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They sure like the word "Nominal"... :)



Nominal and Anomaly sound way too similar. I got nervous everytime they said Nominal thinking there was an anomaly!

Congrats to SpaceX for a successful launch!


I had the same thought about nominal vs anomaly. When the word for a good thing is so close to the word for a bad thing, that's bad. Perhaps they have a standard where they've banned the speaking of "anomaly" on all operations audio channels. I'd ban it.


Me too. Look at definition 5 at Merriam Websters [1]. I think that definition must be related to definition 3 something is insignificant if it is approximately in line with expectations.

[1] http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/nominal


I was wondering what they actually mean by "nominal." According to the dictionaries I can find it means something like "in name only" which doesn't seem appropriate to the context.


Yes they do! :)




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