I had a close friend who worked on this. Everybody in our lab stopped working this afternoon to watch it launch, and to cheer our friend on.
Definitely went from "YAY!" to sad really quick.
It's been said other places in this thread, but to echo it again: I really feel for all the engineers involved in this. That's got to be devastating.
To everybody: failures suck, but big spectacular failure is directly correlated to the difficulty of what you're trying to do. If you're failing, you're doing something right.
Back when I used to mountain bike a lot, it was a personal "joke" that I wasn't really riding unless I crashed at least once. That's how I knew I was pushing myself to improve.
I didn't think people said this and meant it. If you succeed, it means you've done the critical things right. If you're failing, it means that you didn't do something right. Or several somethings.
Yeah, you can learn from it and do better, and that's great - but that doesn't mean it's a success. It's a failure and - in some cases - a chance to do better the next time.
Trying to portray it as a good thing because your goal was a hard one only lessens the value you can receive from it.
As I've understood it, it means that the scale of your ambitions is right.
Consider a continuum of things that you can do, divided up by difficulty. For some part of it, you allways succeed, for some part of it, it's a mix of sucess and failure, and for some even more difficult part, you always fail.
Now in order to succeed at something consistently, you need to master it, which also means that the things you always succeed at are fully mastered. Any knowledge or skills to be gained in those areas are at best minuscule improvements.
Then there's the part where you succeed sometimes and fail sometimes. But each time you fail, you gain more data on how you failed, and you think about how you can fix those points. You're learning, and you're improving.
Now there are also tasks at which you'll consistently fail. Passing the BAR exam as a programmer with no preparation would be a good example. Since you have no sucesses to compare to in that area, you wouldn't learn a lot trying to retake the BAR exam, no matter how often you did it. You're lacking in knowledge and skills required, and trying to perform at that level doesn't do you any good.
Now the ratio of failures and sucesses is more of a rule of thumb, and not an ironclad model. If you do turn it into an ironclad model, tell me, because I'd love exact metrics to shoot for. The reason that the common adage is "If you're failing, you're doing something right", at least so I believe, is that "If you're failing some and succeeding some, you're closer to your optimum failure/success ratio for growth than if you are at either end of the extreme" simply doesn't roll off the tongue quite as nicely. You can't put that on the cover of a self-help book. And since almost everyone is inclined to default to the "sucess" side of the continuum (coloquially known as your comfort zone) instead of the "failure" side (excluding select masochists), it makes a lot more sense to tell someone to fail more often. It's not a curse, it's a call for more ambitious projects. In this specific case, it's a comforting call to the fact that they're trying hard enough to fail at something. And I think that is commendable.
I think the generalization is overbroad. Risk of failure should be weighed against the consequences of failure.
If I'm writing code for robots as a hobby and my robots behave exactly as I intended all of the time, then I'm probably not learning anything, and I should try to make the robots do more sophisticated tasks. The consequences of failure are minimal, so the optimum failure rate is high.
If I'm at work writing avionics code, the cost of failure is astronomical. It's nice to push boundaries and learn things, but it's better to avoid plane crashes. The consequences of failure are high, so the optimum failure rate is low.
I think the problem with rocket science is really the tyranny of physics. All the potential and kinetic energy you give to the rocket has to be stored in chemical form on the launchpad. You have to sit right on the edge of catastrophe or you are not going to make it into space at all. We've been doing this for half a century and the safety record is, quite plainly, not very good.
When we learn how to do spaceflight safely, we'll do that.
Oh, I absolutelty agree with you, and did think about including the concept of failure costs in the above post, but decided against it since I believed it would make the post a little more convoluted. Even with hobby robotics there's a maximum failure cost you can stomach, there's only so many servos you can burn through, and you only have finite time to program, which limits the number of attempts you can make.
One great way to lower the amount of expesive failures is to hedge it with a number of cheaper failures, whether that'd be models, prototypes or testing rigs for individual components of an airplane or rocket. If you look at the early stages of avionics, there were many failures, some of them expensive, deadly or embarrasing. But over time, we did build up a repertoire of testing methods to verify a given airplane design. Does that mean our airplanes don't fail? No. Does that mean we aren't trying to develop even better airplanes because of the risk involved? No. But all in all, it's a considerable improvement. We'll get there for rockets, just like we did for cars, ships, airplanes or computers.
That's also why research, prototyping and product development should often be done in ways where failure is a lot cheaper and your optimum failure rate can be much higher, accelerating progress hugely.
For example at a smaller pilot scale or in test benches.
Yet, if your test bench is very complicated, slow, costly and introduces errors of its own, it might not be wise. Also some "flying" test configurations can be a dead end.
So in the big "Battlestar galactica" NASA missions with lots of new technology, the cost of failure is very high. That's why they analyze a lot and test stuff in test benches. But those can be dead ends. It makes everything even more costly, making failure even more expensive, requiring more tests. Schedules slip while you have zero science return to show... It's a vicious circle.
It might make more sense to just for example launch many smaller probes, each one somewhat better than the previous one in some degrees. Some might crash, but if your audience understands that, it's not a political disaster. You're going to fly the next one again in two years. This way you also don't have to wait 20 years for your technology development to pay off.
So SpaceX launched Falcon 1 quite many times, and learned a lot about technology as well as matured as an organization. They crashed quite many times as well. But those were not nearly as expensive as Falcon 9 crashes were at this point.
That's also why they were flying different versions of Grasshopper and now Falcon 9 R. Retire risk. Allow crashes - when you can afford them. This will reduce crashes later when you can not allow them.
So it is a slightly complex issue but nothing very out of the ordinary. Usually in the real world things settle into a good compromise between conflicting goals.
Actually, SpaceX only launched two successful F1s, flights 4 and 5, before moving on the the development of the F9. And there was only one demonstration flight of F9 before it flew with the first Dragon. So it's not exactly like the test flights have been that many.
I'm way late on this, but I also think considering the network effect of efforts make direct learning from mistakes more...interesting. There are individuals on the team that very clearly were not responsible for the failure, others somewhat responsible, and perhaps a few directly responsible. This would correlate nicely with your continuum above..
For me the essence of the idea that failure is part of (and maybe even required for) eventual success is expressed in Theodore Roosevelt's "Man in the Arena"
The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
Failure can contribute to longer-term success, there's no doubt. But it's not a measure of success in its own right. Even re-reading OP's post today, that remains my interpretation of both what he said, and the more general sense in which the failure-related 'wisdom' is getting spread about the startup community.
If you succeed, it means you've done the critical things right. If you're failing, it means that you didn't do something right. Or several somethings.
I disagree. The only practical difference could be that you got unlucky. People seem to forget that taking risks actually means things can fail, even if you do nothing wrong. That's what a risk means.
If you say a failure means you did something wrong, then you have an acceptable risk of zero. This means you can do very few things. Every time you get into your car, you are taking a calculated risk of severe injury or death. And that happens to many people who never do anyhing wrong.
This edges into politics, which means some people are pretty much incapable of believing it: If they believed it, they'd have to revise their political views, and that would lead to a lot of other changes in their lives.
To be specific, if the race isn't always to the swift, and if the best person can lose due to situations out of their control, maybe it isn't immoral to rely on a social support system for a while, which implies that perhaps we should fund such things.
And saying that is political suicide in some circles.
I once read this on the Internet a long time back - "The problem with most people is not that they fail trying to reach their goals, the problem is that they set their goals too low and succeed"
The parent probably meant that if you are succeeding too easily, you aren't really aiming high.
But in this case, as well as several others (like surgery, for example), that's not at all true. We make jokes about how nearly nothing is "rocket science" or "brain surgery" for a reason: those are fields in which mistakes are not acceptable and the cost of producing as well as the cost of insuring are incredible. There is really nothing comparable between a code jockey who weaves js frameworks and SaaS services together to build apps and the engineers who wrote the assembly 30, 40, 50 years ago to power and control our space craft... or the ones who do the same thing now using more modern hardware & tools at companies like Orbital Sciences or SpaceX.
> We make jokes about how nearly nothing is "rocket science" or "brain surgery"
Fun note: a very long time ago I dated a woman who happened to be a brain surgeon. She used to joke her work was actually easy because nobody realy expecting her patients to survive.
Exactly. The development of rocket software is a very precise business. Here's a Reddit AMA from the SpaceX software development team.http://www.reddit.com/comments/1853ap
That's a fair point, and one I don't disagree with. Where I do disagree is the idea that failure is a measure of success or even the potential for success.
It's a potential indicator of either the difficulty of the task, the abilities of the people performing the task, or both[1]. It's also an indicator that no matter how many things were done right, one or more things were done wrong.
I feel that your original post and subsequent reply reflect the pervasive perception that failure is a requirement for doing something big successfully. I think that's a misconception that's running rampant in the startup community. Failure can happen and it can be learned from, but success is possible without it.
1. In this case I'm going with 'difficult' and 'some things not done right'. Strongly suspect incompetence was not a factor :)
Failure is nearly always bad. It destroys company morale, drains financial resources, and creates a culture of failure. I agree that failure does often happen on the way to success, but there's absolutely nothing good about it besides giving more knowledge to a problem. The culture that failure is good is stupid.
The "move fast and break things" mentality is not saying that its good to break things, it's saying that breaking things is the price of moving fast. Failure is bad, but so is being over-cautious. We all already know that failure is bad. No one like to fail so we don't need to keep saying that failure is bad. People often lose perspective and think that it's not worth taking a sensible risk, so we say things like "If you're failing, you're doing something right." to encourage them.
I agree, this isn't a failure when trying something new, we have done this hundreds if not thousands of times. It should have been a routine mission, failure should not be accepted.
Since this is an unmanned operation, the calculation is fairly straightforward, balancing:
1. the cost of failure
2. the probability of failure
3. the cost of reducing the probability of failure
If these can be accurately calculated, then a certain failure rate can be quite acceptable. Of course, it's still worthwhile to determine the cause of any failures, and hence the cost of eliminating that cause and a reevaluation of points 1..3.
Not to slight your friend, but his was an unmanned launch to resupply the ISS, it's relatively common, comparatively easy, and successful (1 other failure in just under 80 missions).
No disrespect intended, but this is a disruption for the ISS, a loss (hopefully insured) for Planetary Resources, a real setback for Orbital... there's no point in sugar coating anything, it sucks. There's just no point in dwelling on it, either. RCA and move forward.
The failure rate in manned space missions is approximately 1/50 ("failure" as in "it explodes and everybody dies"). (For example, the Space Shuttle had 2/135 failures.)
The unmanned missions have a higher failure rate, IIRC ~10%, but that number probably includes prototype and old models.
So a 2/80 failures is not so bad. It sucks when it explodes, but going to space is difficult.
That 1/50 failure rate is debatable, and depends on your definition.
For example, Soviet/Russian manned flight, "Soyuz", had 131 flights (123 Soyuz + 2 Voskhod + 6 Vostok) [1][2] and 2 accidents, resulted in death of 4 astronauts (1 + 3).[3]
However, both of these accidents occurred before 1972, and both were highly experimental flights. Komarov's was the VERY FIRST flight of Soyuz, and before Soyuz 11 accident, they were descending without space suits, as the space inside the cabin was so tiny.
So you can also say that there were 2 accidents in the first 10 Soyuz flights - they were still finalizing the technology - and no accidents in the remaining 113.
In addition, both of these accidents occurred during the landing, so there was NO accidents during manned-space take-off in Russian/Soviet flights.
There was another unsuccessful launch, when second stage rocket hasn't properly separated from the third. Everyone survived, but they have experienced pretty high acceleration and landed just 21 minutes after the launch.
It should also be noted that Komarov died in first manned Soyuz spacecraft launched - not the first Soyuz. In other words, Komarov's Soyuz-1 - and naming system isn't obvious in Russian space school - wasn't analogous to Columbia first flight as the very first flight of any STS.
And in Soyuz they also had other pretty close calls. Diving into athmosphere hatch-forward because engine module didn't separate in Shatalov-Volynov-Eliseev-Khrunov group flight... Near premature separation of said engine module in the Intercosmos flight with Afghani cosmonaut... Several ballistic landings - with accelerations up to about 20 g's...
Still nobody died. Perhaps in no small part because of overbuilding the ship and also changing the ship design along its long history, learning on mistakes. Soyuz spacecraft is the real workhorse.
Basically how cosomaunts train in Star City to how the rocket is built, take off and all the way till it is about to dock with the ISS, including how launch escape works etc.
The reliability and resilience of the system is just a marvel of engineering.
NASA's CRS contract with Orbital is for 8 flights for $1.9 Billion. Today's flight was supposed to be number 3 of 8.
It remains to be seen if they will be able to complete the rest of their contract. The cause of the accident will need to be investigated, changes to future vehicles may be necessary, and right now it appears as though they damaged their launch pad severely.
Sort of. COTS was supposed to be the development costs, CRS was supposed to be the launches. Orbital got $288 Million for development of Antares/Cygnus from COTS.
From wikipedia:
> "COTS is related but separate from the Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) program.[3] COTS relates to the development of the vehicles, CRS to the actual deliveries. COTS involves a number of Space Act Agreements, with NASA providing milestone-based payments. COTS does not involve binding contracts. CRS on the other hand does involve legally binding contracts, which means the suppliers would be liable if they failed to perform. Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) is a related program, aimed specifically at developing crew rotation services. It is similar to COTS-D. All three programs are managed by NASA's Commercial Crew and Cargo Program Office (C3PO)."
Personally, I am worried about Orbital's ability to complete the remaining flights for CRS. This is a very unfortunate setback for them.
I think it's important to realize that this is a NASA contractor, not NASA itself. Furthermore, Congress & the President have forced NASA into purchasing these transport contracts by killing off the Space Shuttle.
Then the failure wasn't free. This customer and all other customers paid for this failure. Other customers, who may have done more and more expensive work to avoid failure, are stuck paying for this failure. Insurance thus incentivizes a race to the bottom -- using other customers to finance ones own risk.
Which is understood by all those people when they purchase insurance. This isn't news. Spreading the risk around is why people buy insurance in the first place.
are only cargoes insured or is the entire launch vehicle insured? I am curious as to how an insurance company assess risk in these launches, let alone what the starting point for any insurance would be relative to the value of the rocket and cargo.
"I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."
A lot of people are trying to build mechanical perpetual motion engines, and have failed for thousands of years. Failure doesn't always signal you're doing something right.
They've erased some of the history from their website and interest hasn't been high enough for full exposure of their nonsense. Yet a decade of failure hasn't shut them down. I feel sorry for the people who poured €11 million into them. Never seeing that back.
I had followed Steorn Orbo pretty closely back then, and eagerly awaited for their demo at Kinetica Museum, UK. As expected, they chickened out at the last moment :) This website has chronicled the whole Steorn Orbo saga: http://dispatchesfromthefuture.com/
Ahh somehow i missed that blog over the years. Its the kind of things Jon Ronson should do a piece on.
I found his public facebook feed recently. Whole thing is madness. People/friends/family seem to think he really is some kind of big shot. He posts pictures of T-shirts with CEO written on them etc. To me it is and always has been an investment scam.
| If you're failing, you're doing something right.
Wrong. This only goes on to emphasize the stigma associated with failures. This sentence is a cover up for the fact that someone did something wrong, or at the very least, things did not go as planned. Failures are bad and heartbreaking, and we should accept it in its entirety.
| Don't fret the failures.
Right. Instead of focusing on getting stressed and fretting, the right thing to do is fix whatever it was that resulted in failure. And when you redo it and its a success, that means you did something right.
A failure means you took risk, which is something you should do if you want to push the boundaries. So you did do something right. No one would suggest you did everything right.
Conversely, absence of failure may mean you took a calculated amount of risk and it paid off. But it could also mean you were overly conservative, didn't push the boundaries, and took a minimum of risk. There's no way to tell the difference purely from the absence of failure.
The worst outcome is when a failure happens and you though you were very conservative but actually had no idea what the real risks were. That's the Challenger situation.
Taking risks is good in testing/design, but not a great idea for a production rocket. You want to find all the failure points during the design phase instead of blowing up expensive payloads.
> To everybody: failures suck, but big spectacular failure is directly correlated to the difficulty of what you're trying to do. If you're failing, you're doing something right.
This tech-scene cliché annoys me to no end. Challenger and Columbia were both spectacular failures, and both were the result of dysfunctional corporate culture at NASA. Asiana 214, the MV Sewol, and the Costa Concordia can all be chalked up basically to incompetence. If you are failing you are doing something wrong, that is the definition of failure.
This tech-scene cliché annoys me to no end. Challenger and Columbia were both spectacular failures, and both were the result of dysfunctional corporate culture at NASA. Asiana 214, the MV Sewol, and the Costa Concordia can all be chalked up basically to incompetence. If you are failing you are doing something wrong, that is the definition of failure.
There are place and time for failure. Failure on a launch operation isn't one of them.
Note however, that this example doesn't fit in at all with the contrarian view in this thread. Feynman's report was about accurately estimating the failure rate of the shuttle and about the bureaucratic culture that popped up to protect itself and ended up making that failure rate worse by not letting engineers do their jobs.
But if during the Challenger investigation an engineer or a manager had told Feynman "There are place and time for failure. Failure on a launch operation isn't one of them", he would have regarded them as completely incompetent and part of the problem.
The very nature of the enterprise is risky, and so the goal was to manage the risk of failure to an acceptable limit. Cover-your-ass culture can be improved, engineers can be allowed to do their jobs, but you aren't going to eliminate risk. The fact that we can even try to put a number like "1 in 50" or "1 in 100" on estimated space flight failure rates is exactly what blhack is talking about. We could judge that too high a rate, but if we did, we wouldn't be going to space at all, at least not anytime soon. That's the tradeoff.
Note that the engineers and especially the astronauts were well aware of that risk, and you can find almost exactly that sentiment echoed by them in interviews after the Apollo 1, Challenger, and Columbia accidents. Many astronauts were most worried that the American public couldn't stomach the idea that failure came with any ambition in spaceflight and so would shut the program down.
The word "failure" is used to mean two distinct things: 1) bad outcome, 2) made the wrong choices given the available information at the time.
They are not the same. Furthermore if you have no bad outcomes, you may be taking a suboptimal amount of risk, which would then be a failure in the second sense of the term.
blhack's comment was ambiguous. Under some interpretations it is ridiculous, but under others it is sensible. By interpreting charitably, we can avoid a fair bit of two of the worst things on HN: abrasiveness and nitpicking.
(Edit: and protracted disputes. So, three of the worst things on HN.)
Your understanding of what I said is also clearly ridiculous.
In context, what I am saying is pretty obviously meant to be taken as:
Failure is part of taking risk. Risk is part of doing things that are difficult. Doing things that are difficult is part of progress. Progress is something that I consider "right".
And then put further into context, with regards to spectacular failures like the one today: Don't beat yourself up [engineers who worked on orbital] because the very difficult thing that you were doing failed. That is what makes that very difficult thing noteworthy.
Failures are inevitable. I am sure the team has learnt more from it than it would if it had worked. When you have failed once you don't leave any stone unturned and in the process improve on tens of more things.
Definitely went from "YAY!" to sad really quick.
It's been said other places in this thread, but to echo it again: I really feel for all the engineers involved in this. That's got to be devastating.
To everybody: failures suck, but big spectacular failure is directly correlated to the difficulty of what you're trying to do. If you're failing, you're doing something right.
Back when I used to mountain bike a lot, it was a personal "joke" that I wasn't really riding unless I crashed at least once. That's how I knew I was pushing myself to improve.
Don't fret the failures.