
People who have seen their work destroyed in a failed rocket launch - yarapavan
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/03/rocket-launch-failure-spacex-antares/520287/
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TeMPOraL
Interesting article - I was always curious about how those people feel. Though
sadly, "life's work" in the headline is pure clickbait - two years of
preparations is not life, and the explosion left enough of that "work" on the
ground that they could reconstruct the experiment in two _weeks_.

~~~
maxxxxx
The people who work on the James Webb telescope or on some planetary missions
will definitely have lost their life's work if something goes wrong. I am not
sure I could take the pressure.

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DougN7
I knew a guy that worked for a huge computer company that for 10 years never
saw a product ship. The projects were always cancelled before it got that far.
Instead of feeling pressure, he pretty much stopped caring.

~~~
kbart
Been there. Done that. For much shorter period than 10 years, but still -- as
long as I get paid and interesting stuff to do/research, why should I care if
it goes to production or not?

~~~
azdle
I cared and cared enough to quit. Worked my last (and first real software) job
for about 5 years and quit a month ago because of this kind of thing, at least
in part. I was getting good at making the v1, but never learning how to really
do anything beyond that. And figuring out how to ship an MVP is the least
important part, so if that's all you're learning you're missing out on what
will make you successful at a place that's actually successful.

Plus, I'll just generally disagree with you, sitting there making stuff that
falls right into the garbage can is incredibly depressing. What's the point?

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Lambdanaut
> sitting there making stuff that falls right into the garbage can is
> incredibly depressing. What's the point?

A very journey vs destination thought. If the journey is your goal, then you
already have the "point" you're looking for. If, however, the destination is
the goal, then you are forever reaching out for your next "point", and the
moment you reach one, you'll be reaching for another. Always looking for your
next point that will never satisfy you.

The preeminent philosopher Jake the Dog had an interesting comment about this
sort of thing:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFsQprx5pQM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFsQprx5pQM)

~~~
azdle
I get where you're coming from and hadn't really thought on that aspect
explicitly yet, but my first thought is that rather I'm missing half of the
journey that I want to have.

To torture a metaphor, I like hiking, my wife and I have a goal of hiking the
whole SHT [1] in bits and pieces over the course of 5 years. We've found parts
of the trail that are absolutely amazing to hike, we could just hike those
sames bits over and over again because we know that they're amazing and not
risk having to hike the bits that are just a mowed bit of grassland (which is
uninteresting to hike), but then we'd be missing out on the whole experiance
and not only that we might be missing out on even better sections that we
haven't encountered yet.

I feel the same way about how I'm progressing in my career. I could keep doing
the same bit over and over again and I'd probably be pretty damn good at it,
but I just can't let myself. I'd rather keep exploring, keep experiencing not
only what's new, but what's old-hat to others but new to me, and see if
there's something out there that I'm even better at that I enjoy even more
than what I already know.

[1] [https://shta.org](https://shta.org)

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gammarator
I had a year's worth of my life crater next to the launch pad. It's a terrible
feeling.

It was ever thus. Before first light of the 100-inch telescope on Mt. Wilson
in 1917 (at the time the world's largest), George Ellery Hale was so nervous
that he only invited a poet, Alfred Noyes--no members of the general press.

Noyes later recounted the drama as part of a poem, "Watchers of the Skies":

    
    
      "To-morrow night! For more than twenty years,
      They had thought and planned and worked. Ten years had gone,
      One-fourth, or more, of man's brief working life,
      Before they made those solid tons of glass,
      Their hundred-inch reflector, the clear pool,
      The polished flawless pool that it must be
      To hold the perfect image of a star.
      And, even now, some secret flaw—none knew
      Until to-morrow's test—might waste it all.
      Where was the gambler that would stake so much,—
      Time, patience, treasure, on a single throw?
      The cost of it,—they'd not find that again,
      Either in gold or life-stuff! All their youth
      Was fuel to the flame of this one work.
      Once in a lifetime to the man of science,
      Despite what fools believe his ice-cooled blood,
      There comes this drama.
                              If he fails, he fails
      Utterly. He at least will have no time
      For fresh beginnings. Other men, no doubt,
      Years hence, will use the footholes that he cut
      In those precipitous cliffs, and reach the height,
      But he will never see it."
    

[[http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/6574](http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/6574)]

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mabbo
It's bad to have your hard work blow up in a rocket. But to then re-make the
entire thing, put it on _another_ rocket, and have _that one_ blow up too?

Hats off to Rachel Lindbergh for being part of a very exclusive club in that
regard.

~~~
lb1lf
When in university, I worked on a cubesat project; the first satellite
apparently got stuck in its launch container, never getting out to deploy its
antennas and say 'Hi, mom!'. Good thing we had built two; now all we had to do
was wrestle ourselves in on a later launch.

The second, duplicate one? Oh, that wound up in a Kazakh field while still
attached to the launch vehicle. I like to think that second one made some poor
farmer need a new pair of pants, if nothing else.

Then again, as far as impact goes, it would have been a lot cooler to receive
one's telemetry from space rather than just having a pair of soiled pants to
show for it...

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cbanek
Here's my thoughts as someone who has worked on rockets, and even seen a few
of them blow up (but not my fault). It is amazingly depressing. It happens so
fast, and there's a feeling of sheer helplessness. You can't do anything, and
it's just gone. I imagine it's exactly how you would feel it you were watching
your house burn down, or get ripped up by a natural disaster.

That being said, being reproducible is key. Both in terms of production of
vehicles, and scientific experiments and equipment. Some of these things are
very expensive, but it's always a good idea to have at least two copies going
around, and probably more. You'll want to do testing and comparison
experiments if the space flown one comes back.

Another thing not mentioned in this article is the concept of launch
insurance. It's the homeowners insurance for getting stuff to space. It is
also very tricky in terms of wording, and what is covered when (for example,
when AMOS blew up on the pad that's different for the insurance than blowing
up en route).

Some of the biggest troubles come when you have a limited launch window, and
might not see another one for years, or tens of years. You just can't get that
time back.

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lutorm
The consolation is that it is always _much_ quicker to build the second of
something than it is to build the first one, because you know exactly how to
do it.

I like to say that I could have done my PhD thesis in 3 months rather than 5
years if I had to do it all over again... Of course it's actually _figuring
out what to do_ that is the real work, not the doing. ;-)

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yongjik
...then there's this scientist who apparently worked on scientific instruments
on not one, not two, but _three_ failed satellites.

[http://www.nature.com/news/software-error-doomed-japanese-
hi...](http://www.nature.com/news/software-error-doomed-japanese-hitomi-
spacecraft-1.19835)

> Software error doomed Japanese Hitomi spacecraft

> Dan McCammon, an astronomer at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, helped
> to design and build Hitomi’s premiere scientific instrument, an X-ray
> calorimeter that measures the energy of X-ray photons with exquisite
> precision. He has been working on the technology for more than three
> decades, flying versions of it on the ASTRO-E mission, which failed on
> launch in 2000, and the Suzaku spacecraft, in which a helium leak rendered
> the instrument useless weeks after its 2005 launch.

> McCammon says that it would take about US$50 million from NASA, and another
> 3–5 years, to build a replacement calorimeter. A version of it is slated to
> fly on the European Space Agency’s Athena mission, but that is not due to
> launch until 2028.

~~~
engi_nerd
Dr. McCammon has endured even more failures than this article shows. He has a
smaller calorimeter that he launches on NASA's sounding rockets. I was a
telemetry engineer on another mission while both of our payloads were at White
Sands in launch preparation. Dr. McCammon told me that he had been trying to
have a successful launch since 1998, but launch vehicle issues (guidance
failure cost one launch, command uplink cost another) and experiment issues (
the calorimeter is relatively fragile) had resulted in four consecutive
failures.

For all that though, he is an accomplished scientist and still had a positive
attitude, which made me admire him greatly.

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TuxerLulz
I thought this would be about the Antares team (who worked on that rocket
significantly more than 2 year).

I heard however about the story of the experiment that blew up both on Antares
and CRS-7. Glad to see an article about it. Space is hard.

~~~
gillianlish
"space is hard" is a fucking lie.

We knew why the Challenger blew up, we could have prevented it, we chose not
to.

We knew why Columbia disintegrated, we could have prevented it, we chose not
to.

None of this shit is hard. Engineers know how to prevent this stuff.

The hard part is choosing to care whether something is reliable or not, then
doing what is necessary to make sure it is reliable.

Every engineer can tell you about some management fuckhole choosing to do the
wrong thing. The hard part about our civilization is how many fuckholes there
are pushing people to do the wrong things for stupid reasons.

"Space is Hard" is a lie we tell ourselves so that we can ignore the real
problem. The real problem is our personalities, our laziness and our
stupidity. These scare us because they are truly hard and we truly have no
answers for them.

~~~
mikekchar
This is why I always tell people: If all we had were technical problems to
solve, it would be easy. People problems are _much_ more difficult to solve.
As the scale of the project increases, with more people, more personalities,
more money -- so does the difficulty of the project. "Space is hard" because
the scale of the projects are huge. It is hubris to believe that _we_ are the
ones that don't contribute to the problem. It is naive to think that some
manager isn't looking at _us_ and thinking, "That asshole programmer is going
to sink this project for sure". If we can see the problems, why can we not fix
them? Because of assholes? Or because we lack the skills to explain the issue
and motive people to fix it? Or because we are wrong? All of those things come
into play and if you want to be successful you need to navigate that
minefield.

If only it were rocket science, it would be sooooo easy. Alas, it is not.

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WWLink
On the plus side: It's "built to print", we've already done all of the R&D
work so it's just a matter of remanufacturing all of the hardware. The
software's already tested and ready to go (an will get further testing when
the satellite is rebuilt).

On the minus side: Long lead times, and payloads/instruments where the right
things happened at the right time to make them possible. A failed launch on
some projects could mean a 3-5 year delay - and then the whole point of the
mission could be moot (technology moves fast).

And that's where you find yourself in the gray area: Ok, let's take our
lessons learned and improve it!

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JoeDaDude
It usually results in a lot more work: things like failure review boards,
fault tree analyses, corrective action recommendations, and endless status
meetings from management wanting to know when they can launch the next one.

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ams6110
I've known people who've lost huge amounts of work due to a failed hard drive.
Stuff happens.

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lotusko
respect to those people

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aaron695
>is a member of a an exclusive group no one actually wants to be in: people
who have seen their work destroyed in a failed rocket launch.

If I got to join this group, I kinda feel like it would be my lifes pinnacle.

Clickbait to the max here guys.

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Overtonwindow
At first I thought this might have been about the poor North Koreans forced to
work on their rockets.

