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Love that song. Practically required listening for cubicle drones.
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Looking it up on YouTube after reading the obituary was a mistake. I can't get the damn thing out of my head now!
I suspect that he might have been conducting extensive field testing of his "roach clip" device when he created it...Comment
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In the LA Times:
Gordon E. Moore, co-founder of Intel Corp. and creator of Moore’s Law — the mantra of boundless technological development that came to define the digital age — has died at age 94.
Moore died Friday at his home in Hawaii, according to the company and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.
From humble roots as the son of the sheriff of Pescadero, Calif., Moore went on to create Intel, one of the greatest technological powerhouses of the 20th century.
Moore, who was trained as a chemist, was among the earliest pioneers in the creation of the integrated circuit, chips of silicon that came to form the backbone of modern technology.
He was among the small group of engineers and scientists, including Nobelist William Shockley, one of the co-inventors of the transistor, and Robert Noyce, the co-inventor of the integrated circuit, who put the silicon in Silicon Valley.
But what distinguished Moore beyond many of his legendary peers was that he also had a blend of skills that extended far beyond the merely technical.
As the chairman of Intel, Moore guided the company with a homespun demeanor and the spirit of a Las Vegas gambler.
Taking the risky path was something that came naturally to him, although he always maintained that his risks were clear choices that had to be taken.
“This is a fast-moving business,” he once said in an interview. “Unless you’re willing to take technical and financial risks, you’re doomed. Things change so fast, if you don’t, you die.”
Moore described himself as an “accidental entrepreneur,” although the success of Intel — and Moore’s status as one of the richest men in the country because of his Intel holdings — belied his humble assessment.
Although Moore’s co-founding of the microprocessor giant in 1968 assured his place in the history of modern technology, he may be best-known for what became known as Moore’s Law.
In 1965, Moore made a simple observation that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit appeared to be doubling every year.
The integrated circuit had been invented only seven years earlier, and the most that anyone had been able to etch onto the thin chips of silicon that would power the growth of the electronics industry was about 50 transistors.
Looking at a graph of chip development, Moore extended the line forward 10 years and predicted that by 1975 there would be 65,000 transistors on a single silicon chip. It seemed an outlandishly large number at the time, but Moore was right on target.
Moore amended his prediction several times during his life, eventually settling on the prediction that the number of transistors would double every 18 to 24 months instead of every year.
But although the exact equation of Moore’s Law was changed, its spirit of rapid technological advancement remained constant. It became the credo of the electronic world and a slogan of the digerati eagerly awaiting the next great thing.
“Integrated circuits will lead to such wonders as home computers — or at least terminals connected to a central computer, automatic controls for automobiles, and personal portable communications equipment,” Moore wrote in 1965.
The descendants of the first crude chips that Moore designed went on to power personal computers, automobiles, mobile phones and even watches.
“It’s kind of funny that Moore’s Law is what I’m best-known for,” he said in a 1997 interview with Business Week. “It was just a relatively simple observation.”
The accuracy of Moore’s Law became a cornerstone of business planning in the electronics industry.
Gordon Earle Moore hardly fit the image of a prophet of the digital age. He was down-home and practical, an unpretentious, slightly balding scientist who maintained a bit of his small-town roots in the midst of the heady pace of Silicon Valley.
Moore was born in San Francisco on Jan. 3, 1929, to Walter and Florence Moore. The family eventually settled in Pescadero, about 30 miles south, where his father was the chief deputy sheriff for the area.
Moore seemed headed for an academic career after graduating from UC Berkeley with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry in 1950 and a doctorate in chemistry and physics from Caltech in 1954.
After a brief stint at the Applied Physics Lab at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, he went to work in 1956 for Shockley, who had set up his own company, Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, to further develop the transistor. Shockley was a heavy-handed, temperamental and capricious manager. After working for just a year, Moore and most of Shockley’s top scientists rebelled.
The “traitorous eight,” as Shockley called them, broke away and started Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957. The creation of Fairchild was one of the crucial turning points in electronics history, allowing Moore and others to pursue research that helped their partner, Robert Noyce, to devise a commercially viable process to miniaturize whole circuits on a silicon chip — the integrated circuit.
Moore and Noyce left Fairchild in 1966 and two years later formed their own company to exploit the development of the integrated circuit. They named their company Integrated Electronics but later shortened it to Intel.
With the help of Arthur Rock, the first of Silicon Valley’s legions of venture capitalists, Noyce and Moore easily raised $2.3 million and began work. Noyce served as chief executive officer of the new company with Rock as chairman and Moore as executive vice president.
Intel began by making memory chips and rocketed to profitability by adopting a corporate strategy of innovating at a breakneck pace so that it could charge a premium for its products.
Moore took over as chief executive of Intel in 1975, just a few years before his company began being battered by the flood of cheap memory chips from Japanese manufacturers that turned Intel’s main product into a commodity.
Intel began losing money and laying off workers. By the mid-1980s, Intel had begun to lag in the very industry it had created.
By 1985, even Moore began to sound grim. The downturn, Moore told shareholders at the time, was “possibly the greatest in the history of the semiconductor industry.”
“We are flushing out the excesses of a badly overheated electronics industry,” he said. “What happened? Dame Fortune frowned. Intel must be well-positioned and ready when Dame Fortune smiles again.”
In 1984 and 1985, Intel still spent more than $1 billion on chip-manufacturing equipment and facilities. It was all part of Moore’s belief that staying on the cutting edge was the key to success and the company would eventually come roaring back.
Moore and the hard-charging president of the company, Andrew S. Grove, began to refocus Intel away from cheap memory chips to high-margin microprocessors — the brains of the computer.
In 1987, Moore relinquished the chief executive position to Grove, although he remained active in guiding the company as chairman.
Moore also busied himself as a member of the Caltech board of trustees and as a patriarch of the electronics industry.
In 1950, Moore married Betty Irene Whitaker, who survives him. Moore is also survived by sons Kenneth and Steven and four grandchildren.Comment
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Quite a life.Comment
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https://www.theglobeandmail.com/cana...ry-rum-butter/
What would you do with 133,000 chocolate bars? No, really. Crystal Regehr Westergard needs a plan. Fast.
The Alberta physiotherapist and candy company owner finds herself in the unusually sticky situation of having to give away that many Rum & Butter bars, after issues at the plant that manufactures them resulted in a glut of product – all marked with a looming June expiration date.
“It’s quite daunting. That’s one for every seven persons in Calgary,” said Ms. Regehr Westergard, speaking alongside a pile of Rum & Butters at her physiotherapy clinic in Camrose on Thursday. Her voice was strained, in the way of someone who can’t stop thinking about what to do with the 133,000 Rum & Butter chocolate bars.
“It’s immense,” she said. “If I think about it too much, I’ll start to shake.”
A full-time physical therapist, Ms. Regehr Westergard and her husband started Canadian Candy Nostalgia in 2018, recreating and re-releasing her mother’s favourite candy bar, the Cuban Lunch, which had been out of production for 27 years.
After the lauded Cuban Lunch launch – and because Ms. Regehr Westergard’s husband was such a good sport about their new sideline as chocolatiers – she wanted to bring back his favourite chocolate bar as well.
Enter the Rum & Butter.
The bar is comprised of eight squares, each containing a blob of gooey, non-alcoholic, rum-and-butter-flavoured filling. It’s rich with a touch of spice and the retro cool of a flavour that had – for no real reason – fallen from fashion. Think of a Caramilk bar, if the Caramilk bar had a big mustache and was hanging out listening to The Guess Who on LP.
Despite its popularity in the 1970s and 1980s, Cadbury stopped making Rum & Butters in 1996. (Ms. Regehr Westergard has come to know that sometimes big corporations just do this, no matter how much a food is loved.) The couple got the trademark, hired a designer to recreate the straight-from-the-rec-room packaging, and relaunched the Rum & Butter in 2021.
How sweet it would have been to end the story here.
But manufacturing and distributing a new product during the pandemic was a challenge – particularly for independent businesses – and as the factory they’d contracted to manufacture the bars struggled with staffing, production of Rum & Butters lagged.
Ms. Regehr Westergard was sympathetic. After all, you can’t stop the world, flip it back on and not have some problems. In this case, that meant what she calls “the backlog and the whoosh.” Fully staffed and up to full speed, the factory produced a truckload of Rum & Butters last spring.
And then, far too quickly, another.
Let’s pause here to consider the reality of 133,000 Rum & Butter bars. At first glance, it’s not so daunting. They don’t even fill a whole semi. But laid end to end, they would stretch 17 kilometres.
You could give one Rum & Butter bar to every person in the city of Red Deer, then one to every fan at Rogers Place for a sold-out Oilers’ playoff game, then one to every passenger on 26 fully-booked Westjet flights, then one to every musician in the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, then one to every performer in a large-scale musical production of Cats, then one to every member of the Regina Esperanto Club – and you would still have eight left to eat yourself.
For months, Ms. Regehr Westergard worked on moving the Rum & Butters, but the Rum & Butterswere simply not moving fast enough. A country’s appetite for retro chocolate, she observed, does not follow the same dramatic whoosh as a factory jumping back into life.
Chocolate bars don’t require “best before” dates in Canada, but Canadian Candy Nostalgia uses them. Though the bars will be perfectly fine to consume past June, for grocers and many consumers, the date on the package is a ticking time bomb.
As months melted by, Ms. Regehr Westergard accepted that the time had come for action, and started looking for ways to give the bars away for free. But that, as it turns out, is harder than you might expect. She held emergency meetings with her staff, and this week, even appealed to her 161 Facebook friends for help.
“Give them to the food bank!” some said. (A food bank can’t distribute that many chocolate bars before June.)
“Pass them out across Canada!” some suggested. (Who will pay for shipping? How will the bars be handed out?)
“I’ll take a box!” some offered. (The boxes are in pallets of 11,000 bars at a food safe warehouse in Calgary, and can’t be accessed or easily broken up by individuals.)
“Try contacting schools,” one friend advised.
“With 133,000 bars to get rid of, I could phone schools all day, and still not get rid of enough,” Ms. Regehr Westergard lamented.
It all seemed so daunting. So much time and work for every idea that may or may not pan out.
With a full-time job seeing patients and running her physiotherapy clinic, and plenty of regular work to do with Canadian Candy Nostalgia, she didn’t have the time or connections to chase down leads. Rum & Butters sell for about $2 each, and while Ms. Regehr Westergard is prepared to eat the cost of the loss, she can’t spend even more money to give them away.
And so, here we are. With 133,000 Rum & Butter bars sitting at a warehouse in Calgary, waiting to be given away. They’re available in minimum loads of 11,000, or could be taken all together. Pick up: ASAP.
“You’d have a cry if you had to throw them out,” Ms. Regehr Westergard said, practising the kind of deep breaths she advises her patients to use to deal with pain.
She truly loves to make people happy with chocolate. If someone can take them, and all those Rum & Butter bars could be eaten and enjoyed, she’ll be the happiest of all.Comment
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The annual tax filing deadline/headache is fast approaching here in the USA.
If you've ever taken a few questionable deductions, or leapt through a couple
of semi-legal loopholes to lessen your tax load, you're not alone- - in fact,
you're in pretty good company, as is evidenced in this article I found in a
1938 issue of Variety:
TaxesOfStars1938R.jpg
Adjusted for inflation, Babs Stanwyck's tab would come to $1,315,566 in 2023 dollars.
Busby Berkeley = $422.840 Dashiell Hammett & Stephen Fetchit would owe $44,955
and $30,553 respectively, if they were alive today.
(and they'd also be very old, and owe a crapload of late filing penalty fees! )
BONUS INFO:
The US tax filing deadline in 1937 was March 1st. It was changed to April 15th in 1955.
But if you're still working on your tax return, this year, you'll have till April 18th, since this
year the 15th falls on a Saturday, which would normally shift the due date till Mon, 4/17- -
which just happensto be "Emancipation Day" in Washington DC, and so everybody in
government takes the day off. So, we're all emancipated from paying taxes for an extra day.
(make the most of it!) - Jim C -
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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...le-los-angeles
So they dug a trench and then disappeared for three weeks.Arnold Schwarzenegger rebuked for filling LA pothole that was not a pothole
Exasperated former California governor takes action but officials say ‘giant pothole’ is actually service trench dug by utility workers
Wed 12 Apr 2023 19.25 BSTLast modified on Wed 12 Apr 2023 19.54 BST
It was not one of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s most prominent roles, but is proving to be disproportionately controversial. The Hollywood star and former California governor filmed himself filling in a troublesome pothole near his Los Angeles home, proffering it as an act of civic responsibility by an exasperated resident. But he was then told by the authorities it wasn’t officially a pothole at all.
According to city officials, the “giant pothole” Schwarzenegger and a friend packed with quick-drying cement and topped with sand was actually an essential service trench for work being performed by a utility company in the Brentwood neighborhood.
Instead of solving a problem, the actor who generated mayhem and destruction in his best-known role as the Terminator, was creating one with his rogue deed, with SoCal Gas, the natural gas utility, now having to reopen the trench to complete the contract.
Schwarzenegger, a former two-term Republican governor of California, posted a video of the pair laboring to his 5.1 million Twitter followers.
“Today, after the whole neighborhood has been upset about this giant pothole that’s been screwing up cars and bicycles for weeks, I went out with my team and fixed it. I always say, let’s not complain, let’s do something about it. Here you go,” he wrote.
In the clip, a driver stops to thank him for taking action, and the actor said: “You have to do it yourself. This is crazy. For three weeks I’ve been waiting for this hole to be closed.”
But in a statement to NBC News, Los Angeles city officials said they don’t want Schwarzenegger to live up to his most famous on-screen catchphrase of “I’ll be back”.
“This location is not a pothole,” a spokesperson said. “It’s a service trench that relates to active, permitted work being performed at the location by SoCal Gas, who expects the work to be completed by the end of May.
“As is the case with similar projects impacting city streets, SoCal Gas will be required to repair the area once their work is completed.”
A representative for Schwarzenegger did not return a request for comment, NBC said.
Schwarzenegger, meanwhile, is not the first celebrity to become upset by a pothole and take action. In March last year, singer Rod Stewart posted videos of himself filling in holes near his estate in the Essex town of Harlow, after complaining his Ferrari couldn’t get through.
I don't blame him at all for patching it himself.
If you need a hole in the street you dig the hole when you're ready to do the work and close it up when you're done. Hours, maybe a few days. Not weeks.Comment
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This news story involving Arnold Swarzenegger trying to do a good deed makes me think of the current mess in my neighborhood. Several weeks ago AT&T (or contractors hired by AT&T) started work in my Lawton neighborhood to run fiber optic cable under ground for all the homes there. They're digging under front yards near the street curb. I don't know if it's the city's fault for keeping bad records on utility locations or just their own incompetence, but they've hit underground water lines numerous times, causing outages. Then at some point around a month ago the crews stopped work on the project. I have a big fucking hole, about 3' across and at least 3' or 4' feet deep on the edge of my driveway, merely covered by a sheet of cheap plywood. I have to be careful pulling my truck into and out of the driveway. If a wheel dips into that hole it could mean a lot of wheel and axle damage (if not worse). I've seen crews run fiber optic cable before, but I've never seen the process go at stupidly bad as this. It's pretty outrageous.Comment
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Amen, Brother!Originally posted by Frank Cox
Although it's likely that the City of LA is responsible in this case (Brentwood is in the jurisdictional no man's land between Beverly Hills and Santa Monica, most of which is officially part of LA), "so they dug a trench and then disappeared for three weeks" would be a very appropriate motto for CalTrans, only substituting years for weeks. A combintion of shock absorber-destroying potholes and road construction projects that involve coning off lanes and then buggering off for weeks or months has cost me, and everyone else whose work requires them to drive to, from, and within the LA metro, countless wasted hours.
Not that there is anything new about this: Hollywood itself had something to say about the issue three decades ago:
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The world's most expensive firework, and a euphemism to rival Gwyneth Paltrow's, courtesy of the Daily Wail:
"Rapid unscheduled disassembly" ???!!! I guess that's what Gwyneth would call an unconscious separation.Elon Musk's Starship goes up in smoke on 4/20: World's most powerful rocket fails to separate and EXPLODES in $3BN fireball before crashing back down to earth
Elon Musk's SpaceX's Starship exploded into a ball of fire on 4/20 during its second failed orbital launch in a week.
The world's largest and most powerful rocket – which was unmanned - lifted off in South Texas and successfully cleared the launchpad, its first milestone.
But the craft was sent into a tailspin when the rocket failed to separate over the Gulf of Mexico. The mission ended at around four minutes when the failure sent the craft crashing toward Earth, imploding mid-descent.
Despite the craft going up in flames, the team at SpaceX reportedly cracked out champagne bottles and chanted 'go Starship' after the explosion.
The company's leadership – including Musk – has repeatedly stressed the experimental nature of the launch and said any result that involved Starship getting off the launchpad would be a success.
The mission was always due to end with the destruction of the Starship rocket, which was supposed to orbit the earth for about an hour before crashing into the Pacific.
But any setbacks will still be hugely expensive. Musk has said the entire program will cost anywhere from $3 billion to $10 billion.
But Musk himself was braced for a failed launch, claiming last month that there was a 50 percent chance his spacecraft could explode during the test flight.
The billionaire congratulated the SpaceX team on Twitter about 20 minutes after the craft went up in flames.
Musk tweeted: 'Congrats @SpaceX team on an exciting test launch of Starship! Learned a lot for next test launch in a few months.'
SpaceX then shared on Twitter that its team will review data and work toward another flight for the rocket.
'As if the flight test was not exciting enough, Starship experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly before stage separation,' SpaceX tweeted.
'With a test like this, success comes from what we learn, and today's test will help us improve Starship's reliability as SpaceX seeks to make life multi-planetary.'
Starship was the tallest rocket ever built, around the size of a 40-story building.
The mission was supposed to see the craft blast 150 miles high into the atmosphere before cruising for an hour and crashing into the Pacific Ocean.
The mission took off with promise when Starship ignited its 33 Raptor engines and lifted off the launch pad at the Boca Chica, Texas, facility at 1,242 miles per hour.
Cheers erupted in the control room as staff and hundreds of thousands of viewers worldwide watched the massive vehicle leave the ground.
And it reached a height of around 25 miles above the earth.
But the separation failed, sending the rocket into a spin and within seconds, the rocket detonated over the ocean.
Despite failing to complete the full flight test, SpaceX declared it a success.
'We cleared the tower, which was our only hope,' said Kate Tice, a SpaceX quality systems engineer, during the live-streamed event.
'With a test like this, success comes from what we learn, and today's test will help us improve Starship´s reliability as SpaceX seeks to make life multi-planetary,' SpaceX tweeted.
Starship consists of a 164-foot (50-meter) tall spacecraft designed to carry crew and cargo that sits atop a 230-foot tall first-stage Super Heavy booster rocket.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson also congratulated SpaceX.
'Congrats to SpaceX on Starship's first integrated flight test! Every great achievement throughout history has demanded some level of calculated risk, because with great risk comes great reward. Looking forward to all that SpaceX learns, to the next flight test—and beyond,' Nelson shared in a tweet.
Unlike NASA, SpaceX is a private company and launching a massive rocket is seen as a success.
Musk's company also works faster in developing rockets than the American space agency, so to the billionaire, one lost in the name of science is more information gained.
SpaceX engineers and technicians spent about eight months building the first Starship prototype, whereas it took six to seven years to complete the Saturn V rocket.
Musk has said that SpaceX is building several more Starship rockets and that overall he believes there is an 80 percent chance one of them will reach orbit before the end of the year.
The mission – which would have sent Starship around Earth once before it splashes down in the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii – would have been an early milestone in Musk's ambition for the craft to carry people and cargo to the moon and Mars.
Starship is both bigger and more powerful than SLS and capable of lifting a payload of more than 100 metric tonnes into orbit.
It generates 17 million pounds of thrust, more than twice that of the Saturn V rockets used to send Apollo astronauts to the Moon.
No spaceship is currently capable of sending humans to the Red Planet – but all that could change with the development of Starship.
Its creation is part of Musk's grander vision of making us a 'multi-planetary species', first by starting a human colony on Mars and eventually building cities.
That may seem ambitious, but the tech supremo's long-term objective for Starship is to carry people to destinations in the 'greater Solar System', including gas giants such as Jupiter or one of its possibly-habitable moons.
The thinking is that if there were ever a global apocalypse on Earth, the human race would have a better chance of survival if people lived on different worlds in our solar system.
NASA also awards contracts to companies to build its rockets, which also takes time and funding from the government.
This was the second attempt at the first orbital launch. Monday was the initial date, but the mission was postponed due to a glitch moments before takeoff.
'If we get far enough away from the launchpad before something goes wrong, then I think I would consider that to be a success,' Musk said before the flight. 'Just don't blow up the launchpad.'
The rocket was supposed to separate so the booster would then fall back to earth and into the Gulf of Mexico.
Musk has said that SpaceX is building several more Starship rockets and that overall he believes there is an 80 percent chance one of them will reach orbit before the end of the year.
The mission – which would have sent Starship around Earth once before it splashes down in the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii – would have been an early milestone in Musk's ambition for the craft to carry people and cargo to the moon and Mars.
Starship is both bigger and more powerful than SLS and capable of lifting a payload of more than 100 metric tonnes into orbit.
It generates 17 million pounds of thrust, more than twice that of the Saturn V rockets used to send Apollo astronauts to the Moon.
No spaceship is currently capable of sending humans to the Red Planet – but all that could change with the development of Starship.
Its creation is part of Musk's grander vision of making us a 'multi-planetary species', first by starting a human colony on Mars and eventually building cities.
That may seem ambitious, but the tech supremo's long-term objective for Starship is to carry people to destinations in the 'greater Solar System', including gas giants such as Jupiter or one of its possibly-habitable moons.
The thinking is that if there were ever a global apocalypse on Earth, the human race would have a better chance of survival if people lived on different worlds in our solar system.
Starship will be capable of carrying up to 100 people to the Red Planet on a journey that is 250 times further than the moon and would take around nine months each way.
Musk and SpaceX have remained tight-lipped about a lot of the details regarding Starship, including images of what the inside will look like.
Still, the 51-year-old has previously said he wants to install around 40 cabins in the payload area near the front of the upper stage.
'You could conceivably have five or six people per cabin, if you really wanted to crowd people in,' the Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter boss added.
In April 2021, NASA announced that it had selected SpaceX's next-generation vehicle as the first crewed lunar lander for its Artemis III mission — due to put the first woman and first person of color on the moon in 2025.
The Starship HLS – or Starship Human Landing System – will include SpaceX's Raptor engines while also pulling inspiration from the Falcon and Dragon vehicles' designs.
It will feature a spacious cabin and two airlocks for astronaut moonwalks.
However, 2025 will not be the Starship HLS' first moon landing. That's because NASA wants the vehicle to perform an uncrewed test touchdown before it returns human boots to the lunar surface for the first time since 1972.
The other uses for Starship are to deposit satellites into low-Earth orbit and possibly carry out space tourism trips.
Musk has promised a trip around the moon to the Japanese online retail billionaire Yusaku Maezawa, who announced that a crew of eight artists would be joining him for the dearMoon mission at the end of last year.
'But I think mostly we would expect to see two or three people per cabin, and so nominally about 100 people per flight to Mars.'
The Martian surface is not the only destination for Starship, however.
t is currently scheduled for sometime this year, but with Starship not yet having completed a successful orbital launch, that date seems poised to slip.
Musk has previously estimated the total development cost of the Starship project to be between $2 billion and $10 billion.
He later said it would probably be 'closer to two or three [billion] than it is to 10.'
The idea for the Super Heavy dates back to November 2005, when Musk first discussed his desire to create a rocket he then termed BFR or Big F***ing rocket.
Since then, other SpaceX launch vehicles have followed, all building up to the development of the Super Heavy.
As for Musk's take on the whole thing, I suspect he'll have a little trouble hiring any astronauts who agree with him, taking the attitude of "just as long as we don't get blown to smithereens on the launchpad, whatever happens after the launch is OK."
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There is a video online of the debris and rocks it kicked up. I'm thinking the 5 first stage engines that failed may have been due to that. It sure sat on the ground a while before it left the pad... as for stage 2, we'll have to wait and see what they find. The only rocket I can think of that never failed in any of it's flights is Saturn V. The first test flight and I believe Saturn 8 almost self destructed from POGO oscillations. But they solved that by adding baffles in the fuel tanks. During design they also had massive oscillations in the engine that was traced to the multi hole nozzel combustion head. But that was on the test stand in Huntsville, and solved before a rocket ever flew.Comment
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And to be fair, SpaceX's R & D philosophy is to destroy prototypes in testing as a strategy to gather data very quickly with which to make a big leap to the next, far more reliable iteration, rather than the slow and cautious approach. But "rapid unscheduled disassembly" an a euphemism for blowing up was just too good to ignore without a giggle.Comment
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I just watched a video by Scott Manley about the explosion of Space-X's Starship rocket:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8q24QLXixo
From what I understand by watching the video, the rocket was, pretty much, doomed from the moment they touched it off.
The launchpad wasn't properly designed to withstand the forces from the rocket's exhaust and there wasn't any means, built in, to deflect the exhaust in a safe direction. The destruction of the pad and the ground beneath kicked up debris which damaged the rocket even before it left the launchpad.
All throughout the flight, the rocket's computer systems were trying to stabilize the failing rocket until it finally reached the breaking point. The rocket began to tumble and, eventually, it bent in the middle. It was losing altitude for almost half a minute before its "Mission Termination" system activated. Either the rocket blew itself up or it automatically self-destructed. I wasn't able to tell which.
Scott Manley commented that, even though the rocket suffered an "Unplanned, Rapid Disassembly" (Blew up) the Space-X team gathered a whole lot of telemetry data that they will use in future launches.
While I agree with the statement, "We haven't failed. We have simply discovered another way that doesn't work," I don't agree with the philosophy of throwing money at a problem until you figure it out. There are plenty of ways to design, build and test rockets without simply lighting the fuse, sticking your fingers in your ears and hoping you don't hear an earth shattering KABOOM!
I have seen other videos by Manley, regarding Space-X, which said that some of their earlier designs were doomed to fail before they started because of some design flaws or because they failed to take into account some factor which they should have. In this video, Manley said that the ground on which the launchpad was built was soft, saturated with ground water and was fundamentally unstable.
I think that Elon Musk, building rockets, operates the same way I did when I played with model rockets as a teenager. (Launch and pray.) The only difference is that he's got a bazillion dollars to play with while I had to save my pennies from my allowance.
Basically, musk gambles with billions of dollars and hopes things pay off. If he blows up enough rockets, one of them is bound to fly, eventually. That's no way to run a business.
I just hope nobody gets killed in the process.Comment
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"Unplanned, Rapid Disassembly"
Whomever came up with this euphemism earned his/her pay. The real question is did they have it in their pocket before the launch, or was it spontaneous?
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