Comments on a former employee and burnout

[TEG]

I think most gamblers would have put their dice away and stopped rolling after the 3rd failure.
But they knew that there was some luck involved and they needed to keep rolling because there was still a chance they could win given enough tries.

They didn't know the odds of success, but they kept making improvements, so they figured their odds were improving each time.
It is really hard to quit when you know your odds are getting better and better.

 

[Cattledog]

Designers create problems, engineers solve them.

That seems like a pretty gross over-generalization. Really good designers are great synthesizers and can take pieces they and engineers solve and put them together in a cohesive whole. Both important. If the P85D was a golf cart that went 0-60 in 3.1 seconds, this forum would be a lot less popular. (Anyone been to the CODA fourm lately?) Now we might all be out playing a lot more golf!

 

[DavidB]

Speaking only for myself, I don't believe in the concept of "luck" other than there being an inherent level of randomness in the physical universe.

What is interesting is that the first three rockets failed, for a variety of reasons, and since then they have had no failures. That speaks to hard work, skill, accumulated knowledge and an ability to learn from their mistakes.

They have had several failures since the first three rockets. For instance: Failure in recovering the first stage engines. However, none of the more recent failures have been mission critical.

I think most gamblers would have put their dice away and stopped rolling after the 3rd failure.

*heh* If that were true, there wouldn't be so many gambling addicts!

 

[TEG]

*heh* If that were true, there wouldn't be so many gambling addicts!

Perhaps I should have said most financial backers of the gamblers then.
Anyways, obviously, there is less acceptance of individual failures on a many million dollar rocket launch then there is with a small bet on a table game.

 

[deonb]

I prefer to think of luck as a byproduct of hard work, especially in the case of SpaceX.

Garry Player had a great saying for this: "The harder I practice, the luckier I get".

 

[StephenM]

I think there was plenty of luck involved in both spaceX and Tesla, there have been plenty of other people who wanted to build electric cars and reuseable rockets but they failed for different reasons, and Musk himself came very close to failure too, also with the number of launches they plan on doing, its only a matter of time before spaceX lose another rocket, thats just the nature of the business IMO

Did you really have to jinx the next mission?!
In all seriousness, it is extremely hard to launch rockets and it seems that we were starting to take SpaceX successful launches for granted.