9 thoughts on “The Normal Healthy Paranoia”

  2. Off topic, but I just got my copy of “Safe Is Not An Option” in the mail today, it looks very nice so far! Thanks for the good work, Rand.

      1. Any update on the e-book for backers?
        Hopefully its a great time for this to come out with the SpaceX thing really kicking off now

  3. The article ends with comments about SpaceX which are intended to imply that they’ve “learnt paranoia”. Yeah, I think he has it backwards. There’s never been any shortage of paranoia at SpaceX. Even way back in the Falcon 1 days they were doing more testing, documentation and automated self-checks than anyone else.. and they’ve been just as paranoid about the government or crony competitors shutting them down. While SpaceX certainly did have a lot to learn to get to their first successful flights, paranoia wasn’t one of them.

    1. The fact that they designed the Merlin to be able to ingest a metal bolt through its fuel lines without shutting down, a situation which would typically cause destruction of any other engine, is very telling of SpaceX’s paranoic engineering principles. The manned Dragon will have a greater degree of abort capability than any other manned spacecraft in history. And their reliance on simple, proven designs (LOX/Kerosene, 2 stage boosters, capsule+trunk, cold gas thrusters) as the foundation of their systems is a huge testament to their paranoia and carefulness. Even more so their incremental development and testing methadology. They didn’t build a commercially competitive orbital launcher until they had acquired institutional experience in bulding and launcher smaller, easier vehicles. They used the cargo version of the Dragon as a means to prove out the overall design, and used test flights of the Falcon 9 as an opportunity to prove the Dragon on a test flight (instead of just using a dummy payload). Now they’re using flights of the Falcon 9 v1.1 to prove out the design of a reusable first stage (which is different only in the addition of legs and a slightly different flight profile).

      The SpaceX folks are masters of risk mitigation and risk reduction. That’s a big reason why they are so far ahead. Because doing so enables them to concentrate on real R&D instead of spending too much time focusing on tackling overly complex and unproven design, integration, or operational issues.

  4. Seems like a bizarre article to me. So SpaceX had several test flights that failed until they learned better how to do it. That makes sense to me; how exactly does anyone build a successful anything without testing and failing? When I write software, it generally doesn’t work, so I fix it. Obviously, if SpaceX had started selling launches while they were still failing, they would be out of business now, but they didn’t do that.
    The article seems to be trying to make the point that there is really no difference between government and commercial launches, which is wrong.

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