SpaceX
4 HN recommenders · recommended in 14 months, 2018–2026
2:09 · 31M views · Sep 14, 2017
SpaceX's own compilation of failed orbital booster landing attempts, set to sound, showing the crashes before landings succeeded.
HN uses it as evidence that SpaceX iterated through visible failures and is open and humorous about them.
20 comments from Hacker News
Everyone is commenting saying how mundane it has become to see the landings. Hence you might enjoy this official SpaceX Blooper reel from 2017 that shows the numerous spectacular failures that they worked through. Innovation is a type of gamble. People forget that. "SpaceX: How Not to Land an Orbital Rocket Booster" this video (and regular reminder that these things are 12-storey high explosive tubes)
Agree it is strange. I love their "How Not to Land an Orbital Rocket Booster" film. this video Watching the countdown net it seemed plausible that they didn't know whether it had successfully landed either.
Speaking of not being ashamed of failures, I've always liked their compilation of them (with sound it's even better): this video
If you happen not to have seen it, "How Not To Land an Orbital Rocket Booster": this video from SpaceX.
This method has already been proven to be infinitely better than the old school approach. Falcon is the most reliable rocket in the world and capable of landing its booster back safely to earth, something which thought impossible by basically everyone in the industry. It took years of physical iteration to iron out all the problems though, see this video from SpaceX of all their years of failed attempts: this video Anyone who has ever built a physical product will tell you that theory and good engineering are important, but once you start to actually build something you enter "integration hell", which means you need to physically exercise your product end-to-end many MANY times, and iron out all of the edge cases that reality presents. It has nothing to do with "better engineering" and everything to do with complex systems interacting with physical reality. Stuff Made Here (YouTuber) made a video where he built a disc launcher, which is a great example of what the process is like. He put quite a lot of engineering and design work into the project, but eventually entered integration hell at some point and just had to iterate and problem solve by repeatedly firing test disks until all the kinks were worked out. [LINK]