"Does SpaceX not review the data / warnings before launch?" is peak Hacker News pettiness. Try not to assume the worst, especially when it's pretty silly.
I'm just asking questions -- I would be genuinely curious if SpaceX has a system for determining and evaluating risk when it comes to a situation like this. It does seem absurd that they wouldn't review the active warnings prior to launches. What is indisputable here is that they've announced the loss of 40 satellites during an active warning. I think it's valid to wonder what the criteria is for a launch, given that the cost of the launch + payloads is quite high, and the cost of delaying the launch is (relatively) low.
Also curious if atmospheric warming is a predictable side effect of one of these storms or if we’re just learning about it.
Being pseudo-anonymous and safely behind a screen depersonalizes the experience enough that we get tempted to take swipes for some reason (I do too), and it diminishes the experience on places like HN especially where we aspire to do better than reddit or /.
The best test for this kind of thing is "If I were speaking to the responsible person face-to-face, would I say it this way?" Because then the question becomes "Do I want to hurt this person?"
> Who Is A United States Person?
>United States Person. United States person means United States citizens (including minor children); United States residents; entities, including but not limited to, corporations, partnerships, or limited liability companies created or organized in the United States or under the laws of the United States; and trusts or estates formed under the laws of the United States.
The way you framed your question comes off, to paraphrase the wiki, as an attempt to make a wild accusation socially acceptable. Given your response here, I don't get the impression that this was intentional, but given just your original post I absolutely did get the impression that it was intended as an accusation.
---
To attempt to answer the question, the launch weather report [1] does take into account solar activity, and rated it as a low risk. SpaceX takes a more detailed look at the weather than what's in the public report too. However that report almost certainly only counted solar weather during the launch itself - I don't know of public documentation either way towards them looking at post-launch weather as a launch criteria.
[1] https://www.patrick.spaceforce.mil/Portals/14/Weather/Falcon...
> I think it's valid to wonder what the criteria is for a launch.
In my opinion it's pretty clear the jist of his message is "how did this happen when there was a freely available warning"
To ask why "Does SpaceX not review the data / warnings before launch?" instead of asking "why did Space-X choose to launch when there was a warning" are two drastically different questions. The first has an assumption that checking for the warning is the problem while the second does not make an assumption of the problem.
I think it's a pretty poor assumption that an organization like Space-X would not check the warnings before launch. They likely have an NOAA rep advising their decision. It's silly to assume a highly regulated multi-million dollar discipline that has little tolerance for failure (space flight) would be so haphazard. Even pilots of small airplanes are required to check government notifications before each flight. So I'm curious, why did they launch when that warning existed?
There are two options:
1) They don’t monitor the warnings.
2) The warning doesn’t matter. Move fast and breaking things.
Both options are bad.
4) The severity of the situation was misjudged
5) They decided to try a real-world experiment to determine whether their expectations were correct
Seeing how the satellites were taken down not by the storm itself but the atmosphere slightly expanding to make the low-orbit to high-orbit move physically impossible, I wonder if this is something that hadn’t been encountered before, or is a known phenomenon but with unknown consequences.
Known phenomenon with unknown consequences tends to be the kind of stuff SpaceX likes to hurl headfirst into to see what breaks.
I don’t know how to summarize my feelings, but I work in aerospace, primarily in hardware, in Asia, often as a manager. I see a lot of comments that simplify and often criticize those topics based on the simplification. I’ve also said “just do this” to software engineers so I want to emphasize that this is not a dig at certain types of engineers or people but maybe most of us can do better at recognizing where our expertise starts and stops.
So, what were the reasons? Hubris could be a reason.
It's so weird. Anyway, let me have a go. Initial points:
- Lots of marketing is full of rubbish and smoke and mirrors. This does not mean that ALL marketing is full of rubbish and smoke and mirrors.
- Many companies have marketing 'as a function', but other companies have marketing as quite literally their only source of revenue. These companies would know that digital marketing doesn't work as they wouldn't have revenue. It is that simple.
- I have never worked for a CEO that has accepted smoke and mirrors as answers, and I would never work for a CEO like that. The CEO of my company has a Stanford PhD in Physics. He was one of those child geniuses you used to see in the newspaper, before you stopped reading newspapers. This guy is not an idiot.
Some marketing - a lot of marketing - cannot be directly attributed to revenue, but we know it works. How? Because we can, and do run isolated tests of that exact tactic and test if it works in isolation.
Take the example of banner ads. I have run them in isolation (ie - I have run campaigns where literally the ONLY way you could have known this information was to see a banner ad) and have achieved spectacular results despite noone ever clicking on the ad. (People emailed and called asking to take up the offer.)
I have also have achieved horrifically bad results. Same tactics, but everything else was different - audience, market, placement, product being sold etc.
Every product has a better or worse way of being marketed. It takes a TON of experience to learn how to adapt; many junior marketers think they're experts because they crush it in one job, and then go to the next job and have the exact same tactics fail. Why? Because business is hard. Marketing is about so much more than just running ads.
I run marketing right now for a very young startup. A year ago, we were adding around $5-15k in ARR each month (we only bill annually.) Now, we are adding around $80-100k in new ARR each month. Our marketing spend, inc salaries, is around $40k/m and our sales are growing wayy faster than our marketing spend. The results would be even better if I could convince my CEO to raise our prices.
(I can't complain - at least I got an unsolicited salary increase a few months ago.)
Marketing is the only form of lead generation for us. So much so that I had to plead with the CEO and head of sales to stop relying on my function and to go out and actually set up proper outbound sales processes.
Just because Uber's head of marketing was dropping - and wasting - hundreds of millions on programmatic advertising, doesn't make us all idiots.
/endrant.
(oh. One last thing. This is really the cherry on top: our market is devs. We're literally marketing to devs.)
I think my hesitance towards the ad world is coming from my personal experience. I’ve worked at marketing agencies and as digital strategist for a company, so I saw both sides of the chain. My guess is there are a lot of companies that don’t know how to get the highest value out of online ads, and these can be fooled easily by marketing agencies or ad sellers (that a lot of time also don’t really know how to optimize).
I guess as always: don’t blame the tool.