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Comment by mladenkovacevic | Hacker News Reader

Also just to manage some expectations.. the rocket will not fly.

This is just a firing of the engines I believe.

They REALLY need to say that on the page. This has the opportunity to spread virally and the crowd doesn't manage expectations very well :)

Yeah, I just managed to embarrass myself in half a dozen IRC channels. More so than usual.

Which part about "STATIC FIRE TODAY" did you miss?

For an enthusiast, it may not be clear exactly what "Static Fire" means. While Static means non-moving, it also means the hissing noise on mis-tuned analog connections, and it's not inconceivable that it has another overloaded meaning.

> For an enthusiast

I think you're misusing that word. A space flight and/or specifically SpaceX enthusiast would recognize the terminology instantly.

Assuming you mean something like "amateur" or "layman", thinking anything without the word "launch" in it is in fact a launch still seems a remarkable leap of illogic.

In my dialect, enthusiast == amateur and parent used it appropriately.

I'm afraid your dialect is rather singular.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/enthusiast

I'm not sure you checked the definition of amateur in that dictionary.

http://thesaurus.com/browse/amateur

My guess would be, the "static" part.

Even worse, it was just a 2 second test.

It was still a bit unclear: What the static firing intended to be just 2 seconds, or was it cut short?

It was intended to be two seconds [1]

[1] http://www.spacex.com/press.php?page=20120427

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