[AR] Re: SpaceX failure update
- From: Derek Lyons <fairwater@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 14 Oct 2016 14:46:43 -0700
On Fri, Oct 14, 2016 at 2:28 PM, Hugh Blair-Smith <hugh.bs@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The account cited is pretty good but omits a key bit of bad design that hid
the thousand-degree overheat. To quote from my book:
"Unfortunately, the highest reading the temperature sensor could display on
the instrument panel was the designed maximum of 80<deg>F."
I'm not sure I'd call that bad design per se - nobody thinks an oven
thermometer that doesn't read hundreds of degrees outside of it's
normally expected range is badly designed after all.
The problem was trusting the thermostat (itself badly designed) even
though the gauge was reading off scale high _while performing an ad
hoc procedure_. It's the latter that doesn't get as much attention as
it should. They were more concerned about their launch date and got
in a hurry.
D.
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