Comment by Tepix
6 days ago
They really need to establish communications to let the viewers know why they are adding time to the clock.
6 days ago
They really need to establish communications to let the viewers know why they are adding time to the clock.
Cynically, this feels like Corporate Messaging 101: don't ever admit that anything bad happened. Ignore it if you can. If you can't anymore, spin it into something positive at all costs. If it's bad news, be as vague and euphemistic as possible.
To be fair, SpaceX did/does(?) the same thing - they use pretty opaque messaging when things went wrong early on. And do stuff like deliberately not show explosion footage on the live stream.
They do sometimes give reasons for a stopped countdown such as "an issue with a valve" or "a boat in the wrong area".
"An error occured. Please try again later"
Can't use the word "error" in corp speak. "Something unexpected happened." Or maybe just "Oops."
Sometimes this extreme spin just makes me angry, to be honest.
"An unexpexted error..."
If you skimp on testing, errors are always unexpected.
It also took SpaceX some time to figure out how to communicate scrubs to the viewers. I think they guy's name was Inspruker who did a really good job of keeping us up to date even when he was lacking official information. This was back before they were landing the rockets, when we'd wait literally months between Falcon launches.
So SpaceX has had a decade of figuring out what, and how, to inform the viewers. Blue Origin might not be comfortable with that yet.
SpaceX still insists on being cagey too. I watched a launch a while back where the center stage failed to land itself, and the hosts pretty obviously were instructed to beat around the bush and pretend nothing was wrong ("A telemetry failure" as you could see it in the video footage belly flopping into the ground) and do literally anything other than admit the center stage had a minor failure that resulted in it's loss. Like it's not even a big deal, the boosters were right then having a picture perfect landing.
But a profit driven company cannot be honest about anything ever. Honesty is never as profitable as being extremely controlling about the information you share.
I consider this a huge negative of the privatisation of space. When the Shuttle killed people, we could expect great transparency and a general peeling back of the curtain. The public got to learn that their government agency was suffering from management failures by loser managers unwilling to face reality.
We will not get that same transparency when a SpaceX rocket inevitably kills someone. Especially with Musk hanging around the oval office.