Commercial Crew - Information release DISCUSSION thread

[edkyle99]

Showing the crash would generate more publicity than not showing the crash.  There is no such thing as bad publicity. 

It's not that simple -- all publicity is "good" if one doesn't care about the nature of the resulting attention.  For example, I'd guess Mark McGwire doesn't think all the attention from the congressional subpoena and his subsequent testimony was "good."  The commercial crew companies weren't selected or funded based on their popularity and it's unlikely that will change in the near-term.

McGwire was famous *before* his bad publicity, but his example still applies in one sense because he has risen above his scandal, apologizing and reentering  baseball as a highly effective hitting coach, first for the 2011 World Series winning St. Louis Cardinals and then for the increasingly-successful Dodgers of Los Angeles - both teams demonstrating powerful hitting during his tenure.  The point is that it is one thing to gain attention for failure, but that infamy can only be turned to advantage by achieving subsequent success.  SNC should be fearless with its PR and confidently expect future success. 

There are many better examples.  Stravinsky and the Rite of Spring.  Orson Wells' Devil's Night broadcast.  Mae West's arrest.  And so on.

 - Ed Kyle

[spectre9]

Too right Ed.

Right now Dream Chaser is destined to end up dead. That's simply the direction congress is taking.

They had nothing to lose yet they chose not to take a risk.

No reward will come.

[Lar]

Here's a thought for those upset about corporate secrecy. The best way to find out what goes on behind the public face in an aerospace corporation...get a job with them. It will be difficult. It will probably take a while. But it's not impossible (speaking from experience). Then you will probably know all you could ever wanted to.

Oh yeah, keep in mind that 99% of what you will learn you won't be able to discuss with anyone outside of your coworkers around you....

Wait, by working at, say, OSC, I can find out all I want to know about SNC That probably isn't what you meant

[rcoppola]

Too right Ed.

Right now Dream Chaser is destined to end up dead. That's simply the direction congress is taking.

They had nothing to lose yet they chose not to take a risk.

No reward will come.

I'm curious. Are you upset because you wanted DC to succeed and you now think they blew it? Or are you on the record as having a different preference weighted toward Dragon or CST?

[RigelFive]

There has been something going around the past few years that promotes going for an 80% solution.  This was promoted by the DoD around 2008-ish, and it may be a continued theme today.  Perhaps has migrated into the NASA culture.

So when you have a new product being developed in this type of environment... management always wins by cutting costs and aiming for 80% solutions.  Engineers always lose because there is never enough time to do everything to stay in budget.  And then afterwards, politics always expects 100% solutions.

When you adopt an 80% solution mentality, you arbitrarily create something I've entitled as "The Anti-Specification".  Although this document is never written and doesn't exist... if it did, it would be an informal/flexible document that tells you everything that you do not have to do.  If this type of document was written, it would be an infinitely long document that could only be printed in the inner bowels of Hades.

So, for the SNC approach/landing demo... I'd bet there was a moment that perhaps went something like this:

Q (prior to the demo):  Do we have to generate full Monte Carlo simulations and gather test data statistics on the reliability of the gear deployment to show a 99.999999% probability of success with a 90% confidence?
A (prior to the demo):  Per Section 12, paragraph 99, hyperlink 29990.1 of the NASA Commercial Crew anti-specification... we don't have to do that.

This type of program is implicitly dripping in risk.

[rcoppola]

Too right Ed.

Right now Dream Chaser is destined to end up dead. That's simply the direction congress is taking.

They had nothing to lose yet they chose not to take a risk.

No reward will come.

So let me get this right. SNC is spending tens of millions of their own dollars designing and building an orbital vehicle with no guarantee of technical or financial success and yet, according to you, they have taken no risks?

The whole endeavor is a risk!

[spectre9]

I'm saying they have the Sword of Damocles hanging over their precious tax payer funded jobs.

This was a chance to give nightly news programs something they could show.

You think Proton was on the world stage before it tumbled and went boom? That's not the way it works.

Failures are valuable. You can't just stage a failure for the PR, it has to be genuine.

In other words "you can't buy a failure" 

[psloss]

Showing the crash would generate more publicity than not showing the crash.  There is no such thing as bad publicity. 

It's not that simple -- all publicity is "good" if one doesn't care about the nature of the resulting attention.  For example, I'd guess Mark McGwire doesn't think all the attention from the congressional subpoena and his subsequent testimony was "good."  The commercial crew companies weren't selected or funded based on their popularity and it's unlikely that will change in the near-term.

McGwire was famous *before* his bad publicity, but his example still applies in one sense because he has risen above his scandal, apologizing and reentering  baseball as a highly effective hitting coach, first for the 2011 World Series winning St. Louis Cardinals and then for the increasingly-successful Dodgers of Los Angeles - both teams demonstrating powerful hitting during his tenure.

There's also the infamy (well, the baseball infamy).  And the attention that he didn't want, which is why he didn't want to testify.  He probably didn't want his ex-teammate to talk as much; the book that Canseco wrote definitely got a lot of attention for both of them, but it had different outcomes in their cases.

IIRC, he expressed a desire to coach around the time he retired...the attention following his testimony probably made it undesirable to do so for an extended period of time.

There are many better examples.  Stravinsky and the Rite of Spring.  Orson Wells' Devil's Night broadcast.  Mae West's arrest.  And so on.

Can you provide some TV-era and (especially) Internet-era examples?

[Robotbeat]

Showing the crash would generate more publicity than not showing the crash.  There is no such thing as bad publicity. 

It's not that simple -- all publicity is "good" if one doesn't care about the nature of the resulting attention.  For example, I'd guess Mark McGwire doesn't think all the attention from the congressional subpoena and his subsequent testimony was "good."  The commercial crew companies weren't selected or funded based on their popularity and it's unlikely that will change in the near-term.

McGwire was famous *before* his bad publicity, but his example still applies in one sense because he has risen above his scandal, apologizing and reentering  baseball as a highly effective hitting coach, first for the 2011 World Series winning St. Louis Cardinals and then for the increasingly-successful Dodgers of Los Angeles - both teams demonstrating powerful hitting during his tenure.  The point is that it is one thing to gain attention for failure, but that infamy can only be turned to advantage by achieving subsequent success.  SNC should be fearless with its PR and confidently expect future success. 

There are many better examples.  Stravinsky and the Rite of Spring.  Orson Wells' Devil's Night broadcast.  Mae West's arrest.  And so on.

 - Ed Kyle

...except success here has basically nothing to do with PR. A Cinderella story wouldn't really help.

If they succeed somehow with PR, it only helps them get better talent. They don't really have commercial customers for Dreamchaser, and if they did, showing a video of the vehicle crashing won't make them feel it's safer than, say, a capsule. (I say that with the assumption that the Dream Chaser crash would've been survivable.)

[Lar]

Too right Ed.

Right now Dream Chaser is destined to end up dead. That's simply the direction congress is taking.

They had nothing to lose yet they chose not to take a risk.

No reward will come.

I'm curious. Are you upset because you wanted DC to succeed and you now think they blew it? Or are you on the record as having a different preference weighted toward Dragon or CST?

He's on the record as hating everyone and everything   Which is a good thing, someone needs to keep the fan bois honest.

[RigelFive]

I'm saying they have the Sword of Damocles hanging over their precious tax payer funded jobs.

This was a chance to give nightly news programs something they could show.

You think Proton was on the world stage before it tumbled and went boom? That's not the way it works.

Failures are valuable. You can't just stage a failure for the PR, it has to be genuine.

In other words "you can't buy a failure" 

Politicians like Anthony Weiner say there is no such thing as bad press.  So what you are saying is that SNC is like the new Weiner?

[Lurker Steve]

If they succeed somehow with PR, it only helps them get better talent. They don't really have commercial customers for Dreamchaser, and if they did, showing a video of the vehicle crashing won't make them feel it's safer than, say, a capsule. (I say that with the assumption that the Dream Chaser crash would've been survivable.)

Let's say the incident was survivable. SNC says this is the worst that could happen. Normal flights end in a softer landing, similar to say a Lear jet. Then roll tape of the hard landing of the CST-100 on the air bags, or the Dragon bobbing up and down in rough seas. And those are their "normal" landings.

Currently, SNC released a video of the first free flight of DC, to show how much progress they have been making. I'm not really sure how releasing video of the landing would help their cause, unless they wanted to say this stuff is too hard and we quit. I'm sure we will see the video eventually, but only after a couple of successful soft landings.

[spectre9]

Too right Ed.

Right now Dream Chaser is destined to end up dead. That's simply the direction congress is taking.

They had nothing to lose yet they chose not to take a risk.

No reward will come.

I'm curious. Are you upset because you wanted DC to succeed and you now think they blew it? Or are you on the record as having a different preference weighted toward Dragon or CST?

He's on the record as hating everyone and everything   Which is a good thing, someone needs to keep the fan bois honest.

That's not fair. I don't hate LEGO  I can't wait for the movie... whoops off topic.

I don't try to hate space hardware I just tend to get hooked up on the little details like where the money is coming from.

Programs that have less chance of being fully funded have less chance of me being enthusiastic about them.

XCOR Lynx is much more exciting than Dream Chaser because it has a better business case.

Can't bash SNC too much. This is their first real failure to provide public information. They've actually been a bit better than Boeing. Even if they aren't willing to show the crash* it would be nice to see the damage.

*anomaly 

[psloss]

Politicians like Anthony Weiner say there is no such thing as bad press.

Rimshot aside, whether he said that (or Tweeted it or something else) when he re-entered the public eye, the outcome of his most recent NY mayor candidacy suggests otherwise.  Similar to Gary Hart in an earlier era.

[Lurker Steve]

Politicians like Anthony Weiner say there is no such thing as bad press.

Rimshot aside, whether he said that (or Tweeted it or something else) when he re-entered the public eye, the outcome of his most recent NY mayor candidacy suggests otherwise.  Similar to Gary Hart in an earlier era.

It's actually kind of weird. Weiner was doing OK, then just kind of hit the self-destruct button with another set of bad press. He had actually recovered from the sexting scandal that got him kicked out of Congress.

Of course, there's also Marion Berry who got re-elected as mayor of DC after serving his time for drug offenses.

[vt_hokie]

Here's a thought for those upset about corporate secrecy. The best way to find out what goes on behind the public face in an aerospace corporation...get a job with them. It will be difficult. It will probably take a while. But it's not impossible (speaking from experience). Then you will probably know all you could ever wanted to.

Oh yeah, keep in mind that 99% of what you will learn you won't be able to discuss with anyone outside of your coworkers around you....

Been there, done that.  After my second layoff, I went back to school for my MBA!

[edkyle99]

Can you provide some TV-era and (especially) Internet-era examples?

Please don't make me talk about the sex tape era.

I can give some rocket examples though. 

The first Ariane 5 failed shortly after launch.  The first Ariane 5 ECA also failed, and in a bad way.  Yet today Ariane 5 ECA sports the world's most reliable commercial bigsat GTO launch record.

In 1957, Thor 101, the first Thor missile, blew up on its launch pad.  The next three Thors also failed.  At the end of that same year, Vanguard TV-3 exploded on its pad when attempting to launch the first U.S. satellite.  In 1958, someone decided to try to combine Thor with Vanguard's second stage to create Thor-Able, which failed on its first attempt.  In 1960, Thor-Able was updated to create Thor-Delta, which, of course, failed on its first attempt.  Thor-Delta (Delta) went on to become one of the world's most successful, versatile, and oft-flown orbital launch vehicles.

Thor was combined with Agena, a spy camera, and a film return capsule for Discoverer/Corona.  The first twelve attempts failed, in every way possible.  Corona finally succeeded.  What it discovered made everyone forget the failures. 

There are other examples.  Russia's R-7 failed often early on, and we know its unmatched record.  The SpaceX story is still playing out, but could repeat the above examples since the first three Falcon 1 launches failed (and a fourth, initial Falcon 1 was destroyed on the ground without ever flying).

 - Ed Kyle

[dcporter]

Ed you're quoting rockets that overcame bad press, not ones that were helped by it.

[Rocket Science]

Can you provide some TV-era and (especially) Internet-era examples?

Please don't make me talk about the sex tape era.

I can give some rocket examples though. 

The first Ariane 5 failed shortly after launch.  The first Ariane 5 ECA also failed, and in a bad way.  Yet today Ariane 5 ECA sports the world's most reliable commercial bigsat GTO launch record.

In 1957, Thor 101, the first Thor missile, blew up on its launch pad.  The next three Thors also failed.  At the end of that same year, Vanguard TV-3 exploded on its pad when attempting to launch the first U.S. satellite.  In 1958, someone decided to try to combine Thor with Vanguard's second stage to create Thor-Able, which failed on its first attempt.  In 1960, Thor-Able was updated to create Thor-Delta, which, of course, failed on its first attempt.  Thor-Delta (Delta) went on to become one of the world's most successful, versatile, and oft-flown orbital launch vehicles.

Thor was combined with Agena, a spy camera, and a film return capsule for Discoverer/Corona.  The first twelve attempts failed, in every way possible.  Corona finally succeeded.  What it discovered made everyone forget the failures. 

There are other examples.  Russia's R-7 failed often early on, and we know its unmatched record.  The SpaceX story is still playing out, but could repeat the above examples since the first three Falcon 1 launches failed (and a fourth, initial Falcon 1 was destroyed on the ground without ever flying).

 - Ed Kyle

Ed, none of those examples are of commercial human rated spacecraft under development... We have very little to go by apart from launch vehicle failures to set precedence...

[Mader Levap]

Showing the crash would generate more publicity than not showing the crash.  There is no such thing as bad publicity.

Very, very... incorrect. Other already noted that even if this is true, it applies to celebrites only and nowhere else. Various examples given here were about successes achieved despite faliures, not helped by them.

So, nope. This claim is ludicrous.