[AR] Re: Congratulations, Bill Claybaugh and Orbital Sciences!!!

  • From: Norman Yarvin <yarvin@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Tue, 1 Oct 2013 11:43:27 -0400

On Mon, Sep 30, 2013 at 04:00:57PM -0700, Rand Simberg wrote:
>That's not what we're insisting.  We're insisting that we should come up 
>with consistent terminology, on which everyone agrees.

That's a bit much.  Words in human language are and have always been
vague; one writes precisely by using lots of words in such a
combination that the ambiguity is removed, not by nailing down precise
meanings of every word as one does in the hard sciences.  It's one
thing to insist on words that were originally defined with a precise
meaning retaining that meaning, but to insist that words that were
originally defined imprecisely start having a precise meaning is too
much.  (And no, a hundred-page NASA spec is not a precise definition;
there are always plenty of ambiguities in such specs.)  Especially
when you admit there isn't much point in using the term.

In this case, the meaningful distinction is probably that Orbital's
capsule is human-rated while its launch vehicle is not, while in
SpaceX's case both are human-rated.  (At least from the discussion I
presume this is the case.)  And it's meaningful not because of any
fundamental technical property but in social terms: it means many
man-years went into politely arguing with NASA about many of those
ambiguities in that long spec (whatever it happens to be at the
moment), and in changing the hardware whenever they happened to win
the argument.

There are always going to be frivolous words and frivolous people;
trying to stamp out either is a waste of time -- and if you really
want to try, icy contempt is a better tool than passionate pleading.


-- 
Norman Yarvin                                   http://yarchive.net/blog

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