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

  • From: "Monroe L. King Jr." <monroe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Wed, 02 Oct 2013 06:53:30 -0700

Bill
 Here's one just for you from my friends on the satellite tracker
mailing list.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oyMZkbtMVk

 Monroe

> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject: [AR] Re: Congratulations, Bill Claybaugh and Orbital
> Sciences!!!
> From: Norman Yarvin <yarvin@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Date: Tue, October 01, 2013 8:43 am
> To: arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> 
> 
> 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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