"Does SpaceX not review the data / warnings before launch?" is peak Hacker News pettiness. Try not to assume the worst, especially when it's pretty silly.

> Try not to assume the worst, especially when it's pretty silly.

I'm just asking questions -- I would be genuinely curious if SpaceX has a system for determining and evaluating risk when it comes to a situation like this. It does seem absurd that they wouldn't review the active warnings prior to launches. What is indisputable here is that they've announced the loss of 40 satellites during an active warning. I think it's valid to wonder what the criteria is for a launch, given that the cost of the launch + payloads is quite high, and the cost of delaying the launch is (relatively) low.

Let me refer you to the rational wiki on the phrase "just asking questions" https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Just_asking_questions

The way you framed your question comes off, to paraphrase the wiki, as an attempt to make a wild accusation socially acceptable. Given your response here, I don't get the impression that this was intentional, but given just your original post I absolutely did get the impression that it was intended as an accusation.

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To attempt to answer the question, the launch weather report [1] does take into account solar activity, and rated it as a low risk. SpaceX takes a more detailed look at the weather than what's in the public report too. However that report almost certainly only counted solar weather during the launch itself - I don't know of public documentation either way towards them looking at post-launch weather as a launch criteria.

[1] https://www.patrick.spaceforce.mil/Portals/14/Weather/Falcon...

"So…we have the Space Weather Prediction Center [0] and raw data from NOAA for this exact purpose. Does SpaceX not review the data / warnings before launch?" is not just asking questions; it's full-on passive-aggressive.

Being pseudo-anonymous and safely behind a screen depersonalizes the experience enough that we get tempted to take swipes for some reason (I do too), and it diminishes the experience on places like HN especially where we aspire to do better than reddit or /.

The best test for this kind of thing is "If I were speaking to the responsible person face-to-face, would I say it this way?" Because then the question becomes "Do I want to hurt this person?"

Fine, I'll be direct. Why does it appear that SpaceX failed at risk management in the presence of readily available data to suggest delaying launch?

You don't know what SpaceX's risk models show. They likely have to balance launch delay costs with launch risk costs, among other variables.

spacex isn't a person.

The US government says otherwise

> Who Is A United States Person?

>United States Person. United States person means United States citizens (including minor children); United States residents; entities, including but not limited to, corporations, partnerships, or limited liability companies created or organized in the United States or under the laws of the United States; and trusts or estates formed under the laws of the United States.

https://www.fincen.gov/who-united-states-person

(facepalm)

I wonder if there was additional unannounced payload. SpaceX frequently seems to launch spy satellites. It may be that other cargo timing took a higher priority…

Also curious if atmospheric warming is a predictable side effect of one of these storms or if we’re just learning about it.

Space weather is much-studied but not always predictable (although I think particular situation wasn't too surprising).

Certain people high up in the org get irritable over launch delays. Sometimes others think the risk isn't worth the yelling and go ahead in less than perfect conditions.

You're putting an emotional ("get irritated") label on it, but there are no doubt risk vs return evaluations made for these situations. They go beyond just raw "irritation" I'm sure.

I think you’re unduly discounting the influence of emotions on leaders. IMO there are many executives who are for more driven by their personal feelings than we would like to believe.

Presumably you haven’t seen any of the “exited” emails. Or seen some of the petty reasons people get fired for at that company.

You could have phrased it: "how does SpaceX review...?"

  > I think it's valid to wonder what the criteria is for a launch.

SpaceX operates on the very edge of what is possible. It seems very likely that they saw this as an opportunity to check how viable a Starlink launch is during these conditions. And better to do it with a 40-sat launch on Falcon than on a 300-sat launch on Starship. This storm was an opportunity to learn and to refine the launch criteria.

Like you ask this poster to assume the best of the company, I think you should assume the best of the poster.

In my opinion it's pretty clear the jist of his message is "how did this happen when there was a freely available warning"

"Be Curious, Not Judgmental" - Ted Lasso, and (not?) Walt Whitman.

To ask why "Does SpaceX not review the data / warnings before launch?" instead of asking "why did Space-X choose to launch when there was a warning" are two drastically different questions. The first has an assumption that checking for the warning is the problem while the second does not make an assumption of the problem.

I think it's a pretty poor assumption that an organization like Space-X would not check the warnings before launch. They likely have an NOAA rep advising their decision. It's silly to assume a highly regulated multi-million dollar discipline that has little tolerance for failure (space flight) would be so haphazard. Even pilots of small airplanes are required to check government notifications before each flight. So I'm curious, why did they launch when that warning existed?

I would be astounded if SpaceX asks NOAA's advice for how to position/maneuver satellites.

Based on Tesla’s history with FSD, I don’t think giving any Musk company the benefit of the doubt is warranted.

There are two options:

1) They don’t monitor the warnings.

2) The warning doesn’t matter. Move fast and breaking things.

Both options are bad.

3) The warning was missed due to <fill in the blank process failure>

4) The severity of the situation was misjudged

5) They decided to try a real-world experiment to determine whether their expectations were correct

I suspect some combination of 4 and 5.

Seeing how the satellites were taken down not by the storm itself but the atmosphere slightly expanding to make the low-orbit to high-orbit move physically impossible, I wonder if this is something that hadn’t been encountered before, or is a known phenomenon but with unknown consequences.

Known phenomenon with unknown consequences tends to be the kind of stuff SpaceX likes to hurl headfirst into to see what breaks.

Your comment qualifies as a thought terminating cliche! At least I come to this forum wanting to think about the kind of questions OP has asked.

I have a big collection of “why don’t they just” comments from HN. It’s pretty amusing to look at them in aggregate.

Would you mind sharing it?

Maybe someday. I wouldn’t want to share it without finding time to write a few paragraphs. This community is really great and I don’t want to criticize without context. HN also over-represents one engineering discipline and one region.

I don’t know how to summarize my feelings, but I work in aerospace, primarily in hardware, in Asia, often as a manager. I see a lot of comments that simplify and often criticize those topics based on the simplification. I’ve also said “just do this” to software engineers so I want to emphasize that this is not a dig at certain types of engineers or people but maybe most of us can do better at recognizing where our expertise starts and stops.

I'd almost agree if not for the fact that the warning was ignored. And that ESA had to move their satellites because Elon Must thinks his satellites are more important than others.

So, what were the reasons? Hubris could be a reason.

Ummm…this is quite possible.

It is really up there with the HN classic "Does anyone else think the entire multi billion dollar targeted advertising industry is a scam that doesn't work?"

I don’t necessarily think it’s a scam but am rather skeptical of the way that the results get measured and reported.

Thank you! This HN trope is so tiring. It's almost impossible to convince developers as a group, but to convince them one by one is easy.

I still believe this, but am willing to learn. Honest question: Would you mind trying to convince me?

Sure. It's a lot easier when I can swing open a Facebook/Google Ad (etc) account and show you the actual data. I have tried having this conversation online before and people literally say things like 'you're just a shill how can we trust anything you say', as if I would post this sort of thing in bad faith?

It's so weird. Anyway, let me have a go. Initial points:

- Lots of marketing is full of rubbish and smoke and mirrors. This does not mean that ALL marketing is full of rubbish and smoke and mirrors.

- Many companies have marketing 'as a function', but other companies have marketing as quite literally their only source of revenue. These companies would know that digital marketing doesn't work as they wouldn't have revenue. It is that simple.

- I have never worked for a CEO that has accepted smoke and mirrors as answers, and I would never work for a CEO like that. The CEO of my company has a Stanford PhD in Physics. He was one of those child geniuses you used to see in the newspaper, before you stopped reading newspapers. This guy is not an idiot.

Some marketing - a lot of marketing - cannot be directly attributed to revenue, but we know it works. How? Because we can, and do run isolated tests of that exact tactic and test if it works in isolation.

Take the example of banner ads. I have run them in isolation (ie - I have run campaigns where literally the ONLY way you could have known this information was to see a banner ad) and have achieved spectacular results despite noone ever clicking on the ad. (People emailed and called asking to take up the offer.)

I have also have achieved horrifically bad results. Same tactics, but everything else was different - audience, market, placement, product being sold etc.

Every product has a better or worse way of being marketed. It takes a TON of experience to learn how to adapt; many junior marketers think they're experts because they crush it in one job, and then go to the next job and have the exact same tactics fail. Why? Because business is hard. Marketing is about so much more than just running ads.

I run marketing right now for a very young startup. A year ago, we were adding around $5-15k in ARR each month (we only bill annually.) Now, we are adding around $80-100k in new ARR each month. Our marketing spend, inc salaries, is around $40k/m and our sales are growing wayy faster than our marketing spend. The results would be even better if I could convince my CEO to raise our prices.

(I can't complain - at least I got an unsolicited salary increase a few months ago.)

Marketing is the only form of lead generation for us. So much so that I had to plead with the CEO and head of sales to stop relying on my function and to go out and actually set up proper outbound sales processes.

Just because Uber's head of marketing was dropping - and wasting - hundreds of millions on programmatic advertising, doesn't make us all idiots.

/endrant.

(oh. One last thing. This is really the cherry on top: our market is devs. We're literally marketing to devs.)

Thank you for taking the time and attention to write this up. I find your insights valuable, and I tend to agree.

I think my hesitance towards the ad world is coming from my personal experience. I’ve worked at marketing agencies and as digital strategist for a company, so I saw both sides of the chain. My guess is there are a lot of companies that don’t know how to get the highest value out of online ads, and these can be fooled easily by marketing agencies or ad sellers (that a lot of time also don’t really know how to optimize).

I guess as always: don’t blame the tool.

Yep. Exactly. Thanks.

There have been more expensive scams.

Like most advertising before targeting. Not so much a scam though, more a theater performance.

They literally lost 80% of the satellites in the last launch. Given that Elon was telling everyone to work over the holidays, this event reeks of gross incompetence.

40 of 49 launched were lost, about 80% loss. Perhaps they intend to learn about geomagnetic storms and deal with them better next time.

As far as I can tell, they didn't lose 40 because of the storm directly, but because they entered safe mode before reaching their orbit, and were then unable to exit safe mode because they were too close to earth. So the data, other than "don't launch during a geomagnetic storm" is likely to be minimal.

I'm not so sure. They had the satellites in their "flat" mode and adjusted them to be edge on into the worst of the drag induced by the storm. They effectively tested that profile and have measurement data on how much drag they have to deal with under those situations. That data may allow them to limit damage to the entire fleet with larger storms, or make more informed decisions about future launches.

That data probably isn't worth the cost of the satellites they lost though...

> Preliminary analysis show the increased drag at the low altitudes prevented the satellites from leaving safe-mode to begin orbit raising maneuvers

The increased drag was caused by the storm.

That was a minor event to everybody else. I checked the PJM power grid alerts, and they didn't issue a geomagnetic disturbance warning. Their last warning was on 11.04.2021, and it didn't reach a level that affected operations.

> That was a minor event to everybody else. I checked the PJM power grid alerts, and they didn't issue a geomagnetic disturbance warning. Their last warning was on 11.04.2021, and it didn't reach a level that affected operations.

I think it's entirely possible that this type of warning would _only_ be relevant to SpaceX, because their satellites are so low and so small. They're going to notice atmospheric drag to a much higher degree by virtue of size and orbital insertion point, compared to other interested Space Weather parties. G1 is relatively minor for most space weather customers, but there are obviously times when G1 conditions aren't observed that they can launch during too.

It was a minor storm. For some reason the atmosphere puffed up more than expected or with a bad timing.

I think they just rolled the dice on that one.

Spacex will probably IPO soon and needs Starlink to look like it could actually make money at some indefinite time in the future.