5 ms·

Essentially a throw new RuntimeException(e) for rockets? As a fellow engineer, I sympathize.

• ackbar03 3y ago
  whoever wrote that line of code has the coolest job in the world. try: launch_rocket() except: explode_rocket()
• skipkey 3y ago
  I vaguely remember reading about that actually happening some years ago. Control system written in C++, bad data comes in from a sensor causing a floating point exception which was not caught locally, and the outermost catch code was basically, “explode the rocket”. Might have been in the c++ Users Journal or Dr Dobbs in the late 90s.
  • trothamel 3y ago
    Probably the first flight of Ariane 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariane_flight_V88 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariane_flight_V88
• TylerE 3y ago
  Kind of, but it's almost worse. More like a subsystem that reboots the machine if you run out of disk space or some other such "something is probably really wrong, but I can't prove it" sort of telemetry signal. Given that it seems to have been trigged by the pitchover manouver, likely something went a bit outside guidelines. Who knows how conservative those are? With an unmanned rocket they tend to lean towards pushing the big red button early and often. A failed launch is bad. Drop a booster on an elementary school, and your nation is probably down attempting to go to space.