X Prize and John Carmack

Anonymous Coward writes "ABC News is running a story ostensibly about the X Prize but in reality they only talk about John Carmack and his teams efforts to win the prize (or at least compete). Quote: 'Some people have commented that I am trying very hard to make aerospace like software, and that's the truth," he says. "If we looked at what we do in software, if we could only compile and test our program once a year, we'd never get anything done. But that's the mode of aerospace.' "

Comments

That quote

[jandrese]

The quote about making rockets the same way we make software reminds me of another quote:

"If we built houses the way we build software, the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization."
- U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary John J. Hamre, in testimony before the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee, June, 1998 (Attr Gerald Weinberg)

Unfortunatly, unlike software, you can't just reboot rockets that crash.

Counterpoint

[ThePyro]

No matter how good your software is, you're going to need brute force to get the vehicle into space in the first place. Putting three men into space is going to require a significant amount of energy, and no amount of programming genius will change that fact. More importantly, you're going to need a good bit more brute force than Armadillo Aerospace has been testing with so far.

The tricky part is that I don't think tests done with small rockets will necessarily give you a good idea of how the big rocket will perform. If that were the case, all we'd really need is to buy a model rocket kit from Wal-Mart and just build it 20x bigger.

"this holy war"?

[blunte]

You call it a holy war, I call it English. The English language is being eroded gradually by ignorance.

There's a reason for having two words, then and than. It's preferrable to have exact words that aren't dependent upon context. If we just toss out "than", and exclusively use "then", our language will become even less precise.

Some other common mistakes that really suck:
confusing "your" with "you're"
confusing "their" with "they're"
adding unnecessary apostrophes to plural words - Dog's and Cat's...

Just because some people have forgotten or were never taught how to write the language they speak doesn't mean that we should just dumb it down completely. Taken to the extreme, we could just back all the way up to grunts and growls.