Over the past year, we’ve seen a variety of different commercial missions that do things I wouldn’t necessarily consider successful.
We’ve seen lunar landers unintentionally practice gymnastics by standing on their heads and flipping over sideways. We’ve seen starships blow up in a variety of different ways. Yet somehow these kinds of weird failure modes keep getting labeled successes after the fact “because data has been collected.”
I would argue that there are a lot of times when collecting data is insufficient for declaring something as a success. This is where the iSpace list of milestones for success brings my heart joy. From successfully completing launch preparations to achieving a study operational state on the surface of the moon, they detail 10 different items they want to be successful at and what they need to accomplish to meet their goals.
Also, releasing their goals is Firefly Aerospace. These lists allow them to say whether something was a full or partial success and to exactly what degree it was a partial success. By laying all of this out prior to launch we get to go on this journey with them knowing exactly what to look for.
As someone who has graded countless papers, this reminds me of a grading rubric, and an education professor can tell you that the fairest way to grade a project is with a rubric the students have ahead of time that lays out exactly what they have to accomplish to succeed. what’s good for students is also, in this case, good for spacecraft, and I really hope that one day we see this kind of success metrics for every mission before it gets launched.
