Comments by "Tony Wilson" (@tonywilson4713) on "" video.

Aerospace engineer here: You are 100% right its a control system issue. The system is basically underdamped. If you watch the wobbles (for want of a better term) each successive wobble gets larger. Rockets by virtue of having their centre of gravity above the centre of thrust are inherently unstable and the only way to compensate for that is with a a guidance system. In this case its pretty obvious they have thrust vectoring because you can see the motor thrust shifting. I actually work in industrial control systems and this is inevitably a problem with certain types of systems and getting them tuned can really mess you day (or days up). Hopefully they got enough data from the launch to work out their issue.
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Yeah the biggest item of data they will get will be the control system dampening parameters. Once it started wobbling each wobble got slightly larger. That's a sign for a system with that's underdamped.
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@yellowfilly5690 Yeah but back then NASA was basically starting from a blank sheet of paper and slide rules. There were no computers to help design or simulate anything. There wasn't 50+ years of rocket engine design and operational experience. There wasn't 50+ years of materials science. About all they had were a few convenient German engineers who they managed NOT to hang.
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@Raruschmaru Buddy I have over 35 years of experience as an engineer across a number of industries. I know the value of experience and the difference between not using it and using it.
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@fromagefrizzbizz9377 Yeah that's sort of close to normal. SpaceX had a lot more early failure because they were willing to take more risks. One of my favorite launchers is the Pegasus/Pegasus XL family. They are the ones that were initially launched from under the same B-52 that Neil Armstrong flew his X-15 flight. They did a lot of smart things with that launcher. Simple solid fuel. The reused the same drop mechanism from the X-15 and other things. Plus the concept of air launching was well established from the X-Plane Programs. The X-7 had done over 200 flights. Go look it up on Wikipedia. Pegasus still had 5 partial and complete failures in the first 14 launches followed by 31 successful flights in a row. After working out the bugs its been one of the most successful launchers in history. Its one of the reasons why the proposal I put to the Australian Space Agency was for a a scaled down version on the Pegasus for cube sat launches. Despite almost zero experience launching rockets as a nation one of our universities won competition a few years ago that was open to universities across the World. So the proposal I had used a method and planform I knew would work and that I could tap into some decent talent and that was all so it would reduce the number of early failures. Despite that I'd still expect a few failures early on because it would be a fresh program with things to learn.
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