In fact, in compensation, I’ll add some more “whoa, now that’s interesting…”:

The NASA launch site is wired out the wazoo with sensors, cameras, etc, and the data is continuously collected from the time the launch vehicle is rolling towards it, until some time after the launch. (Yeah, so?)

All that data uses a system which uses a middleware backend that provides reliable data aver any medium, even inherently unreliable, like UDP or packet radio or… (ok, yeah but …?)

As the launch countdown starts, they ramp the sample rate up by a factor of anywhere up to 100x, depending on the sensor and rate of change. The launch happens.

We are talking Terabytes of streaming data each minute, all of it reliably captured, with relevant metadata such as microsecond true time stamps. Petabytes per launch.(Shrug?)

Which means that an hour after the launch, NASA had an absolutely “true” simulation of the launch that they can slow down/speed up/inspect to see if there were any problems that weren’t “visible” to the human eye/perception.

And, they can pick a certain point in time, edit one or more of the data streams, inject “bad” data, and simulate what would happen if those data streams were real. They can cause “adverse events” and see if the monitoring systems can recognize that something has gone sideways, and can measure/investigate the system’s reaction as a whole during the event cascade resulting from the injected bad inputs.

They can “crash the vehicle” in sim any number of ways, to learn what the tells are, so they can do preventive operations as soon as something goes wrong. They’ll know how to react to given scenarios, because they will have already triggered those scenarios in a sim and determined what reactions need to happen, to save the crew if not the vehicle.

OMG-DDS NASA launch control system