The technological feat seems amazing! But .. my English parser crashes here:
“The initial shock wave disturbances experienced during second flight, from which the vehicle was able to recover and continue controlled flight, exceeded by more than 100 times what the vehicle was designed to withstand,” DARPA Acting Director Kaigham J. Gabriel said in a statement. “That’s a major validation that we’re advancing our understanding of aerodynamic control for hypersonic flight.”
Is he saying that (my understanding) the shock wave disturbances exceeded the designed/expected maximum by a factor of 100? And claims that this is supporting the idea of understanding hypersonic flight so much better?
I _think_ he wants to say 'In spite of these troubles we were able to recover, due to our good understanding of the underlying principles' but I parse it as 'The outcome of the experiment showed that we greatly underestimated the forces involved and this clearly validates our understanding'.
Can some native speaker point out were I stumbled?
I believe he is trying to say their ability to recover from such a large variation from their initial expectation is proof that they truly understand/are advancing in their knowledge of hypersonic flight. That said, since there is a break between the two quotes the second could have come 10 sentences later and the writer could have unknowingly dropped context/information in some omitted statements. It is a bit of a hard to parse statement, but that is what you get from people, rarely do people speak in memorable, concise sound bites 'off the cuff'.
Native speaker here. I think you're correct that it's somewhat contradictory. Gabriel says two things: 1) They were off by a factor of 100 in predicting the shock wave disturbances, and 2) The vehicle was able to recover.
I think his comment about advancing understanding is more referring to (2) than (1), although now that you point it out, it's hard to say you understand something well if you're off by two orders of magnitude...
He didn't say that it validates our understanding, he said it validates that "we're advancing our understanding." It sounds like they learned quite a lot from this experiment, including some big surprises.
“The initial shock wave disturbances experienced during second flight, from which the vehicle was able to recover and continue controlled flight, exceeded by more than 100 times what the vehicle was designed to withstand,” DARPA Acting Director Kaigham J. Gabriel said in a statement. “That’s a major validation that we’re advancing our understanding of aerodynamic control for hypersonic flight.”
Is he saying that (my understanding) the shock wave disturbances exceeded the designed/expected maximum by a factor of 100? And claims that this is supporting the idea of understanding hypersonic flight so much better?
I _think_ he wants to say 'In spite of these troubles we were able to recover, due to our good understanding of the underlying principles' but I parse it as 'The outcome of the experiment showed that we greatly underestimated the forces involved and this clearly validates our understanding'.
Can some native speaker point out were I stumbled?