In article .com,
Alex Terrell wrote:
Just woke up - read all this and can't decide whether the Falcon 1
flight was a success or whether it was a failure with a positive spin.

Unquestionably a failure -- the customer paid for it to place a satellite
in orbit, and it did not achieve that -- although an informative and
useful failure that came very close to success.

If it had been a *demonstration* launch, without a customer payload, then
you could argue that successfully checking out most of the hardware made
it a partial success. But when there's a paying payload aboard and the
flight plan says "deliver to orbit", it doesn't qualify as any kind of
success unless it makes orbit; making an undesirably low orbit could be a
partial success, but not making orbit at all is unambiguously a failure.

What's a roll excitation, and why doesn't the flight control software
compensate for this?

A roll excitation is a loss of control as reported by a good spokesman. :-)
As for why the flight control software didn't cope, well, it should have.
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