The Rocket Man Who Wants To Beat the Billionaires | Hacker News Reader

The Rocket Man Who Wants To Beat the Billionaires

popularmechanics.com

159 pointscwal3719 comments

Love this, very inspirational and pragmatic. I like how down to Earth Masten comes across in the article (pun intended). Reminds me of the lesson learned in the restaurant business - over-estimate the wait time, deliver early, and let people enjoy!

I think it's something about the inherent risks and rewards of flight that are a great challenge and temptation for advancement - space being a dream for so many from childhood. Maybe it makes us feel a little more important in such a grand universe.

The Wright Brothers were bicycle mechanics. They beat out the entire world into manned, powered flight. Creativity, some resources, and tenacity can do wonderful things.

There's an important insight in there that I think a lot of people miss. It reminds me of the old, probably apocryphal, story about the maintenance guy who comes out to visit some machine that's malfunctioning, hears about what's wrong, then goes and hits it with a hammer, causing it to start working again. The business owner complains about the bill, since anyone can hit something with a hammer, so the technician creates an itemized receipt, wherein "knowing the right spot to hit" is the majority of the cost.

So much of anything is knowing the right thing to build and the right way to build it. Everything else tends to be much easier problems to solve. The same thing is true in rocketry. And that's what's so exciting about these startups, they're not just trying to fill the shoes of past generations, they're innovating, they're doing research. They're developing the knowledge base and experience base that will serve as the foundation of a tremendous amount of future work. Once you've developed the fundamental technology components and figured out an optimum vehicle design then you just have scaling up and iterating (as SpaceX has done, for example), which is a lot more straightforward.

Very cogent point, as it seems one of the threads of the article is about reining in ambition - hence, as you note, innovating through looking acutely at the problems to solve. In line with scientific approaches, repeatability is critical. Getting lucky once? Put that champagne away! Wisdom - knowing which spots to hit, why and how - is not gestated by throwing cash and minds at a problem, in my opinion anyway. It's about taking all kinds of disparate inputs, making often unexpected mental connections and relationships, and somehow seeing a way around the problem. In my experience, that's usually in the shower.

It is also not lost on me that using his personal means and keeping the company "scrappy" has enabled the longevity thus far. That, and pursuing grants in the narrow field where there still, well, there's still money to be obtained through such channels (not true of all sciences in the US). This article is probably the closest thing regarding "hype" in the business plan. I doubt there's a marketing budget in that warehouse!

The crafty engineer was Charles Steinmetz, and the business owner balking at the invoice was Henry Ford [1]. EDIT: Maybe not so true after all [2].

I had never heard of Maston Space Systems. It's amazing they were able to compete with such massive names in Boeing, and Lockheed.

[1] http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/charles-proteus-steinm...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10389203

There are real life examples though, my father being one. On one job he did, he flew from Australia to Malaysia, walked into the factory, turned a single valve on to get a major machine working, then walked out job done.

Apocryphal: http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/where.asp

...but it was told at a MIT commencement address: http://web.mit.edu/president/communications/com99.html

Great. First Musk, now Masten. I'm incredibly hopeful that entrepreneurs will keep challenging the massive, monolithic companies/contractors. Their ability to compete with these companies show that increased size often leads to a lot of waste both within the company and in the bureaucratic decision structure. Large isn't inherently bad, until the only competitors are also large. It then becomes the bigger the better. Now that smaller guys are able to successfully enter the field, it make them reevaluate their structure. In the end, not size, but efficiency is key. Funding still remains the medium to get there.

Musk, Masten, Blue Origin, Firefly, XCOR. There's really quite a lot of innovative rocket companies out there now. A lot of them are working on similar or complementary problems, and innovating while they do it. I'm excited to see not only what they produce but what fruits are born from follow-on innovators.

Yeah, remember when Armadillo used to be a cool kid on the block?

Not sure if you caught the interview but John Carmack recently said he'd still love to re-visit it, but he held firm to his "10 years, that's it" plan. He said it was "binary" - didn't make it, close it down. If you did catch that, then sorry for being redunant!

Heh. Still have an Armadillo Aerospace sweatshirt in my closet. Wonder if it'll be a "collectors item" someday like those SF magazines that are worth a whopping $5 more than I paid for them 30 years ago :-)

Extremely different companies. Blue Origin founded, IIRC, before SpaceX - yet has comparatively little to show, even though it had money of Bezos.

Masten "graduated" from Experimental Rocket Propulsion Society - erps.org - from San Jose, CA area; the group still has projects going on!

Well, you can't expect a company that's motto is "Gradatim Ferociter" to move quickly. But they have flown a single stage rocket to the edge of space and their engines are going to be in ULA's new rocket.

The latter remains to be seen, the former is good - and the number of flights they had to achieve that is quite odd. Looks like Bezos is a follower of quite different development philosophy than e.g. John Carmack.

Blue Origin way of doing things isn't clear - may be by design.

Don't forget http://copenhagensuborbitals.com/

Is there anyone else to add to the list? The news we had "recently" on Indian rocket science was not about private endeavours, was it?

http://www.rocketlabusa.com/ is a scrappy contender from New Zealand. (Not the same goals -- they're focusing on being super cheap way to get small payloads to LEO)

I've heard of other small rocket companies using alcohol and lox as the fuel/oxidizer. Does anyone know if that is a stand-in for "real" fuels (e.g. RP-1 or H2) that they'll switch to after getting contracts or if they plan on using an alcohol-fueled engine as part of their strategy?

I've heard of planning to use alcohol - ethyl alcohol - as fuel for Kliper spacecraft in RKK Energiya. Reminding that Soyuz capsule still uses hydrogen peroxide as its RCS fuel.

So alcohol isn't that much of "non-real" fuel.

Probably they will switch as vehicles get into higher performance requirements. Alcohol's a great fuel to work with: clean burning, room temp, good cooling properties, but it'll be tempting to switch to something else when you need more performance--and have the money and experience to deal with the extra complexity. (And RP-1 isn't that much worse, unless you have a particular problem with coking and a reusable engine, while it gives a noticeable increase in ISP. If you can handle the low density, methane's nice and clean.)

But part of the new wave of space development is to optimize for cost and simplicity instead of performance, and you certainly can do real stuff with alcohol; many early rockets used it. It's possible someone will keep using alcohol; Masten's suborbital stuff might certainly stay that way. Doubt they'll land on the Moon with alcohol, though.

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