Congressional Investigators Warn of SpaceX Rocket Defects
wsj.com
wsj.com
I'm not disputing the factual content of the article, nor do I have reason to believe he's paid off to do hit pieces, but it's important to realize he almost constantly has a chip on his shoulder with respect to SpaceX.
Another thing to keep in mind: SpaceX produces more liquid rocket engines than any other domestic provider by a VERY large margin.
What's with this commonly repeated narrative that SpaceX is the only private company in space? I think the formation of ULA between Boeing and Lockheed was garbage as much as the next person. Just like Boeing buying McDonnell Douglas was garbage. But look at a list of rockets to take something to space and they are all private (ULA, Orbital, and SpaceX).
SpaceX plays the game just like everyone else. They hire the retired generals from the military. They bid on government launches. They use government ranges for launching.
SpaceX is charging a fraction of the cost.
ULA has been paying lobbyists and trying to squeeze SpaceX out of bidding. It has been purely due to the hype around SpaceX that they were not successful.
[1] http://www.theverge.com/2017/2/2/14490946/spacex-rocket-engi...
Imagine a person who you know to have a large bias against something. Now imagine they tell you a narrative about that thing. You, being a reasonable person, would use greater scrutiny about that narrative than someone who you know to be uninterested or even marginally interested in the subject.
I agree that the public has an interest in finding out about issues in the rockets its government purchases. The above commenter isn't saying "disregard, it's the anti-SpaceX guy!" It's just more information. Gathering information has a cost; and we can't all fully research every opinion.
I didn't downvote you; it's a reasonable argument to make, and I don't mind giving the counter-opinion in the least.
Since I don't see anybody pointing out what's obviously wrong with these concerns, I feel safe to assume it's not biased. Figuring out if an argument is biased is at least as hard as examining the argument on merits, and usually much harder. So I think that the commenters were right to call out the ad hominem.
Andy's information is usually well-sourced. I'm not saying to disregard the objective information in his articles, only be wary of his spin on those facts. There ARE people in the space journalism field that are noted for their professionalism and neutrality. Jeff Foust, for instance, is one of them. Andy P is definitely not.
“we have qualified our engines to be robust” to such cracks but are “modifying the design to avoid them altogether.” The pending changes “will be part of the final design” for the Falcon 9, he added, “in partnership with NASA to qualify engines for manned spaceflight.”
In other words this might not have been a meaningful safety issue. I am not qualified to judge robust in that context, but this reads like a one sided hit piece and the writer has demonstrated past bias. EX: bulging backlog is not a neutral statement.
The only thing we can say for sure is it has not been an issue in the last 29 flights, so the actual risk must be greater than 0 and less than ~10%.
PS: I would hope they would take even a specific risk at 0.01% per flight as a serious safety concern. But, again without data we don't know if it was more or less than that.
P.S. hit piece is not exactly neutral on your part either. Bias works both ways, you know.
Also, I am not sure the guy is biased, just that the piece is. He got a strong response form HN for that article which drives readership. Which is why Hit Pices are such a common style they promote readership.
It's just more words for the same idea.
IMO, Hit Piece like War has negative connotations because of what they depict, not the tone. Hatchet Job on the other hand tacks on the idea it was written that way with malicious intent, which I don't want to imply as it may simply be a tactic to gain more views.
So, I disagree there is bias when simply describing what it's structure of point and counter point suggests. You could replace the content with talk of muffins and the same structure works to exaggerate concerns.
-GAO analyzes SpaceX processes and discovers a shortcoming -Media reports on this to create public awareness -SpaceX is compelled to respond and fix the problem (something their engineers were probably already aware of anyway) -Space Travel continues to move safely forward
This is quite refreshing from other government initiatives at the moment.
Isn't it? One wonders what would've followed from a decision on the part of Thiokol's engineers to take to the media their concerns about SRB segment seal reliability. Absent such external pressure, I see no a priori reason to assume NASA management won't make the same errors it did in 1986 and 2003.
SpaceX said it has "qualified our engines to be robust to turbine wheel cracks. However, we are modifying the design to avoid them altogether,” said spokesman John Taylor. http://uk.reuters.com/article/us-space-spacex-idUKKBN15H307
It is this IT thinking principle of MVP with knowing design flaws. "But we will fix the flaws later." which is different from the engineering principle. In the engineering principle if design flaws become obvious, yes things gets delayed, because it has to be redone to eleminate the design flaws from the beginning. Because we know, things you can fix early may delay, but it is cheap. Things you need to fix later are expansive. Like if your production is set up and running and then you need to change things, you need also to change production.
He has shown this behavior with the Autopilot in the Tesla. Now it also becomes obvious for SpaceX: "Industry officials have known about problems with cracked blades on Falcon 9 versions for many months or even years. But cracks continued to be found during tests as recently as September 2016, Robert Lightfoot, NASA’s acting administrator, confirmed in an interview with The Wall Street Journal earlier this week."
>The crack-prone parts are considered a potentially major threat to rocket safety, the industry officials said, and may require redesign of what are commonly called the Falcon 9’s turbopumps.
>A SpaceX spokesman said “we have qualified our engines to be robust” to such cracks but are “modifying the design to avoid them altogether.” The pending changes “will be part of the final design” for the Falcon 9, he added, “in partnership with NASA to qualify engines for manned spaceflight.”
>For Boeing, these officials said, GAO investigators—among other items—raised questions about the status of tests to determine the reliability of its parachute systems designed to help returning manned capsules land safely.
>The GAO also has determined that both companies face an uphill struggle to meet NASA’s statistical goal of no more than one projected astronaut fatality in 270 flights, industry officials said.
> success rate of 99.5% or something. 0.995^135 is about 0.5
Method seems pretty good, but unfortunately that math would only work if there was exactly one astronaut per flight. Per Wikipedia, the capacity is up to 7 crew members, so I reckon at full capacity, that would be 1 full vehicle failure with 7 lives lost in 1,890 flights.
My math is a bit rusty too though.
So statistics aside it's interesting just how high those standards are if you bore them out. Going to look stupid with some maths here; If spacex launch every 2 weeks which I thought was the goal, that's like 72 years to prove that reliability record.
72.69 = (1890 * 2) / 52
Number of 1 week periods divided by weeks in a year.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-7_(rocket_family)#Summary_of...
Must have been good enough for government work.
NASA threw in with the only folks willing to fund spaceflight--the military. And the military demanded an orbiter that could do circumpolar orbits--which was totally crazy from an engineering standpoint.
This means a massive body to hold an object, The earth would move under the craft as it rotated. Without being able to wait for it to rotate around you need wings for the large cross-range capability to glide back to america.
As KSP teaches us you can't put massive wings at the top of a rocket, without even bigger wings at the bottom. But that's got too much drag to get to space and so, the insane launch system that was the shuttle is invented.
They never used this ability for the entire service life of the shuttle.
Yes, it was political. And it wasn't at all impossible that they would just collapse NASA's budget (this was in the recessions of the 1970's), and NASA wouldn't even exist today.
To torture the shuttle comparison, they shouldn't get damaged by a piece falling of their launching rockets because they get to sit on top and keep their heat shields protected during launch, and they shouldn't be destroyed if the booster explodes because they have launch escape systems. The only two shuttle failures causing fatalities were kind of inherent to shuttle.
No. How did you reach this number?
> 14 fatalities in 135 launches?
Yes. Though I think it makes more sense to read this as 2 losses in 135 flights (98.5% safety rating), or 14 fatalities among 817 passengers (98.2% safety rating).
(The per-passenger safety rating is slightly less because the only losses carried 7-passenger crews, while about half the flights carried 5 or 6 passenger crews. I didn't include the non-orbital test flights carrying crews of 2, which were arguably more dangerous than orbital flights, and I tried to handle Mir transfers and ISS crew exchanges sensibly.)
Historically, failures in spaceflight result in a loss of all crew (or a loss of no crew, if they have abort capabilities). This suggests an easy way to artificially improve the launches-per-fatality metric would be to reduce the number of crew per flight, so I'd prefer to use numbers for failures-per-launch or fatalities-per-passenger.
You MUST fly to _really_ test.
I think it's vastly more likely they're cracking from the rotation speed, temperature, and pressure.