Hmm, who do I trust, the guy who figured out how to land rockets onto a barge, or some “analyst” desk jockey who has been consistently wrong his entire career? Tough question. I think I’ll go with the rocket guy. He has a pretty good track record.
This kind of comment is a disservice to all the engineers who actually figured it out. Elon Musk is certainly a visionary and a financier, but is not a 1000x engineer/mathematician who did all the work himself
Go listen to Tom Mueller on the design choices made for the Merlin example.
But of course nobody does everything himself, but for some reason I read this sort of comment made about Musk in every single thread but not with most other people.
Bear in mind that the first time one of his staff proposed verticals landing rocket stages, he laughed.
Go listen to Tom Mueller for example. Musk himself says at SpaceX 80% of the time he is working on engineering not traditional 'CEO' things..
Tesla's inability to quickly ramp up Model 3 production is pretty much one of those "fact" things at this point. The same goes for every model they've brought out, it's taken a long time to get decent production rates on any of them. So this isn't so much predicting problems he's going to have, but explaining the causes of all the problems they've already had and are having right now.
Testing is also very different. For a car, you can build a batch and test it extensively under all conditions, fixing errors as they come up. If you develop an assistance system, you can test this extensively before releasing it. Rockets are so expensive that SpaceX had only a few trials for their landing system. You need to make sure that both hardware and software work perfectly without ever testing them in production.
I'm not so sure about electric cars, but I would judge a rocket to be less complex than an ICE car. Rockets just have much more spectacular failure modes and are more expensive due to size.
Can't help but think that if learning to get really good at robotics is a strategic goal, then that's something which might pay off later.
when his 100% robotic and autonomous ships mine an asteroids and bring back huge payloads we'll still probably see articles like this.
"They have concluded that improvements to conventional engines will be key over the next 10 to 15 years and HEVs will become viable on a large scale by 2020. They believe near-term mass market adoption of electric vehicles is unlikely given the tough financial comparison with ever improving combustion engine vehicles. While premium-priced plug-ins may become viable earlier, by definition they will be niche products."
https://seekingalpha.com/article/310159-bernstein-and-ricard...
> Warburton, who spent his career before Wall Street at the International Motor Vehicle Program — a partly academic, partly commercial organization based at MIT — wrote that "automation in final assembly doesn't work."
It doesn’t even matter since it’s not public money. Which makes me wonder about the analyst’s intent: Tell people not to invest? Do people not know Tesla is super-risky? but if they succeed to obliterate this anchored rule that automation doesn’t work in the final assembly, isn’t that a superwin that stakeholders dream of?
Friends who invested in Tesla didn’t “invest” so much as “donated” money for what they think is a good cause. And perhaps because it’s fun to hear the NASA chief say “I had asked my engineers and they told me it wasn’t possible”.
I’d pay for that kind of fun.
So yeah, this could apply to Tesla cars. Or rubber toys, which are also manufactured in a highly automated environment.
51 launches
48 completely successful
49 partially successful
94% success rate (complete success)
96% success rate (partial success)
Ariane 5
97 launches
92 completely successful
95 partially successful
95% success rate (complete success)
98% success rate (partial success)
Atlas V
76 launches
75 completely successful
76 partially successful
99% success rate (complete success)
100% success rate (partial success)
Delta IV (including Heavy)
36 launches
35 completely successful
36 partially successful
97% success rate (complete success)
100% success rate (partial success)
Proton (since 2010 as an arbitrary cutoff)
65 launches
58 completely successful
59 partially successful
89% success rate (complete success)
91% success rate (partial success)
I don’t really think there is any way in which the adjective “terrible” would be an appropriate use of the word here. Also note the low numbers involved here, the different contexts and the plain arbitrariness of such comparisons. One failure more or less can make a world of difference here, despite maybe not being the most reliable indicator.
94% is about the long term ballpark figure for successful orbital launches but it is true that some newer rocket families may have ever so slightly higher reliabilities.
What about Soyuz? IIRC, they haven't lost a manned mission since 1971.
Neither has SpaceX :)
Soyuz is somewhat more complicated since it's an entire family of rockets:
The Soyuz-FG (2001-today, currently does all manned flights) has a 63/63 success record.
The Soyuz-U2 (1982-1995) also has a 72/72 success record.
The Soyuz-U (1973-2017, also manned flight) has a 765/786 (97%) success rate, with no failure in their manned flights.
The Soyuz-2 (2004-today) has a 68/75 (91%) success rate.
And over time their failure rate has been dropping steadily, since 1/1/2017 they've launched about half of all F9s and all have worked perfectly. It's gotten to the point where the press will crow 'failure' if they don't manage to land the first stage on the barge, which is apples-to-oranges with the rest of the industry, who are - rightly - getting seriously worried.