A shadowy op-ed campaign is now smearing SpaceX in space cities
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
One op-ed article attacking SpaceX's safety practices appears in the newspapers of several space-industry-oriented cities. The article is not written by the person it is attributed to, but rather by two people apparently affiliated with a PR firm in Washington, DC. One of the three main clients of said PR firm is Boeing, SpaceX's direct competitor.
And a nitpick, NASA was the pioneer, and pushed hard during the cold war to develop ICBM tech, the failure rate then was more in line with the goals. As its just minor economic and exploration roles now, with less polarizing military applications, we see less frantic push. I.e. killing a few people to prevent ww3 > next internet sat/artists on mars/astroid mining. Its not a fair comparison.
Individuals have very different risk tolerances, often based on their deepest values. But I don't think we should say it's wrong to want to e.g. go to Mars, even if there's an 90% chance of failure. It's a reasonable tradeoff to make.
If you succeed, you'll be hailed as a new civilization's Pilgrims, and will continue in that culture's oral history for as long as it exists. Children will sing songs about your feats, and dress up in crude facsimiles of your space suits on Landing Day. Adults will proudly trace their genealogy to members of your party, and speak admiringly about the values you instilled. Many people would trade their lives for a 10% chance of such a fate. As a society we should let them.
NASA did not develop ICBM technology; the USAF did. NASA used ICBMs in their early days, particularly Atlas missiles. There may well have been some cross-pollination of basic rocket design technology. But NASA was not in the business of making ICBMs and had nothing to do with MAD or the nuclear triad.
Should we disregard safety on their account, too?
At first glance, these op-eds (which are linked to) appear similar rather than identical.
Also, they confirmed "at least 4 out of 6".
To be pedantic, he -did- write the article, but not for a newspaper. It was submitted to multiple large newspapers in space-heavy cities around the country as an Op Ed without his awareness (or at least, "ostensibly on his behalf") by the PR firm.
> To try to understand his viewpoint, Ars attempted to reach Hagar by phone and email in September. In the course of this process, we learned that he did not actually submit many of these op-eds.
Since the article claims to be about one op-ed piece submitted to many places, it seems reasonable to assume he wrote it, but that the mentioned PR firm then submitted it far and wide.
It's also not clear from that wording if they actually spoke with Hagar (they "attempted to reach" him), or if this information comes from another source.
In any case, it's still an obvious smear campaign.
The most common version of it says good things about your own company.
I blog occasionally about defense issues. I got a call out of the blue from someone who said they liked something I'd written about the F-35 (this: https://jasonlefkowitz.net/2013/08/stovl-the-f-35-and-how-we...), and would I be interested in getting paid to write an op-ed about the current state of the F-35 program?
I'm always interested in getting paid, so I said sure, let's talk. And over the course of ten minutes or so of conversation, it came out that:
- What the caller really wanted was an article about all the cost overruns of the F-35 program;
- Specifically, an article that attributed those cost overruns to the rocky development of the F-35's engine, Pratt and Whitney's F135 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pratt_%26_Whitney_F135); and
- That the caller was representing a D.C. "government relations" (aka lobbying) firm.
At that point I politely ended the conversation, because it was obvious what was happening.
The question of what engine to put in the F-35 was the subject of a long and bitter political battle back in the 2000s between the two big producers of aircraft engines in the US, Pratt and Whitney and General Electric. P&W won that battle and got their engine chosen for the F-35, but GE self-funded their own alternative engine and then pushed hard for years to get Congress to approve funding it as an "alternate engine" -- a sort of insurance policy against P&W tanking the too-big-to-fail F-35 project by screwing their engine up. The Air Force didn't want that insurance policy, but GE won the support of a few powerful Senators on the Armed Services and Appropriations committees, and those Senators managed to steer enough money to GE to keep the program alive until 2011, when it was finally axed for cost-cutting reasons. (Here's some background on this story: https://www.pogo.org/analysis/2009/07/experts-contractors-an..., https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Latest-News-Wires/2011/0217/F-..., https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/157649-pen...)
So what was going on, I surmised, was that someone with an interest in making Congress regret the decision to cancel GE's alternate engine -- maybe GE themselves, maybe some other company in their orbit, or maybe just someone with a financial interest in seeing UTX (P&W's parent company) go down a few points and GE go up -- had decided that the time was ripe to start building a public record linking the F-35's problems to the decision to go with P&W's engine; and they had money to spend to hire people to make that happen. (It wouldn't even need to be much money. By the standards of defense contracting, writers are dirt cheap.) And so they had engaged this lobbying firm, and the lobbying firm had gone looking for people who could write knowledgeably about the F-35, and Google had led them to me.
I didn't take the gig. But it did provide an interesting case study in the kind of maneuvering that goes on behind the scenes of the manufacturing of opinion.
Curious what the going cost for funding this type of activity is. I assume drastically cheaper than desired result profits, but in comparison to traditional advertising?
There's a nearly inevitable lack of conscience within deeply established institutions where people, in committee, are paid to seek an outcome.
The agency where I worked (social media marketing) would make outrageous claims and give a lot of "smoke and mirror" presentations to both land clients and give them the impression they were getting more for their money than they were. They'd engage in astroturf, fake views, and generally do whatever it took to deliver on the number they promised. It made me uncomfortable, but I was young in my career and thought that's just how the world worked. Thankfully I didn't have to stay there long enough for it to really rub off on me. I've heard enough stories from others over the years to know this wasn't an isolated experience.
Most agencies only have a few big customers paying everyone's paychecks, and it's far easier to retain a client than land a new one. As a result, they're highly incentivized to do whatever it takes to keep them. It's probably the biggest dark side of a directly incentivized culture.
Hearing that an agency for Boeing did this doesn't surprise me. What might be worse is it's quite possible Boeing is finding out through this reporting.
_If_ Boeing really is behind all this, they may well be unaware of the specific details, sure. But so what? This doesn't make them any less responsible. So I don't understand what makes this "worse".
I think the story is more complicated as always - If you watch Scott Manley's channel, I think there's a few mission profiles that ULA can do better than SpaceX. One launcher can't do everything well.
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/launch-dates-to-be-updated-more...
The development sure is cheaper at SpaceX compared to Arianespace, so I assume the same is true for Boeing. On the launch costs, taken everything into account, including the WSJ article using SpaceX internal data up to 2015, there is not much of a difference between SpaceX and Arianespace on average. It seems that SpaceX is undercutting the commercial competition with government contracts. Also, Google most likely saved SpaceX from bancruptcy in 2016. That ULA, as a historical DoD monoplist, plays in different league all together is a different story. I am not yet finished, so yes I might be mistaken with my conclusion so far.
So there is no complete vacuum. Also, you have advertised costs on SpaceX website. It is at least enough to get a first idea of things. I don't have the numbers in front of me rigjt now, but I am more than happy to share them. Because my whole thought process and thus analysis was wrong it would really help to know that.
EDIT: The rumors I read have been the reason I tried to chase down as much numbers and information I could by myself.
I know that there is no such thing as a "standard" launch, but all numbers that are available point at higher prices than the $ 62M a Falcon 9 is advertised for.
Reusable launchers are different story. And SpaceX is giving 30% discounts for them (source: SpaceX, Gwynn Shotwell).
So yeah, if you can point out wrong assumptions or errors, I'm more than happy because I am not convinced of my analysis so far myself.
EDIT: Typos... man, typing on the phone really is suboptimal for sentences with more than three words...
I mostly agree, but it's entirely possible that they just spread the cost out more, which would reduce the cost of individual launches.
As far as production goes - my recollection is that SpaceX does a lot of in-house stuff, so they've got vertical integration going for them. Perhaps more importantly, they build their own engines, and lots of them (10 per rocket, as I believe MVac is similar enough to the first stage engines to use essentially the same production). That's a pretty big advantage over buying RD-180s like ULA.
Also, doesn't SpaceX use essentially 'off-the-shelf' electrical components, and just use more if needed for redundancy? 'Space-grade' hardware isn't cheap, so if they really are avoiding that entirely, that could be a big win.
Whatever the case, unfortunately for us, they're a private company - so this is all semi-educated guesswork. They definitely seem to be doing well, so clearly something somewhere is keeping those costs down.
And it is impressive what they achieved.
The Falcon 1 even went so far as to strip the most failure-prone part of the engine that could be eliminated, the turbopump, and simply pressure feed the vacuum engine. They called it Kestrel, but the combustion chamber and most of the rest of the motor (sans bell) was identical to the Merlin on the first stage.
Also, have you not even considered the official reasons given for why SpaceX is cheaper? Namely vertical integration, extreme cost consciousness, use of off the shelve hardware, designs made to take advantage of economies of scale (several smaller engines per rocket instead of a few), the advantages of clean slate designs, and details like friction welding?
HN is a great place to have that kind of discussion.
So let me rephrase my statement: Alphabet and Fidelity invested $ 1 bn in January 2015, this helped to keep SpaceX afloat when in June 2015 a launch mishap resulted in a launch hiatus and subsequent loss of $ 260m in fiscal year 2015. Now even the timeline is correct.
The fact that the Chron used a screencap of Musk smoking that blunt to go along with the anti-SpaceX op-ed is unbelievable. Letting a PR firm throw mud at a client's competitor via a thinly-veiled op-ed is one thing, but helping them by taking part in the propaganda machine to that extent is something else entirely.
Can someone explain me this line? What "good for the country" do they mean?
This is not considered less safe than fueling after the crew has boarded, and NASA agrees.
EDIT: The tinfoil bit was over the top, but he's such a lightning rod and attracts so much criticism and persecution from the entrenched interests he is trying to disrupt, that it starts to look like there is some shadowy cabal trying to bring him down. I rather like the guy, we need some level of technological optimism to counteract the gloom and doom that is ever present.
Other space launch activities, however, have been getting their lunch eaten by SpaceX. This is probably pissing off everyone who was comfortable with the old approach, not just Boeing.
Which makes it very weird to see people level that accusation against claims that an obviously-real group did an obviously-plausible thing, like "this agency that exists to gather information gathered a lot of information". Or in this case "this PR firm ran several articles to affect PR". Sure, it's a conspiracy in that they aren't admitting to doing it, but why is that surprising?