I don't think SpaceX came in to play when it was "may or may not work", tech is mostly developed by NASA and others over decades.
SpaceX's value add is eventually providing economies of scale.
SpaceX's value add is eventually providing economies of scale.
This has become a popular line of contrarian bunk as of late.
I am an aerospace engineer. I am also a Tesla valuation sceptic. The work SpaceX has done is revolutionary.
In materials, numerical methods, logistics and technology, they have pioneered. Common knowledge in 2001 was reusable launch could not compete with expendable vehicles. SpaceX overturned that paradigm with a fraction of the competition’s cash. Ignoring that is to reduce the problem to a simplistically technical level that detaches entirely from reality.
How can we say anything about SpaceX's efficiency with cash if there are no public statements available and even investors have trouble getting any financial data at all?
I was going to say to look exactly at its endless money pit counter-part: SLS from ULA. Nothing will ever compare to that monstrosity that will never work: $7.2 Billion and growing [0].
Also, not an Engineer, but went to interview at both Tesla and SpaceX and SpaceX's internal facilities are jaw-dropping. People love to go on about Tesla's Fremont factory, which is awesome, but I've been to Fremont and Boca Chica. And Boca is by far more impressive; I lived and worked in Emilia Romanga in Italy, and also lived in the town nearest to Stuttgart in Germany so I've have seen my share of amazing engineer and logistical/distribution feats.
I saw them starting to stack what was to become SN3 (RIP) in real time in the hangar as I saw SN2 vertical on the launchpad which that still remains one of the coolest things I've ever seen in my Life. I was basically leaning up against one of the Raptor Engine prototypes they have pretty much just around.
I've also got a few glimpses of the Hawthorne factory from (the outside) when I was charging the Model 3, lots of cool stuff comes out there (namely Falcon 9 and Merlin and Raptor engines) they have so much cool stuff just lying on the side of the building which I took pictures of but was asked to delete by security, which I complied.
Just one note on that: Boeing is the company building the SLS core stage, not ULA. While ULA is partially owned by Boeing (joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin), they operate independently.
ULA can't quite match SpaceX for style or cost these days, but they are consistently much better at what they do than Boeing is. Their launch success record is extraordinary, and their rockets provide certain capabilities that Falcon 9 and Heavy can't match without adding a kick stage to the payload.
How long ago? Did you get to hang out and eat at the mezzanine?
As for how daunting, maybe it's just because I've been into Motorsports for most of my Life and Aerospace is the most often transitioned to Industry from Automotive I knew (as much as anyone not hands-on with the project could be I suppose) what an immense feat that was. Also I was at the Mars Desert Research Station and got to ask as many questions as I wanted about it, and I'm also a member of The Mars Society.
BUT I still get giddy and have goosebumps going back and watching highlights of the first successful landing as I saw it on the streamcast with a friend who is doing his now doing his Masters in Iceland and wants to be the first wave of Martian colonizers because of that event.
I also saw the first re-landing mission at Vandenburg in 2018, the one that lit up the sky and made people think it was 'aliens' all over SoCal. We saw it from the Eagle's Nest where a bunch of NASA and SpaceX guys watch it from and met one of the non-crew Dragon capsule pilots and you could still get an idea of the scale of it from up there as I've seen the F9, too.
But SN2 at Boca was breathtakingly massive when it stood in its full glory on the launchpad, and to think this too will be reusable but will take Humans to Mars makes feel think the World still makes some sense.
I’d love to see one of the SNs at some point, they look like they dwarf the F9.
Similarly we have good estimates for how much it took to develop Falcon-9, up until first launches. I think we have rough data to make some comparisons.
SpaceX provides audited financials to its (preferred stock) investors. They also highlight them every funding round.
It was well argued by alt.space community, the kinds of XCOR, Beal Aerospace, Armadillo Aerospace, Scaled Composites etc. that it's not the case. SpaceX is a more successful of this line of groups - and better equipped than many, though not all.
> The work SpaceX has done is revolutionary.
Yes, but mostly not in technology, but execution and optimization in an unusual market area. Success over space dinosaurs tells more about sad state of the competition - though Elon is correct in identifying the deficiency and improving on that.
They had a hypothesis. It was untested and, by any reasonable definition of common expert knowledge, a far bet.
Saying this list’s existence disproves SpaceX’s technological work is arguing home brewers as evidence that Apple did nothing groundbreaking. Or Alberto Santos-Dumont as evidence the Wright Brothers were just incremental inventors.
Yes, they weren’t the only ones on the bleeding edge. But they were right there on it, and doing the lion’s share of the pushing of it.
> better equipped than many, though not all
SpaceX is miles ahead of all of them. Literally, hundreds of thousands of miles of flight time ahead. Ahead in vehicle manufacturing. Number of engineers working on number of problem domains. Hell, out of your list, only Scaled Composites still builds anything.
If we say SpaceX does no science, we must argue that the Japanese and Indian space programs do no science. Which nobody claims because it’s baseless. Designing new motors and engines and control systems and crew capsules and space suits and ultrasonic reëntry systems requires new science, technology and production expertise.
We can say Newton had a hypothesis regarding Earth artificial satellite, which took centuries to experimentally observe. But regarding powered descent, Delta Cliper flew years ago by the time SpaceX Grasshopper tests, and Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge showed that again. The untested part was to actually land the stage of an orbital rocket - difference in usage, not principal technology. Wouldn't say it was a far bet.
> But they were right there on it, and doing the lion’s share of the pushing of it.
They were practically alone in the commercial space, but technologically their achievements, I think, more incremental that Wright Brothers.
I'm not saying SpaceX did nothing worthy mentioning. It's the case, IMO, of staying on the shoulders of giants when other commercial giants became to lazy to look forward - indeed, the status quo was rather beneficial to Boeing-Lockheed, while Musk was interested in more long range projects. But Musk wasn't operating in vacuum by a long shot. Andrew Beal could probably reach similar results in a slightly different scenario.
> SpaceX is miles ahead of all of them.
"Better equipped" in this context is mostly "had almost a hundred millions to spare on first project development". That kind of money was't available to XCOR, Armadillo Aerospace, Masten Space - but probably was available to Beal Aerospace and certainly to Blue Origin (which is somewhat to the side of this list), maybe to Kistler Rocket... It's not about ideas and achievements, it's about starting conditions.
> Hell, out of your list, only Scaled Composites still builds anything.
It's almost two decades since founding of SpaceX, and this is capital-heavy area, surely only commercially successful survive. Blue Origin is practically only exception. Doesn't tell about technological advantage.
> If we say SpaceX does no science, we must argue that the Japanese and Indian space programs do no science.
SpaceX does applied science, targeted towards rather immediate applications in commercial systems, be that Raptor of Starlink. Here at least we can agree that a degree of science work is required for projects of that kind.
And saying this is about money and resources, and not focus and management, ignores the fact that SpaceX spent less than ULA and Blue Origin to develop 2 rocket engines, 3 rockets, three different recovery systems, and 2 different capsules. Blue Origin has been spending $1 billion a year of Jeff Bezos's money, and despite starting before SpaceX, still hasn't reached orbit or beaten the Falcon 1.
Rocket Lab's Electron made it to orbit with $210m of total funding, and they built their own engine with an electric pump. Far smaller than many other companies.
The reason why SpaceX is so successful is because Elon Musk isn't in it a vanity project, or to make money taking a slice of the LEO sat launch market. He has a vision, call it lunacy, of getting huge numbers of people to Mars. Working backwards from that goal, informs everything they do, which is why they won't settle for an incremental improvement on what ULA or Arianne is doing.
It's like saying if you gave equal money in 2001-2006 to someone to build better mobile phones, they would have produced an iPhone, because most of the components were there. I worked in the mobile market at that point, and I can tell you most people were chasing Blackberry, or imagining slightly better versions of say, an Nokia Communicator 9000, iPAQPhone, or OQO. The iPhone took a vision, and someone willing to tell the naysayers and corner cutters that he doesn't care about their objections, this is what they're doing.
For TEN YEARS on USENET, I read sci.space as people like Henry Spencer and other luminaries decried reusability. They rightly said that anything wings, or landing legs, or extra strengthening and margin you add to have repeated flights comes out of your payload. The major consensus of the time would be to tell Musk his ideas won't work and the physics say disposable rockets are the most efficient.
But marginal cost matters more than Isp or payload fraction, and if you have a system where the majority of your costs are amortized over many launches, lower payload is less relevent, you just do more launches.
Ultimately, SpaceX will prove the naysayers wrong, as surely as he proved the establishment and ULA's allies wrong.
I don't know if it was state-of-the-art but it looked impressive to me as a layperson.
Fusion power still needs to overcome fundamental, hard physics problems.
Talk to someone in physics closer to this. The time scales ITER is operating on are so long term the tech is ancient by the the time they are actually operating it and the path to commercial power is - basically not there I think.
It is a research reactor. It goes first to prove it is at least possible to build a power producing reactor. That's all it has to do. Just exist.
Progress in computer science, and the absurd utility of data handling improvements to other fields, has created an extremely unrealistic expectation in the minds of computer tech adjacent professionals about how quickly technology can actually develop, because the core technology of computing (more transistors) had a long period of exponential improvement due to the nature of how it's produced (lithography on 2D surfaces). Feature size shrinks give you exponential improvements.
But that period is ending for computing - there's no more room left in the silicon chip regime to keep doing it much past 6nm. And progress in other fields enjoys no such advantages: cellular biology for example, can't exponentially increase the time it to takes to grow a culture. They also can't shrink it easily - scaling biological research generally involves just scaling in size - facilities, space, grad students, everything. It is much more linear - there are very few easy wins beyond what improved informatics handling gave us (and where we did get big wins was the same mechanism - the availability of cheap silicon handling led to a rush to look for ways to capitalize on cheap silicon handling).
There's a reason computing is powering better surveillance, but brain-computer interface technology is moving exactly as fast as there are people working in the field, doing experiments, developing technology and doing slow, uncool research like patch-clamping single cells or whatever. Because the fundamentals are diverse, and there is no one single technical improvement which gives you a big scaling improvement (and everyone is hoping they'll find one).
Also since we are already speaking extra terrestrially Apollo 11 landed propulsively in 1969, with humans on board and it got back to orbit!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_1#Lander
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_3#Entry,_descent,_landing...
They plan to land the 2nd stage of starship, which will have reached orbital speeds. But that is a huge challenge that they have not attempted yet.
Also Blue Origin actually did propulsive sub-orbital landing from space to Earth before SpaceX, although admittedly from a lower altitude and velocity. Both came after the 1990s era Delta Clipper. Before that there were probably a lot of Apollo era test vehicles.
Each one got a bit higher and faster. This is the value SpaceX offers. They're doing the hard work of making things we know are possible also commercially viable.
The first ones that did, by the way, are the Soviets in the early 70s.
If you mean space probes it’s actually more impressive, the Soviets landed a probe on the moon in 1966: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luna_9
The analogy holds!
Starting fusion isn't easy, but as I understand it, that's not even the hard part. Containment is the big deal, because of the energy needed.
Getting fusion energy without gravitational confinement is the tricky bit.
If you take 800 cubic meters of plasma from the core of the Sun, about the same volume as ITER, it only produces 216 kW - comparable to the engine in your car.
And in that volume, you will have an average rate of 1500 hydrogen fusion reactions per second. Compared to ITER, this is something like twelve orders of magnitude slower. That is why ITER needs to go to much higher temperatures than the sun.
The power density is correct, but the number of reactions is too low by a factor of 10^10...
You can't iterate your way from fission to fusion, but you can iterate your way from the Merlin to the Raptor.
The Raptor which, by the way, is not even that far ahead of what came before it.
In some sense Earth science had practically do that - from Goddard's 1926 pressure-fed/piston pumps feed via von Braun's open loop of 1944, via Isayev-Melnikov staged combustion of 1949-1959 to Glushko's full-flow combustion of 1967.
Slow, and engines were designed from scratch. But still some iterations and evolution.
Disagree, the theory of full-flow gas generators, and test bench results, were known for many years. At the same time with fusion we only have experience with uncontrolled one (bombs), or theory of how stars operate (and we can't reproduce that mechanism, not enough gravity). There is a lot more science to discover in fusion than in Raptors.
Hopefully you (like me) were one of the ones cheering them on, but achievements that seem obvious in reterospect usually have had notoriously shaky statements about how obvious they were.
Obviously the proponents are vindicated today, but it becomes a dodgy game of definitions when talking about how everyone who really had any insight knew that it was inevitable.
https://spacenews.com/38891a-hat-tip-to-spacex-as-rebranded-...
What's fascinating about this is how NO ONE was talking about them getting the first stage to be reusable. Musk's plan looks like it exploited this blind spot. Reusing the first stage was so obviously impossible that even with the evidence of nine first stage engines staring them in the face, they thought this was just to minimize development cost. It was only when the legs went on that the penny dropped.
And now, no one else will be able to repeat the free R&D flights that SpaceX got by trying to recover first stages off expendable launches sold at expendable launcher prices.
One really has to be meticulous to stay honest when looking at things in reterospect. And, by extension, when looking at lofty-sounding predictions about the future.
Compared to space tech, fusion science is at the stage of 1929 sci-fi drama "Woman in the moon".
reusable rockets were uniformly assumed to be a fool's errand.
SpaceShuttle was already partially reusable and operational, just like falcon 9 is, just was not economical.
SpaceX doesn't have a fully reusable vehicle yet, and there was a program to develop a fully reusable replacement for Space Shuttle
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VentureStar
If Elon was laughed out of somewhere, thats to do with Elon's credibility at the time.
That was the second total loss of crew in its ~20 year history.
No, actually the PR was that it was reusable, but the design was not. Each shuttle had to be remanufactured after use, taking up to a year and costing $1 billion.
But it gets better. They had "lost tiles" problems on the very first flight, and never bothered to do anything about it.
What a piece of junk.
We also knew that landing rockets was possible, and closed-cycle combustion engines were possible, the physics said so, and even had prototypes that could do it, but with SpaceX, it is not the science that's the issue, or even one-off engineering feats, but practical, economical, scalable production.
With Fusion, we've already achieved confinement times and burns that show we can make it work. But making it work in a prototype reactor is a far cry from making it work in a commercial reactor which needs to be run everyday and maintained. ITER's been going for 13 years now, and I don't think they're solving any of the problems that SPARC will solve.
Yes, tokamak prototypes have provided the insight to help nail down the plasma physics, but small scale fusion prototypes have helped to do, with much faster turnaround time than $20+ billion mega projects.
What SPARC is saying is that small is beautiful. That because of scaling of the B-field to the fourth power, if you focus on stronger magnets, you can dramatically reduce both the size and the cost to build your fusion reactors.
That is, if you double the strength of your B-field, you shrink the size of the machine needed by a factor of 4. So clearly, instead of focusing on ITER, you should focus on the economics and scaling of REBCO manufacturing, and increases in magnetic field you can eeek out because they pay huge dividends.
In other words, we are not longer at the Von Braun stage of rockets, or even the Apollo stage, we're at the SpaceX stage of dramatically reducing manufacturing costs and increasing use.
Likewise, I think Fusion is poised to move past the Von Braun stage of "is this possible" to "can we build a real reactor?" As long as people can let go of huge super-projects, and we can get funding for a bunch of innovative startups in the space to try various techniques and designs for engineering small, cheap, and rapidly.
Likewise, for Thorium reactors, we already know Molten Salt Reactors work, we already know the Thorium cycle works, and we even know a commercial plant works, as Germany ran one at one point. There are oodles of startups now vying to build small scale thorium reactors. The role the government could play here is, like with NASA, the DOE, could provide capital to reduce risk, and get some of the more promising ventures off the ground.
Most importantly, they need to be allowed to fail.
The US military expenditure for fiscal year $934 billion dollars. That is not the actual spend. ITER, over it's entire 20-30 year history will cost about $23 billion USD projected. So a $1 billion or less per year.
By comparison, the US military budget between FY 2019 and FY 2020 increased in proposed (i.e. the actual spend was more) by $63 billion USD.
So the US, somehow, between 2019 and 2020 found the money for another 3 entire ITER projects. Just kick another 3 20-30 year projects out, fully funded.
Uber has raised $24.5 billion USD to date. A company who's principle asset is an algorithm which dispatches taxis, raised enough money to literally fund it's own ITER project.
So "At what cost" - what are these startups needing to be budgeted for, that are going to be so much cheaper, that they are unable to get any of this money? Set aside the actual defense spend of the US - but I mean, how can you, the US runs nuclear powered carriers, and would have infinite utility for a compact fusion power plant - how is it that ITER is always the problem here, and not that this notion of "we need startups" might actually be running into funding issues because on closer examination they're not actually as cheap, the data is not as convincing, or they're actually about to ask for just as much money.
So again, how much money do these alleged startups need? Why is it apparently so hard for them to get it, when the total valuation of ITER is being thrown around by venture capitalists pretty regularly and the prize is dominance of the next several centuries of power generating technology?
No one claimed ITER is consuming their budget, if ITER is consuming anything, it's people, actual scientists in academia working on it, instead of working on smaller scale projects. It's an opportunity cost.
Look, even if ITER is a success, it still won't even produce electricity, that's require DEMO, a follow on project. We're talking post 2035 just for the first Deuterium-Tritium operation. Now, do you think by 2035+, which is 15 years from now, commercial fusion reactors are going to be run off Niobium-Tin cooled with Liquid Helium?
Or do you think commercially available REBCO, which needs only liquid nitrogen, and whose superconductivity doesn't falloff as field strengthen increases, will be used? By 2035, whatever DEMO uses of the ITER design will be 30 years old.
Meanwhile, hundreds of smaller scale fusion devices could have been built, with equivalent field strengths, but at far far less cost.
Would you rather run one massive international experiment with dozens of bureaucracies, or run hundreds of smaller experiences, and collect a lot of data from many more designs in the mean time?
We don't need the kill ITER to fund more startup fusion research in this country. ARPA-E funded Solyndra and Tesla. Solyndra failed, Tesla succeeded, paid their money back, and created a new industry leading car company with a market capitalization larger than all US car companies combined. I'd call ARPA-E and DOE's investment portfolio HUGELY successful. If they were a Silicon Valley VC, all the other VC's would be envious.
There definitely wasn't one 10 years ago, nor were superconducting tapes expected to become viable.
So what exactly do you think anyone would have been building if we were investing in fusion 10 years ago? What would "hundreds" of small scale devices be if we tried to build them today? With a technology that is being kept proprietary and this unavailable for use?
Again: we have a whole bunch of small scale fusion devices. This is what the article here is talking about! And until very recently all of them suggested the same thing: you need an ITER sized reactor to be able to get suitable mean free paths, and that Q is going to be all about the b dynamic manipulation of plasma at scale (which is what ITER is setup to study).
Imagine if the Manhattan project decided to build ICBMs and Hydrogen bombs before they had perfected enrichment. Or if the government decided to fund the full scale model of a National Spaceplane (NASP, remember that?) before they had figured out how to make a SCRAMjet, or store slush-hydrogen properly, or deal with hypersonic heating.
Not to mention, this was purely for power transmission - no one had any idea if they could hold up to mechanical forces of high power magnets, hell, they had a serious problem which was that high temperature superconductors actually would very suddenly stop superconducting if the impinging magnetic field exceeded a critical threshold.
All this was true right up to 2010 - is still somewhat true today because again, there is no scaled up artifact proving it's actually possible to use.
Everyone who wanted to work on high temperature superconductivity was - it wasn't like this was a field which was struggling. And the story at the time - and in fact still, today - was that it wasn't reliable enough and for ITER definitely would be the wrong technology choice for it's goals - which was to build a facility handling large volumes of plasma in a plausible fusion generator environment.
The 5 year timelines being thrown around like gospel here sound utterly absurd on the face of that. A damn CRUD web app takes a year to build, but an experimental fusion plant using essentially nothing but bespoke parts will be done in 5? Cheaply? No.