Starship is threatening NASA’s moon contractors
politico.com
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Musk does deserve a lot of credit for SpaceX. The Falcon 9 vehicle is arguably the most reliable launch system we've ever made [1]. It's cheap to produce and launch. It's even cheaper once you factor in reuse. Starlink will probably be a game changer for many (but it isn't yet). But that doesn't matter because Starlink is driving down launch costs (with reuse) and improving the Falcon 9 track record.
All of this for <$20B in investment, which is about the development cost of SLS. SLS hasn't even launched yet and will probably cost ~$1B/launch anyway. And it's not just an issue of throwing money at the problem. Blue Origin has had just as much money thrown at it and was founded years before SpaceX yet it still hasn't reached orbit and its BE-4 engines have been delayed years.
Starship is incredibly ambitious but if it doesn't reach orbit before 2025 I won't be surprised.
[1]: https://www.thespacetechie.com/falcon-9-the-most-loved-rocke...
Maybe 2025 before both parts land from oribt.
Starship is a different can of worms. Its radical and innovative in many ways so there are a lot of work that needs to be done. This is definitely where Elon mis estimated how long it would take. It took them nearly a year to get the fuel tanks right. Then it took them a few prototypes to prove the belly flop concept. I wouldn't be surprised if the same proves to be true for the heat shield.
The easiest part about Starship is the booster because its not doing anything F9 isn't already. Just at a much larger scale. That of course isn't easy either. But it does but things into perspective somewhat.
And after all of that, my money is still on it beating SLS to orbit. Starship may be audacious but SLS's goal was never to get into space. In fact the longer they can drag it out the better it serves its purpose as a social welfare program.
"The easiest part about Starship is the booster because its not doing anything F9 isn't already. Just at a much larger scale."
Why is it in general required, to design a new, more heavy rocket - and not "just scale" up an existing design?
I mean, "just scaling up" means a different build process and this alone could probably prevent it when, using off the shelf solutions and not build everything yourself (screws and cables included), but are there other fundamental reasons, why usually a redesign is required?
Because defense contractors make a lot more money for the new one.
A great place to start is this amazing video by The Everyday Astronaut: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbH1ZDImaI8
Notice how the type of fuel used itself is a consideration for the type of rockets we may send to Mars if we're considering In-Situ refueling.
Can you explain that a bit more? I don’t understand.
Another example of a similar principle applies to insects: they don’t have lungs, and absorb oxygen directly through their skin. In earlier eras of earth’s history, there was much more oxygen in the air, and so insects could be much larger, because the same amount of surface area could absorb enough oxygen to fuel a larger number of cells.
The principle is that 2x size, i.e. 2x length, 2x width, 2x height, gives you 8x volume and, for animals, mass. All that mass has to be kept fed and aerated, and produces heat. But the surface area didn't go up by 8x. It only went up 4x unless you changed the shape a lot. You probably can't get skin to shed heat 2x as well, so you have to be careful not to produce 8x as much heat, instead.
This is all fine up to, say, the size of a giraffe or elephant. But an elephant that runs for five minutes is in for a bad time.
Vehicles are mostly empty space and skin, so they have different sorts of scaling problems.
Of course the birds have us beat all to hell, no matter which way you look. Fruit bats would be impressive if not for the competition from birds.
I'm not a rocket designer, just someone who has really enjoyed following it for a long time. Someone in the industry could give more specifics, but the basics are straight forward. Everything about a specific rocket is tightly coupled, from material factors to engines and everything that goes into that. To take an obvious one, how do you drive the bigger rocket? If you choose bigger engines, then you need entire new engines (and there are scaling issues there too). If you choose to use more smaller engines, you need brand new plumbing to feed all those engines (a very complex thing itself, last I checked each Raptor engine consumers nearly 800 kilograms of fuel PER SECOND), you need to deal with harmonics and control of more engines, different fluid mechanics, etc. Even merely construction changes with scale. For example scaling up carbon fiber to huge sizes is incredibly hard and expensive, one of a number of reasons SpaceX dropped it in favor of steel instead. Rocket volume obviously scales with the cube compared to surface area with the square of size, material properties change with thickness of various walls, and on and on. All of this also impacts aerodynamics, center of gravity and a host of other things.
So yeah! Knowledge and expertise from existing rocket designs is absolutely very useful in designing a new one, Starship directly comes out of a ton of things SpaceX learned from F9, which itself took important lessons from F1 (and "F9" is a much bigger range much faster then typical rockets, from version 1.0 to Full Thrust Block 5, the current one, they changed more and gained more power then entire new rockets sometimes have). A much bigger Starship v2 may take much more from v1 then typical because they now do have something with more scaling potential (steel construction in particular). And a lot of the software no doubt will be directly evolved, Starship landing of course used F9 landing software and hardware lessons. But still, cannot just "scale up", even without things like completely changing fuel.
Edit: In reply, jmyeet points out that I glossed over the manufacturing bit too much as well. There is a huge amount of expertise and institutional knowledge in going from a general design of any big complex machine to actually manufacturing it in a reliable fashion. People and the machines that make the machines and all the processes that go into that is a whole 'nother ball of wax. Can find plenty of stories on HN and elsewhere about merely duplicating "the same thing", like trying to manufacture an aircraft in a different factory. Or the level of work in "simply" copying a fab and the lengths that are gone to in order to try to make sure everything is exactly the same.
It's worth noting that the Saturn V to this day remains the most powerful launch vehicle ever created. So why didn't we just build that again? There are lots of reasons. Materials science has changed (ie there are newer, better materials now), the F5 engine was "handcrafted" in a way that required a lot of tuning and the whole system was expensive and unlikely to scale. There's probably lost expertise as a factor too.
Remember the Ares I/V designs? They theoretically were claimed to use what were "essentially" shuttle solid rocket boosters (SRBs), but scaled up. In fact, much of the chatter in general forums was that the Ares boosters were shuttle SRBs with an extra segment on top. (SRBs are built of several independent segments of propellant with the external structure wrapped around them. When they're assembled, they segments are stacked with, among other things, o-rings between them---that is what failed in Challenger.)
Ok, so you can just stack another segment on top for more power, right? Well, no. SRBs don't burn from the bottom to the top; there is a hole from the bottom of the propellant to the top, and when ignited it is the propellant on the surface of this hole that burns.
This hole up the propellant (remember, it's a solid) is not just a round cylinder. If it were, when you lit it on fire, it would start out at a minimum thrust and the thrust would increase as the hole got larger in diameter. This is not so much what you want a rocket engine to do. So the hole is actually a weird star shape that maintains the same surface area as it burns, which requires a bunch of strange parameters known only to the initiates of aerospace engineering magic. (This is what my friend did in grad school. Now he's an enterprise webby project manager thingy.)
If you just stack another segment on a SRB, it will burn for the same amount of time with more thrust, which may not be a good idea---remember, this is a mechanical structure that is mechanically connected to whatever you want to lift and the whole thing may not like higher g-loads.
So, to just "add another segment" you have to redesign the propellant entirely, then look at the structures and connectors that may not be designed for the new loads, and so on.
Scaling up isn't easy.
If I remember correctly (See the book Ignition!), one of the major problems for the Saturn V's F-1 engine was the design of the engine injector plate, the thing that sprays fuel and oxygen into the combustion chamber. It had dramatic effects on the stability of the burn (they can and will go BOOM!), the vibration and other aspects of the engine. And that was basically determined experimentally. Also, keep in mind that the big design problem for a liquid-fuel engine is how to feed as much liquid propellant and oxidizers into the engine at the rate necessary for the thrust. They use burning rocket propellant to drive turbine pumps to feed propellant into the combustion chamber, and those pumps are the cutting edge of high-temperature, high-pressure pump design. "Just scaling it up" can be a completely new research and development project.
As other parallel posters have commented, mechanical devices do not always squish or stretch with ease.
To scale your engine cluster you want to add an engine worth of thrust but not an engine worth of mass. To that end you reduce the mass of your piping or use one pump for multiple engines. All those changes require engineering and testing because the dynamics of the system have changed. For instance a fuel pipe of X thickness and Y material may have some weird failure mode if you make it just a little thinner to save mass.
Think about that for a second. For an orbital class upper stage larger than any ever built, it took shorter than ever for it to be designed AND manufactured through multiple iterative designs and manufacturing techniques than either the design stage or the manufacturing stage for ANY OTHER ROCKET.
All this while they continue to churn out and iterate on heatshield material and design at the "Bakery" which is another manufacturing facility they spun up from scratch in record time, manufacturing nearly a new rocket engine every DAY and that which has been flown and tested to demonstrate higher chamber pressures than ANY full flow staged combustion rocket engine in the history of mankind.
They're much further along than any comment in this thread indicates.
Elon seems to be dedicated to focusing on Engineering and Operations and it's resulting in the full potential of those engineers and professionals being explored. Instead of focusing exclusively on market capture, lobbying and new marketing strategies, SpaceX is focused on actually getting something done.
I've been nothing but impressed with them so far. While not nearly as financially successful as Tesla, I think SpaceX is closer to reaching Mars than Tesla is to reaching sustainable transportation and power.
A reusable rocket? How much would China pay for that capability? Don't worry about ITAR rules, it's a hypothetical question to understand the value of having such an asset available for defense or aerospace contracting purposes.
The centuries prior to the digital age, whole private empires were built on the back of shipping and transport. Spacex is presently sitting on the largest payload capability fleet in the world, by tonnage to orbit. Yes, including China. Yes, including Russia, Yes, we're not even counting one single Starship here yet.
The alloy itself that allows their turbines to run as hot as they have demonstrated to achieve such insane chamber pressures. What is that worth? No one else in the World has been able to do that in the history of mankind (In the unclassified realm atleast)
The thing i love about the company that you allude to as well is they're running a ship that converts these "ideas" into tangible business value quicker than anyone we've seen in classic space industries.
Once starship actually works it seems like a less complicated task diverting asteroids and mining them. Obviously not easy with a million new problems, but still easier than a fully reusable space transport system.
At that point humanity’s resources will become orders of magnitude larger. It will be a different world.
And I don’t see how this doesn’t happen in my lifetime.
The total mass of the asteroid belt is about 4% that of the Moon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon#Size_and_mass:
The Moon's mass is 1/81 of Earth's
So, the total mass of the asteroid belt is about 1/2000 that of earth. Assuming (slightly incorrectly) an even distribution of mass throughout earth, thats’s about as much as in the outermost 1/6000 of the radius of earth, or the top km.
That’s a lot of material, but there also is the complication that asteroids are far away, and far away from each other.
⇒ I wouldn’t count on asteroid mining making our resources orders of magnitude larger.
And unlike Earth, we don't live in any of that volume.
We mine about 3 billion tonnes of iron a year. A single iron rich asteroid could plausibly have hundreds or even thousands of times as much iron.
You have to want more than financial gain to engage in high risk high reward engineering endeavors (building EVs, building space vehicle build and launch systems with your own capital), although financial gain is likely a side effect of being successful in those endeavors.
I think it's more likely that people who are purely motivated by financial gain are likely to lack the imagination or drive to realize anything significantly innovative. Maybe we're saying the same thing?
I don't think I'd like the culture in one of his companies (I like my life outside of work too much), but I agree. So many of our tech projects at big companies and government projects have been taken over by business/bureaucrat folks making them into job factories, not product factories. I've seen this in aerospace, medical, and other areas too.
I think you underestimate how difficult those were. If it were easy to make a low mass pressure vessel that can handle cryogenic temperatures, and do so at a mass fraction lower than existing designs while also being reusable, then they wouldn't have had to iterate so much. Such a design would have already been in use if it were that easy. Which in a circular way means they probably would have been doing all of this anyways to hit even higher performance goals.
They were not just focused on the tanks. That was one component of the structure which involved Spacex testing propulsive landings using test articles of varying designs. . And this is the crucial part. . . While designing those test articles and iterating on the manufacturing systems AT THE SAME TIME.
The tanks are silly to make a point about was the response above if that was unclear. It was one component that was going through changes with the rest of the system in a revolutionary way that has never been done before. Not during the falcon development process or any other rocket development process going back to the Apollo era.
Blank sheet -> Starbase today is ridiculously complex. Each element in of itself that I outlined above takes YEARS. Arguing in a silly way about “oh my, they did take two years, well, technically, kinda, with these caveats” is such a stupid way to approach the measurement of progress where , while being completely wrong , is also not constructive to the discussion.
It's possible that its easier than the other challenges starship faces, but everything I've read seems to suggest the raptor engine underpinning the entire project is massively behind schedule and over budget to the point of putting SpaceX at risk of bankruptcy (according to Elon).[1]
It's also burning a completely different fuel and has numerous other massive changes so a booster leveraging it isn't really just F9 at a larger scale. [2]
[1] https://spacenews.com/spacex-grapples-with-raptor-production...
TLDR: Delay at this point is mostly regulatory (environmental study approvals) to launch out of Boca Chica. If they have to move to the Cape, then there will be delays.
More specifically: Nominal date for FAA clearance is X. Actual clearance will be >X (these agencies are never complete early; it's already been delayed twice). SpaceX readiness date will be <= X. Therefore FAA clearance is the program bottleneck.
https://www.space.com/faa-spacex-starship-review-delayed-mar...
To be fair to the FAA, I wouldn't bet on that. It's not called Elon Time for nothing.
Not true. Musk said they weren't ready to launch yet anyways, and that they expected to be ready around the same time they expected to get FAA clearance. So it's not holding things up yet. And it might never.
It would not be at all surprising if they did not get approval for anything like the launch cadence from Boca Chica that they had projected, and need to fall back on Florida and ocean platform launches.
The delay to get that stuff ready might give them time to actually work out bugs, without them being treated as failures. And, there is little doubt those will work just as well, although standing that stack up on a floating platform will be an impressive achievement. Boca Chica will still be able to do tests. One wonders if they will deliver completed vehicles to the real launch sites by ("test") launching from Boca Chica. I don't think you need a Starship on top to launch the booster, although a cone hat seems advisable.
I was just trying to imagine a booster delivery flight path. I'm assuming orbital otherwise FAA has appropriate concerns.
So north of Cuba, achieve orbital speed for one orbit, de-orbit burn to re-enter aiming past Florida, and then landing burn to get you back over Cape Canaveral?
Is it that straight forward? Would that be allowed? Would they need to dog leg to avoid flying over mainland USA?
Maybe an unladen Starship could make such a hop by itself. If not, a booster could assist on the first leg and come back.
On that note, I recall reading somewhere that the top part is at least in theory SSTO-capable without payload.
> Years earlier, Musk ordered Falcon Heavy canceled, forcing Shotwell, who’d been tipped off by another SpaceX employee, to sprint to a conference room and remind him that the U.S. Air Force, a critical customer, had already purchased a launch
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-07-26/she-launc...
The tiles they have are a design that is known to work, and will suffice to prove that the vehicle can get to orbit and come back in one piece.
So they will need a new design that doesn't need so much detailed attention after every flight. They have years to work out what that will be, because they are much farther from ready than some, apparently many, imagine. The gross, visible, easy stuff is mostly in place. The hard stuff you can't see is still to come.
On the space shuttle few, if any heatshield tiles were the same. They were individually manufactured, instead of bulk manufactured to a common specification as SpaceX are doing. Obviously that is going to be far, far more efficient.
Yeah, they have had problems with tiles coming off during static fires. Although this seems to have been getting better, and it remains to be seen how bad an issue losing a few patches of single tiles actually is. Under the tiles the structure is stainless steel, while with the space shuttle it was aluminum which is clearly not as tolerant of the extreme heating of re-entry.
The issue is not the shapes or even how to keep them attached during hypersonic flight. The immediate problem is that they require personal attention to each and every tile, after each flight, before they are ready to be re-used.
SpaceX engineers are strongly motivated to come up with a system that does not require such treatment, but that does not mean they will get it soon. Or ever. Probably they will be trying to come up with a ceramic-fiber fabric covering that could be peeled off and replaced quickly. It would still need babying, but the vehicle would not need to be there all the while, as with the tiles.
Scaling up in this context isn't simple at all. For all the recognition of the complexity of rocket science, structural engineering is perhaps the most underappreciated.
Scaling up in multiple dimensions often means different things need to be scaled at different rates. Hydraulic and atmospheric modeling is similar in this respect. You pick the variable(s) that you want to scale linearly, and then have to resolve all the other variables in terms of what you've fixed. Lots of dimensional analysis, and then experiments to calibrate the results to be meaningful.
For instance, max ultimate moment loading is generally the controlling factor for determining beam strength, which in turn determines the required beam cross section and weight/span. However, as beam span length increases linearly, moment increases exponentially for the same load. And scaling up likely increases the external loading, such that moment increases to the 4th power as base dimensions increase linearly.
And then needing a bigger/stronger beam cross-section increases the self-weight that also needs to be supported.
Things can quickly runaway in certain configurations, when you start to account for volumetric increases in fuel capacity, and dynamic loadings like impact forces on fuel tank baffles, which themselves are often scaled to the 3rd or 4th power of the fuel weight, and 2nd or 3rd power wrt to the relative change in velocity.
And finally there's the structural harmonics and vibration, which all increase in force faster than linear increases in span, and affect structural serviceability (lifetime loading cycles).
I imagine a similar thing will happen with Starship: once it reaches orbit, I wouldn't be surprised if each subsequent mission was full of Starlink satellites (and perhaps other payloads, from brave customers!); even if it takes a long time to get reliable re-entry, re-fuelling, landing, etc.
You can still launch beyond that but it means you're doing so for non-economic reasons. This could be range (eg geosynchronous or Moon orbit instead of LEO) or larger payloads. Falcon Heavy launches seem to be pretty much exclusively military payloads to high orbits that the Falcon 9 just can't carry.
People forget that payloads are deeply coupled to the launch system. Starship will ultimately allow a much larger payload (eg think of JWST 2.0 but with way less complexity) but that will take years for the industry to adapt to, possibly a decade or more.
Starlink exists in part because the launch demand for getting payloads into space just doesn't exist otherwise. Cheaper launch costs will ultimately create more use cases (because they're now economic) but this will take time too.
Starships may be lost in attempting to land but I honestly believe that attempted landing and reuse will be there from day one.
That said, SpaceX is targeting $10M for a Starship launch early on, with aspirations of bringing that down towards a single million. https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-spacex-starship-ro...
Sure, customers won't be fronting the entire cost of a Starship. My point was that Starship can perform revenue-generating commercial work through much of its testing.
SpaceX will still be losing a fortune for each RUD; just a slightly smaller fortune than if they stuck with mass simulators until everything's perfected.
That assumes you don't have any mission payloads larger than 22t (or 63t for heavy). This is more extreme for Mars transfer orbit 4 & 16t respectively. Starship is advertised as being capable of 100t to mars transfer.
Only with a yet undeveloped in-orbit refueling. Starship can get a lot of mass to LEO or is can get much less mass to a higher orbit or Mars transfer.
The only way it can get a lot of mass out of LEO is for a second Starship loaded with fuel to refill its tanks. This capability is likely still a ways off, SpaceX need to get Starship flying and landing reliably before they attempt a large scale in-orbit fuel transfer.
An expendable starship with fairings can launch a (dimensionally) even larger telescope. Or a starlink like array of large telescope modules.
The JWST was so complex in part because the mirror was so large it had to have the complicated unfolding mechanism to even fit on the choosen vehicle. When Starship is in service, I imagine a replacement for JWST with the same mirror size oculd be developed for much cheaper because it wouldn't have to be so complex. Or it have an even larger mirror.
But JWST development went hand in hand with the capabilities of the launch vehicle for a decade or more. You can't just put that same payload on another rocket. It's part of the design process. It will take time for the capabilities of Starship to flow into the design process for even larger payloads that otherwise just aren't possible today.
But it's not just straight fixed vs variable costs. You need assembly lines that have a production capacity. How mjch capacity do you want? Do you want the ability to ramp up production if there's sufficient demand?
But other launch vehicles had relatively straightforward math. The vehicle costs $Xm to produce and launch so you charge $(x+y)m for that (where y is the amortized development cost and profit). Production capacity is still a factor (as a variable cost) of course. But a resuable vehicle just upends all that math. Part of the math is then how long does it take to recondition a vehicle for a future flight? How many times can it be reused? Does each reuse make the reconditioning cost more? A lot of these questions will only be answered with time and experience.
And obviously that's a key commercial secret for SpaceX. But they can pretty much charge what they want because there's literaly no competition at that price point. I imagine this is a big part of what is funding the (significant) R&D costs for Starship and Raptor.
>A lot of these questions will only be answered with time and experience.
I guess that's a bit of what I was poking at. In my mind, there's still a lot of uncertainty with the cost claims, but I see so many people talking about how it's going to bring launch costs down X% and they seem to say it with relative certainty.
I have faith that SpaceX will make great strides in this, but at the moment it seems to be a big unknown, at least in terms of magnitude. My biggest worry is that every misstep will layer additional quality oversight that will drive up cost. An example being the strut failure from a few years back that was related to a supplier material issue. As a remedy, SpaceX now does additional supplier quality control checks. I can imagine a few decades of similar issues being fixed may drive their processes to be more costly.
By this logic the cost of mail should be much lower given I can get a package 200x larger delivered to my house for 10x the price.
Where they will need full reusability is to make in-orbit refueling work out economically long term, and they need that to use Starship in deep space or other high energy work. Though even there if we're comparing to SLS it still looks good because SLS is just that stupid bloated.
For a long time, the only fully loaded Starships will be carrying Starlink satellites, and maybe fuel for an orbital tank farm. The Starlink launches will be physically full, but not boosting even close to the advertised cargo weight capacity, because those Starlink sats don't pack in tightly enough. Eventually, people may start to think of things that can use up that much load capacity or volume (rarely both).
Suborbital freight will be a tricky business. It can take quite a lot more than 45 minutes to round up and pack enough freight to fill up a Starship, and to get it unpacked and distributed at the other end, so the 45 minutes aloft doesn't save as much time as you might expect. Same for passenger service: if it takes four hours to get everybody secured, and two hours to get everybody out to the curb after, you have to go pretty far to make it save enough time to be worth the extra cost.
So, in order to take advantage of the new capability, a lot of boring stuff has to be invented and fielded. Practical air freight needed, besides the aircraft, a custom shipping container design delivered to everybody with freight to ship, and cargo bay floors with rollers built in to get them on and off fast enough.
Are you joking? That isn't even vaguely the "general consensus of the informed", at best it's "wishful thinking by old space types who are seeing the real time overturning of their gravy train". Frankly, at this point the major risk factors as far as getting to orbit are done. Raptor works and generates plenty of thrust. Starship can go up, complete a bellflop maneuver, and then land. And under harder conditions, they did an extremely aggressive fast landing to save fuel, much higher g's then they have to. The only critical component to save in SS/SH is the SH booster, which is where most of the expense is in terms of lots of Raptor engines. However, that's also the easiest part technically speaking, it just goes up and straight down again and SpaceX has proven capability to do that obviously. In fact fundamentally it's easier than F9. SH will have a minimum empty TWR (thrust/weight ratio) below 1, which means it's capable of hovering. F9 doesn't, so when they light up empty even a single engine on minimum throttle it'll still be heading right back up again. That's why they need the "hover slam" landing procedure, where they very carefully time things so that downward velocity and thrust counteract at exactly the landing height. Steel is easy to work with and more reliable.
People have this notion that "bigger is harder" but that's no in fact always true. And SpaceX has engineered every last bit about Starship as part of an overall self-reinforcing system. It's cheap to iterate. Mass manufacturing has been a core part of the plan from day 1. So they can be hardware rich, cheaply. Flight is also engineered to be cheap, from the materials in construction to the construction procedures themselves and right down to the fuel (RP-1 rocket grade kerosene is quite pricey, methane is not). And they can self-bootstrap thanks to Starlink. SpaceX can look at a true MVP: all they have to do to start iterating is launch SS/SH and recover SH, it's fine to have SS be fully expended while they figure things out and it will still be cheaper/kg (maybe even cheaper outright!) than F9. So they can be making money off it very fast, and then make more money once SS is landing too. They can do initial proof with their own payload, then riskier commercial payload, then full commercial, then manned, ironing out issues with actual real flight the entire way.
So what's revolutionary about Starship isn't merely the vehicle itself, but the entire system around the vehicle including the fact that "the vehicle" can pretty rapidly evolve and get tweaked.
There's a history of this. Case in point: Falcon Heavy. It ended up being delayed so long that improvements in the Merlin engine greatly reduced the payloads that Falcon Heavy was originally built for to the point there are a couple of launches a year at best.
No, you've got this completely backwards. The rapid iteration and increasing power of the F9 negated the initial economic proposition for Falcon Heavy, so they just didn't need to bother and put it on the backburner until F9 was fully baked. Then they didn't devote much more resources to FH because Starship will completely obsolete it anyway.
There's a lot more to Starship than that, right? In-orbit refueling. Heat shield. The launch tower chopstick catch. Engineering a crew space. Hell, the big window. I don't doubt they'll get one into orbit this year, but that's not what I'd define as a completed Starship program.
Even Elon knows it's notable when he hits a deadline. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1434959550575255558
Not for MVP, which is getting Starship to LEO. Once they do that, they can start using it for Starlink and a fair amount of commercial cargo, which means it starts paying for itself and their runway extends vastly
>In-orbit refueling. Heat shield. The launch tower chopstick catch.
First is only required for high energy, stuff like deep space. They don't need that to get iterating. Hell, they don't need second stage reuse even for their NASA Lunar contract, that was part of the risk assessment. Lunar Starship won't be landing back on Earth. If they can't do reuse it'd probably nuke most of the possible profit on that one, but it's not mission critical.
Second is needed for reentry, but again, expended upper stage is fine. Most of the cost is in Super Heavy.
Third is a nice economics thing. SH will be able to hover, landing legs add to dry mass, and landing raises more chance of damage which would slow cadence. Since there is no particular physical reason they can do a tower catch it's worth trying. But worst case they just give up (or give up temporarily) and go back to legs. That's still not at all a blocker for going to orbit.
>Engineering a crew space. Hell, the big window.
Manned won't be for a long, long while. I'm not sure what you're confused about here, you do realize that F9 was going to orbit with commercial cargo for a long while before any human launch right?
>I don't doubt they'll get one into orbit this year, but that's not what I'd define as a completed Starship program.
Well in that case, since I said "as far as getting to orbit" I'm not even sure what you're arguing with. SpaceX's entire thing here is MVP and iteration. MVP for Starship is getting SS to orbit and expending it while recovering SH. That's enough for it to start making them lots of money. Cargo SS will be quite cheap for a rocket. At that point they start to get working on reentry and landing that "for free", just like with F9. And with high cadence. How many dozens of times do you think it'll take them to figure it out? Because remember, they did 31 F9 launches last year alone. And they've got lots of margin in the design.
I don't think that was inherently clear to anyone but you. I don't think that's the definition the parent poster meant in the context of "Starship is going to take years longer than originally predicted".
That's not redefining, just SpaceX's confusing naming I guess but I thought I was quite clear for anyone who knows about the system. The "Starship launch system" consists of a first stage named Super Heavy (SH) and a second stage also named Starship (SS). It was obvious I was talking about expended second stage "Starship" because I explicitly noted that Super Heavy was important to land, why, and additionally why I thought that was also relatively feasible compared to the SS parts.
>I don't think that was inherently clear to anyone but you.
Only if you didn't actually bother to read the comment or don't know anything about Starship but are choosing to comment anyway. Yes, all of us wish that "Starship" wasn't an overloaded term, but it is. The context nevertheless was very clear. What else did you think I was talking about with Super Heavy?
>I don't think that's the definition the parent poster meant in the context of "Starship is going to take years longer than originally predicted".
It seems fairly clear given both the article and their "Starship is incredibly ambitious but if it doesn't reach orbit before 2025 I won't be surprised" statement? OP didn't write "if the second stage doesn't have full reuse before 2025 I won't be surprised", they wrote reach orbit. Please explain how else you can parse that except a claim that Starship won't reach orbit? And a refined expended second stage would still absolutely slaughter SLS and everything else too. And yes, I'd be surprised if it took them dozens and dozens of attempts to get SS to survive reentry, they've got plenty of mass margin for it and fundamental advantages vs a range of other reentry systems including the shuttle, and as far as landing, well they've already demonstrated the most aggressive version landing maneuver successfully! So I don't think it's going to take them 3+ years after getting to orbit to land SS.
> Starship is incredibly ambitious but if it doesn't reach orbit
> before 2025 I won't be surprised.
If OP had said "Starship won't do everything everyone dreams of doing before 2025", then OK, that's not even vaguely contentious.
But not reaching orbit by 2025? That seems very unlikely.
He still seems to forget about it anytime he's "very confident [random bold claim] is 1 year away" though.
They achieved the highest chamber pressure for a full flow staged combustion engine. . . . EVER.
They've flown and landed upper stage prototypes, achieved an engine production capacity that not even China or any state power in the WORLD has managed in the history of humanity and account for a significant portion of global payload to orbit right now.
They've developed an in house metal alloy that allows for temperatures in the turbine and combustion chamber to reach levels that the United States Government considered "Impossible" during the cold war and one so exotic that only like 4 engines have ever been built in all of human history. The only one of those engines to leave the test stand is . . .the Raptor.
They develop and build their own heat tiles and have achieved significant output capacity in the past two years.
The support system at the launch site which includes the launch tower, grappling arms, fuel stores etc are in very advanced stages at the moment and certainly ready to handle a steady stream of iterative full flight tests.
All this IN PARALLEL !! The weight of the booster through iterative design has been steadily coming down as well, the engine ISP and chamber pressure has been rising in insane steps to the point where it is already amongst the best rocket engines known. Complexity of the engine build has visibly come down in the past few months alone.
Each of these items by themselves take YEARS and were similarly expected to take YEARS even when Spacex started work on them. They're much further along than many people thought they would be two years ago.
There is a lot of juicy detail in the three part video that the Everyday Astronaut did with Elon Musk at Starbase, i'd urge the people interested in this thread to go watch that instead of the armchair idiocy of either the OP or myself and make up your own minds.
I do hope I'm wrong.
(Except the Raptor engines, those are hard, but they are also quite far from done: they have not been flight tested. No, those 10km hops don't count: that's just data collection.) We won't know if it all works until after they have gone to orbit, come home, and sent the same hardware up again. They will get that done, sooner or later, but how soon or how late is not predictable. The rule, for stuff like this, is "always later than you wished".
And they could do EXPENDABLE starships (or different upper stages) that would absolutely CRUSH SLS. Take the heatshield off and fly a cargo variant of the upper stage - for $4B per launch they would be raking it in.
Probably for the first couple of years, the Starships carrying Starlink satellites will be one-shots, with just three vacuum Raptor bells and no central gimbal system, heat shield tiling, or flaps. Those might have smaller fuel/oxidizer tanks to leave more room inside for the satellites. The only expensive bit is the three Raptor movements, but those are getting cheaper all the time. Until they work out a good, new tile system, there won't be any quick turnaround Starships.
So landing and turning (a few of) them around will be a marketing play.
Did you mean that "improvements in the Merlin engine greatly increased" the payloads that Falcon 9 can deliver, therefore reducing the need for Falcon Heavy? Because if that's what happened, then there wasn't a delay as such and it's quite disingenuous to put it as such.
> All of this for <$20B in investment, which is about the development cost of SLS.
$1B is <$20B, and the cost of SLS will be much more than $20B. This sentence is particularly disingenuous if not outright dishonest.
> SLS hasn't even launched yet and will probably cost ~$1B/launch anyway.
SLS has been in the works for longer than Starship, has it not? And Starship supposedly will cost much less per ton to orbit than Falcon 9 / Falcon heavy, which means "~$1B/launch" is just nuts.
> Starship is incredibly ambitious but if it doesn't reach orbit before 2025 I won't be surprised.
Meh. They'll reach orbit when they reach orbit, but you've not shown any arguments for why it would take them that long.
> Blue Origin has had just as much money thrown at it and was founded years before SpaceX yet it still hasn't reached orbit and its BE-4 engines have been delayed years.
BO hasn't even reached orbit at all, while SpaceX sure has! What are you on about?!
I believe that's what I said. The specs for FH claim ~64t to LEO. F9 is ~22t but it didn't start at 22t. It got that way with increasing improvements in the Merlin engines. That improved capability ate away at the payloads that would otherwise have necessitated FH.
> This sentence is particularly disingenuous if not outright dishonest.
You've misunderstood my point. I'm arguing SpaceX has been ridiculously more economical than the SLS welfare program for defense contractors and pork barrelling for Congressional districts (which is what it is). There is quite literally no reason for SLS to exist. For the cost of a handful of launches, SpaceX has done over 100 launches.
> BO hasn't even reached orbit at all, while SpaceX sure has! What are you on about?!
Again, you've misunderstood my point. We're agreeing.
Billions spent anywhere else would hardly do anything and would not be met with criticism of the failed contractors tasked with carrying out the job. Instead, there would mearly be calls for more money and time and that the same results would have been achieved with any other contractor.
Can someone elucidate what are the major technical challenges related to Starship that can cause such a delay? Powered descent and landing I assume is a largely solved problem from Falcon rockets.
Re-entry would require heat shielding tech but isn't that a fairly mature technology? Also the fact that SpaceX isn't trying to maximize payload per launch and compensate with launch frequency argues they can use more robust tech than NASA used.
The engines are completely new and the only one of it's kind that's ever flown but I've not heard that they are a problem now.
Re-launch so quickly may not happen initially but that's ok and SpaceX does have experience with the other rocket.
So I'm wondering what's the big unknown left?
It would not be at all surprising if they didn't work out the new shielding until after 2025.
I'm guessing "no".
I think that's a bit unfair. For most of it's existence BO was just a think tank, and while Bezos has put a few billion into it that is small potatoes compared to the funding and contract revenue Musk has rallied for SpaceX so far.
Re-entry, landing, and full reusability could easily take several more years though.
The world as they know it might be coming to an end, of course they're worried.
Most of us were new to this way of thinking. At the time, the engineers with the most experience in building these things had endured decades of minimal funding, and had learned to keep things as simple as possible. There was a lot of pushback against what was perceived as unnecessary complexity.
What is the quote, that organizations will expand towards supporting the organization, rather than the goals of the organization... Well.
Science is hard, rocket science more so. All of the other commercial launch programs have (as yet) failed to achieve anything close to sustainable orbital operations, unless they are also traditional aerospace defense contractors. ULA is Boeing/Northrop Grumman, and I can't recall but I think ArianneSpace is technically a commercial company rather than a national space agency. Both are very, very good at orbital launch. But comparing their funding structure to that of SpaceX seems a bit weird.
SpaceX can just provide cheap launch services and we can have more large projects to send up!
One year after the start of the project, this manufacturer had done nothing, so the project leader made sure the work was transferred to a German SME which looked more active.
After another year, still nothing was done, so the project leader became very anxious.
What happened in the last 6 months of the project was that students did the work. But they probably were not aware that EU paid 7b for their work.
I got the impression this kind of behavior was not that uncommon.
I've got an unpopular opinion: For me, the state-sponsored space exploration of space (particularly, the Space Race) slowed down progress in the sciences and even for space exploration in the long run.
Of course, people can point to me all sorts of technologies that appeared first during the race. Unfortunately, we don't have a fork or an alternative world where this didn't happen that we could use to compare, so anything I say pointing to the high-cost such endeavors had to society is almost always met with skepticism (if you argue this makes me wrong, you're committing a fallacy regardless if I'm right or wrong).
It's impossible to say for sure but had not a lot of resources been taken from civil society for these projects, there is a chance that there'd be a demand to do it in a more effective and long-term way from the very beginning, and this is my point.
Yes, maybe humans would be on Moon only 30 years later. Still, there's a chance at least the wealthiest could afford a week-long vacation with their families today on the Moon. We could have labs and factories for specialized equipment that might benefit from a low-gravity environment in space or whatever.
Would you say the same thing regarding the Department of Defense and the Pentagon budget? I have heard good arguments that the military industrial complex is largely a bureaucratic deadweight cost to society, with few benefits (and generates the largest loss of life through Democide: https://hawaii.edu/powerkills/20TH.HTM ). Anyway, I think perhaps your argument fits military waste spending even more than it does with regard to the space race and NASA. Or maybe it's just a characteristic of State spending in general (like the infamous story of a $640 toilet seat https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/only-the-pentagon-... ).
Economically speaking, the waste caused by the industrial-military complex worldwide is probably 10000 times worse, at least.
Going off-topic: However, even though I'm a capitalist pig, the problem with this goes even far worse than economics: most murders recent history are related to state-sponsored conflicts, not the John Doe carrying a gun around to commit petty theft and accidentally murdering someone. It's hard to become aware of it as institutions like UNODC never includes armed conflict between states in the count, for starters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...
There is no way the space shuttle would have happened without stupid politics.
Jokes on them, the contracts started then are still impossible to kill today, and none of them have produced anything of real value for 20 years now.
Expensive parts of STS are not used in anything except maybe X37, which by all indications is useless, spending years parked in orbit just so it doesn't look totally disused.
The original NASA was military only. Then an all civilian nasa was formed and the two quasi competed. There is a really good overview of this in Chuck Yaeger’s autobiography.
Similarly nuclear space propulsion and nuclear power outside of RTGs in US space program were killed unilaterally by Nixon, killing all heavier missions outside of moon orbit.
What would have been the economic imperative that would have jump started the development of rockets in the first place?
Like there has to be some sort of reason for people to develop rockets in the first place, otherwise they're not going to do it, even on a whim because it's so outrageously expensive and required the development of so many technologies to make it possible.
But I do tend to think that without the public investment we saw along military and PR lines that space research would have been very seriously delayed. Something like $100+ billion in public funds between the US and USSR to develop ICBMs, which then translates to heavy satellite launch and etc.
At the time, we had ships that floated on the ocean.
The space race's initial run was motivated by national pride and defense. The costs to keep it up have been high, which is why SpaceX's approach at reducing fixed pre-launch costs have found success.
(His being in complete control over the mechanism required to immigrate helps shape that direct democracy, too.)
On the other hand we managed to end up with a suspiciously high number of communist dictatorships, which is equally contradictory, so who knows.
[1]: yes, I know the “state” was “a bit” different in that early modern world, but still Columbus would not have done that thanks to market forces alone.
I was replying to a very insightful comment saying "Why would anyone build a rocket??"
> What would have been the economic imperative that would have jump started the development of rockets in the first place?
With this one:
> What was the economic imperative to build a ship to cross the Atlantic?
How is it “not commenting on state or market force”?
The problem is that if the economy stops growing but productivity keeps going up we will have to work less and less. However, we don't have a solution to sharing jobs. We think it is more efficient to employ a single full time employee which makes some people perpetually redundant while simultaneously running into the paradox that these individuals could work but don't have to. We still blame them if they don't work. We blame them even though the products the full time employees produce have no market other than these unemployed people.
the truth of which depends on many things, including
- how "better" is defined,
- the timescale of the product/service,
- the value creation/capture equation of the product/service,
- the robustness of the product/service to disruption
- the delivery cost vs profit margin distribution (some customers cost more to serve than others, think rural mail delivery vs urban)
On any number of these, it isn't clear that the development of space tech from say 1935 to 2000 would have been faster if private industry was in charge.
vs. now, when lots of the basic tech exists (Musk's rockets are based on Soviet missile tech, if I remember) ALONG WITH a proven market for that tech, yes, it does become more feasible for a commercial venture to leverage that existing tech/knowledge to create a product for the existing market.
vs. now, when lots of the basic tech exists (Musk's rockets are based on Soviet missile tech, if I remember) ALONG WITH a proven market for that tech, yes, it does become more feasible for a commercial venture to leverage that existing tech/knowledge to create a product for the existing market.
IIRC, Elon Musk tried to buy soviet rockets, but otherwise all the engineering works are his company's own creation. As far as standing on shoulder of giants, they likely stand more on NASA's than on Russian rocket designs.
Probably solid rockets have a different lineage, too.
If you ever find yourself in Roswell, after enjoying the alien museum or when you get tired of the "crowds", walk a couple blocks north to the quiet little Roswell art museum. Buy a ticket and ask where the Goddard exhibition is.
I was blown away! They have what appears to be most of his actual workshop on exhibition in a recreated workshop, as well as a number of his rockets (well a lot of pieces and a couple never flown/incomplete ones). Plus, loads of the usual pictures/documents/etc you would expect of a museum. I spent at least an hour standing in that workshop looking at the different tools he was using to build his rockets. Its crazy cool, and pretty much no one knows about it because "Art museum".
https://roswell-nm.gov/1259/Roswell-Museum
(ah and here is a link to the gallery description: https://roswell-nm.gov/348/Robert-H-Goddard-Dreamer-Tinkerer... )
https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/TRC/Rockets/history_of_roc...
But to your point the turbopump was a key contribution of the Nazis:
In mid-1935 Wernher von Braun initiated a fuel pump project at the southwest German firm Klein, Schanzlin & Becker that was experienced in building large fire-fighting pumps.
No. While von Braun and other German engineers received a lot of attention, his team at Army Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA) was one of three competing US efforts to launch a satellite in the late 1950s. The Navy's Project Vanguard was the second to launch a US satellite (and would have been the first had its December 1957 attempt succeeded). The formation of NASA brought the three efforts together; Project Mercury used ABMA's Redstone and Air Force's Atlas rockets.
The Soviets took German scientists, too, but returned them to Germany in the 1950s. Sergei Korolev and other Chief Designers of the various USSR rocket-design bureaus (which, unlike NASA, did not come and continued competing against each other) were all native Soviets.
Interesting. Could you elaborate on this? Was there a specific incident or reason why Russia "returned them to Germany"?
They were very, very helpful—much more than the USSR liked to acknowledge—to the early Soviet rocket program, but even with their help, Russia had something like only four ICBMs capable of reaching the US during the "Missile Gap" that JFK in part won the presidency in 1960 over.
https://www.inverse.com/article/34976-spacex-ceo-elon-musk-t...
> The third and final meeting happened back in Russia. Musk flew there with Cantrell, prepared to purchase three ICBMs for $21 million. But to Musk’s disappointment, the Russians now claimed that they wanted $21 million for each rocket, and then taunted the future SpaceX founder. As Cantrell recounted to Esquire: “They said, ‘Oh, little boy, you don’t have the money?”
At some level this is always true. Are there any countries with competitive industries that don't have corporations doing the actual work even if the government accounts for 100% of their revenues? Isn't this the basic premise behind the economic revolutions in India and China, that government industries are significantly less efficient than private industries?
An open market where anyone is allowed to compete is better at organizing capital and labor to deliver a product/service than a single monopolist organization.
That also allowed Zond program (Chelomey's Proton and Korolyov's Soyuz spacecraft) and automatic Moon explorers (Lunokhods and three sample return missions), so diversity did bring some fruits, but the manned system - which wasn't that far from working - was scrapped and Energiya-Buran project was launched. It brought results, but too late to be used with the terminally ill country.
The soviets did well in military power, international sports, and maybe one other thing, while the rest of society stagnated.
For huge scale production, centralized planning can't be beat, at least for a period of time. I believe the same is true of the early space race, or the Manhattan Project.
Blanket statements like "It'd have gone better with Industry" are potentially true, but miss the issue entirely: No highly-funded market for pictures of Mars, Neptune, Venus existed, essentially ever, including today.
Industry didn't have the appetite for this until very, very recently. To get anything done, gov had to create expertise (initially) and a market (later) for space exploration technologies and hope for efficiency to pick up in the industry. For the longest time, NASA existed almost exclusively to demonstrate technology and to create an environment where talent and tech could mature in the US. Now, that talent can be leveraged directly by market, thankfully.
Blanket statements like "It'd have gone better with Industry" are potentially true, but miss the issue entirely: No highly-funded market for pictures of Mars, Neptune, Venus existed, essentially ever, including today.
Private industry often has the option to NOT do something. When they leverage that option, if the thing really does need to be done, it is typically left to government. That puts government led initiatives at an inherent disadvantage when private industry also dictates the metrics of success. Government is forced into doing things that private industry doesn't want to or cannot do - and we point to the government like its a failure. See USPS vs. FedEx/UPS - USPS treats its employees well, delivers to everyone, and controls prices to make basic services accessible to all citizens. Private versions do none of those things but we view them as more successful because 'they don't lose money'.
Example from when I used to live in Arizona:
* they introduced a school voucher program
* theoretically, charter schools could not discriminate against students with disabilities
* students with disabilities are more expensive to educate, in a public school the ratio of able bodied to disabled students helps lessen the burden of those costs
* shockingly, Charter schools in practice wildly discriminated against students with serious disabilities. They used the language of 'would not succeed in our rigorous academic environment'
* Students with major disabilities (e.g., Down's Syndrome) became enormously overrepresented in public schools
* For public schools - costs per student went up, relative test scores went down.
Some argued that this was proof that public education was failing and they needed to expand the voucher program and grow the number of Charter schools. I would argue it didn't - the ideology of industry better than government just changed the rules, broke the system, and claimed a victory.
Space-X and Blue Origin and [insert space startup here] exists because of NASA in the 60s and 70s and everyday since. It isn't just that NASA did the early parts and now industry can do now. NASA literally used that time to write the standards that all of these companies now rely on. They generated the knowledge base required to succeed in spaceflight. They literally generated the standards - e.g., 3D printed spaceflight parts https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/msfcstd... that are a starting point for anything they do.
UPS is unionized and notorious for paying very good wages. The difference is that UPS doesn't deliver to a lot of rural (unprofitable) areas. That _is_ something the government should be funding through USPS. On the other hand the travesty that is the USPS delivery vehicle procurement process shows maybe we shouldn't always rely on government for everything.
> I would argue it didn't - the ideology of industry better than government just changed the rules, broke the system, and claimed a victory.
In this case industry also created a market where there previously wasn't one for your educational funds. Your local school district no longer has a monopoly on tax revenue for schools and is forced to improve to compete. I would argue we should be explicitly subsidizing those disabled students you're talking about rather than implicitly have everyone else pay for them. Then you can split out necessary costs (accessibility, etc.) vs. costs that need to be cut (school is paying admin too much, etc.)
I hear this type of logic a lot. If you don't start with an assumption that the ideology is true and therefore the outcomes from the ideology are better then what comes out is functionally incoherent. It begins with the assumption that public organizations are poorly run and then uses that assumption to conclude they are poorly run. That's not thinking, its not argumentation, and it should not be respected as a serious viewpoint.
When the charter schools get to pick the students they want and leave the the more expensive students to the group that is required by law to educate them they haven't improved. They haven't innovated, they've stolen from the public and claimed their moral superiority for doing so. This comment is representative of the fucking inanity (not insanity) of this ideology.
There's no inherent reason why I shouldn't get to decide how my own property taxes are spent. If my city decides through an election that those property taxes should be given as vouchers, why shouldn't that be allowed? You're proposing taxation without representation.
> collect more tax dollars so that disabled students have access to segregated education and somehow that will show us who is making too much money
Local tax dollars, which are raised by local elections approving those tax dollars. It also sounds like you haven't actually been in a school this decade because special needs students are _already_ segregated and take separate classes with separate teachers.
> You have invented the idea of accounting and presume that it is impossible that it will not show you are right
If I'm wrong then the tax dollars all flow back to public schools anyways. That's how a market works.
> It begins with the assumption that public organizations are poorly run and then uses that assumption to conclude they are poorly run
I don't see why we shouldn't give parents the choice to decide themselves whether those public organizations are in fact poorly run. And speaking from experience growing up in public K-12 and a public university, a lot of these organizations _are_ poorly run.
> When the charter schools get to pick the students they want and leave the the more expensive students to the group that is required by law to educate them they haven't improved. They haven't innovated, they've stolen from the public and claimed their moral superiority for doing so
You mean just like how gifted programs pick the students they want and leave the more expensive students (in dollars per student graduated or however you want to measure it) to the group that is required by law to educate them? You seem to assume that charter schools automatically haven't shown any improvements in outcomes when you say this.
I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and say let's wait and see how they do. I think parents are more than intelligent enough to select the best school for their kids. I'm happy mandating that charter schools be nonprofits if that reduces the grifting but I think we need choice. The other alternative is I move to where the good schools are and pay $$$$ for a house in a good school district. I think one is definitely going to help more people than the other, don't you think?
No, the point is that as a city we should be able to choose, not individually. I said if my local election decides we should be able to funnel our property tax dollars to vouchers then we should be allowed to do that. I don't mean each individual gets to decide what line-item taxes they're paying that year.
> WHile special needs may be segregated, they are still funded by the general pool, you completely failed to address his argument
I said we should separate the funding for special needs because it's fundamentally a different cost structure and hides inefficiencies in the non-special needs costs.
> You also seem to say criticize his opinion for not being in a school this decade, so are you arguing that maybe people who are say, more expert in schools, should make schooling decisions and not just any old person, say someone handed a voucher
I think people whose kids are in school should get to decide. I criticized his opinion because it seems like he's trying to impose his one-size-fits-all public option when he's neither a parent nor a student. The US has never been a technocracy.
> Instead of fixing a sinking boat, it just figures out a way for some to get to lifeboats
Curious how you think we can do better. The US spends the most out of any nation on education per capita and has among the poorest outcomes out of any developed nation. More money doesn't fix the sinking boat, it just lets it take on more water before it sinks. Vouchers aren't perfect but I think they're better than pouring more money into a black hole with no accountability.
Really, anyone that has worked for a living can tell you that most institutions are poorly run.
At best, despite being poorly run, some institutions have a more consistent track record of mining value from their customers and employees than others. Those are the ones that tend to survive. As both a customer and an employee, those aren't the metrics that coincide with me having a good time with them. As a shareholder, though, they are pretty great.
I found myself saying recently that I can no longer respect people who hesitate to vote for a group of people who have done a bad job fixing something and instead vote for the people who broke it.
I have found, over a lot of sad experiences, when people's assumptions become their ideology, those assumptions then become their experiences. Largely, there is no arguing with them and stridency is called for to point out to others the error of their ways. Your call is for respectful discourse and argumentation. That call is seemingly reasonable on its face but is easily weaponized to protect bad faith arguments. It shifts responsibility to prove a negative instead of someone proving the claim. If you reread the post I reacted to, critically, it is a truly nonsense set of talking points masquerading as an argument. I hold no ill will to the poster - its just regurgitation that is presumed to have meaning. "create more options" "figure out who is overpaid" that have no connection to each other besides the underlying ideology that government bad industry good. That isn't an argument - it's an ideology. And you can't argue with ideologies because they aren't argument based.
If we are speaking of argumentation, then evaluating the * basic coherence * and credibility of a claim made is perfectly reasonable. But it isn't my job to argue people out of a position they didn't argue themselves into. That is not a good use of my time, and defending those people isn't a good use of yours. What has value is laying bare, for others who might be misled, just how hollow that non argument is.
Your points about the TSA and DMV are ones I to an extent understand, because they match my own experiences. But if one steps back and looks at evidence they tend to fall apart - because its an ideology not an argument. What matters isn't is the DMV good or bad, its would industry run it better. I have experienced two states with privatized DMVs. Those were categorically the two worst DMV experiences I have had - because they had no staff on hand, no ability to do anything, and they charged me more for the service. I would argue the TSA has worked exactly as intended - create the appearance of doing something and line the pockets of (shocker) industry by buying useless equipment. It is regulatory capture, it is the purest vision of what industry will do if given the opportunity to influence government services - as little as possible for as much money as possible.
The discussion of which is better is a red herring, as you correctly noted. But its one that exists and is viewed as an assumptive way of making things better (industry! run the government like a business!) that is accepted with farcically lacking evidence. Maybe the side suggesting that privatization is better should spend their time teaching government the lessons of industry rather than wasting our time trying to steal from the public.
TL:DR - make an argument, talking points aren't an argument and should not be treated as one just for the sake of making discourse feel nice.
Let's be clear - we are talking about organisational structure not about funding.
A lot of SpaceX's income comes from the US government. The money that they have used to develop Falcon was a result of NASA contracts, they get paid by NASA to deliver people to the ISS, they're getting paid by the DoD etc. I think it's a good thing that public money is paying for exploration, it just turns out the legacy players in the industry were incapable of innovation and a blank slate was needed.
But same with the internet: The government funded the raw science, with military objectives in mind, and then it became commercially viable for private industry to make money from.
Arguably, you could then make the claim that the private industry ruined it for everyone. I hope this doesn't become true of space.
I strongly disagree. A rocket engine is so complex, I think nation state level investment in a war economy moved it forward at least half a century, if not more.
It took them seven years just to create the first turbo-pump!
Without Nazi-Germany bankrolling von Braun and his Space Nazis, USA and Soviet Union would not have had the seed to start their ICBM programs.
Which then fed everything else. Without Apollo program, you would not have had the huge airforce talent to figure out how to operate in space.
Space has nothing trivial in it. Each step has required carefull engineering.
I kind of agree that with modern computing we probably could make a few leaps, but difficult engineering up to this day has required century or more of groundwork.
For example Nokia did not become the fallen giant due to some VC investment in the 80's but because they had long tradition of radio engineering going back to 20's. And so on.
SpaceX is now so succesful, because they have a century of aeronautics training, research and culture - bankrolled to a large extent by US taxpayers (for which we in other countries should be grateful for facilitating the future of space faring humanity) to lean on. It's still a huge achievement but without the century of defense spending it would not be even remotely possible.
I would say that the tech is only now mature enough to facilitate the public ventures.
But that's just me, you might be correct as well :)
Numerical simulation methods, especially for hypersonic flow, powder-bed fusion, CAD etc. - those were invented by other people and for the most part all of the numerical methods involved come from DoD work, where they were first developed and verified. FEA? DoD. Finite-Differences? DoD. All kinds of clever methods for mechanical/thermal/optical simulation? DoD.
It's almost sad how much of modern engineering depends on that basis.
Edit: If you look at old papers for numerical methods, especially in wave optics, most of the time you see a fighter or a bomber in the results - gotta estimate that radar cross-section for when the cold war gets hot.
No commercial effort would have expended those billions knowing it would take decades to maybe see any payoff. The interests of companies are overwhelmingly simply to increase next quarter's profits and return value to shareholders.
Similarly, Columbus's initial explorations were state sponsored "light money on fire in the hope we get useful knowledge out of it" (like a path to the indies that cuts out the middle man) endeavors. The initial conquest of SA by the Spanish for low hanging fruit type resource extraction (stealing gold) in the 1500s is roughly analogous to "BigCo" commercial viability (draw your comparisons with the very expensive telecommunications satellites of the 80s) and by the 1630s even marginalized religious extremists could afford to settle on the other side of the ocean. Space is in that same process of moving down the economic ladder of viability.
I've thought the same about railroads and the USA. The federal government largely subsidized the rapid expansion into the west with railroads that meant that expansion was haphazard and unsustainable. The poor way railroads developed has left impacts on how society works today.
If they'd expanded more slowly, we'd have had a more adapted and sustainable infrastructure today. Maybe we'd even have high speed rail everywhere.
The problem is that there's no obvious return on investment for space exploration once you get out of Earth orbit, since you need to overcome a vast number of complex scientific and engineering challenges, costing at least tens of billions of dollars, before you can even start to pursue speculative enterprises. Even if we stipulate there being opportunities in zero-g manufacturing or mining, the companies positioned to extract value from those markets are not companies that have any kind of aerospace core competency, so you have an innovation deadlock due to information asymmetries and ambiguous cost/value estimates. No board is going to sign off on tens of billions of dollars of investments with a high probability of failure, poorly-forecastable costs, and no defined market value on the other side of the equation; instead, the highest-value play is to let someone else own the cost and risks and, if they prove feasibility, to only then aggressively apply capital -- essentially, free-ride on the first-mover. In a scenario like this, it's likely that the technology never gets created until the government steps in with funding to break the deadlock.
Suppose that never happened. Suppose we had ICBMs and satellites but never felt the need to go to the moon or even develop human spaceflight. If we were to spin up a new space program today, we would be missing decades of human spaceflight knowledge, BUT we would have the advantage of modern robotics, aerodynamic modeling software, 3d printing, and everything else.
For that matter, we might have been able to go to Mars in the 80s if we were willing to "brute force" the problem (see von Braun's books). But maybe the smart move is/was to invest in other areas instead and wait for the progression of technology to make such endeavors more affordable, and by extension, sustainable instead of being a one-off novelty project like Apollo.
On the other hand, history doesn't exist in a vacuum. As expensive as they were, I think Apollo and the Shuttle got multiple generations interested in space; not just science fiction but the pairing of imagination with reality, so it's impossible to predict where the public (or even billionaire-class) excitement about space would have be without them.
So far Starship has flown to 12.5 km [1], which seems to be a stretch to describe as "the edge of space" [2].
It seems like the FAA Environmental Assessment for the "SpacePort" at Boca Chica has been delayed again from Feb 28th, by a month to March 28th [3]. If they recommend a full Environmental review that will delay progress even further. I believe Elon mentioned in the recent Starship update that they will move Starship testing to Cape Canaveral which already has permissions to launch Starship there if this is required [4] [5], but that will require building out an orbital pad for Starship.
It will certainly be interesting to see how long it takes Starship to get to orbit. I would guess that the raptor 2 performance/reliability and also the heatshield performance will be significant challenges to overcome. When/if SpaceX do overcome them, the incumbents will be justified in "shitting the bed", as per the article.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_SpaceX_Starship_flight...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%A1rm%C3%A1n_line#Interpre...
[3] https://www.faa.gov/space/stakeholder_engagement/spacex_star...
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3N7L8Xhkzqo (SpaceX Starship update)
[5] https://futurism.com/the-byte/spacex-starship-orbital-cape-c...
“At this point, I am highly confident we will get to orbit this year,”
is a special thing that Musk says when development is taking longer than expected. Historically, everything that Musk is highly confident about either never happens or happens years later than promised.
Don't hold your breath.
Don't confuse big, hairy, audacious goals, https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/big-hairy-audacious-goa..., that push a group to push further than would have with "realistic" goals with bullshit.
2015: "We’re going to end up with complete autonomy, and I think we will have complete autonomy in approximately two years."
2016: "I really consider autonomous driving a solved problem, I think we are less than two years away from complete autonomy, safer than humans, but regulations should take at least another year."
2018: "I think probably by end of next year (2019) self-driving will encompass essentially all modes of driving and be at least 100% to 200% safer than a person."
2019: "We need to be at 99.9999..% We need to be extremely reliable. When do we think it is safe for FSD, probably towards the end of this year then its up to the regulators when they will decide to approve that."
2019: "I feel very confident predicting autonomous robotaxis for Tesla next year."
2020: "I am extremely confident of achieving full autonomy and releasing it to the Tesla customer base next year. But I think at least some jurisdictions are going to allow full self-driving next year."
It also seems likely that SpaceX will have to fundraise at least once at their current burn before Starship gets to orbit, so that could be a down round.
[1] https://spaceexplored.com/2021/11/29/spacex-raptor-crisis/
I’m looking through the list of the heads of nasa, and they’re all trained scientists or engineers up until 1981 when Reagan appointed a business management executive to the position. If I could pinpoint anything as the inflection point, that’s probably it. After that it’s a mixture, but you get a lot of military generals and other members of the national security apparatus together with various business CEOs, and some mechanical engineers, and a couple rocket scientists too. But why did none of them try what spacex is doing? People from lower down in the organization were presumably shouting at them that they were wasting money. Everyone in an organization knows when the leadership is useless. It just baffles the mind. A fish rots from the head.
I don't think this is a NASA problem, it's really a problem across the US Federal government. You see it on the military side of government-funded technology programs as well. (If you want to see a really terrible example, look at the ongoing failure to produce a replacement for the M109 howitzer.)
My personal theory is that it's mainly driven by funding mechanisms, especially those covered by FAR.
It's not, as some people allege, that the government is particularly bad at things; the government is roughly as competent as any large corporation when it comes down to task execution. I've consulted both to private sector corps and the government, and the fundamental challenges are largely the same. Yes, government compensation structures (heavy on pensions) do tend to attract people in different phases of their careers and lives than, say, equity-heavy packages at a startup. But there's not much evidence linking this to performance.
Rather, the difference is that the US government has an institutional attention-deficit disorder. What gets funded one year might get cancelled the next. No plan can possibly be accurate beyond the end of the current budget cycle, no priority fixed beyond the next election. Everyone is going for "quick wins", because they want to be able to justify the continuation of the project. This is not conducive to risk-taking, at all. Quite the opposite. What government PMs want are projects that can set a ~24 month goal, and then show monotonic progress towards that goal every month, like clockwork.
Projects that can't show those kind of clean metrics are often managed to death, if they are even started at all.
Private-sector organizations, particularly those run by single individuals without regard for short-term profitability, can take on risks that the government won't—basically can't—deal with. Elon Musk made some pretty big technical bets that paid off... but the government isn't allowed to play at that table with tax money.
I generally agree with the overall gist that large organizations are basically incapable of achieving excellent results.
However, having worked as an employee for both large corps and government, I see two or three attributes that cut against government being effective.
1. Private industry is mission oriented whereas government is process-oriented. Government bureaucracies value adherence to process above all, regardless of what they create or impede. It's all process all the way down. Even when large, ossified firms make process a centerpiece of management, they still ultimately are attempting to pursue a mission.
2. The government's culture is homogenous and based on a mythos about "serving something bigger than yourself," whereas each firm in industry tends to have some more concrete aspirational statement.
3. Government always has many more people on the critical path who can seriously impede work, because they're hard to get rid of or move out of the way, whereas private companies would have no problem firing such people.
On the whole, I think even the largest monopoly firms would tend to be at least a few degrees more efficient than government just for missional focus and the ability to remove bad performers. If a competitive firm were to be as (in)efficient as government, it would die.
However, communication, internal politics and management are major challenges for any organization at scale. It really is a difference of degrees, not orders of magnitude.
NASA shackeled itself to Shuttle, a expensive failure of a project and from them on the basically didn't develop anything new for 3 decades.
The millitary if anything is where such thinking should have been happening. The went threw many iterations of rockets.
A few reasons why they never managed to go reusable. Reliance on solid boosters, once you have them reusability is not really practical.
The millitary also simply doesnt care much about cost. What they care about is reliability above all else.
And you would be suprised how much engineers buy into constraints. The reality is that after a while the status quo of the industry you work on is simply an assumed constraint. Nobody asked engineers the question 'how do you get 100 tons to orbit per week' or whatever.
As Musk puts it, the most difficult part is asking the right question. Nothing is as harmful as smart engineers spending lots of money and time answering the wrong question.
Maybe that's the real takeaway here: the people at the top of society by definition benefited from things being as they are, therefore those people are the least likely to want innovations that might cause real change. Therefore to the extend that society is unequal, it is also unable to innovate. I wonder if you could put that hypothesis to the test with data.
There’s no scenario where NASA or a NASA administrator could do what SpaceX is doing, well or poorly. That’s not their role.
That said. Charles Bolden pushed back on congress with regards to SLS as much as was practical. (I imagine other administrators did too, in their way) Congress wanted a jobs program and is getting a jobs program, and in that situation the NASA administrator can just say “this is not what we need” and be polite when congress ignores his recommendations. It’s more complicated than that, but not by much…
It's not a setting where you can get a million or two and see if it works out. Trying this requires pouring lots and lots of cash into it, it can all go up in flames, and even if it works you're then competing for a small market. If you just want to make money there are probably much easier and less risky ways if you have that kind of budget. You need the rare combination of somebody who is really into space tech and can get the funding for it.
And even if the thing flies, it's easier said than done. NASA tried to make the shuttle quickly and cheaply reusable. It didn't quite go to plan.
And even after Musk proved it can be done... not much happened elsewhere. Whoever else also wants to do it either needs to have some reasonable expectation they can compete with SpaceX, or needs to have basically unlimited money to spend on a passion project like Blue Origin.
If you are doing a limited number of missions, it doesnt particularly make sense to go reusable, because you're going to have a hell of a time getting suppliers. If you are going to do 6 launches a year, and you can do that with 2 rockets, then you might think to build 4 rockets total. If youre developing your own engines, you now have to spend all that money to build maybe 4-16 total engines, depending on the design, which means your per engine cost is going to be massive. Same with core stages and everything else. You end up paying massive costs per component, and now you have to figure out what to do with those production lines you just started. Do you keep working on making more engines? Do you shut down the line because you've made enough for your 4 rockets?
That, combined with a lot of reliance on solid rocket boosters, which are less important to make reusable, makes the idea sketchy. If we needed to put tons of stuff into LEO 30 years ago, the projects probably wouldve been attempted before. We just didnt really have the launch cadence to support it
Add in constant program stretching due to a limited budget, I don't doubt NASA will look bad by comparison.
I've always said that the US Govt pays $10 for $1 worth of work.
https://media.defense.gov/2019/May/01/2002126691/-1/-1/0/SWA...
> The current approach to software development is a leading source of risk to DoD: it takes too long, is too expensive, and exposes warfighters to unacceptable risk.
> Nothing is changing: most of this has been said before and the 1987 DSB report on military software pretty much says it all. What is it going to take to actually do something?
Lockmart and Boeing are fortunate that SpaceX has no desire to get into the defense game beyond launching satellites for the Space Force. They wouldn't be as fast as their past work, half the friction in the defense world is imposed by the customer. But they would be faster than the incumbents.
Falcon Heavy is just Falcon 9s in a new configuration.
Now that Starship's shell is assembled, it looks 90% done. Which means there's only 90% hidden work left to do.
The devil's always in the details. (BTW I'm a fan of all these rockets—ad astra per redundantiam.)
In The Expanse it was rocks from the belt coated in "stolen" Mars stealth material.
Luna's a UN colony, practically on Earth's doorstep, not a beligerent.
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is the reference.
but yeah, something something, shoulders of giants.
oh
the contractors haven't even got off the ground once?
huh
I'm guessing these companies enumerated in the last sentence are the "competitors" referenced in the article's actual title? How concerned would/should those companies be? Aren't those same suppliers constantly flush with regular defense contracts from the government? I don't know enough about them to know what percentage of their business is NASA vs regular defense/military contracting.
Efficiency means not doing unnecessary things, not employing unnecessary people. They may have been doing something useful, or just something that someone thought was important.
The important point is the question of what exactly you are being efficient at doing. As you drive towards a particular Pareto optimization, economic forces have changed what you need to optimize for, perhaps driven by your own optimization. The limiting factors have changed.
If the moat of required competencies and capital allocation is large enough, you can hide a lot of inefficiencies (aka your boss's friends) for quite a long time.
---
Edit: people can comment about crony capitalism etc if they like, my comment is not meant to be comprehensive, merely observational.
I'd also add that government tends to magnify these distortions since it gates access to a lot of demand behind a bidding process that's heavily politicized and reliant on lobbying. So the market as thought of in economics doesn't really exist anymore.
The market can impose some discipline, but it's up to the humans in the driver seat.
But different; the US is the best funded / most expensive military in the world by a big margin, and the defense contractors know it and develop weapons and price them accordingly. It's why they use fancy weapon systems instead of tried, tested and cheap Kalashnikovs.
SpaceX is the Kalashnikov of rockets, if you think about it.
Another context for SpaceX is the Moonshot - the big transformational project. In a Moonshot, everyone has to do more work than their job requires. This is called glue work and normally you should limit what glue work you do because you may not be rewarded for it. People working at SpaceX seem to believe in the mission and that is a reward in itself, which leads people to be motivated to bridge all those little gaps that form between job roles.
I'd love to hear what other contexts people use to think about this.
If the CEO is patting the head of development on the back for results he got by stonewalling sales, and the head of sales for stonewalling development, that's the source of the problem even if the company sells used carpets.
That unfair favoritism of established companies over Tesla is more likely than not what's motivated him raising his voice.
But also, not everyone in the government is this petty or stupid. The military in particular is keenly away of the potential strategic advantage Starship opens up to them that no other organization is anywhere close to being able to offer. And it would be absurdly dumb for this government to hamstring SpaceX over petty political grievances and risk giving China time to close the gap.
Didn't realize you could brag about things that haven't happened
I wonder if Tesla owners will ever get a refund for the self-driving feature they bought and will never work.
SpaceX might be able to get to $1M marginal cost for a launch, but you can bet they will never sell launches for that.
So, if they mark it up by an order of magnitude for external customers, you're predicting that a Starship launch might be cheaper than a Falcon 9 launch is, today, with a capacity of a dozen times the Falcon 9?
Cheaper per pound is fine, but teasing with prices 10x less than you will actually charge is no more honest than charging for a self-driving feature that kills people who rely on it.
Bragging about something in the future is as old as the time. Or are we talking about different meaning?
He didn't say 'We are awesome its so cheap'. He was asked to project and explain what they were working towards and did so.
> Boeing’s Starliner... continues to be delayed.
Man, is 'old space' good for anything? Over breakfast this morning I read the article below about problems from consolidation in defense. After a certain point, aren't these companies supposed to make money building things? Isn't there some will to succeed in the management above the engineers? How much longer will government bureaucrats allow the farce to continue?
https://www.ft.com/content/c408c7bd-466a-496b-9889-9f83cc85e...
As such these companies setup manufacturing to be in an optimal set of districts to ensure their success even if it’s inefficient that’s just more pork.
Commercial companies like SpaceX on the other hand, who are spending their own money (i.e. no strings attached) have much more of a free hand on things like technology choice, architecture and procurement.
The thing is built and then shopped to NASA as a possible launch platform.
There'll be quite a few specifics on the HLS award variant (which, hilariously, still manages to shoehorn an Orion capsule into the plan, at least for now). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_HLS
Why is this hilarious? It makes perfect sense for the mission to me. The HLS probably isnt going to return to Earth, and even if it did have that capability, it seems extremely unlikely that we will have humans on a propulsively landed Starship by the end of the decade. Id be much more concerned if Orion wasnt part of the plan
It's the big prestige NASA capsule and it's like a toy besides a Starship.
SpaceX is saving plenty of taxpayer money. They have significant contracts from NASA, which they won by offering reliable launch services for a lower price than their competitors.
There, fix that for you.
> Commercial companies like SpaceX on the other hand, who are spending their own money
That's not an accurate description, regardless of whether SpaceX is saving NASA (and the rest of us) money.
Development is hard, and many projects fail. If that area SpaceX also seems to do better than the competition. This is probably because SpaceX basically takes "development project money" to do things they would like to do anyway, and would do on their own given unlimited funds. They do ignore projects that are not in line with their longer term goals.
Public dollars bootstrapped the rocket program SpaceX was able to bootstrap itself from.
The whole ownership thing is a semantic slight of hand. One planet, one environment; we’re all paying the bill in real terms. If we’d been told all our lives it was prudent for government to do these things rather private profiteers, that’s how it would be.
Thank you for politicizing it correctly for us, though. We’d all be lost without you.
> Commercial companies like SpaceX on the other hand, who are spending their own money
If there's a lie here (and I'm not saying it is a lie), that would be it. SpaceX being cheaper (and maybe better) than the alternatives doesn't change the fact that they are not "spending their own money" exclusively (or even majority).
To be more fair, SpaceX is mostly spending VC money, while SLS is spending taxpayer money. They are gambling that they can make a better product for the customer without working under contract with the customer and being payed for their development..
SLS has a government contract that pays up front for development, and will work hand in hand with the customer throughout development.
Not at the time of the grants.
You know you spend my money, right? I mean, I paid taxes, which government used to buy products from the company which pays your salary. So behave please.
:)
Making money not building things has a higher ROI.
@hn Maybe a mod can correct my op link with this one? I can no longer edit it.
Edit: however, it's not the original source, so we've switched to that from https://futurism.com/nasa-horrified-spacex. Note this guideline:
"Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter."