SpaceX Prepares For April 30 Launch To Space Station | Hacker News Reader

SpaceX Prepares For April 30 Launch To Space Station

wired.com

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As a former engineer on the Atlas V launch vehicle program, I'm so excited to see the commercialization of spaceflight come to fruition. The latest projections I've seen have the Dragon and Falcon 9 coming in at 20% of the price of an equivalent Atlas V / Delta IV (EELV) launch. Comparative Non-Recurring Engineering (NRE) costs are even lower than that. (I'd love if any SpaceX employees can comment further on any of this with more detail.)

As I've seen firsthand, the waste in typical defense contractor programs is obscene – it's so great to see someone doing something about it. Hopefully with much lower cost to orbit, we'll see a revitalization of the commercial launch market as well.

It's also worth mentioning that SpaceX is possibly even significantly cheaper than their commercial competitors. If you look up the other company mentioned in the article, Orbital Science Corporation it says they have a contract with NASA for 8 launches for 1.9 Billion to do the same thing. SpaceX has a contract for 1.6 Billion for 12 launches. That's 50% more flights for 15% less cost.

Do you have the Mass to LEO numbers for each of those?

I don't know what that means, but Wikipedia says that Space Science Corporation's vehicle can cary a "2,000kg / 2700kg" "delivered payload" and SpaceX's Dragon a 6,000kg "launch payload" so they win there too by more than double.

Wikipedia has 9900kg to LEO for the Falcon 9 block 1 and 10450kg to LEO for Falcon 9 block 2 (both from Canaveral).

To GTO those numbers are 2400kg and 4680kg.

The "Launch Payload" of the Dragon spacecraft (6000kg) appears to be approximately the Mass to LEO of the block 2 (10450kg) minus the mass of an empty Dragon spacecraft (4200kg).

Been waiting for this. I did some embedded C programming for the docking of the Dragon to the ISS two years ago as an intern. I wish them the best of luck. Check out for updates on this: http://www.spacex.com/updates.php

They let interns program the docking to the ISS? Or is this supposed to be a joke?

If he does not get back to you - check out 'amirmansour' profile->comments - the answer seems to be yes.

Why wouldn't they? Seriously. When you get down to the nuts and bolts of it, it's really rather boring, uninteresting, low-level stuff. At the same time, it's major cool points on their resume that kids in their senior year of college crave. Why shouldn't an intern do that?

About 25 years ago I had a co-op job with a defense contractor, working on a radar system for military aircraft. Part of the obstacle to having interns or people like me do "real" work is the security bureaucracy. It's just not worth the expense of going through the security checks for somebody who won't be working there very long.

I remember working on a simulation of one aspect of the system. I wasn't allowed to know the real operational parameters of the system, which makes testing difficult. So when testing my code I could only guess, plugging in numbers that seemed reasonable to me. Then I'd give my code to my team lead, saying "I think it works now. Want to try it?".

One thing about SpaceX is that there is no bureaucracy. If Elon Musk wasn't busy talking to someone, I could have just walked into his office and chatted with him.

Nothing in either the SpaceX or ISS projects is classified. Export-controlled, yes, but nothing that requires a security clearance.

With proper testing, why not?

A surprising amount of essential technical work in the space industry is done by the most junior employees. They're eager, smart, and not constantly trying to cover their ass/lay blame/take credit/file endless paperwork/attend useless meetings/maneuver office politics.

That said, of course there are even more important key senior staff that the whole enterprise rests on...

I had a friend in college who did programming for the "black box" on a military aircraft as an intern.

That wasn't as cool as my other friend who programmed the school's online class signup system...

Interns at SpaceX have a REAL impact since the day they walk in. I've have never come across a project where someone said "that's not an intern task." Also don't forget that all parts of the system all heavily tested at SpaceX (this is the aerospace industry). It's all tested and developed alongside individuals with experience and talent.

Spectator here: I too am so excited about the upcoming launch I have been hanging out for it and wish them the best of luck too (even though luck has nothing to do with it and plain good engineering does).

I read the SpaceX pages, reports and updates with the same excitement I had when I read about the Saturn V, the Apollo craft the Lunar Lander, the Shuttle, and the engineering and esp. the control computers behind and embedded in all those craft.

To be involved with SpaceX, designing systems and writing and testing the software and the hardware systems they control must be very exciting right now. That would be something!

What kinds of procedures, tools etc do they use to get code sufficiently perfect for deployment in space vehicles?

I do not about every aspect of that, because my work was heavily in R&D. From what I am legally allowed to say, SpaceX essentially runs the whole rocket on linux with all the code in C++ (you can also figure this out since SpaceX advertises to C++ programmers on Stackoverflow). Every programmer has their own preference and can use whatever tool they like. However, from glancing at monitors of the top-dog programmers I can tell you that they either use Vim or emacs. During my time there, the company seemed to be using SVN for version control. That's all I know with regards to tools. For getting it all tested, they ran a LOT of simulations. Aerospace industry defines the word "testing."

The final polished product of my work was reviewed and tested by higher level engineers. In R&D, you just get it to work as best as possible, and move on to the 100 other tasks lined up. If you want to see a truly fast pace working environment, work at SpaceX.

That surprises me - when I am talking about tools, I mean things like static analysis, theorem provers, and coding standards like MISRA C.

I guess they figure if they simulate it enough, they can test out the bugs rather than being very careful about putting them in.

SpaceX has a $1.6 billion contract for 12 cargo flights to the ISS.

And I thought shipping in the UK was expensive...

It would be, if standard procedure involved blowing up the delivery truck in your driveway.

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