Boeing Starliner launches first crewed mission
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
Huh? My understanding was that something unique about the falcon is the capability of multiple reuses, in contrast to previous missions that were one and done uses. What past experience in the history of spaceflight might someone be referring to where seven reuses registers as a disappointment?
Exactly.
Just to elaborate for your parent, the Atlas V which currently flies Starliner uses an RD-180 engine that's manufactured in Russia. ULA is no longer able to procure any more such engines, and a rocket with those engines are no longer legally allowed to fly DoD payloads. Which prompted ULA to retire Atlas V in favor of Vulcan.
I think someone from ULA or Boeing (I forget which) recently said that they've begun the process of certifying Starliner on Vulcan, although I'll have to go back and make sure I remember exactly what was said.
That means about 10 years of R&D since they got the initial contracts and then about half a decade of production for the flight articles and then a wind-down of a couple years and a skeleton crew to make the last few flights.
A 15-20 year project that sends dozens of people to space for the last years of the ISS's lifetime is not going to be a disappointment for 95% of the people who worked on this.
Haha, I'm guessing you don't work in the space industry. Frankly if something you work on gets to space at all you count yourself fortunate. My first job was at a defense contractor working on a big rocket. A senior engineer on our team had a picture of the Indiana Jones warehouse on the wall in his office, rows and rows of boxes. I asked him why, he said it's a reminder to not get too stressed about work - 9 out of 10 projects will never fly.
Things are changing especially in the new space corners of the industry, but for big projects requiring political will I think it's still the same.
Out of curiosity, were you working on one of the Ares rockets?
That is unless you work on a ballistic missile
Getting to space SEVEN times off one poweplant/project is nothing short of incredible.
Sure, if you ignore the 20+ year old Atlas V that actually launched it...
> Starliner has been given a go to hold at 260 meters from the space station. During the approach two reaction control system jets have failed off. A manual flight test has been put on hold while flight controllers look to restore those jets with a hot fire.
[1]: https://x.com/SpaceflightNow/status/1798738262368104639
keeping my fingers crossed that everything works out. must be very tense for the astronauts.
update : issues mitigated, starliner has docked with the ISS. yes!
Not reentering with this capsule would be a catastrophic failure. They are, unless something actually serious happens, certainly reentering on this capsule.
I anticipate catastrophic failure. Dunno where you think they’re going to get more helium from.
"Currently the helium leak is not a safety issue for the crew, the vehicle or the mission.”
(Unlike Boeing quality control, apparently.)
Falcon 9 + Dragon, SLS + Orion, Atlas V (Vulcan Centaur) + Starliner
Close to orbital payload launch, likely human rated in the future: Vulcan Centaur + Dream Chaser, Superheavy + Starship
Under development: New Glenn + Space Vehicle (?), Neutron
Yes and no.
It's probably more accurate to say "human ratable". They're planning on designing the rocket with human rating in mind, so that if they want to do it in the future, it'll be easier.
But NASA doesn't human rate a rocket - they human rate the entire system as a whole, so it doesn't really make sense to say "human rate Neutron".
IMO, this one is the least likely.
There are a lot of problems that need to be over come for Dream Chaser to be crew rated. And AFAIK, they aren't getting NASA money to do it.
Intriguing. Can you elaborate?
Starliner has a launch abort system; the Shuttle did not.
From what I understand, they use a very powerful rocket (much more powerful than Crew Dragon) to get the capsule far away from the booster. I guess it can get far enough away that NASA is satisfied that falling bits of burning SRB aren't a danger to the parachutes.
For those who might not know SRB = solid rocket booster. Boeing uses them, SpaceX doesn't. An SRB is basically like a giant firecracker. You light it and it starts burning and doesn't stop until its done. It poses substantial safety concerns in the case of an accident where you need to abort the flight. But they're cheap, extremely powerful, and relatively simple contrasted against liquid fuel engines.
> It poses substantial safety concerns in the case of an accident where you need to abort the flight
SRBs are in general very safe, which is why they're still used for human rated rockets.
I would also observe that NASA has a relatively poor safety record contrasted against the Soyuz (which has not lost crew since 1971 in spite of flying more manned missions), and one of the few completely catastrophic crashes we have had, Challenger, was directly related to the SRB. In either case, I expect variance is playing a much larger role than most might appreciate.
Interestingly, both Crew Dragon and Starliner have eschewed SRB based LES/LAS systems for liquid fueled hypergolic ones. You can tell this because neither capsule has a "puller" on the nose like Apollo/Orion does.
I thought I read about that. Of course that's effectively no actual escape system lol. They'd be long dead by the time they managed all that in an out of control shuttle.
I guess it depends on what you mean by that. Astronauts were trained on the system and it was aboard the shuttle.
Did the astronauts believe that it's likely that the system would save them? Probably not.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/escape-spe...
Yeah personally I would have taken my chances ditching the craft, tbh. It would probably ditch pretty well considering it doesn't have huge engine pods under the wings.
Harebrained is right.
How far did this plan go? Just because it was discussed and documented and thought through does not mean it was something that was actually going to happen. Was this actually developed and the parts&pieces put into place with procedures written up in the flight manual?
Yes.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/escape-spe...
Dream Chaser flies in a fairing for aerodynamic reasons. In order to fly crew (so that the vehicle could have a working launch abort system), they'd need to figure out how to fly without a fairing.
I'm not a rocket scientist, so I don't really know the answer. But I have some questions:
* How reliable will the "blow the fairing" system be? If it's only used in emergencies (instead of the regular fairing separation mechanism) than it'll suffer from the same problem as emergency generators - they're rarely tested and fail very often when needed.
* How easy is it to get the fairing out of the way once it's opened? Normally, regular aerodynamic forces slough the fairing halves off, but an LES/LAS doesn't have time for that - it's escaping a potentially exploding rocket. And those fairings will act like sails - huge surface area:volume ratio means they're just not going to move fast.
* What happens if DreamChaser hits one of the fairings on the wing? Would it damage it enough that it'd have trouble landing? Is it enough to cause it to foul the escape trajectory? Or even put it in a spin?
It seems like a lot of work to get it to work with or without a fairing.
You don't want the LES to activate, seem to be working correctly, and then blast the crew into a fairing panel that did not fully separate. The crew doesn't have time to roll down the window and kick it loose.
A bit complicated but was already used in emergency and worked.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_abort_modes#Jettisonable...
Could be spin from Sierra but that's what they were saying to the press as of 2015 when they announced the cargo variant.
https://spacenews.com/sierra-nevada-hopes-dream-chaser-finds...
Seems like Starship fins and Falcon 9 grid fins did that trick as well.
That's a fair point, although my understanding is that parachute systems for small planes are becoming more common.
My view is that flight rate is the fundamental issue at hand. Airplanes and helicoptors fly many orders of magnitude more than these capsules, which means we know they are many orders of magnitude more reliable.
They've also generally been through a long process of refinement - the original airplanes were extremely dangerous compared to modern variants.
Additionally, aircraft can afford to have a lot higher margin of safety baked in to them. Because of how high gravity is on Earth and the nature of the Rocket Equation[1], it's just not possible to have a lot of margin in rockets of capsules. They need to be extremely svelt to launch at all.
And lastly, we have experience with human spacecraft without an LES/LAS - it was the Space Shuttle. And it killed 14 people - easily the most dangerous spacecraft ever created. No one has any desire to build on that particular legacy.
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1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsiolkovsky_rocket_equation
No, it means we have orders of magnitude more reliability data. Same result, different point.
Those other systems have other redundancies and safety mechanisms.
2) Both planes and helicopters have an ability to glide (or autogyro) to a relatively safe landing in the event of most failures. A spacecraft can also do that with wings or parachutes, but only if it gets far away from its exploding booster fast enough to survive.
3) Many military planes do have the ability to safely eject passengers.
4) astronauts dying live on stream is a really bad look.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/freak...
Here's an attempt to develop a jet fuel that wouldn't burn:
Airplanes need some kind of runway, by contrast, and this isn't usually available within the glide distance. So they can "land", but it frequently won't be a pretty landing.
The main dangers with helicopter engine failures are 1) it happens too close to the ground, so there's no time to react and enter a safe autorotation, and 2) the pilot is too slow to react (low-inertia rotor systems are more dangerous this way, so helicopters like Robinsons are worse).
Unlike the Shuttle there will be a lot more uncrewed testing of Starship, so hopefully it will be more reliable.
Thanks, this is helpful to know. What do you know about the dream chaser problems?
We had a launch system that could take humans to the moon in 1972.. haven't had one since. Maybe we will get another one in our lifetime, if it is even possible.
The lowest the RTT gets is six minutes but that is a brief period every couple of years. The longest RTT is 45 minutes.
Even 6 minutes makes any kind of tele-operation infeasible and require system to function autonomously. This restricts the kinds of science that are currently possible.
I wouldn't go that far, but we already had humans on the moon so we can get away with robots doing the science now. I still think sending astronauts to mars would speed up research, for example.
But as long as some subset of humanity believes in this humanity will keep investing in it. Not everyone has to be aligned and we can have many priorities at once, not the least of which is robotic science which I only see as mutually exclusive as long as there’s not plentiful private investment, which there is at the moment. I don’t see robotic exploration as suffering in the build out of extremely low cost launch capability and a general space infrastructure including moon infrastructure. I see it benefiting enormously as the costs and risks drop significantly.
Edit: falcon 9, not starship
I get Starship 34,000,000 kg + 12,000,000 kg vs 747 ~200,000 liters ≅ 150,000 kg, or about 1/300 th of what Starship holds.
Rockets can also be carbon negative in another way. A rocket that uses less than 50% of its fuel getting to orbit would be carbon negative, because it's spending less than 'x/2' fuel to go burn at least 'x/2' fuel away from Earth. Factor in some of the fuel coming from carbon neutral sources, and it quickly becomes quite easy for a rocket to be carbon negative.
Humans definitely can't leave. Humans are even less well suited to interstellar travel than they are to living at the bottom of the ocean, something they also don't do and have no idea how they could ever do.
So, with tremendous effort humans could visit one of their neighbouring planets. All of these planets are terrible. Mars is by far more hostile to life than anywhere humans have even visited, let alone had a permanent settlement. But we could do it. To what end?
Live here, or die here, those are your options and you should get used to it.
To have the species survive if anything ends all life on Earth - apparently not a priority for you but it is for those that enjoy humanity existing.
Also to explore and learn more about the universe we live in. Do you truly not see value in that? Have you never left the city/state/country you were born in?
Nothing the universe has thrown at Earth in the past 3 billion years has been capable of ending all life. And nothing that could happen in the next million years seems possible of doing that either.
It's difficult, but I don't think it is _that_ difficult. Ecologies, like any living systems, can self-heal and regenerate. There are practices that allows us to tap into that regenerative power as societies. They may not happen fast relative to our individual human lifespan, but 50 years is more than enough time to restore wastelands or reverse desertification.
I don't have a good answer to how sustain an economy based upon mining, refining, and manufacturing things out of mineral resources. Many of us have gotten used to modern conveniences (at its own cost related to mental and emotional health, and social cohesiveness). I think what most people balk on are on the perception of having to go back to barely surviving off the land, or having to alter lifestyle. Lifestyle may have to change, but the same regenerative power of ecologies also gives us significantly more resiliency.
Why do anything at all? Who are you to dictate to others what their options are?
I do agree that we should better manage our impact on the only system that we know works.
It's a very unlikely for one, we haven't had an extinction asteroid in 65 million years. Detection and mapping is very good today, and they're relatively simple to deflect given even with current technology, and a long enough lead time. Obsessing about asteroid impact is just an excuse to engage in fantasy.
But saying "We can improve our understanding of ecology by [designing] artificial biosphere", is just the chef's kiss of bullshittery. It's like saying, that we can understand the ocean by getting a fish bowl. Not exactly, and it certainly won't teach us anything about the actual biosphere. Instead, all you'd learn about is atmosphere scrubbers and water reclamation.
and what is this simple method to deflect a large asteroid headed for Earth?
Essentially you have a spacecraft park itself beside an asteroid. It's gravity will minutely change the asteroids trajectory. With enough lead time that's all you need. Since you're not blowing up, or applying a large focused amount of energy to the asteroid it doesn't matter what the targets composition is. You won't break it up.
> This is the lamest of all excuses.
> It's a very unlikely for one, we haven't had an extinction asteroid in 65 million years.
He said "like astroids". Quite frankly we don't know how frequent extinction events happen. We've had nuclear weapons for less than 100 years, and have a couple of close calls[1] already.
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1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alar...
If you want something that uniquely requires leaving the planet for somewhere you have truck in literally everything except rocks, you’re pretty much limited to the sun becoming a red giant. That and gamma ray bursts. That’s pretty much it.
No. We can't detect asteroids coming from the direction of Sun. Just ask people of Chelyabinsk, Russia. [0]
[0] https://www.livescience.com/space/asteroids/the-sun-is-blind...
[I hope an LLM made it polite enough]
Engage in self harm.
I'd say that such an event happening over a populated region of the Earth would be pretty bad. It's worth a bit of investment.
Here's what would happen if Tunguska happened over Paris, using a mid-range estimate of its magnitude: https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=30000&lat=48.8583&ln...
To be kind of blunt, even an extinction-level asteroid hit with near-total biosphere destruction is probably still more conducive to human life than any other planet or satellite in the solar system, as evidenced by the continued existence of at least a few forms of life past the extinction event. And many of the events people worry about are far less destructive than even that (nuclear winter, for example, would probably roll Earth's climate back to pre-industrial temperatures, maybe as far as Little Ice Age, which is, uh, nowhere near extinction-level threat to humanity).
It's also worth pointing out that it's possible to do closed ecological studies without the expense of running it in space (e.g., Biosphere 2). The only thing you need space for studying in that regard is "what is the effect of non-1g environments on biological forms?" (to which existing studies suggest the answer is somewhere between "bad" and "horrible").
That would be easier if we could move polluting industries off Earth.
As far as cleaning up pollutants themselves, there are some amazing work by Dr John Todd for cleaning up pollution. Two examples of his work — a system capable of breaking down DDT within 40 days. Another where he cleaned up a superfund site that had all ten of EPA’s top toxic pollutant list.
I think opening up a new frontier however, is valuable - in fact specifically, the transition which would be good would be to move heavy industry out of the biosphere entirely. You can imagine a nearer future where a place like Earth is treated as the paradise it is, and the idea of polluting it when we have all the rest of the uninhabitable space of the solar system to do that in is thought of as ludicrous.
And this isn't really unreasonable - beyond a certain point, the resource and energy availability of space is far greater then the places we can reach despite the advantages of the biosphere - whether we do it by robots or with manned exploration.
There's a zeitgeist change that I think would accompany having enough people working frequently in space: where its a couple of degrees of separation from someone who's looked at the pale blue dot and gone "you have no idea how valuable this is" (I do think we should have a program which sponsors any world leader who wants to on a trip around the moon: send the people making the big decisions out past the dark side, where the thing bubble of air, steel and alloy is the only thing keeping them alive - might not always work but at least then we can know they've had the opportunity for that perspective).
Cities on the moon and Mars are a reasonable and achievable goal. There are resources which can much more easily be exploited with real people on premise, some people will want to live in different environments, there are opportunities for sport, entertainment, tourism, and plenty of industries which will be much more effective with skilled labor on site instead of meticulously planned missions which often fail and if they don't spend a whole bunch of effort overcomming the basics of operating.
Without fail there's always some negative Nelly who already knows the answer to their downer question.
We get it. You don't care about space shit, most people don't. But why go derail a thread about a space accomplishment with negativity?
Is there much practical reason for that?
If they are so much better, why does anyone get up off their couch and do field research? Just let the robots do it.
Besides, it's human nature to explore, in person. As George Mallory said, "Because it's there."
Not saying that there isn't value to sending humans into space - it's just that that value isn't in gathering data for science, other than on the astronaut-subjects themselves.
The Moon is both very near and very easy to communicate with so it is the perfect first place to learn about building a "colony" before moving on to Mars.
Since its only a 3-4 day trip, with transfer windows every month (and non-optimal ones essentially constantly). resupply missions and rotating astronauts/personnel are going to be much easier. Much less of a gravity well to deal with.
The plan would be for in situ resource extraction and manufacturing. With enough of a human presence, projects like local construction of spacecraft become feasible. And something like a mass driver would be much more feasible on the moon. A big enough one and you're even considering interstellar probes ...
It would require a consistent, sustained effort. But not astronomical in US budget terms. Maybe $20-$30 billion/year (about of 3-4% the defense budget)
Starship is a vastly better attempt at more of these goals than STS. But if it misses cost, or payload, or reliability goals it won't solve this problem. It is even possible that it will take too many attempts in which a ship and 39 engines are expended to even get close.
The big one that robots can’t do is studying human biology in space.
How do we fare long term on a foreign body? What does trauma medicine look like? How do we accommodate the diseases and disabilities that frequent our non-astronaut grade population? Is gestation, birth and development possible in low gravity? Et cetera.
Then Moon provides the easiest place to do this at scale by virtu of being the closest place to Earth with in situ resources.
Beyond this though (and also the survival aspect as others have hit on), I'd simply mention the inspirational aspect. Many who lived through the Moon landings (as well as those who did not) see this as humanity's greatest achievement. And I think this sort of stuff helps to create a better future for a people. When asked what they want to be when they grow up, the most popular choice for American children today is a vlogger/YouTuber, the least popular is astronaut [3]. In China, the answers are completely reversed. Who's going to have the better generational outcome in 30 years?
But of course this isn't just for children. So many people just seem completely devoid of hope and optimism for the future. And that's completely understandable the way things have been going for many decades now. But show literally anybody this video of the Falcon Heavy landing [4] and the first question you will always get is, "Is that real?" People just can't even believe what we're achieving, and I think doing even more of this, on a much larger scale, and making it all the more visible would really improve so many lives, and likely the entire country itself. Just read the comments to that video, to see how it impacts people, and those are friggin YouTube comments!
[1] - https://attheu.utah.edu/facultystaff/qa-perseverance-rovers-...
[2] - https://www.space.com/perseverance-rover-self-driving-on-mar...
[3] - https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/07/american-kids-would-...
Also many people see the whole point to be expanding people out into the cosmos, not the science.
Saturn V was ridiculously expensive [1] and very unsafe.
Apollo was built to get to the Moon fast half a dozen times. We’re building more ambitiously today.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_V $1.5bn in 2024 dollars
Von Braun was asked if the Saturn V was safe to launch. He asked six of his engineering reports, each replied nein. Von Braun replied that the Saturn V had six nines of reliability.
Why replicate that? Indeed we should ask: Is there a goal to value, other than the obvious "the Chinese would get there first if we don't?"
A lunar "base" would just be a vastly more expensive ISS. We will discover that lunar regolith is a bigger nuisance than floating boogers in the ISS.
Source?
We can design—and are designing—automation into a lunar base in a way we couldn’t with the ISS.
Where’s the barely? What would you have done better?
It was still a great accomplishment, so I would not use barely, but technically it is correct I think. They spend great effort, to just make it to the moon, which was the goal, to beat the sowjets. And that succeeded. No great safety margins, not much room for error - barely.
Humans walked on the Moon in my lifetime. I should be contented with that.
I'm apparently younger than you, and humans have not walked on the moon in my lifetime. I'm discontented by that.
Really probably your grandparents or great grandparents depending on your age. Most Americans born after the moon landings had boomer or gen-x parents. All the men who walked on the moon and the majority of those in high office until roughly the 1990s were silent generation, the GI generation or older. They’re the ones who had the power to keep the space program going but didn’t. Once your parents had significant influence the Apollo program was long gone, the know how to build the hardware was gone, they would have had an even harder time than us rebuilding it because the commercial impetus wasn’t there and we didn’t yet have insane internet billionaires competing for launch contracts.
The 3rd para talks about the (golf) balls.
In between the Greatest Generation and Gen X - "Baby Boomer" was a name, but Destructive Generation seems to fit pretty well.
I think perhaps Dr Strangelove is more educational about the cultural climate around the Apollo program than almost any other media.
Hopefully with vastly reduced cost to LEO it will be put within the reach of normal people who aren’t engaged in the dance of WW3 nuclear brinksmanship.
I think about 30 years should lead to more exploration of Mars, and maybe multiple landers andn robots getting there from here, maybe even a return trip. (human travel to Mars feels so far out, even if Starship works out in the next 10 years).
No, it has no propulsion system. That is the difference between a ship and a station.
Still, even then it will take, what, about a century to get rid of the CO2? (Does it even count as an "atmosphere" at ground level, given that it's past the critical point and the distinction between liquid and gas phases no longer exists?)
There's no realistic way to evacuate that much gas (the surface pressure on Venus is almost 100 atmospheres!).
One option is first to cover the surface of Venus with water, by first creating giant orbital mirrors to let the atmosphere to cool. Then you can sequester the carbon dioxide as elemental carbon under the water surface. Oxygen released in the process will be naturally consumed by all the underoxidized minerals present on Venus.
There will still be a lot of CO2 around though. Now you shade the planet with a giant sunshade and the atmosphere will cool down to the point where CO2 will snow out as dry ice after a couple decades of cooling. What you'll have left is a layer of carbon, followed by a layer of water ice, followed by a layer of dry ice. The atmosphere will be 2 - 3 times as dense as Earth's with almost entirely nitrogen gas. You use autonomous robots and mass drivers to collect and launch the excess dry ice into orbit.
Once you've got most of the CO2 ice out you remove the sunshade and the planet will very quickly thaw out. The planet will be covered mostly in oceans at this point with a thick nitrogen and CO2 atmosphere. At this point use genetically modified algae and microbes which, using the plentiful sunlight, can quickly convert the high CO2 atmosphere into oxygen and organics for the soil. The planet may still need some minor solar shading to keep the temps down until the CO2 approaches earth levels. Introduce Earth life to build a natural biosphere and voila! You've got a whole new Earth whose biosphere should be able to sustain life for millions of years!
The second issue is sourcing H2, water ice is common, you "just" need to redirect enough comets. Comets can be also used to build a solar shade, by placing them into a polar orbit around Venus inside the Roche limit. They'll naturally fall apart and form a cloud around the planet.
Velocity in a gas is a distribution; raise temperature and increasing fraction exceeds escape velocity.
This is why Earth has ~ no hydrogen or helium in the air.
> There's no realistic way to evacuate that much gas (the surface pressure on Venus is almost 100 atmospheres!).
"Realistic" for values including "let's build a mirror the size of a planet, in space, and keep it together for centuries".
It's currently scifi to send more than a mere few tons total mass that way, and mirrors wouldn't even survive decades, so "realistic" is a bad criticism.
It's not going to be a significant fraction to matter, except of truly geological timeframes.
> "Realistic" for values including "let's build a mirror the size of a planet, in space, and keep it together for centuries".
Probably thousands of years. But not hundreds of thousands.
Doing it to heavier gases on human time scales is a whole other scale of problem.
The long night seems like a problem for life but forests already thrive in the warmer parts of the near-arctic. And in times past even Antarctica had tropical rainforests despite experiencing a polar night. Another idea I had was building a ring around the planet of dark material, perhaps of left over carbon after we cleaned up the CO2 rich atmosphere. The dark ring would provide shade to certain parts of the planet during the day and would reflect light for the long night.
Sounds like a sure fire recipe for a (permanent?) super intense electrical storm in right that spot.
Might make that specific latitude uninhabitable due to the planet turning. Though it could be worth the trade off, due to there being a bunch of available land on the planet in other latitudes.
If you have some truly huge arrays of super capacitors such a permanent electrical storm might even be useful. :)
That's a rather weird person to pick, even considering that it's probably a Futurama reference...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2023/nas...
None of this was done in a vacuum of billionaire self funding.
A vacuum of billionaire self funding? Of course not, but would these ventures have progressed to where they are without the deep pockets of some of these billionaires?
People mock him for being bad at estimating how long projects will take… but even if you agree with the critics, he's still the one-eyed in the land of the blind when it comes to space mission project planning.
Fair, I've heard the same from chatting with someone who shall not be named who got on a different list.
I can't remember if it was them or someone else who said that people lie about their wealth all the time for lists like these; the show-offs who want on them and pretend to have more, and the quiet ones who want off them and pretend to have less. (The person previously mentioned was one of the quiet ones).
They comment on a thread about Boeing’s Starliner ferrying NASA astronauts to the ISS atop a ULA rocket.
As for Blue Origin and New Glenn, this is an object lesson that simply throwing money at the problem doesn't necessarily solve it. Did you know Blue Origin was founded ~18 months before SpaceX?
For the longest time (up until ~9 months ago), Bezos had the former Honeywell CEO in charge of Blue Origin, which to me was such an odd choice. You see, this guy seems to embody everything wrong with corporate America: he was completely focused on not failing rather than succeeding. So there were constant delays with New Glenn and the BE-4 engine, which is years behind schedule. You can't fail if you don't launch.
And the new CEO (David Limp) used to be in charge of Kindles.
I don't know if either of those are actually true, there are plenty of good CEOs who came from zero experience in the industry. And plenty of bad CEOs who came from plenty of experience in the industry. Both of these run successful and not successful companies.
For example the currently Boeing CEO does not have experience in airplanes, came from a business background. And is considered a bad CEO by the average person (though considered a good CEO by stockholders, or at least was before the past few months).
the only assumption i see is the counter to that - a bad CEO equals an unsuccessful company. and i don't think that's a very controversial assumption.
Seems to imply there is an issue with a CEO of a space company previously working on Kindles.
> Bezos had the former Honeywell CEO in charge of Blue Origin, which to me was such an odd choice
Also seems to imply the CEO is bad because their previously only worked at Honeywell on thermostats.
In my mind none of the above has anything to do with how good or bad a CEO is. Perhaps I am misreading it. In which case ignore me.
Long term value, employee satisfaction, and customer satisfaction are all intertwined. New management is more likely than not to harm at least one of those 3 .
I also reject the financialization of modern companies where we put accountants in charge who aren't subject-matter experts whose only playbook is to cut costs and jack up prices.
It's exactly what's wrong with Boeing today.
Obligatory Steve Jobs quotes on "idea people" [1] and Xerox [2].
> In August 2013, Carmack indicated that following the crash of the STIG-B rocket earlier that year, he had wound down the company operations and had put the company in "hibernation mode."
> In 2015, the assets of Armadillo Aerospace were sold to EXOS Aerospace Systems & Technologies, Inc.Musk is an enormous risk taker.
"Elon Musk" by Ashlee Vance, pg 210
I refuse to think any sufficiently clever billionaire doesn’t have $1-10M in gold buried in a couple geographically distributed places. I know several people with NW of <$50M who have stashed 2-4% of their assets away in this fashion.
World wars happen, governments collapse, favor shifts, etc. Why wouldn’t you have a backup plan when it’s just pennies?
I refuse to believe that he was ever at risk of having less than 5-10M in pocket money left over after everything implodes.
I'm likely missing something here, but to me this minimises the problem to just a reduction in the number of properties you can move into (assuming some are lost and some of the others sold).
10-20kg of gold coins buried at gps coordinates in the deep desert has no such limitations.
I think a lot of ultrawealthy who have experience playing the geopolitical game probably must have some hedges like this. Doesn’t Thiel have NZ citizenship without any explicit intention of residing there?
It’s not like value stored like this loses its utility even if the state doesn’t collapse/confiscate your assets/persecute you.
I can’t imagine circumstances where one would end up being a billionaire then ever being a not-millionaire unless you’re thick as a brick.
Maybe you don't remember this, but Elon wasn't a Billionaire with his exit from Paypal. He made his bones with Tesla/SpaceX (honestly, mostly Tesla, but we'll see how SpaceX turns out, it could be bigger in the end).
The BE-4 was launched earlier this year. I wouldn’t assume that late means never.
There's a phrase "failure to launch" that would imply the opposite sentiment
You can't fail if you don't try, but you can't succeed either.
So, the full stack of SLS costs $4.1B. But that includes the cost of Orion which is ~$1.3B when you include the European Service Module, and it includes the cost of 1 year's worth of ground support equipment including upkeep for various buildings like the VAB, etc.
The marginal cost of a cargo SLS (should one ever launch, which is looking increasingly unlikely) is a bit over $2B. Which is still a horrifically high price.
For people who don't know much about SLS, one way to put its cost into context is, every time the full stack with Orion launches, that's about 1/6th of NASA's yearly budget. And that doesn't count any development cost which is several tens of Billions.
You can of course get higher if you add development cost as well. But that depends on how many launches there are.
From the OIG report[1]:
> We project the cost to fly a single SLS/Orion system through at least Artemis IV to be $4.1 billion per launch at a cadence of approximately one mission per year.47 Building and launching one Orion capsule costs approximately $1 billion, with an additional $300 million for the Service Module supplied by the ESA through a barter agreement in exchange for ESA’s responsibility for ISS common system operating costs, transportation costs to the ISS, and other ISS supporting services. In addition, we estimate the single-use SLS will cost $2.2 billion to produce, including two rocket stages, two solid rocket boosters, four RS-25 engines, and two stage adapters. Ground systems located at Kennedy where the launches will take place—the Vehicle Assembly Building, Crawler-Transporter, Mobile Launcher 1, Launch Pad, and Launch Control Center—are estimated to cost $568 million per year due to the large support structure that must be maintained. The $4.1 billion total cost represents production of the rocket and the operations needed to launch the SLS/Orion system including materials, labor, facilities, and overhead, but does not include any money spent either on prior development of the system or for next-generation technologies such as the SLS’s Exploration Upper Stage, Orion’s docking system, or Mobile Launcher 2.
> And we don't really yet know the cost of the EUS.
We have an idea of an initial cost estimate from this[2].
NASA agreed to buy 2 core stages and 2 EUSes for $3.2B. Since RS-25s are around $100M each and the SRBs are around $200M each, this pushes the cost of the rocket up to $2.4B, maybe a bit more.
---
1. https://oig.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/IG-22-003.pd...
2. https://www.nasa.gov/humans-in-space/nasa-commits-to-future-...
Yeah but you see, they will miss that 'one mission per year' thing by quite a large margin. And it will be more expensive because of that alone.
There are other traps in these numbers. OIG numbers are far better then NASA but I bet in 20-30 years when somebody does the total cost it will be higher.
> prior development of the system or for next-generation technologies such as the SLS’s Exploration Upper Stage, Orion’s docking system, or Mobile Launcher 2.
And I don't think just excluding all 'prior development' as if it was irrelevant makes much sense. Development cost should be considered as part of a program.
So, that's fair. But it's also complicated. Part of that number (for EGS) is for the upkeep of buildings like the VAB. Which is fair - SLS is the only real user, so they get charged for it.
But it's also kind of not fair, since NASA's going to keep it around, even if SLS wasn't a thing. As evidenced by NASA doing just that in the interim period between Constellation and SLS.
> And I don't think just excluding all 'prior development' as if it was irrelevant makes much sense. Development cost should be considered as part of a program.
I completely agree with you in general.
But I think that it's easier to tally the development costs separately.
And it's important to know how much it costs to just build and launch the rocket. A number which NASA (outside of OIG) has been extremely reluctant to release to the public. As far as I know, NASA leadership has never made specific claims about how much SLS costs, just that the OIG numbers are wrong and/or misleading.
Once the program ends, we'll have a better idea of how to amortize the develop costs over the total number of launches.
Investing in commercial approaches as the step 1 doesn't seem to work in multi-billion R&D endeavors.
So yes, it's not fair, but turns out to be better for the country down the road.
"Jostle" you mean competition? That's the idea, right.
So -- awesome.
During peace time, the predominant motive is to maximize profit by dragging out the work.
That could happen, but I don't see it as likely. NASA is far more likely to spend ridiculous amounts of money to keep it alive in the name of "competition" or some such.
While EU has none.
Truly awe inspiring stuff happening these days
I work in the aerospace industry and just watching a depiction of it in a universe where people still just...gave a shit...especially about something other than money, brings about a whole spectrum of emotions.
With Starship it appeared as if it was struggling to lift off, staying for a while burning fuel until it left the launch pad and even then it felt a bit slow at accelerating.
I'll see tomorrow if it was just an illusion.
Although you are a bit off the mark, you did actually hit on the likely reason for the faster liftoff, which is that the SRBs have a much higher thrust-to-weight ratio than the SpaceX Superheavy booster.
For Falcon 9 - it will look slower on takeoff as well. One reason not mentioned yet is that after engine start, Falcon is held down until all vehicle systems are verified as functioning normally before release for liftoff. So they can do pressure / thrust etc checks on the ground before releasing.
With solid rocket motors especially - once you light those you are pretty committed.
Starliner is also held for confirmation of all systems being functional even with the SRBs. Better to let them burn out on the pad and clean up the mess than to risk release with, say, asymmetrical thrust. That said I'm sure there are variances between the two rockets' procedures which could make one appear faster.
I think SLS does 90% thrust on main engines - then lights SRB's but SRB ignition is takeoff. A problem at that point is launch escape abort (capsule to safety) if for example one SRB lit but the other didn't for some reason. Not sure it can otherwise manage the asymmetric thrust.
https://reuters.com/pictures/boeings-starliner-blasts-off-fi...
Boeing and NASA call off Starliner crew launch minutes before liftoff - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40547338 - June 2024 (47 comments)
Boeing's Starliner Crew Flight Test delayed again, path forward unclear - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40434398 - May 2024 (28 comments)
Boeing Starliner's first crewed mission scrubbed - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40281272 - May 2024 (162 comments)
NASA and Boeing Are (Finally) Putting Astronauts on Starliner - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39843148 - March 2024 (9 comments)
Boeing has now lost $1.1B on Starliner, with no crew flight in sight - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36879769 - July 2023 (218 comments)
NASA safety panel skeptical of Starliner readiness for crewed flight - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36085531 - May 2023 (27 comments)
Boeing to ground Starliner indefinitely until valve issue solved - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28185195 - Aug 2021 (42 comments)
Boeing Starliner's flight's flaws show “fundamental problem,” NASA says - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22297564 - Feb 2020 (140 comments)
NASA Shares Initial Findings from Boeing Starliner Orbital Test Investigation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22266747 - Feb 2020 (14 comments)
Starliner faced “catastrophic” failure before software bug found - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22260731 - Feb 2020 (60 comments)
Boeing reports a $410M charge in case NASA decides Starliner needs another test - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22194735 - Jan 2020 (55 comments)
Boeing Starliner updates: Spacecraft flies into wrong orbit, jeopardizing test - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21843988 - Dec 2019 (240 comments)
New Spacesuit Unveiled for Starliner Astronauts - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13488096 - Jan 2017 (65 comments)
Boeing-SpaceX Team Split Space Taxi Award - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8326845 - Sept 2014 (115 comments)
NASA to Make Major Announcement Today About Astronaut Transport to the ISS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8324848 - Sept 2014 (43 comments)
SpaceX Vies With Boeing as NASA’s Taxi to Station - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8296567 - Sept 2014 (49 comments)
Are there clear guidelines already written? I’m assuming it inherits a lot of rules of general aviation? But since private firms launching into space is new, do the rules and regulations keep up? Or are they still to be written?
There are host of rules that NASA has for human spaceflight these are not regulations per se. Till now NASA has been the only buyer[1][2] of human spaceflights or the destination has been ISS which is jointly managed by them so even private operators to comply with these rules.
SpaceX and now Boeing human rate their spacecrafts to these specifications to allow them to compete for commercial crew contracts or dock to ISS[4].
In the next few years this will change, NASA is research organization not a regulatory authority sooner or later regulations have to move to either FAA or another new entity.
Currently no regulations exist for space proper. FAA does control a lot of launch related items, but don’t regulate things like spacesuits that now spaceX is developing currently.
There are no strict limits to FAA authority they do control Virgin rocket planes although it does cross the US defined line for space .
Knowing Musk’s temperament, what is likely to happen is FAA will try to extend their authority that he deems is overreach and he will sue in court saying they have no jurisdiction, either Supreme Court will say they do (not likely in Robert’s court) or congress will have pass law regulating this ( less likely in current congress it is too dysfunctional) but these things may change in the next few years when it does happen
—-
[1] Axiom buys private launches from spaceX but they still dock to ISS so I expect NASA rules apply.
[2] Jared Issacman’s last mission was the true first fully private mission to space but still used mostly stock Dragon so they mostly likely followed NASA rules
[3] all this from US perspective , Soyuz and China has capabilities and Soyuz and also in Mir space station have had some commercial flights of course
[4] only place you can go today , end of this decade there maybe private station or moon or even mars but not today
It's not mentioned once.
I always see majestic rocket photography promoted on Twitter.
Why not today?
I thought Twitter was the worlds #1 news source.
The rocket used to launch Starliner today is an Atlas V which first flew in 2002. I.e. it's a 22 year old rocket system.
Are you posting from 2026?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_V
has a first stage powered by the Russian RD-180 engine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RD-180
and a Centaur upper stage powered by RL10 engines
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RL10
Vulcan Centaur
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulcan_Centaur
has a first stage powered by Blue Origin's BE-4 engines
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BE-4
and a second stage known as Centaur V. It's an upgraded version of the Centaur, also powered by RL10 engines
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centaur_(rocket_stage)#Centaur...
Vulcan has only flown once, in part because of slow delivery of BE-4 engines, which to date have not powered any other launcher (though they are meant to eventually power New Glenn).
So I don't know what you mean by "Vulcan Centaur engines replacing the Russian RD-180".
The BE-4 is the engine on Vulcan-Centaur's booster stage, which replaces the RD-180 on the Atlas V booster stage. Both Atlas V and Vulcan use RL-10 engines on their main stage (what ULA calls Centaur).
And to add more confusion, the new engine for Ariane 5/6 is the "Vulcain". :D
I only knew it was launching 6 minutes prior because my partner alerted me about it because it was top stream on twitch.
I did not, either. I tend to get most of my tech-related news via HN. Fortunately this morning I decided to swing past Ars to see if anything interesting was happening, and they had a high profile post about the launch. I made it to the livestream with less than five minutes to spare.
Also 30 days ago.
Plus, NASA crew rates the full stack rather than treating the rocket and capsule separately, so integrating Starliner on another rocket would require the crew rating process to be repeated (granted, it'd be a bit easier since F9+Dragon is already crew rated).
Does the Starliner have any feature that current SpaceX rockets don't have?
Here's a pic of the Starliner control panel: https://x.com/TrevorMahlmann/status/1207437431374565376/phot...
And Crew Dragon's control panel: https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/30/21275753/nasa-spacex-astr...
Edit: for those wondering, this is not hearsay or speculation; it is from direct experience (albeit 5+ years ago)
But the controls themselves have physical buttons in addition to the touch screen.
Also all systems have triple redundancy.
Interesting, why would they want that capability?
All Russian space vehicles land on land because they don’t have easy access to warm waters and Kazakhstan steppe is big and empty.
But why boeing/nasa would want that?
Dragon was also initially intending to land on solid ground, but dropped the idea when NASA asked for additional tests to prove that popping landing legs out of the heat shield would be safe. SpaceX had intended such landings in large part because of the plans for Red Dragon, but since by then they had started to shift towards Starship, they deemed it easier to just splashdown and deal with the extra refurbishment than try to prove out a technology they no longer felt the need for.
Additionally, I know when the first Crew Dragon landed, it clearly wasn't hard or expensive to get to given that there were a bunch of small, private boats that (inappropriately) approached the spacecraft. It was quite close to shore, not like the old Apollo missions landing in the middle of the Atlantic or Pacific.
Plus, since it's supposed to fly autonomously, there isn't a lot of physical control to be done. This isn't like with cars where there's an argument that tactile controls are easier to adjust without looking away from the road.
The station can also boost itself with the Zvezda module, which has thrusters.
https://www.nasa.gov/international-space-station-frequently-...
"Although it was originally planned for a 2017 launch,[15] various delays pushed the launch back to no earlier than July 2023.[47] Then on June 1, 2023, Boeing announced the flight was indefinitely delayed, due to problems with the parachute harness and flammable tape on wiring.[105] On August 7, 2023, Boeing announced that it was resuming preparations for a launch, and that it hoped to resolve the issue with the flammable tape by September 2023, and to address the parachute harness issues by November 2023.
The Crewed Flight Test was tentatively scheduled for a launch date of May 6, 2024,[106] but due to a problem with an oxygen valve on the ULA Atlas rocket, the May 6 launch date was cancelled approximately two hours before the planned launch time.[107] The launch has been further delayed due to a helium leak in the Starliner service module, which was originally discovered during the May 6 launch attempt.[108][109]
A launch was attempted on June 1, 2024, for 16:25 UTC (12:25 PM EDT), but was aborted at 3 minutes and 50 seconds prior to liftoff. Starliner successfully completed countdown and lifted off on June 5, 2024 at 14:52 UTC (10:52 AM EDT)."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_Starliner#Third_orbital...
On top of that Boeing's launch coverage is nowhere near as fancy as SpaceX (or new space in general, RocketLab and Blue Origin also tend to have pretty decent coverage, although neither of them are doing crewed orbital spaceflight yet). No views of the non-flight-control employees enjoying seeing their work fly, very little live telemetry, low resolution for when they do have live video, mostly CGI views once down to the second stage, no live views from the capsule in space either.
Finally, on top of that, Starliner is kind of just a dead end in its current state. Boeing only built the two it needs for this one contract, and it only flies on Atlas V, which are fully sold out now. So it can only do the 6 contracted ISS missions and then it's done until someone is willing to pay to have Starliner+Vulcan Centaur crew rated.
This is what I like about SpaceX. Of course they have government contracts, but it's always building towards something bigger.
We all see it as a huge national security issue that these companies are fumbling, given how foundational they are for U.S. security, self-reliance and tech leadership.
I would ride the Atlas/Centaur stack, it's been exceedingly reliable. Starliner itself? Not quite yet, given its checkered history.
Boeing brings up nothing but sadness in me these days. I really, really, really want that company to succeed and be awesome. Hopefully going forward Starliner will bring forward the excellence that has been Boeing in the past.
Even when the industry overall is doing pretty well, we should still scrutinize every incident. There's no such thing as acceptable fatalities.
Because Boeing deliberately withheld information about MCAS from the training. Especially because that would have led to breaking the shared type certificate. It could have happened in a western country just as well.
About the second incident it is a bit more debatable as some information was given after the first accident (though very sparse still) but for the first the pilots could not have been aware of the MCAS off-switch that would have solved all their problems.
In fact it was a bit nasty that Boeing even tried to play the "poor third-world airline" card for a while even though they knew exactly what had happened.
John Glenn
Oh and the build up to this finale is no less... odd. Boeing did their pad abort test - demonstrating the ability for their capsule to rocket off on its on, like it might do from a failing rocket. And that test failed with only 2 out of 3 of the parachutes opening. But insert 'Boeing influence' - NASA decided it was a clear success. And not just any success, but a success so clearly successful that they simply let Boeing completely skip the launch abort test (where you'd to the same escape test, but in flight) and moved right on to complete unmanned tests to the ISS.
So they launch their first mission to the ISS, and completely miss the station leaving the craft in a potentially catastrophic scenario, though it does eventually make its way back to Earth. So NASA just pats them on the back 'Happens to us all! Just give it another go!' So they do, and on this flight 1/6th of the thrusters on the approach module failed, but by some act of God (and backup thrusters), the craft somehow managed to mate with the ISS. So of course NASA said, "Brilliant! Success! Bring on the humans!"
And that's where we are right now. And that is the company behind the rocket that's under you right now.
-- News next week probably.
It's a great accomplishment but it's not "super crazy"
I'm just pointing this out because there are many people apparently who are confusing Starliner for Boeing's version of Starship, i.e. a whole rocket plus crew rated capsule.
Initial work on Dragon began in 2004, it ‘entered service’ in 2009, had its first mission in 2010, but first connected to the ISS in 2012. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Dragon
Work on a crewed version was officially mentioned in 2006 though they only got a contract for manned missions in 2014 and the first manned mission was 16 November 2020. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Crew-1
It's kind of useful perspective that when the contracts for this were being awarded, Boeing argued that SpaceX shouldn't get the contract at all because Boeing, having "human spaceflight heritage", was guaranteed to do the better job than an inexperienced upstart. Plus the extra $400M they extorted out of NASA despite this being a fixed price, milestone based contract.
I think it's useful to note that this wasn't just Boeing's opinion - it was pretty widely believed in the industry. And not without reason - Boeing had Shuttle heritage.
Thankfully, NASA kept both awards.
However the missing context is SpaceX put in 8+ years into the project before getting the award which offset most of the issues.
So it worked out well for NASA, but SpaceX was approaching it more as a prestige project than a profitable one.
Late and over a budget is how you maximize profit in cost plus contracts.
How many SpaceX rockets and failures have there been? (And that's not a knock on SpaceX, either - this stuff is hard. Combining precision and technology with 'controlled explosion' is going to be a challenge).
But as a NASA person said - NASA-funded contracts "can't" have failures. They obviously do, but he was more talking to the acceptability, political and otherwise. One or two launchpad explosions of a taxpayer funded vehicle and you're fighting Congressional demands to shut down the entire program. SpaceX provides a layer of abstraction and indirection to that, so they can move faster - "Who cares if we blow up 10 in the next couple of years to get to one that works".
But they didn't, they went for the first time right approach, but that failed too. If you are going to have failures, maybe just accept that first time right doesn't exist, or just takes much much longer.
Either you make fast iteration acceptable, regardless of politics, or you fail.
It's not just political process either, it's the technical process. You need to be able to debug, fix, and manufacture the iterations quickly.
Looking at https://www.space.com/every-spacex-starship-explosion-lesson...
there have been many many prototype and other losses. And incidents, some catastrophic, some less so.
SN1, 3, 4, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 15 and the orbital Starship launch attempt all had failures losing hardware. If NASA/publicly funded work had that many failures (or a fraction of them) there'd be Congressional enquiries and calls to shut down the program and stop burning tax dollars.
It's true that SpaceX enjoys more latitude to destroy test hardware in its private development programs that aren't funded with somebody else's money (public or private), but why is that relevant here? Commercial Crew was funded by NASA with public money, and SpaceX developed Dragon 2 in a relatively conservative and conventional program with NASA looking over their shoulder the whole time. There is no double standard.
The overall perspective is that SpaceX developed their crewed capsule much much faster and cheaper than Boeing. The data also indicates that flying with SpaceX is safer.
Congress doesn't care about buring tax dollars as long as it is spent in their districts. Otherwise Artemis and SLS wouldn't exist.
The issue isn't "burning tax dollars". Congress is too busy selling out the country's future to give a shit about that. The issue is that they'd already rather not be giving any money to NASA in the first place. They'd just give the defense contractors tax payer funded 'donations' directly if they could.
SpaceX has an assembly line in Hawthorne and test site in Texas. (Both send kit to the space coast for launch.)
The reliability of what comes out of the former exceed’s Boeing’s. The innovativeness of what comes out of the latter exceeds them once again. Muddling statistics between the two would be like considering Boeing’s experimental drones when measuring its commercial airliners’ reliability. They’re totally different departments.
So SpaceX is the only company truly innovating on all fields, has the highest launch success rate, highest launch cadence, the most capable rockets, and launches for far cheaper than any other company (or country).
I think it's worth pointing out that the failures were early in F9's life, and that the current configuration "F9 v1.2FT Block 5" has had no failures to launch and remarkable success when it comes to landing the booster.
> How many SpaceX rockets and failures have there been? (And that's not a knock on SpaceX, either - this stuff is hard. Combining precision and technology with 'controlled explosion' is going to be a challenge).
IMO, this really misunderstands the two kinds of "tests".
SpaceX is engaged in a development program. And as a part of that development program, they're doing test flights to discover how to properly build Starship. Those flights are expected to fail in various ways. The exact way they fail gives SpaceX vital information that's used to improve the rocket.
A big part of the reason SpaceX is doing this is because simulation and modeling have a limited ability to give good answers to questions about novel behaviors when it comes to rockets - the speeds and just too high. And the only way to find the true unknown unknowns is to interact with reality.
In contrast, Starliner's tests are supposed to be demonstrations that the system is complete, functional, and ready for service. They are not supposed to have anything wrong with them at all.
It's worth pointing out that Boeing chose to do less testing and more paperwork as part of Starliner's certification. If Boeing had done an in-flight abort test instead of a pad abort test like SpaceX did, they probably would have caught the OFT-1 problems then.
I guess that most people in my small town don't know who Roger Bannister is. A lot more of them can tell you the name of the first local to officially run a mile in less than four minutes. They couldn't tell you if anybody from my state has done it since.
I guess that's just a long way to say, "That's natural."
The first jet flight across the Atlantic was newsworthy. The 837th isn’t.
We've built many rockets, there are numerous resources about building one, so building rockets is trivial.
> We've built many rockets, there are numerous resources about building one, so building rockets is trivial.
Except that you're wrong.
Because it's very common for the first launch of a company's first orbital rocket to fail to make it to orbit. So you can't "just open the manual and start building".
It is also very common for the first pancake to be a total failure.
That doesn't mean it is non-trivial to make pancakes.
I guess, it depends on what you mean by "total failure".
It's very rare for the first pancake to be inedible, or basically anything except a little misshapen. As someone who's primary interested in pancakes is eating them, that's a far cry from "total failure".
But if that is your criteria, there's a very simple and effective solution: ring molds. They cost a couple of dollars on Amazon and guarantee that your pancakes will be perfect circles every time.
In contrast, there is no known way to ensure that a first rocket launch will be a success. If there was, the companies launching them would do it since failed launches are extremely expensive in time, money, and reputation.
"Ask not what flying cars can do for you; ask what 140 characters can do for your country." [0,1]
"We choose to go to LEO. We choose to go to LEO... We choose to go to LEO in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but so that MIC will learn to build without cost-plus contracting" [2, 3]
0. https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/education/teachers/curricul...
1. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/697729-we-wanted-flying-car...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_choose_to_go_to_the_Moon
3. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/cost-plus-contract.asp
I don't know if he still takes that approach. In fact, I kind of doubt he ever really did, but he certainly projected that image publicly, and most importantly to workers of those companies - whether he "really believed" it I guess is a moot point.
When you take the "businesses exist to return a profit to shareholders" approach you're always going to focus on leadership that has a track record of doing that, even if that excludes building a good product or for that matter even the long-term viability of the business. Thus, you see these CEO hires that don't seem to make sense - most of us unconsciously still think of businesses as things created to make a thing or do a specific thing, because that's a natural thing to believe.
Anyway I think you can attribute some of the success of both to this, as well as Musk's public image at least ca 2008-2018 or so.
Communication and agreement are what add cost and misdirection to development. When a tiny set of people with one clear goal pull the strings, it is much more efficient to reach the north star product.
This happens for many online debates where extreme positions are common.
You know why people really do it? It has nothing to do with Elon Musk, but rather is a response to our own fears for our own social standing. We fear that if we say something good about a person that our social group has, in defiance of your complex human point, decided is "a bad guy" that we'll just as cavalierly be excluded or derided from that group.
So when you acknowledge that complexity or something good that this "good for nothing" person has done, you have to start off with with virtual signaling: "oh this guy is terrible, but... ", (meaning "please see that I'm still one of you").
I find the whole act kinda craven, perhaps even moreso than a social group that demands it.
Upon reflection this is also a problem with me, but I don't own SpaceX or Tesla, so fewer people are going to call me out on it.
[0] I will accept that choosing a side is fine if it aligns with your goals, but Elon's most ambitious goal appears to be going to Mars, and voicing his opinions about politics on Xwixxer appears to be hampering his efforts to achieve that goal
Boring Company was always bad so I guess that doesn't count.
Twitter is doing fine.
Then Musk came in with several million dollars and got it created in any real sense of the word.
As for Twitter, what's your evidence that it isn't doing well? I use it regularly, and it works fine.
Even this, you need to put asterisks on "created" because he spends so much time building out lies about the companies he runs/ran because the creation myth is so important. The amount of unforced errors behind his tenure at Paypal, a lot of it around trying to be taken as the guy who "made Paypal"... it's just very silly!
And I think ultimately in a place like HN, where there are supposedly a lot of "builder" types, when you hear every Musk company say "yeah the way we stay productive is to keep Musk out of things...." everyone's natural bias against bullshitters kick in!
I think it's hard to discount Tesla really pushing forward EVs. I think it's extremely easy to discount all of his other stuff if you're cynical (yes I include SpaceX in there, though it's easy for me because I think manned spaceflight, let alone "going to Mars", is extremely silly). But this stuff isn't really fungible...
Never heard that from people at Tesla or SpaceX.
... and since then called a rescue diver a pedo, got into quite the mess regarding his partnerships and offspring [1], burned dozens of billions of dollars in Twitter, seems to be doing the public customer service for a bunch of literal neo-Nazis on Twitter [2], and is apparently on a truckload of drugs on the regular [3].
It takes years to build up trust, but it's very easy to completely erode it in a few weeks.
> Why do people always have to preface Elon praise with some initial criticism.
Because otherwise, people might accuse one of being a Musk shill, and there's unfortunately quite a bunch of these, completely ignoring any of the countless issues with Musk.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk#Relationships_and_ch...
[2] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/les-decodeurs/article/2022/12/19/c...
[3] https://www.wsj.com/business/elon-musk-illegal-drugs-e826a9e...
He does remarkably well for someone on a truckload of drugs on the regular. Perhaps other CEOs should copy that? ;)
He also has a section of people that are cult-like in their defense of him which adds fuel to the fire. “You’re jealous” or “you’re just angry he’s rich” or some other such nonsense seems to come out of the woodwork for anyone who has anything even slightly negative to say about him.
He says what he thinks. Unlike most public figures who filter everything through their PR person.
Tesla lists Elon Musk as a founder but he didn't found it. He was an early investor who essentially took over the company. Tesla only exists through government largesse, specifically carbon tax credits. Also, it arguably only survived thanks to a 2009 Department of Energy loan (for $465 million). If you look at the history here, this loan is under a cloud.
This is particularly funny given Elon's self-made propaganda.
SpaceX succeeded (IMHO) in spite of Elon not because of him. I've read (admittedly unverified) accounts where someone in SpaceX's leadership essentially built a wall around Elon to insulate the rest of the company from him. SpaceX engineers themselves are a byproduct of NASA to a large degree. Also, SpaceX could not have succeeded without government loans, grants and contracts. Even today, it's completely reliant on the government purse.
Both Tesla and SpaceX have made huge promises and under-delivered on them or delivered late. People forget how delayed the Falcon timeline was. It just didn't matter because there was no competition: the ULA, for example, is a jobs program with no interest in competing on price or features.
And self-driving Telsas, anyone? Anyone?
Any proper understanding of the term "self driving", including the way Musk advertises it, is 'tell car through the UI where you want it to go, sit back and it reliably gets you there with zero further input, better than the average human driver'.
Please post a video of it doing this for any route on real roads, with no driver input. Seriously. I'd love to see it, because I never have.
I've seen Tesla videos with few required driver interventions. But not none. And from the accidents I've read about, I sure as shirt would not give it a destination and recline reading a book. Especially on left-turns and near emergency vehicles, turning trucks, or construction barriers.
So, what is your definition of self-driving, and what performance can you show? And in what road conditions?
You still have provided ANY example of the topic of the discussion — a car that is actually self-driving, as in can get from one location to another on public roads with zero intervention by a human.
Telling us about another less capable car with driver-assist tech advances the conversation how?
Well it doesn't. Mercedes will gladly sell you their much less capable self driving.
Sure I agree, it'd be great if self driving meant absolutely zero interventions. The market is elsewhere though.
It does NOT tell me that either have achieved anything near the stated standard: "for practical purposes it is self-driving."
I don't think anyone promotes (or any reasonable person understands) L2 as self driving. SAE defines L2 assist [0] as "You ARE driving... you must constantly supervise and support these features ... lane centering and adaptive cruise control at the same time".
"Self driving" implies to me and everyone I know as "the car drives itself". As in I can safely sleep in the back seat as if another human were driving, or I could ask the car to come or go to a destination, as I could ask another human to drive my car to/from a destination.
Can you provide an example of ANY car doing this yet?
Attributing the success of Tesla to a government loan they paid back early is also joke and insulting to all the hard work of the employees and other investors.
This assumes no subsidies for oil and gas (plenty, including depreciation below cost basis!)
In terms of credits - those are in the 2%-3% range of revenue.
In terms of SpaceX being the most dependent on the govt - totally false. Things like SLS are cost plus, have cost $20 billion with almost nothing to show for it. SpaceX is so available, cheap and reliable they are literally launching ESA payloads (ESA won't even mention them its so embarrassing), most commercial payloads that can actually go to bid and competitors payloads (looking at you Amazon).
For both National Security and other missions SpaceX is FAR cheaper. I'm not sure if that still counts as government "largesse" - which is more about a generous gift or contract. To keep more than one provider in mix the government has been doing some largesse to try to get some money to other providers.
As for the loan, Fisker got an even bigger one and went bankrupt[1]. Ford took a much bigger one (justified by their size) and in 2020 still didn't manage to pay it back[2]. What is wrong with the loan Tesla took, kept it alive, and it paid back early with interest?
USA likes to tout free markets and lobby against protectionism, but aside from the UK as a first mover nobody ever industrialized without protectionism and directed industrial policy, and I would argue it is impossible or at very least inefficient.
I agree SpaceX could not have succeeded w/o the government contracts, but that is true to any space launch company. All SpaceX contracts were acquired as the lowest bidder, often offering dramatically lower prices and higher value than anyone. Just look at the Commercial Crew where Boeing got $4.49B, SpaceX got $2.6B and did a better job.
Elon time is a known phenomenon. "At SpaceX we specialize at converting the impossible to late". And delays are a common thing in the aerospace industry. Can you name a rocket in recent times that was developed faster, or even just less delayed than Falcon 1? Or than Falcon 9? I bet you find much easier to name those who were more.
Musk succeeded in two industries that were certified money pits. You have a big graveyard both before and after 2002 of bankrupt companies in both fields.
It's ludicrous to believe SpaceX succeeded despite Musk when all other "new space" companies started before or around the same time, with the same NASA/Military complex boosted engineers and contracts available to them, failed, and when Musk has been so involved in SpaceX. Instead of unverified accounts, what about hearing about the organizational structure of early Spacex from a senior NASA scientist that worked with them[3] (the whole series of videos with him is very interesting), or many other similar accounts [4]?
[1]https://publicintegrity.org/politics/two-doe-electric-car-lo...
[2]https://www.freep.com/story/money/cars/ford/2020/07/29/ford-...
[3]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P06X2TZUKZU&t=197s
[4]https://old.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden...
- None of the markets he participates in could ever truly be free markets no matter what due to their very high (and necessarily high) capital requirements. It's not like other tech companies which use government money to monopolize markets that have low entry barriers and end up messing with millions of little guys who think they're operating in a free market... Then it takes a decade for them to learn that they actually had 0 chance of ever competing in that market due to asymmetries in margins caused by gov subsidies.
- He consistently gave the government value for money. If his companies weren't there, the government would have spent the same amount of money (or more) and obtained worse results.
He invested in a 6 month startup that consisted of an office and desk. Tesla had no money, no plan, and a borrowed electric kit car. Musk was the early investor.
From a practical point of view, Musk was indeed the founder.
In spite of all your criticism, neither Tesla nor SpaceX would exist without Musk, and Musk has greatly pushed forward the technology of both, creating two new major industries.
This is in opposition to the usual "the only point of a business is to make money" ethos that so permeates neoliberal capitalism that we hardly even notice it anymore. The latter is dysfunctional, inhuman, and ultimately bad for business.
Call it cynicism, but decision calculus from upstairs always work in that direction (i.e. gotta hit arbitrary financial goals for this quarter because that's how bonuses and comp gets dictated) so I think in that mindset so I don't setup myself for disappointment or surprise if a decision that doesn't appeal to that shorted-sighted thinking doesn't gain traction.
Thanks for putting it words that I could not normally articulate. On HN, I find people are quick to label capitalism=only for profit,hence bad for people and the supposed opposite i.e socialism=good for people. The lack of nuance among cranial challenged is annoying, without realizing that the later embodies the quintessential the-road-to-hell-is-paved-with-good-intentions.
Capitalism is about the accumulation of capital goods into private hands and centralization and socialization of production. To my mind, that's what it does and what drives it forward - most everything else is secondary. That's not quite the same as "only for profit" but it's close. People under capitalism don't all think of it that way, but unfortunately the humans aren't in charge. The logic of capitalism, is.
What you are saying is that if people are told that meaning of life = make money, then they will do so, with little or no compassion for their fellow humans? ( it's not a rhetorical question, so please answer)
But all I was getting at with my comment is that we can't even be said to be ruled by capitalists, I don't think. Our government acts at the behest of capital not capitalists, and our society is shaped by that as well. All our institutions are bent toward it. It may seem like a trivial distinction but it means that people - even capitalists - who for whatever reason act against the interests of capital accumulation, will find their influence wane and eventually wink out of existence. They'll be pushed out. As such we're ruled by capital i.e. "the humans aren't in charge."
My original understanding socialism = mostly control by government. ( which is a perverted version of 'let's co-operate as a society', and since that does not quite work it's need a central authority to force co-operation). Nearly all business end up be controlled by the state.
Capitalism = Govt. should not involve itself in ordinary and other activities such as enterprises, businesses of citizen, except when there is direct harm, like stealing, murder etc. Or so this was the original definition.
Note: I realize that neither is perfect, and that there can be nuances and different definitions. What's yours?
Note that the centralization and socialization of production is regarded as a good thing here. You get greater economies of scale and thus greater productive capacity when this happens. This is why Marxists view capitalism as a progressive historical development - we just don't fixate on it as though it's the pinnacle of human productive relations or the "final step" or something like that.
The main problem with capitalism comes when you have a great degree of centralization and control at which point the profit motive inherent in capitalism tends to produce a ton of rent-seeking behavior which drags the economy down and makes further progress difficult or impossible. I would argue that in most industries we reached this point decades ago, or even a century ago in some cases. Tech is a notable exception, though we're reaching the point there as well.
This is the point at which reformists will say "well you just need to break up monopolies" but it's like I said: social, cultural, and government institutions tend to bend toward the economic paradigm more than the other way around. The economic base tends to influence the societal superstructure more than the other way around. This is mostly because, day-to-day, people are more focused on their material needs than they are on ideology and culture. So, our government is much more reluctant than it should be to break up monopolies, our media is dominated by capital interests (to control public opinion in favor of capital interests) and so on. Idealists will insist we're "not doing capitalism right" or something but that argument is not persuasive if the long-term result of doing capitalism "right" is that you eventually stop doing it "right" as government and culture bends toward capital interests - which seems inevitable.
And, anyway, remember that the centralization of productive capacity and control is a good thing. It is more efficient, at least until the rent-seeking behavior starts to assert itself and drags the economy down. So breaking up monopolies is kind of a regressive course of action. It would be nice if we could have highly-developed productive forces with a great degree of specialization and centralization, etc., but without the rent-seeking behavior. In order for that to happen you need to keep the accumulation of capital but get rid of the profit motive - or at least remove it as the primary driver of economic activity. Marxists identify the working class as the only class that has the correct incentives to make this happen: capitalists won't do it because they won't benefit from it personally and in fact stand to lose out personally if it happens.
And then, from there you have 150+ years of history of trying to figure out the best way to do that, usually in the face of violent reprisals from capital interests. A history filled with success and failure and lessons learned. A history I'm not going to get into here because I've already typed a massive wall of text and need to get back to work - I'll just say that IMO China has done a lot of good work in this regard but they still have a long way to go.
To the extent I have read about the term capitalism, one area is almost completely ignored - private land ownership as 'birth' right. ( a subject in its own right)
It's a larger discussion though - both so called capitalism and socialism as normally characterized misses many fundamentals of human life, but has huge appeal for the simplistic minded economists, philosophers and masses alike. When you get the fundamentals wrong, sooner or later things turn sour. And my firm belief is that one cannot get the fundamentals right with an IQ of 100 except for tiny groups of people, say less than 150.
Do you think blue origin is focused on making money? They haven’t done anything that would indicate that.
SpaceX on the other hand focused on landing rockets completely to make money. There is no other reason to do it and it’s why NASA never focused on it.
Starlink is entirely to make money to feed the mars mission long term.
You might say that his visions aren’t focused on money, but the execution is ruthlessly so. It’s why both companies are famous for squeezing their suppliers so hard and inhousing when they can.
It's the exact same reason as it is now for air travel...profits. It doesn't matter the size of the ship. If you can squeeze the space to increase the number of occupants per flight on the same ship, you increase revenue. That's all corporate bean counters will care about. I would not be surprised if they hire a similar team that airlines have now that get paid to specifically redesign seats to squeeze more in per flight.
His companies where all founded based on his own engineering idea about how an important (existing) product/service could be fundamentally !at least an order of magnitude! better in multiple areas by designing it with a different approach or even different goal (going to space as a country vs commercially building a precense on mars for example).
His vision about the future, substantiated by (simple) physics calculations + drive to actually do it make him outright unique in the world right now.
There would be no SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink, etc without Elon Musk. Period. I don't get why people must insist on what a terrible personality he has (often based on gossip and outright lies).
Starlink was a fantastic way to ensure long term high profitability, and is set to bring them $6.6bn this year alone. For some context the Falcon 9 development costs were estimated by Nasa to be around $300 million, and Starship's development is estimated to going to have cost anywhere from $5-$10 billion by the time its fully operational.
Starlink's profitability is what's going to make it possible for some monumentally huge projects once Starship is in full swing.
In terms of Elons involvement in SpaceX it does seem to be a bit more than just a money making venture for him.
The comment starts out with "long term high profitability", then offers "bring them 6.6B", and the central proposition of the comment is extremely high Starlink profits allows for free moonshots.
6.6B is a recent revenue projection, not profit.[1]
Their finance people say it's unprofitable, still. (off the record) [2]
Rooting for them and it will be profitable IMHO, but I've never heard any reporting it's profitable.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1co60j0/starl...
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-04-10/is-elon-m...
Note: I don't have a point, I'm just relying content!
Note #2: *your
This popular meme is all a gross exaggeration.
Your comment wouldn't be so bad if you had taken out the obvious provocations ("awful personality traits" etc.), but in any case it flew too close to the planet Musk and the whole thread got sucked in. We don't want to die that way.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40589501.)
Alas, my efforts were in vain.
Ultimately there's no way to win with these.
I caught NPR recently cutting and pasting a white house press release with zero journalism or commentary. Or their health blog which now routinely has stories like "measurements of height have historically been uses to marginalize short people, should doctors even measure it anymore?"
I literally only get my news from what I randomly hear off forums like this. And I guarantee I'll beat anyone on a quiz of actual facts about world news. (e.g. after SBF was convicted, not before.)
Put your money where your mouth is - prediction markets or some other fair debate. I personally would take the other side of that bet if contrarianism is your default.
All news services do this. And it already fragments and destroys and hope of really talking about the news in a healthy manner IMHO.
Guessing it's everyone that's not in the UK.
It might not be obvious to those within the UK or maybe further afield if reading articles on relatively neutral topics like science or climate, but the BBC is a bulwark of UK Government political influence and Oxbridge sensibilities.
> Its work is funded principally by an annual television licence fee which is charged to all British households, companies, and organisations using any type of equipment to receive or record live television broadcasts or to use the BBC's streaming service, iPlayer. The fee is set by the British Government, agreed by Parliament, and is used to fund the BBC's radio, TV, and online services covering the nations and regions of the UK. Since 1 April 2014, it has also funded the BBC World Service (launched in 1932 as the BBC Empire Service), which broadcasts in 28 languages and provides comprehensive TV, radio, and online services in Arabic and Persian.