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Comment by drzaiusapelord | Hacker News Reader

Its hopeless for the ESA. On one hand you have a super nimble startup vs a nationalized industry whose decisions makers span different countries, all of whom have a political dog in this fight. SpaceX's biggest advantage isn't Musk or its team, its that its not hamstrung by the Congress and Senate on how to do things and historically their demands to move pork into their home states.

Nor is the air force demanding design requirements like they did with the shuttle.

Too many cooks for the ESA.

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This comment would be a lot more worthwhile if you could point to specific instances.

It's not that I find it terribly implausible, but I really get sick of rhetoric thrown around without any supporting details. As is it's just an anti-government rant.

Have you ever wondered why Mission Control is in Houston rather than where the rockets take off from? It's inconvenient, but they needed the vote of a Texan senator who was on an important committee, so they moved mission control to Texas.

Do you have any source that spells this out?

Reading wikipedia, I get a fairly different story. I did a short search for other versions, but mostly just found inaccurate yahoo-answer type sites.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyndon_B._Johnson_Space_Center#...

I'm sure it's mentioned in Moon Shot[1]. Most books about the space race mention it. Houston was just one of several proposed locations which met NASA's official specifications for a mission control site.

One of those specifications was the minimum distance between mission control and the launch site. That specification was revised upward so that it just barely excluded the then-leading site after Rice University agreed to donate the land. It doesn't take a Von Braun to figure out what happened.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_Shot

That's completely different than what the other poster (Symmetry) claimed -- that they otherwise would have been in the same location.

That politics plays into the decision making process of which site to use isn't too shocking, but Symmetry was claiming that the very creation of that site was political.

http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4201/ch12-3.htm

NASA denied there was political influence, but it's hard to say since the stars lined up perfectly for them.

IIRC, parts of the shuttle were manufactured in about 400 different electoral districts of the USA. It's extremely unlikely all the best prices were that evenly distributed.

Indeed the infamous o-rings sealed connections between pieces which logically wouldn't have been separate.

I believe this is incorrect. If I remember correctly, transport was not the only issue with building the solid rocket boosters in one piece: physically pouring a solid rocket motor of that size was infeasible.

I of course don't remember the details so I looked them up. Here's an interesting document that doesn't actually go into the fundamental question of why the engines were built in one place, partially assembled in another, then snapped together in a third:

http://www.cedengineering.com/upload/Ethics%20Challenger%20D...

The point being that if the rockets were welded and fueled near the launch pad there would have been no need for o-rings. The reason for o-rings was that cylinders full of fuel needed to be shipped around and welding them together would have meant too big a lump of explosives. Casting a big engine had nothing to do with it.

That's definitely part of the B1-B program.

It's true. Just look at the state of NASA's next generation space architecture. Instead of designing an architecture based on performance and economics, they are building a large rocket that will keep employees at Kennedy Space Center and Johnson Space Center working, even though there are neither the funds or demand for such a rocket. Space Agencies are less concerned about the market than they are satisfying the policymakers that fund them.

This is a great read: http://www.idlewords.com/2005/08/a_rocket_to_nowhere.htm . Talks about how the Air Force requirements for launching spy satellites, the Cold War and SDI madness affected NASA's Shuttle design.

I wouldn't make of it a shallow "government is incompetent by nature" argument, of course. For instance, the Apollo program was a complete success. It just turns out that massive, complex "enterprisey" projects lacking both focus on a clearly defined objective, and strong leadership with a vision, go badly. Not that unexpected in hindsight, I guess.

One such instance, from the article:

France, which has traditionally led the launcher effort in Europe, wants development on a next-generation Ariane - often dubbed Ariane 6 - to start immediately. This would incorporate cheaper components and fabrication methods.

But Germany, the other major player within Esa, wants the current vehicle upgraded first before moving to a completely fresh design.

Well, the difference in this case is a) Airbus provided a in it's early days a way for carriers to put presure on Boeing and b) that Airbus is a defacto french company (forget about all the crap of being french-german blablabla), Airbus is french.

But when you see hiw much damage was done by to-little-to-late political infighting going on in and around Airbus / EADS the situation would be a lot different without it. Examples include the wiring issues on the A380, engine issues on the A400M, redundant fighter development with the Eurofighter and the Rafale and various issues regarding the multinational helicopters like the Tiger and the NH90 (which mean NATO Helicopter of the 90s, 1990 to be exact...).

What makes the situation even more difficult for Ariane Space and ESA is the fact that space transportation is to a huge part a state run business, one example includes the european satellite navigation system Gallileo. And the very much extends to ESA and Ariane. In most of this cases it boils down to two different, yet closly related things: culteral difference and political powerplays. The later on all levels, management and politics.

Just as an example, germans (I'm german) tend to somewhat over-engineer things. A prime exaple in this case is the gradual evolution of Ariane 5. Projects like this a great for the industry implementing them (in the old market place without any feasable alternative, or very few of them). And it's german engineer speaking. Intheory he might be right since it reduces risk. But the main assumption this concept builds on is the existance of the political commitment to it over the long run. It could be there at the beginning, but then culteral differences will kick in.

And this how it most likely will play out (if Ariane 5ME gets its go):

Big start, Ariane Space, EADS and ESA all working together (at least as far as PR goes). Then there will be a lot of behind the door bickering about work-share (which the franch will certainly win since Germany is only concerned with building cars that go fast in a straight line). To make it not to obvious, the German part will get some work that might even look great on paper, but the actaul decisions will be met in France (and since the french and germans have the trouble understanding each other, these decisions will miss some important points, like wiring...).

Once this setting is is put in place (read in around 2 - 3 years after the launch) Ariane 5ME will be to late, so it will more be like Ariane 6 in disguise (that won't be comunicated like this, of course. It will more likely be put as anecessary adaption to changed sircumstances or somethuing like that). The main reason why it wouldn't be reset is that a reset would require a new battle to get the same power balance, but right now you already have the green light to go ahead. Plus, even if a reset would yield the more or less same french-german balance, the people will be different. So everybody stick to his chair.

And then, the franch are going to get there Ariane 6 with some years of delay and a different naem in the worng programm with around half the people working on a different rocket. And since the franch are very much content with ahvning won yet another political battle without the other side realizing it there will be a lot of cheers and champagne and stuff.

Only the you end up with a late, over budget, under spec rocket and expensive launch costs.

And now compare that to SpaceX ( as an example) using state funded launches to develop state-of the art rockets in a much shorter time frame and yields much cheaper launch costs.

I will go even further than Musk and say no matter what Ariane Space is doing (Ariane 5ME or Arinae 6), they will loose as long as it is a franch-german-pan-euorpean endeavour. And this will even further marginalize the euopean space industry, which is the last thing both France Germany want.

The only thing worse than a nationalized industry is a multi-nationalized industry.

While that seems obviously true, it may not always be e.g. Airbus vs Boeing[0]

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Airbus-boeing_deliverycomp...

Boeing Commercial is essentially multinational for production (especially on the 777 and even more so 787). Huge amounts of work are done in Japan, other parts from other places.

For now at least, I wish SpaceX success. I also wish some nationalist scumbag in US Congress do not try to control this industry with some type of weapon regulation.

In all fairness, regulating rockets that can put something in orbit is probably a good idea. A Falcon 9 is basically an ballistic missile that can drop a nuclear weapon (even a giant, heavy north korean nuke) anywhere on the globe (from any direction, see Fractional Orbital Bombardment). The ability to buy falcon 9's on the open market would greatly decrease the cost of developing a nuclear deterrent (since you don't need to develop a delivery system and you don't have miniaturize your warhead) likely leading to a large number of states starting nuclear weapons programs.

This is the reason the US and USSR worked so hard to kill cheap commercial space flight in the 1980's.

My understanding is they're already regulated under export control. SpaceX would probably need an export license from Congress to ship Falcon 9s out of the country. This is highly unlikely to ever happen for the reasons you state.

What about something that looked like a regular comms satellite but in fact was something completely different? Does SpaceX get to inspect the guts of what they launch?

I think it is highly unlikely that spacex or anyone else disassembles and reverse engineers the satellites they are paid to launch.

Maybe they look for a reentry shield and radioactive emissions or something, but I don't think it is much of a risk since the blowback from trying to sneak a weapon into space would immense, the risk of discovery is high (satellites weight much less than nukes or kinetic weapons) and you will have just given the world community all the evidence it needs to prove you did it (nuclear weapons and satelite payloads are very traceable).

Of course someone could get a satellite launched that maybe has enough fuel to change orbits slightly and could be used as a weapon against the space station or other orbital assets. The difference between a satellite and an orbital missile is software and maybe a small delta in fuel.

Fair point, but what I was trying to say, and did not said because I only wrote a single small paragraph, is that I fear a nationalistic bill passing in American congress that basically only allows american companies/scientific projects using SpaceX services.

About scientific projects I doubt it will ever happen because you can simply find a group of American researchers to collaborate who probably would be open if the research advance their field, about companies I'm less sure, they can simply put extra regulations because of idiotic nationalism, for example do not allow a German company to use a Falcon rocket because it has sold some type of cheap telecommunications equipment to Cuba for example.

I think no one that is sane will enjoy SpaceX doing clearance sales of old rockets to warlords in Somalia.

EDIT: As I understand SpaceX do not intend to sell rockets but just the service of having rockets and selling launches. But I can be wrong about that.

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