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Comment by UnoriginalGuy | Hacker News Reader

And he was wrong. They had 4 successful launches since then. Plus it seems unprofessional to be bad mouthing a competitor like that in public.

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Which is now good for an 80% success rate. And from the video it certainly seems like an engine failure is the most likely scenario. I think if anything Musk is looking pretty vindicated now.

No comment on the unprofessionalism bit. I don't disagree, but then it's hardly uncommon in high tech either.

Here's his statement on twitter from today: "Sorry to hear about the @OrbitalSciences launch. Hope they recover soon"

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/527247155954610176

Was he speaking facts? Because if they were using rockets made in the 60s - he's not really badmouthing them as much as he is making public facts.

Comparing their rockets to "the punchline of a joke" is definitely bad mouthing, just factual badmouthing.

Despite that, I don't blame him. Being factual is what's important.

And of course it's ridiculous that engines like NK-33 are considered bad just because they sit in a hangar for some 40+ years :) . It's not milk, they aren't that easily spoiled. Elon just used this time reference to make the decision look good - for somebody who doesn't know better.

So factually he's right - but also misses the point. Here I should admit that Elon says more than he does - but he does quite a bit too, so kudos to his successes - Merlin-1D is a great engine.

It's not that they've been sitting in a hangar for decades so much as that we've gotten a lot better at building engines. Presumably modern designs have a lot lower catastrophic fault probability.

> And of course it's ridiculous that engines like NK-33 are considered bad just because they sit in a hangar for some 40+ years

I took his comment to be more in the "that's your business model? buying and selling old Russian hardware?" vein. It's not that the hardware is bad, per se.

Although the hardware might be bad. I imagine they're looking into that...

I think technically engines were manufactured in early '70s - like, in 1974? Definitely weren't stored in Siberia - Russia has quite sizable European part, no need to go to Siberia if you want to hide about 70 engines from nemesis Glushko's eye...

They were stored in Samara, Russia. Maps say that is in Siberia.

Samara is in european part of Russia. Siberia starts from Novosibirsk, it's about 2k miles to East from Samara.

> Siberia starts from Novosibirsk, it's about 2k miles to East from Samara.

Omsk is in Siberia and it's only 1000 miles away from Samara.

Anyway, Los Angeles is not in Oregon, Moscow is not in Germany, and Samara is not in Siberia.

> They were stored in Samara, Russia. Maps say that is in Siberia.

Samara is not in Siberia. It is in the Volga Federal District, which is west of the Urals and therefore in European Russia.

In fact, Samara is 1000 miles away from Siberia. Even for Russia, that's still quite a distance.

What exactly was he wrong about?

Well, if you can take 80% as a success rate at a quarter the cost per launch due to re-using old parts, and build that into your business model somehow (insurance, assurance, whatever and however it might be done), then maybe it can be viable as opposed to using new materials and expensive innovation to get a more reliable result at a higher cost.

I'm not arguing for that business strategy; I think it would not be successful. I also don't think that re-using old rocket parts actually reduces cost to orbit significantly (I haven't looked at the numbers). I also don't think that what I think matters a whole lot.

However, it's worth a discussion beyond simply rejecting the model at face value.

It's not only a cost issue - those old engines have performance characteristics that (in some areas) outperform anything that they could buy today off-shelf (as much as "off-shelf" exists for rocket engines), and developing a completely new model would likely be even less reliable than the current situation.

It was also part of a larger conversation about how little rocket and aerospace technology has advanced since the 60's because they're afraid of trying anything new.

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