I really am glad that SpaceX exists, and I want them to be successful. To me, it represents a grand intersection of my technical interests, the dream of space travel that was instilled in me since I was a child, and my moral belief that government has no place in this (nor in many other things).
SpaceX is making progress toward real commercial access to orbit. But is there any work being done by business farther out than that?
I think government space flight is a dead end, but for economic reasons foremost.
NASA can only take a politically-bounded slice of a fixed size tax pie. It spends the money it was allocated and comes back with empty hands. Unless the USA is in a military-driven space race with a superpower rival, it's going to get the crumbs and it has no way of getting more than that. Success does not breed success, only photo-ops. If the photo-ops get stale, success can breed apathy and abandonment.
A commercial space company comes back from each successful flight with more money than it set out. It causes the economy to grow, actually increasing the size of the pie, and the slice it gets is investment-bounded. Success will bring more investment. There is no political upper limit on how high it can scale.
An interplanetary culture is going to require utterly enormous amounts of wealth by modern standards - only commerce has the potential to create that much wealth.
I just hope we can get started with the asteroid mining for rare earth metals before we run out of the rare earth metals to build computers that will get us there.
We've had real commercial access to orbit for over 20 years. The solution SpaceX is offering now however is to give companies (or god-forbid, individuals) a much cheaper ticket to space, albeit at a much lower probability of that cargo actually getting there.
Rocket launching will always be an expensive endeavor. It's the nature of the business. The interesting question now is whether the chance your cargo getting to space is proportional to cost, and is that something you're willing to risk as a customer.
I have a slightly more pessimistic outlook on SpaceX, but I'll admit that I'm slightly biased.
My dad has worked on the Delta, Atlas, and Titan rockets close to 30 years. These rockets are expensive (an order of magnitude more than SpaceX), but they can do one thing that SpaceX can't: guarantee success. If you had to put up sensitive cargo (commercial or military) that costs on the order of $100 million (and sometimes much much more), would you entrust a fledgling company with its sparse mission success record or the more established company with proven success? And if you were to hop on a rocket, would you pick the one that had a severe failure within the past few years, or one that has been operating as engineered for the past 20-30 years?
Rocket launching doesn't go by the typical startup mantra. Mistakes are very real, very expensive, and have much more human impact.
SpaceX seems more to me like fast food: their efficiency is awe-inspiring, but I worry at what significant cost?
I used to work on the Atlas V as well.. and I applaud SpaceX's efforts. The reliability of traditional launch vehicles like the Delta and Atlas have come at the cost of innovation. The fundamental design hasn't changed in decades. Private efforts like SpaceX promise a return to innovation.
Low-cost launches make it possible to try experiments that would just be untenable on traditional launch vehicles. Lower costs lead to more innovation, at the expense of some (acceptable) risk.
I'd hop on a SpaceX launch vehicle tomorrow. Seriously. The opportunity to go to space is too compelling -- I'm willing to take the risk, and I'm sure many other people would as well. I really hope this can usher in a new era of manned space exploration.
Your argument holds well for military and large commercial payloads, though -- When the cost of the payload approaches the cost of the launch (100-500MM+), it makes sense to fly on the most proven hardware.
> And if you were to hop on a rocket, would you pick the one that had a severe failure within the past few years, or one that has been operating as engineered for the past 20-30 years?
Except that that's not the choice that I have. My choice is between going up on a rocket with a 5% chance of failure or not going at all.
Yes, there are folks who won't take that 5% chance, but there are a lot that will.
Well, I think the failure rate is somewhere around 60% not 5% (I think out of the 5 Falcon 1 launches, only 2 succeeded). But over time, that figure will go down dramatically as they perfect their model (hopefully). Anyways, if you really wanted to catch a flight to space there are other options. It's reported that you can buy a seat on the Russian Soyuz which is very reliable. If you want to go for lower earth orbit, then those distances are easier and cheaper to reach, and I believe there are other commercial craft right now.
One thing that is often overlooked is that I think current aerospace companies have regulated profit margins if they do business with the government. So they don't have the incentive to make cheaper space craft even if they thought it would be a good idea. I'm not sure if SpaceX are subject to those same laws and regulations. But it would be a tragedy if they were able to operate with lower standards.
On SpaceX's failure rate, I think I should point out that it was the first 3 that failed, and have learned from each failure. There are too few launches to do statistics on, but it doesn't seem to me that we can infer from past events that the 6th launch has a 60% failure rate.
Cost plus doesn't seem to be helping the situation, but the fact that so much of American space technology is ITAR-controlled seems to be far more detrimental. For those that don't know, ITAR[1] effectively prevents critical spacecraft components from being exported to non-US persons, and even the technical details must be kept secret. All this means is that other countries design and build their own components (including software) from scratch, and American companies can't even compete with them in non-US markets.
ITAR is a major hassle, but the consequences are too severe for any company or individual to try to take matters into their own hands (i.e. release ITAR stuff anyways). There needs to be legislation to fix this.
> Anyways, if you really wanted to catch a flight to space there are other options. It's reported that you can buy a seat on the Russian Soyuz which is very reliable.
Soyuz was $20M before they raised their prices.
> If you want to go for lower earth orbit, then those distances are easier and cheaper to reach, and I believe there are other commercial craft right now.
Virgin Space still hasn't flown so who are you thinking of?
The expertise of the SpaceX people I've known is impressive. I think it's too early to tell whether the SpaceX advantages (dropping cost-plus, plus incorporating 50 years of rocketry experience) will result in better technology. There are lots of reasons to suppose it will.
I'm not sure if this is actually true or not, but when those SpaceX flights failed, I sent the articles to my dad for his interpretation (currently works on the Atlas rockets). His response was somewhat comical: "Oh yea, those were mistakes we made 20 years ago. Welcome to the business." heh.
It seems that you have some knowledge in this area. Sometimes people who have know-how get bogged down by the limitation of current state of technology.
It then requires an outsider to come in with a fresh perspective and fire in the belly. Yes, they may fail hundreds of time, but there is a chance that during the process they can do a breakthrough which the well funded gov labs had overlooked.
If it has not worked for past 30 years (cheap space travel), i bet it is a good idea to stoke up these innovative companies and see the results.
>>If you had to put up sensitive cargo (commercial or military) that costs on the order of $100 million
Some payloads will always be that expensive.
But I've seen quite knowledgeable people (Henry Spencer etc) who argued that the launch costs are driving the cargo costs. With a launch cost of X 000 dollars/lbs, then you have a large incentive to remove weight.
As I understand it, some problems can be solved easily if you can throw weight at them (e.g. temperature control, vibrations?). You can earn money by weight addition reusing common satellite platforms, etc.
So, as I've understood it, lower prices on launch will lower payload costs.
Do you have any more detail on the operational efficiency or profitability of Spacex? I read your comment before the article; which didn't provide much detail on this.
Despite Musk's obvious vested interest, he's spot on here. The achievements of Musk at SpaceX, John Carmack at Armadillo and Burt Rutan at Scaled are impressive enough on their own merits. Consider that all 3 companies combined are spending a tiny fraction of what was being thrown at Orion and there's no contest.
The big aerospace companies seem to have lost their way - look at the Joint Strike Fighter or 787 debacles for example. Massive delays and cost overruns made sense under NASA's "cost plus" funding model. They need to get back to the "internal startup" philosophy exemplified by Skunkworks. Competitive commercial funding is the best way to get there.
I was slightly hopeful as I looked into their careers section. There are 99 open jobs apparently, which is great! And I'm just graduating with a BS in mechanical engineering, and they need interns doing tedious tasks as much as any other company right?
But of course, due to government regulations, they only hire US citizens and permanent residents. Unfortunately, that rules me out of even the slightest chance. Oh well..
The U.S. space program is a source of tremendous prestige to the U.S. government. People whose plans depend on the U.S. government's voluntarily letting private companies take over leadership of parts of the space enterprise should be aware of the strength of the government's need for prestige. (Prestige helps maintain moral legitimacy, which is necessary in the long term for the continued ability of exercise power.)
Wow, 50 more billions was needed to develop Ares?!
If USA is in dire need of prestige that doesn't come from its industry, why not put more money(+) into research to eradicate diseases of the world's poor, like malaria? Oh wait, an industrialist is already doing that...
Why not e.g. give a few billions to DARPA for energy and health research? The USA should get both prestige and real jobs from that.
(+) Say, a tenth of the money earned from the cost difference between Ares and the private alternatives being built now?
While I don't disagree with canceling the current tactical plan ("let's build Ares/Orion"), I wish he hadn't canceled the current vision ("let's return to the Moon/go to Mars"). Maybe the two were inextricably linked, but seems like whatever efficiency we gain through privatization could just as easily be squandered by a NASA stumbling around without a purpose or motivation.
...which is a call for the next "Moon landing" scale project for the US to back. So at least at some level they're aware that these sorts of visions are needed, and (possibly quite correctly) the Moon return and Mars landing wasn't it.
Summary: Orion wasn't going to work, so it's good Obama canceled it. He's looking forward to private industry solving all the problems while NASA works on interplanetary stuff. He thinks the president's upcoming speech about space is going to be important, so to stay tuned for it.
It's interesting that after so many years they are actually going back to the old capsule design. I guess people are starting to realize that the Space Shuttle program may not have been actually worth it when you consider Saturn V's near 100% mission success and the fact that the Space Shuttle had two catastrophic failures.
The Space Shuttle program has had 130 launches. The crew died twice. That's a failure rate of around 1.5%. The Apollo program had 11 launches and no loss of life... as long as you don't count the three astronauts who died on the ground in the Apollo 1 fire.
Assuming the same failure rate of 1.5%: (1 - 0.015)^11 = 0.84. That means that if the Apollo program was just as (un)safe as the Space Shuttle program, we would have an 83% chance of seeing no loss of life in the Apollo missions.
The Apollo program had the advantage of using big dumb boosters with no reusable parts, but the Space Shuttle program got to use newer materials and better engineering techniques. I'd estimate both were about equally unsafe. A 1% chance of death is way too high for any sort of civilian transportation. A simpler design (capsule + big dumb booster) with modern engineering and materials would be much safer than both.
You make some interesting points. I'm not sure what the failure rate would have been if the Apollo program were allowed to continue with the same design (albeit better materials and engineering), but its probably incorrect to assume it would be the same for the two craft because they are fairly different designs and have different physics (i.e Shuttle rocking back and forth before launch is due to its "piggybacking").
However the two most significant design changes that would have reflected far different failure rates are: 1) Change in fuel type and 2) Presence of an abort sequence.
1) In the Apollo design, the rocket was liquid propelled, thus it could have been shut off (theoretically) at any point in the launch sequence. The Space Shuttle by contrast has Solid Rocket Boosters, which once lit, do not turn off.
2) The Apollo rocket had an escape rocket mounted to the capsule that could have been fired and brought the crew to safety in the event that 1) did not occur. The Space Shuttle by contrast cannot enter into an abort sequence until those SRB's are done firing.
Apollo 1 should count. Gus Grissom had been to space twice. Ed White once. They were the top candidates in the program at the time. The accident was clearly related to space exploration and the Apollo program. When we lost those astronauts it directly effected the outcome of the Apollo program since they were going to continue to actively participate in future missions. [1]
As for the space shuttle, it is a failure of both complexity and the inability to adapt. Had it been either less complex or more adaptable it would have had a different fate.
All of that being said it was designed to last 10 years or 100 missions[2]. That should be read whichever comes first. So all the reliability engineering that was run on the parts in the 70s did not assume the same parts would still be in use in the 00s. Such an accident should be expected when using hardware that was designed to have been retired over 10 years ago.
My own take on it is the Apollo program was more dangerous and we were relatively lucky. Meanwhile the shuttle program was safer yet we didn't follow our own rules and got burned. Whether it's launching outside of recommended temperatures or running shuttles for twice as long as they were designed for...
I watched it, and you should, too. It was a great speech.
The best summary I can come up with:
* Pres. Obama is really passionate about the space program (or at least talks like he is)
* His earliest memory is waving a flag as astronauts visited Hawaii
* He has a picture of Jupiter taken by the Hubble hanging in his private office
* He's increasing NASA's budget
* He's cutting Constellation and re-purposing Orion (2 failing programs, IMO)
* He wants to see NASA to put humans farther into deep space
* He wants to extend the life of the ISS by >5 years
* He wants to send humans to an asteroid
* He wants to send a human into a Mars orbit and back by 2030
* Next up, landing on Mars.
* He's going to have a plan to give current (aka soon-to-be-former) shuttle engineers jobs by August 15.
* He (or his speech writers) really like random space trivia
I don't agree with Obama very much, but this was a good decision. Bush clearly created this program in a quest to have his Kennedy-to-the-moon-the-cost-be-damned moment and it needed to be killed.
SpaceX is making progress toward real commercial access to orbit. But is there any work being done by business farther out than that?