Hondas in Space 228
mikejz84 writes "Fast Company takes a look at SpaceX's attempt to challenge the high cost of space. This cost cutting philosophy includes buying equipment on eBay, looking to milk trucks for tank design ideas, and rummaging though junk yards. CEO Elon Musk remarks 'A Ferrari is a very expensive car. It is not reliable. But I would bet you 1,000-to-1 that if you bought a Honda Civic that that sucker will not break down in the first year of operation. You can have a cheap car that's reliable, and the same applies to rockets.'"
Re:It is not about how much rocket costs.. (Score:3, Insightful)
the analogy sucks though, and who the hell would be stupid enough to bet that a new car wouldn't break, be it a honda, vw, mercedes-benz, jaguar or a ford.
Re:It is not about how much rocket costs.. (Score:2, Insightful)
So maintainance is really not the prime concern. IMO the real concern would be to get the rockets into space, which in itself would be a great achievement.
um, car's aren't rockets... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It is not about how much rocket costs.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Stereotypes (Score:2, Insightful)
To the rockets - think of mass production is always cheaper per unit, but more expensive in total. If you spend country budget it is one thing, if you sell to a market - it's another. Trick here is to create a market.
Re:Red index fingers: the hip new way to protest B (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Stereotypes (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Yeah but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It is not about how much rocket costs.. (Score:3, Insightful)
The same is true about the Kalashnikov, it was build simple and reliable because having it work in any conditions was essential. You can drag it though mud, snow and sand and it will still shoot. While at the same time the more modern M16 rifle would get jammed in the Vietnamese jungle.
But, I don't think that the analogy of Honda would work, because there is still a trade-off between cheap and reliable. The cost of having well-trained engineers and designers and testing does cost money.
A Rocket a Day Keeps the High Costs Away (Score:4, Insightful)
In SpaceX's case, the reusability aspect with ocean recovery of parts means a single rocket is not going to be cycled through the entire launch operation in a day even though it is theoretically possible to do so with an ocean launch system. However, with a small fleet of vehicles, it might be feasible to get the whole system cranking out a couple of launches a week.
That's when it starts to look like an aerospace "Honda" since you start applying Deming's statistical methods [signweb.com] to the operation.
Experience Curves Explain This (Score:4, Insightful)
An "experience curve" is a way of explaining that the price per unit for any device decreases with the sum of the production repititions.
This means that it's the area under the curve that matters, the total number of produced items. A Wikipedia article explains it here [wikipedia.org].
The multiplier for how much it decreases obviously varies with the device. Any number of examples abound. For one, Photovoltaic cells are decreasing in per-unit price in good accordance with the sum of the cells ever produced. The idea of the government purchasing or subsidizing the purchase of items (examples: ethanol, PV-cells) fits in nicely to this function.
Rockets have not followed the curve because artificial limits (trade secrets, military secrecy, launch licenses, technology transfer) and purchasing uncertainties (NASA defending their turf) has clamped down on information transfer. If info flows freely, everyone benefits from cheaper devices.
This may not be what we want. Rocket tech = missle tech = N. Korea lobbing a nuke at us = maybe we'd better not publish the cheap rocket designs in Popular Science today, eh? (fearmongering).
Check out the wikipedia article link above, you'll see it directly applies to this situation.
--Kevin
Hondas jets (Score:2, Insightful)
I would say one day we'll see a variety of privately manufactured space travelling vehicles,at least intra solar system/near space variety, and probably sooner than most folks think, if they can keep production of fuels up at a reasonable cost over the next several decades, along with just general manufacturing, seeing as how that is so closely tied to oil as well. That is going to be the largest technological challenge that we all face really, peak oil and what to do about it. Well, that's my opinion, put it that way. I think that there already exists enough tech right now to make a Model A generic rocket good enough for some limited space travel, just not a lot of call for it, but it's getting closer. You get dudes like branson combined with rutan and mass production and Q and A out of asia and combine all that sort of interest and you'll see private space travel, at least to limited short term orbital flights, probably within a couple of decades, maybe even sooner. That nut has been cracked, just needs oil to stabilise and more research on alternative fuels and on replacing oil "stuff" here on the ground with other forms of alternative enerrgy so that oil can be used for the more energy dense and expensive applications such as "flight" in general speaking terms.
Re:Think about the Soyuz... the AK47... (Score:2, Insightful)
It's silly to nitpick on the AK's accuracy when it's still more accurate than anyone holding it. Better things to nitpick would be the wood stock, the weight, the exposed gas system, the way it can't keep the bolt locked in the open position or the awkward safety. Those are the real tradeoffs that it took in it's design.
But the point is that when you're making a design for something you want to do a certain thing, it's ok to diss all those aspects that aren't all that important to the design goal. Who cares if it's a little heavy, has a cheap stock, or it can't keep the bolt open? Of course it'll have shortcomings, but those aren't really relevant if you do it right. Same thing applies to just about any design concept.
Re:Stereotypes (Score:3, Insightful)
My Nissan 240SX has over 263,000 miles on it and still pulls strong. The cost of purchasing and maintaining this vehicle is less than the cost to maintain the ferrari over the same number of miles. The car does less than even a Ferrari 308 GT, but I (and previous owners) have driven the piss out of it and sometimes neglected maintenance on it, such as when we were too poor to perform it, and it has reacted admirably.
Ferraris are not engineered primarily for reliability, because that is not their owners' primary goal. They can afford to repair the cars, so they buy them even though they are not all that reliable. They COULD be buying an Acura NSX, which does nearly the same stuff, but they want a Ferrari. Nothing wrong with that, I'd like to have one too, but it's simply not as reliable as a Japanese import.
Re:um, car's aren't rockets... (Score:3, Insightful)
Bullshit.
The Honda S2000's engine is making more horsepower per litre of displacement than any other mass-produced normally aspirated engine on the market, including every single Ferrari engine. The Acura RSX engine also makes more HP per litre than every Ferrari engine.
It has absolutely nothing to do with "pushing the envelope," and everything to do with volume production. It's a lot easier -- and a lot more IMPORTANT -- to iron out the bugs when you make 50,000 than if you make 1,000.
People don't buy Ferraris for their reliability. They buy them because they have a big prancing horse emblem on the hood and exude sex appeal like only a piece of fine Italian machinery can.
The original analogy was flawed at best. Science doesn't give a crap what brand name is on the rocket -- they just want the reliability at a low cost.
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