SpaceX Falcon 9 Relatively Cheap Compared To NASA's New Pad 352
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Motherboard.tv:
"As debate over the future of spaceflight rages on — and as the axe all but falls on NASA's mission back to the moon and beyond — the successful launch of SpaceX's Falcon 9 two weeks ago proved at least one of the virtues of the private option: it's a heckuva lot cheaper than government-funded rides to space. In fact, the whole system was built for less than the cost of the service tower that was to be used for NASA's proposed future spaceflight vehicle (yup, the service tower is finished, but the rocket isn't, and the whole program may well be canceled anyway)."
CEO Elon Musk spoke recently about some of the ways SpaceX finds to cut costs in the construction of their rockets.
Re:Cut costs, sure. (Score:5, Insightful)
Will these cheaper options be more efficient, or just cheaper?
More efficient.
Between government salaries, the way they get contracts, how NASA's budget is dependent on pork barrel spending, NASA having to put some projects in certain states to get votes from Congressmen for a budget, price gouging by contractors, etc...
Just eliminating Congress from the loop is going to save billions. Add in businessmen/engineers and you have a much more efficient space program.
Safety? We'll see if it's reduced. But I have a feeling there won't be change in safety record.
Ares = manrated, Falcon = cargo. (Score:2, Insightful)
As simple as that.
While I agree that often cost of private enterprise is much lower than a government one, one needs to compare apples to apples to be fair.
If it's only about the cost, give the money (Score:5, Insightful)
If it's only about the cost, give the money to Russians. If you pay a little more, they'll even let you have the blueprints for stuff. They've been launching stuff into space on the cheap for decades now.
Re:Cut costs, sure. (Score:4, Insightful)
NASA sure did great things, but "track record"? As compared to? Which other venture is your baseline?
Re:Cut costs, sure. (Score:4, Insightful)
It's great that they cut costs and all, but what about those pesky corners? I'm all for a private space industry, but NASA has a pretty darn good track record of performance to back up their expenditures. Will these cheaper options be more efficient, or just cheaper?
Are we talking about the same NASA that proceeded with a shuttle launch when the temperature was too cold, when they knew that certain very highly engineered O-Rings were likely to fail, instead of scrubbing the launch because it's expensive to do it all over again? The same NASA that knew they'd be launching in cold weather but accepted specs for these parts that would fail under those conditions rather than spending more money to come up with parts that would operate under the actual operating conditions? Or is this some other NASA?
Re:About to get more expensive! (Score:5, Insightful)
The Falcon-9 is about to get 50% more expensive.
Musk has just proposed to NASA that Space-X will fly only two demonstration flights of Falcon-9, instead of three... but he still wants to be paid for all three.
I read TFA you linked and you make it sound all evil. If they can prove everything in two flights (three if you count the first launch) then good for them, they should get paid for not fucking up. I guess you'd rather just waste everyones time having an extra flight instead of moving forward and getting shit done. I'd rather move forward and start suppling the station instead of flying by it a few times and waving...
Re:Ares = manrated, Falcon = cargo. (Score:3, Insightful)
And the operational history of the Shuttle program shows that "manrated" = meaningless.
Re:About to get more expensive! (Score:2, Insightful)
Well, the deal was for certain things to be accomplished and not just to launch another rocket. If they can achieve the next to goals of the COTS missions why shouldn't they get paid?
Re:Ares = manrated, Falcon = cargo. (Score:1, Insightful)
Falcon isn't manrated yet, but the dragon capsule is intended to carry people, so I assume it will be eventually. And if it's "eventually" we're talking about, ares isn't manrated yet either. And at the current rate (even if the budget wasn't axed) Falcon will be ready sooner and for less money.
Re:Cut costs, sure. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Cut costs, sure. (Score:1, Insightful)
NASA sure did great things, but "track record"? As compared to? Which other venture is your baseline?
Well, let's see. The space shuttle had 25 launches before its first launch failure. That's a record that has never been equalled by any other venture. As a general thing, new launchers fail a couple of times before they achieve reliability. The only exception to that rule-- so far-- has been the vehicles NASA developed.
So, yes, I'd call this a track record. When Falcon-9 makes 25 flights in a row without failure, they'll have a track record, too. (So far Space-X's record is 3 for 6, by the way.)
Musk may be the Henry Ford of space travel. (Score:5, Insightful)
What Elon Musk is doing is similar to the assembly line process Henry Ford brought to the automotive industry.
Instead of each item being lovingly hand-crafted by thousands of pork-fueled constituents, SpaceX is making a rocket factory. It's fantastic.
Moon-Mars was never more than a pipe dream... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:About to get more expensive! (Score:2, Insightful)
That's a rather single-sided interpretation of that article (though I'm not saying it's wrong).
I'll accept "not wrong."
The contract was for three flights. He's now proposing to do two flights, and says "but of course we will be paid the full contract."
That's fifty percent more expensive.
If he had said "we can demonstrate what we need to demonstrate in two flights, and we propose saving the government money by flying one less flight"---I would have been cheering. But when he says "we will take the money but won't do the flights that we signed a contract to do"-- that's not unacceptable. He's saying "We'll do less than we contracted, which will save us money, and we pocket the difference."
I have to bow to his awesome ability to spin the facts. He's saying "how about we won't do what we signed the contract to do, but still get the money..." and three different people post to say "sure, that sounds reasonable."
Re:Cut costs, sure. (Score:4, Insightful)
No one in government gains anything by being efficient.
This is one key problem of letting government solve any problem. You better have exhausted
all possible alternate approaches first. The problem should really be "too big for anyone"
else because you know that any solution created by beaurocrats is going to have serious
inherent drawbacks.
Elon Musk's example about different engine technologies in the same rocket is the sort
of thing that even goes back to Apollo 13.
No one tries "efficient" because no one is motivated and it would actually interefere
with their personal fiefdom building.
Eventually, any technology has to crawl out of the crib and be done outside of government
before it becomes really effective or widespread.
Re:Cut costs, sure. (Score:4, Insightful)
NASA researches space with experimental hardware.
Companies want to commercialize space with commoditized hardware.
Experimental hardware is great for solving problems and learning new things, but it will never be as cheap or reliable as commoditized hardware.
Ideological nonsense (Score:2, Insightful)
inventors (Score:4, Insightful)
Not having to reinvent everything from scratch certainly helps the budget. Never forget that when NASA started out, there was no such thing as space travel.
Going into orbit after someone else figured out how to put people on the moon and robots on Mars and Venus is a lot less of a challenge then going into orbit when nobody quite knows how to do it.
It's still a great feat, but don't forget that a lot of the cost savings are also because someone else invested a lot of money into figuring it all out.
Large organizations are the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
"No one tries 'efficient' because no one is motivated and it would actually interefere with their personal fiefdom building."
In fairness, that happens all the time in private companies, too. It's just less public because they're, ya know, private.
I'm not saying this to defend government so much as to also criticize private companies. They both suck.
If there's any conclusion I can reach, it's that large organizations of any type are the problem. When you scale up, you inevitably get longer lines of communications, a higher tolerance for mediocrity (you need more people than the cream of the crop can provide), the need for more formal procedures (to compensate for the first two), deeper pocket to fund fief building, and more places to hide it all.
I think Space-X wins because they're small, nimble, and fresh. And more power to them for it.
Easy to be cheap when you don't have a history. (Score:4, Insightful)
It is very similar to the BP disaster. I'm sure all of the oil companies operate this way BP's luck just ran out. So they will most likely go bankrupt eventually paying for this because they will have so many eyes on them that they won't be competitive. Then their competitors with a little more luck and maybe a bit smarted will continue until the next accident.
Re:Cut costs, sure. (Score:4, Insightful)
"BP executives may be responsible for many bad decisions, but I doubt the disaster at Deepwater Horizon is the result of short term thinking."
So risking the big amount of money that the Deepwater Horizon costed just to let it sink down is not a short term thinking result? So expending a lot of millions designing, building and positioning the blowout preventers just to let them fail is not a short term thinking result?
"If those violations didn't result in employee lawsuits then the fines were trivial and not really a risk factor."
It's obvious that a big accident in deept waters will result in life loss not mentioning the financial damage.
There were obvious danger signs; there were millions of already deployed structure at risk; there were oil to be lost in the ocean instead of being pumped out to the oil market; there were human lives at risk. And all that was overlooked so production could start this quarter instead of next one. Tell me *that* is not the result of short term thinking pushed by the most egregious greed.
Re:inventors (Score:3, Insightful)
Also take note that much of SpaceX's engineering staff is drawn from existing players in the industry and collectively they have a lot more experience in developing spacecraft than their 8 year history would suggest.
Re:Solid rocket costs (Score:4, Insightful)
In outward appearance the shuttle looks somewhat insane from an engineering perspective due to the compromises required on the original design. Strapping to the side of a rocket instead of on top of it created a large number of challenges that took years to overcome and reduced the performance. It's like bolting a Volkswagen to the roof of a formula 1 car and trying to get the whole thing to be stable at high speed.