'Space Is Hard. There Is No Excuse For Pretending It's Easy' (spacenews.com) 163
"For-profit companies are pushing the narrative that they can do space inexpensively," writes Slashdot reader RUs1729 in response to an opinion piece from SpaceNews. "Their track record reveals otherwise: cutting corners won't do it for the foreseeable future." Here's an excerpt from the article, written by Robert N. Eberhart: The headlines in the space industry over the past month have delivered a sobering reminder: space is not forgiving, and certainly not friendly to overpromising entrepreneurs. From iSpace's second failed lunar landing attempt (making them 0 for 2) to SpaceX's ongoing Starship test flight setbacks -- amid a backdrop of exploding prototypes and shifting goalposts -- the evidence is mounting that the commercialization of space is not progressing in the triumphant arc that press releases might suggest. This isn't just a series of flukes. It points to a structural, strategic and cultural problem in how we talk about innovation, cost and success in space today.
Let's be blunt: 50 years ago, we did this. We sent humans to the moon, not once but repeatedly, and brought them back. With less computational power than your phone, using analog systems and slide rules, we achieved feats of incredible precision, reliability and coordination. Today's failures, even when dressed up as "learning opportunities," raises the obvious question: Why are we struggling to do now what we once achieved decades ago with far more complexity and far less technology?
Until very recently, the failure rate of private lunar exploration efforts underscored this reality. Over the past two decades, not a single private mission had fully succeeded -- until last March when Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost lander touched down on the moon. It marked the first fully successful soft landing by a private company. That mission deserves real credit. But that credit comes with important context: It took two decades of false starts, crashes and incomplete landings -- from Space IL's Beresheet to iSpace's Hakuto-R and Astrobotic's Peregrine -- before even one private firm delivered on the promise of lunar access. The prevailing industry answer -- "we need to innovate for lower cost" -- rings hollow. What's happening now isn't innovation; it's aspiration masquerading as disruption... "This is not a call for a retreat to Cold War models or Apollo-era budgets," writes Eberhart, in closing. "It's a call for seriousness. If we're truly entering a new space age, then it needs to be built on sound engineering, transparent economics and meaningful technical leadership -- not PR strategy. Let's stop pretending that burning money in orbit is a business model."
"The dream of a sustainable, entrepreneurial space ecosystem is still alive. But it won't happen unless we stop celebrating hype and start demanding results. Until then, the real innovation we need is not in spacecraft -- it's in accountability."
Robert N. Eberhart, PhD, is an associate professor of management and the faculty director of the Ahlers Center for International Business at the Knauss School of Business of University of San Diego. He is the author of several academic publications and books. He is also part of Oxford University's Smart Space Initiative and contributed to Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory. Before his academic career, Prof. Eberhart founded and ran a successful company in Japan.
Let's be blunt: 50 years ago, we did this. We sent humans to the moon, not once but repeatedly, and brought them back. With less computational power than your phone, using analog systems and slide rules, we achieved feats of incredible precision, reliability and coordination. Today's failures, even when dressed up as "learning opportunities," raises the obvious question: Why are we struggling to do now what we once achieved decades ago with far more complexity and far less technology?
Until very recently, the failure rate of private lunar exploration efforts underscored this reality. Over the past two decades, not a single private mission had fully succeeded -- until last March when Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost lander touched down on the moon. It marked the first fully successful soft landing by a private company. That mission deserves real credit. But that credit comes with important context: It took two decades of false starts, crashes and incomplete landings -- from Space IL's Beresheet to iSpace's Hakuto-R and Astrobotic's Peregrine -- before even one private firm delivered on the promise of lunar access. The prevailing industry answer -- "we need to innovate for lower cost" -- rings hollow. What's happening now isn't innovation; it's aspiration masquerading as disruption... "This is not a call for a retreat to Cold War models or Apollo-era budgets," writes Eberhart, in closing. "It's a call for seriousness. If we're truly entering a new space age, then it needs to be built on sound engineering, transparent economics and meaningful technical leadership -- not PR strategy. Let's stop pretending that burning money in orbit is a business model."
"The dream of a sustainable, entrepreneurial space ecosystem is still alive. But it won't happen unless we stop celebrating hype and start demanding results. Until then, the real innovation we need is not in spacecraft -- it's in accountability."
Robert N. Eberhart, PhD, is an associate professor of management and the faculty director of the Ahlers Center for International Business at the Knauss School of Business of University of San Diego. He is the author of several academic publications and books. He is also part of Oxford University's Smart Space Initiative and contributed to Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory. Before his academic career, Prof. Eberhart founded and ran a successful company in Japan.
Erm... (Score:2, Insightful)
I thought SpaceX WAS doing pretty well and wa sbeing rather cost-effective so far?
What am I missing?
Re:Erm... (Score:5, Informative)
The cost of development for the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy were incredibly low and they are currently the cheapest way to get cargo into orbit. So, for these two programs, SpaceX has been cheaper than any government run program.
Flacon 9 : $2600/kg Falcon Heavy : $1500/kg Long March 5 : $2800/kg Everyone else : $4000+/kg [ourworldindata.org]
The Dragon space craft and the Falcon 9 together received about $400 million in tax payer money to design. The total cost of development for the Falcon 9 was around $400 million. SpaceX spent an additional 100 to 200 million dollars to develop the Falcon Heavy. For comparison, the Starliner space craft cost the US tax payers about $5 billion. The US tax payer paid around $25 billion to develop the SLS. The space shuttle cost about $30 billion to develop in today's dollars. The Saturn V cost about $50 billion to develop in today's dollars. The SLS and Saturn V could take over 100 tons to orbit. The Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy can take about 22 tons and 63 tons to orbit. If successful, the Starship will deliver 100 to 150 tons while recovering both stages or 200 tons to LEO without recovery.
The cost of development for the starship first and second stage is about $5 billion so far. Elon is hoping the total cost will be $10 billion. If SpaceX can get the lower stage of Starship to land softly 95% of the time and the second stage is able to deploy satellites without blowing up, then the cost to LEO for Starship will be on the order of $1100/kg. If SpaceX can get both stages to land softly, then the cost to LEO will be less than $100/kg, a factor of 11 reduction! (Elon has stated that SpaceX may be able to reduce the cost to LEO to $20/kg if Starship is able to recover both stages.)
In summary, so far, SpaceX had been much better than anyone else at developing the best rockets on earth (best both due to reliability and cost per kg to orbit) more cheaply than any other rocket development program.
Re:Erm... (Score:5, Interesting)
> The cost of development for the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy were incredibly low
Which is to be expected since governments spent on the order of a trillion dollars and 50+ years developing the technology. Just about every aspect of their operation was conceived, developed, and trialed before Musk was even born.
SpaceX deserves a lot of credit for refining that tech, but do not dismiss the fact they are standing atop a mountain of taxpayer funded R&D without which they wouldn't even have a business model, let alone working rockets.
=Smidge=
Re:Erm... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Erm... (Score:4, Insightful)
The senate lunch system was designed as a jobs and wealth redistribution scheme first and a space craft development project second.
boeing stock much? (Score:2)
The identities of people who mod posts should be public. That's the single most broken by design thing about the Slashdot moderation system.
That wouldn't make sense if everyone had modpoints and comment scores could be higher, but they don't and they can't.
This isn't a community, and this is a big part of why.
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but do not dismiss the fact they are standing atop a mountain of taxpayer funded R&D
Why? It is more profitable to forget that the past ever occurred.
Perspective changes everything. There is a reason all conquering civilizations try to completely erase the civilizations they have conquered.
Nobody wants to pay their debts.
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There is a reason all conquering civilizations try to completely erase the civilizations they have conquered.
The Hellenic Greeks (Alexander the Great and the Diadochs), the Romans and the Persians were famous for a) building really large empires and b) actually caring for the civilizations they conquered. After the Romans for instance conquered the last of the Greek Diadoch kingdoms, Greek became the language of choice for the Roman elite. Alexander the Great took over the Persian bureaucracy and even coopted the Persian court ceremonial for himself. Ptolemaios, despite being of Macedonian origin, became pharao of
Re:Erm... (Score:5, Interesting)
We really need to think about what we are going to do when it costs $100 or even $20 to put 1kg in orbit. Thus far the high cost has limited the amount of crap being thrown up there, and ensured that the people doing it are invested enough to at least attempt to not cause mayhem and work with existing regulators.
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It will never cost that little. A Falcon 9 has about 400 tons of propellant. If it were all commercial diesel, it would cost $400,000, or $17 per kg of weight launched to LEO. But of course it's not commercial diesel. Liquid oxygen and RP1 are both much more expensive.
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It will never cost that little. A Falcon 9 has about 400 tons of propellant. If it were all commercial diesel, it would cost $400,000, or $17 per kg of weight launched to LEO. But of course it's not commercial diesel. Liquid oxygen and RP1 are both much more expensive.
Starship burns methane, not RP1.
Between SuperHeavy and Starship, a fully-loaded stack needs 3500 tons of LOX and 1000 tons of CH4. So what do those cost?
Well, oxygen is easy to get from the atmosphere, so the cost of LOX is really just some equipment (which isn't terribly expensive to buy and maintain) plus electricity, and the cost ends up being dominated by the cost of electricity. It takes between 150 kWh and 800 kWh [thundersaidenergy.com] to separate and liquify a ton of oxygen, so if you're paying $0.10 per kWh, LOX co
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"What am I missing?"
That the author of this article is an idiot.
Yes, humans went to the moon in the 1960s. It also consumed a huge chunk of the federal budget. Adjusting for inflation [thespacereview.com] by NASA's NNSI inflation index, the entire Lunar program cost $288,1B. If the US were to prioritize a project to the same degree today as then, accounting for GDP growth in inflation-adjusted terms, it would be $702,3B. NASA's annual budget is around $25B.
The cost of access to space today is a tiny fraction of what it used t
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That the author of this article is an idiot.
Yes, humans went to the moon in the 1960s. It also consumed a huge chunk of the federal budget. Adjusting for inflation [thespacereview.com] by NASA's NNSI inflation index, the entire Lunar program cost $288,1B. If the US were to prioritize a project to the same degree today as then, accounting for GDP growth in inflation-adjusted terms, it would be $702,3B. NASA's annual budget is around $25B.
I think that's the point of the article, though (not that I read it, of course). A lot of people are assuming that it should now be cheap and easy to land ships on the moon, but there are reasons that we spent that much money to do it the first time, and those reasons are still true.
Re:Erm... (Score:5, Insightful)
I thought SpaceX WAS doing pretty well and wa sbeing rather cost-effective so far?
What am I missing?
Apart from Musks endless hype mongering and over promising, developing anything space based is where history shows that going a bit slow and steady tends to wins the race. Musk is trying to do what he always does: "Move fast and break things!!", his cultists love it and will argue for it being the best way to do anything to their dying breath. What the article is saying is in essence:
According to the American tech elite we are now on the cusp of general AI, a future where all human labor will be obsolete within a decade and 99% of humanity will be 'useless eaters'. One would expect that a breathtakingly intelligent group of people armed with even the precursors of such awesomely advanced AI could design spacecraft that perform reliably with a lot fewer "learning opportunities" (also known as explosions and crashes). The criticism is that this "Move fast and break things!!" attitude of the Silcone Valley is not applicable to the space industry and that maybe the way things were done in the US 50 years ago, which is the same way space systems design is still done elsewhere where people don't have inexhaustible supplies of money to throw at a problem, might be better.
Re:Erm... (Score:5, Interesting)
"Move fast and break things!!" is just a euphemism for "I don't know WTF I'm doing and cannot be arsed to learn or I'm too stupid to learn, so I'll break it and pick up the pieces."
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Silcone Valley
Not sure if intentional...
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As for Starshi
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Musk certainly is overly optimistic regarding timelines, but "move fast and break things" (for lack of a better term) has been proven to work in space, by SpaceX. It gave us a launch system that was cheap to develop and cheap to operate. Everyone in the business was laughing at Musk for keeping "breaking things" and crashing rockets while trying to land one. Then he did. And got good at it. Now they only make the news when one of their (many many) boosters fails to make a soft landing. As for Starship, I've no idea what kind of data they have and how they are acting on it, but from a distance it does look like there are some major problems to overcome, and making a few changes before sending up another one might not be the right approach. The idea about "move fast and break things" is not to design and test until you are 99% sure, you spend a lot less effort in getting to 90%, and hoping that a failure will point to the error(s) you missed. But Starship smells like it's at 70% right now (or whatever the number are, for illustrative purposes only)
I don't see a major difference between Musk's extremely over optimistic timelines and moving fast and breaking things both lead to the same result, lots of "learning opportunities" a.k.a explosions. I can only re-emphasize that with modern software and AI tools at their disposal I'd expect Musk and his genius squad at SpaceX to get starship done with far fewer "learning opportunities" than they have done so far, unless the efficacy of AI, the genius level of Musk and the abilties of his SpaceX genius squad
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INB4 the Muskovites relentlessly flame me for daring to suggest SpaceX isn't the bestest most innovative thing evar... but that's the reality, when you want to do something cheaply you're not going to be pushing the envelope very far.
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https://www.iwm.org.uk/history... [iwm.org.uk]
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The author isn't saying there has been no progress, his main complaint is around the PR hype machine, companies cutting away from their livestreams of launches for their CFO to talk about investor confidence, promises of hotels on the moon. That sort of thing. There were a couple good points specifically about Space X in TFA:
"SpaceX’s Starship saga is another emblem of this phenomenon. Yes, progress requires trial and error. But we must stop measuring success by launch views and splashy animation ree
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I thought SpaceX WAS doing pretty well and wa sbeing rather cost-effective so far?
What am I missing?
The Falcon 9 Rockets are fine machines.
But this cost effectiveness thing. How do we know what the actual cost of a Falcon 9 flight is? It is not what they charge NASA. It is the cost of the launch, the retrieval, the refurbishment. There is an army of support logistics involved, and we don't seem to be able to access that cost.
But we were told that we'd be landing Crew Dragons on Mars in 2016, that the Mighty Starship will be on a mars Mission in 2016, that the Starship would be a land, refuel and
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I'm sorry but is any of that relevant? From a consumer perspective it is relevant that Musk didn't deliver on autonomous driving and that his cars, if you're honest, are crap. Doesn't change the fact that he forced an old and vast industry to try and pivot on a dime on a subject said industry has been adamant was impossible to achieve.
The same goes for Falcon 9.
Tesla can go bankrupt and Starship never reach maturity for all I care, hist name, deservedly so, will enter history books. That's what I'm getting
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SpaceX *is* doing pretty well, despite the spectacular failures.
The problem is all about Elon Musk communication. To put it bluntly, he is a manipulative bastard. But the rockets, yes, they are fine, very good actually. I don't know how much SpaceX got in state funding, but probably a lot more than meets the eye. Again, I don't consider it a bad thing, US rocketry had been an international joke between the Space Shuttle and the Falcon 9. The people who put a man on the moon have their astronauts travel on a
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Some SpaceX vehicles like Falcon have done well after many attempts. Their Starship (which was the most ambitious) has not done well with the last one exploding on the pad, the one before that exploding shortly after launch--I mean it was a "controlled disassembly".
The nice thing about exploding on the pad is that they should be able to do a proper failure analysis, complete with being able to X-ray the fragments of the failed components, because they can locate them all. :-)
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SpaceX is doing very well launching stuff into LEO and GTO. But plenty of organizations do that and have been doing that since the 1970s. It's (relatively speaking) fairly easy, and SpaceX's main success has been doing it more cheaply and more efficiently than anyone has before.
SpaceX is not having much luck going further or more complicated than putting things in GTO. They haven't orbited the moon, or have a working vehicle for doing so yet (Starship is nowhere near ready), and leaving Earth's orbit is p
Re:Erm... (Score:5, Interesting)
I think a lot of people miss the fact that SpaceX engineers know very well that what they're doing might fail spectacularly, and that this is the cost of speed.
A random example: autogenous pressurization.
It's beneficial to have a rocket's engines pressurize the tanks themselves rather than to haul up pressurant tanks and a separate pressurant. But it's surprisingly tricky. For a methalox rocket, you ideally want hot methane injected into the methane tank, and hot oxygen into the oxygen tank. But hot oxygen is very difficult to work with in an engine, as it tends to eat your engine.
If you're still working on reliably producing hot oxygen, there is a hack available to you, but it's not pretty: just inject exhaust into the oxygen tank; after all, it's not combustible. BUT, it is water and carbon dioxide. Both can settle out as frosts or plated ices, and in the liquid, the water ice will float at the top, while the CO2 will form a snow at the bottom. Frosts / ice plating can block e.g. your RCS jets. The CO2 snow will kill your engines. You can put in filters around their intakes, but it'll clog your filters. You might try expanding the filters, and maybe that'll work for a while, but then you rotate the rocket, the snow rushes ti one side, and a bunch of engines die from clogging. You may put some big mesh plates across the whole tank to keep the snow off the bottom, but they can cause their own problems with fluid flow and still sometimes clog or let snow through during maneuvers. Etc.
So then comes the question: put Starship on hold while working on getting the engines to reliably produce hot oxygen, potentially for years, or forge ahead with a hack solution that you know has a reasonable chance of killing your rocket?
To SpaceX, the question is obvious. You cannot afford to give up years of critical flight data just to avoid some booms. The decision is immensely lopsided in favour of "put in the hack solutions and launch, while you work on the proper solutions". Because you learn SO much from every launch that can be used to evolve your design. And you also learn so much from every rocket that you build, whether you launch it or not, so you might as well launch it.
To be clear, you don't want to lose rockets due to doing stupid things. Like, for example, if it turns out that some SpaceX engineer installed the wrong COPV and caused the recent pad explosion**, basically the only thing they would learn from that is "have tighter controls on your COPV processes", which isn't at all worth the cost of the explosion. But in general, if you launch and it clears the pad, you're getting good, important data from it, it's worth it even if it blows up seconds later, and it's on to the next evolved version of the rocket in your production sequence with both production- and flight lessons learned.
** It's clear that the recent explosion was from a COPV failure, but it's unclear why. Some claimed leaks state that a COPV may have been coded to a higher pressure than it actually was during production, so when they scanned it it checked out as being the right tank, but actually was not designed to handle the needed pressures. But I'll wait for official confirmation on this. SpaceX only makes some of their COPVs, usually not the smaller ones - ones that have washed up ashore were made by Luxfer. So this could be a supplier problem, like the strut failure on a 2015 Falcon flight. But again, too early to say.
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The dream of a sustainable, entrepreneurial space ecosystem is still alive. But it won’t happen unless we stop celebrating hype and start demanding results
ok, less hype, more results. I'm ok with that, let's set some concrete goals. What goals/results does he want? Maybe it will be an improvement over the status quo. What brilliant plan does the author have, or even mediocre idea? Nothing.
He doesn't say.
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I think a lot of people miss the fact that SpaceX engineers know very well that what they're doing might fail spectacularly, and that this is the cost of speed.
That sounds like some BS excuses when someone fails: "No I meant to drive my car in a ditch again and again. This is the cost of speed. Oh I meant to explode Starship. Multiple times. It is not a problem."
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In my head I read it in a Pee-wee Herman voice.
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Thanks for the insights, much appreciated.
That is a hell of a lot of words to say (Score:3)
Remember when your mom told you the measure twice and cut once?
SpaceX isn't going fast because it gets results they're going fast because it gets investors. It builds elon's brand which attracts lots of investors to his various publicly traded companies. SpaceX is in public right now but you can bet your ass that when it's profitable enough to do so, and I don't
Re:Erm... (Score:5, Interesting)
the fact that most of the early Super Heavies so far went boom (this is not a surprise, but some people don't remember how many Falcons went boom before they developed into one of the most reliable rockets available) and possibly a few launch and moon landing failures.
That's the hot hand fallacy going on there. That the Falcon 9 rockets are fine machines does not in any way shape or form mean that the Starship is the same thing.
Those two "families" aero not even related. The falcons are regular rockets, carrying on with the basic principles that Germany developed during WW2.
Will it work eventually? possibly. Even the Spruce Goose flew once. Will it be practical? I'm seriously doubting it. Will it take us to Mars? Oh, does the move fast and fail early doctrine still in place? And in a reduced to practice field like Rockerty (we've been doing Liquid filled rockets for over a century now) we have enough accumulated knowledge that just getting to orbit shouldn't be accompanied by a string of failures like Starship has been having.
Flamesuit on, I know this one will piss off the faithful.
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The falcons are regular rockets, carrying on with the basic principles that Germany developed during WW2.
Yes and no. The biggest difference is that the falcon 9 lands safely and can be reused after refurbishment. The German V2 was good at coming back to earth, but the landing had a different outcome.
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The falcons are regular rockets, carrying on with the basic principles that Germany developed during WW2.
Yes and no. The biggest difference is that the falcon 9 lands safely and can be reused after refurbishment. The German V2 was good at coming back to earth, but the landing had a different outcome.
So you're saying that the new Starship is basically a V2, as well, but it is exploding prematurely? :-D
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So you're saying that the new Starship is basically a V2, as well, but it is exploding prematurely? :-D
Heh, usually the goal is to get the explosion at the other end. I guess so far the Starship results look more like an attack plan for taking down Mars.
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But whether Starship will work is a separate topic from "Have we seen success in space faring under Musk?".
Yes, we have. As someone stated, that tech stood on the shoulders of predecessors. Fair enough. But neither government nor behemoth corporations have achieved similar success standing on the same shoulders... heck, some may still employ some of those very shoulders.
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we have enough accumulated knowledge that just getting to orbit shouldn't be accompanied by a string of failures like Starship has been having
Nonsense. Our only experience with reusable orbital rockets is the space shuttle, which was an unsustainably-expensive and complex beast that was more refurbishable than reusable and had a payload one fifth of what Starship is designed for. It's all of the differences that aim to make Starship both reusable and cheap that make it hard. It's possible that it's just too ambitious, that we don't yet have the technology to make a cheap, fully-reusable (not refurbishable, reusable) orbital rocket with massive
Re: Erm... (Score:2)
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Gee. Wow. I've SO been put into my place. It's such a shock to my system that henceforth I will hallucinate my 15 year old Mazda into a Tesla.
Musk doesn't have the best people. (Score:2, Insightful)
NASA hired women as scientists and engineers when that wasn't a thing. If her talents were worth it, that was that.
Musk won't hire people unwilling to work in an open office. And forget about telework. It doesn't matter what skills you bring to the table, Musk having his way is more important.
That's how NASA landed people on the moon while SpaceX's rocket keeps blowing up.
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You've got a point there but you left yourself open to the counter: Musk also managed to ferry people to the station at a price NASA couldn't match with the shuttle.
I gotta say, snickering at the fact that a rocket of so far unparalleled proportions and capabilities, as far as I am aware, isn't working on the first try seem petty in the face of the aforementioned success.
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You've got a point there but you left yourself open to the counter: Musk also managed to ferry people to the station at a price NASA couldn't match with the shuttle.
Er. No. People at SpaceX did. People seem to forget: Musk is not an engineer. He has limited understanding of the engineering. He just likes taking credit for the work his people do.
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That's how NASA landed people on the moon while SpaceX's rocket keeps blowing up.
Just as a reminder, the SpaceX Falcon-9 has one of the best success records of any orbital booster in history. You could argue that the Atlas V has a slightly better success record, but Falcon-9 has an order of magnitude more flights. Successful Falcon-9 launches are so routine that they rarely even make the news.
So, no, not all SpaceX rockets "keep blowing up."
Your post was also talking about women scientists and engineers. A lot of SpaceX's routine success is attributed to Gwynne Shotwell, the President a
Re: Musk doesn't have the best people. (Score:2)
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Sure, but people need to be made aware of it in the first place. Just putting it in a document isn't enough.
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Cart before horse - something has to be discussed before its put in a document. You don't just get some random engineer to put in whatever he thinks is suitable.
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"Things can be discussed over email, zooms, phone calls, messages"
Unless you work for some mickey mouse web company or similar doing unimportant BS, then problems are best solved and designs generated when everyone is together in a room with a white board.
"the requirements were specified verbally and no one wrote them down. "
Then you don't work in a serious company if they don't minute important meetings.
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Unless you work for some mickey mouse web company or similar doing unimportant BS, then problems are best solved and designs generated when everyone is together in a room with a white board.
In your world. Not in everyone's world. The part you seem to ignore is that now you are relying on people's memory about important details unless you write down what happened like in a summary email or other documentation.
Then you don't work in a serious company if they don't minute important meetings.
Bahahahahaha. Have you actually worked for a serious company? Meetings happen all the time. Sometimes key people are not available for every meeting. Should things be documented? Yes. In things called emails. You seem to still insist that work can ONLY be done in meetings. According to yo
Re: Musk doesn't have the best people. (Score:2)
You're both right (Score:2)
You're both right. Some jobs simply require teams to work in the same physical location. Also, if it's safety critical, the engineers should be following the documented requirements, and documenting everything.
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Some jobs simply require teams to work in the same physical location.
The complaint wasn't about being in the same physical location. It was about the compulsory open-office configuration, even back in the middle of the pandemic.
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Yeah imagine giving engineers a quiet place to work in a building.
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If something safety critical can slip through the next because it was missed on Teams or email, you are doing it wrong.
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I'm all for home working, but some jobs simply require teams to work in the same physical location - eg safety critical engineering. I speak as someone who worked in aerospace.
The complaint was not that some people work better when physically located near team members. The complaint was Musk insisted that people work in open offices specifically or they cannot work for him.
You CANNOT have something slip through the net because it was missed on a teams chat or email, people have to literally and figuratively be in the same room when discussing important topics. If you disagree then fine, but you're the wrong person for the job.
So you would rather rely on people’s memory of verbal communications instead of relying on records of written communications? That seems more ripe for failure. However, part of every engineering project I have been a part is the insistence on written documentation for things like specifications. There ar
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The complaint was Musk insisted that people work in open offices specifically or they cannot work for him.
Correct. Even in the middle of the pandemic he demanded on-site work and would not allow private offices in the building.
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What does "open office" mean in this regard?
No partitions. No walls. No doors. Just desks and chairs.
No success? (Score:2)
Over the past two decades, not a single private mission had fully succeeded -- until last March when Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost lander touched down on the moon.
It depends on what they call success. Look at the pace of Falcon 9 launches, and the massive reduction in launch costs that represents. That is a very successful commercialization of space.
Lunar probes? No, not much success there, but it's also an open question what commercial value those could ever have. Let's be honest: we are not going to be mining moon resources anytime soon. And Mars? It's a great dream, but even in the most optimistic scenarios it will never be profitable.
The fundamental problem w
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So much this.
Musk has the same billionaire self-worth issues many of them seem to have and the technological successes SpaceX and Tesla represent aren't his badges of honor but to stand there and imply SpaceX and Tesla hadn't achieved pivotal successes makes it hard to take those people seriously.
And for better or worse, Musk was leading the ship while those successes happened. Was it due to his leadership or despite it? I, for one, am not in a position to tell but to just gloss over them reeks of personal
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Leaders aren't there out there e.g. building the rockets or doing the vast majority of the engineering. Musk doesn't get credit for that. But they do set the culture and direction for their companies. And in this regard, the "build quickly, launch quickly, fail quickly, learn quickly, and iterate quickly" culture developed for SpaceX happens to be very effective. Musk gets credit for instilling that. Another thing he should get credit for is the broad design strokes such as "focus on designs that are che
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Precisely.
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Collecting contributions to send the most annoying politicians and celebrities there on a one way trip would be very profitable.
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Collecting contributions to send the most annoying politicians and celebrities there on a one way trip would be very profitable.
Sending them "there" is just as good, Starship is already adequate to get the real job done.
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Mod parent funny, though morbid.
With less computational power than your phone ... (Score:5, Interesting)
a) one once snickered that a Saturn V and all the modules on top had less computing power than a washing machine. That was in the 1990s ... assuming a washing machine runs on a 86x88 derivate
b) a phone as a smart phone as many people have has more computing power than the 1990s Cray super computers
Or looking at the time when the Apollo program was running: a phone has more computing power than all the computers combined on the planet had at that time.
What kind of "primitive" computer they settled for is an interesting read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Cold war motivation (Score:2)
Was part of the previous success, "national security" appears to be a different motivation to capitalism's greed.
China will have a base on the moon before SpaceX gets to Mars, learning how to live there, how to mine the abundant 02, making a step off point for longer missions.
Elon's "stretch goal" is valid but his "big bang" approach is high risk. It looks like another Big Tech empty promise to hype funding. If it ends in a big bang or watching astronauts suffocate on youtube the story is "a private compan
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To add to what you said there wasn't a bright line between the Apollo Program and the ICBM program.
Though SpaceX is being funded to build a war-fighting duplicate of Starlink and a weapons-deployment copy of Starship for the Air Force.
Whether or not Armstrong walked on a moon or a set at Elgin Air Force Base wasn't important to the ICBM program, just to TV and politicians. And he refused any TV interviews for decades.
Innovation, cost and success (Score:5, Insightful)
Overhyping innovation. Cutting costs. Overblowing success. That's what modern entrepreneurs are good at. A way with words and empty promises can only take you so far.
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BS (Score:2)
Ignoring the obvious (Score:5, Informative)
Let's be blunt: 50 years ago, we did this. We sent humans to the moon, not once but repeatedly, and brought them back. With less computational power than your phone, using analog systems and slide rules, we achieved feats of incredible precision, reliability and coordination.
50 years ago, NASA sent 29 unmanned missions to the moon before its first manned mission. A whole series of Pioneer missions failed to get off the ground. Of the 9 Ranger missions, 6 failed, and all they had to do was crash into the moon while transmitting a TV image on the way down. In total, 17 of those 29 missions failed.
And putting this into the larger context, over the period of those 29 lunar missions, NASA did 500 launches in total, with tons of failures.
Now we're whining when a new company that has never done a lunar mission before, has a failure on its first mission. A mission with a vastly smaller budget than NASA had in the 1960s, too.
What NASA was doing in the 1960s was build institutional knowledge and experience. Every failure was analyzed and used to improve subsequent missions. They improved spacecraft design, but also the procedures for building and operating spacecraft, and with those improvements came an increased success rate. The last unmanned program before Apollo (Surveyor) had a 5/7 success rate.
Now, companies like iSpace and Intuitive Machines have to build their own institutional knowledge. They can take advantage of tons of documentation made and published by NASA. Some of them do this. Others seem to go out of their way to avoid doing that. Intuitive Machines is a prime example of the second approach: their first landing failed because their main altimeter (a lidar) was left in safe mode during the preflight check.
NASA in the 1960s learned not to cut corners on things like preflight checks. They learned to create comprehensive checklists etc. to make sure nothing could be forgotten. Today, some companies are learning this same lesson the hard way, while others heeded the lesson and had a successful first lunar mission (Firefly with their Blue Ghost lander).
Another company (SpaceX) is breaking new ground, trying to build the first fully-reusable launcher. They realized that the hard parts of this design (reentry and landing) cannot be tested well on the ground, so they proceeded to flight testing at a much earlier stage than e.g. NASA did for the Saturn V (which spent years being tested on test stands before its first flight). Failures are inevitable when you do this. The USSR did this for Proton, for instance: instead of spending money on a test stand and a long test campaign, they proceeded to flight testing at an early stage. It took 14 test launches before Proton could be declared operational.
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Now we're whining when a new company that has never done a lunar mission before, has a failure on its first mission. A mission with a vastly smaller budget than NASA had in the 1960s, too.
We are not whining. We are warning people not to automatically believe ambitious promises that such efforts are easy. Here on slashdot, some people are already promoting Starship on how it can deliver 100 ton payloads cheaper than anyone else. The word "can" has not been demonstrated yet.
Accountability? To whom? (Score:5, Insightful)
Government prestige projects like Apollo have effectively unlimited funding and political backing that can override accountability to the electorate. See also Concorde. It's also worth noting that, while Saturn rockets were very successful of themselves, their original design intent was as military heavy-lift for spy satellites.
Indeed, the development program that led to them had effectively begun in the early 1940s as a military weapons program, firsty under the Germans and then Americans post-1945, and R.A.D. was very common. See also Operation Paperclip and Ignition! by John D. Clark.
Private companies are primarily accountable only to their shareholders, to a lesser extent their customers, and finally the government regulations under which they operate.
If the shareholders and customers are happy - or, at least, not unhappy - and the rules are being followed, everything else is just whingeing clickbait.
Why go into space instead of 10 min at the border (Score:2)
Why try doing all kinds of hard things while you can fly up to space for 10 minutes with BlueOrigin and tell everyone that you are an astronaut?
Jeff got it all figured out.
He may be missing the quiet part... (Score:2)
Putting satellites into orbit is kind of mundane at this point, too common, too obviously useful; but it's sufficiently obviously useful that more or less anyone with nati
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This isn't hard, I don't know what everyone else's problem is. Maybe it's because they are using ChatGPT, the inferior AI. Jump into Perplexity, it will solve all your problems. I'm tired now but tomorrow I'm going to build a
SpaceX Is Winning. (Score:2)
Just because Musk went crazy and just because some tests went wrong, does not mean Spacex are not years ahead of any competition, with the best chance of producing a much better rocket than anyone else.
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Alternate Hypotheses (Score:2)
> Why are we struggling to do now what we once achieved decades ago with far more complexity and far less technology?
"Everybody is stupid and lazy now" isn't the most parsimonious explanation.
Especially from the Gulf of Tonkin/MK Ultra era.
Imagine it's 1903 (Score:2)
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Boeing and the 3 or 4 Turbine Manufactures can marginally make a product that looks and performs like every other one for the last 50 years that does not regularly kill the kids going to Disney. That takes a remarkable amount of specialized invenstment that may have a tiny relation
I work for an aerospace company (Score:2)
It's the bottom line (Score:2)
And Elon has led his teams of scientists, engineers, technicians, all of them, to successfully develop a LEO launch system that is much more affordable than anything before.
Every complaint that Elon, and by extension his companies, are somehow idiots, foolish, incompetent, blah blah blah, is itself misguided and foolish. Hating mildly eccentric and flawed CEOs or business leaders is a somewhat harmless hobby, but it's not astute. It's just spew.
At least with NASA, you could make complaint and rail against t
It's about COSTINGS (Score:3)
Labour was cheap: Professional footballers earned GBP £15 per week! Machinery was dear. But bespoke machinery wasn't a lot dearer.
JFK set up the Moon mission as "Our country versus the Russians," and everyone in Nasa then felt the country was behind them. Who is behind the budget-cut Nasa today? Who is behind Musk or Bezos? Where is the encouragement, the fervour of war time? Nasa needs a wad of cash and a torch under it's behind, and it has neither.
"Hype" IS the economy (Score:3)
The tree that is the dollar and the lack of understanding of the precariousness of the value of the dollar worries me much more than exploding space tourists. This is is the biggest reason Trump's deranged approach to global affairs is so dangerous to the future of the country. The dollar is devaluing at close to 2% a month
No funny at all? (Score:2)
Really sad that there were no jokes. Low hanging fruit around excuses like "money" or "Step 4: Profit" jokes.
Okay, so I see what to search for in case there is some unmoderated low-hanging humor around here...
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Found one bit of unmoderated Funny under "profit", but I realized there was lots of funny potential around "Musk", too. However too many to check all mentions for unmoderated Funny there, so I can blame that one on the moderators. (As usual.)
Modern landers are trying to be more efficient (Score:3)
The historical landers took a different path/trajectory down to the Moon. They came to an almost-halt laterally, and then descended straight down, giving them a good static view of their landing area from very high up. The problem with this is you use up a lot of extra fuel due to gravity losses. That then has an impact on getting less payload (mass) down to the surface.
The modern landers are trying to be more efficient in fuel usage, so are doing something akin to a "suicide burn" where they adjust their orbit so it will impact the surface, and then only just cancel out lateral and vertical motion in time. This entails facing some amount of 'sideways' until very shortly before landing, so that the engines are still cancelling out lateral motion. That in turn means a downward facing altitude sensor, often LIDAR based (lower power requirements than the RADAR that historical landers used) can't even see the landing area until the lateral velocity is mostly cancelled out and the bottom of the lander is actually facing the surface. This in turn means there's an issue with lunar dust being kicked up by the landing engines, just as the lander is trying to judge its distance to the surface to decelerate to a near-stop in time (but not too soon).
I'm getting most of this from Scott Manley's video on this topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] . Specific discussion on this topic starts at https://youtu.be/ISZTTEtHcTg?t... [youtu.be] . Discussion of the landing system, including how little mass made it down on a Surveyor: https://youtu.be/ISZTTEtHcTg?t... [youtu.be] .
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