'Space Is Hard. There Is No Excuse For Pretending It's Easy' (spacenews.com) 53
"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:4, Informative)
I thought SpaceX WAS doing pretty well and wa sbeing rather cost-effective so far?
What am I missing?
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Musk's hype and overambitious promises, people who hate his politics and are therefore looking for any reason to call anything he does a failure, 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.
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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
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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I think a lot of people miss the fact that SpaceX engineers know very well what they're doing
Why does Rice play Texas?
They choose to do these things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone.
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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.
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.
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> 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
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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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"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.
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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:
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"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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What am I missing?
Everything. Don't worry about it. Enjoy your cybertruck.
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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
Musk doesn't have the best people. (Score:3, 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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"Musk won't hire people unwilling to work in an open office. "
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. 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.
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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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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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.
Re: Musk doesn't have the best people. (Score:2)
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Except that Musk is allowed to show up at work or not whenever he feels like it, so he's a giant hypocrite who forces everyone else to do that which he himself is not willing to do.
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Ah yes, the old days when it is possible some women weren't hired because of their sex.
Which got the feminists all riled up.
But that is now what happens in most hiring and college admissions, to men.
But for some reason the feminists are silent about that.
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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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Collecting contributions to send the most annoying politicians and celebrities there on a one way trip would be very profitable.
"Space is easy... (Score:1)
...if you just use AI."
With less computational power than your phone ... (Score:3)
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:1)
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
People need goals. (Score:1)
I would not call visions of hotels on the moon and colonies on Mars some kind of distraction from keeping rockets from blowing up before they reach stage separation. People need goals or all the milestones that need to be met along the way lose meaning.
Goals motivate people, and the bigger the end goal the more motivation that can come from it. If all people see in their future is a repeat of putting people on the moon, like we've seen 50 years prior (or likely 60 years prior at the pace we are going) the
Innovation, cost and success (Score:4, 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.
BS (Score:2)
Built to be there (Score:1)
I couldn't agree more with this viewpoint. Space hardware needs to be built with a mindset of permanence and reliability. The only way we will go to space and stay there is if our systems are robust and reliable. (It's also a good goal for earthly engineering.. wink wink)
Ignoring the obvious (Score:3)
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.
Accountability? To whom? (Score:2)
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.
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