Why SpaceX will sort out Sunday's snafu faster than NASA ever could SpaceX's perfect delivery record to the International Space Station ended on Sunday, 139 seconds into the flight of its Falcon 9 rocket. But there are good reasons why Elon's Musketeers will be back on schedule far faster than many are predicting. The accident itself was a disaster, and a very unfortunate birthday present for …
NASA. National Aeronautics and Space Administration. It is an Administration stuffed with administrators.
They love meetings, passing the buck and basically doing SFA. So long as there's food in the trough they're happy.
Musk et al are a business. They're interested in making progress. They're used to taking calculated risks and making decisions.
Which will generate outcome quicker? No contest.
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We're not talking about the NASA of 1960s, we're talking about the NASA of today.
The 1960s NASA was a very different animal than today's NASA. They were driven by a very specific goal.
It was the ENGINEERS that really drove the pace and achieved the goal. The administrators just provided support.
After Apollo 11, that goal was gone and the real administrative overheads kicked in, trying to make huge programs with lots of management to keep their jobs alive.
If you've read any of the reports on the aftermath of the SRB failures, the cover ups and the general shit deflection you see the real depths of an administrative quagmire. Engineers know there are problems and try to fix them, but the administrators inflate the reliability numbers and stifle everything.
Basically people like these would rather spend a week making sure they could not be blamed for anything rather than spend 5 minutes to actually fix the problem.
For a good read on the disconnect in NASA between engineering (the people that actually solve problems and put people on the moon) and administration (ie. managers who shuffle paper and make up bullshit) read: http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l/docs/rogers-commission/Appendix-F.txt
"Yes, apart from putting the only humans ever on the moon, getting probes to every planet and exploring the surface of Mars they've done fuck all."
Well, there *was* a snafu with metric and imperial measurements that resulted in an unintended ground incursion at high velocity on Mars once.
But, you can't fuck up if you never try to do anything.
SpaceX is building upon the years of experience of launching rockets into space. This is where most of the innovation is coming from. I'm not knocking it. There is a clear vision being well-executed. But it's not like sending a probe to Venus or a man to the moon for the first time.
The NASA culture stems from too much government and military interference which inevitably leads to feature creep and being beholden to the cost-plus military industrial complex that has a vested interest in delay and budget overrun.
AFAIK, and I'm happy to be corrected, but SpaceX launches are not yet significantly cheaper than say Ariane. Competition should hopefully lead to better, safer and cheaper launches.
I guess enough people will have slapped you about the head for your insightless NASAbash by now that you are already sorry you typed, so I'll just say "what do you expect when you tacitly sign on to a low-bid design and materials paradigm?", or perhaps I wrong you and you wrote your congressman to tell him how you wouldn't mind paying a little more for quality and astronaut safety?
you wrote your congressman to tell him how you wouldn't mind paying a little more for quality and astronaut safety?
Yeah, it's government all right: Just a little bit more and it will work, promise.
I wouldn't mind to see all the money for the white elephant F-35 and the Israel Safety Show in the Middle East go to space exploration. mind. But that's not up to me.
No-one wastes public money like the Pentagon.
Even when the contractors are honest and tell them when asked for a late addition to an airframe that an ashtray made of titanium will cost $800 per whereas an aluminum one can be brought in at about 100th that cost they will pick "only the very best", then look outraged and surprised when the papers get the story.
Sergeant York was being decommissioned when I first came to the USA. That one took, what, ten years to be proven as unworkable at the design level. Before that there was the first iteration of the M1 tank that wore out transmissions every 36 miles on average. After that there was the Strategic Defense Initiative. All funded from the bottomless public moneybucket.
In fairness, everyone I've met from NASA has been a committed, dedicated, talented and skilled professional. It does have a big-organization decision methodology, replete with the usual politics and administrative complexities. But NASA has been very creative in providing a variety of support for outside efforts - they really want the 'people' to succeed where they are not allowed to go.
There was a milestone back in the late 1960s or early 1970s - I'm too lazy to look the date up just now. At the time, the NASA team were working on an advanced nuclear engine based on the NERVA program. The engine had progressed to the point where they had successful test stand firings, and were preparing to move to the next phase, building it into a new second stage for the Saturn V. This engine was considered essential to a variety of heavy-lift jobs after Apollo, notably a not-yet-official Mars project.
But certain members of Congress thought all of space was a boondoggle, and killed funding for the nuclear engine specifically to prevent any thought of going to Mars. This was the first time I know of when the politicians really imposed their rules on NASA, which had been working on the magical can-do Apollo project till then. NASA had no choice but to cancel the engine, and put the Mars project file on a shelf. And since that day, NASA has been subject to Congressional and Presidential whims, trying to survive the Washington bureaucracy as best as possible.
"The engine had progressed to the point where they had successful test stand firings, and were preparing to move to the next phase, building it into a new second stage for the Saturn V."
I remember that mess quite well. It seems that the US and the USSR had a treaty against things nuclear or nuclear looking going into orbit.
Hence, the Congressional cut, abiding by a space treaty that remains in effect today.
I also recall that that particular engine wasn't capable of anything *near* a Mars shot. At all. It'd have made the moon run much faster, but Mars was flat out out of the question.
That all said, we still do have nuclear rocket designs, which are far more efficient and designed to work in microgravity. However, environmental concerns also are important, for who wants uranium spewed on their beaches or their petunia garden?
So, what we *really* need is a rocket that is intrinsically safe, which sounds like black heresy today, but within our technological capabilities.
As for this one, compared to NASA, this is a small shop. Answers will be far more easily available, as one doesn't need to contact each and every subcontractor. The answer is likely simple enough, in terms of engineering. O2 overpressure and failure tends to a rare few methods to overpressure a sealed tank, fire, electrical short inside the tank or placed upon the tank. Heat is the key, as a cryogenic tank doesn't have a pressure increase without a fuckton of heat applied.
Thankfully, rocket science isn't *quite* as hard as it was when we confiscated war booty in the form of German scientists and V2 rockets.
Understood is length of wires, lest they separate under boost. Understood is pogo oscillation. Understood are thousands of things.
I share your laziness but the project was an extension of the nuclear propelled bombers(USAF was supposed to have built two) and the radioisotope thermal generators(RTG) built by Martin-Marietta corporation. Part of the reason for the cancellation was due to protest from the nuclear free crowd that didn't want nuclear in space and worried about a crash on launch. But at least it's good to see other people remember what could have been had NASA proceeded with nuclear propulsion and that technology the shared with the public at large. Space X will undoubtedly keep any knowledge earned private, then see if it can be applied to TESLA Motors. We may even some day discover how to use repulsion away from Earth's magnetic field to generate propulsion. I think Boeing and Space X are in a race to build a re-usable space plane while the Air Force is flying some mystery plane about the Earth. Politicians deliberately stall for time when their errors cause a tragedy and private sectors have been known to do the same. In this case, a lot of contract renewals are at stake so time is of the essence. At some point Space X will become bureaucratic and slow to respond as well. In the meantime, enjoy a "will do" attitude.
Idiot.
Yes, there were organizational issues that resulted in the loss of lives and spacecraft. But, the number of suppliers (who are sub-contractors) was and remains immense.
Look up the Apollo program, then look up who designed and built the Command and Service Modules, then look at who designed and built the LEM.
Then, look at who made the Saturn rockets.
Then, look at Apollo 13, whose accident was triggered by a change of contractor, which resulted in the incorrect voltage heater being installed in a cryogenic tank, which then overheated and blew the tank to hell and gone.
As the line in the movie said, "It's time to wake up ten thousand people", that was quite accurate.
Yes, there were safety cultural issues present and some peter principle present, the acronym wasn't an indicator. Some complacency was present and is always a danger, however, mission requirements resulted in other cultural issues, where launch may not be delayed without a major reason.
You will be laughing from the other side if (I am praying for when) New Horizons starts to sending back good photographs from the Pluto system next week.
BTW, the latest supplies to the ISS were carried by the Progress craft, sure the one before failed, but unlike the two USA private enterprise efforts since, it did not explode soon after launch, entered orbit, and does not get insane levels of funding and cross-funding (so not 'private enterprise') in the way the two US failures are.
I'd nod to that, save for one thing. They were used only a bit over a dozen times.
Far too short a successful launch number to suggest high reliability.
That said, those rockets and payloads *did* turn a lunar launch into "something as exciting as driving to Pittsburgh".
But, a total of under 20 launches?
No.
I suppose it depends upon how you define "Catastrophic failure". The unmanned Apollo 6 flight had some VERY serious problems related to pogo oscillations in the first stage, which caused some minor structural failures in the CSM. The second stage had some very serious performance problems, so severe that the control system shut down two of five engines on that stage!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_6#Flight
The Apollo 13 launch also suffered severe pogo oscillations in the second stage, although these were overshadowed by later developments during the flight. And, the center engine was shut down before the pogo oscillations caused structural failure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pogo_oscillation#Hazard
But, as such, not all of the Saturn launches were considered successes.
Dave
Yes, I imagine that SpaceX, which is rather well-known for keeping things in-house as much as possible, will be able to have ready access to all the production paperwork, talk to the guys who built the 2nd stage and so on.
I'd bet that we'll see another Falcon 9 v1.1 fly again before October 2015, with the fallback position being before November 2015. The SpaceX engineers will, in my admittedly uninformed opinion, get this sorted.
And yes, NASA, being forced/required/compelled to buy stuff from a range of companies, almost all of whom are from certain Senator's/Congressmen's backyards, will find, and always has found, it difficult to get things to go fast.
That said, let's not go overboard with the NASA-bashing. They don't get to run things as they'd like. As the system stands, the NASA guys, for all their big IQs and many professional qualifications, are REQUIRED by the people who allocate their money to spend their money on things their political masters want them to spend the money on, and in the way that the politicians want them to spend it. Hence SLS, for example, a heavy-lift rocket with a huge price tag when both SpaceX and even ULA have said they can do a heavy lift rocket for much, much less. So if you're going to bash anyone, bash Washington DC.
It is if anything even worse in european projects. Exactly the same pork barreling but you also have countries that spent the last 1000years at war with each other, and some countries who think that only they can build some things because certain other countries are a bunch of neanderthals who can barely bang rocks together. Then you have a bunch of small countries who decide that their post office/civil aviation authority/milk marketing board has to be in charge of approving the specs for a space project.
And then you have to translate everything into a dozen languages even though everybody working on the project is speaking English.
Mind you - you do get to go for some very nice lunches when the meetings aren't being held in the UK or Germany.
Well, I guess you might recall Armstrong's words, 'we came in peace for all mankind.'
Interesting that British aid budget to India is paying for the Indian space programme, but not to helping anybody in India who is needing aid, and British space programme is long extinct.
I think they (UK) used to launch rockets in Australia, when not using it for hydrogen bomb tests.
Good luck to the Skylon people, interesting project.
I think it will come to nothing, closest Britain comes to space and rocketry these days is politicians and military watching the single demo launch of a Trident, which is part of the bill when they buy the stupid thing.
Yes:
capable of transporting 15 tonnes of cargo into space. It is the use of SABRE's combined air-breathing and rocket cycles that enables a vehicle that can take off from a runway, fly direct to earth orbit and return for a runway landing, just like an aircraft.
there has never been a rocket system that hasn't had a catastrophic failure at one time or another
For unmanned rockets, occasional catastrophic failure should probably be designed in at some level.
The penalty of any added weight for something going all the way to orbit is very high (in terms of reduced payload). Henry Ford once asked which parts on his cars never went wrong, and then ordered "make them cheaper". For getting an unmanned vehicle into orbit, there's far more justification for "make them lighter".
This is also the weak point of any proposed spaceplane. Because it'll cost very much more than a rocket, it has to be reusable many times, but that level of reliability will impose a weight penalty. It would be a non-starter, if it didn't have the advantage over a rocket of being able to do away with a large weight of oxidizer (it can use ambient air until it's a few miles up).
Nice bit of flim-flam about how lean mean SpaceX will fix the problem real quick once they figure out what happened not like stodgy old NASA who are, you know, the people paying SpaceX to fly the CRS missions to the ISS.
NASA doesn't build or fly rockets, it buys launches from manufacturers like ULA (Boeing and Lockheed) and SpaceX. The big kerfuffle about the Shuttle disasters was that people were killed and determining exactly what went wrong in the operational sense was what took the time -- the true causes were known a day or two after they happened.
This failure is going to put a crimp on man-rating the Falcon design which was otherwise moving along smoothly and it's also going to make the US DoD and No Such Agency a bit more wary of offering SpaceX contracts to fly their pricey military and spy hardware, just after Elon managed to wedge his way onto that gravy train.
They'll handle this a lot faster than 32 weeks. More like 32 days (ok, that's too fast, call it twice that at 2 months) It's a relatively small private company with a big backlog, they can't afford to take half a year to find the problem. They will find the root cause, verify it to everyone's satisfaction, institute changes, retrofit everything in production, retest everything in the queue and be back on the launch pad by end of August.
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