Remember how Reagan and Thatcher told your parents that private corporations are (somehow) “more efficient” than state run organisations?
Yeah… they lied.
They are more efficient.
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They are more efficient moving money from the bottom to the top and making investors and CEOs rich.
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They are more efficient at making the minimum product for the price while suppressing labor, reducing customer service, and enshittifying the product as the lifespan of the company progresses in order to do #1.
Well… since you put it that way - I’ll just have to concede.
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We privatized anything related to space exploration.
Safety, scope of mission, budget
The first moon missions were extremely risky. Many people died during development and/or during those missions. As NASA evolved, they reprioritized safety and that changed the demands of the vehicle.
The scope of the missions are also different. The first moon missions were, mostly, about just getting there. Taking moon samples back and doing science experiments were limited. The mission now is for a larger group of people to stay on the moon for week/weeks.
Budget has been a huge issue since the 80s. Once the allure of new and exciting space things died down after the first landing on the moon, public perception and federal budgets got moved to other things. The reason NASA is using the SpaceX rocket isn’t because they couldn’t make something better. But SpaceX has done a lot of the development on their own dime. Getting a moon-worthy rocket without an additional decade of funding and research ensures reasonable timeframes for the new moon missions.
modern companies use “Agile” development
I don’t know for sure but if it started to suck after 1980, it was Reagan’s fault.
Easy answer. Far less money is being given today to NASA:
Further, that NASA budget includes all the extra planetary science happening (multiple Mars rovers, Deep Space network, LEO space station operations, deep space probes like DART, Juno, OSIRIS-REx, etc, plus all of the atmospheric flight stuff like the low noise supersonic flight experiments. This also includes all of SLS which is a SECOND rocket being made for Moon exploration.
To answer your second question: yes, reuse is worth it. We didn’t do it during Apollo because it would have been even more expensive. Because we didn’t have it, any flight was just as expensive as the first. So we had to stop going unless the crazy amount of money would stay, which it wouldn’t.
Plus SpaceX squanders far less money than the contractors that have sucked off the government teat via NASA for 50+ years.
Those bloated companies are part of the military-industrial complex and finance lobbying to push projects (especially cost-plus) which they can then “compete” for.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t blame NASA, this is a problem of politicians and grubby bastards in companies like Boeing, General Dynamics, etc. NASA is controlled by congress and whoever is providing financing - the shuttle development history demonstrates these problems very clearly (competing requirements from Air Force, NSA, etc, who were providing funding).
At a high level, NASA, (like many government projects) have traditionally used more of a “Waterfall” project management approach, while SpaceX has used an iterative Agile-like approach. This means SpaceX can be more nimble while learning along the way, enabling them to change direction when they discover a fundamental misunderstanding. The first launch of Starship demonstrates this approach perfectly.
Different design paradigms. In 1969, they had one shot to get everything right, and prepared accordingly (not to mention, they had a massive budget since the space race was all part of the cold war).
SpaceX is taking a different approach, fail fast and cheap. They are taking an iterative approach that allows them to learn from previous failures, rather than anticipating what all those failures could be and then over engineering the rocket to prevent that.
They are different approaches, and each has their own pros and cons. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
That’s a great summary, I appreciate it. Do you think the new approach has been worth it so far? The Artemis 1 launch was successful first try.
The Artemis 1 launch was also staggeringly expensive, and yet to be repeated.
In the time it’s taken to develop that rocket, SpaceX has gone from it’s very first real flight (by which I mean actually achieving something, rather than a pure test flight) to launching far more every year than the entire rest of the world combined. Note that by that definition, Artemis hasn’t had a single “real” flight yet.
SLS did a lap around the moon flawlessly and returned safely.
Starship, a scale model of the empty shell that HLS might one day sit in, when it is finally developed, can’t even land without exploding.
According to a recent speech by musk, it wasn’t even the real shell. IFT3 was a 40ton-to-LEO craft, where HLS will have to be around 100, which would take the as of yet unflown and (mostly?) unbuilt “Starship 2”.
And where SLS will simply have to do a repeat of what it has already done for Artemis 2.
HLS will have first be actually built, get launched, get refueled by a tanker craft that also doesn’t exist yet, an unknown number of times (probably 12), fly to the moon, land there, take off, come back, land on earth and then do ALL of that again in time for Artemis 3 where it will have people on board.
SLS is 1 for 1, and if Starship IFT4 does everything right tomorrow, HLS is still at 0. And if it does everything right, I will buy a hat and eat it.
SLS is also ridiculously expensive. They hope, with time, to bring the cost down to $1 billion per launch. And the first one took 6 years longer than expected. If we’re going to get to the moon more than one more time before I die, this isn’t the vehicle I’m going to pin my hopes on.
SLS is currently priced at 4b per launch, based on its one launch.
Starship-HLS has cost at least the 2.9b from the NASA contract, and doesnt exist yet.
SLS is a disposable product based on existing technology. Starship intends to be reusable and is an evolution based on tech developed in the last 20 years.
Neither private companies nor the DoD is interested in using the SLS once it has been proven in the Artemis project, and given the project is based on the time-honored tradition of government pork, it’s doubtful it will ever be economical. Every indication I can see is that the Blue Origin and SLS contract are to hedge bets in case Starship fails. After all, we know SLS will work, but it will always be cost-ineffective just based on the nature of the beast. Blue Origin might work out, but they’ve been around as long as SpaceX and have achieved suborbital flights so far. Meanwhile, SpaceX has had 332 successful launches in 14 years, with 2 failures. Their team seems to know what they’re doing.
As I say elsewhere, Starship is a scale model of an empty shell into which the HLS might one day be built. HLS has not been built. HLS doesn’t even exist as a non-functioning mockup. HLS has not even been designed. The vehicle to carry HLS into space has not been built. The vehicle that will refuel HLS when it eventually has been built, has not been built.
HLS has so far cost 3 billion, and doesn’t exist even slightly. All that exists is a scaled down model of an empty shell and a scaled down model of the booster that has not lifted even a single pound of simulated cargo off the ground.
I’m not saying Starship won’t be a great heavy-lift craft for LEO or maybe GEO cargo one day, but HLS does not exist in any way other than CGI renders, and it has cost 3 billion government dollars so far, and many more other funds.
And that’s not to say I don’t think Falcon isn’t a great machine. It’s a machine that runs entirely on unsustainable artificial demand, but I’m a massive proponent of burning the private venture capital of overly-rich idiots to fund useful spacetravel.
Several reasons.
1 - SpaceX is a startup company. They run on venture capital, and unlike NASA who gets a big bag of taxpayer money, SpaceX has to promise new investors something better every year. And since SpaceX hasn’t come close to turning a profit, they need to do it by making spectacle. Launching Rockets is spectacle. Traditional companies can take their time to get it right, but SpaceX can’t draw in the venture capital they need to survive based on one succesful launch every other year. But they can get money with slightly less shitty failures.
2 - SpaceX is using an entirely new type of engines, burning liquid methane instead of kerosine or hydrogen, and making rocket engines is… well… rocket science. The problem is mostly that it’s really really hard to get engines to relight when you don’t have gravity, and especially hard when it’s methane you’re burning. This is why Apollo used hypergolic engines (fuel that will burn when it touches, instead of needing to be lit) for everyone but the main launch.
3 - SpaceX only got the contract for the lunar lander because the head of the lunar lander program, Kathy Lueders, gave them (and not the other parties) a private call to tell them the exact budget available. Then she awarded the contract to SpaceX, for being the only party to submit a bid within the budget. (Source: https://ecf.cofc.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/show_public_doc?2021cv1695-77-0 the court opinion where they spell out this was legal, and say nothing on wisdom or ethics, pdf alert). Incidentally she now has a cushy and well-paid job at SpaceX.
4 - NASA recently paid a second party, blue Origin, to also develop a lunar lander, so feel free to take that as you will. It’s probably not a sign of trust in SpaceX… so I’m willing to say that point 5 is that either SpaceX is shit at this (unlikely, since Falcon 9 is pretty awesome) or they’re just not taking it seriously.
Point 1: SpaceX’s entire development philosophy is “test early, test often and learn from failures”. This is a much quicker pace than simulating every imaginable failure scenario and leads to faster progress in development. With the Falcon 9, that process proved wildly efficient and successful, culminating in a launch vehicle so reliable that it’s cheaper to insure a payload on an F9 that already has multiple launches under its belt than a brand new booster. And they’re turning enough of a profit to develop the Starship largely on internal funds, seeing how the early Raptor flight tests were before the HLS contract.
Point 2: Just adding, the Raptor engine is the first full-flow staged combustion engine to ever get off a testing stand and actually fly. The engineering complexity of these things is on the level of the Shuttle’s RS-25.
Point 3: SpaceX were the only ones with more than designs and mockups to present, and they had a reliable track history from working with NASA on the commercial resupply and crew projects. And I see no problem with awarding a contract to a bid that actually fits into the budget.
Point 4: Multiple options was always part of the plan. NASA wants redundancy, so that if one of the providers runs into problems, the other provider can continue (and perhaps even take up the slack) instead of everything coming to a grinding halt. For a perfect example, look at the Shuttle and Commercial Crew programs. The Shuttle got grounded and since it was NASA’s only manned launcher, they had to bum rides from the russians. In contrast, the CC contract was awarded to Boeing and SpaceX. With Starliner’s continued issues, SpaceX has picked up the slack and fulfilled more than their initial contract in launches, instead of NASA having to bum rides from the russians again. The initial HLS contract was supposed to go to two providers, until the budget got cut. Blue’s bid was always the favorite for the second pick.
SpaceX’s entire development philosophy is “test early, test often and learn from failures”. This is a much quicker pace than simulating every imaginable failure scenario and leads to faster progress in development.
This is a catchy statement, not an actionable philosophy. There’s many ways to do it, and it’s entirely possible that SpaceX is doing it poorly.
There’s a lot of value in brainstorming every imaginable failure scenario. It’s industry standard to do so in fact with HAZOPs. There’s failures that you may not necessarily see in testing – especially those that are rare but catastrophic. This is a field that should be acutely aware of that given past events.
There’s also a right way to do testing and a wrong way to do testing. You typically consolidate tests and do several at a time, depending on the stage in the project. And you don’t typically risk precious equipment in doing so.
From the sounds of it, they don’t have a robust safety program, and they’re hemorrhaging money and resources through poor testing philosophies.
Other commentor answered very well. I’ll just add that if China or Russia starts sending successful ships to the moon/mars and/or starts making real steps for a moon base, then you can bet your ass the US government will pour all their resources into our space program. In other words, the Cold War boosted the space program in the 60s because Russia scary. During “peace-time”, the US government purposely under funds the living shit out of NASA. That’s why private corporations are doing it now, like SpaceX.
I agree, but I’m afraid these days they’d just farm it out to a private business instead of doing it themselves with the goal of doing it right like they did in the 60’s. Today they’d overpay some billionaire hugely for worse results because greed for profit = overcharging and substandard parts and oversight.
