The pace of which Elon & the SpaceX team continues to prototype and develop the Starship is beyond mind boggling to me — especially in contrast to the complete waste of taxpayer money that is the SLS.
Yet again another example that the government is unbelievably inefficient and an incompetent manager of our taxes/public funds.
> the complete waste of taxpayer money that is the SLS.
SLS is such if you see it as a space exploration program. If you see it as a qualified workforce preservation program, then it is quite successful. There's a chance it is exactly that. The US has built thousands, or maybe tens of thousands rockets capable of reaching space in the '60s, '70s, '80s and a bit in the '90s. The Trident II SLBM is an absolute marvel of technology, and it's probably unsurpassed even today, three decades after it was introduced. But what do you do with your workforce once you built all the rockets you need? Do you simply fire them all? What if there's some new development 20 years from now, some Chinese or Russian innovation (maybe hypersonic missiles? nuclear thermal rockets?) that destabilizes the balance of powers? You won't be able to flip a switch and bring all your engineers back to work to figure out some way to stay relevant. So what you do instead is you give them some pretend work. What you don't want is to turn that pretend work into real results, because those results is not what you are paying them for. You are just paying them to keep them around and a little busy, not to take you to the Moon.
This would be more convincing if there weren't a major labor shortage right now. There are plenty of companies including aerospace companies where the skills of that qualified workforce could help move things forward.
It's a free country, those people are not slaves. Do you think they don't know how to write a resume, make a profile on LinkedIn, or get in touch with a recruiter?
One problem with this strategy is that the sort of workforce you will attract to a make work project is much different than with an exciting new technology.
If you're essentially telling your workers that what they're doing isn't very important, why would they bust their butts and make major sacrifices in their lives to do it (as SpaceX employees do)?
> If you see it as a qualified workforce preservation program, then it is quite successful. There's a chance it is exactly that.
This is my take on why we have such a huge automobile industry - it's not that the automobile is the best mass transit option, it's wildly inefficient, but having the manufacturing capacity for automobiles on tap keeps what's essentially a hot standby for a wartime manufacturing of tanks, etc. I think SLS is in the same boat, we have it operating inefficiently for civilian purposes, but it's a hot standby in case we need to manufacture a lot of ICBMs in short order.
> I think SLS is in the same boat, we have it operating inefficiently for civilian purposes, but it's a hot standby in case we need to manufacture a lot of ICBMs in short order.
There's very little applicable to both manned rockets and ICBMs. There's no mystery about why SLS is what is.
It's built out of STS parts in order to keep money flowing to the same companies that supported the space shuttle.
And its even 100x easier to say 'hey SpaceX build us 1000 rockets' or 'hey firefly' or 'hey relativity' or 'hey rocketlab' or 'hey blueorigin'. Or any other of other places aerospace engineers could work.
Why do you think it would be 100x easier to go to them then the defense industry companies contracted for the SLS? Eg Northrup, Boeing ect? Surely you see how it is more strategic to keep 10s of thousands of rocket engineers and manufacturers at the weapons companies busy with pretend work, than rely on Musk and Bezos converting their private companies to war machines in a time of need.
Those engineers are not that different. Just because Boeing also works on weapons doesn't magically mean that those engineers would be great at building weapons when they spent all their time on SLS.
If you want engineers that have knowledge about a particular thing, then just pay them to work on that. And if for some strange reason you don't want to do that, then at least let them work on something that is not dumb and pointless.
Non of the arguments why SLS makes sense, are credible to me.
And its not historical either, as those jobs are not preserved for deep strategic reasons, but rather shallow political gain reasons.
> So what you do instead is you give them some pretend work.
Are you saying that the SLS is just pretend work? Because if it's not then it's very much a waste of taxpayer money at this point.
And if it's not pretend work then I would further argue that pretend work doesn't keep the skills sharp for the goal of building rockets. That's particularly true since SLS has yet to deliver any successful rockets!
> You are just paying them to keep them around and a little busy, not to take you to the Moon.
So you're definitely arguing that people should get employed to pretend to build rockets so that when you have to build rockets you can.
But I tell you: when you have to build rockets you still won't be able to because your people weren't actually building successful rockets.
Indeed, they aren't building successful rockets. But the re-learning process for them would still be much faster than if you start with people with zero experience.
It's like saying there's no point in keeping a National Guard around, because if a war comes, the guardsmen will have no actual war fighting experience. That might be true, but they'll still be able to man a 155mm howitzer, or dig a trench, or perform a patrol at night in a forest or 100 other things better than me.
> If you see it as a qualified workforce preservation program, then it is quite successful.
No it isn't. This workforce is not innovating can creating new things learning new things. They are working on technology from the past with tools from the pasts and methods from the past.
How about you have your workforce try to build those instead of blowing 2 billion a year on a nothing.
Or how about this crazy idea, this workforce could work at places like SpaceX, Firefly, RocketLab and so on. This crazy thing called private companies.
Where is the billions of $ the government spends to keep a bunch of computer scientist and programmers to spin their wheels? It doesn't exist because it makes no sense. If they want something there is plenty of workforce there to get it.
Giving people pretend work when you could just as well give them real work is literally the dumbest thing I have ever heard. And its nothing but a galaxy brain rationalization of idioitic pork politics.
And if that was even remotely the thinking, it would actually make far, far, far, far more sense to do it for nuclear technology not rocket technology. Yet there the knowledge is getting lost very fast and nobody cares.
It's crazy that we are still funding the non-reusable SLS. Promoting competition makes sense but reusability is now proven and should be a requirement.
Funding would be better spent with Blue Origin or the many other smaller companies that have demonstrated reusability or a path to it.
Funding Blue Origin is basically the same as SLS at this point -- creating JOBS but not, you know, rockets or what is actually supposed to be paid for.
If Blue Origin isn't building rockets why is there a video of a reusable rocket being launched which has Blue Origin branding on it on the Blue Origin YouTube channel? [1]
I asked the rhetorical question because the claim that they don't make rockets is obviously false and the evidence that they do is easily found. I think it is worthwhile when people make false claims to counter those claims with the truth, overcoming darkness with light. Stoking anger with falsehood is folly.
Blue origin was formed 20 years ago. They have never delivered a single orbital class product. There are currently around 5 privately run space companies that have produced orbital class rockets that have flown, or will fly this year (Firefly Space, Spacex, Relativity Space, Virgin Orbit, Rocketlab... and probably others I don't know about). Every one of these companies took about 6 years to develop their rocket from scratch.
That thing in the video is essentially just a spaceplane. It has about 1/100th the amount of energy needed to reach orbit. It isn't comparable to any of the companies mentioned above. Blue origin has had billions of dollars pumped into it and has produced nothing.
This is likely not going to be popular, because your small errors won't seem worthy of the level of harm I'm going to attribute to them, but I hope you'll take the critique according to the good intent that motivates it and understand that even as I ask this I'm not so much angry with you as disturbed by a tendency I see in online discourse which I feel doesn't get nearly as much push back as it should.
A while before I came to this thread I was reading conversations between random people on the internet. These people were talking about murdering Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos because false narratives built on hyperbolic criticisms made it sensible for them to believe that all billionaires investing in space travel are evil. When I say random people, I mean that if the same thing were happening in real life there would be a thousand strong mob all echoing this sentiment.
Your words are the fuel of this mob. Your hyperbole is the fire that lights the outrage. Don't you see this?
We're not even opponents:
> It has about 1/100th the amount of energy needed to reach orbit.
I agree with this and did well before I asked my question.
> and has produced nothing.
This isn't true. It just isn't true. They did produce a rocket. They produced factories and office buildings as well. They produced some things.
You seem to believe that if you convince people to take your view for the wrong reasons that you will benefit from it. This isn't the case. If you convince people by prompting them into emotional outrage then what you get is people who can't be reasoned with easily.
These angry mobs you are helping to create aren't under your control. You are extremely reckless with your words. I hope the fires you kindle are doused and will continue to assert that they built a rocket even though I know that the rocket isn't particularly good relative to other rockets.
There is this horrible thing that happens on the internet. People say untrue things into a crowd of people and you don't see that your words lead to an angry mob forming down the street. It's all invisible. Even when you're part of an angry mob you can't really tell you are. It seems so harmless. Hopefully it remains that way, but we've seen real harm bubble out of the internet and into our national conversation.
The root is the rhetoric. So I'm trying to counter the stoking of anger now rather than waiting for it to build up to something more substantial.
What are you talking about angry mobs? Do you just mean that sad jealous people who say bad things about anyone more successful than them? That isn't a mob, that is humanity since the beginning of time.
What I meant to say, and thought was obvious, was that Blue Origin has created nothing of value. Anyway the whole thing is funded with Jeff Bezo's own money so I don't know why anyone would care. It's better than him buying yachts with his money. My only point is the government should not give Blue Origin a cent to do work in space for them, and if the government does, then it is pure corruption, simple as that.
What is crazy is that we're going to chuck 4 Shuttle rocket engines which belong in a museum into the the ocean after a pointless flight of a pointless rocket.
So what you fail to understand and much of the "govt waste" argument also fails to understand is that the government has funded the basic research and incredible high risk capital to do any the projects in the first place. With out the decades of work and capital that the R&D programs have built in this country none of SpaceX would be possible.
Everything that Elon has done has been piggybacked on the heavy lifting of the government. Most of all climate technology, space tech and the internet has been developed off their back and productionized (ie most of the technology is de-risked thanks to the fundamental research from the government).
This, frankly, unintelligent argument that the government is a waste of resources probably better represents your understanding of how difficult technology gets funded in the US. Critical word here is difficult (not some ad-tech SAS company).
FWIW the government has a ton of inefficiencies but their goal isn't to productionize something and turn it into a business.
Basic research has nothing to do with the pork barrel boondoggle that is the SLS. SpaceX in the last decade has dramatically outdone NASA et. al[0] to the point of embarrassment. If building rockets and going to space was a football game, NASA vs. SpaceX is looking like Cumberland vs. Georgia Tech (0-222).
Frankly as someone who is on 'team USA' I'd like us to suck a lot less at building rockets[1].
[0]Who not only also benefit from all the same basic research, but have more direct and firsthand access.
Elon is hyper focused on one task. Go to mars. Everything he is doing is that. Orbital network so you can talk to each other. Boring company to dig places to live as the surface is probably too harsh. Electric vehicles and solar to move around the surface. Reusable rockets to dramatically lower the costs going there and back. To move the amount of material to build a city there is going to be daunting the rocket cost was one of the large outliers. Think he said that cost had to come down 10-20x for him to make this happen. SpaceX is doing research and they are willing to blow up rockets to do that. NASA seems to have lost the taste for that years ago.
Obviously the USSR and Russia space program is world-class. But they clearly took some cues from NASA*, albeit sometimes due to political pressure.
Just look at Buran- Brezhnev started the program as a direct response to the US Space Shuttle. The KGB and VPK spent a fortune hoovering up documents about the shuttle, and the resulting vehicle had clear similarities.
*And there have obviously been times where NASA drew on their work
Yeah but the actual rocket scientists didn't want anything to do with it. They basically said 'clearly this shuttle thing makes no sense what so ever for space flight, the only reason it could exist is to nuke us'. The Russians built their own because politicians wanted to match it.
Soviet engineers were clever and put built the rocket in a way where they could use it without the Orbiter and make the system much more useful then the Shuttle ever was.
But that was late in the game really, for the most part, in terms of engines the Soviets kicked the US ass.
The USSR/Russia had it's own many decades long R&D programmes.
We know for a fact SpaceX has benefited from NASA expertise because Elon has said so repeatedly and often, and the experienced designers and engineers he hired in the early days, some of whom are still there, cut their teeth in "old space". That's aside form the fact that much of what SpaceX has done has depended on NASA funding, including the couple of billion for lunar Starship.
Didn't say anything about Russia, but certainly they did - competitors emulate.
So in terms of your SpaceX comment: They are certainly pushing the frontier on the heavy lifting of the decades of research and projects from the national research labs and NASA. The US government doesn't (afaik) have a mission to populate and develop mars - so that opening is available for Elon to pursue.
The 20B+ / $2B/launch SLS program "innovation" is to not innovate! This is Apollo+, but heavier and in many ways worse and very expensive.
My own guess is that all in NASA / SLS cost per launch and program maint is probably on the range of $3B per launch if you look at the facilities list they have for this - which is super large.
Even weirder, NASA now says they want to be the anchor customer for 30 years of this boondoggle! Rather than just bidding out whatever heavy lift they need, they are going to get stuck with this crap for 30 years, which is a clear lock-in effort to avoid this thing getting cancelled out.
I mean is it the Apollo program? The spend for Apollo was $285B - during the whole Apollo period the spend at nasa was $482B. Not even on the same order of magnitude.
This does not explain why NASA of the 1960s was so dynamic and goal-oriented and lost that spirit in the following decades.
I still trust NASA when it comes to interplanetary probes and other basic research, but they stopped squeezing their suppliers (Boeing, Morton Thiokol etc.) for radically better launchers a long time ago. All improvement was very gradual. Which is not terrible in itself, but expendable rockets need reusable replacement very sorely. Fortunately, Falcon 9 seems to work very well.
I think no one, including Elon Musk, would claim that private space companies developed everything from scratch. They were obviously standing on the shoulders of giants. What is less fortunate is the fact that many of those giants were already dead.
The government is extremely efficient and funneling taxpayer money to Boeing. That was the whole point of the SLS, no? The best rocket lobbyists could buy.
Exactly. Government waste is laid at the foot of the Lobbyists from private companies. We need better laws on this, but good luck, all the politicians are bought and paid for. Meanwhile, the corrupt class of contractors milking the government claims that government is the problem. Find me an honest man in Washington, and I will show you a corpse.
Soviets tried that approach with their Moon robotic landing. I mean landings. The heads of that effort were mostly military generals from artillery, who used to test by firing it.
After a few unsuccessful launches (sometimes at the very late stages during moon landing, and sometimes fully capable drone got just blown up on launchpad), they realized they need to change the strategy and test rigorously on land every small piece.
SpaceX does that and have always done. SpaceX was famous in the industry for test firing.
SpaceX has early on internalized a lot of iterative testing, testing in the small and then testing in the large.
The Soviets moon rocket was the opposite, they build engines and only did sample testing because they used non-reusable pyros on the rocket. Those engines also couldn't restart.
Well hold on now, what about the pace of government funded space programs in the 60s and 70s? Government became mired and slow over time as the means of capturing money from tax payers became more routine.
It’s entirely possible the private sector will get mired in the same way over time.
Things ebb and flow like this. Healthcare in this country is mired due to the private sector, and can only really flow the other way due to government.
It’s a natural cycle. Once something becomes a money printing machine, all parties involved naturally want to keep it the same money printing machine (it prints money for god’s sake). Once private space ventures print money in a predictable way, the pace in which an Elon will move forward will stop (or such an Elon will cease to be involved, ala your Bezos and Google founders, gone from their money printing machine at this point).
Actually the government space program was mired and slow in the 50s as Werner von Braun was walled out of the main programs because he was unpopular among the bureaucrats.
It was only after the success of the Soviet space program that the US government got worried and decided things needed to change. They put von Braun in charge an the rest is history.
The lessons one learns from this isn't that he government is good at science. The lessons are that great individuals produced just about every great thing humanity has, and the best way to empower individuals in through the private sector, rather then having them bogged down in the bureaucracy. The other lesson is something that most totalitarian regimes in history worked out pretty quick: that an all powerful governments can only function well when it has an enemy. It is something in human nature that we fight among ourselves and are happy to corrupt and ruin things for our own benefit. It is only when faced with an enemy that the human instinct to work together for survival kicks in.
Korolev was a genius engineer. He was also a workaholic who would not relent until he got first class components for his rockets, even if it involved bitter fights with ossified Soviet industry.
When he died, his peers Glushko and Chelomei could not really replace him. After Korolev's death, innovation in Soviet space program slowed down and they lost the edge.
That's not quite fair. In the East there were actually many different streams of development.
And the Soviet space program didn't really slow down. They would continue to make great engines and launch great rockets. In no way can it be said that they lost 'the edge'.
What failed was the moon program, but its not at all clear that Korolev being alive would have changed that.
The Soviet still ended up building the second most powerful rocket ever. They built engines that were way better then anything the US did (RS-25 might be the exception but it was outrageously expensive). The Soviets also built pretty cool nuclear engines as well. In the 90s US engineers went over to Russia and literally didn't believe the engine specs they were being told. Some of the things they did was considered impossible in the West.
Keep your eye on the 'Everyday Astronaut' channel on Youtube. He will soon release an insane 1.5h video about Soviet rocket engines. Its insanely detailed and long and well researched. I was able to see it because of Patreon, but it should be public in a week or two.
What was unique about Korolev was the fact that his designs worked almost from scratch and usually did not result in much delay. It wasn't just product of his genius, but of the fact that he was willing to spend hours and hours on the phone with various factories, cajoling and threatening them into shipping the necessary parts in good quality and on time. Generally, the USSR had a major weakness in logistics of industrial products and Korolev was able to overcome it.
N-1 was an impressive design, but Korolev's successors were unable to get it to fly, which was a major financial black hole and a source of embarassment for the USSR. To be honest, we do not know if Korolev could make it fly either. The design was very revolutionary, a lot of engines firing at once.
Soviet engines were absolutely great. But development of the launchers as such slowed down significantly after Korolev's death.
As one of the examples of losing the edge: Soviet attempt at building a space shuttle was almost ten years delayed compared to the American one.
Interesting, I have not read to much about Korolev day to day. What the best thing to read?
They should have never attempted to build the Shuttle. I mean as far as I know they started to copy it pretty late in the game.
In my opinion the US could have been far ahead overall, but they decide to drop every aspect of Apollo. The should have continued with the Saturn 1B and the Apollo stack.
I am afraid my sources are Czech, for example, Konstruktéři raketového věku by Karel Pacner and a lot of articles by the same author. Pacner was our top rocket journalist, he had a lot of sources in Russia. Unfortunately he died this February.
Quality was a recurring problem in industrial production east of the Iron Curtain. I was born in an industrial city as well (Ostrava) and it was well known which section of which factory is "good" and which is "bad". People could not be fired for mere incompetence or laziness (as long as they were physically present), because jobs, especially in primary production, were seen as a right. Therefore, getting a good and reliable team together and getting rid of the misfits was a real challenge.
In production, quantity was rewarded. Quality did not matter as much. As a result, you had leaking faucets, uneven sheets of metal, crooked nails, weak glue, brittle bricks, shoddy workmanship ... and finding high quality stuff was a problem even for important industries.
Makes a lot of sense to me. And tracks with my general reading of history.
One example is how much Soviet tankers loved the in the West much mainlined Sherman tank. Soviet tanks loved them because they would just work and you could actually drive it any distance.
Its still quite amazing what they managed to do in terms of turbo and nuclear machinery despite those problems.
At the other hand, they build all these amazing engines but at the end of the day, they are still launching practical rockets with R-7 derived rockets. Those they actually produce stably in large numbers. While the more complex engines have never been produced in anywhere near those numbers.
You speak in absolutes, but the world is not black and white.
Look at the publicly funded Bell Labs in the 1940's - 1970's
They invented everything from the transister, tcp/ip, C language, satellites, cellphones, and the list goes on ... they were not-for-profit because the government allowed ma bell to be a government sponsored monopoly.
Look at that incredible work done, which would not have occurred if they had been forced to churn a profit each and every quarter.
It is a tragedy what happened to Bell Labs when they finally were cut off from being a non-profit in he mid 1970's. The shell of Bell Labs remains, iirc the buildings are now owned by Nokia, but it is a very sad result for the company that pioneered our modern society.
A great book on Bell Labs is called The Idea Factory, highly recommend that.
What on earth? Bell Labs wasn't publicly funded. Talk about turning things around. Bells Labs is the best example of the universal rule that just about every good piece of science for the last 70 years was produced by the private sector.
Every time I see something along the lines of "<so and so> tech wouldn't exist without government funding because...." I do some research and it turns out that the article was based on one person working for the government who contributed about 1/100'th of the important work, meanwhile the other 99% of the work being done by the private sector doesn't get mentioned. Sometimes the government also takes credit because they funded 50 million out of a 5 billion dollar budget, or something equally ridiculous.
As for Bell Labs, I remember watching a documentary about Shockley and co inventing the transistor. The military decided they needed that technology and managed to get their hands on some samples from Bell Labs. They set up a team to try to work out what Bell Labs was doing. Even having all of the Bell Lab's work in front of them, and knowing what to do, they couldn't keep up. They interviewed the military scientists much later for the documentary and they were all very depressed by the whole situation because for every one month of work the military group did catching up, Bell Labs had pulled 3 months further ahead.
The government can't even keep up with the private sector when they are copying them, let alone actually initiating that kind of research. It isn't a coincidence that almost all the best research in the world is done at privately run American universities. At best, good research can get done at public universities when they receive industry funding.
I've heard a UK story (from 19 century I believe), when someone gave a talk about government role in economy, and as example said that if not government, no one would have built lighthouses.
Someone checked that argument, and found out that out of thousands British lighthouses, not a single one was built by government. They all were built by various associations of mariners or traders.
Bell Labs were owned by Western Electric and AT&T.
AFAIK they weren't directly public funded. You can argue that AT&T being a monopoly amounted to indirect help, but that still does not it itself generate enough money for research itself, neither does it ensure that the entity will be even willing to do and finance more research than absolutely necessary. They could have spent all the revenue on executive bonuses and campaign contributions to their congressmen.
They also basically employed a gigantic number of PhDs. I don't remember the exact number but at point in time they basically hired a high % of all PhD in the country.
The question is what would all these people have done if not for Bell Labs.
And Bell Labs has nothing to do with SLS. SLS is LITERLLY the opposite of giving freedom to smart people to innovate. Its lets use old technology so we can pork fund the existing contractors.
Looking forward to it! If they can get Starship working, it will completely change the game for not just super heavy lift boosters, but access to space in general.
Good luck, SpaceX! I hope that everyone else copies your approach (assuming it works).
> ... especially in contrast to the complete waste of taxpayer money that is the SLS.
Time to chop down the knowledge trees of economic theory and bureaucratic budget proceduralism. Crazy to think of all those 1960s concepts left on the drawing board in the U. S. A. meanwhile Communists in China were subsisting in caves.
NASA should have a crash (NPI) program to re-booster most of its missions on reusable boosters. And reimagine its goals in the light of the vastly cheaper cost of mass to orbit (that will likely soon be) achieved by Starship. Of course pork barrel projects die hard so it may take some technical or economic setback to deliver the coup de grace.
Its really amazing to see, in 2016 people basically called Musk crazy and the whole vehicle was consider insane. Re-usability was just beginning and the 'its never be economical' was still widely believed.
In interviews with people form places like ESA/Arianespace, ULA and co they were still basically totally patronizing towards SpaceX and them not understanding the 'real' difficulty and so on.
BlueOrigin was gone have all that funding and beat SpaceX to methane, staged-combustion and so on. BlueOrigin would be a 'second mover' and would bring a large high performance rocket to market take SpaceX cake. This rocket is now delayed to 2023 and some people question even that year.
Ariane 6 has been delayed years and might launch next year, with some now fearing it will slip to 2023. Apparently this amazing company so superior to 'upstart' SpaceX can't even make a slightly upgraded Ariane 5 less then 8 years despite the different engine being in development for decades. Not to mention this slightly updated non-reusable Ariane 6 cost 4-5 billion $ to develop. Continuing to fly Ariane 5 would have been cheaper.
ULA Vulcan also delayed to at some point in 2022, flight engines are not yet even in testing.
SLS, was once going beat Falcon Heavy to Orbit and is now delayed to 2022 and maybe slipping towards mid-22. Even if it achieves that it wont fly again for a long time. The amazing upper stage EUS has been frozen because the development is so expensive, you can't pay for EUS at the same time. EUS would be an additional 5 billion at least and take another 5 year at least.
Some Russian commentators were talking like the Angara was gone be the next big thing even.
Now Starship has the chance and honestly a high likelihood to beat all of these other rockets to Orbit. That is really a staggering achievement.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 157 ms ] threadYet again another example that the government is unbelievably inefficient and an incompetent manager of our taxes/public funds.
SLS is such if you see it as a space exploration program. If you see it as a qualified workforce preservation program, then it is quite successful. There's a chance it is exactly that. The US has built thousands, or maybe tens of thousands rockets capable of reaching space in the '60s, '70s, '80s and a bit in the '90s. The Trident II SLBM is an absolute marvel of technology, and it's probably unsurpassed even today, three decades after it was introduced. But what do you do with your workforce once you built all the rockets you need? Do you simply fire them all? What if there's some new development 20 years from now, some Chinese or Russian innovation (maybe hypersonic missiles? nuclear thermal rockets?) that destabilizes the balance of powers? You won't be able to flip a switch and bring all your engineers back to work to figure out some way to stay relevant. So what you do instead is you give them some pretend work. What you don't want is to turn that pretend work into real results, because those results is not what you are paying them for. You are just paying them to keep them around and a little busy, not to take you to the Moon.
If you're essentially telling your workers that what they're doing isn't very important, why would they bust their butts and make major sacrifices in their lives to do it (as SpaceX employees do)?
This is my take on why we have such a huge automobile industry - it's not that the automobile is the best mass transit option, it's wildly inefficient, but having the manufacturing capacity for automobiles on tap keeps what's essentially a hot standby for a wartime manufacturing of tanks, etc. I think SLS is in the same boat, we have it operating inefficiently for civilian purposes, but it's a hot standby in case we need to manufacture a lot of ICBMs in short order.
There's very little applicable to both manned rockets and ICBMs. There's no mystery about why SLS is what is.
It's built out of STS parts in order to keep money flowing to the same companies that supported the space shuttle.
If you want engineers that have knowledge about a particular thing, then just pay them to work on that. And if for some strange reason you don't want to do that, then at least let them work on something that is not dumb and pointless.
Non of the arguments why SLS makes sense, are credible to me.
And its not historical either, as those jobs are not preserved for deep strategic reasons, but rather shallow political gain reasons.
Are you saying that the SLS is just pretend work? Because if it's not then it's very much a waste of taxpayer money at this point.
And if it's not pretend work then I would further argue that pretend work doesn't keep the skills sharp for the goal of building rockets. That's particularly true since SLS has yet to deliver any successful rockets!
> You are just paying them to keep them around and a little busy, not to take you to the Moon.
So you're definitely arguing that people should get employed to pretend to build rockets so that when you have to build rockets you can.
But I tell you: when you have to build rockets you still won't be able to because your people weren't actually building successful rockets.
It's like saying there's no point in keeping a National Guard around, because if a war comes, the guardsmen will have no actual war fighting experience. That might be true, but they'll still be able to man a 155mm howitzer, or dig a trench, or perform a patrol at night in a forest or 100 other things better than me.
No it isn't. This workforce is not innovating can creating new things learning new things. They are working on technology from the past with tools from the pasts and methods from the past.
> (maybe hypersonic missiles? nuclear thermal rockets?)
How about you have your workforce try to build those instead of blowing 2 billion a year on a nothing.
Or how about this crazy idea, this workforce could work at places like SpaceX, Firefly, RocketLab and so on. This crazy thing called private companies.
Where is the billions of $ the government spends to keep a bunch of computer scientist and programmers to spin their wheels? It doesn't exist because it makes no sense. If they want something there is plenty of workforce there to get it.
Giving people pretend work when you could just as well give them real work is literally the dumbest thing I have ever heard. And its nothing but a galaxy brain rationalization of idioitic pork politics.
And if that was even remotely the thinking, it would actually make far, far, far, far more sense to do it for nuclear technology not rocket technology. Yet there the knowledge is getting lost very fast and nobody cares.
Your exploitation makes flat out no sense.
Funding would be better spent with Blue Origin or the many other smaller companies that have demonstrated reusability or a path to it.
Funding Blue Origin is basically the same as SLS at this point -- creating JOBS but not, you know, rockets or what is actually supposed to be paid for.
[1]: https://youtu.be/ZUZZ0EDzII0?t=4913
That thing in the video is essentially just a spaceplane. It has about 1/100th the amount of energy needed to reach orbit. It isn't comparable to any of the companies mentioned above. Blue origin has had billions of dollars pumped into it and has produced nothing.
A while before I came to this thread I was reading conversations between random people on the internet. These people were talking about murdering Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos because false narratives built on hyperbolic criticisms made it sensible for them to believe that all billionaires investing in space travel are evil. When I say random people, I mean that if the same thing were happening in real life there would be a thousand strong mob all echoing this sentiment.
Your words are the fuel of this mob. Your hyperbole is the fire that lights the outrage. Don't you see this?
We're not even opponents:
> It has about 1/100th the amount of energy needed to reach orbit.
I agree with this and did well before I asked my question.
> and has produced nothing.
This isn't true. It just isn't true. They did produce a rocket. They produced factories and office buildings as well. They produced some things.
You seem to believe that if you convince people to take your view for the wrong reasons that you will benefit from it. This isn't the case. If you convince people by prompting them into emotional outrage then what you get is people who can't be reasoned with easily.
These angry mobs you are helping to create aren't under your control. You are extremely reckless with your words. I hope the fires you kindle are doused and will continue to assert that they built a rocket even though I know that the rocket isn't particularly good relative to other rockets.
There is this horrible thing that happens on the internet. People say untrue things into a crowd of people and you don't see that your words lead to an angry mob forming down the street. It's all invisible. Even when you're part of an angry mob you can't really tell you are. It seems so harmless. Hopefully it remains that way, but we've seen real harm bubble out of the internet and into our national conversation.
The root is the rhetoric. So I'm trying to counter the stoking of anger now rather than waiting for it to build up to something more substantial.
What I meant to say, and thought was obvious, was that Blue Origin has created nothing of value. Anyway the whole thing is funded with Jeff Bezo's own money so I don't know why anyone would care. It's better than him buying yachts with his money. My only point is the government should not give Blue Origin a cent to do work in space for them, and if the government does, then it is pure corruption, simple as that.
Everything that Elon has done has been piggybacked on the heavy lifting of the government. Most of all climate technology, space tech and the internet has been developed off their back and productionized (ie most of the technology is de-risked thanks to the fundamental research from the government).
This, frankly, unintelligent argument that the government is a waste of resources probably better represents your understanding of how difficult technology gets funded in the US. Critical word here is difficult (not some ad-tech SAS company).
FWIW the government has a ton of inefficiencies but their goal isn't to productionize something and turn it into a business.
Frankly as someone who is on 'team USA' I'd like us to suck a lot less at building rockets[1].
[0]Who not only also benefit from all the same basic research, but have more direct and firsthand access.
[1]Among other things.
Is it not possible that SpaceX did what they did not because of the US government, but in fact, in _spite_ of it?
You may have this completely backwards.
Just look at Buran- Brezhnev started the program as a direct response to the US Space Shuttle. The KGB and VPK spent a fortune hoovering up documents about the shuttle, and the resulting vehicle had clear similarities.
*And there have obviously been times where NASA drew on their work
Soviet engineers were clever and put built the rocket in a way where they could use it without the Orbiter and make the system much more useful then the Shuttle ever was.
But that was late in the game really, for the most part, in terms of engines the Soviets kicked the US ass.
We know for a fact SpaceX has benefited from NASA expertise because Elon has said so repeatedly and often, and the experienced designers and engineers he hired in the early days, some of whom are still there, cut their teeth in "old space". That's aside form the fact that much of what SpaceX has done has depended on NASA funding, including the couple of billion for lunar Starship.
So in terms of your SpaceX comment: They are certainly pushing the frontier on the heavy lifting of the decades of research and projects from the national research labs and NASA. The US government doesn't (afaik) have a mission to populate and develop mars - so that opening is available for Elon to pursue.
The 20B+ / $2B/launch SLS program "innovation" is to not innovate! This is Apollo+, but heavier and in many ways worse and very expensive.
My own guess is that all in NASA / SLS cost per launch and program maint is probably on the range of $3B per launch if you look at the facilities list they have for this - which is super large.
Even weirder, NASA now says they want to be the anchor customer for 30 years of this boondoggle! Rather than just bidding out whatever heavy lift they need, they are going to get stuck with this crap for 30 years, which is a clear lock-in effort to avoid this thing getting cancelled out.
> but their goal isn't to productionize something and turn it into a business
Which means that you hate the government's recent plan to do just that with the SLS?
I still trust NASA when it comes to interplanetary probes and other basic research, but they stopped squeezing their suppliers (Boeing, Morton Thiokol etc.) for radically better launchers a long time ago. All improvement was very gradual. Which is not terrible in itself, but expendable rockets need reusable replacement very sorely. Fortunately, Falcon 9 seems to work very well.
I think no one, including Elon Musk, would claim that private space companies developed everything from scratch. They were obviously standing on the shoulders of giants. What is less fortunate is the fact that many of those giants were already dead.
the take away for me from this article is SpaceX's appoarch is like software development.
fail often and fail fast, stock options for employees to retain talents.
i also believe Elon's vision for Mars paint a goal for SpaceX employees and Gwynne Shotwell. She is the force behind SpaceX.
After a few unsuccessful launches (sometimes at the very late stages during moon landing, and sometimes fully capable drone got just blown up on launchpad), they realized they need to change the strategy and test rigorously on land every small piece.
SpaceX has early on internalized a lot of iterative testing, testing in the small and then testing in the large.
The Soviets moon rocket was the opposite, they build engines and only did sample testing because they used non-reusable pyros on the rocket. Those engines also couldn't restart.
It’s entirely possible the private sector will get mired in the same way over time.
Things ebb and flow like this. Healthcare in this country is mired due to the private sector, and can only really flow the other way due to government.
It’s a natural cycle. Once something becomes a money printing machine, all parties involved naturally want to keep it the same money printing machine (it prints money for god’s sake). Once private space ventures print money in a predictable way, the pace in which an Elon will move forward will stop (or such an Elon will cease to be involved, ala your Bezos and Google founders, gone from their money printing machine at this point).
It was only after the success of the Soviet space program that the US government got worried and decided things needed to change. They put von Braun in charge an the rest is history.
The lessons one learns from this isn't that he government is good at science. The lessons are that great individuals produced just about every great thing humanity has, and the best way to empower individuals in through the private sector, rather then having them bogged down in the bureaucracy. The other lesson is something that most totalitarian regimes in history worked out pretty quick: that an all powerful governments can only function well when it has an enemy. It is something in human nature that we fight among ourselves and are happy to corrupt and ruin things for our own benefit. It is only when faced with an enemy that the human instinct to work together for survival kicks in.
Korolev was a genius engineer. He was also a workaholic who would not relent until he got first class components for his rockets, even if it involved bitter fights with ossified Soviet industry.
When he died, his peers Glushko and Chelomei could not really replace him. After Korolev's death, innovation in Soviet space program slowed down and they lost the edge.
And the Soviet space program didn't really slow down. They would continue to make great engines and launch great rockets. In no way can it be said that they lost 'the edge'.
What failed was the moon program, but its not at all clear that Korolev being alive would have changed that.
The Soviet still ended up building the second most powerful rocket ever. They built engines that were way better then anything the US did (RS-25 might be the exception but it was outrageously expensive). The Soviets also built pretty cool nuclear engines as well. In the 90s US engineers went over to Russia and literally didn't believe the engine specs they were being told. Some of the things they did was considered impossible in the West.
Keep your eye on the 'Everyday Astronaut' channel on Youtube. He will soon release an insane 1.5h video about Soviet rocket engines. Its insanely detailed and long and well researched. I was able to see it because of Patreon, but it should be public in a week or two.
N-1 was an impressive design, but Korolev's successors were unable to get it to fly, which was a major financial black hole and a source of embarassment for the USSR. To be honest, we do not know if Korolev could make it fly either. The design was very revolutionary, a lot of engines firing at once.
Soviet engines were absolutely great. But development of the launchers as such slowed down significantly after Korolev's death.
As one of the examples of losing the edge: Soviet attempt at building a space shuttle was almost ten years delayed compared to the American one.
They should have never attempted to build the Shuttle. I mean as far as I know they started to copy it pretty late in the game.
In my opinion the US could have been far ahead overall, but they decide to drop every aspect of Apollo. The should have continued with the Saturn 1B and the Apollo stack.
Quality was a recurring problem in industrial production east of the Iron Curtain. I was born in an industrial city as well (Ostrava) and it was well known which section of which factory is "good" and which is "bad". People could not be fired for mere incompetence or laziness (as long as they were physically present), because jobs, especially in primary production, were seen as a right. Therefore, getting a good and reliable team together and getting rid of the misfits was a real challenge.
In production, quantity was rewarded. Quality did not matter as much. As a result, you had leaking faucets, uneven sheets of metal, crooked nails, weak glue, brittle bricks, shoddy workmanship ... and finding high quality stuff was a problem even for important industries.
One example is how much Soviet tankers loved the in the West much mainlined Sherman tank. Soviet tanks loved them because they would just work and you could actually drive it any distance.
Its still quite amazing what they managed to do in terms of turbo and nuclear machinery despite those problems.
At the other hand, they build all these amazing engines but at the end of the day, they are still launching practical rockets with R-7 derived rockets. Those they actually produce stably in large numbers. While the more complex engines have never been produced in anywhere near those numbers.
Look at the publicly funded Bell Labs in the 1940's - 1970's
They invented everything from the transister, tcp/ip, C language, satellites, cellphones, and the list goes on ... they were not-for-profit because the government allowed ma bell to be a government sponsored monopoly.
Look at that incredible work done, which would not have occurred if they had been forced to churn a profit each and every quarter.
It is a tragedy what happened to Bell Labs when they finally were cut off from being a non-profit in he mid 1970's. The shell of Bell Labs remains, iirc the buildings are now owned by Nokia, but it is a very sad result for the company that pioneered our modern society.
A great book on Bell Labs is called The Idea Factory, highly recommend that.
Every time I see something along the lines of "<so and so> tech wouldn't exist without government funding because...." I do some research and it turns out that the article was based on one person working for the government who contributed about 1/100'th of the important work, meanwhile the other 99% of the work being done by the private sector doesn't get mentioned. Sometimes the government also takes credit because they funded 50 million out of a 5 billion dollar budget, or something equally ridiculous.
As for Bell Labs, I remember watching a documentary about Shockley and co inventing the transistor. The military decided they needed that technology and managed to get their hands on some samples from Bell Labs. They set up a team to try to work out what Bell Labs was doing. Even having all of the Bell Lab's work in front of them, and knowing what to do, they couldn't keep up. They interviewed the military scientists much later for the documentary and they were all very depressed by the whole situation because for every one month of work the military group did catching up, Bell Labs had pulled 3 months further ahead.
The government can't even keep up with the private sector when they are copying them, let alone actually initiating that kind of research. It isn't a coincidence that almost all the best research in the world is done at privately run American universities. At best, good research can get done at public universities when they receive industry funding.
Someone checked that argument, and found out that out of thousands British lighthouses, not a single one was built by government. They all were built by various associations of mariners or traders.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lighthouse_in_Economics
Ronald H. Coase is one of the most brilliant scientists ever and he just recently died in 2013. He was literally still productive at 100 years old.
Btw, the famous Coase Theorem is actually not be Coase and he didn't like the way it was used.
Here an interview with him just 1 year before he died:
https://www.econtalk.org/coase-on-externalities-the-firm-and...
Here some other interviews from the same podcast about him:
https://www.econtalk.org/wally-thurman-on-bees-beekeeping-an...
https://www.econtalk.org/boudreaux-on-coase/
https://www.econtalk.org/robert-frank-on-coase/
AFAIK they weren't directly public funded. You can argue that AT&T being a monopoly amounted to indirect help, but that still does not it itself generate enough money for research itself, neither does it ensure that the entity will be even willing to do and finance more research than absolutely necessary. They could have spent all the revenue on executive bonuses and campaign contributions to their congressmen.
They also basically employed a gigantic number of PhDs. I don't remember the exact number but at point in time they basically hired a high % of all PhD in the country.
The question is what would all these people have done if not for Bell Labs.
And Bell Labs has nothing to do with SLS. SLS is LITERLLY the opposite of giving freedom to smart people to innovate. Its lets use old technology so we can pork fund the existing contractors.
Good luck, SpaceX! I hope that everyone else copies your approach (assuming it works).
Time to chop down the knowledge trees of economic theory and bureaucratic budget proceduralism. Crazy to think of all those 1960s concepts left on the drawing board in the U. S. A. meanwhile Communists in China were subsisting in caves.
In interviews with people form places like ESA/Arianespace, ULA and co they were still basically totally patronizing towards SpaceX and them not understanding the 'real' difficulty and so on.
BlueOrigin was gone have all that funding and beat SpaceX to methane, staged-combustion and so on. BlueOrigin would be a 'second mover' and would bring a large high performance rocket to market take SpaceX cake. This rocket is now delayed to 2023 and some people question even that year.
Ariane 6 has been delayed years and might launch next year, with some now fearing it will slip to 2023. Apparently this amazing company so superior to 'upstart' SpaceX can't even make a slightly upgraded Ariane 5 less then 8 years despite the different engine being in development for decades. Not to mention this slightly updated non-reusable Ariane 6 cost 4-5 billion $ to develop. Continuing to fly Ariane 5 would have been cheaper.
ULA Vulcan also delayed to at some point in 2022, flight engines are not yet even in testing.
SLS, was once going beat Falcon Heavy to Orbit and is now delayed to 2022 and maybe slipping towards mid-22. Even if it achieves that it wont fly again for a long time. The amazing upper stage EUS has been frozen because the development is so expensive, you can't pay for EUS at the same time. EUS would be an additional 5 billion at least and take another 5 year at least.
Some Russian commentators were talking like the Angara was gone be the next big thing even.
Now Starship has the chance and honestly a high likelihood to beat all of these other rockets to Orbit. That is really a staggering achievement.