The Perpetual MEGA Space Thread

[Swanee]

NASA blew up a lot of rockets before Shepard went up. Despite what the movie shows, a lot of those tests had expectations of destruction but weren't viewed as a failure.

All that said, once they got the hang of it, it really is amazing what they accomplished with the Saturn V, given the technology level at the time.

True. But that was the 1950s. We don't design and develop rockets, or airplanes, or any other type of vehicle that way anymore.

Twice now they've failed to reach their mark.

This is like saying, "Congrats on the success of the first F-35 off the carrier flight. You didn't make it feet dry, in fact the airplane blew up shortly after launch, but you got off the aircraft carrier so great success! High fives all around."


I'd sure hope they've learned a lot, they've blown up a shit ton of money at this point.

 

[Random8145]

I know SpaceX likes to cheerlead their fly-fail-fix-fly development model and since they‘re a private company, they can obviously do things as they wish. The problem is that unlike the early Falcon efforts, SpaceX is a lot more high-visibility now. And the primary customer for Starship is going to be NASA - it’s the key element in the current Artemis landing mission model. Too many more of these “successes” carried out in the glare of publicity and it’s going to seriously erode confidence in the company at the Agency and in Congress. They’ve already cut a contract to Blue Origin for another lander design effort because going sole-source to SpaceX was considered too programmatically risky.

By the bye, SpaceX damn near went bankrupt with this model during development of Falcon.

NASA is well aware though of the difficulty involved in such a large rocket design, so I think they are willing to cut SpaceX some slack.

 

[Random8145]

True. But that was the 1950s. We don't design and develop rockets, or airplanes, or any other type of vehicle that way anymore.

Twice now they've failed to reach their mark.

This is like saying, "Congrats on the success of the first F-35 off the carrier flight. You didn't make it feet dry, in fact the airplane blew up shortly after launch, but you got off the aircraft carrier so great success! High fives all around."


I'd sure hope they've learned a lot, they've blown up a shit ton of money at this point.

I don't think that is a proper comparison though. Airplanes aren't giant bombs executing a controlled explosion. They also are reusable. Imagine if historically, every time the Navy sent up an aircraft, they had to destroy it after the mission. So the pilot would go up, execute the mission, then eject and the plane blow up. Then you have a company that is started with the goal to produce reusable airplanes. They have achieved substantial success with multiple designs, with the Navy now regularly using their planes, but are now attempting reusability with a plane larger and more complex than ever before, but for a mission capability the Navy really wants. Thus far, one plane launched off the carrier then crashed. The second one one launched and made it further, successfully doing some things the first failed to do, but then still crashed. You'd probably be willing to cut the company some slack, right?

As for not designing rockets that way anymore, one could argue the result of that has been the space program slowing to a crawl, with expenses extraordinarily high. I'd give SpaceX some more launches and see how they do before getting too skeptical. They have accomplished multiple things that were previously said to be impossible.

 

[AIRMMCPORET]

How many successful launches in a row would it take for anyone on here to strap yourself into one. My over/under would be 7, I think... ?

42?

 

[Random8145]

How many successful launches in a row would it take for anyone on here to strap yourself into one. My over/under would be 7, I think... ?

Saturn V had two (successful) launches before they put crew in it And sent them straight to the Moon to orbit (I think ten times) and then come back! Not saying they should only do two for Starship but just interesting.

 

[jmcquate]

Saturn V had two (successful) launches before they put crew in it And sent them straight to the Moon to orbit (I think ten times) and then come back! Not saying they should only do two for Starship but just interesting.

Apollo 8 and 10 were the only manned flights to the moon. The other manned Apollo (pre 11) were Saturn 1B earth orbit CSM and LEM tests.

 

[Flash]

Until the catastrophically failing engine takes out some adjacent ones.

Not saying it’s not a good approach, but I remember the P3 that threw a prop off one engine that took out the rest.

VP-47 P3 Ditching!

VPNAVY is dedicated to the men and women of the United States Navy flying ASW VP/VPB Patrol Aircraft past and present. VPNAVY has attempted to collect every available piece of information via the InterNet. Everything and anything relating to U. S. Navy ASW Patrol Squadrons is posted with...

www.vpnavy.org

The AC was an instructor at VT-10 when I was at VT-4, his debrief on that flight at a TW-6 safety standdown was one of the best briefings I have ever seen in person. Didn't sugarcoat anything and was very matter of fact, apparently didn't have flying orders for his post-squadron tour until after the mishap. The alert crew that launched after they ditched actually got some video of the plane sinking and the rescue of the crew, showed it at the end of his brief.

The follow-on briefings by the German student who was swept out to sea for a night while sailboarding (Gilligan!) and the unintentionally absurd holiday airline safety briefing by the wing chaplain made it the best safety standdown I've ever attended.

 

[taxi1]

apparently didn't have flying orders for his post-squadron tour until the mishap

Whatever it takes to get a good set of orders

 

[JTS11]

he unintentionally absurd holiday airline safety briefing by the wing chaplain made it the best safety standdown I've ever attended.

I need more details on Chaps' safety brief. Always down for good awkward Chaps interactions...?

 

[Flash]

I need more details on Chaps' safety brief. Always down for good awkward Chaps interactions...?

He'd been assigned to do a safety briefing and really did put in an honest, earnest effort as a chaps on his very first assignment but he really didn't take into account that he was briefing an auditorium full of professional aviators and flight students. By the end the entire wing was laughing at the absurdity of it.

 

[JTS11]

He'd been assigned to do a safety briefing and really did put in an honest, earnest effort as a chaps on his very first assignment but he really didn't take into account that he was briefing an auditorium full of professional aviators and flight students. By the end the entire wing was laughing at the absurdity of it.

Really my own interactions with Chaps was on two deployments.

1) Returning from a 6 month deployment to OIF aboard USS Boxer. Not a lot of flight ops going on during return Every night, ship's TV freezes during movie night, and on the 1MC you here "Good evening Saywahs and Mawines". A collective "Fuck" can be heard coming from every stateroom. And it drones on for 15 minutes.

2) 2nd deployment to Iraq in '04. We're mid deployment and flying crazy hours. After a long night, the section is grabbing some breakfast, and here comes Chaps approaching the table for the Nth time, and everyone is eyes down trying to avoid the question, "Can I join you gents?". Internally, everyone groans, "Fuck".

We called him Robert Goullet, bc he looked like Will Ferell's caricature of him...



No Chaps hate, but they should be available to those who seek them out, and not seek to make a hard sell IMO.

 

[Sonog]

Blowing up rockets is not revolutionary. It's failure, it always has been. They're 0-2 with starship. You don't launch without a plan to land, and you don't launch with the intent to blow up just to see what happens. That's not revolutionary, that's dumb.

No one else is saying this is a win other than SpaceX and their fanboys.

I don't think its as dumb or as brilliant as anyone thinks it is. Its probably something much simpler like time value of money. They are making launches that a more risk averse organization like NASA would have scrubbed and as a result are knocking off X number of years off the development timeline in exchange for a few total losses. I read recently that they have 6 more starships fully stacked and ready to go. I have no idea what I'm talking about, but just offering a counter argument for funs sake.

 

[Random8145]

I read recently that they have 6 more starships fully stacked and ready to go. I have no idea what I'm talking about, but just offering a counter argument for funs sake.

Yup, they have money to (literally) blow regarding these rockets. It isn't just the process of rapid iteration with rockets though, there are some other things. Big Aerospace apparently has a lot of legacy practices to it that are just there from decades ago but which are not really necessary anymore, which SpaceX cuts out. Also, due to technological advancement, a lot of commercial grade components are just as good as what previously were aerospace-grade.

Elon has what he calls an Idiot Index. This is basically a ratio of the raw material costs of a product versus the cost to manufacture it. If the Idiot Index shows a part should cost far less to make than what a subcontractor is offering, SpaceX will often build it themselves. SpaceX has in the process dealt with hundreds of subcontractors that wanted astronomical amounts of money for parts that really didn't cost that much. For example, there was one part that the subcontractor quoted for $100,000. Elon said to his engineer, "That part is no more sophisticated than a garage door opener. Your budget is $5000." The engineer made it work for a budget of slightly over $5K, so he presented it to Musk with a detailed report about why the costs were what they were and Elon accepted. On some parts, SpaceX has apparently designed and built better versions of what a subcontractor was offering but for far cheaper.

So this process of identifying cheaper non-aerospace grade components that are just as good as aerospace grade, designing and making a lot of parts in-house to avoid the subcontractors, and blowing up rockets and learning iteratively, is a good part of how SpaceX has had the success they've had.

They've also been willing to just try things others haven't and say can't be done and are stupid to try, and have benefited from access to the NASA Technical Archive.

 

[BigRed389]

I don't think its as dumb or as brilliant as anyone thinks it is. Its probably something much simpler like time value of money. They are making launches that a more risk averse organization like NASA would have scrubbed and as a result are knocking off X number of years off the development timeline in exchange for a few total losses. I read recently that they have 6 more starships fully stacked and ready to go. I have no idea what I'm talking about, but just offering a counter argument for funs sake.

Govt agencies tend to be risk averse because Congress and the public tend to get pissed off when they see things go ka boom.

The defense industry is risk averse because shareholders lose their shit if things RUD…and they’ve learned that we’ll pay them for research anyway so why take any risk on their own dime?

So like you I’m sort of in the middle with SpaceX. They are definitely burning cash and RUDs for money/technological progress and that’s not some kind of innovative marvel in itself. But…it’s also literally what we want the conventional defense base to basically be doing on their own dime with the profits we pay them (but which they don’t). I literally had a conversation with some tactical rocket SMEs on why it takes so goddamn fucking long to qualify a new motor…and it’s basically because we can’t take any technical risk to burn cash against schedule.

So…if they’re doing it with SpaceX internal R&D to proof stuff out for a contract bid? Good on em. That’s what private industry is supposed to do.

 

[Swanee]

I don't think its as dumb or as brilliant as anyone thinks it is. Its probably something much simpler like time value of money. They are making launches that a more risk averse organization like NASA would have scrubbed and as a result are knocking off X number of years off the development timeline in exchange for a few total losses. I read recently that they have 6 more starships fully stacked and ready to go. I have no idea what I'm talking about, but just offering a counter argument for funs sake.

They're not knocking years off the DTE cycle. They're trying to spin failure as success. It's still going to take them just as long to figure this out than if they slid the program to the right to get an entire successful flight in. Remember that they still haven't tried establishing, changing, or maneuvering in orbit, nor have they tried reentry and recovery.

Artemis 1 didn't fail and it made it to the moon and back in 6 years from program start. Artemis started in 2016. SpaceX started Starship development in 2012. in 11 years they haven't made it into low Earth orbit.