This is a good change. To summarize for those not following closely:
SLS, a rocket derived from Shuttle tech, takes astronauts on the Orion spacecraft to the vicinity of the moon. From there, a lander built by either SpaceX or Blue Origin will take the astronauts to the surface and then back to Orion. The astronauts will then return to Earth in Orion.
Artemis I flew a couple of years ago and took an uncrewed Orion spacecraft around the moon and back to Earth.
Artemis II, which should hopefully fly in April, will take 4 astronauts around the moon--the first time humans have been that far in space in 50+ years.
Artemis III was going to be a crewed moon landing, planned around 2028, but between delays in the lander development and the complexity of this mission, no one expected it to happen on time.
The major change that NASA has announced is to launch SLS more often--ideally once every 10 months. There are two major advantages to this:
1. More frequent launches will improve reliability because the team/engineers will understand the system better. There will be more commonality between launches.
2. With more launches before the end of the decade deadline there are more opportunities for intermediate milestones. In particular, Artemis III will turn into an Earth-orbit mission in which Orion will dock with one or both of the landers. This will test out the system before heading to the moon. Moreover, NASA plans to have at least two lunar landing attempts in 2028, which means that even if the first attempt is scrubbed, they will still have a chance to land before the end of the decade.
The difference in philosophy between NASA's current approach and SpaceX is quite stark. SpaceX has launched 11 Starships in the two and a bit years, with a lot of them blowing up. Where as Artemis is trying to get it near perfect on each run.
I wonder if NASA could start to adopt SpaceX like approaches? Where one doesn't try to get everything correct before acting?
I wonder which approach is more capital efficient? Which is more time efficient?
(It seems that Artemis cost is $92B, where as SpaceX's Starship costs are less than $10B so far, give or take. So it seems that SpaceX is a more efficient approach.)
Given that SLS is the part of Artemis that has actually shown it works, and Starship is the part that is nowhere near schedule, and doesn't work, it's very funny to suggest that NASA should learn from SpaceX and not the other way around.
SpaceX hasn't even had the confidence to put Starship in LEO yet, and has not carried 1kg of real payload (and barely a few kg of test payloads) - while SLS did an orbit of the Moon, with real payload satellites.
It's not like SLS is on schedule either, and it is absurdly more expensive than Starship. It's very likely that Starship will eventually be operational with lower total costs by any accounting measure. (And I say this as a current NASA contractor and current anti-fan of Musk)
To OP's point, Artemis has cost $92 billion over 14 years. This has produced exactly one launch.
It's hard to put an exact timeline on Starship since a lot of its development overlaps with Falcon 9 using the same components, but it's inarguable that it has cost one tenth Artemis so far.
I agree that Starship has been plagued by delays and the capabilities are so far mostly just talk. However, it has flown a number of times, and I would be willing to make a strong bet that it will orbit the moon with real payload long before it catches up to Artemis in budget.
Do you want to put a dollar amount per kg to orbit on that? Because if you're spending orders of magnitude more, the expectations also go up, no?
And mind you, SLS isn't a new system. It's old space shuttle engines. It's old solid rocket boosters that were extended by a segment. So, it should be cheap and fast?
I think the point here is really that SLS should be a walk in the park. Mostly old tech, reused with not a lot of innovation.
Starship might not have put a real payload into orbit yet but it has already delivered vastly superior engine technology (full flow staged combustion), a new way to land rocket boosters to allow for reuse and many more smaller things.
If you're going to innovate, things will not be smooth because you're learning things. You should be celebrating those achievements, especially as it didn't cost you a dime
They are not trying to accomplish the same thing or on the same schedule, so your comparison is per-se invalid.
One could also ask "how many times has the SLS booster landed and been reused?". This would be a silly question to ask, because SLS is not trying to reuse the booster.
Difference is SLS has received 2 billion $ a year for 15 years in a row, while SpaceX get that much once and has to actually cover any extra cost themselves. Why do people just totally ignore money when it comes to SLS.
Not to mention that SpaceX got funding in like 2021, and SLS in 2011.
And SLS works, then why can it only launch every couple of years. I mean what good is a rocket that is so hard to produce that the whole politics and everything around it changes between launches. They basically have to teach a whole new group of people about SLS for each launch.
> while SLS did an orbit of the Moon, with real payload satellites.
If you want things launched to the moon, SpaceX, BlueOrigin or ULA could have done that many times every year for the last 15 years just as well.
Starship isn't just another 'look we can launch some stuff to the moon', its much more, and therefore much more difficult.
You are praising SLS for doing the very, very, very minimum that it should have been doing since 2017. And it will do it at most 3 times until 2027.
Artemis is nowhere near schedule, had vast cost blowouts, and it's a commercial dead end though. It's incredibly expensive boutique warmed-over 50 year old technology.
NASA absolutely should learn from SpaceX, they were the company that liberated US astronaut's access to space from Russian rockets after NASA had lost that capability. And they have brought down the cost of payload to orbit enormously, and they have been finding viable commercial non-government markets for space. They've been launching around 90% of global mass to orbit. An order of magnitude more than all other corporations and governments in the world combined.
All other serious commercial space companies have taken lessons from SpaceX, so has the Chinese space program. To suggest NASA should not learn from SpaceX is just astounding. That's the kind of think you'd only hear from western government bureaucrats.
This reminds me of my all-time-favourite HN comment[0] (and a life lesson too):
This idea is captured nicely in the book "Art and Fear" with the following anecdote:
"The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.
His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot – albeit a perfect one – to get an “A”.
Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay."
I would think that it's just as likely that the quantity group would sit around philosophizing about what constitutes a "pot" so that they could get away with doing the least amount of work and still earning an A.
If I was being graded solely on quantity, why would I bother caring at all to make anything good? Make the minimum quality necessary to be counted as a pot and move on with your life. That was basically my real world approach to ceramics back in HS, and I still feel good about my B+.
2cents from a kid who grew up in a NASA family during the shuttle years -
As others have commented, NASA’s baseline objective is to not kill astronauts.
My understanding of their ethos growing up was that there was absolutely no excuse not to pursue excellence and prioritize safety when people’s lives were on the line.
One would have to think that goal is fundamentally incompatible with SpaceX’s way of doing things (see the many exploding rockets - who wants to get in that?).
And from what I’ve read and heard through the grapevine, working with SpaceX as a contractor on Artemis has certainly had pain points related to these mismatched priorities.
SpaceX has the most reliable orbital launch vehicle ever made. Falcon 9 block 5 has had 550 successful launches out of 551 attempts, giving it a 99.8% success rate. For comparison, Soyuz-2's success rate is 97%, Ariane 5 is 95.7%, and the Space Shuttle was 98.5%. All of these are worse than Falcon 9's block 5's landing success rate of 98.9% (552 out of 558 attempts[1]).
The current Starship launches are part of a development and testing program. They expect quite a few failures (though probably not as many as they've experienced). But since each Starship launch is only 1/25th the cost of an SLS launch, SpaceX can afford to blow up a lot of them. And they won't put people on them until they have a track record of safe operation. Falcon 9 didn't have crew on it until the 85th launch.
1. The number of landing attempts is higher than the number of launches because Falcon Heavy results in multiple landings per launch.
You risk it when there are no people on board to find the issues. Fix issues, rinse repeat.
NASA/Congress pushes the armchair quarterback approach. Analyze forever, fail because analysis isn't the same thing as real world experience, get stuck using 50 year old rocket technology. Each engine on SLS cost more than the entire Starship super heavy launch vehicle.
By weight the RS-25 engines cost about 70% of that of building their 7000lb mass dry mass out of gold. That's insane.
NASA says its baseline is to not kill astronauts and yet it is currently planning to send astronauts on a mission in space with an Environmental Control System on its first space flight in a capsule that has flown in space once, and was different on that one flight, and had unexpected heat shield problems with another different heat shield and on a untested return path that is guessed to fix the issues. Actions speak louder than words.
Congress is fickle enough without rockets blowing up, even if NASA explains up front that it's going to happen. There is much which is suboptimal about NASA, not just their attitude towards perfection, which is downstream of the political reality they have to deal with. For instance, a project that could be done in one year given adaquate funding will instead be spread out over ten years or more, to spread out the costs and keep NASA's monetary requirements as smooth and predictable as possible, for the sake of Congress.
SpaceX's move-fast-and-break-things approach was lauded and NASA panned as being stuck in the past until <checks notes> the zeitgeist turned against Musk at which point the drones and tech blogs they read and write now view SpaceX as dangerous and wasteful at all costs. When a mere few years ago they couldn't shower them with enough praise.
I have no skin in this game other than to say the old school methods resulted in a janky ship that stranded two astronauts in space for months until they could catch a ride home on a SpaceX ship.
Starship is starting to be a very long and not so cheap project though that doesn't seem to be making significant iterative improvements - Rockets are still exploding regularly where you'd expect them to have moved beyond that phase.
NASA is beholden to politicians and voters who get easily ruffled when politicians can point to explosions and say "those are you tax dollars." NASA needs to be perfect and impress people or they get their budget cut even further.
SLS/Artemis seems mostly to be just a program designed to funnel money to traditional aerospace contractors so that they don't close down their space business (SpaceX has already made their business unviable without government subsidy) and force a lot of their skilled engineers and technicians out of space jobs just in case these are needed for some future war. A trickle of rockets, lots of people employed practicing hand building and engineering skills for space skills crafting something every couple of years. It doesn't look like a real program designed to create any significant value, much like the some of the government fusion programs seem to be primarily a way to keep nuclear scientists and engineers employed.
I had a lightbulb moment when someone said 'the point of iterative approaches is not to find bugs, it's to do something (small) successfully and build confidence+learn'. There's a subtle but important difference between the iterative approach that SpaceX takes and 'debugging through exhaustive retries', and I'm worried NASA would look like the latter (and admittedly, some of the more recent starship launches look that way too).
The ability to pick a small-but-well-defined goal as an interim milestone - and stay focused on it - is a key skill, and too often I've seen waterfall-like companies slowly scope-creep their first MVP until it's a lumbering mess. You almost always need someone with a strong personality to push team to 'get it done', and that level of ownership is really hard to come by in an organization historically built around ass-covering.
I think Commercial Crew is the right model for NASA. Pick the design objectives, provide some level of scaffolding regulation (i.e loss-of-crew calculations), and then contract out to private sector to actually 'get it done'. (Yes Starliner was a failure, but Dragon is definitely a success. A 50% hit rate and success of the program overall is better than Artemis)
> I wonder if NASA could start to adopt SpaceX like approaches? Where one doesn't try to get everything correct before acting?
With humans inside?
Move fast and break things has its place, but when putting humans in things you should be very concerned about... you know... not killing them...
The reason NASA does things this way is because they essentially have one shot. Failure is not an option. When they fail, funding gets pulled and you don't get to try again. NASA doesn't get to launch 11 and have half of them fail. This puts a weird spin on things because in many industries you have the saying "why is there always time to do it twice but never to do it right" but NASA (and plenty of other sectors) have the reverse "there's always more time to do it right, but never time to do it twice".
Truthfully, the optimal path is somewhere in between, but what is optimal is highly dependent on many different environmental factors. For example, when there are humans on board, well... you don't have the luxury of doing it twice. When those people are gone, they're gone. But when unmanned, well... early NASA also blew up a bunch of shit while it was figuring things out and had a much less regulated budget. Move fast and break things is a great strategy when you're starting and still needing to figure things out. But also when things become successful and working, people in charge look less fondly on mistakes. Doesn't matter if it is reasonable (e.g. human lives should be protected) or more unreasonable (you can't make dinner without getting the dishes dirty).
What I'm saying here is when SpaceX gets successful they'll shift gears too. Did we not see the same evolution in every big tech company? Seems to happen in every business and what is the government if not a giant organization? It really seems like as companies get larger and more powerful they start to look much more like governments.
> I wonder which approach is more capital efficient? Which is more time efficient?
I don't. I wonder whether US astronauts are going to die on the surface of the moon while the world watches in 4K. I believe, to my great relief, that by some minor miracle, we've ended up with a NASA administrator that is wondering the same thing, and also has the temerity to make some really hard calls, despite what is doubtless an enormous amount of pressure. I've been analyzing his words and speech. There is just no bullshit in him, and he clearly doesn't suffer fools. You can see it. He's like something out of SAC from the Cold War.
NASA is in desperate need of exactly that. Perhaps that's not the correct, permanent disposition for all things at all times, but if the US and NASA are actually going to engage in another Space Race, this time with China, we very much need it at this time.
> The difference in philosophy between NASA's current approach and SpaceX is quite stark. SpaceX has launched 11 Starships in the two and a bit years, with a lot of them blowing up. Where as Artemis is trying to get it near perfect on each run.
> I wonder if NASA could start to adopt SpaceX like approaches? Where one doesn't try to get everything correct before acting?
My understanding is the difference is politics. The US political system is dysfunctional, and so riven by anti-government factions, that there's too much pressure to not fail.
If NASA tried the SpaceX approach, after the second rocket blew up NASA's administrator would have been hauled in front of Congress and interrogated over the "waste of taxpayer money" and then the program may get canceled.
Systemic inefficiencies aside. I wonder how much of that is a public funding feedback loop? The cost gets higher, because the standards, requirements, and processes are stricter, because there is the need to validate the use of public funds, exacerbated by being higher, increasing the standards/requirements etc etc... Especially in a political environment where there is no shortage of sniping funding for points.
Regardless, first thing it reminded me of was that interview quote about how if nasa had SpaceX track record they would have lost funding long ago. Is there a US political landscape, even back to 2008-2016, where that isn't the case?
I wonder how much is a cost-plus billing issue, too… and a contrast between primes with a single customer in mind and a commercial firm chasing a bigger pie than the immediate program at hand
NASA has been directed by Congress to use the remaining Space Shuttle RS25 engines on SLS. There aren't that many RS25's left, so Artemis requires that they make the most of each launch. Getting more RS25's produced is one of those "nobody's made them in a long time and it would be terribly expensive and time-consuming to do so" type of situations.
correction: there are 16 RS25's left, but production has begun on more for the Artemis V mission. However, production is slow so they can't just yeet SLS's into space and test rapidly.
I think the public funding aspect complicates this, NASA is probably not in a position where it can blow up a bunch of rockets and still get funding for the next year.
Boris Chertok's memoir[0] on early Soviet space program is essential reading.
inexact quote: "You know, we're throwing towns into the sky" related to the early mishaps of R-7 program development, but they kept doing it. After that R-7 derivatives became the most reliable launch vehicle.
> inexact quote: "You know, we're throwing towns into the sky" related to the early mishaps of R-7 program development
I have not looked at the source (in Russian) for several years; now that I am curious I will check at home tonight. But as far as I remember "we are shooting towns into the sky" remark was not in reference to the R-7, but in reference to N1-L3, a hellishly expensive competitor to the Apollo manned Moon mission rocket. The meaning of the phrase was that each and every test should be taken extremely seriously as the cost of each flight is comparable to the cost of building a new city.
R-7 was developed much earlier when Korolev and his team at OKB-1 were iterating rapidly on much cheaper models that were primarily funded as rockets for strategic thermonuclear strike warheads. The civilian (Sputnik and later Gagarin) flights were an offshoot of that and were small enough that it happened as a side project. R-7 was a comparatively simple and cheap design, which may be why that family became a workhorse from the late 50s to carrying crews to the ISS. And the super expensive N1-L3 was a stillborn.
That's my recollection, need to recheck the sources.
It's everything. NASA doesn't have the money, brainpower, efficiency etc. to implement SpaceX development method. They can't fab it fast enough, nor can they iterate on the engineering fast enough, nor are they will to sustain the optics of a "government rocket blowing up" like Musk is. They don't have the caliber of engineering talent available or a workflow setup (high autonomy, long hours, better pay).
If you want to choose example of a failed approach to space exploration, NASA is your worst option. It's like choosing Netflix as an example of a failed approach to video multicasting.
NASA's approach to space exploration remains incredibly successful. Look at all the missions operating all over our solar system, including on Mars' surface, and beyond. No other organization comes close.
> I wonder which approach is more capital efficient? Which is more time efficient?
How we frame the debate - if you like, the specs that define the rfp - determines the outcome. You define it by efficiency, which is what businesses prioritize and is SpaceX's strength. They take a well-established technology, orbital launch, and make it much more efficient.
NASA prioritizes ground-breaking (space-breaking?), history-making exploration and technology - things never done before and often hardly dreamed of by most people. That can take time and money but they deliver at a very high rate - think of how many missions have failed, compared to recent private missions, such as moon missions, and even those of other space agencies.
There were no humans on those Starships that blew up.
Most of the delays in Artemis are not around the launch system but the spacecraft and lander and life support and associated systems.
Not saying it couldn't be done more efficiently, but comparing Artemis to SpaceX is apples and oranges. The SLS is old expensive disposable rocket tech but it's also solid and tested and we pretty much know it will work. It's not the problem.
So how did we do it in the 60s? With a blank check and luck. The insane accomplishment of Apollo wasn't just landing people on the moon but doing it without killing anyone. The fact that nobody died on those flights is incredible, and luck was certainly a factor. We very nearly lost a crew on 13. If we'd kept flying Apollo rigs we'd have lost people. That whole mission was way ahead of its time technologically and generally unsustainable. It was an early proof of concept.
A human rating is only necessary for NASA missions. Do you think Falcon 9 will never fly crew because of all the explosions SpaceX had developing it and landings?
NASA and SpaceX are fundamentally incomparable, considering how these two organizations are established and the motivations that drive all the actors within. Sure, NASA could start to adopt certain approaches but I don't imagine it to work in a way anyone else would imagine it to.
NASA did have SpaceX like approach. Much more aggressive as a matter of fact. They cooked the occupants of Apollo 1 and they sent another mission out broken so they had to fix it live in space.
The question is whether you have the appetite for killing three astronauts on a test run like the Apollo team did.
EDIT: Fine, I’ll clarify. By “SpaceX like approach” I mean iterative design. By “more aggressive” I mean risk tolerance much greater than SpaceX to the degree that they do things that SpaceX wouldn’t do.
This is ignoring the massive distinction between manned flight (where failure is not an option) and unmanned tests. NASA and SpaceX both know this well.
Calling it a "SpaceX like approach" and connecting to Apollo 1 is a neat trick, but SpaceX wouldn't (and doesn't) adopt that risky approach during manned flights.
It's all about "the right risk for the job." You can't be risky with human safety, but you also don't want to be overly timid and failure-averse during safely managed R&D tests, or your R&D grinds to a halt.
They've blown up 11 Starships without any of them making it to orbit. Artemis I flew around the moon and came back already.
And don't compare costs because Starship does not and may never work so I dont care how much cheaper it is. If we are comparing fictional rockets I have a $1 rocket that can fly to Jupiter.
> They've blown up 11 Starships without any of them making it to orbit.
They purposely were not trying for orbit from my understanding. The last one did orbit the earth at suborbital heights and release satellites. It did seem to do what they wanted it to do, it wasn't a failure.
When SpaceX launches a rocket, they think it will work.
When NASA launches a rocket they know it will work.
The cost of going from "I think this will work" to "I know this will work" is really expensive. It might be cheaper/faster to fail a few times and fix those problems than it would be to verify everything up front.
>> And we 'tried until it didn't blow up immediately' is not a great sign.
But everything that didn't blow up has been tested 11 times already. Things that did fail have had more than one design iteration tested. One approach has gains more real-world test experience.
I think we're all misunderstanding SpaceX. I think it's more of an engine factory disguised as a general space company that managed to borrow the dad's card.
The only thing SpaceX truly has an edge is its engines.
They have perfected the engine for a ship like a giant Mars class rockets. And that engine has been in full scale series production for years, while the actual Starship keeps blowing up. The reason they developed their hoverslam landing technology, also, was because they wanted their precious engines back.
It's as if they handed groups of gamers a credit card and they went onto plunder stocks of RTX cards from 20 miles around with some Roombas bought on reward points. It's just inches below the threshold for typical BS detector if it weren't specifically tuned for the relevant topics.
All makes sense if everything was an elaborate ploy to get someone to pay for specifically the engines.
I think the main difference was political: for Apollo you had the most powerful nation in history throw their economic and political will into pushing a project forward.
NASA programs today are mainly about creating/maintaining jobs and keeping private industry contractors busy. They lost the political agency and freedom to move fast that they had in the 60s.
More frequent launches with less ambitious progress per launch makes good sense,
and follows the old-school approach used through Apollo to mitigate risk.
Having a lunar lander test in earth orbit,
for example,
is roughly the same mission as Apollo 9, is a good call.
Validating everything works together has been a sort of sore spot for the Artemis program.
And even the Apollo 10 mission which went 99.99% of the way from the Earth to the moon, just 15km from the surface (but couldn't have landed on the moon- LM structure was too heavy) was incredibly important step. The sort of thing that people today would want to skip, it doesn't seem flashy or necessary. Why take all the risk of going into lunar orbit and separating the modules (requiring the very first rendezvous not in in Earth orbit) but not actually land on the Moon? It was about getting all of the ground crew proved and worked out, and proving that the rendezvous would work and they could get home, so that the actual landing mission could focus their efforts on just working out the last 15km, confident that all of the other problems were already dealt with. Trying to do all of that in one mission would have been a gigantic mess- A11 crew felt a lack of training time as it was.
I’d say we’ll look back in a few decades and recognise the Apollo programs as the peak of the USA. Those people did truly amazing things. I recommend “Space Rocket History” podcast if you like Apollo. It’s a wonderful and highly detailed podcast and covers the US and Soviet space race in great detail.
In a few decades we will look back and say now is peak (space) USA with SpaceX launching successfully, creating Starlink, Blue Origin finally reaching orbit, Rocket Lab reaching for Neutron, even ULA making BVlcan work.
to be fair they had way less requirements on making the CGI look good
back then TVs weren't that popular and those that had one were stuck with very low definition video, today our 2k and 4k screens would be able to spot their flaws easily
Well to be fair Nasa isn't nearly as good as it once was. The quality of engineer during the Apollo era was far better and more like what can be found at Spacex
What is that based on? NASA's recent accomplishments are far beyond anyone. Off the top of my head: The many Mars missions, JWST, Europa Clipper (still in progress), etc. SpaceX hasn't left Earth orbit, afaik.
I knew a lot of this, and had a good idea of how bad this whole thing was but... damn, how comprehensively horrible a parade of bad, multi-decade decisions this is turning out to be.
If you visit US, I really recommend a detour to the Kennedy Space Center if you can, there's a ton of interesting stuff especially about the Apollo program.
Especially if you can time your visit to Florida with a launch. Seeing the Shuttle launch in real life made me realize what a poor medium television is to actually show you reality.
(I don't know what the current policies are but you used to be able to apply in advance for VIP tickets, or buy them on the secondary market, which gives you much closer viewing of the launch)
I'm very, very concerned for the astronauts piloting this upcoming trans-lunar flight. Given that Boeing, well, does Boeing things, the current state of NASA in this political climate, and the fact that problems keep arising with this current stack, it makes me feel that there is a significant chance of issues mid-flight.
Godspeed to them, hopefully I'm being overly dour.
Sadly, the worst thing I'm worried about is the current president pushing for a landing before he leaves office in order to have that feather in his cap. Isaacman seems competent and this article shows they are responding to the concerns of the plan and are "shortening the steps in the staircase" to a landing.
So far, Isaacman's competence has mostly consisted of (rightfully) throwing is predecessors under the bus. The real test will be if there are problems on his watch, but also it seems likely the result of having backbone will not be good for Isaacman and sycophants will end up running the agency again.
Wow, in the past no presidents pushed for NASA to launch under deadlines. Imagine telling them they need to get to the moon before the end of the decade. Unprecedented.
Good thing we have a large number of CRUD SaaS experts to tell us what's wrong with the space program
You summarized my concerns almost perfectly. My only addition is that you didn't stress enough how much this anti-science administration has destabilized NASA, both directly and indirectly. The institutional decision making has definitely been compromised.
I'm glad this is getting overhauled, the existing plan was a bit of a mess and NASA can't afford mistakes on a program of this scale. Hopefully we get safer and more effective result out of this.
I watched an interview with the current NASA admin and he seems very competent. Good choice there. He basically implied SLS was a dead end outside Artemis and other options will be the future. It was also clear the influence of the Congress jobs program seems to be making him choose his words carefully.
I have been awake too long so I am probably stupid.
Please have mercy.
I don't understand.
NASA says they goal of landing on the moon in 2028 is not realistic.
They are adding a launch in 2027 to do more testing.
Great.
It will be followed by one possibly two lunar landings in 2028.
Are the now 2028 landings primarily testing SpaceX integration?
The Artemis rockets are huge, and extremely expensive.
And the build time is considerable.
Now they are planning 3 rockets in two years,
each of which is not reusable?
Then they have to build those in parallel, which makes sense
but incorporating wha you learn in 2027, into rockets you have already
nearly finished seems an odd approach
They're getting slightly bullied into following their own rocket certification process. Wild they're going right to human flight without their three unmanned certification flights, etc. NASA themselves will not allow mission critical payloads on rockets that don't meet that process. But they're (trying) to skip it with Artemis.
No it doesn't. Because literally anybody who knows anything about NASA and follows the Space industry in detail has known about most of the issues since 2015 or even in 2011 when this whole new Post-Constellation shit-show started. And many of the problems have been talked about since the day NASA created Artemis. Destin is just more famous then many of the people in nerd forums.
Destin analysis is ok and he makes a number of good points, but it very pro-Alabama (Mafia) inside NASA and contractors since he very clearly is influence by the strong Albama presence and those are the parts of the industry he interacts with.
So Destin misses a huge amount of the relevant puzzle pieces, or he simply doesn't talk about them.
He also simple makes a few assumptions that are fundamentally wrong, namely the different targets of the program. The goal was never to repeat Apollo and landing a few people a few times is totally different from the original goals of Artemis.
Why does it seem like we can’t do shit anymore? Was it always like this and there was no news coverage of all the failures? If not what is the main cause of failure right now? Is it onerous regulations and bureaucracy? Stressed work environments?
The Apollo program budget was immensely large, and the objective was clear: put people on the moon before the Soviet Union.
Artemis objectives are less well defined, more ambitious and with way less money. The big budget is being allocated to brutes killing people in the streets and a decadent ballroom for the emperor. The difference in importance between the two is the cause of all the failures.
The budget is actually not that much worse. If you adjust for inflation.
On avg NASA budget was about the same as now. But now we do more things now. But between Constellation/SLS and Orion this new Shuttle based architecture has as much money as Apollo while having done almost non of it. Before it is where Apollo ended up, it will cost much, much more then Apollo.
But even if what you said was true, a gigantic amount of infrastructure that was paid for in the 1960s is still in use today. A huge amount of fundamental research that was required is already done. That alone should make it much cheaper.
Same goes for development, Artemis is not developing any new engines, while Apollo had to develop many new engines.
> The big budget is being allocated to brutes killing people in the streets and a decadent ballroom for the emperor.
Except of course that Korea/Vietnam were much more expensive then what were are doing now.
And we can't forget the nationalism at the time. Everyone was rallied behind the program and wanting to beat the Soviet Union. I mean, sputnik scared the hell out of everyone.
I think that's probably important framing for how things were reported back then. But also, I'm wrong like 99.9999999% of the time. So!
Artemis was never a "return to the moon" program. NASA had one of those; congress killed it and replaced it with a "keep shuttle jobs going" program. There has always been and will always be pork spending, but in this case keeping the gravy train going has been the primary if not sole driver, as opposed to programs like Apollo where it was a means to an end. People have known it was a problem from day one and probably most people thought it would get cancelled and replaced by something more sound long before this point.
No... Orion has always been aiming for travel to Mars. The moon is a sales tactic and a gimmick that works as a stepping stone towards the larger mission goal.
I feel the same. The Golden Gate Bridge took 3 years to build, start to finish. It was the biggest suspension to have ever been built at the time. Compare that to any modern public works project of today. There are countless examples of how we used to be able to build things before 1970.
Per Wikipedia, the Golden Gate Bridge was proposed in 1917, approved by the state for design in 1923, funded in 1930, started construction in 1933, and completed in 1937.
The reason modern projects take so long is that so many of them are stuck in design or awaiting funding stage for what feels like interminable ages; once the construction phase starts, they tend to go fairly quickly. But if you look at projects 100 years ago, well, they also seem to have fairly lengthy pre-construction timelines. It's just that we conveniently forget about those when we look back on them nowadays.
11 people died during the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge. We have onerous safety requirements and red tape which is why everything is so slow. Very few people die on construction sites now. Do we want 11 dead people or do we want things done extremely slow? I guess as a society we have answered that question.
I think the narrative is more difficult now, as is visibility of goals. “Land a man on the Moon and return him safely” is a clear objective, while “decarbonize the global economy” or “make AI safe and useful” are fuzzier, and don’t give you a single flag‑planting moment.
But there's no lack of huge achievements. The Mars rovers are amazing: super-sonic parachutes, retro rockets, deploying a little helicopter with no real-time control is huge. So is planting JWST at the L2 point and unfolding it a million miles from earth.
Also, the NASA budget in the 1960's was 10 times higher.
We're doing really complicated stuff. And think about it though, in the 60s/70s we had one organization - NASA. That was it. Today, we have RocketLab, SpaceX, Blue Origin, and NASA, plus Boeing I guess.
If you look at the unmanned side of NASA, that's going great. NASA can get amazing stuff done.
The manned side gets political attention, and the nature of current politics makes it a bad kind of attention. Results are essentially irrelevant. Jobs and cronyism are the point.
The overall design of the Space Launch System makes very little sense. We know all too well that solid rockets are a bad idea for crewed spaceflight. Hydrogen is a bad fuel for a first stage. It's horrendously wasteful to use expensive, complicated engines designed to be reused, and then throw them away on every launch. Early estimates were over $2 billion per launch, which in the current age is total clownshoes. The actual costs will be much higher still.
So why are they doing it? Because using all this old, rather inappropriate tech allows them to keep paying the contractors for it. If you gave NASA a pile of money and told them to build a moon program, they wouldn't build this. But it's not their choice.
Way more safety and rigid testing procedures and a better understanding - the Apollo program was all done by the seat of the pants engineering that somehow worked all based on the ideas of the team that built the German V2.
Each F1 rocket engine was hand tuned by drilling holes into the "plate" so it would not cause the combustion mixture to vibrate the engine into smithereens.
Such an approach would never be tolerated today by NASA.
This complete nonsense. The Apollo team was much, much, much, much larger then any V2 team. And mostly Americans.
And their testing procedures were actually very high quality. You don't just accidentally land on the moon and return. That doesn't just happen 'somehow'. That is truly idiotic level analysis.
> Each F1 rocket engine was hand tuned by drilling holes into the "plate" so it would not cause the combustion mixture to vibrate the engine into smithereens.
And that this works was established with lots of both experimental testing and lots of theoretical work.
So much so that F1 is one of the most reliable engines ever used in space flight history.
> Such an approach would never be tolerated today by NASA.
Except of course that the RS-25 engine used by NASA today is known to be less safe then F-1. Having had more failures and generally causing more minor operational problems.
It seems you have absolutely no clue what you are talking about. In fact, NASA own analysis before they were forced to pick SLS by congress indicated that a updated version of F-1 (still relying on the analysis of those people in the 1960s) would be a much better rocket.
Apollo worked because engineers from the top to the bottom made smart engineering focused decisions taking responsibility for their part of the stack, and close working together in teams on a shared goal while having very solid testing procedures for everything.
Essentially, neoliberalism. The goal of everyone on the project is now higher and higher profits. Delivering a working product doesnt necessarily mean best profits anymore. Spacex would rather drag the project along with ships that dont work than to just make something that works. The government has privatized so much of their workload into so few specialized companies that they really can't stop them from doing this.
This is just nonsense. First of all, the companies in the 1960s were all there for profit and all made profit. And the politicians in power back then also tried to get contracts to companies in their districts. Why do you think the NASA control center is in Houston?
SpaceX is on a fixed price contract. Dragging the project along is literally costing them money.
By literally any analysis you can do, you will see that in the last 15 years SpaceX was by far and away (its not close) the best contractor to NASA in terms of delivering what NASA wanted.
In fact, by far and away the project that have done the worst, are the project NASA does in the old style where they remain the main designers and operate and only work with private companies as builders. That's exactly why SLS is such a shit-show.
The SLS and Orion project have been so incredibly deeply flawed from the start. Its a huge mistake that they exists. The were bad designs to begin with and they are badly executed.
Constellation was a bad program by Bush Jr that was aimed at the moon, it would have been 4 expensive project, a human rocket, a big cargo rocket, a earth-moon capsule and a big new moon lander. Most of it Shuttle based, because everybody knew Shuttle was going to die, but they wanted to keep the workforce. Of these the human rocket was one of the dumbest human rocket designs ever, and it was so absurdly hilariously over-budget that the program basically had to kill itself. Orion was being worked on but was also over-budget and behind. The never even got to the big rocket or the moon lander.
Obama and his space team had some better idea, namely using commercial rockets and new contracting structures. You only need normal commercial rocket if you simply invest in distributed launch. Any analysis shows that this was going to be cheaper but NASA was never allowed to explore that. So they wanted to cancel the incredibly expensive badly designed Constellation program and did so. But Congress, Republicans and Democrats lead by later NASA Administrator Bill Nelson and Alabama-man Richard Shelby wouldn't let it happen, they saved Orion by giving it a mission it was not suited for and transformed the Ares 1 and Ares 5 rocket from Constellation (the horribly over budget complete shit-shows) into SLS.
The way this happen is funny. NASA did a bunch of analysis on different very big rocket. And NASA analysis was perfectly clear, the cheapest and long term best option would be a RP-1 fueled first stage with big engines. So basically a Saturn V modernized. So basically going away from Shuttle legacy (Of course commercial rockets and distrusted launch would have been even cheaper, but they were not allowed to investigate that). Commercial companies were also never asked for suggestion, despite both SpaceX and ULA offering.
Congress lead by Richard Shelby and friends wouldn't allow that. So they specifically wrote the bill in a way that made it absolutely impossible to do anything other then a Shuttle derived. They wrote in 2010-2011 that the a rocket with 70t to LEO had to launch by 2017 and then later be upgraded to much more then that. And that made it clear no engine other then already existing RS-25 and the Shuttle Solid boosters could work.
But of course, Constellation was dead, SLS was literally just a rocket that didn't have a mission. Literally non, it had no uses. So Obama space team just came up with some mission that didn't really made sense, but at least they could pretend in marketing material that SLS was anything other then job creation.
Of course the program has just continue to done badly and done all the things anybody with a brain could have predicted already in 2012. Its incredibly expensive legacy hardware. Every aspect of the design makes it not only expensive but also incredibly hard and slow to produce. Every aspect of it makes it hard to operate.
SLS had the best possible budget, often getting more money in the Budget then they even asked for. It has been the darling of congress. SpaceX is delayed, and there are congressional hearings and questions. Tons of paid for media and so on. SLS that consumes more money per year then SpaceX received for the whole moon-lander barley gets mentioned. Under Trump 1 Bridenstein tried to launch an investigation if Orion could be launched on anything other then SLS. This was a pretty bad idea, likely mostly don't to pressure Boeing. Shelby basically told him that he would have to resign if he continued investigating this.
Jared Isaacman just like all the NASA Administrators before him know that this program is incredibly stupidly designed. Its program designed around a bunch of legacy hardware. And really dumb requirement. Really dumb contracting structure. And so on.
Isaacman is at least trying to contain how much money gets drained into the SLS money-pit, by dropping the also late and also over-budget EUS upper stage. This stage would likely have been just another endless money pit inside the money pit. And instead they might get away with a somewhat smaller money pit.
All of this is just an embarrassing shit-show from beginning to end. Between Shuttle derived vehicles and Orion NASA has spent already something on the order of 100-150 billion $ and what they got out of it was 1 SLS launch and a few Orion tests that never tested the whole system. Its going to cost much more and its not gone get much cheaper anytime soon. On the meantime, the complete development of Falcon 1, Falcon 9, re-usability and human rating Falcon 9 plus Falcon Heavy, plus Cargo Dragon 1, Cargo Dragon 2 and Crew Dragon cost on the order of 5 billion $ conservatively.
And I'm not saying this as a SpaceX believer who wants all money to go to SpaceX. Distrusted launch (including refueling) where many companies can compete is the right answer specially for launch.
This is a good change. To summarize for those not following closely:
SLS, a rocket derived from Shuttle tech, takes astronauts on the Orion spacecraft to the vicinity of the moon. From there, a lander built by either SpaceX or Blue Origin will take the astronauts to the surface and then back to Orion. The astronauts will then return to Earth in Orion.
Artemis I flew a couple of years ago and took an uncrewed Orion spacecraft around the moon and back to Earth.
Artemis II, which should hopefully fly in April, will take 4 astronauts around the moon--the first time humans have been that far in space in 50+ years.
Artemis III was going to be a crewed moon landing, planned around 2028, but between delays in the lander development and the complexity of this mission, no one expected it to happen on time.
The major change that NASA has announced is to launch SLS more often--ideally once every 10 months. There are two major advantages to this:
1. More frequent launches will improve reliability because the team/engineers will understand the system better. There will be more commonality between launches.
2. With more launches before the end of the decade deadline there are more opportunities for intermediate milestones. In particular, Artemis III will turn into an Earth-orbit mission in which Orion will dock with one or both of the landers. This will test out the system before heading to the moon. Moreover, NASA plans to have at least two lunar landing attempts in 2028, which means that even if the first attempt is scrubbed, they will still have a chance to land before the end of the decade.
On the surface, the changes appear logical.
The difference in philosophy between NASA's current approach and SpaceX is quite stark. SpaceX has launched 11 Starships in the two and a bit years, with a lot of them blowing up. Where as Artemis is trying to get it near perfect on each run.
I wonder if NASA could start to adopt SpaceX like approaches? Where one doesn't try to get everything correct before acting?
I wonder which approach is more capital efficient? Which is more time efficient?
(It seems that Artemis cost is $92B, where as SpaceX's Starship costs are less than $10B so far, give or take. So it seems that SpaceX is a more efficient approach.)
Given that SLS is the part of Artemis that has actually shown it works, and Starship is the part that is nowhere near schedule, and doesn't work, it's very funny to suggest that NASA should learn from SpaceX and not the other way around.
SpaceX hasn't even had the confidence to put Starship in LEO yet, and has not carried 1kg of real payload (and barely a few kg of test payloads) - while SLS did an orbit of the Moon, with real payload satellites.
It's not like SLS is on schedule either, and it is absurdly more expensive than Starship. It's very likely that Starship will eventually be operational with lower total costs by any accounting measure. (And I say this as a current NASA contractor and current anti-fan of Musk)
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I think it's actually a reasonable comparison.
To OP's point, Artemis has cost $92 billion over 14 years. This has produced exactly one launch.
It's hard to put an exact timeline on Starship since a lot of its development overlaps with Falcon 9 using the same components, but it's inarguable that it has cost one tenth Artemis so far.
I agree that Starship has been plagued by delays and the capabilities are so far mostly just talk. However, it has flown a number of times, and I would be willing to make a strong bet that it will orbit the moon with real payload long before it catches up to Artemis in budget.
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Do you want to put a dollar amount per kg to orbit on that? Because if you're spending orders of magnitude more, the expectations also go up, no?
And mind you, SLS isn't a new system. It's old space shuttle engines. It's old solid rocket boosters that were extended by a segment. So, it should be cheap and fast?
I think the point here is really that SLS should be a walk in the park. Mostly old tech, reused with not a lot of innovation.
Starship might not have put a real payload into orbit yet but it has already delivered vastly superior engine technology (full flow staged combustion), a new way to land rocket boosters to allow for reuse and many more smaller things.
If you're going to innovate, things will not be smooth because you're learning things. You should be celebrating those achievements, especially as it didn't cost you a dime
They are not trying to accomplish the same thing or on the same schedule, so your comparison is per-se invalid.
One could also ask "how many times has the SLS booster landed and been reused?". This would be a silly question to ask, because SLS is not trying to reuse the booster.
Isn’t SLS still costing like $4 b’s per launch?
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Difference is SLS has received 2 billion $ a year for 15 years in a row, while SpaceX get that much once and has to actually cover any extra cost themselves. Why do people just totally ignore money when it comes to SLS.
Not to mention that SpaceX got funding in like 2021, and SLS in 2011.
And SLS works, then why can it only launch every couple of years. I mean what good is a rocket that is so hard to produce that the whole politics and everything around it changes between launches. They basically have to teach a whole new group of people about SLS for each launch.
> while SLS did an orbit of the Moon, with real payload satellites.
If you want things launched to the moon, SpaceX, BlueOrigin or ULA could have done that many times every year for the last 15 years just as well.
Starship isn't just another 'look we can launch some stuff to the moon', its much more, and therefore much more difficult.
You are praising SLS for doing the very, very, very minimum that it should have been doing since 2017. And it will do it at most 3 times until 2027.
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Artemis is nowhere near schedule, had vast cost blowouts, and it's a commercial dead end though. It's incredibly expensive boutique warmed-over 50 year old technology.
NASA absolutely should learn from SpaceX, they were the company that liberated US astronaut's access to space from Russian rockets after NASA had lost that capability. And they have brought down the cost of payload to orbit enormously, and they have been finding viable commercial non-government markets for space. They've been launching around 90% of global mass to orbit. An order of magnitude more than all other corporations and governments in the world combined.
All other serious commercial space companies have taken lessons from SpaceX, so has the Chinese space program. To suggest NASA should not learn from SpaceX is just astounding. That's the kind of think you'd only hear from western government bureaucrats.
This reminds me of my all-time-favourite HN comment[0] (and a life lesson too):
This idea is captured nicely in the book "Art and Fear" with the following anecdote: "The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.
His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot – albeit a perfect one – to get an “A”.
Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay."
[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22105478
This works if there's no cost of failure in the meantime.
If we're putting humans into rockets into space, I'd like to think we adopt a balanced approach.
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I would think that it's just as likely that the quantity group would sit around philosophizing about what constitutes a "pot" so that they could get away with doing the least amount of work and still earning an A.
Now tell the fake story about the moneys and the ladder too.
If I was being graded solely on quantity, why would I bother caring at all to make anything good? Make the minimum quality necessary to be counted as a pot and move on with your life. That was basically my real world approach to ceramics back in HS, and I still feel good about my B+.
The actual real world result is the opposite. When you score on quantity you get James Patterson, not F Scott Fitzgerald.
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I'll take Things That Never Happened for 500 please.
2cents from a kid who grew up in a NASA family during the shuttle years - As others have commented, NASA’s baseline objective is to not kill astronauts. My understanding of their ethos growing up was that there was absolutely no excuse not to pursue excellence and prioritize safety when people’s lives were on the line. One would have to think that goal is fundamentally incompatible with SpaceX’s way of doing things (see the many exploding rockets - who wants to get in that?). And from what I’ve read and heard through the grapevine, working with SpaceX as a contractor on Artemis has certainly had pain points related to these mismatched priorities.
SpaceX has the most reliable orbital launch vehicle ever made. Falcon 9 block 5 has had 550 successful launches out of 551 attempts, giving it a 99.8% success rate. For comparison, Soyuz-2's success rate is 97%, Ariane 5 is 95.7%, and the Space Shuttle was 98.5%. All of these are worse than Falcon 9's block 5's landing success rate of 98.9% (552 out of 558 attempts[1]).
The current Starship launches are part of a development and testing program. They expect quite a few failures (though probably not as many as they've experienced). But since each Starship launch is only 1/25th the cost of an SLS launch, SpaceX can afford to blow up a lot of them. And they won't put people on them until they have a track record of safe operation. Falcon 9 didn't have crew on it until the 85th launch.
1. The number of landing attempts is higher than the number of launches because Falcon Heavy results in multiple landings per launch.
You risk it when there are no people on board to find the issues. Fix issues, rinse repeat.
NASA/Congress pushes the armchair quarterback approach. Analyze forever, fail because analysis isn't the same thing as real world experience, get stuck using 50 year old rocket technology. Each engine on SLS cost more than the entire Starship super heavy launch vehicle.
By weight the RS-25 engines cost about 70% of that of building their 7000lb mass dry mass out of gold. That's insane.
NASA says its baseline is to not kill astronauts and yet it is currently planning to send astronauts on a mission in space with an Environmental Control System on its first space flight in a capsule that has flown in space once, and was different on that one flight, and had unexpected heat shield problems with another different heat shield and on a untested return path that is guessed to fix the issues. Actions speak louder than words.
The shuttle lost two crews. Maybe pushing its limits in unmanned testing would have prevented those incidents.
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Congress is fickle enough without rockets blowing up, even if NASA explains up front that it's going to happen. There is much which is suboptimal about NASA, not just their attitude towards perfection, which is downstream of the political reality they have to deal with. For instance, a project that could be done in one year given adaquate funding will instead be spread out over ten years or more, to spread out the costs and keep NASA's monetary requirements as smooth and predictable as possible, for the sake of Congress.
SpaceX's move-fast-and-break-things approach was lauded and NASA panned as being stuck in the past until <checks notes> the zeitgeist turned against Musk at which point the drones and tech blogs they read and write now view SpaceX as dangerous and wasteful at all costs. When a mere few years ago they couldn't shower them with enough praise.
I have no skin in this game other than to say the old school methods resulted in a janky ship that stranded two astronauts in space for months until they could catch a ride home on a SpaceX ship.
Starship is starting to be a very long and not so cheap project though that doesn't seem to be making significant iterative improvements - Rockets are still exploding regularly where you'd expect them to have moved beyond that phase.
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NASA is beholden to politicians and voters who get easily ruffled when politicians can point to explosions and say "those are you tax dollars." NASA needs to be perfect and impress people or they get their budget cut even further.
SLS/Artemis seems mostly to be just a program designed to funnel money to traditional aerospace contractors so that they don't close down their space business (SpaceX has already made their business unviable without government subsidy) and force a lot of their skilled engineers and technicians out of space jobs just in case these are needed for some future war. A trickle of rockets, lots of people employed practicing hand building and engineering skills for space skills crafting something every couple of years. It doesn't look like a real program designed to create any significant value, much like the some of the government fusion programs seem to be primarily a way to keep nuclear scientists and engineers employed.
I had a lightbulb moment when someone said 'the point of iterative approaches is not to find bugs, it's to do something (small) successfully and build confidence+learn'. There's a subtle but important difference between the iterative approach that SpaceX takes and 'debugging through exhaustive retries', and I'm worried NASA would look like the latter (and admittedly, some of the more recent starship launches look that way too).
The ability to pick a small-but-well-defined goal as an interim milestone - and stay focused on it - is a key skill, and too often I've seen waterfall-like companies slowly scope-creep their first MVP until it's a lumbering mess. You almost always need someone with a strong personality to push team to 'get it done', and that level of ownership is really hard to come by in an organization historically built around ass-covering.
I think Commercial Crew is the right model for NASA. Pick the design objectives, provide some level of scaffolding regulation (i.e loss-of-crew calculations), and then contract out to private sector to actually 'get it done'. (Yes Starliner was a failure, but Dragon is definitely a success. A 50% hit rate and success of the program overall is better than Artemis)
NASA should not do what businesses do, because by definition their job is to do what businesses cannot or will not do.
They should not adopt spacex practices, they should adopt spacex lift vehicles (once proven).
With humans inside?
Move fast and break things has its place, but when putting humans in things you should be very concerned about... you know... not killing them...
The reason NASA does things this way is because they essentially have one shot. Failure is not an option. When they fail, funding gets pulled and you don't get to try again. NASA doesn't get to launch 11 and have half of them fail. This puts a weird spin on things because in many industries you have the saying "why is there always time to do it twice but never to do it right" but NASA (and plenty of other sectors) have the reverse "there's always more time to do it right, but never time to do it twice".
Truthfully, the optimal path is somewhere in between, but what is optimal is highly dependent on many different environmental factors. For example, when there are humans on board, well... you don't have the luxury of doing it twice. When those people are gone, they're gone. But when unmanned, well... early NASA also blew up a bunch of shit while it was figuring things out and had a much less regulated budget. Move fast and break things is a great strategy when you're starting and still needing to figure things out. But also when things become successful and working, people in charge look less fondly on mistakes. Doesn't matter if it is reasonable (e.g. human lives should be protected) or more unreasonable (you can't make dinner without getting the dishes dirty).
What I'm saying here is when SpaceX gets successful they'll shift gears too. Did we not see the same evolution in every big tech company? Seems to happen in every business and what is the government if not a giant organization? It really seems like as companies get larger and more powerful they start to look much more like governments.
Also interesting to hear what the NASA people assigned to work with SpaceX say:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxIiiwD9C0E&t=1440s
Neither craft have achieved their missions so it's a bit early to make that call.
Well the SLS has already sent a capsule around the Moon. And it has kept a lot of people employed. That's pretty much what it was intended to do.
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> I wonder if NASA could start to adopt SpaceX like approaches? Where one doesn't try to get everything correct before acting?
that would be such a culture change you'd have to disband NASA and start it over.
Yeah there is no way they do that with THREE LOCVs in their history. The fire, Challenger, and Columbia.
It's a risk-averse culture for a reason.
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> I wonder which approach is more capital efficient? Which is more time efficient?
I don't. I wonder whether US astronauts are going to die on the surface of the moon while the world watches in 4K. I believe, to my great relief, that by some minor miracle, we've ended up with a NASA administrator that is wondering the same thing, and also has the temerity to make some really hard calls, despite what is doubtless an enormous amount of pressure. I've been analyzing his words and speech. There is just no bullshit in him, and he clearly doesn't suffer fools. You can see it. He's like something out of SAC from the Cold War.
NASA is in desperate need of exactly that. Perhaps that's not the correct, permanent disposition for all things at all times, but if the US and NASA are actually going to engage in another Space Race, this time with China, we very much need it at this time.
> The difference in philosophy between NASA's current approach and SpaceX is quite stark. SpaceX has launched 11 Starships in the two and a bit years, with a lot of them blowing up. Where as Artemis is trying to get it near perfect on each run.
> I wonder if NASA could start to adopt SpaceX like approaches? Where one doesn't try to get everything correct before acting?
My understanding is the difference is politics. The US political system is dysfunctional, and so riven by anti-government factions, that there's too much pressure to not fail.
If NASA tried the SpaceX approach, after the second rocket blew up NASA's administrator would have been hauled in front of Congress and interrogated over the "waste of taxpayer money" and then the program may get canceled.
Systemic inefficiencies aside. I wonder how much of that is a public funding feedback loop? The cost gets higher, because the standards, requirements, and processes are stricter, because there is the need to validate the use of public funds, exacerbated by being higher, increasing the standards/requirements etc etc... Especially in a political environment where there is no shortage of sniping funding for points.
Regardless, first thing it reminded me of was that interview quote about how if nasa had SpaceX track record they would have lost funding long ago. Is there a US political landscape, even back to 2008-2016, where that isn't the case?
I wonder how much is a cost-plus billing issue, too… and a contrast between primes with a single customer in mind and a commercial firm chasing a bigger pie than the immediate program at hand
https://www.thespacereview.com/article/4498/1
If I were to bet, even with no information. I would wager that the private company is more capital efficient than the government ran one
Maybe go read the report on Starliner before making that call? Boeing is a private company too and no one is this deferential about it.
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NASA can't adopt SpaceX's approach, because any failure will be used to attack them in Congress and in the media.
SpaceX doesn't have investors itching to take AWAY money from their programs. they are obligated to be perfect on the first run. Public vs. private.
NASA has been directed by Congress to use the remaining Space Shuttle RS25 engines on SLS. There aren't that many RS25's left, so Artemis requires that they make the most of each launch. Getting more RS25's produced is one of those "nobody's made them in a long time and it would be terribly expensive and time-consuming to do so" type of situations.
correction: there are 16 RS25's left, but production has begun on more for the Artemis V mission. However, production is slow so they can't just yeet SLS's into space and test rapidly.
I think the public funding aspect complicates this, NASA is probably not in a position where it can blow up a bunch of rockets and still get funding for the next year.
They used to depend on the Army to blow up the rockets for them.
The Artemis mission is manned. I assume the Starships are unmanned.
The risk profile is very different.
If NASA switches to the Space X approach of just blowing up its rockets it would soon need to change its name to "Need Another Seven Astronauts".
Except of course that SpaceX is launching Astronauts right now and has a perfect safety record and operate the safest space vehicle ever built.
Doesn't Artemis intend to launch humans? It seems like Space X Starship approach is hella dangerous for astroanuts.
Once Starship has launched 1000 times without problems it'll be obviously safer despite having no abort system
Boris Chertok's memoir[0] on early Soviet space program is essential reading.
inexact quote: "You know, we're throwing towns into the sky" related to the early mishaps of R-7 program development, but they kept doing it. After that R-7 derivatives became the most reliable launch vehicle.
[0] https://www.nasa.gov/history/history-publications-and-resour...
> inexact quote: "You know, we're throwing towns into the sky" related to the early mishaps of R-7 program development
I have not looked at the source (in Russian) for several years; now that I am curious I will check at home tonight. But as far as I remember "we are shooting towns into the sky" remark was not in reference to the R-7, but in reference to N1-L3, a hellishly expensive competitor to the Apollo manned Moon mission rocket. The meaning of the phrase was that each and every test should be taken extremely seriously as the cost of each flight is comparable to the cost of building a new city.
R-7 was developed much earlier when Korolev and his team at OKB-1 were iterating rapidly on much cheaper models that were primarily funded as rockets for strategic thermonuclear strike warheads. The civilian (Sputnik and later Gagarin) flights were an offshoot of that and were small enough that it happened as a side project. R-7 was a comparatively simple and cheap design, which may be why that family became a workhorse from the late 50s to carrying crews to the ISS. And the super expensive N1-L3 was a stillborn.
That's my recollection, need to recheck the sources.
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> Where one doesn't try to get everything correct before acting?
That only works if the unit cost is low. A single SLS rocket engine costs about the same as an entire starship launch including 39 engines.
My suspicion is ULA can’t manufacture SLS quickly enough, at high enough quality, to meet multiple, gradual tests.
ULA has nothing to do with SLS.
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It's everything. NASA doesn't have the money, brainpower, efficiency etc. to implement SpaceX development method. They can't fab it fast enough, nor can they iterate on the engineering fast enough, nor are they will to sustain the optics of a "government rocket blowing up" like Musk is. They don't have the caliber of engineering talent available or a workflow setup (high autonomy, long hours, better pay).
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If you want to choose example of a failed approach to space exploration, NASA is your worst option. It's like choosing Netflix as an example of a failed approach to video multicasting.
NASA's approach to space exploration remains incredibly successful. Look at all the missions operating all over our solar system, including on Mars' surface, and beyond. No other organization comes close.
> I wonder which approach is more capital efficient? Which is more time efficient?
How we frame the debate - if you like, the specs that define the rfp - determines the outcome. You define it by efficiency, which is what businesses prioritize and is SpaceX's strength. They take a well-established technology, orbital launch, and make it much more efficient.
NASA prioritizes ground-breaking (space-breaking?), history-making exploration and technology - things never done before and often hardly dreamed of by most people. That can take time and money but they deliver at a very high rate - think of how many missions have failed, compared to recent private missions, such as moon missions, and even those of other space agencies.
Perhaps it is best to accept that SpaceX is a unicorn.
What exactly is ground breaking about SLS and not quite getting back to the moon with it?
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First Time NASA did that was how we got Apollo I and lost three astronauts.
They learned a few lessons, but then 1986 they let “getting things perfect” slip a bit more. It’s happened a few times since.
Personally, I’d rather not lose any more astronauts.
SpaceX managed their methodologies with Falcon 9 and Dragon without losing any crew.
That’s because, unlike NASA, they don’t risk crew with untested systems and first time flights.
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There were no humans on those Starships that blew up.
Most of the delays in Artemis are not around the launch system but the spacecraft and lander and life support and associated systems.
Not saying it couldn't be done more efficiently, but comparing Artemis to SpaceX is apples and oranges. The SLS is old expensive disposable rocket tech but it's also solid and tested and we pretty much know it will work. It's not the problem.
So how did we do it in the 60s? With a blank check and luck. The insane accomplishment of Apollo wasn't just landing people on the moon but doing it without killing anyone. The fact that nobody died on those flights is incredible, and luck was certainly a factor. We very nearly lost a crew on 13. If we'd kept flying Apollo rigs we'd have lost people. That whole mission was way ahead of its time technologically and generally unsustainable. It was an early proof of concept.
The Saturn V never blew up, either.
I suspect that Starship will never get a human rating
A human rating is only necessary for NASA missions. Do you think Falcon 9 will never fly crew because of all the explosions SpaceX had developing it and landings?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociotechnical_system
NASA and SpaceX are fundamentally incomparable, considering how these two organizations are established and the motivations that drive all the actors within. Sure, NASA could start to adopt certain approaches but I don't imagine it to work in a way anyone else would imagine it to.
NASA did have SpaceX like approach. Much more aggressive as a matter of fact. They cooked the occupants of Apollo 1 and they sent another mission out broken so they had to fix it live in space.
The question is whether you have the appetite for killing three astronauts on a test run like the Apollo team did.
EDIT: Fine, I’ll clarify. By “SpaceX like approach” I mean iterative design. By “more aggressive” I mean risk tolerance much greater than SpaceX to the degree that they do things that SpaceX wouldn’t do.
This is ignoring the massive distinction between manned flight (where failure is not an option) and unmanned tests. NASA and SpaceX both know this well.
Calling it a "SpaceX like approach" and connecting to Apollo 1 is a neat trick, but SpaceX wouldn't (and doesn't) adopt that risky approach during manned flights.
It's all about "the right risk for the job." You can't be risky with human safety, but you also don't want to be overly timid and failure-averse during safely managed R&D tests, or your R&D grinds to a halt.
Insane that this is getting downvoted.
Like others have said, its easy to blow shit up and improve when you dont have congress breathing down your neck and threatening to cut your budget.
They've blown up 11 Starships without any of them making it to orbit. Artemis I flew around the moon and came back already.
And don't compare costs because Starship does not and may never work so I dont care how much cheaper it is. If we are comparing fictional rockets I have a $1 rocket that can fly to Jupiter.
> They've blown up 11 Starships without any of them making it to orbit.
They purposely were not trying for orbit from my understanding. The last one did orbit the earth at suborbital heights and release satellites. It did seem to do what they wanted it to do, it wasn't a failure.
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This is why NASA can never adopt the SpaceX philosophy. People don't understand the concept of test fight.
> I wonder if NASA could start to adopt SpaceX like approaches? Where one doesn't try to get everything correct before acting?
This seems so ridiculous in the abstract. Like, what is that exactly supposed to entail in the context of launching rockets?
When SpaceX launches a rocket, they think it will work. When NASA launches a rocket they know it will work.
The cost of going from "I think this will work" to "I know this will work" is really expensive. It might be cheaper/faster to fail a few times and fix those problems than it would be to verify everything up front.
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The real question is which is more likely to avoid catastrophic failures in practice.
And we 'tried until it didn't blow up immediately' is not a great sign.
>> And we 'tried until it didn't blow up immediately' is not a great sign.
But everything that didn't blow up has been tested 11 times already. Things that did fail have had more than one design iteration tested. One approach has gains more real-world test experience.
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I think we're all misunderstanding SpaceX. I think it's more of an engine factory disguised as a general space company that managed to borrow the dad's card.
The only thing SpaceX truly has an edge is its engines.
They have perfected the engine for a ship like a giant Mars class rockets. And that engine has been in full scale series production for years, while the actual Starship keeps blowing up. The reason they developed their hoverslam landing technology, also, was because they wanted their precious engines back.
It's as if they handed groups of gamers a credit card and they went onto plunder stocks of RTX cards from 20 miles around with some Roombas bought on reward points. It's just inches below the threshold for typical BS detector if it weren't specifically tuned for the relevant topics.
All makes sense if everything was an elaborate ploy to get someone to pay for specifically the engines.
A couple of new posts by Nasa Administrator Isaacman:
Launch cadence across NASA programs:
https://x.com/NASAAdmin/status/2027456699175497741
An infographic showing the new architectures:
https://x.com/NASAAdmin/status/2027456713507356713
It's interesting how Artemis III (the new one) will try to prove out both HLS landers in one LEO mission.
Every new story about Artemis gives me even more respect for the Apollo engineers.
I think the main difference was political: for Apollo you had the most powerful nation in history throw their economic and political will into pushing a project forward.
NASA programs today are mainly about creating/maintaining jobs and keeping private industry contractors busy. They lost the political agency and freedom to move fast that they had in the 60s.
More frequent launches with less ambitious progress per launch makes good sense, and follows the old-school approach used through Apollo to mitigate risk. Having a lunar lander test in earth orbit, for example, is roughly the same mission as Apollo 9, is a good call. Validating everything works together has been a sort of sore spot for the Artemis program.
And even the Apollo 10 mission which went 99.99% of the way from the Earth to the moon, just 15km from the surface (but couldn't have landed on the moon- LM structure was too heavy) was incredibly important step. The sort of thing that people today would want to skip, it doesn't seem flashy or necessary. Why take all the risk of going into lunar orbit and separating the modules (requiring the very first rendezvous not in in Earth orbit) but not actually land on the Moon? It was about getting all of the ground crew proved and worked out, and proving that the rendezvous would work and they could get home, so that the actual landing mission could focus their efforts on just working out the last 15km, confident that all of the other problems were already dealt with. Trying to do all of that in one mission would have been a gigantic mess- A11 crew felt a lack of training time as it was.
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I’d say we’ll look back in a few decades and recognise the Apollo programs as the peak of the USA. Those people did truly amazing things. I recommend “Space Rocket History” podcast if you like Apollo. It’s a wonderful and highly detailed podcast and covers the US and Soviet space race in great detail.
In a few decades we will look back and say now is peak (space) USA with SpaceX launching successfully, creating Starlink, Blue Origin finally reaching orbit, Rocket Lab reaching for Neutron, even ULA making BVlcan work.
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to be fair they had way less requirements on making the CGI look good
back then TVs weren't that popular and those that had one were stuck with very low definition video, today our 2k and 4k screens would be able to spot their flaws easily
Well to be fair Nasa isn't nearly as good as it once was. The quality of engineer during the Apollo era was far better and more like what can be found at Spacex
What is that based on? NASA's recent accomplishments are far beyond anyone. Off the top of my head: The many Mars missions, JWST, Europa Clipper (still in progress), etc. SpaceX hasn't left Earth orbit, afaik.
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You meant cinematographers, right?
Relevant: https://idlewords.com/2024/5/the_lunacy_of_artemis.htm
I knew a lot of this, and had a good idea of how bad this whole thing was but... damn, how comprehensively horrible a parade of bad, multi-decade decisions this is turning out to be.
If you visit US, I really recommend a detour to the Kennedy Space Center if you can, there's a ton of interesting stuff especially about the Apollo program.
Especially if you can time your visit to Florida with a launch. Seeing the Shuttle launch in real life made me realize what a poor medium television is to actually show you reality.
(I don't know what the current policies are but you used to be able to apply in advance for VIP tickets, or buy them on the secondary market, which gives you much closer viewing of the launch)
Yes! I just got to go there earlier this month for the first time. They even have the lectern from the Kennedy speech (and the speech itself)!
Went to Florida some years ago when my kids were all teens and pre-teens. Did Disney World, Universal Studios, Sea World, the works.
We unanimously agreed KSC was by far the best of all. If you only do one thing in Florida, that would be it.
Been once as a kid and once as an adult. Wonderful place. The rocket garden is wonderful.
Make sure you look at ALL the stuff in the rocket garden and make sure you take the bus to the Apollo center and make sure you do them in that order.
If you've never seen a gator then looking in the ditches by the road during the bus tour is a good bed.
I'm very, very concerned for the astronauts piloting this upcoming trans-lunar flight. Given that Boeing, well, does Boeing things, the current state of NASA in this political climate, and the fact that problems keep arising with this current stack, it makes me feel that there is a significant chance of issues mid-flight.
Godspeed to them, hopefully I'm being overly dour.
Sadly, I feel the same way. Here's a great video of Starliner:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L96asfTvJ_A
Sadly, the worst thing I'm worried about is the current president pushing for a landing before he leaves office in order to have that feather in his cap. Isaacman seems competent and this article shows they are responding to the concerns of the plan and are "shortening the steps in the staircase" to a landing.
So far, Isaacman's competence has mostly consisted of (rightfully) throwing is predecessors under the bus. The real test will be if there are problems on his watch, but also it seems likely the result of having backbone will not be good for Isaacman and sycophants will end up running the agency again.
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Wow, in the past no presidents pushed for NASA to launch under deadlines. Imagine telling them they need to get to the moon before the end of the decade. Unprecedented.
Good thing we have a large number of CRUD SaaS experts to tell us what's wrong with the space program
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You summarized my concerns almost perfectly. My only addition is that you didn't stress enough how much this anti-science administration has destabilized NASA, both directly and indirectly. The institutional decision making has definitely been compromised.
Artemis II is a disaster in progress.
I'm glad this is getting overhauled, the existing plan was a bit of a mess and NASA can't afford mistakes on a program of this scale. Hopefully we get safer and more effective result out of this.
I watched an interview with the current NASA admin and he seems very competent. Good choice there. He basically implied SLS was a dead end outside Artemis and other options will be the future. It was also clear the influence of the Congress jobs program seems to be making him choose his words carefully.
Jared Isaacman is the best possible person to have as NASA admin. He genuinely cares and is trying to revitalize NASA to its glory days.
I have been awake too long so I am probably stupid. Please have mercy.
I don't understand. NASA says they goal of landing on the moon in 2028 is not realistic.
They are adding a launch in 2027 to do more testing.
Great.
It will be followed by one possibly two lunar landings in 2028. Are the now 2028 landings primarily testing SpaceX integration?
The Artemis rockets are huge, and extremely expensive. And the build time is considerable.
Now they are planning 3 rockets in two years, each of which is not reusable?
Then they have to build those in parallel, which makes sense but incorporating wha you learn in 2027, into rockets you have already nearly finished seems an odd approach
They're getting slightly bullied into following their own rocket certification process. Wild they're going right to human flight without their three unmanned certification flights, etc. NASA themselves will not allow mission critical payloads on rockets that don't meet that process. But they're (trying) to skip it with Artemis.
Fun read on Artemis https://idlewords.com/2024/5/the_lunacy_of_artemis.htm
Same contractors (Beoing) who built Starliner...
Explaining Why NASA's Starliner Report Is So Bad > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L96asfTvJ_A
Is it time to start sending delivery bots into space.
I made sure to watch the first SLS launch in person as I'm not confident they will be able to launch again.
If Artemis fails does that mean it goes ...
I honestly wonder why NASA bothers. To me it seems like a massive waste of money when SpaceX can do it much cheaper.
Does this vindicate Destin from Smarter Every Day?
2-years ago he presented concerns to NASA.
https://youtu.be/OoJsPvmFixU
No it doesn't. Because literally anybody who knows anything about NASA and follows the Space industry in detail has known about most of the issues since 2015 or even in 2011 when this whole new Post-Constellation shit-show started. And many of the problems have been talked about since the day NASA created Artemis. Destin is just more famous then many of the people in nerd forums.
Destin analysis is ok and he makes a number of good points, but it very pro-Alabama (Mafia) inside NASA and contractors since he very clearly is influence by the strong Albama presence and those are the parts of the industry he interacts with.
So Destin misses a huge amount of the relevant puzzle pieces, or he simply doesn't talk about them.
He also simple makes a few assumptions that are fundamentally wrong, namely the different targets of the program. The goal was never to repeat Apollo and landing a few people a few times is totally different from the original goals of Artemis.
Had the same thought. NASA already cracked this nut with Apollo; if you’re gonna crack it again and differently, be real sure your solution is better.
Why does it seem like we can’t do shit anymore? Was it always like this and there was no news coverage of all the failures? If not what is the main cause of failure right now? Is it onerous regulations and bureaucracy? Stressed work environments?
The Apollo program budget was immensely large, and the objective was clear: put people on the moon before the Soviet Union.
Artemis objectives are less well defined, more ambitious and with way less money. The big budget is being allocated to brutes killing people in the streets and a decadent ballroom for the emperor. The difference in importance between the two is the cause of all the failures.
The budget is actually not that much worse. If you adjust for inflation.
On avg NASA budget was about the same as now. But now we do more things now. But between Constellation/SLS and Orion this new Shuttle based architecture has as much money as Apollo while having done almost non of it. Before it is where Apollo ended up, it will cost much, much more then Apollo.
But even if what you said was true, a gigantic amount of infrastructure that was paid for in the 1960s is still in use today. A huge amount of fundamental research that was required is already done. That alone should make it much cheaper.
Same goes for development, Artemis is not developing any new engines, while Apollo had to develop many new engines.
> The big budget is being allocated to brutes killing people in the streets and a decadent ballroom for the emperor.
Except of course that Korea/Vietnam were much more expensive then what were are doing now.
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And we can't forget the nationalism at the time. Everyone was rallied behind the program and wanting to beat the Soviet Union. I mean, sputnik scared the hell out of everyone.
I think that's probably important framing for how things were reported back then. But also, I'm wrong like 99.9999999% of the time. So!
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Artemis was never a "return to the moon" program. NASA had one of those; congress killed it and replaced it with a "keep shuttle jobs going" program. There has always been and will always be pork spending, but in this case keeping the gravy train going has been the primary if not sole driver, as opposed to programs like Apollo where it was a means to an end. People have known it was a problem from day one and probably most people thought it would get cancelled and replaced by something more sound long before this point.
No... Orion has always been aiming for travel to Mars. The moon is a sales tactic and a gimmick that works as a stepping stone towards the larger mission goal.
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I feel the same. The Golden Gate Bridge took 3 years to build, start to finish. It was the biggest suspension to have ever been built at the time. Compare that to any modern public works project of today. There are countless examples of how we used to be able to build things before 1970.
Per Wikipedia, the Golden Gate Bridge was proposed in 1917, approved by the state for design in 1923, funded in 1930, started construction in 1933, and completed in 1937.
The reason modern projects take so long is that so many of them are stuck in design or awaiting funding stage for what feels like interminable ages; once the construction phase starts, they tend to go fairly quickly. But if you look at projects 100 years ago, well, they also seem to have fairly lengthy pre-construction timelines. It's just that we conveniently forget about those when we look back on them nowadays.
11 people died during the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge. We have onerous safety requirements and red tape which is why everything is so slow. Very few people die on construction sites now. Do we want 11 dead people or do we want things done extremely slow? I guess as a society we have answered that question.
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I think the narrative is more difficult now, as is visibility of goals. “Land a man on the Moon and return him safely” is a clear objective, while “decarbonize the global economy” or “make AI safe and useful” are fuzzier, and don’t give you a single flag‑planting moment.
But there's no lack of huge achievements. The Mars rovers are amazing: super-sonic parachutes, retro rockets, deploying a little helicopter with no real-time control is huge. So is planting JWST at the L2 point and unfolding it a million miles from earth.
Also, the NASA budget in the 1960's was 10 times higher.
We're doing really complicated stuff. And think about it though, in the 60s/70s we had one organization - NASA. That was it. Today, we have RocketLab, SpaceX, Blue Origin, and NASA, plus Boeing I guess.
Basically because we don't feel like it.
If you look at the unmanned side of NASA, that's going great. NASA can get amazing stuff done.
The manned side gets political attention, and the nature of current politics makes it a bad kind of attention. Results are essentially irrelevant. Jobs and cronyism are the point.
The overall design of the Space Launch System makes very little sense. We know all too well that solid rockets are a bad idea for crewed spaceflight. Hydrogen is a bad fuel for a first stage. It's horrendously wasteful to use expensive, complicated engines designed to be reused, and then throw them away on every launch. Early estimates were over $2 billion per launch, which in the current age is total clownshoes. The actual costs will be much higher still.
So why are they doing it? Because using all this old, rather inappropriate tech allows them to keep paying the contractors for it. If you gave NASA a pile of money and told them to build a moon program, they wouldn't build this. But it's not their choice.
Way more safety and rigid testing procedures and a better understanding - the Apollo program was all done by the seat of the pants engineering that somehow worked all based on the ideas of the team that built the German V2.
Each F1 rocket engine was hand tuned by drilling holes into the "plate" so it would not cause the combustion mixture to vibrate the engine into smithereens.
Such an approach would never be tolerated today by NASA.
This complete nonsense. The Apollo team was much, much, much, much larger then any V2 team. And mostly Americans.
And their testing procedures were actually very high quality. You don't just accidentally land on the moon and return. That doesn't just happen 'somehow'. That is truly idiotic level analysis.
> Each F1 rocket engine was hand tuned by drilling holes into the "plate" so it would not cause the combustion mixture to vibrate the engine into smithereens.
And that this works was established with lots of both experimental testing and lots of theoretical work.
So much so that F1 is one of the most reliable engines ever used in space flight history.
> Such an approach would never be tolerated today by NASA.
Except of course that the RS-25 engine used by NASA today is known to be less safe then F-1. Having had more failures and generally causing more minor operational problems.
It seems you have absolutely no clue what you are talking about. In fact, NASA own analysis before they were forced to pick SLS by congress indicated that a updated version of F-1 (still relying on the analysis of those people in the 1960s) would be a much better rocket.
Apollo worked because engineers from the top to the bottom made smart engineering focused decisions taking responsibility for their part of the stack, and close working together in teams on a shared goal while having very solid testing procedures for everything.
That doesn't imply that it was faster though. It just implies they didn't have the technology to simulate it, nor CNC machining to do it another way.
I mean does it sound like that was faster then what we can do today?
it's because we "destroyed the technology" :^)
Essentially, neoliberalism. The goal of everyone on the project is now higher and higher profits. Delivering a working product doesnt necessarily mean best profits anymore. Spacex would rather drag the project along with ships that dont work than to just make something that works. The government has privatized so much of their workload into so few specialized companies that they really can't stop them from doing this.
This is just nonsense. First of all, the companies in the 1960s were all there for profit and all made profit. And the politicians in power back then also tried to get contracts to companies in their districts. Why do you think the NASA control center is in Houston?
SpaceX is on a fixed price contract. Dragging the project along is literally costing them money.
By literally any analysis you can do, you will see that in the last 15 years SpaceX was by far and away (its not close) the best contractor to NASA in terms of delivering what NASA wanted.
In fact, by far and away the project that have done the worst, are the project NASA does in the old style where they remain the main designers and operate and only work with private companies as builders. That's exactly why SLS is such a shit-show.
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The SLS and Orion project have been so incredibly deeply flawed from the start. Its a huge mistake that they exists. The were bad designs to begin with and they are badly executed.
Constellation was a bad program by Bush Jr that was aimed at the moon, it would have been 4 expensive project, a human rocket, a big cargo rocket, a earth-moon capsule and a big new moon lander. Most of it Shuttle based, because everybody knew Shuttle was going to die, but they wanted to keep the workforce. Of these the human rocket was one of the dumbest human rocket designs ever, and it was so absurdly hilariously over-budget that the program basically had to kill itself. Orion was being worked on but was also over-budget and behind. The never even got to the big rocket or the moon lander.
Obama and his space team had some better idea, namely using commercial rockets and new contracting structures. You only need normal commercial rocket if you simply invest in distributed launch. Any analysis shows that this was going to be cheaper but NASA was never allowed to explore that. So they wanted to cancel the incredibly expensive badly designed Constellation program and did so. But Congress, Republicans and Democrats lead by later NASA Administrator Bill Nelson and Alabama-man Richard Shelby wouldn't let it happen, they saved Orion by giving it a mission it was not suited for and transformed the Ares 1 and Ares 5 rocket from Constellation (the horribly over budget complete shit-shows) into SLS.
The way this happen is funny. NASA did a bunch of analysis on different very big rocket. And NASA analysis was perfectly clear, the cheapest and long term best option would be a RP-1 fueled first stage with big engines. So basically a Saturn V modernized. So basically going away from Shuttle legacy (Of course commercial rockets and distrusted launch would have been even cheaper, but they were not allowed to investigate that). Commercial companies were also never asked for suggestion, despite both SpaceX and ULA offering.
Congress lead by Richard Shelby and friends wouldn't allow that. So they specifically wrote the bill in a way that made it absolutely impossible to do anything other then a Shuttle derived. They wrote in 2010-2011 that the a rocket with 70t to LEO had to launch by 2017 and then later be upgraded to much more then that. And that made it clear no engine other then already existing RS-25 and the Shuttle Solid boosters could work.
But of course, Constellation was dead, SLS was literally just a rocket that didn't have a mission. Literally non, it had no uses. So Obama space team just came up with some mission that didn't really made sense, but at least they could pretend in marketing material that SLS was anything other then job creation.
Of course the program has just continue to done badly and done all the things anybody with a brain could have predicted already in 2012. Its incredibly expensive legacy hardware. Every aspect of the design makes it not only expensive but also incredibly hard and slow to produce. Every aspect of it makes it hard to operate.
SLS had the best possible budget, often getting more money in the Budget then they even asked for. It has been the darling of congress. SpaceX is delayed, and there are congressional hearings and questions. Tons of paid for media and so on. SLS that consumes more money per year then SpaceX received for the whole moon-lander barley gets mentioned. Under Trump 1 Bridenstein tried to launch an investigation if Orion could be launched on anything other then SLS. This was a pretty bad idea, likely mostly don't to pressure Boeing. Shelby basically told him that he would have to resign if he continued investigating this.
Jared Isaacman just like all the NASA Administrators before him know that this program is incredibly stupidly designed. Its program designed around a bunch of legacy hardware. And really dumb requirement. Really dumb contracting structure. And so on.
Isaacman is at least trying to contain how much money gets drained into the SLS money-pit, by dropping the also late and also over-budget EUS upper stage. This stage would likely have been just another endless money pit inside the money pit. And instead they might get away with a somewhat smaller money pit.
All of this is just an embarrassing shit-show from beginning to end. Between Shuttle derived vehicles and Orion NASA has spent already something on the order of 100-150 billion $ and what they got out of it was 1 SLS launch and a few Orion tests that never tested the whole system. Its going to cost much more and its not gone get much cheaper anytime soon. On the meantime, the complete development of Falcon 1, Falcon 9, re-usability and human rating Falcon 9 plus Falcon Heavy, plus Cargo Dragon 1, Cargo Dragon 2 and Crew Dragon cost on the order of 5 billion $ conservatively.
And I'm not saying this as a SpaceX believer who wants all money to go to SpaceX. Distrusted launch (including refueling) where many companies can compete is the right answer specially for launch.
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Did we ever get clarification as to how the Dragon 8 crew member got hurt and why SpaceX got warned? https://www.popsci.com/science/nasa-spacex-safety/#:~:text=%...