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We're in the middle of a few different technological revolutions right now, and the kind of conservatism / lock-in that this article talks about is very much in

by nkoren 7y ago

We're in the middle of a few different technological revolutions right now, and the kind of conservatism / lock-in that this article talks about is very much in evidence. It can be surreal to observe. One revolution which I follow quite closely is in spaceflight. Since the beginning, it had been done one way and one way only, and its way of doing things had become a goal in itself. Its exorbitant cost was lauded for its ability to create jobs and -- for more ambitious initiatives -- to foster international collaboration, since surely it was too expensive for any one nation to undertake on its own. Its resulting rarity and exclusivity created a kind of mystique around rocket scientists and astronauts. This mystique and these justifications became fundamental to the narrative of what spaceflight was about. Then SpaceX came along and screwed it all up, and practically nobody noticed. "Bad example," you might say: "Elon Musk is fetishized by millions, and is hardly out of the news cycle for more than a few minutes". Which is true, but Musk's status as a celebrity is entirely orthogonal to actually comprehending what he's doing, and adjusting one's model of the world accordingly. What SpaceX has done/is doing, is this: 1. Changed traditional aerospace engineering, management, and procurement practices, so that they were more focused on efficiently building/operating rockets than distributing work sites around a critical mass of congressional districts. Nothing at all heroic or sexy about this, but it reduced launch costs by a factor of 3 relative to the industry norm. 2. Developed 1-stage reusability, which is quite sexy, and reduced launch costs by a factor of 6. 3. Developed the Falcon Heavy, which reduced launch costs by a factor of 8 (for large enough payloads, of which there currently aren't any). What I find remarkable about this is that although the sight of boosters landing themselves has become common place enough to no longer grab headlines, the industrial / political community is still very much at the "Do Not Think Aeroplanes Will Ever Compete With Railroads" stage of comprehension. The fact that it's made Musk into a celebrity is, frankly, totally meaningless and facile. What's slightly more meaningful is that this has enabled a startup to capture the majority of commercial launch services in the world, and make a profit doing it. But ultimately, what a 8x reduction in the cost of spaceflight should do is change the the entire nature of the spaceflight business: enable many new types of business cases and missions. This is a fait accompli, but it's taking a long time for the world to catch onto this fact. If you browse through an archive of traditional industry magazines and forums and such, you'll find almost no mention of SpaceX's innovations apart from dismissal and derision. Typical themes are: 1. Private companies can't afford to develop launch vehicles. (Still being claimed for a couple of years after they first reached orbit). 2. SpaceX is losing money. (They're not.) 3. SpaceX is only making money because they're subsidized by the government. (They're not.) 4. Recovering a booster is impossible. 5. Reusing a booster is impossible. (This argument was still being made long after SpaceX had started flying reused booster.) 6. Rocket reusability will never be economically meaningful because [insert painfully tortured and ridiculous argument here]. (Said after SpaceX had captured the bulk of the world's launch services). 7. Private companies can't develop heavy-lift launch vehicles. (Said as recently as a congressional hearing last week, after the Falcon Heavy has been successfully flying for almost two years) 8. Look, astronauts should be the very best of the best of the best. We shouldn't just allow anyone into space. (Said ever since the very first space tourist booked a flight to the ISS in 2001). The myopia here is really striking to me. But one thing I've noticed is that -- contrary to the article -- it mostly doesn't really come from a too-conservative Joe Public. Rather, it comes from well-regarded experts with a vested interest in their world not being upended. When SpaceX first successfully recovered a booster in late 2015, I found that my friends with no particular interest in space were able to comprehend the significance of that milestone far more accurately than executives from the old guard space contractors. And I genuinely think that the old guard didn't comprehend. They weren't publicly ignoring/rubbishing SpaceX, while privately doing intensive R&D in an effort to catch up. Privately, they were doing nothing differently. So they really didn't understand what they were seeing. 4 years later, they're vaguely beginning to understand what has happened, and starting to think about how they might catch up. The European Space Agency is funding paper studies of reusable rockets which look almost exactly like the Falcon 9. SpaceX's main US competitor, United Launch Alliance, is aiming to start doing trials of partial reusability in 5 years. China is ahead of both of them, already doing booster-recovery experiments very similar to the early Falcon 9 recovery trials in 2013. But this a terribly muted reaction to what has already been a significant revolution in spaceflight. And anyhow, it is all going to be much too little, much too late -- because actually the revolution was just getting started, and matching the capabilities of the Falcon 9 is about to be the least of any competitor's worries. SpaceX is now developing the Starship, which will be fully reusable and plausibly stands to reduce launch costs by a factor of 50-100 vs. the prior industry baselines. This will be a mind-bogglingly huge development: at those prices, asteroid mining is viable, and building Mars colonies is with reach of many NGOs, never mind governments. At those prices, the fact that we live in a solar system with almost unlimited resources starts to become a meaningful statement. Once the culture has absorbed the fact that this is really happening, I would expect to see thousands of people emigrating off-world every year, to pursue the many opportunities elsewhere. This will be a BIG DEAL. And it's happening right now. Starship's engines have completed development and are now being optimised for mass production. The first test-bed flew earlier this year. The first full prototype vehicle is under construction and will make its first trans-sonic flight as soon as next month. They expect to hit orbit by next year. Musk is saying as early as next Spring -- and this is undoubtedly too optimistic -- but at the pace they've been going, late next year is absolutely plausible. Moreover, "the pace they've been going" isn't a matter of speculative kremlinology: they've been practically open-source about the whole endeavour, with all the parts laid out in a field and assembled in full public view. As if to try to convince the world: "hey, wake up, this is actually happening." But so far, awareness of this seems to be largely confined to cult-of-Musk fanboys, and their equal but opposite anti-fanboys. With very few exceptions, few in the industry have noticed that this is actually happening. Based on what I've seen with the Falcon series, I fully expect this state of denial to persist for at least 5-10 years after Starship reaches orbit.

Gibbon1 7y ago
I only have a passing interest in space stuff, but it's obvious to me that SpaceX has ratfucked all big players. To me as neither a cult of Musk or an anti-Musk guy is mostly what Musk did is allow existing engineering talent to innovate. Which says that typical aerospace management is exceptionally shitty.
- nkoren 7y ago
  It's kind of worse than that: typical aerospace management is actually very good at their game. They're just playing the wrong game. This is part of the reason that it can take so long to comprehend a genuinely innovative new technology: it doesn't win the game that's being played -- it plays a different game entirely. When airplanes came along, rail companies could quickly (and correctly!) judge that they would never be hauling coal and cattle and such. Therefore: airplanes are just a toy; we can safely ignore them. Similarly, when television came along, the radio industry said: "people listen to the radio when they are working, driving, or drifting off to sleep. You can't do anything else when you're staring at a screen, so television isn't a threat." What these industries failed to realise is that while the the new technologies were non-competitive on the use-cases that railways and radios had optimised for, the new entrants could win on metrics that the old industry had never thought to care about. (All this is fairly standard Christensen disruptive-technology stuff, BTW.) Anyhow, the thing about the legacy aerospace industry is this: they weren't playing the "let's build and fly rockets" game. They were playing the "let's maximise our funding" game. The rules of this game are as follows: 1. Spend all the money you get, otherwise your budget will be cut next year. 2. Spend even more money than you get, and do as little as you can with it, so that you can plead the necessity of a funding increase next year. 3. The more money you get, the more of a political base you can establish. The more of a political base you've established, the harder it will be to cancel the whole program. Underlying all of this is the axiomatic assumption that the spaceflight market is essentially inelastic. Weather and positioning and communications and spy satellites need to be launched at more or less any cost, but any reduction in launch prices won't be matched by a corresponding increase in demand. Therefore: if you cut costs, you're just leaving money on the table and putting your political base at risk. Don't do it. Typical aerospace management was playing this game exceptionally well. NASA's heavy-lift rocket, the Space Launch System, has spent $14B last time I looked, and is still years away from its first launch. Its launches will cost a billion dollars apiece. That's actually not easy to accomplish. If I gave you $14B and told you -- a person with only a passing interest in space stuff -- that I wanted a heavy-lift rocket in return, I'm quite you could do it. All you need to do is put out a tender for heavy-lift services, with payments made on a milestone/per-launch basis. Award these to several teams to keep things robust and competitive. Job done. On the other hand, if I gave you $14B and told you to spend it on the appearance of serious rocket development work, I think you'd find it quite challenging. Spending that money without flying a damned thing takes exceptional skill. Hats off to any program manager who can accomplish this! But when SpaceX comes along and decides that the rules they want to play by are "build and operate the most amount of rocket for the least amount of money", the rest of the industry simply couldn't figure out WTF game SpaceX was playing at. Most of the industry still hasn't figured it out.

by nkoren 7y ago

Gibbon1 7y ago

I only have a passing interest in space stuff, but it's obvious to me that SpaceX has ratfucked all big players. To me as neither a cult of Musk or an anti-Musk guy is mostly what Musk did is allow existing engineering talent to innovate. Which says that typical aerospace management is exceptionally shitty.

nkoren 7y ago
It's kind of worse than that: typical aerospace management is actually very good at their game. They're just playing the wrong game. This is part of the reason that it can take so long to comprehend a genuinely innovative new technology: it doesn't win the game that's being played -- it plays a different game entirely. When airplanes came along, rail companies could quickly (and correctly!) judge that they would never be hauling coal and cattle and such. Therefore: airplanes are just a toy; we can safely ignore them. Similarly, when television came along, the radio industry said: "people listen to the radio when they are working, driving, or drifting off to sleep. You can't do anything else when you're staring at a screen, so television isn't a threat." What these industries failed to realise is that while the the new technologies were non-competitive on the use-cases that railways and radios had optimised for, the new entrants could win on metrics that the old industry had never thought to care about. (All this is fairly standard Christensen disruptive-technology stuff, BTW.) Anyhow, the thing about the legacy aerospace industry is this: they weren't playing the "let's build and fly rockets" game. They were playing the "let's maximise our funding" game. The rules of this game are as follows: 1. Spend all the money you get, otherwise your budget will be cut next year. 2. Spend even more money than you get, and do as little as you can with it, so that you can plead the necessity of a funding increase next year. 3. The more money you get, the more of a political base you can establish. The more of a political base you've established, the harder it will be to cancel the whole program. Underlying all of this is the axiomatic assumption that the spaceflight market is essentially inelastic. Weather and positioning and communications and spy satellites need to be launched at more or less any cost, but any reduction in launch prices won't be matched by a corresponding increase in demand. Therefore: if you cut costs, you're just leaving money on the table and putting your political base at risk. Don't do it. Typical aerospace management was playing this game exceptionally well. NASA's heavy-lift rocket, the Space Launch System, has spent $14B last time I looked, and is still years away from its first launch. Its launches will cost a billion dollars apiece. That's actually not easy to accomplish. If I gave you $14B and told you -- a person with only a passing interest in space stuff -- that I wanted a heavy-lift rocket in return, I'm quite you could do it. All you need to do is put out a tender for heavy-lift services, with payments made on a milestone/per-launch basis. Award these to several teams to keep things robust and competitive. Job done. On the other hand, if I gave you $14B and told you to spend it on the appearance of serious rocket development work, I think you'd find it quite challenging. Spending that money without flying a damned thing takes exceptional skill. Hats off to any program manager who can accomplish this! But when SpaceX comes along and decides that the rules they want to play by are "build and operate the most amount of rocket for the least amount of money", the rest of the industry simply couldn't figure out WTF game SpaceX was playing at. Most of the industry still hasn't figured it out.