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I don't think SpaceX came in to play when it was "may or may not work", tech is mostly developed by NASA and others over decades. SpaceX's value add is eventua

I don't think SpaceX came in to play when it was "may or may not work", tech is mostly developed by NASA and others over decades. SpaceX's value add is eventually providing economies of scale.

foota 6y ago
They developed a new rocket engine and the ability to land upright, both significant engineering challenges, which it seems is what the problem is currently for fusion (i.e., we need to build and iterate on things that mostly seem they should work)
- mulmen 6y ago
  They weren't the first to build a new engine or an engine of that type or land upright. They just combined previous achievements in a better way. Their technology is incredible but it is all incremental improvements combined with a sustainable business model.
  - yholio 6y ago
    Their major accomplishments were economic, not technological. Their crown jewel Raptor, applies full-flow staged combustion principles that were known and demonstrated on soviet test stands since the 60s. Fusion power still needs to overcome fundamental, hard physics problems.
    - mulmen 6y ago
      My understanding is that the physics are actually pretty well understood but it's just a matter of executing on them. Fusion is possible but we just need someone to actually... do it. Which AFAIK is the point of ITER.
      - donor20 6y ago
        ITER will NOT in any reasonable time frame actually do it, and will not be a commercial success. Talk to someone in physics closer to this. The time scales ITER is operating on are so long term the tech is ancient by the the time they are actually operating it and the path to commercial power is - basically not there I think.
        mulmen 6y ago
        I don't think ITER was ever intended to be a commercial success and it doesn't have to be. It's literally named the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor. It is a research reactor. It goes first to prove it is at least possible to build a power producing reactor. That's all it has to do. Just exist.
        DubiousPusher 6y ago
        How can the tech be "ancient" if they are the first ones building it, even if slowly. There may be many new designs by the time they deliver on an older one but that hardly makes the tech "ancient".
        erk__ 6y ago
        The design of ITER was finished in 1998. Technology have changed a lot since then,although no one have built any near the size of it because of the expenses that are pretty much guaranteed to not give any money back.
        DubiousPusher 6y ago
        That's fine but to act like new small scale experiments and designs obsolete technology that has never before been developed at scale is silly and frankly runs contrary to how technological and scientific progress are made. I'll never understand the biases of theorists. They act as if all theory isn't deeply indebted to practical learnings. You don't commit to a project like ITER because you believe it will turn out a cutting edge solution to a problem. You do so because you believe that whatever happens, in the end you will harvest many learnings that are widely useful.
  - tintor 6y ago
    First to land upright from orbital flight.
    - madengr 6y ago
      The retro-rockets on 1976 Viking lander in Mars don’t count? Of course that had a parachute to assist, but I think it was still going really fast.
      - mulmen 6y ago
        Sounds like the Russians actually did it in 1971? Also since we are already speaking extra terrestrially Apollo 11 landed propulsively in 1969, with humans on board and it got back to orbit! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_1#Lander https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_1#Lander https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_3#Entry,_descent,_landing,_transmission,_and_failure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_3#Entry,_descent,_landing...
    - everyone 6y ago
      Not orbital. Sub-orbital. Only their 1st stage rocket has landed, which mainly goes up, its nowhere near orbital velocity. They plan to land the 2nd stage of starship, which will have reached orbital speeds. But that is a huge challenge that they have not attempted yet.
    - mulmen 6y ago
      On top of the great points made by sibling comments the Apollo Lunar Modules landed propulsively from orbit with an additional party trick of having humans on board. Also Blue Origin actually did propulsive sub-orbital landing from space to Earth before SpaceX, although admittedly from a lower altitude and velocity. Both came after the 1990s era Delta Clipper. Before that there were probably a lot of Apollo era test vehicles. Each one got a bit higher and faster. This is the value SpaceX offers. They're doing the hard work of making things we know are possible also commercially viable.
    - sudosysgen 6y ago
      When did SpaceX ever do a powered landing from orbital flight? The first ones that did, by the way, are the Soviets in the early 70s.
- mdorazio 6y ago
  I don't agree the problems are comparable at all. The original Merlin engines were modern iterations of proven technology and vertical landing rockets were already proven technology dating back many decades to the DC-X [1] and Apollo lunar lander. What SpaceX did was cut all the bullshit out of the space launch industry that had grown incredibly lazy due to lack of competitors and revolving doors with the government, and then modernize everything with iterative development. In comparison, commercially viable fusion has never been shown to work in the real world at all. The Raptor engine, however, really is a massive achievement and is somewhat comparable to developing fusion power. But if SpaceX had started with it, they probably would have failed due to how much time, money, and expertise it took to get working. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-X https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-X
  - vladTheInhaler 6y ago
    I don't think that landing on the moon with lunar gravity and no atmosphere is at all comparable to surviving hypersonic reentry speeds and landing on such a tiny target. And reading the Wikipedia article, it doesn't sound like the DC-X ever demonstrated a landing from orbit, which is most of the challenge.
    - everyone 6y ago
      Space X have never landed any rockets from orbit. Only their 1st stage has landed, which mainly goes up, its nowhere near orbital velocity.
      - vladTheInhaler 6y ago
        That's fair. Perhaps I should have said "from a trajectory that could plausibly lead it to orbit."
  - fastball 6y ago
    Ok, so then someone should start a company that iterates on fission (proven tech like Merlin) and gets the cost of that way down and safety way up, then uses that momentum to work on fusion, which (like the Raptor engine) is a whole 'nother ball game, but you can still use some of the expertise from fission for fusion. The analogy holds!
sanxiyn 6y ago
I think reusable rocket was definitely "may or may not work".
- yholio 6y ago
  Reusable rockets were at "They most likely would work, but it's pointless since governments are willing to spend billions on rockets; in fact, lowering price to space would be very bad for our business". Compared to space tech, fusion science is at the stage of 1929 sci-fi drama "Woman in the moon".
  - aidenn0 6y ago
    For context: 1926 was the first liquid fueled rocket. In 1929 it was not yet clear that this was the technology that would take us into space. That sounds about right for fusion. It is probable that we have built a primitive version of what will eventually sustain a net-positive fusion reaction, but it may only be obviously a milestone in hindsight.
  - chasd00 6y ago
    spacex was laughed out of the room by industry and press when they announced trying to land the first stage. then they did it. reusable rockets were uniformly assumed to be a fool's errand.
    - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
      This is a complete fantasy, people were working on reusable vehicles for decades. SpaceShuttle was already partially reusable and operational, just like falcon 9 is, just was not economical. SpaceX doesn't have a fully reusable vehicle yet, and there was a program to develop a fully reusable replacement for Space Shuttle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VentureStar https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VentureStar If Elon was laughed out of somewhere, thats to do with Elon's credibility at the time.
- foolfoolz 6y ago
  then space shuttle was designed to be reusable. spacex had 20-30 years of data to build off
JumpCrisscross 6y ago
> SpaceX's value add is eventually providing economies of scale This has become a popular line of contrarian bunk as of late. I am an aerospace engineer. I am also a Tesla valuation sceptic. The work SpaceX has done is revolutionary. In materials, numerical methods, logistics and technology, they have pioneered. Common knowledge in 2001 was reusable launch could not compete with expendable vehicles. SpaceX overturned that paradigm with a fraction of the competition’s cash. Ignoring that is to reduce the problem to a simplistically technical level that detaches entirely from reality.
- tenpies 6y ago
  > SpaceX overturned that paradigm with a fraction of the competition’s cash. How can we say anything about SpaceX's efficiency with cash if there are no public statements available and even investors have trouble getting any financial data at all?
  - ericd 6y ago
    We know how much they've raised, how much they charge for launches, and how many launches they've done.
    - donor20 6y ago
      And we know the VAST amounts of cash devoured by SLS and the traditional folks who critiqued SpaceX approach.
      - Melting_Harps 6y ago
        > And we know the VAST amounts of cash devoured by SLS and the traditional folks who critiqued SpaceX approach. I was going to say to look exactly at its endless money pit counter-part: SLS from ULA. Nothing will ever compare to that monstrosity that will never work: $7.2 Billion and growing [0]. Also, not an Engineer, but went to interview at both Tesla and SpaceX and SpaceX's internal facilities are jaw-dropping. People love to go on about Tesla's Fremont factory, which is awesome, but I've been to Fremont and Boca Chica. And Boca is by far more impressive; I lived and worked in Emilia Romanga in Italy, and also lived in the town nearest to Stuttgart in Germany so I've have seen my share of amazing engineer and logistical/distribution feats. I saw them starting to stack what was to become SN3 (RIP) in real time in the hangar as I saw SN2 vertical on the launchpad which that still remains one of the coolest things I've ever seen in my Life. I was basically leaning up against one of the Raptor Engine prototypes they have pretty much just around. I've also got a few glimpses of the Hawthorne factory from (the outside) when I was charging the Model 3, lots of cool stuff comes out there (namely Falcon 9 and Merlin and Raptor engines) they have so much cool stuff just lying on the side of the building which I took pictures of but was asked to delete by security, which I complied. 0: https://oig.nasa.gov/docs/IG-20-012.pdf https://oig.nasa.gov/docs/IG-20-012.pdf
cromwellian 6y ago
Many comments have claimed this, but I disagree. Plasma confinement as science has largely been solved now. Like the Rocket Equation, Computational Fluid Dynamics, and other aspects of Aerospace, we know the parameters of how to do it, and it is simply a matter of searching the space, reducing the parameters, via engineering iteration. We also knew that landing rockets was possible, and closed-cycle combustion engines were possible, the physics said so, and even had prototypes that could do it, but with SpaceX, it is not the science that's the issue, or even one-off engineering feats, but practical, economical, scalable production. With Fusion, we've already achieved confinement times and burns that show we can make it work. But making it work in a prototype reactor is a far cry from making it work in a commercial reactor which needs to be run everyday and maintained. ITER's been going for 13 years now, and I don't think they're solving any of the problems that SPARC will solve. Yes, tokamak prototypes have provided the insight to help nail down the plasma physics, but small scale fusion prototypes have helped to do, with much faster turnaround time than $20+ billion mega projects. What SPARC is saying is that small is beautiful. That because of scaling of the B-field to the fourth power, if you focus on stronger magnets, you can dramatically reduce both the size and the cost to build your fusion reactors. That is, if you double the strength of your B-field, you shrink the size of the machine needed by a factor of 4. So clearly, instead of focusing on ITER, you should focus on the economics and scaling of REBCO manufacturing, and increases in magnetic field you can eeek out because they pay huge dividends. In other words, we are not longer at the Von Braun stage of rockets, or even the Apollo stage, we're at the SpaceX stage of dramatically reducing manufacturing costs and increasing use. Likewise, I think Fusion is poised to move past the Von Braun stage of "is this possible" to "can we build a real reactor?" As long as people can let go of huge super-projects, and we can get funding for a bunch of innovative startups in the space to try various techniques and designs for engineering small, cheap, and rapidly. Likewise, for Thorium reactors, we already know Molten Salt Reactors work, we already know the Thorium cycle works, and we even know a commercial plant works, as Germany ran one at one point. There are oodles of startups now vying to build small scale thorium reactors. The role the government could play here is, like with NASA, the DOE, could provide capital to reduce risk, and get some of the more promising ventures off the ground. Most importantly, they need to be allowed to fail.
- 6y ago

I don't think SpaceX came in to play when it was "may or may not work", tech is mostly developed by NASA and others over decades. SpaceX's value add is eventually providing economies of scale.

foota 6y ago

They developed a new rocket engine and the ability to land upright, both significant engineering challenges, which it seems is what the problem is currently for fusion (i.e., we need to build and iterate on things that mostly seem they should work)

mulmen 6y ago
They weren't the first to build a new engine or an engine of that type or land upright. They just combined previous achievements in a better way. Their technology is incredible but it is all incremental improvements combined with a sustainable business model.
- yholio 6y ago
  Their major accomplishments were economic, not technological. Their crown jewel Raptor, applies full-flow staged combustion principles that were known and demonstrated on soviet test stands since the 60s. Fusion power still needs to overcome fundamental, hard physics problems.
  - mulmen 6y ago
    My understanding is that the physics are actually pretty well understood but it's just a matter of executing on them. Fusion is possible but we just need someone to actually... do it. Which AFAIK is the point of ITER.
    - donor20 6y ago
      ITER will NOT in any reasonable time frame actually do it, and will not be a commercial success. Talk to someone in physics closer to this. The time scales ITER is operating on are so long term the tech is ancient by the the time they are actually operating it and the path to commercial power is - basically not there I think.
      - mulmen 6y ago
        I don't think ITER was ever intended to be a commercial success and it doesn't have to be. It's literally named the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor. It is a research reactor. It goes first to prove it is at least possible to build a power producing reactor. That's all it has to do. Just exist.
      - DubiousPusher 6y ago
        How can the tech be "ancient" if they are the first ones building it, even if slowly. There may be many new designs by the time they deliver on an older one but that hardly makes the tech "ancient".
        erk__ 6y ago
        The design of ITER was finished in 1998. Technology have changed a lot since then,although no one have built any near the size of it because of the expenses that are pretty much guaranteed to not give any money back.
        DubiousPusher 6y ago
        That's fine but to act like new small scale experiments and designs obsolete technology that has never before been developed at scale is silly and frankly runs contrary to how technological and scientific progress are made. I'll never understand the biases of theorists. They act as if all theory isn't deeply indebted to practical learnings. You don't commit to a project like ITER because you believe it will turn out a cutting edge solution to a problem. You do so because you believe that whatever happens, in the end you will harvest many learnings that are widely useful.
- tintor 6y ago
  First to land upright from orbital flight.
  - madengr 6y ago
    The retro-rockets on 1976 Viking lander in Mars don’t count? Of course that had a parachute to assist, but I think it was still going really fast.
    - mulmen 6y ago
      Sounds like the Russians actually did it in 1971? Also since we are already speaking extra terrestrially Apollo 11 landed propulsively in 1969, with humans on board and it got back to orbit! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_1#Lander https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_1#Lander https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_3#Entry,_descent,_landing,_transmission,_and_failure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_3#Entry,_descent,_landing...
  - everyone 6y ago
    Not orbital. Sub-orbital. Only their 1st stage rocket has landed, which mainly goes up, its nowhere near orbital velocity. They plan to land the 2nd stage of starship, which will have reached orbital speeds. But that is a huge challenge that they have not attempted yet.
  - mulmen 6y ago
    On top of the great points made by sibling comments the Apollo Lunar Modules landed propulsively from orbit with an additional party trick of having humans on board. Also Blue Origin actually did propulsive sub-orbital landing from space to Earth before SpaceX, although admittedly from a lower altitude and velocity. Both came after the 1990s era Delta Clipper. Before that there were probably a lot of Apollo era test vehicles. Each one got a bit higher and faster. This is the value SpaceX offers. They're doing the hard work of making things we know are possible also commercially viable.
  - sudosysgen 6y ago
    When did SpaceX ever do a powered landing from orbital flight? The first ones that did, by the way, are the Soviets in the early 70s.
mdorazio 6y ago
I don't agree the problems are comparable at all. The original Merlin engines were modern iterations of proven technology and vertical landing rockets were already proven technology dating back many decades to the DC-X [1] and Apollo lunar lander. What SpaceX did was cut all the bullshit out of the space launch industry that had grown incredibly lazy due to lack of competitors and revolving doors with the government, and then modernize everything with iterative development. In comparison, commercially viable fusion has never been shown to work in the real world at all. The Raptor engine, however, really is a massive achievement and is somewhat comparable to developing fusion power. But if SpaceX had started with it, they probably would have failed due to how much time, money, and expertise it took to get working. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-X https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-X
- vladTheInhaler 6y ago
  I don't think that landing on the moon with lunar gravity and no atmosphere is at all comparable to surviving hypersonic reentry speeds and landing on such a tiny target. And reading the Wikipedia article, it doesn't sound like the DC-X ever demonstrated a landing from orbit, which is most of the challenge.
  - everyone 6y ago
    Space X have never landed any rockets from orbit. Only their 1st stage has landed, which mainly goes up, its nowhere near orbital velocity.
    - vladTheInhaler 6y ago
      That's fair. Perhaps I should have said "from a trajectory that could plausibly lead it to orbit."
- fastball 6y ago
  Ok, so then someone should start a company that iterates on fission (proven tech like Merlin) and gets the cost of that way down and safety way up, then uses that momentum to work on fusion, which (like the Raptor engine) is a whole 'nother ball game, but you can still use some of the expertise from fission for fusion. The analogy holds!

sanxiyn 6y ago

I think reusable rocket was definitely "may or may not work".

yholio 6y ago
Reusable rockets were at "They most likely would work, but it's pointless since governments are willing to spend billions on rockets; in fact, lowering price to space would be very bad for our business". Compared to space tech, fusion science is at the stage of 1929 sci-fi drama "Woman in the moon".
- aidenn0 6y ago
  For context: 1926 was the first liquid fueled rocket. In 1929 it was not yet clear that this was the technology that would take us into space. That sounds about right for fusion. It is probable that we have built a primitive version of what will eventually sustain a net-positive fusion reaction, but it may only be obviously a milestone in hindsight.
- chasd00 6y ago
  spacex was laughed out of the room by industry and press when they announced trying to land the first stage. then they did it. reusable rockets were uniformly assumed to be a fool's errand.
  - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
    This is a complete fantasy, people were working on reusable vehicles for decades. SpaceShuttle was already partially reusable and operational, just like falcon 9 is, just was not economical. SpaceX doesn't have a fully reusable vehicle yet, and there was a program to develop a fully reusable replacement for Space Shuttle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VentureStar https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VentureStar If Elon was laughed out of somewhere, thats to do with Elon's credibility at the time.
foolfoolz 6y ago
then space shuttle was designed to be reusable. spacex had 20-30 years of data to build off

JumpCrisscross 6y ago

> SpaceX's value add is eventually providing economies of scale This has become a popular line of contrarian bunk as of late. I am an aerospace engineer. I am also a Tesla valuation sceptic. The work SpaceX has done is revolutionary. In materials, numerical methods, logistics and technology, they have pioneered. Common knowledge in 2001 was reusable launch could not compete with expendable vehicles. SpaceX overturned that paradigm with a fraction of the competition’s cash. Ignoring that is to reduce the problem to a simplistically technical level that detaches entirely from reality.

tenpies 6y ago
> SpaceX overturned that paradigm with a fraction of the competition’s cash. How can we say anything about SpaceX's efficiency with cash if there are no public statements available and even investors have trouble getting any financial data at all?
- ericd 6y ago
  We know how much they've raised, how much they charge for launches, and how many launches they've done.
  - donor20 6y ago
    And we know the VAST amounts of cash devoured by SLS and the traditional folks who critiqued SpaceX approach.
    - Melting_Harps 6y ago
      > And we know the VAST amounts of cash devoured by SLS and the traditional folks who critiqued SpaceX approach. I was going to say to look exactly at its endless money pit counter-part: SLS from ULA. Nothing will ever compare to that monstrosity that will never work: $7.2 Billion and growing [0]. Also, not an Engineer, but went to interview at both Tesla and SpaceX and SpaceX's internal facilities are jaw-dropping. People love to go on about Tesla's Fremont factory, which is awesome, but I've been to Fremont and Boca Chica. And Boca is by far more impressive; I lived and worked in Emilia Romanga in Italy, and also lived in the town nearest to Stuttgart in Germany so I've have seen my share of amazing engineer and logistical/distribution feats. I saw them starting to stack what was to become SN3 (RIP) in real time in the hangar as I saw SN2 vertical on the launchpad which that still remains one of the coolest things I've ever seen in my Life. I was basically leaning up against one of the Raptor Engine prototypes they have pretty much just around. I've also got a few glimpses of the Hawthorne factory from (the outside) when I was charging the Model 3, lots of cool stuff comes out there (namely Falcon 9 and Merlin and Raptor engines) they have so much cool stuff just lying on the side of the building which I took pictures of but was asked to delete by security, which I complied. 0: https://oig.nasa.gov/docs/IG-20-012.pdf https://oig.nasa.gov/docs/IG-20-012.pdf

cromwellian 6y ago

Many comments have claimed this, but I disagree. Plasma confinement as science has largely been solved now. Like the Rocket Equation, Computational Fluid Dynamics, and other aspects of Aerospace, we know the parameters of how to do it, and it is simply a matter of searching the space, reducing the parameters, via engineering iteration. We also knew that landing rockets was possible, and closed-cycle combustion engines were possible, the physics said so, and even had prototypes that could do it, but with SpaceX, it is not the science that's the issue, or even one-off engineering feats, but practical, economical, scalable production. With Fusion, we've already achieved confinement times and burns that show we can make it work. But making it work in a prototype reactor is a far cry from making it work in a commercial reactor which needs to be run everyday and maintained. ITER's been going for 13 years now, and I don't think they're solving any of the problems that SPARC will solve. Yes, tokamak prototypes have provided the insight to help nail down the plasma physics, but small scale fusion prototypes have helped to do, with much faster turnaround time than $20+ billion mega projects. What SPARC is saying is that small is beautiful. That because of scaling of the B-field to the fourth power, if you focus on stronger magnets, you can dramatically reduce both the size and the cost to build your fusion reactors. That is, if you double the strength of your B-field, you shrink the size of the machine needed by a factor of 4. So clearly, instead of focusing on ITER, you should focus on the economics and scaling of REBCO manufacturing, and increases in magnetic field you can eeek out because they pay huge dividends. In other words, we are not longer at the Von Braun stage of rockets, or even the Apollo stage, we're at the SpaceX stage of dramatically reducing manufacturing costs and increasing use. Likewise, I think Fusion is poised to move past the Von Braun stage of "is this possible" to "can we build a real reactor?" As long as people can let go of huge super-projects, and we can get funding for a bunch of innovative startups in the space to try various techniques and designs for engineering small, cheap, and rapidly. Likewise, for Thorium reactors, we already know Molten Salt Reactors work, we already know the Thorium cycle works, and we even know a commercial plant works, as Germany ran one at one point. There are oodles of startups now vying to build small scale thorium reactors. The role the government could play here is, like with NASA, the DOE, could provide capital to reduce risk, and get some of the more promising ventures off the ground. Most importantly, they need to be allowed to fail.

6y ago