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It is quite apparent that the NASA/Government space industry has milked the public for 50+ years. We could have had re-useable first and higher stages decades a

• shadowgovt 5y ago
  I don't think I'd frame it that way. SpaceX is taking advantage of technologies that weren't available until recently. Of course, now that they are available, we should see SpaceX's competition adopting them.
  • pfdietz 5y ago
    Something very much like an expendable F9 could have been made decades ago. Simply evolving the Saturn 1B might have done it. But no, Nixon needed pork in California to ensure his reelection.
    • ceejayoz 5y ago
      > Something very much like an expendable F9 could have been made decades ago. We've made non-reusable rockets for quite some time pre-F9.
    • bodhiandphysics 5y ago
      Not really. Falcon 9 is more sophisticated than it looks at first glance. Merlin has extremely high performance when compared to earlier gas generators... it has a t/w of 200 compared to the ra-27s 100 or the f-1s 95. The alluminum lithium alloys that give the rocket such a low dry mass date from the 90s. The avionics in falcon are revolutionary, and couldn’t have been possible before the early 2000s... a lot of little things like that.
      • pfdietz 5y ago
        That's why I said "evolving". Making engines better, introducing FSW when it was introduced, and so on. The F9-like boosters that could have been made around 1972 would still have been much better than the shuttle turned out to be. What one should object to in this scenario is the idea that the conventional aerospace companies, and NASA, would have done anything like this, when their internal incentive structures pushed them away from it.
        • bodhiandphysics 5y ago
          We did build an f-9 like booster around the time of the shuttle, the delta ii. It doesn’t compare to falcon. Neither does Antares, built at the same time as the f-9
          • pfdietz 5y ago
            Delta-II was not a F9-class launcher. The first stage thrust (ignoring strapons, which one should because F9 doesn't use them) was less than 1/7th that of the F9. A closer match was the Saturn IB.
            • bodhiandphysics 5y ago
              Delta ii was designed around boosters! Also when falcon 9 was developed its target payload was ten tons to Leo, similar to delta ii’s 8
              • pfdietz 5y ago
                F9 1.0's payload to LEO was 11.5 tons, vs. (up to) 6.8 tons for Delta II. Yes, D9 was designed around boosters. This means D9 is a different kind of design than F9. I'm contending that a more F9-like design, like Saturn 1B, could have evolved into something like the F9 over time. D-II could not have.
                • pfdietz 5y ago
                  DII, not D9
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
• low_common 5y ago
  Wait, what?
  • credit_guy 5y ago
    I think what the GP is trying to say is that reusable rockets had been known and built by NASA 50 years ago. More precisely, the Moon lander was just such a rocket that was able to land and then to lift off, albeit on the Moon, not on Earth. But the concept was there, it was just a matter of scaling it up. By the way, I don't personally buy this argument, but it's not completely meaningless either.
    • ceejayoz 5y ago
      The moon lander wasn't really reusable, though. It was a two stage disposable rocket that happened to hang out somewhere during the interstage period. Calling it "reusable" is like calling the Apollo capsules reusable because they go up, then down. SpaceX benefits enormously from fast computers, advances in metallurgy, CAD, etc.
    • hwillis 5y ago
      They may also be referring to the McDonnell Douglas DC-X. It flew and landed itself in 1996, but it was heavily based on the 1967 Douglas SASSTO. Neither project was government funded or ordered. There's no particular reason to think it could have even been built in 1967, and even in 1996 it may not have been possible to land a rocket after reentry. Coming in backwards at supersonic speed is incredibly challenging. Flipping around would have been even more so. Transitioning from supersonic to subsonic would have been a total guess. The DC-X certainly could not have done any of those things. The OP may also not understand the incredible gulf in difficulty between landing a suborbital rocket and a real first stage. A suborbital rocket doesn't weigh that much more going up than it does going down. The F9 first stage weighs less than 5% of what it has to lift on the way up. Getting a rocket to output 25% thrust is easy; use four engines and turn off 3. You can't just turn off 19 engines; the F9 first stage is huge and needs huge power swings to remain stable. SpaceX built custom sparse voxel GPU solvers to design around combustion instabilities and supersonic flows around the rocket. Even in the 90s they would have had to make huge concessions for the sake of running 20+ engines at once. There's absolutely zero chance they could have done it in the 60s or 70s.
• davidaa 5y ago
  Let's not oversimplify or cast blame. Sure, most/all of the tech has been around for decades - although Lars Blackmore & the other controls engineers did original work that was arguably absolutely critical - but there hasn't been any milking going on. The most profitable route wouldv'e been to develop this tech & then use it, after all. [Case in point: SpaceX, of course.] There simply wasn't enough interest from the public or Congress to put enough R&D money into any number of cool programs to see them through to commercialization.
  • wolf550e 5y ago
    Boeing and Lockheed Martin, separately and together under the name of ULA, and Northrop Grumman (as Morton Thiokol, ATK, Orbital ATK and now NGIS) have been milking the taxpayer for decades. Their business plan always involved making everything take longer and be more expensive. That is what they have to do to make more money, because they work on "cost plus" contracts. An engineer in any one of them who presented a way to make the rocket cheaper to his boss would have been fired for not understanding how the company makes money. The oversight is supposed to be done by congress, but they are extremely happy to provide good paying jobs in their districts, for decades. No one even really hides it anymore. Any official, when asked about something like SLS and costs, would answer with "But NASA is going to the moon! Don't you want America to go to the moon?!" and with "tens of thousands of high paying jobs in all 50 states". There is no attempt to say the rising year over year price of orbital launch (before SpaceX), the exorbitant price of SLS + Orion, the use of solid boosters for crewed launches, etc, make any sense except to support the existing contractors to the detriment of the tax payer and space exploration. See a NASA insider explaining: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3gzwMJWa5w&t=463s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3gzwMJWa5w&t=463s (Or see anything by Dr. Robert Zubrin, or see the story of how the shuttle derived design that lost to RAC-2 (a Saturn V like design) was chosen to be "SLS": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNZx208bw0g&t=1970s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNZx208bw0g&t=1970s)
    • davidaa 5y ago
      I'm familiar with both Zubrin (two of his books within arms-reach as a I type this) and generally how NG/Innovation Systems does business (having worked at a legacy ATK plant). I don't disagree that they often make money via cost-plus contracts, that SLS is mainly a jobs program, or any of that. What I disagree with is your apparent inherent assumption that it's malicious. Nobody's "milking" anything - Hanlon's razor, remember. Never assume malice when stupidity (I'd prefer "incompetence") is an adequate explanation. The project managers at ULA, at Boeing, at Lockheed, at Northrop, aren't monsters trying to squeeze more money from the taxpayer. They, quite simply, believe that this is the way you have to build a rocket and you can't possibly do it any cheaper. They do pride themselves on being able to deliver things ahead of schedule and under budget, except they can't because everybody expects projects to be behind schedule and over budget, since that's the way it's always gone. Traditional expectations have a stranglehold on the oldspace industry. I've also worked for a newspace company - there was none of that attitude. Don't assume the astronautics primes are evil. They're just... old.
• 0x000000E2 5y ago
  NASA nah, they transitioned to third party launch providers many years ago. They like making space vehicles more than rockets. The SLS, yes, that's a classic pork project. ULA is the real problem. The government allowed all the launch providers to merge into one with no domestic competition. Think space Comcast. Other countries allowed the same. Nobody innovated for decades. Russia and US ULA are flying rockets from 50 years ago with minimal updates.
  • tehbeard 5y ago
    > Russia and US ULA are flying rockets from 50 years ago with minimal updates. Old Babushka proverb, if complicated explosion related plumbing is working as intended, best not to completely rework it for sake of changelog. Minimal updates to the shape, maybe? But I bet the electronics and manufacturing have seen steady improvements over that time. SLS does feel quite like a pork barrel, but I understand the funding of it along with the other commercial companies as "more options, less risk", if something grounds the Dragon capsules, having a "home" alternative instead of buying seats on a foreign rocket makes sense.
    • 0x000000E2 5y ago
      > Old Babushka proverb, if complicated explosion related plumbing is working as intended, best not to completely rework it for sake of changelog. Aye, but everyone stuck with that proverb for too long. Then Musk appeared and he doesn't seem to care that his test rockets explode. He revels in it. To me it's the classic startup vs giant corporation. The bigger you are, the harder it is to change course. And exploding rockets look bad to management. The same reason so many companies are still on IBM mainframes running FORTRAN. SLS is an insurance policy against SpaceX. But it's being managed by the same old wasteful monopolies as always, plus plenty of government mandated pork.
  • vardump 5y ago
    Your nickname, 0x000000E2... ERROR_VIRUS_DELETED?
    • 5y ago
• justapassenger 5y ago
  We could’ve landed on the moon in 18th century as well, right? Given that we landed in 20th century, it’s just a conspiracy that we didn’t do it earlier.
  • smaddox 5y ago
    Doubtful. Landing on the moon prior to the commercialization of BJT's would have been staggeringly more difficult.
  • Veedrac 5y ago
    In 1957 the Soviets launched the first artificial satellite into space. In 1969 America landed the first man on the moon, using the Saturn V rocket, capable of launching 140 tons to LEO. In 2021 NASA has yet to build a single rocket better than the Saturn V, with the in-construction SLS being not realistically much cheaper, and no more powerful. We have had zero advances in launch technology from old space in fifty years. There was an attempt in 1981, but that attempt was bad and then they just gave up.
    • thechao 5y ago
      The book “Ignition!” explains the realities of chemical rockets. The Saturn V is as powerful as it gets, given chemistry and the rocket equation. Modern construction techniques and computers can bring the costs & overheads down, but they can’t make hypergolics better.
      • Veedrac 5y ago
        It's true we're all working in the margins of efficiency, but that's like saying there's no difference between a Falcon 1 and Starship. Saturn V isn't close to the limits of how big you can make a rocket, nor how efficiently you can make a rocket, nor how cheaply you can fly a rocket for. There have been plenty of proposals along the way for bigger, cheaper, more modular, and more reusable spacecraft, plenty of which are totally compatible with historic methods. Even literally “keep flying Saturn V” would have been better than what we did.
• simonh 5y ago
  The essential features of the F9 that made it capable of propulsive landing were an accident. After the success of the F1 SpaceX didn’t have the resources to develop a larger engine, so they built the bigger rocket by just adding a cluster of engines to the first stage. This is far from ideal because multiple small engines gives poorer power to weight than fewer big engines, but SpaceX hoped to gain cost advantages by mass producing the engines. The original plan for recovering the F9 first stage was to use parachutes and this was tried with the first couple of launches, but the boosters broke up on re-entry. That’s when the idea of a re-entry burn came up, and from that the concept of a propulsive landing. But propulsive landing is only possible with the F9 because it has a central engine and the engines are small enough to throttle down low enough to do a suicide burn. You have to have an engine at or very close to the centre of the vehicle for it to work. But this 9 engine cluster with a central engine was not originally designed with propulsive landing in mind. It was an accident. If SpaceX had better funding early on, they probably would have developed a larger main engine for the booster, which wouldn’t have been able to throttle low enough to stick a landing and may not have had a cluster arrangement with a central engine anyway. This is also why the other rocket companies mostly can’t adapt their rockets for reusability easily.
  • imron 5y ago
    It’s amazing how much scientific progress is caused by accident.
  • Denvercoder9 5y ago
    > This is far from ideal because multiple small engines gives poorer power to weight than fewer big engines Are you sure about that? The Merlin engine Falcon 9 uses has the highest thrust-to-weight ratio of any rocket engine currently being used, more than double that of the much more powerful RD-180 used on the Atlas V. You'll lose some advantage because structural support and plumbing for more engines is heavier, but I'd expect they'll still come out ahead. The Raptor has been downsized from the original plans, and Musk has said that was to improve thrust-to-weight ratio.
    • simonh 5y ago
• internetslave 5y ago
  Yup. Now apply the same thinking to the rest of government
• mulmen 5y ago
  SpaceX did not develop their launch vehicles in a vacuum. They built on lessons from the projects that came before. NASA's job is to do things that are not commercially viable. NASA tried to build a reusable spacecraft with the Shuttle. Valuable lessons were learned.