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Anecdotally, ITER was the largest of few options for a fusion researcher to run their experiment in a new tokamak. Everybody wanted to put their work into it, a
by dfdx 5y ago
Anecdotally, ITER was the largest of few options for a fusion researcher to run their experiment in a new tokamak. Everybody wanted to put their work into it, and as more features were added, the more funding it sucked up, leaving less money for other experiments, leading to more people wanting to put their experiment into ITER. Here's a presentation [0] that goes over why SPARC, being so much smaller and simpler than ITER could be more likely to succeed.
[0] https://library.psfc.mit.edu/catalog/online_pubs/iap/iap2016/mumgaard.pdf https://library.psfc.mit.edu/catalog/online_pubs/iap/iap2016...
This quote from the presentation summarizes it well:
“The more money that's involved, the less risk people want to take. The less risk people want to take, the more they put into their designs, to make sure their subsystem is super-reliable. The more
things they put in, the more expensive the project gets. The more expensive it gets, the more instruments the scientists want to add, because the cost is getting so high that they're afraid there won't be
another opportunity later on- they figure this is the last train out of town. So little by little, the spacecraft becomes gilded. And you have these bad dreams about a spacecraft so bulky and so heavy it
won't get off the ground- never mind the overblown cost.”
“That boils down to the higher the cost, the more you want to protect your investment, so the more money you put into lowering your risk. It becomes a vicious cycle.”
- Rob Manning, Chief spacecraft engineer, JPL
- maccam94 5y agoThis is also why it's exciting to see the huge drop in satellite launch costs driven by SpaceX. Your satellite design is going to be much different if you have a few chances to launch on a $1B rocket per year, vs launching it for $10M anytime. Rather than one complicated reliable one, you might make 10 simpler ones and buy extra flights to do repairs if necessary.
- Gravityloss 5y agoFor NASA science probes, this cost increase and risk averseness spiraling is called when missions become "Battlestar Galactica".
- ksec 5y agoI thought this was some joke involving Bears and Beets. Turns out it is an actual thing [1]. >In 1992, Dan Goldin became the NASA Administrator. Goldin believed in a philosophy of Faster… better… cheaper—i.e., he thought NASA could do more with less. Hence, Goldin did not support the idea of having large EOS platforms in space and in fact once referred to them as “Battlestar Galactica.” He believed smaller, less expensive missions that could be built more quickly were the way to go and supported development of new programs that actually diverted funds from EOS. [1] https://eospso.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/eo_pdfs/Perspectives_EOS.pdf https://eospso.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/eo_pdfs/Perspect...
- mikepurvis 5y agoArguably the Shuttle suffered from this too— instead of being a tightly focused space truck, it needed to be able to do ridiculous things like fly polar missions and grab Soviet spy satellites right out of the air.
- mauvehaus 5y agoPoint of order: if the space shuttle were grabbing satellites out of the air, something has gone terribly wrong with both launching the satellite and the shuttle.
- mikepurvis 5y agoI think the idea was that early spy satellites would use film rather than digital transmission, so it would be at the very least necessary to potentially grab one's own satellites. In any case, this exact question was asked here, and the top-rated response indicates that it's unlikely that the design requirement was ever meant to refer to grabbing an uncooperative payload: https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/41741/was-the-space-shuttle-ever-actually-intended-for-the-military-to-steal-satellite https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/41741/was-the-spac...
- neltnerb 5y ago
- notJim 5y agoThis is an amazing observation, and something I've seen in many realms.
- fragmede 5y agoSPARC (as proposed this year, by CFS, which was founded in 2018) also has the benefit of 3 decades worth of advancement in materials science, computers, and other technologies over ITER, which was started sometime in the 1980's. Sometimes being first to market takes a long time and is very expensive because you first have to invent all of the components yourself. SpaceX's advancement is impressive, but if NASA had never happened, I doubt SpaceX would even exist today.
- maccam94 5y agoSpaceX's main innovation was that they decided to build a rocket that wasn't optimized for performance or reliability, but cost. They were willing to bear huge development risks to create a new price category and capture latent demand for cheaper launches.
- zarzavat 5y agoI'd say what SpaceX optimises for most is iteration time. They have benefited hugely from an iterative development pattern contrasted to the waterfall pattern of NASA et al. Time is your biggest cost.
- tcmart14 5y agoI'd say yes and no. You most definitely have a point here as I agree that their model, or view, is different than NASA. However, if NASA had not happened, would even conceiving of a different model or target had happened? Not to mention just initial research into rocketry. It maybe could have happened without NASA, but probably with a severely higher initial investment.
- aaronblohowiak 5y agoThe soviets had a very strong space program and arguably their rocket designs have had a significant impact on spacex…
- Symmetry 5y ago
- ksec 5y agoSounds like politics more than technological. Although I guess it is unavoidable.
- stainforth 5y agoThe first step to correction is awareness right? Lets turn this tanker of human behavior away from these pitfalls.