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I’m kinda confused by the criticism of the industry and NASA not designing for Starship. The author argues that NASA doesn’t understand Tempe game changer that

I’m kinda confused by the criticism of the industry and NASA not designing for Starship. The author argues that NASA doesn’t understand Tempe game changer that Starship is, but I don’t think that’s accurate. I think the risk to NASA of assuming the benefits of Starship before it’s proven are just too high. If NASA (or other industry players), assume Starship will deliver the benefits it promises, they to fundamentally alter their approach to space. But that leaves them with no backup plan in the event that Starship fails to materialize or deliver on its promises. Whereas this other approach, of treating Starship like a much better vehicle but integrating it into its old processes, gives them an out if Starship fails in some way. Because they’re still using the “old” assumptions, they can fall back to other “old space” style providers. I think once Starship has proven itself capable of deliver on its promises, you’ll see NASA changing its approach radically in the manner the author describes. So, fundamentally, I think it’s not a lack of “understanding”, but a different calibration of “risk”. This also applies to many existing space companies, and I also think this gives opportunities for new companies that have a higher risk tolerance to take advantage.

fasteddie31003 5y ago
I'm not sure that NASA designs much. JPL designs and builds most of the probes launched by NASA. JPL is an anomaly in the Federal Government where it gets good results. It would be interesting to look into how JPL does so well relative to other agencies and contractors such as Boeing (which is a national embarrassment).
- Loic 5y ago
  People with passion. JPL people were/are (and I hope will continue to be) believer in the purpose of what they are doing.
  - aero-glide2 5y ago
    Interestingly, the author himself works for JPL.
- basementcat 5y ago
  JPL is the only NASA center that is staffed by non civil servants and managed (under contract) by a private organization (Caltech). By law this gives them certain flexibility that other NASA centers aren’t afforded (e.g. Caltech has lobbyists in Washington DC). It may make more sense to categorize JPL with other Federally Funded Research and Development Centers such as Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.
- jacobr1 5y ago
  JPL employees are actually private employees of CalTech not federal employees.
gameswithgo 5y ago
Yeah if starship gets to orbit and lands both stages, NASA will start talking about it more. At the moment brief static fire tests still knock off multiple heat tiles. Still a long way from knowing it will be viable for humans to fly on.
soco 5y ago
In other words, NASA doesn't want to move fast and break things.
- thereisnospork 5y ago
  Considering the history of rocket development can be pretty fairly summarized as '[intelligently] breaking things' that seems a counter-productive design philosophy.
bryanlarsen 5y ago
NASA just announced that they want to spend $1B per launch for SLS once a year until 2050. For a capability less than what SpaceX might provide for $10M. That's not sensible risk management, that's head in the sand denialism. https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/10/nasa-wants-to-buy-sls-rockets-at-half-price-fly-them-into-the-2050s/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/10/nasa-wants-to-buy-sl...
- api 5y ago
  It's a jobs program for Alabama.
  - handrous 5y ago
    The space museum (also home of the famous Space Camp) in Huntsville, AL sure is pimping it, still. That's the one and only future rocket for USA space flight, one might think if one's only knowledge came from a visit to that museum, rather than a sad zombie project that everyone knows will be badly obsolete by the time it flies. Plus a huge amount of square footage dedicated to advertising for various MIC contractors for stuff that has little or nothing to do with space, and a lot to do with killing people. Super lame. Half of the museum feels like a government contractor trade show, not a museum, which makes sense given where it's located, but doesn't explain why it seems to have a good reputation, as far as space & rocketry museums go.
- panick21_ 5y ago
  This is beyond insane and wont happen. Once Starhip flies even the last politicans can be cornered to admit to kill this ridiculous rocket.
  - yokem55 5y ago
    No, there will be one excuse after another. Starship isn't human rated and only Orion is rated for human deep space flight. So something else will still be needed to launch Orion to that lunar trajectory. That something else is SLS. Now the obvious solution is to rate Dragon for deep space and launch humans in that on a falcon and have it meet up with a starship in LEO. But getting that will probably take more years and billions paid to to the Orion and SLS POR before it will actually come to pass. Never underestimate the power of a self-licking ice cream cone.
panick21_ 5y ago
> I think the risk to NASA of assuming the benefits of Starship before it’s proven are just too high. I think the risk of not doing so is to high. And NASA is already relaying on it. They have had all the data and they selected it for Human Landing System. They knew what it required and they were comfortable with it. > If NASA (or other industry players), assume Starship will deliver the benefits it promises It doesn't have to deliver on everything to be worth designing for it. > But that leaves them with no backup plan Going back what they always did before is the backup plan. How come wasting 20 billion on SLS is totally reasonable, but risking a few billion on starting with designing for a rocket that doesn't exist isn't. > I think once Starship has proven itself capable of deliver on its promises, you’ll see NASA changing its approach radically in the manner the author describes. But that will leave a years to decade long gap of actually profiting from it. > but a different calibration of “risk” Yes an incredibly conservative one that would have meant the US could never go to the moon.
sailingparrot 5y ago
I think the author is arguing for NASA to take a cautiously optimist stance on Starship, instead of assuming it won't work at all until it does. For example, NASA could start allocating a small-ish budget (e.g. 50M$) to design a parallel mission to their Artemis-IV mission that is currently scheduled for 2026 (but will slip) and that should deliver the Gateway i-HAB module to Moon's orbit. While 50M$ (excluding launch costs) for a mission like this would be lunacy today given the constraints on weight imposed by current rockets, with Starship that would be a sizeable budget to design a much bigger and more useful module. If by some cut-off date (say 2024) Starship still hasn't proven itself, then scrap that mission, proceed with the original one and the wasted 50M$ will be a rounding error in Artemis-IV budget. If Starship proves itself before then, scrap the original mission and go with the redesigned Artemis-IV based on Starship. Billions of dollars will be saved (SLS launch cost + at least 2 years worth of development), and we will have a Lunar Gateway 10 years ahead of what we would have had otherwise in terms of capabilities.
- pintxo 5y ago
  Isn't the point of most/all big NASA projects to distribute as much money as possible into a specified number of states? Kind a hard then to get political backing to move to a quicker + cheaper project.
  - rbanffy 5y ago
    A less cynical person would say that NASA’s role is to employ as many highly qualified aerospace workers as feasible to both keep the workforce updated and advancing space applications and to do the things private companies don’t want to. Now that it seems SpaceX is willing and able to fulfil part of NASA’s mission, maybe it should refocus a bit.
- ncallaway 5y ago
  > I think the author is arguing for NASA to take a cautiously optimist stance on Starship, instead of assuming it won't work at all until it does. NASA has taken a cautiously optimistic stance on Starship. The assignment of the HLS to Starship and no other provider was an aggressively optimistic stance from NASA that surprised many of the space industry observers at the time of its announcement. The expectation (and normal NASA behavior) would've been two assign the HLS to multiple vendors, at a reduced funding level and stretch the timelines out. So, I'd argue that NASA is already being quite bullish on Starship given the projects and funding that they have available.
spacemark 5y ago
As someone who has worked on NASA contracts pretty much my whole career, you're quite right. Starship is still extremely unproven. If you look at the history of rockets, mayyyybe 1 in 5 that make it to an orbital launch debut (which is like 1 in 50 paper rockets) in turn make it to commercial rollout. The author's claim that the potential benefits of Starship are not understood by NASA is cringeworthy naive. Everyone at NASA is rooting for SpaceX but they have been burned many times by the promises of the next shiny rocket: DC-X, VentureStar, NASP, Ares, SLS, hell even the shuttle despite its "success" only fulfilled a small fraction of the desired results. Makes me wonder how old the author is.
- JulianMorrison 5y ago
  It seems a little unfair to compare a program with flying test vehicles and production already in progress, with flying Powerpoints that got cancelled because you can't make a cryogenic hydrogen tank out of scrith.
- prox 5y ago
  This would be true perhaps if this wasn’t SpaceX. They already moved the goalpost with Falcon And I don’t think the author wrote what you said. His main point was that not one of NASA’s powerpoints even as much acknowledges that something like Starship might come round. The new constraints by Starship are a game changer.
  - ARandumGuy 5y ago
    Past success does not guarantee future success. And when you're dealing with space travel, which is inherently expensive and extremely dangerous, then you can't afford to buy into any hype.
    - panick21_ 5y ago
      If it was just 'hype' why did NASA select them for HLS? They had all the data and they officially declared it was very doable and that SpaceX had a path to get there. So its ok to plan for it but pretend it only exists for that one thing they contracted if for, and ignore if for everything else.
JulianMorrison 5y ago
They're happy enough to put all their eggs in the even more untried SLS basket. I've read that the fundamental problem for NASA is that they are a political football. They have at most 8 years of one administration before the next comes in, and Congress can change hands several times even in that span. As such, the only way to create a program that won't be announced to great fanfare one year and cancelled the next, is to make it out of solid, Congressional grade pork. Which would be SLS. Since nobody benefits by cancelling it, it won't be cancelled. Even if it becomes an obsolete and ridiculous white elephant.
- panick21_ 5y ago
  > to make it out of solid, Congressional grade pork. Which would be SLS. Since nobody benefits by cancelling it, There are always other people who think 'maybe those Alabama $ could go to Texas instead'.
  - bryanlarsen 5y ago
    SLS pork is spread to all 50 states. Texas gets a good chunk of it. A small fraction of $2B is more than all of $10M.
    - JulianMorrison 5y ago
      The waste is not even a downside.
    - panick21_ 5y ago
      NASA budget will not change that much so the money will still be spent. You can compare launch cost like that. And while it might use all 50 states, in reality the waste majority of money is spend in a very few locations as paying labor is huge part of the cost.
Yizahi 5y ago
Latest post is more of a continuation of this one: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/03/04/sls-what-now/ https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/03/04/sls-what-now/ I'm going to presume what author thought and quote him: ------ What does NASA do with teams that cost a few billion dollars a year to feed and whose main expertise is building rockets and space probes whose entire architectural philosophy is threatened by current launch costs, let alone the order of magnitude improvement that’s in the pipeline? The Perseverance Mars rover cost $2.4 billion, which works out to a few thousand salaries for just under a decade. Thousands of people are needed to build this rover because landing stuff on Mars is so hard that subsystem masses must be tracked to a tenth of a gram, on a system that weighs a tonne. The whole thing is meticulously handcrafted from custom silicon, PCBs, titanium tubes, motors, cameras, and other awe-inspiring instruments. Starship will be able to land 100 of them per flight. Now what? How can NASA feed a team that makes one feather light rover per decade for a billion dollars if the demand just jumped by a factor of a thousand and the unit cost fell by the same amount? Set up a production line? Work out how to make them with a team of ten? Build one every two weeks? In short, in a world where SLS’s ongoing failure is justified and/or ignored while Starship races towards transformational capabilities, NASA needs to think very deeply about its place in a human spaceflight program that appears poised to proceed without NASA at its center. ----- So the point is it seems to be a question - what is NASA planning to do AT ALL in the world where Starship is flying?
- kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
  Probably make more custom satellites for scientific projects. There’s an infinite amount of such work to be done.
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  "Starship will be able to land 100 of them per flight. Now what?" Starship cannot deliver 100 tonnes to mars, only to LEO. The rover was not just a ton, it came with a heatshield and other machinery. Nasa has plenty of other projects, like the SAFE nuclear reactor, and I am sure these teams will be delighted to do something other than track every milligram
  - 5y ago
natch 5y ago
I would buy your argument if they weren’t assuming the benefits of SLS before it’s proven. Why give SLS, but not Starship, the benefit of the doubt?
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  Because Nasa is calling the shots on SLS, but Elon could cancell starship with a tweet, or OD on crack and kick the bucket, or go bancrupt, or end up in jail for calling someone a pedo. There is a real non-zero risk of something bad gappebing to him and then future of SpaceX is in question, its not a robust institution like NASA
  - panick21_ 5y ago
    Elon going to prison would not stop Starship. Neither would it stop if he died. And in some absurd crazy scenario NASA could basically 'take' it because its relevant for future mission. NASA has done so before if a company they needed went bankrupt. SLS depends on a incredibly long list of suppliers. Far longer then Starship.
- ncallaway 5y ago
  I don't think NASA really wants to give the benefit of the doubt to SLS. It's a congressionally mandated program, that NASA regularly proposes reducing the budget and responsibility for (e.g. https://spacenews.com/nasa-budget-proposal-targets-sls/ https://spacenews.com/nasa-budget-proposal-targets-sls/), and Congress regularly rebuffs them and demands SLS. If Congress passes a budget with $7B in funding specifically for SLS, you can't really blame NASA for spending that money on SLS.
soperj 5y ago
>I think once Starship has proven itself capable of deliver on its promises, you’ll see NASA changing its approach radically in the manner the author describes. Like how SLS has proven itself?
bvogelzang 5y ago
I have to agree with you here. Given NASA's position it has to wait and see how successful Starship will be. NASA cannot afford to lose ground financially, politically, or publicly if they bet on Starship only for there to be issues with it down the line. They're not the owners of this tech which gives them time and flexibility to wait for the right moment to capitalize on it. I can only assume they are internally very excited at the prospect of what Starship can be to them in the future but that can't be fully expressed if something out of their control has not been fully proven. They will jump on this as soon as the risk is outweighed by the benefit which, as the author argues, is in the process of happening.
dr_orpheus 5y ago
I think part of the point that the author misses is that while designing a spacecraft for a Starship launch does remove a lot of the constraints there is not the infrastructure to take advantage of that (yet). There have been some preliminary studies on spacecraft that could take advantage of a Starship launch capability, but we currently can't transport a spacecraft that large over the road. It would most likely have to be transported by ship from the manufacturing facility to the launch site. Additionally, new test facilities like thermal vacuum chambers, acoustic cells and anechoic chambers would likely have to be created to handle the large spacecraft that a Starship could enable. And NASA is not going to make that investment until there is a higher probability of the Starship succeeding. Those in the industry are pretty cautious about Elon's promises. Back in 2011, SpaceX advertised that the first Falcon heavy flight was going to be in 2013 [0], but the demo flight didn't occur until 2018, with the first launch of an actual payload in 2019. [0] https://www.reuters.com/article/space-business-rocket-idUSN0513302920110405 https://www.reuters.com/article/space-business-rocket-idUSN0...
- bryanlarsen 5y ago
  When your primary customer says that they will never man-rate your rocket, as NASA's administrator Bolden did, it's more surprising that they actually went on to finish Falcon Heavy than that it was late.
  - dr_orpheus 5y ago
    Yeah, that's fair. But the original first operational launch of the Falcon Heavy (USAF STP-2) was to help certify it for the National Security Space Launch. So one of their main targets was to get classified business that was going to the Delta Heavy rockets. So I don't know how much/little NASAs planned use of the Falcon Heavy affected their decision.
- panick21_ 5y ago
  > Those in the industry are pretty cautious about Elon's promises. Back in 2011, SpaceX advertised that the first Falcon heavy flight was going to be in 2013 [0], but the demo flight didn't occur until 2018, with the first launch of an actual payload in 2019. This is misleading. SpaceX pushed Falcon 9 so much that it actually reached the targeted Falcon Heavy payload years before that. Many early Falcon Heavy costumers launched on Falcon 9. There was very little market for Falcon Heavy and the main costumer was DoD and their launch was scheduled for pretty late. The simply didn't work on Falcon Heavy until Falcon 9 was at the end of its evolution and they had figured out re-usability. However the end result was more then double as powerful then the version announced in 2013.
shalmanese 5y ago
In the days of steam powered factories, a central power plant was used to drive belts that would power various machines. More power intensive machines were sited near the central power plant to maximize efficiency and parts were moved to where the machines were. Electrification allowed the replacement of belts with motors but machines were expensive so they were upgraded in place and electricity was thought of as just steam, but less messy and cheaper. It took several decades into electrification before people fully wrapped their heads around: a) many small motors didn't cost more than one big motor and you should redesign your machines so that the motors were where they made sense and b) now that machines could be placed anywhere, you should design your factories so that the machines were in the path of the parts. Sometimes, quantitative changes become qualitative changes and you need to start from a clean sheet because all of the existing received wisdom stemmed from obsolete assumptions. It takes a while for this process to happen because we don't fully know how all of our assumptions stack on top of each other and we resist the change because our power/identities rest on elements of the status quo. Disruption theory is premised on upstarts recognizing opportunities that incumbents are structurally unable to exploit because they derive too much benefit from the old status quo.
- ncallaway 5y ago
  I agree with all of this. I think Starship, if it pans out, will be exactly as disruptive as the author of the post thinks it will be. I'm very very much hoping that is the case. And if it delivers on its promises, it will be a revolutionary change in how we think about space exploration, space tourism, space manufacturing, and other things. But, I strongly suspect that many very smart people at NASA also understand this. And that the reason NASA isn't retooling everything that they do around Starship has more to do with the risk of that future not panning out, and less to do with the people at NASA not understanding that there's a massive economic change at hand if Starship delivers. > Disruption theory is premised on upstarts recognizing opportunities that incumbents are structurally unable to exploit because they derive too much benefit from the old status quo. Yes! Exactly! The old space industries (and NASA) derive significant benefit from the status quo, and fully transitioning to the new system risks many those current benefits in the event that the new system fails to materialize. For someone like NASA, they have many resources, so betting everything on a 95% chance of success may be a bad bet. While a start-up that has very little status quo resources, it's a really really really good bet. However, I have a problem in characterizing that as "not understanding" the opportunity. NASA, and plenty of old space companies can recognize and understand the opportunity, while it's still a bad bet for them to make at the current development point we're at. It's more a matter of strategic risk, and current positionining. An organization like NASA isn't in a good position to bet the farm on Starship yet, even if they fully understand the benefits of the bet if they knew the bet would pay off.
itsoktocry 5y ago
>I think the risk to NASA of assuming the benefits of Starship before it’s proven are just too high. This seems to be a theme of many of Elon Musk's ideas: assume they will work and talk about what a difference it will make. Just look at the media coverage surrounding the Tesla Robot. So, this stuff is cool and I'm glad it's happening, but there's a ton of capability to prove before any sort of external organizational budget should be allocated to the Starship project. It's still a rough prototype.
- jonathankoren 5y ago
  I think Shotwell keeps Elon away from SpaceX, and that's secret to SpaceX's success compared to Elon's other ventures.
  - dane-pgp 5y ago
    Or maybe SpaceX is more successful because improvements in that industry are easier to achieve and the technology of the competition is relatively primitive. I mean, it's not exactly brain surgery.
    - jonathankoren 5y ago
      > I mean, it’s not exactly brain surgery. No. It’s rocket science. :)
giantrobot 5y ago
The author trots out the "$10,000 a pound" launch cost which is really indicative of the overall quality of the article. For non-Space Wonks, the "$10,000/lb" to orbit number was the rough cost of launching some payload on the Space Shuttle to orbit. Costs for the Space Shuttle were basically NASA's entire manned spaceflight budget divided by the number of Shuttle launches performed in a year. It's not just a naive number it's wholly misleading. No/few commercial space launch approach $10k/lb. It's a meaningless number for any discussion of launch costs since the Space Shuttle is retired and was not a commercial launch vehicle anyways. Even the most expensive ULA rockets aren't even close to that price. If you're going to talk about space launch capabilities and bring up stupid numbers it impacts your credibility.
- elurg 5y ago
  The author mentions $10000/kg, not per pound. This number is reasonably accurate for recent launch within one order of magnitude. Starlink launches were claimed to cost $35 million for 16 tons, this means SpaceX is still around $2000/kg even internally. This is the lowest cost of "real" missions with payload adapters and deployment mechanisms. Atlas 551 is ~150M for max 18.8tons to orbit so best theoretical price is > $8000/kg. Dividing the space shuttle program cost of $196B by 133 successful launches and a max payload of 23tons you get around $64000/kg.

fasteddie31003 5y ago

I'm not sure that NASA designs much. JPL designs and builds most of the probes launched by NASA. JPL is an anomaly in the Federal Government where it gets good results. It would be interesting to look into how JPL does so well relative to other agencies and contractors such as Boeing (which is a national embarrassment).

Loic 5y ago
People with passion. JPL people were/are (and I hope will continue to be) believer in the purpose of what they are doing.
- aero-glide2 5y ago
  Interestingly, the author himself works for JPL.
basementcat 5y ago
JPL is the only NASA center that is staffed by non civil servants and managed (under contract) by a private organization (Caltech). By law this gives them certain flexibility that other NASA centers aren’t afforded (e.g. Caltech has lobbyists in Washington DC). It may make more sense to categorize JPL with other Federally Funded Research and Development Centers such as Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.
jacobr1 5y ago
JPL employees are actually private employees of CalTech not federal employees.

gameswithgo 5y ago

Yeah if starship gets to orbit and lands both stages, NASA will start talking about it more. At the moment brief static fire tests still knock off multiple heat tiles. Still a long way from knowing it will be viable for humans to fly on.

soco 5y ago

In other words, NASA doesn't want to move fast and break things.

thereisnospork 5y ago
Considering the history of rocket development can be pretty fairly summarized as '[intelligently] breaking things' that seems a counter-productive design philosophy.

bryanlarsen 5y ago

NASA just announced that they want to spend $1B per launch for SLS once a year until 2050. For a capability less than what SpaceX might provide for $10M. That's not sensible risk management, that's head in the sand denialism. https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/10/nasa-wants-to-buy-sls-rockets-at-half-price-fly-them-into-the-2050s/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/10/nasa-wants-to-buy-sl...

api 5y ago
It's a jobs program for Alabama.
- handrous 5y ago
  The space museum (also home of the famous Space Camp) in Huntsville, AL sure is pimping it, still. That's the one and only future rocket for USA space flight, one might think if one's only knowledge came from a visit to that museum, rather than a sad zombie project that everyone knows will be badly obsolete by the time it flies. Plus a huge amount of square footage dedicated to advertising for various MIC contractors for stuff that has little or nothing to do with space, and a lot to do with killing people. Super lame. Half of the museum feels like a government contractor trade show, not a museum, which makes sense given where it's located, but doesn't explain why it seems to have a good reputation, as far as space & rocketry museums go.
panick21_ 5y ago
This is beyond insane and wont happen. Once Starhip flies even the last politicans can be cornered to admit to kill this ridiculous rocket.
- yokem55 5y ago
  No, there will be one excuse after another. Starship isn't human rated and only Orion is rated for human deep space flight. So something else will still be needed to launch Orion to that lunar trajectory. That something else is SLS. Now the obvious solution is to rate Dragon for deep space and launch humans in that on a falcon and have it meet up with a starship in LEO. But getting that will probably take more years and billions paid to to the Orion and SLS POR before it will actually come to pass. Never underestimate the power of a self-licking ice cream cone.

panick21_ 5y ago

> I think the risk to NASA of assuming the benefits of Starship before it’s proven are just too high. I think the risk of not doing so is to high. And NASA is already relaying on it. They have had all the data and they selected it for Human Landing System. They knew what it required and they were comfortable with it. > If NASA (or other industry players), assume Starship will deliver the benefits it promises It doesn't have to deliver on everything to be worth designing for it. > But that leaves them with no backup plan Going back what they always did before is the backup plan. How come wasting 20 billion on SLS is totally reasonable, but risking a few billion on starting with designing for a rocket that doesn't exist isn't. > I think once Starship has proven itself capable of deliver on its promises, you’ll see NASA changing its approach radically in the manner the author describes. But that will leave a years to decade long gap of actually profiting from it. > but a different calibration of “risk” Yes an incredibly conservative one that would have meant the US could never go to the moon.

sailingparrot 5y ago

I think the author is arguing for NASA to take a cautiously optimist stance on Starship, instead of assuming it won't work at all until it does. For example, NASA could start allocating a small-ish budget (e.g. 50M$) to design a parallel mission to their Artemis-IV mission that is currently scheduled for 2026 (but will slip) and that should deliver the Gateway i-HAB module to Moon's orbit. While 50M$ (excluding launch costs) for a mission like this would be lunacy today given the constraints on weight imposed by current rockets, with Starship that would be a sizeable budget to design a much bigger and more useful module. If by some cut-off date (say 2024) Starship still hasn't proven itself, then scrap that mission, proceed with the original one and the wasted 50M$ will be a rounding error in Artemis-IV budget. If Starship proves itself before then, scrap the original mission and go with the redesigned Artemis-IV based on Starship. Billions of dollars will be saved (SLS launch cost + at least 2 years worth of development), and we will have a Lunar Gateway 10 years ahead of what we would have had otherwise in terms of capabilities.

pintxo 5y ago
Isn't the point of most/all big NASA projects to distribute as much money as possible into a specified number of states? Kind a hard then to get political backing to move to a quicker + cheaper project.
- rbanffy 5y ago
  A less cynical person would say that NASA’s role is to employ as many highly qualified aerospace workers as feasible to both keep the workforce updated and advancing space applications and to do the things private companies don’t want to. Now that it seems SpaceX is willing and able to fulfil part of NASA’s mission, maybe it should refocus a bit.
ncallaway 5y ago
> I think the author is arguing for NASA to take a cautiously optimist stance on Starship, instead of assuming it won't work at all until it does. NASA has taken a cautiously optimistic stance on Starship. The assignment of the HLS to Starship and no other provider was an aggressively optimistic stance from NASA that surprised many of the space industry observers at the time of its announcement. The expectation (and normal NASA behavior) would've been two assign the HLS to multiple vendors, at a reduced funding level and stretch the timelines out. So, I'd argue that NASA is already being quite bullish on Starship given the projects and funding that they have available.

spacemark 5y ago

As someone who has worked on NASA contracts pretty much my whole career, you're quite right. Starship is still extremely unproven. If you look at the history of rockets, mayyyybe 1 in 5 that make it to an orbital launch debut (which is like 1 in 50 paper rockets) in turn make it to commercial rollout. The author's claim that the potential benefits of Starship are not understood by NASA is cringeworthy naive. Everyone at NASA is rooting for SpaceX but they have been burned many times by the promises of the next shiny rocket: DC-X, VentureStar, NASP, Ares, SLS, hell even the shuttle despite its "success" only fulfilled a small fraction of the desired results. Makes me wonder how old the author is.

JulianMorrison 5y ago
It seems a little unfair to compare a program with flying test vehicles and production already in progress, with flying Powerpoints that got cancelled because you can't make a cryogenic hydrogen tank out of scrith.
prox 5y ago
This would be true perhaps if this wasn’t SpaceX. They already moved the goalpost with Falcon And I don’t think the author wrote what you said. His main point was that not one of NASA’s powerpoints even as much acknowledges that something like Starship might come round. The new constraints by Starship are a game changer.
- ARandumGuy 5y ago
  Past success does not guarantee future success. And when you're dealing with space travel, which is inherently expensive and extremely dangerous, then you can't afford to buy into any hype.
  - panick21_ 5y ago
    If it was just 'hype' why did NASA select them for HLS? They had all the data and they officially declared it was very doable and that SpaceX had a path to get there. So its ok to plan for it but pretend it only exists for that one thing they contracted if for, and ignore if for everything else.

JulianMorrison 5y ago

They're happy enough to put all their eggs in the even more untried SLS basket. I've read that the fundamental problem for NASA is that they are a political football. They have at most 8 years of one administration before the next comes in, and Congress can change hands several times even in that span. As such, the only way to create a program that won't be announced to great fanfare one year and cancelled the next, is to make it out of solid, Congressional grade pork. Which would be SLS. Since nobody benefits by cancelling it, it won't be cancelled. Even if it becomes an obsolete and ridiculous white elephant.

panick21_ 5y ago
> to make it out of solid, Congressional grade pork. Which would be SLS. Since nobody benefits by cancelling it, There are always other people who think 'maybe those Alabama $ could go to Texas instead'.
- bryanlarsen 5y ago
  SLS pork is spread to all 50 states. Texas gets a good chunk of it. A small fraction of $2B is more than all of $10M.
  - JulianMorrison 5y ago
    The waste is not even a downside.
  - panick21_ 5y ago
    NASA budget will not change that much so the money will still be spent. You can compare launch cost like that. And while it might use all 50 states, in reality the waste majority of money is spend in a very few locations as paying labor is huge part of the cost.

Yizahi 5y ago

Latest post is more of a continuation of this one: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/03/04/sls-what-now/ https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/03/04/sls-what-now/ I'm going to presume what author thought and quote him: ------ What does NASA do with teams that cost a few billion dollars a year to feed and whose main expertise is building rockets and space probes whose entire architectural philosophy is threatened by current launch costs, let alone the order of magnitude improvement that’s in the pipeline? The Perseverance Mars rover cost $2.4 billion, which works out to a few thousand salaries for just under a decade. Thousands of people are needed to build this rover because landing stuff on Mars is so hard that subsystem masses must be tracked to a tenth of a gram, on a system that weighs a tonne. The whole thing is meticulously handcrafted from custom silicon, PCBs, titanium tubes, motors, cameras, and other awe-inspiring instruments. Starship will be able to land 100 of them per flight. Now what? How can NASA feed a team that makes one feather light rover per decade for a billion dollars if the demand just jumped by a factor of a thousand and the unit cost fell by the same amount? Set up a production line? Work out how to make them with a team of ten? Build one every two weeks? In short, in a world where SLS’s ongoing failure is justified and/or ignored while Starship races towards transformational capabilities, NASA needs to think very deeply about its place in a human spaceflight program that appears poised to proceed without NASA at its center. ----- So the point is it seems to be a question - what is NASA planning to do AT ALL in the world where Starship is flying?

kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
Probably make more custom satellites for scientific projects. There’s an infinite amount of such work to be done.
ClumsyPilot 5y ago
"Starship will be able to land 100 of them per flight. Now what?" Starship cannot deliver 100 tonnes to mars, only to LEO. The rover was not just a ton, it came with a heatshield and other machinery. Nasa has plenty of other projects, like the SAFE nuclear reactor, and I am sure these teams will be delighted to do something other than track every milligram
- 5y ago

natch 5y ago

I would buy your argument if they weren’t assuming the benefits of SLS before it’s proven. Why give SLS, but not Starship, the benefit of the doubt?

ClumsyPilot 5y ago
Because Nasa is calling the shots on SLS, but Elon could cancell starship with a tweet, or OD on crack and kick the bucket, or go bancrupt, or end up in jail for calling someone a pedo. There is a real non-zero risk of something bad gappebing to him and then future of SpaceX is in question, its not a robust institution like NASA
- panick21_ 5y ago
  Elon going to prison would not stop Starship. Neither would it stop if he died. And in some absurd crazy scenario NASA could basically 'take' it because its relevant for future mission. NASA has done so before if a company they needed went bankrupt. SLS depends on a incredibly long list of suppliers. Far longer then Starship.
ncallaway 5y ago
I don't think NASA really wants to give the benefit of the doubt to SLS. It's a congressionally mandated program, that NASA regularly proposes reducing the budget and responsibility for (e.g. https://spacenews.com/nasa-budget-proposal-targets-sls/ https://spacenews.com/nasa-budget-proposal-targets-sls/), and Congress regularly rebuffs them and demands SLS. If Congress passes a budget with $7B in funding specifically for SLS, you can't really blame NASA for spending that money on SLS.

soperj 5y ago

>I think once Starship has proven itself capable of deliver on its promises, you’ll see NASA changing its approach radically in the manner the author describes. Like how SLS has proven itself?

bvogelzang 5y ago

I have to agree with you here. Given NASA's position it has to wait and see how successful Starship will be. NASA cannot afford to lose ground financially, politically, or publicly if they bet on Starship only for there to be issues with it down the line. They're not the owners of this tech which gives them time and flexibility to wait for the right moment to capitalize on it. I can only assume they are internally very excited at the prospect of what Starship can be to them in the future but that can't be fully expressed if something out of their control has not been fully proven. They will jump on this as soon as the risk is outweighed by the benefit which, as the author argues, is in the process of happening.

dr_orpheus 5y ago

I think part of the point that the author misses is that while designing a spacecraft for a Starship launch does remove a lot of the constraints there is not the infrastructure to take advantage of that (yet). There have been some preliminary studies on spacecraft that could take advantage of a Starship launch capability, but we currently can't transport a spacecraft that large over the road. It would most likely have to be transported by ship from the manufacturing facility to the launch site. Additionally, new test facilities like thermal vacuum chambers, acoustic cells and anechoic chambers would likely have to be created to handle the large spacecraft that a Starship could enable. And NASA is not going to make that investment until there is a higher probability of the Starship succeeding. Those in the industry are pretty cautious about Elon's promises. Back in 2011, SpaceX advertised that the first Falcon heavy flight was going to be in 2013 [0], but the demo flight didn't occur until 2018, with the first launch of an actual payload in 2019. [0] https://www.reuters.com/article/space-business-rocket-idUSN0513302920110405 https://www.reuters.com/article/space-business-rocket-idUSN0...

bryanlarsen 5y ago
When your primary customer says that they will never man-rate your rocket, as NASA's administrator Bolden did, it's more surprising that they actually went on to finish Falcon Heavy than that it was late.
- dr_orpheus 5y ago
  Yeah, that's fair. But the original first operational launch of the Falcon Heavy (USAF STP-2) was to help certify it for the National Security Space Launch. So one of their main targets was to get classified business that was going to the Delta Heavy rockets. So I don't know how much/little NASAs planned use of the Falcon Heavy affected their decision.
panick21_ 5y ago
> Those in the industry are pretty cautious about Elon's promises. Back in 2011, SpaceX advertised that the first Falcon heavy flight was going to be in 2013 [0], but the demo flight didn't occur until 2018, with the first launch of an actual payload in 2019. This is misleading. SpaceX pushed Falcon 9 so much that it actually reached the targeted Falcon Heavy payload years before that. Many early Falcon Heavy costumers launched on Falcon 9. There was very little market for Falcon Heavy and the main costumer was DoD and their launch was scheduled for pretty late. The simply didn't work on Falcon Heavy until Falcon 9 was at the end of its evolution and they had figured out re-usability. However the end result was more then double as powerful then the version announced in 2013.

shalmanese 5y ago

In the days of steam powered factories, a central power plant was used to drive belts that would power various machines. More power intensive machines were sited near the central power plant to maximize efficiency and parts were moved to where the machines were. Electrification allowed the replacement of belts with motors but machines were expensive so they were upgraded in place and electricity was thought of as just steam, but less messy and cheaper. It took several decades into electrification before people fully wrapped their heads around: a) many small motors didn't cost more than one big motor and you should redesign your machines so that the motors were where they made sense and b) now that machines could be placed anywhere, you should design your factories so that the machines were in the path of the parts. Sometimes, quantitative changes become qualitative changes and you need to start from a clean sheet because all of the existing received wisdom stemmed from obsolete assumptions. It takes a while for this process to happen because we don't fully know how all of our assumptions stack on top of each other and we resist the change because our power/identities rest on elements of the status quo. Disruption theory is premised on upstarts recognizing opportunities that incumbents are structurally unable to exploit because they derive too much benefit from the old status quo.

ncallaway 5y ago
I agree with all of this. I think Starship, if it pans out, will be exactly as disruptive as the author of the post thinks it will be. I'm very very much hoping that is the case. And if it delivers on its promises, it will be a revolutionary change in how we think about space exploration, space tourism, space manufacturing, and other things. But, I strongly suspect that many very smart people at NASA also understand this. And that the reason NASA isn't retooling everything that they do around Starship has more to do with the risk of that future not panning out, and less to do with the people at NASA not understanding that there's a massive economic change at hand if Starship delivers. > Disruption theory is premised on upstarts recognizing opportunities that incumbents are structurally unable to exploit because they derive too much benefit from the old status quo. Yes! Exactly! The old space industries (and NASA) derive significant benefit from the status quo, and fully transitioning to the new system risks many those current benefits in the event that the new system fails to materialize. For someone like NASA, they have many resources, so betting everything on a 95% chance of success may be a bad bet. While a start-up that has very little status quo resources, it's a really really really good bet. However, I have a problem in characterizing that as "not understanding" the opportunity. NASA, and plenty of old space companies can recognize and understand the opportunity, while it's still a bad bet for them to make at the current development point we're at. It's more a matter of strategic risk, and current positionining. An organization like NASA isn't in a good position to bet the farm on Starship yet, even if they fully understand the benefits of the bet if they knew the bet would pay off.

itsoktocry 5y ago

>I think the risk to NASA of assuming the benefits of Starship before it’s proven are just too high. This seems to be a theme of many of Elon Musk's ideas: assume they will work and talk about what a difference it will make. Just look at the media coverage surrounding the Tesla Robot. So, this stuff is cool and I'm glad it's happening, but there's a ton of capability to prove before any sort of external organizational budget should be allocated to the Starship project. It's still a rough prototype.

jonathankoren 5y ago
I think Shotwell keeps Elon away from SpaceX, and that's secret to SpaceX's success compared to Elon's other ventures.
- dane-pgp 5y ago
  Or maybe SpaceX is more successful because improvements in that industry are easier to achieve and the technology of the competition is relatively primitive. I mean, it's not exactly brain surgery.
  - jonathankoren 5y ago
    > I mean, it’s not exactly brain surgery. No. It’s rocket science. :)

giantrobot 5y ago

The author trots out the "$10,000 a pound" launch cost which is really indicative of the overall quality of the article. For non-Space Wonks, the "$10,000/lb" to orbit number was the rough cost of launching some payload on the Space Shuttle to orbit. Costs for the Space Shuttle were basically NASA's entire manned spaceflight budget divided by the number of Shuttle launches performed in a year. It's not just a naive number it's wholly misleading. No/few commercial space launch approach $10k/lb. It's a meaningless number for any discussion of launch costs since the Space Shuttle is retired and was not a commercial launch vehicle anyways. Even the most expensive ULA rockets aren't even close to that price. If you're going to talk about space launch capabilities and bring up stupid numbers it impacts your credibility.

elurg 5y ago
The author mentions $10000/kg, not per pound. This number is reasonably accurate for recent launch within one order of magnitude. Starlink launches were claimed to cost $35 million for 16 tons, this means SpaceX is still around $2000/kg even internally. This is the lowest cost of "real" missions with payload adapters and deployment mechanisms. Atlas 551 is ~150M for max 18.8tons to orbit so best theoretical price is > $8000/kg. Dividing the space shuttle program cost of $196B by 133 successful launches and a max payload of 23tons you get around $64000/kg.