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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 site

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.
- shalmanese 5y ago
  GP isn't advocating that NASA throw away everything and bet the farm on Starship. They're saying that there needs to institutional acknowledgement that what's possibly coming is a qualitative, not quantitative shift and open up the intellectual space to explore what that means. What happens when launch costs are $10,000/kg, $1000/kg, $100/kg? What things that we're doing still make sense, what doesn't? Who could be a player that isn't a player now. It's going to happen some day, even if it doesn't happen tomorrow, but it's looking like it's increasingly about to happen tomorrow from a NASA timeline perspective. NASA is in the business of futuristic speculation, they develop plans for hypothetical future propulsion systems or life support systems or missions and draw out the vision for the future. But like any organization, making plans for what's politically palatable is always easier than politically unpalatable and Casey is merely pointing out that lower launch costs appear based on public actions to be very politically unpalatable and thus, an institutional blind spot.
  - giantrobot 5y ago
    Launch costs are not the end-all be-all of space exploration/exploitation. There are a large number of extremely difficult problems to solve beyond just throwing shit into space. 1. None of the current public Starship designs include payload doors. So none of these are in any way useful as launch vehicles for orbital payloads. Payload doors a huge structural weakness and requires a lot of engineering effort. None of the current public Starship designs have an obvious "payload doors go here". A Starship-based delivery vehicle will likely be a separate design from the manned vehicle. 2. In-orbit refueling is not just an unsolved problem it's a largely unexplored problem. Moving fuel between two vehicles in free-fall is going to be a monumental challenge. You'll basically be running the same pump mechanisms you'd use for the rocket motors but feeding into a flexible umbilical between vehicles. Starships are huge so you're talking about docking two huge vehicles (one of which is nearly empty of fuel for maneuvers), connecting an umbilical between them, pumping fuel through the umbilical (in free-fall), then undocking and the two go their merry ways. None of that has been done and involves hundreds of individual challenges. 3. Musk (not necessarily SpaceX engineers) is making grand promises about the turn around time for Starships. I think they're wildly unrealistic. A large vehicle undergoing a lot of extreme dynamic forces in a flight is going to need a lot of examination before it can be safely relaunched. SpaceX is likely going to need to construct hundreds of Starships to maintain anywhere close to the promised cadence of launches. The manpower to refit vehicles is going to be expensive. There's a big difference between reusing a booster core and a vehicle that had to survive orbital reentry. 4. Even if launch costs were hundreds of dollars per kilogram it doesn't make any other aspects of spaceflight less challenging. If you send people somewhere they need their vehicle and life support launched with them. A broken toilet can still kill the crew. Just because it was cheaper to launch doesn't mean you get to scrimp on other expenses. The Space Shuttle was expensive not because of the marginal cost of the launch itself but the operations/personnel costs of the Shuttle program.

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.

shalmanese 5y ago
GP isn't advocating that NASA throw away everything and bet the farm on Starship. They're saying that there needs to institutional acknowledgement that what's possibly coming is a qualitative, not quantitative shift and open up the intellectual space to explore what that means. What happens when launch costs are $10,000/kg, $1000/kg, $100/kg? What things that we're doing still make sense, what doesn't? Who could be a player that isn't a player now. It's going to happen some day, even if it doesn't happen tomorrow, but it's looking like it's increasingly about to happen tomorrow from a NASA timeline perspective. NASA is in the business of futuristic speculation, they develop plans for hypothetical future propulsion systems or life support systems or missions and draw out the vision for the future. But like any organization, making plans for what's politically palatable is always easier than politically unpalatable and Casey is merely pointing out that lower launch costs appear based on public actions to be very politically unpalatable and thus, an institutional blind spot.
- giantrobot 5y ago
  Launch costs are not the end-all be-all of space exploration/exploitation. There are a large number of extremely difficult problems to solve beyond just throwing shit into space. 1. None of the current public Starship designs include payload doors. So none of these are in any way useful as launch vehicles for orbital payloads. Payload doors a huge structural weakness and requires a lot of engineering effort. None of the current public Starship designs have an obvious "payload doors go here". A Starship-based delivery vehicle will likely be a separate design from the manned vehicle. 2. In-orbit refueling is not just an unsolved problem it's a largely unexplored problem. Moving fuel between two vehicles in free-fall is going to be a monumental challenge. You'll basically be running the same pump mechanisms you'd use for the rocket motors but feeding into a flexible umbilical between vehicles. Starships are huge so you're talking about docking two huge vehicles (one of which is nearly empty of fuel for maneuvers), connecting an umbilical between them, pumping fuel through the umbilical (in free-fall), then undocking and the two go their merry ways. None of that has been done and involves hundreds of individual challenges. 3. Musk (not necessarily SpaceX engineers) is making grand promises about the turn around time for Starships. I think they're wildly unrealistic. A large vehicle undergoing a lot of extreme dynamic forces in a flight is going to need a lot of examination before it can be safely relaunched. SpaceX is likely going to need to construct hundreds of Starships to maintain anywhere close to the promised cadence of launches. The manpower to refit vehicles is going to be expensive. There's a big difference between reusing a booster core and a vehicle that had to survive orbital reentry. 4. Even if launch costs were hundreds of dollars per kilogram it doesn't make any other aspects of spaceflight less challenging. If you send people somewhere they need their vehicle and life support launched with them. A broken toilet can still kill the crew. Just because it was cheaper to launch doesn't mean you get to scrimp on other expenses. The Space Shuttle was expensive not because of the marginal cost of the launch itself but the operations/personnel costs of the Shuttle program.