9 ms·

> SpaceX needs to try and turn a profit, so they have a different set of incentives to NASA. How so? Surely if NASA can do something cheaper it should have mo

• ceejayoz 4y ago
  It doesn't necessarily work like that. SLS is expensive in part because it scatters jobs around to various important Senators and Representatives' districts. It's in part a jobs program.
  • bumby 4y ago
    Jobs, I think, is part of it but not the whole story. Imagine if NASA was solely located in Alabama where von Braun set up shop. I think it would have been defunded in short order and there would be no NASA and, by extension, no SpaceX (since they are so reliant on govt contracts)
    • ceejayoz 4y ago
      That's the same story, isn't it? You'd only have two senators and a handful of reps really caring about maintaining NASA jobs. Put JPL in California, mission control in Texas, launches in Florida, and a bunch of manufacturing at Boeing and you've got a much, much wider Congressional support base. Look at https://www.nasa.gov/specials/ESDSuppliersMap/ https://www.nasa.gov/specials/ESDSuppliersMap/ - they've even managed to spread suppliers around to Alaska, Montana, and Hawaii. Every single state has at least some jobs that depend on SLS.
      • bumby 4y ago
        Yes, I just think calling it a “jobs program” misses some of the nuance. You could ostensibly have the same number of jobs but much more political risk by concentrating them in one geographic area. The political risk is the more salient point to me, and jobs is just a way to mitigate it. (You could also, for example, mitigate it with less productive means like lobbying) (Suppliers is a different story. A lot of time NASA is handcuffed by which suppliers actually want work with them. There’s a lot of hoops to jump through and many suppliers just don’t find it worth the hassle)
        • actionfromafar 4y ago
          Guess which suppliers lobby to keep those hoops.
          • bumby 4y ago
            I don't think being that cynical is warranted here. 1) The requirements aren't levied by congress. They are created by NASA civil servants who are usually the technical experts in a particular field. These aren't people who have much of any interface with lobbyists. 2) A lot of the instances where it's not worth it to suppliers isn't because they are being boxed out by some industry giant clamoring for some giant contract. It's usually closer to "it's not worth our effort to overhaul our manufacturing process to meet requirements so we can sell NASA a $70 teflon seal." The giant corps have little desire here either. But being a big manufacturer is sometimes correlated with having a more mature manufacturing process that meets specific standards.
            • panick21_ 4y ago
              When SLS was designed by congress they specifically wrote the requirements so that the Shuttle contractors would continue to receive contracts.
              • bumby 4y ago
                Those drive some of the main contractors (like Aerojet Rocketdyne) but not all those others in that protracted list. Those are selected by the supplier quality process defined by typical civil servants, not Congress.
                • panick21_ 4y ago
                  That's true but not where most money goes. And for a lot of these things there are just the same legacy contractors.
                  • 4y ago
      • Rebelgecko 4y ago
        Thanks for sharing the map, that's pretty interesting. I wonder what NASA or their contractors got from Lowe's Home Improvement? Is there any infrastructure there for the mission? My cynical side wonders if someone flew to Honolulu, went to a hardware store to pick up some JB Weld, and flew it back to Florida just so they could check off Hawaii on the list of states.
        • deleted 4y ago
          [deleted]
        • bumby 4y ago
          It’s important to note that being listed as a “supplier” doesn’t mean NASA has actually purchased anything. A lot of times, it’s preemptive as a way of ensuring all the quality checks have been put in place so an PO can just be issued when needed without the delay.* It also doesn’t mean they want spaceflight material. It can just be something needed to support the project, like shelving to hold extra parts. But if the charge code is traceable to the program, it makes the list. * this is also why SpaceX can do things cheaper. They don’t have the same quality requirements so they can streamline their processes. Sometimes that’s good, sometimes not: https://parabolicarc.com/2016/06/28/nasa-investigation-spacexs-falcon-explosion-questions-single-strut-theory/ https://parabolicarc.com/2016/06/28/nasa-investigation-space...
  • tracerbulletx 4y ago
    More importantly it's a capability program. People and organizations who can build rockets, execute space missions, and have regular work doing so is necessary if you want to maintain the institutional knowledge and manufacturing capacity to do so.
    • kube-system 4y ago
      And high-end manufacturing capability is very important to have domestically from a defense perspective. I recall some NPR story recently about war games the US runs about a hypothetical war with China -- it was said that the US loses most of the time in these simulations. Why? A lack of industrial capability.
      • robertlagrant 4y ago
        If SpaceX hadn't appeared then the ISS would be in an interesting spot still relying on Russian rockets.
    • bryanlarsen 4y ago
      That was a good argument in 2009 but it's a bad argument now. There are currently over 100 rocket companies in the US. Having those people work on dead end technologies like SLS rather than forward looking technologies like Starship or RocketLab Neutron or Relativity Terran R or Blue Origin New Glenn etc hurts rather than helps.
      • ceejayoz 4y ago
        > There are currently over 100 rocket companies in the US. Zero of which are currently capable of putting a human around the Moon.
        • dotnet00 4y ago
          SLS is incapable of doing so too.
• WalterBright 4y ago
  > How so? The profit motive is a powerful and universal incentive. People are careless when spending Other Peoples' Money.
  • bumby 4y ago
    Universal is a bit hyperbolic here. Maybe we can say maximizing utility is universal, but utility comes in a lot of forms with profit being only one of them. For example, someone doing volunteer work usually isn't trying to maximize their profit. They may be trying to maximize something else, but that fact means the profit motive isn't a universal first principle.
    • WalterBright 4y ago
      You'd have to look hard to find people who aren't motivated by money. Many charities seem to exist only to enrich the people who run them.
      • bumby 4y ago
        Motivated by money isn’t the same as only (or even primarily) motivated by money. We all intuitively recognize this. Why do people watch football or spend time with family on Sundays instead of working another job? Because they recognize there’s marginal utility and are more motivated by the increase in quality of life than the increase in money. So much so that we look at people who try to maximize profit at all costs as having sociopathy.
        • WalterBright 4y ago
          Being motivated by self-sacrifice is pretty rare, and so trying to build a system based on that simply doesn't work. On the other hand, a system built around people being selfishly motivated by money works pretty darn well.
          • bumby 4y ago
• bumby 4y ago
  NASA is not designed to do it cheaper. It is designed to reduce political risk so that programs like CCP can continue to be funded by tax dollars. Look at where the major NASA centers are compared to politically important states. That reduces political risk but also increases inefficiency. SpaceX and NASA have different, but symbiotic, goals.
• giantrobot 4y ago
  NASA is optimizing for different capabilities than SpaceX. With SpaceX's Starship every launch will require them leaving fuel for landing. Every gram of fuel you don't burn is less velocity you impart on your vehicle. To get to the Moon a Starship will require two launches. A manned vehicle and a fuel tanker. They have to dock in Earth orbit, refuel, then the manned vehicle transfers to a Lunar injection orbit. It's very likely a Starship will need a tanker waiting on the Moon to refuel a lander for the return trip and landing back on Earth. Starship hasn't even flown let alone demonstrated in-orbit refueling. SpaceX hasn't even demonstrated that in the small scale with Dragon capsules. It's a hard problem with a lot of unknowns. SLS can launch the manned element directly into a Lunar injection orbit. It doesn't require any refueling to get anywhere. It also doesn't need a fuel tank at the destination to allow a lander to return home. In order to do that the launch stages don't save any fuel for landing. It's "more expensive" to use expendable stages but all of their energy is used for their payload and none is saved for landing (and landing safety margin). Overall SLS is mass optimized rather than cost optimized. The NASA way involves a lot fewer moving parts and <unproven technology goes here>.
  • bryanlarsen 4y ago
    Starship has twice the thrust of SLS. It could do everything SLS or Saturn 5 can. It just chooses not to because it chooses to be fully reusable. If you stuck a third stage, Orion and an Apollo CM style lander on top of Starship you could do everything in a single launch Saturn 5 style. That's something SLS can't do because Orion is much heavier than Apollo was. But Starship could. It'd have to run expendable. The difference is that Starship is getting $3B from NASA vs the $40B that SLS got. NASA could get a single launch moon mission using Starship, but they'd have to pay SpaceX more than $3B to get it. > SLS can launch the manned element directly into a Lunar injection orbit. It doesn't require any refueling to get anywhere. It also doesn't need a fuel tank at the destination to allow a lander to return home. SLS doesn't carry the lander nor the fuel for the lander. So yes, it does need something else to get the lander's fuel to the destination.
• thebigman433 4y ago
  Reuse isnt always cheaper. If you arent flying a bunch of missions, it can actually be more expensive. SLS could absolutely be cheaper, but reuse isnt really part of that equation.
  • dotnet00 4y ago
    This was a frequent excuse back when SpaceX had just started landing Falcons, but both factors go hand-in-hand. If you have reuse, you can fly a bunch of missions. SLS is going to have difficulty maintaining a 1 launch per year even without payload readiness, so of course it's expensive and therefore disposable. But if they had reusability, they might have been able to fly it more often, thus helping make it cheaper on average to fly. With SLS this becomes stark in the sense that if SLS was reusable, it could fly more often and would have lower per launch costs, which would make the other lunar lander proposals more viable and would make it more realistic to fly science payloads on it. If SLS were reusable, establishing a long term lunar presence with it wouldn't be a joke that everyone pretends to take seriously because it wouldn't be a matter of choosing between sending over a crew or launching components for a base for a given year.
    • thebigman433 4y ago
      > But if they had reusability, they might have been able to fly it more often, thus helping make it cheaper on average to fly. This is true, but the issue is that there just isnt the need for it really. Very, very few missions actually require a SHLV. There just arent enough payloads atm, and that probably wouldnt change a ton even if the rocket was cheaper
      • dotnet00 4y ago
        Plenty of the things needed for establishing the sustainable long-term presence on the Moon that Artemis claims to aim for would benefit immensely from a cheaper SHLV that can fly more often. That's entirely why Starship ended up being such a valuable deal for NASA. Even the NASA OIG has been saying for a few years now that SLS with its current cost structure and flight rate is not compatible with Artemis's goal of being sustainable.
• rsj_hn 4y ago
  > How so? Surely if NASA can do something cheaper it should have more money to do other things or find it easier to get money for more things? This touches on an important question in economics. When you take your 101 class, if you pay attention, you will see that there is no role for competition at all. The whole economy could be a single firm, and all the prices and quantities would be the same, because the firm drives down economic profit to zero on the marginal good as a result of maximizing their producer surplus all by itself. This comes from optimization of convex functions - with appropriate convexity assumptions, any economic profit is money left on the table for the firm because it would just produce more and sell more units up until the last unit sold would earn zero profits. What this means is that there is usually not a difference between a planned economy managed by a social planner and a free market economy (there are some differences with more exotic models, but this isn't important here). That is the observation you are using. This led economists to investigate what the difference would be, and one group focused on non-convexities, a small group jumped into the rabbit hole of disequilibrium economics, while another group -- the Austrians -- insisted it was lack of price information that thwarted the social planner. If everything was auctioned off and every task given a budget with a maximization goal, we would discover prices but administrative processes would not discover prices. But what I believe is that many organizations are just bad actors -- they leave money on the table, both in the free market and in an administrative setting. What you need is competition to drive out bad actors. People do not act in their self-interest nearly as much as models predict -- they have to basically be forced into it with competition. The first inkling I had of this was landlords in San Francisco letting their properties rot via water damage because they couldn't be bothered to fix the windows. Why would they commit economic sabotage? Because they could afford to lose the money and still make enough to meet their needs. And for others, it was just that they were bad at their job, but rising property prices/rents meant they would not be driven out of business. This is why monopolies suck so much -- there is no mechanism to get rid of those who are bad at their job, even the job of profit maximization. So rather than viewing an organization as maximizing efficiency, maybe view it as "minimizing effort subject to avoiding bankruptcy". Once you adopt that view, you get different answers to questions such as why NASA isn't as efficient as possible (and neither is SpaceX). You are only as efficient as your competitors/shareholders force you to be.