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You can work harder or smarter. I’m not convinced that all the quality control isn’t harder instead of smarter. The proof point is how spacex managed to drastic

You can work harder or smarter. I’m not convinced that all the quality control isn’t harder instead of smarter. The proof point is how spacex managed to drastically reduce the cost of a space shuttle launch vs what NASA was able to do. NASA does good work and what they accomplish in their environment is impressive but culturally they seem to have stagnated a bit - not entirely their fault and having a mercurial political situation adds to the distinction but it does indicate that the costs that NASA projects take may be unnecessarily expensive and there may be cheaper ways of accomplishing this stuff. Repeatability in particular is huge in driving down costs and it’s why spacex costs are so low. Unfortunately there’s no money to be made from scientific telescopes and even national security decisions are driven by the US government which often makes incorrect cost/benefit decisions because of politics. I’m really happy to see them exploring things like the Mars copter to do a super cheap “unreliable” robot that turns out to actually work reliably. I think people seriously overestimate how much has to “go right” to get amazing results and decoupling things from the “must succeed” parts of the mission are ways to bring down that cost by having more non-critical pieces of the project (in addition to reuse). It’s easy to point tot reuse failures one offs but the data is irrefutable that repetition drives down cost and improves reliability. So we should simply learn from the repetition failures and just keep repeating anyway.

bumby 2y ago
>The proof point is how spacex I think this ignores some of history. The most glaring example is the strut failure that lost a launch. It is common practice in aerospace to test material coupons for structural specs for critical parts. SpaceX didn't and it cost them a rocket. Luckily it was uncrewed, but it forced them to layer on those quality requirements afterwards. They had to re-learn what much of industry was already doing but I bet if you asked them beforehand, they'd claim those weren't value-added requirements. With low probability events, it can be easy to conflate being lucky with being good. I will say I think NASA is probably too risk adverse. This gets more into a philosophical debate, but I think that stems more from NASA being as much about national prestige as science. There are many people at NASA who think the engineerinng and quality requirements are too much, but very few people want to stick their neck out and waive them. Maybe a hot take, but I think that's a big part of CCP: it allows private companies to skirt many of those requirements so civil servants don't have to make those decisions. When civil servants have raised the flag on some CCP issues, they've been told it's not their place because NASA is just buying a ride and it's up to the contractor to drive the design. It essentially allows them to get rid of those requirements and outsource responsibility for the increased risk. (This is also a somewhat similar dynamic with JPL that made the Ingenuity copter, although it tends to be less pronouced. JPL is quasi-NASA because it's mainly managed via CalTech)
yencabulator 2y ago
> The proof point is how spacex managed to drastically reduce the cost of a space shuttle launch vs what NASA was able to do. NASA developed the tech with human cargo, the acceptable risks there are very different than losing 20 satellites from a 6,000 unit constellation.

bumby 2y ago

>The proof point is how spacex I think this ignores some of history. The most glaring example is the strut failure that lost a launch. It is common practice in aerospace to test material coupons for structural specs for critical parts. SpaceX didn't and it cost them a rocket. Luckily it was uncrewed, but it forced them to layer on those quality requirements afterwards. They had to re-learn what much of industry was already doing but I bet if you asked them beforehand, they'd claim those weren't value-added requirements. With low probability events, it can be easy to conflate being lucky with being good. I will say I think NASA is probably too risk adverse. This gets more into a philosophical debate, but I think that stems more from NASA being as much about national prestige as science. There are many people at NASA who think the engineerinng and quality requirements are too much, but very few people want to stick their neck out and waive them. Maybe a hot take, but I think that's a big part of CCP: it allows private companies to skirt many of those requirements so civil servants don't have to make those decisions. When civil servants have raised the flag on some CCP issues, they've been told it's not their place because NASA is just buying a ride and it's up to the contractor to drive the design. It essentially allows them to get rid of those requirements and outsource responsibility for the increased risk. (This is also a somewhat similar dynamic with JPL that made the Ingenuity copter, although it tends to be less pronouced. JPL is quasi-NASA because it's mainly managed via CalTech)

yencabulator 2y ago

> The proof point is how spacex managed to drastically reduce the cost of a space shuttle launch vs what NASA was able to do. NASA developed the tech with human cargo, the acceptable risks there are very different than losing 20 satellites from a 6,000 unit constellation.