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The interesting thing for me is how this mission underscore the difference between SpaceX and other space companies. SpaceX have become an entire commercial spa

The interesting thing for me is how this mission underscore the difference between SpaceX and other space companies. SpaceX have become an entire commercial space agency, able to supply everything from the rockets and capsules, to the ground operations and even the space suites and to do that in a complete package. If you have enough money you can ring them up and say "I want to go into space" and they can make that happen. That is a pretty big deal.

paulryanrogers 2y ago
Except for the whole launch facilities thing they lease from the government.
- jdross 2y ago
  which they have also massively refurbished and could have handled themselves if not for regulations around creating a launch site. there aren’t many technical issues to pouring concrete in a good lat-lon
  - michaelt 2y ago
    > there aren’t many technical issues to pouring concrete in a good lat-lon Other than when a powerful and explosion-prone rocket destroyed its launchpad, hurling chunks of steel-reinforced concrete thousands of feet. But it's almost 18 months since that happened.
    - taneq 2y ago
      Haha well that’s gonna happen from time to time when you try new things.
      - dmix 2y ago
        Can't be taking risks. You might actually accomplish something.
    - gertrunde 2y ago
      That incident probably underscores the parent poster's point quite effectively. That launch was on 20th April 2023, and the next prototype test launch was only 212 days later on 18th November 2023, although I think the pad redesign/rebuild/repair work was complete by the end of July 2023. So only 3-4 months to redesign/rebuild/repair the pad (although it's probably reasonable to assume some design work had already occurred).
      - jandrese 2y ago
        At the end of the day it wasn't a major problem. SpaceX tried something new, it didn't work out, so they had to fix it. Nobody was hurt. Property damage was minimal. The repair didn't take very long. All in all a good example of learning from your mistakes without spending too much time or money overthinking it.
      - michaelt 2y ago
        In civil engineering terms, if falling apart with debris thrown thousands of feet doesn't count as a "technical issue" what does? I'm no rocketry expert, but I'm old enough to remember the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster; I'm pretty sure if you've got falling chunks of steel-reinforced concrete hitting your space vehicle during launch, that's an issue.
        jjk166 2y ago
        The launch pad didn't explode, the rocket on the launch pad exploded. A fully fueled falcon 9 has about as much energy as a small nuclear bomb, it's not a technical issue if your structure is unable to survive that at point blank range.
        gertrunde 2y ago
        Oh, definitely, of course it wasn't a good or desirable outcome. But it was also a prototype being deliberately tested to destruction, so the context as compared to Columbia was quite different. (And it wasn't just the rocket itself that was a prototype, the pad and tower were at least a little as well). And this has always been SpaceX's approach, rapidly iterating their design by building, testing, destroying, rinse/repeat - so it sometimes feels a little difficult to compare to a more NASA-style design process where a (usually) small number of items are produced with a significantly lower tolerance for failure. (Edit: And how much better is it to learn these design lessons before the cargo is more fragile/delicate/squishy?)
    - iknowstuff 2y ago
      Whats your point
      - michaelt 2y ago
        That building a rocket launch pad is in fact more difficult than pouring a slab for a garage, and there some nontrivial technical issues involved. Having chunks of the launchpad go flying isn't just an inconvenience - flying debris during launch can damage critical rocket systems, as the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster demonstrated.
        wonderwonder 2y ago
        and they figured out how to prevent this happening by the next launch just a few months later. So it turned out to be fairly trivial after all. SpaceX is able to iterate in months what it takes Nasa and its contractors years to do.
      - faggotbreath 2y ago
        [dead]
- rogerrogerr 2y ago
  It’s clear they’d be fine without that; they could probably have Texas ready for manned launches fairly quick. More likely they lease launch facilities from the government to minimize regulatory interference from… the government.
- HideousKojima 2y ago
  Soon to change with Starship launching from Boca Chica. And planned to be able to launch from essentially anywhere, eventually (in Musk Time so give it a decade).
  - elif 2y ago
    I have seen no plans for a 4th launch/catch tower.. has he even hinted at more sites? Or are you referring to the historical BFR design when musk planned on landing them on the ground like falcon?
- panick21_ 2y ago
  The government took all the good land for this in the 60s. So the government mostly just has the land in the right places, that's a really important part. Building most of the ground infrastructure, is still custom to every rocket company.
- caconym_ 2y ago
  Given the incredibly hostile regulatory environment they've faced in Texas trying to operate their own private launch site, I think there are very clear benefits in using an established public facility that isn't under threat by constant attempts (often in outright bad faith) to curtail its activity or even get it shut down. It's not a question of money or capability.
  - mrguyorama 2y ago
    >private launch site But you know it ISN'T private, because every rocket ever designed will end up in public space, either literally in outer space, or dropping parts in the ocean, or a tiny tiny tiny tiny chance of exploding somewhere less convenient. This idea that you can just make your own little closed off launch pad and therefore ignore society is stupid. Some of the more onerous pushback comes from people who have been ignored before and turned out to be right. For example, when Dupont and friends first started producing PFAS, someone out there was crying foul about "hey maybe we shouldn't just dump this everywhere", and they were ignored, it was dumped everywhere, and now we get to deal with the consequences because nobody listened to those people. This has happened hundreds of times, including serious things like lead paint and leaded gasoline, which we KNEW caused direct and measurable harm to people, and yet was completely ignored. A portion of the public has obviously lost ALL trust for the private sector claiming any sort of "this couldn't possibly cause problems" and are willing and able to take action. If you are a "big" enough entity, there is no such thing as "private". Anything you do, affects a lot of people, and you should be treated that way.
    - caconym_ 2y ago
      Perhaps you can show me where you think I said SpaceX shouldn't be subject to regulatory oversight.
croes 2y ago
So space will become more expensive.
- teekert 2y ago
  Yeah, the way capitalism made goods more expensive. /s
  - rbanffy 2y ago
    The way monopolies do.
    - seneca 2y ago
      There is no monopoly bigger, or more expensive, than government, which was previously the only player in the space.
      - rbanffy 2y ago
        Funny... Government is the only monopoly you get to elect, and the only that can be undone by voting against it.
    - dialup_sounds 2y ago
      I don't think you can monopolize going up.
      - croes 2y ago
        If it costs a shitload of money you can.
  - croes 2y ago
    You mean like Insulin in the US? Or healthcare or housing or education etc.?
    - adventured 2y ago
api 2y ago
That's because SpaceX is run with the goal of building actual space transit capabilities, not milking the taxpayer and distributing pork to as many politically influential districts as possible. Until SpaceX and post-Apollo most of the space program was really a pork distribution system and a way to keep certain high-skill labor areas 'hot' in case we need them again. It wasn't a serious effort to learn about the universe or build a real presence in space. Some of that did happen but it happened almost as a side effect. Edit: Honestly I think SpaceX is just a decent aerospace company. They've appeared superhuman by contrast with companies like Boeing that have done nothing to innovate in the sector since the 1970s. When the comparison is with people completely asleep at the wheel, mere competence looks striking.
- xattt 2y ago
  I don’t see downsides of keeping skilled labour “hot”. One indirect benefit of domestic manufacturing is that it gives blue collar workers a sense of productivity and involvement in society. Idle hands are the Devil’s playthings, and a fairly compensated workforce is less likely to feel stagnant in their stage of life, and less likely to be radicalized. Edit: it seems there is a distinction between how you keep the labour hot - meaningful long-term missions; or a half-assed approach.
  - panick21_ 2y ago
    The downside to keeping skilled labour 'hot' are many. First of all, if you have skilled labor, instead of of keeping them 'hot' actually 'eat' them. Ok, the analogy breaks down. But why keep them 'hot' just have them build actually useful stuff instead. Its not like there is a lack of useful things they could be doing. And second giving people bullshit useless projects like SLS, does not actually keep them 'hot'. Its more like warmed up Pizza. The people and more importantly organization lose the actual ability to do things quickly at reasonable prices. Somehow it seems acceptable that SLS will cost more then 30 billion $ in development cost and 2-4 more billion $ per launch. Not to mention the time. Don't misunderstand political pork as actually strategic workforce development or long term government policy. That just what you personally wish it to be, not what it actually is.
andsoitis 2y ago
I think a large part of it is because of Elon Musk's obsession about controlling (if not owning) as much of stack as possible. That mentality goes into even the things you do not own, but lease. In the Isaacson biography there's a theme across his ventures, sparked by early misfortune, about being in control of things end-to-end because then you have more flexibility to optimize, make more leaps that can come from orchestrating creative adn bespoke integration options.
- HarHarVeryFunny 2y ago
  It's really because SpaceX is Musk's hobby company with the singular goal of putting a colony on Mars. The commercial launches and Starlink are just a way to leverage all the infrastructure they've had to build to make it pay for itself.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- afiodorov 2y ago
  No, in this case it is much more pragmatic. Elon has commented on this aspect himself. When he started he thought of just buying rockets and related equipment from Russia on the cheap but quickly found the exuberant prices states want to charge. He then made a first order approximation of how much it’d cost to just manufacture things he needs and it was an order of magnitude lower - thus he bit the bullet and started doing just that. Had the states let him buy things at a fair price may be the controlling of the stack would not have happened.
  - schiffern 2y ago
    Here's story as retold by (now retired) SpaceX engine chief Tom Mueller: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/is-spacex-changing-the-rocket-equation-132285884/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/is-spacex-... > Significantly, the Merlin engines—like roughly 80 percent of the components for Falcon and Dragon, including even the flight computers—are made in-house. That’s something SpaceX didn’t originally set out to do, but was driven to by suppliers’ high prices. Mueller recalls asking a vendor for an estimate on a particular engine valve. “They came back [requesting] like a year and a half in development and hundreds of thousands of dollars. Just way out of whack. And we’re like, ‘No, we need it by this summer, for much, much less money.’ They go, ‘Good luck with that,’ and kind of smirked and left.” Mueller’s people made the valve themselves, and by summer they had qualified it for use with cryogenic propellants. > “That vendor, they iced us for a couple of months,” Mueller says, “and then they called us back: ‘Hey, we’re willing to do that valve. You guys want to talk about it?’ And we’re like, ‘No, we’re done.’ He goes, ‘What do you mean you’re done?’ ‘We qualified it. We’re done.’ And there was just silence at the end of the line. They were in shock.” That scenario has been repeated to the point where, Mueller says, “we passionately avoid space vendors.”
stef25 2y ago
> If you have enough money you can ring them up and say "I want to go into space" and they can make that happen. To whoever wants to be the first one to drop acid in space, the doors are open
- jMyles 2y ago
  > the first one to drop acid in space Seems unlikely we'll ever definitely now, but I suspect that whomever does it next won't be the first (or second, or third).
  - brandall10 2y ago
    Esp. on longer ISS trips. I can't believe this hasn't already been a sanctioned experiment.
    - baseballdork 2y ago
      I can believe it. Dunno how reasonable it would be to risk having someone in an altered state of mind on the ISS. What do you do if someone has a bad trip or decides to make poor decisions?
      - brandall10 2y ago
        Similar to what's been done on earth during such experiments. Just have to do it in a controlled way in a prepared environment, and have both an administrator and a person likely versed in taking the substance to minimize risk. Of course with just a sample of one it won't yield much scientific benefit.
      - mycodendral 2y ago
        I agree to not do it casually But it could probably be arranged under supervision with an anesthetizer option. They probably already have some protocol for antisocial or psychotic behavior.
      - mycodendral 2y ago

paulryanrogers 2y ago

Except for the whole launch facilities thing they lease from the government.

jdross 2y ago
which they have also massively refurbished and could have handled themselves if not for regulations around creating a launch site. there aren’t many technical issues to pouring concrete in a good lat-lon
- michaelt 2y ago
  > there aren’t many technical issues to pouring concrete in a good lat-lon Other than when a powerful and explosion-prone rocket destroyed its launchpad, hurling chunks of steel-reinforced concrete thousands of feet. But it's almost 18 months since that happened.
  - taneq 2y ago
    Haha well that’s gonna happen from time to time when you try new things.
    - dmix 2y ago
      Can't be taking risks. You might actually accomplish something.
  - gertrunde 2y ago
    That incident probably underscores the parent poster's point quite effectively. That launch was on 20th April 2023, and the next prototype test launch was only 212 days later on 18th November 2023, although I think the pad redesign/rebuild/repair work was complete by the end of July 2023. So only 3-4 months to redesign/rebuild/repair the pad (although it's probably reasonable to assume some design work had already occurred).
    - jandrese 2y ago
      At the end of the day it wasn't a major problem. SpaceX tried something new, it didn't work out, so they had to fix it. Nobody was hurt. Property damage was minimal. The repair didn't take very long. All in all a good example of learning from your mistakes without spending too much time or money overthinking it.
    - michaelt 2y ago
      In civil engineering terms, if falling apart with debris thrown thousands of feet doesn't count as a "technical issue" what does? I'm no rocketry expert, but I'm old enough to remember the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster; I'm pretty sure if you've got falling chunks of steel-reinforced concrete hitting your space vehicle during launch, that's an issue.
      - jjk166 2y ago
        The launch pad didn't explode, the rocket on the launch pad exploded. A fully fueled falcon 9 has about as much energy as a small nuclear bomb, it's not a technical issue if your structure is unable to survive that at point blank range.
      - gertrunde 2y ago
        Oh, definitely, of course it wasn't a good or desirable outcome. But it was also a prototype being deliberately tested to destruction, so the context as compared to Columbia was quite different. (And it wasn't just the rocket itself that was a prototype, the pad and tower were at least a little as well). And this has always been SpaceX's approach, rapidly iterating their design by building, testing, destroying, rinse/repeat - so it sometimes feels a little difficult to compare to a more NASA-style design process where a (usually) small number of items are produced with a significantly lower tolerance for failure. (Edit: And how much better is it to learn these design lessons before the cargo is more fragile/delicate/squishy?)
  - iknowstuff 2y ago
    Whats your point
    - michaelt 2y ago
      That building a rocket launch pad is in fact more difficult than pouring a slab for a garage, and there some nontrivial technical issues involved. Having chunks of the launchpad go flying isn't just an inconvenience - flying debris during launch can damage critical rocket systems, as the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster demonstrated.
      - wonderwonder 2y ago
        and they figured out how to prevent this happening by the next launch just a few months later. So it turned out to be fairly trivial after all. SpaceX is able to iterate in months what it takes Nasa and its contractors years to do.
    - faggotbreath 2y ago
      [dead]
rogerrogerr 2y ago
It’s clear they’d be fine without that; they could probably have Texas ready for manned launches fairly quick. More likely they lease launch facilities from the government to minimize regulatory interference from… the government.
HideousKojima 2y ago
Soon to change with Starship launching from Boca Chica. And planned to be able to launch from essentially anywhere, eventually (in Musk Time so give it a decade).
- elif 2y ago
  I have seen no plans for a 4th launch/catch tower.. has he even hinted at more sites? Or are you referring to the historical BFR design when musk planned on landing them on the ground like falcon?
panick21_ 2y ago
The government took all the good land for this in the 60s. So the government mostly just has the land in the right places, that's a really important part. Building most of the ground infrastructure, is still custom to every rocket company.
caconym_ 2y ago
Given the incredibly hostile regulatory environment they've faced in Texas trying to operate their own private launch site, I think there are very clear benefits in using an established public facility that isn't under threat by constant attempts (often in outright bad faith) to curtail its activity or even get it shut down. It's not a question of money or capability.
- mrguyorama 2y ago
  >private launch site But you know it ISN'T private, because every rocket ever designed will end up in public space, either literally in outer space, or dropping parts in the ocean, or a tiny tiny tiny tiny chance of exploding somewhere less convenient. This idea that you can just make your own little closed off launch pad and therefore ignore society is stupid. Some of the more onerous pushback comes from people who have been ignored before and turned out to be right. For example, when Dupont and friends first started producing PFAS, someone out there was crying foul about "hey maybe we shouldn't just dump this everywhere", and they were ignored, it was dumped everywhere, and now we get to deal with the consequences because nobody listened to those people. This has happened hundreds of times, including serious things like lead paint and leaded gasoline, which we KNEW caused direct and measurable harm to people, and yet was completely ignored. A portion of the public has obviously lost ALL trust for the private sector claiming any sort of "this couldn't possibly cause problems" and are willing and able to take action. If you are a "big" enough entity, there is no such thing as "private". Anything you do, affects a lot of people, and you should be treated that way.
  - caconym_ 2y ago
    Perhaps you can show me where you think I said SpaceX shouldn't be subject to regulatory oversight.

croes 2y ago

So space will become more expensive.

teekert 2y ago
Yeah, the way capitalism made goods more expensive. /s
- rbanffy 2y ago
  The way monopolies do.
  - seneca 2y ago
    There is no monopoly bigger, or more expensive, than government, which was previously the only player in the space.
    - rbanffy 2y ago
      Funny... Government is the only monopoly you get to elect, and the only that can be undone by voting against it.
  - dialup_sounds 2y ago
    I don't think you can monopolize going up.
    - croes 2y ago
      If it costs a shitload of money you can.
- croes 2y ago
  You mean like Insulin in the US? Or healthcare or housing or education etc.?
  - adventured 2y ago

api 2y ago

That's because SpaceX is run with the goal of building actual space transit capabilities, not milking the taxpayer and distributing pork to as many politically influential districts as possible. Until SpaceX and post-Apollo most of the space program was really a pork distribution system and a way to keep certain high-skill labor areas 'hot' in case we need them again. It wasn't a serious effort to learn about the universe or build a real presence in space. Some of that did happen but it happened almost as a side effect. Edit: Honestly I think SpaceX is just a decent aerospace company. They've appeared superhuman by contrast with companies like Boeing that have done nothing to innovate in the sector since the 1970s. When the comparison is with people completely asleep at the wheel, mere competence looks striking.

xattt 2y ago
I don’t see downsides of keeping skilled labour “hot”. One indirect benefit of domestic manufacturing is that it gives blue collar workers a sense of productivity and involvement in society. Idle hands are the Devil’s playthings, and a fairly compensated workforce is less likely to feel stagnant in their stage of life, and less likely to be radicalized. Edit: it seems there is a distinction between how you keep the labour hot - meaningful long-term missions; or a half-assed approach.
- panick21_ 2y ago
  The downside to keeping skilled labour 'hot' are many. First of all, if you have skilled labor, instead of of keeping them 'hot' actually 'eat' them. Ok, the analogy breaks down. But why keep them 'hot' just have them build actually useful stuff instead. Its not like there is a lack of useful things they could be doing. And second giving people bullshit useless projects like SLS, does not actually keep them 'hot'. Its more like warmed up Pizza. The people and more importantly organization lose the actual ability to do things quickly at reasonable prices. Somehow it seems acceptable that SLS will cost more then 30 billion $ in development cost and 2-4 more billion $ per launch. Not to mention the time. Don't misunderstand political pork as actually strategic workforce development or long term government policy. That just what you personally wish it to be, not what it actually is.

andsoitis 2y ago

I think a large part of it is because of Elon Musk's obsession about controlling (if not owning) as much of stack as possible. That mentality goes into even the things you do not own, but lease. In the Isaacson biography there's a theme across his ventures, sparked by early misfortune, about being in control of things end-to-end because then you have more flexibility to optimize, make more leaps that can come from orchestrating creative adn bespoke integration options.

HarHarVeryFunny 2y ago
It's really because SpaceX is Musk's hobby company with the singular goal of putting a colony on Mars. The commercial launches and Starlink are just a way to leverage all the infrastructure they've had to build to make it pay for itself.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
afiodorov 2y ago
No, in this case it is much more pragmatic. Elon has commented on this aspect himself. When he started he thought of just buying rockets and related equipment from Russia on the cheap but quickly found the exuberant prices states want to charge. He then made a first order approximation of how much it’d cost to just manufacture things he needs and it was an order of magnitude lower - thus he bit the bullet and started doing just that. Had the states let him buy things at a fair price may be the controlling of the stack would not have happened.
- schiffern 2y ago
  Here's story as retold by (now retired) SpaceX engine chief Tom Mueller: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/is-spacex-changing-the-rocket-equation-132285884/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/is-spacex-... > Significantly, the Merlin engines—like roughly 80 percent of the components for Falcon and Dragon, including even the flight computers—are made in-house. That’s something SpaceX didn’t originally set out to do, but was driven to by suppliers’ high prices. Mueller recalls asking a vendor for an estimate on a particular engine valve. “They came back [requesting] like a year and a half in development and hundreds of thousands of dollars. Just way out of whack. And we’re like, ‘No, we need it by this summer, for much, much less money.’ They go, ‘Good luck with that,’ and kind of smirked and left.” Mueller’s people made the valve themselves, and by summer they had qualified it for use with cryogenic propellants. > “That vendor, they iced us for a couple of months,” Mueller says, “and then they called us back: ‘Hey, we’re willing to do that valve. You guys want to talk about it?’ And we’re like, ‘No, we’re done.’ He goes, ‘What do you mean you’re done?’ ‘We qualified it. We’re done.’ And there was just silence at the end of the line. They were in shock.” That scenario has been repeated to the point where, Mueller says, “we passionately avoid space vendors.”

stef25 2y ago

> If you have enough money you can ring them up and say "I want to go into space" and they can make that happen. To whoever wants to be the first one to drop acid in space, the doors are open

jMyles 2y ago
> the first one to drop acid in space Seems unlikely we'll ever definitely now, but I suspect that whomever does it next won't be the first (or second, or third).
- brandall10 2y ago
  Esp. on longer ISS trips. I can't believe this hasn't already been a sanctioned experiment.
  - baseballdork 2y ago
    I can believe it. Dunno how reasonable it would be to risk having someone in an altered state of mind on the ISS. What do you do if someone has a bad trip or decides to make poor decisions?
    - brandall10 2y ago
      Similar to what's been done on earth during such experiments. Just have to do it in a controlled way in a prepared environment, and have both an administrator and a person likely versed in taking the substance to minimize risk. Of course with just a sample of one it won't yield much scientific benefit.
    - mycodendral 2y ago
      I agree to not do it casually But it could probably be arranged under supervision with an anesthetizer option. They probably already have some protocol for antisocial or psychotic behavior.
    - mycodendral 2y ago