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On the surface, the changes appear logical. The difference in philosophy between NASA's current approach and SpaceX is quite stark. SpaceX has launched 11 Sta

• bregma 8mo ago
  If NASA switches to the Space X approach of just blowing up its rockets it would soon need to change its name to "Need Another Seven Astronauts".
  • panick21 8mo ago
    Except of course that SpaceX is launching Astronauts right now and has a perfect safety record and operate the safest space vehicle ever built.
• 2OEH8eoCRo0 8mo ago
  They've blown up 11 Starships without any of them making it to orbit. Artemis I flew around the moon and came back already. And don't compare costs because Starship does not and may never work so I dont care how much cheaper it is. If we are comparing fictional rockets I have a $1 rocket that can fly to Jupiter.
  • bhouston 8mo ago
    > They've blown up 11 Starships without any of them making it to orbit. They purposely were not trying for orbit from my understanding. The last one did orbit the earth at suborbital heights and release satellites. It did seem to do what they wanted it to do, it wasn't a failure.
    • delichon 8mo ago
      Not only were they not trying to reach orbit, they are specifically trying to do risky things that they can learn from. It's not exactly destructive testing because they hope to succeed, but it's close.
      • UltraSane 8mo ago
        That just seems like a huge waste of money
        • qingcharles 8mo ago
          Elon Musk's net worth now (sadly) near a trillion dollars... :/
          • delichon 8mo ago
            He is spending it effectively to colonize the sky. That makes him the MVP of the whole biosphere.
        • delichon 8mo ago
          It wouldn't if you were scheduled to fly on it.
          • NetMageSCW 8mo ago
            By the time people are scheduled to fly on it, it will have launched 100s of times and SLS wilk have launched once. Which so you want to ride on?
        • elictronic 8mo ago
          Each Expendable Starship Super Heavy launched costs less than a single engine on the Artemis program. Every time you see a Starship launch what you aren't seeing is manufacturing processes corrected, issues in launch protocols and field issues resolved. All the little things that build up to make your system reliable. Do you want the doctor who has done a hundred successful surgeries, or the one who has done one or two but spent a long time in school watching videos. The big difference is in the end, Starship gets built faster, costs much less, and can do more. It's not even close.
  • ThrowawayTestr 8mo ago
    This is why NASA can never adopt the SpaceX philosophy. People don't understand the concept of test fight.
• shiandow 8mo ago
  The real question is which is more likely to avoid catastrophic failures in practice. And we 'tried until it didn't blow up immediately' is not a great sign.
  • phkahler 8mo ago
    >> And we 'tried until it didn't blow up immediately' is not a great sign. But everything that didn't blow up has been tested 11 times already. Things that did fail have had more than one design iteration tested. One approach has gains more real-world test experience.
    • bigyabai 8mo ago
      NASA is constrained by the triple-whammy of taxpayer dollars, an administration that hates public science, and a market that rewards private enterprise more than them. JPL would blow up a rocket every week, if the budget had room for it. Alas, we don't see that testing pace outside defense procurement.
      • dash2 8mo ago
        So is Artemis cheaper than Starship then?
        • bigyabai 8mo ago
          Are you familiar with the definition of the word "constrained"?
          • dash2 8mo ago
            I was referring to the quote “JPL would blow up a rocket every week, if the budget had room for it.” That makes it sound as if JPL can’t afford to follow the SpaceX strategy, hence my question.
• riffic 8mo ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociotechnical_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociotechnical_system NASA and SpaceX are fundamentally incomparable, considering how these two organizations are established and the motivations that drive all the actors within. Sure, NASA could start to adopt certain approaches but I don't imagine it to work in a way anyone else would imagine it to.
• schiffern 8mo ago
  Also interesting to hear what the NASA people assigned to work with SpaceX say: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxIiiwD9C0E&t=1440s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxIiiwD9C0E&t=1440s
• connoronthejob 8mo ago
  Neither craft have achieved their missions so it's a bit early to make that call.
  • verzali 8mo ago
    Well the SLS has already sent a capsule around the Moon. And it has kept a lot of people employed. That's pretty much what it was intended to do.
    • readthenotes1 8mo ago
      Only the latter achievement was a real intention. The former is just the malarkey useful to sell it
• kdheiwns 8mo ago
  NASA is beholden to politicians and voters who get easily ruffled when politicians can point to explosions and say "those are you tax dollars." NASA needs to be perfect and impress people or they get their budget cut even further.
• DSMan195276 8mo ago
  I think the public funding aspect complicates this, NASA is probably not in a position where it can blow up a bunch of rockets and still get funding for the next year.
  • kevin_thibedeau 8mo ago
    They used to depend on the Army to blow up the rockets for them.
• mikkupikku 8mo ago
  Congress is fickle enough without rockets blowing up, even if NASA explains up front that it's going to happen. There is much which is suboptimal about NASA, not just their attitude towards perfection, which is downstream of the political reality they have to deal with. For instance, a project that could be done in one year given adaquate funding will instead be spread out over ten years or more, to spread out the costs and keep NASA's monetary requirements as smooth and predictable as possible, for the sake of Congress.
• renewiltord 8mo ago
  NASA did have SpaceX like approach. Much more aggressive as a matter of fact. They cooked the occupants of Apollo 1 and they sent another mission out broken so they had to fix it live in space. The question is whether you have the appetite for killing three astronauts on a test run like the Apollo team did. EDIT: Fine, I’ll clarify. By “SpaceX like approach” I mean iterative design. By “more aggressive” I mean risk tolerance much greater than SpaceX to the degree that they do things that SpaceX wouldn’t do.
  • freejazz 8mo ago
    Insane that this is getting downvoted.
  • schiffern 8mo ago
    This is ignoring the massive distinction between manned flight (where failure is not an option) and unmanned tests. NASA and SpaceX both know this well. Calling it a "SpaceX like approach" and connecting to Apollo 1 is a neat trick, but SpaceX wouldn't (and doesn't) adopt that risky approach during manned flights. It's all about "the right risk for the job." You can't be risky with human safety, but you also don't want to be overly timid and failure-averse during safely managed R&D tests, or your R&D grinds to a halt.
• tencentshill 8mo ago
  SpaceX doesn't have investors itching to take AWAY money from their programs. they are obligated to be perfect on the first run. Public vs. private.
• MSKJ 8mo ago
  If I were to bet, even with no information. I would wager that the private company is more capital efficient than the government ran one
  • XorNot 8mo ago
    Maybe go read the report on Starliner before making that call? Boeing is a private company too and no one is this deferential about it.
    • NetMageSCW 8mo ago
      But their mistakes on Starliner have cost them billions whereas the mistakes on SLS has cost the taxpayers billions.
• lstodd 8mo ago
  Boris Chertok's memoir[0] on early Soviet space program is essential reading. inexact quote: "You know, we're throwing towns into the sky" related to the early mishaps of R-7 program development, but they kept doing it. After that R-7 derivatives became the most reliable launch vehicle. [0] https://www.nasa.gov/history/history-publications-and-resources/nasa-history-series/rockets-and-people/ https://www.nasa.gov/history/history-publications-and-resour...
  • ptero 8mo ago
    > inexact quote: "You know, we're throwing towns into the sky" related to the early mishaps of R-7 program development I have not looked at the source (in Russian) for several years; now that I am curious I will check at home tonight. But as far as I remember "we are shooting towns into the sky" remark was not in reference to the R-7, but in reference to N1-L3, a hellishly expensive competitor to the Apollo manned Moon mission rocket. The meaning of the phrase was that each and every test should be taken extremely seriously as the cost of each flight is comparable to the cost of building a new city. R-7 was developed much earlier when Korolev and his team at OKB-1 were iterating rapidly on much cheaper models that were primarily funded as rockets for strategic thermonuclear strike warheads. The civilian (Sputnik and later Gagarin) flights were an offshoot of that and were small enough that it happened as a side project. R-7 was a comparatively simple and cheap design, which may be why that family became a workhorse from the late 50s to carrying crews to the ISS. And the super expensive N1-L3 was a stillborn. That's my recollection, need to recheck the sources.
    • lstodd 8mo ago
      I read it last some years ago too but I think it was in relation to many early moonshot failures - first half of Luna program and also early attempts at Mars and Venus. Have to reread it too. Still, while R-7 was initially funded as ballistic missile system, that was abandoned quite early, since it was very unwieldy, basically unusable. Ballistic program in OKB-1 continued separately resulting in superchilled-LOX R-9. N1 failure is attributed mostly to Korolev - Glushko rivalry that resulted in N1 lacking engines in time. It is widely belived that Kuznetsov bureau delivered just a bit too late - Korolev died, Moon race was lost and N1 project was literally buried. EDIT: Mishin (OKB-1 head after Korolev) had no administrative push, and Glushko ended up heading it and building Energia-Buran. It's all a sad story of unchecked emotions leading to monumental waste.
• chasd00 8mo ago
  > I wonder if NASA could start to adopt SpaceX like approaches? Where one doesn't try to get everything correct before acting? that would be such a culture change you'd have to disband NASA and start it over.
  • kunai 8mo ago
    Yeah there is no way they do that with THREE LOCVs in their history. The fire, Challenger, and Columbia. It's a risk-averse culture for a reason.
    • NetMageSCW 8mo ago
      Tell that to the Starliner crew and the Artemis II crew.
    • DennisP 8mo ago
      SpaceX is currently on a streak of over 300 successful Falcon missions in a row. I'm not convinced their approach isn't compatible with risk aversion. They push their test rockets to failure and learn from what goes wrong. That seems to be a pretty good process for getting a solid production rocket.
• freejazz 8mo ago
  > I wonder if NASA could start to adopt SpaceX like approaches? Where one doesn't try to get everything correct before acting? This seems so ridiculous in the abstract. Like, what is that exactly supposed to entail in the context of launching rockets?
  • RandallBrown 8mo ago
    When SpaceX launches a rocket, they think it will work. When NASA launches a rocket they know it will work. The cost of going from "I think this will work" to "I know this will work" is really expensive. It might be cheaper/faster to fail a few times and fix those problems than it would be to verify everything up front.
    • freejazz 8mo ago
      Again, that is put so vaguely as to be actionably useless.
      • ThrowawayTestr 8mo ago
        SpaceX is willing to blow up a rocket, even if it exploding is fully planned and expected. That's it, really not hard to comprehend.
      • RandallBrown 8mo ago
        So let's say you want to check something like a new fuel nozzle. SpaceX might design and build the nozzle, then put it in the rocket and launch it. It might work how they intended, or it might not, but they'll find out immediately. They'll make changes, build a new nozzle, launch another rocket, and continue until it works like they want. NASA will do a lot more testing, simulation, redesigning, etc. until they KNOW that the nozzle will perform perfectly on the first try. On the surface, NASA's approach sounds cheaper because you aren't wasting rockets. In reality it looks like SpaceX's approach might be better.
        • elteto 8mo ago
• tsimionescu 8mo ago
  Given that SLS is the part of Artemis that has actually shown it works, and Starship is the part that is nowhere near schedule, and doesn't work, it's very funny to suggest that NASA should learn from SpaceX and not the other way around. SpaceX hasn't even had the confidence to put Starship in LEO yet, and has not carried 1kg of real payload (and barely a few kg of test payloads) - while SLS did an orbit of the Moon, with real payload satellites.
  • 0xffff2 8mo ago
    It's not like SLS is on schedule either, and it is absurdly more expensive than Starship. It's very likely that Starship will eventually be operational with lower total costs by any accounting measure. (And I say this as a current NASA contractor and current anti-fan of Musk)
    • tsimionescu 8mo ago
      I agree that SLS is not an efficient project by any stretch of the imagination, and they have their own problems. I don't really see a reason to believe that Starship will ever achieve the goals that were declared for it. In particular, their plan for how to achieve the Moon mission, requiring an unclear number of missions to fuel a single flight in orbit.
      • brandonagr2 8mo ago
        You don't have long to wait to see an obvious reason, the first v3 starship is in preflight testing right now.
        • tsimionescu 8mo ago
          And do you think the this next launch will deploy actual satellites in orbit around the Moon? If not, I still don't see why you'd compare it to SLS's current success. Or do you think this will deploy 100 tons to orbit for less than $10/ton, or fly to Mars, since these are the stated goals for Starship?
• gwbas1c 8mo ago
  The Artemis mission is manned. I assume the Starships are unmanned. The risk profile is very different.
• Arthurian 8mo ago
  2cents from a kid who grew up in a NASA family during the shuttle years - As others have commented, NASA’s baseline objective is to not kill astronauts. My understanding of their ethos growing up was that there was absolutely no excuse not to pursue excellence and prioritize safety when people’s lives were on the line. One would have to think that goal is fundamentally incompatible with SpaceX’s way of doing things (see the many exploding rockets - who wants to get in that?). And from what I’ve read and heard through the grapevine, working with SpaceX as a contractor on Artemis has certainly had pain points related to these mismatched priorities.
  • zardo 8mo ago
    The shuttle lost two crews. Maybe pushing its limits in unmanned testing would have prevented those incidents.
    • mikkupikku 8mo ago
      They very nearly lost the first shuttle they launched. Jumping straight into manned testing was quite reckless, but politically necessary. If they had tested the shuttle without crew, that would have gotten people thinking that crews probably aren't necessary for a lot of shuttle missions, in particular launching satellites. It also would have prompted people to compare the cost of shuttle launches to other unmanned rocket launches, in particular for commercial satellite launches (which they were doing until the Challenger disaster.) These are comparisons that would have been very problematic for NASA as a political entity.
      • HerbManic 8mo ago
        The lesson is that people can be irrational even it the logic is sound.
      • pdonis 8mo ago
        > They very nearly lost the first shuttle they launched. Which mission are you referring to? If it's STS-1, AFAIK there were no close call incidents during the actual flight, but the mission commander, John Young, did have to veto a suggestion to make that mission an RTLS abort instead of an actual orbital flight. Doing that would have been reckless, yes: Young's reason for not doing it was "Let's not practice Russian roulette."
• deleted 8mo ago
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• jvanderbot 8mo ago
  NASA should not do what businesses do, because by definition their job is to do what businesses cannot or will not do. They should not adopt spacex practices, they should adopt spacex lift vehicles (once proven).
• leonflexo 8mo ago
  Systemic inefficiencies aside. I wonder how much of that is a public funding feedback loop? The cost gets higher, because the standards, requirements, and processes are stricter, because there is the need to validate the use of public funds, exacerbated by being higher, increasing the standards/requirements etc etc... Especially in a political environment where there is no shortage of sniping funding for points. Regardless, first thing it reminded me of was that interview quote about how if nasa had SpaceX track record they would have lost funding long ago. Is there a US political landscape, even back to 2008-2016, where that isn't the case?
  • alwa 8mo ago
    I wonder how much is a cost-plus billing issue, too… and a contrast between primes with a single customer in mind and a commercial firm chasing a bigger pie than the immediate program at hand https://www.thespacereview.com/article/4498/1 https://www.thespacereview.com/article/4498/1
• tokyobreakfast 8mo ago
  SpaceX's move-fast-and-break-things approach was lauded and NASA panned as being stuck in the past until <checks notes> the zeitgeist turned against Musk at which point the drones and tech blogs they read and write now view SpaceX as dangerous and wasteful at all costs. When a mere few years ago they couldn't shower them with enough praise. I have no skin in this game other than to say the old school methods resulted in a janky ship that stranded two astronauts in space for months until they could catch a ride home on a SpaceX ship.
  • XorNot 8mo ago
    Starship is starting to be a very long and not so cheap project though that doesn't seem to be making significant iterative improvements - Rockets are still exploding regularly where you'd expect them to have moved beyond that phase.
    • nine_k 8mo ago
      Sorry, what? Starship 11 proceeded with a totally nominal ascent, orbit, descent, and powered landing that would end up with it standing on the ground, were it not deliberately landed into water. What SLS currently has achieved had been achieved by Falcons and Dragons years ago, only way more cheaply and successfully. No matter what we may think about Mr Musk, SLS is dead end.
      • toraway 8mo ago
        I'm 99% confident Starship 11 was actually a sub-orbital test so you can't credit it for successfully entering orbit (my memory is confirmed by Gemini but caveat emptor).
        • DennisP 8mo ago
          They did reach orbital velocity though. If they'd aimed slightly differently they would have attained orbit, and reentry was as difficult as if they had done that.
        • 8mo ago
• dyukqu 8mo ago
  This reminds me of my all-time-favourite HN comment[0] (and a life lesson too): This idea is captured nicely in the book "Art and Fear" with the following anecdote: "The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot – albeit a perfect one – to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay." [0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22105478 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22105478
  • nixpulvis 8mo ago
    This works if there's no cost of failure in the meantime. If we're putting humans into rockets into space, I'd like to think we adopt a balanced approach.
    • distortionfield 8mo ago
      Isn't this a non-sequitur though? Artemis presumably doesn't have to actually load up humans on the rockets to flight test them.
    • danw1979 8mo ago
      It works perfectly well when you’ve got deep pockets and unmanned test vehicles though.
      • nixpulvis 8mo ago
        Those deep pockets are funded by the same pot we all feed from.
• numpad0 8mo ago
  I think we're all misunderstanding SpaceX. I think it's more of an engine factory disguised as a general space company that managed to borrow the dad's card. The only thing SpaceX truly has an edge is its engines. They have perfected the engine for a ship like a giant Mars class rockets. And that engine has been in full scale series production for years, while the actual Starship keeps blowing up. The reason they developed their hoverslam landing technology, also, was because they wanted their precious engines back. It's as if they handed groups of gamers a credit card and they went onto plunder stocks of RTX cards from 20 miles around with some Roombas bought on reward points. It's just inches below the threshold for typical BS detector if it weren't specifically tuned for the relevant topics. All makes sense if everything was an elaborate ploy to get someone to pay for specifically the engines.
• baggachipz 8mo ago
  NASA has been directed by Congress to use the remaining Space Shuttle RS25 engines on SLS. There aren't that many RS25's left, so Artemis requires that they make the most of each launch. Getting more RS25's produced is one of those "nobody's made them in a long time and it would be terribly expensive and time-consuming to do so" type of situations. correction: there are 16 RS25's left, but production has begun on more for the Artemis V mission. However, production is slow so they can't just yeet SLS's into space and test rapidly.
• JumpCrisscross 8mo ago
  My suspicion is ULA can’t manufacture SLS quickly enough, at high enough quality, to meet multiple, gradual tests.
  • carabiner 8mo ago
    It's everything. NASA doesn't have the money, brainpower, efficiency etc. to implement SpaceX development method. They can't fab it fast enough, nor can they iterate on the engineering fast enough, nor are they will to sustain the optics of a "government rocket blowing up" like Musk is. They don't have the caliber of engineering talent available or a workflow setup (high autonomy, long hours, better pay).
    • NetMageSCW 8mo ago
      They don’t do the fabbing or (a lot of) the engineering now - they contract it all out. They could oversee those contracts differently but that would just be hiring SpaceX instead of Boeing or Blue Origin. Which they are doing some anyway.
  • NetMageSCW 8mo ago
    ULA has nothing to do with SLS.
    • JumpCrisscross 8mo ago
      Sorry, antique brain fart.
    • mr_toad 8mo ago
      They’re supplying the second stage propulsion, with plans to replace it with a a Boeing module.
• palmotea 8mo ago
  > The difference in philosophy between NASA's current approach and SpaceX is quite stark. SpaceX has launched 11 Starships in the two and a bit years, with a lot of them blowing up. Where as Artemis is trying to get it near perfect on each run. > I wonder if NASA could start to adopt SpaceX like approaches? Where one doesn't try to get everything correct before acting? My understanding is the difference is politics. The US political system is dysfunctional, and so riven by anti-government factions, that there's too much pressure to not fail. If NASA tried the SpaceX approach, after the second rocket blew up NASA's administrator would have been hauled in front of Congress and interrogated over the "waste of taxpayer money" and then the program may get canceled.
• Galxeagle 8mo ago
  I had a lightbulb moment when someone said 'the point of iterative approaches is not to find bugs, it's to do something (small) successfully and build confidence+learn'. There's a subtle but important difference between the iterative approach that SpaceX takes and 'debugging through exhaustive retries', and I'm worried NASA would look like the latter (and admittedly, some of the more recent starship launches look that way too). The ability to pick a small-but-well-defined goal as an interim milestone - and stay focused on it - is a key skill, and too often I've seen waterfall-like companies slowly scope-creep their first MVP until it's a lumbering mess. You almost always need someone with a strong personality to push team to 'get it done', and that level of ownership is really hard to come by in an organization historically built around ass-covering. I think Commercial Crew is the right model for NASA. Pick the design objectives, provide some level of scaffolding regulation (i.e loss-of-crew calculations), and then contract out to private sector to actually 'get it done'. (Yes Starliner was a failure, but Dragon is definitely a success. A 50% hit rate and success of the program overall is better than Artemis)
• mmooss 8mo ago
  If you want to choose example of a failed approach to space exploration, NASA is your worst option. It's like choosing Netflix as an example of a failed approach to video multicasting. NASA's approach to space exploration remains incredibly successful. Look at all the missions operating all over our solar system, including on Mars' surface, and beyond. No other organization comes close. > I wonder which approach is more capital efficient? Which is more time efficient? How we frame the debate - if you like, the specs that define the rfp - determines the outcome. You define it by efficiency, which is what businesses prioritize and is SpaceX's strength. They take a well-established technology, orbital launch, and make it much more efficient. NASA prioritizes ground-breaking (space-breaking?), history-making exploration and technology - things never done before and often hardly dreamed of by most people. That can take time and money but they deliver at a very high rate - think of how many missions have failed, compared to recent private missions, such as moon missions, and even those of other space agencies.
  • NetMageSCW 8mo ago
    Perhaps it is best to accept that SpaceX is a unicorn. What exactly is ground breaking about SLS and not quite getting back to the moon with it?
    • mmooss 8mo ago
      I don't know or care about some classification of SpaceX, but about what they do. My description is accurate, I think. I don't understand the second part: NASA doesn't do groundbreaking work, because you found one project, in progress, that hasn't broken new ground yet?
• HaloZero 8mo ago
  Doesn't Artemis intend to launch humans? It seems like Space X Starship approach is hella dangerous for astroanuts.
  • mavhc 8mo ago
    Once Starship has launched 1000 times without problems it'll be obviously safer despite having no abort system
• jiggawatts 8mo ago
  > Where one doesn't try to get everything correct before acting? That only works if the unit cost is low. A single SLS rocket engine costs about the same as an entire starship launch including 39 engines.
• Whatarethese 8mo ago
  Like others have said, its easy to blow shit up and improve when you dont have congress breathing down your neck and threatening to cut your budget.
• sfifs 8mo ago
  SLS/Artemis seems mostly to be just a program designed to funnel money to traditional aerospace contractors so that they don't close down their space business (SpaceX has already made their business unviable without government subsidy) and force a lot of their skilled engineers and technicians out of space jobs just in case these are needed for some future war. A trickle of rockets, lots of people employed practicing hand building and engineering skills for space skills crafting something every couple of years. It doesn't look like a real program designed to create any significant value, much like the some of the government fusion programs seem to be primarily a way to keep nuclear scientists and engineers employed.
• fnord77 8mo ago
  The Saturn V never blew up, either. I suspect that Starship will never get a human rating
  • NetMageSCW 8mo ago
    A human rating is only necessary for NASA missions. Do you think Falcon 9 will never fly crew because of all the explosions SpaceX had developing it and landings?
• api 8mo ago
  There were no humans on those Starships that blew up. Most of the delays in Artemis are not around the launch system but the spacecraft and lander and life support and associated systems. Not saying it couldn't be done more efficiently, but comparing Artemis to SpaceX is apples and oranges. The SLS is old expensive disposable rocket tech but it's also solid and tested and we pretty much know it will work. It's not the problem. So how did we do it in the 60s? With a blank check and luck. The insane accomplishment of Apollo wasn't just landing people on the moon but doing it without killing anyone. The fact that nobody died on those flights is incredible, and luck was certainly a factor. We very nearly lost a crew on 13. If we'd kept flying Apollo rigs we'd have lost people. That whole mission was way ahead of its time technologically and generally unsustainable. It was an early proof of concept.
• jachee 8mo ago
  First Time NASA did that was how we got Apollo I and lost three astronauts. They learned a few lessons, but then 1986 they let “getting things perfect” slip a bit more. It’s happened a few times since. Personally, I’d rather not lose any more astronauts.
  • NetMageSCW 8mo ago
    SpaceX managed their methodologies with Falcon 9 and Dragon without losing any crew. That’s because, unlike NASA, they don’t risk crew with untested systems and first time flights.
    • jachee 8mo ago
      SpaceX also has a nepo-billionaire’s disposable hobby budget, while NASA’s has been cut to the marrow.
• topspin 8mo ago
  > I wonder which approach is more capital efficient? Which is more time efficient? I don't. I wonder whether US astronauts are going to die on the surface of the moon while the world watches in 4K. I believe, to my great relief, that by some minor miracle, we've ended up with a NASA administrator that is wondering the same thing, and also has the temerity to make some really hard calls, despite what is doubtless an enormous amount of pressure. I've been analyzing his words and speech. There is just no bullshit in him, and he clearly doesn't suffer fools. You can see it. He's like something out of SAC from the Cold War. NASA is in desperate need of exactly that. Perhaps that's not the correct, permanent disposition for all things at all times, but if the US and NASA are actually going to engage in another Space Race, this time with China, we very much need it at this time.
• terribleperson 8mo ago
  NASA can't adopt SpaceX's approach, because any failure will be used to attack them in Congress and in the media.
• godelski 8mo ago
  > I wonder if NASA could start to adopt SpaceX like approaches? Where one doesn't try to get everything correct before acting? With humans inside? Move fast and break things has its place, but when putting humans in things you should be very concerned about... you know... not killing them... The reason NASA does things this way is because they essentially have one shot. Failure is not an option. When they fail, funding gets pulled and you don't get to try again. NASA doesn't get to launch 11 and have half of them fail. This puts a weird spin on things because in many industries you have the saying "why is there always time to do it twice but never to do it right" but NASA (and plenty of other sectors) have the reverse "there's always more time to do it right, but never time to do it twice". Truthfully, the optimal path is somewhere in between, but what is optimal is highly dependent on many different environmental factors. For example, when there are humans on board, well... you don't have the luxury of doing it twice. When those people are gone, they're gone. But when unmanned, well... early NASA also blew up a bunch of shit while it was figuring things out and had a much less regulated budget. Move fast and break things is a great strategy when you're starting and still needing to figure things out. But also when things become successful and working, people in charge look less fondly on mistakes. Doesn't matter if it is reasonable (e.g. human lives should be protected) or more unreasonable (you can't make dinner without getting the dishes dirty). What I'm saying here is when SpaceX gets successful they'll shift gears too. Did we not see the same evolution in every big tech company? Seems to happen in every business and what is the government if not a giant organization? It really seems like as companies get larger and more powerful they start to look much more like governments.