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?
I wonder which approach is more capital efficient? Which is more time efficient?
(It seems that Artemis cost is $92B, where as SpaceX's Starship costs are less than $10B so far, give or take. So it seems that SpaceX is a more efficient approach.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
>> 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.
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.
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.
I'm very, very concerned for the astronauts piloting this upcoming trans-lunar flight. Given that Boeing, well, does Boeing things, the current state of NASA in this political climate, and the fact that problems keep arising with this current stack, it makes me feel that there is a significant chance of issues mid-flight.
Godspeed to them, hopefully I'm being overly dour.
Sadly, the worst thing I'm worried about is the current president pushing for a landing before he leaves office in order to have that feather in his cap. Isaacman seems competent and this article shows they are responding to the concerns of the plan and are "shortening the steps in the staircase" to a landing.
So far, Isaacman's competence has mostly consisted of (rightfully) throwing is predecessors under the bus. The real test will be if there are problems on his watch, but also it seems likely the result of having backbone will not be good for Isaacman and sycophants will end up running the agency again.
Out of fiscal responsibility I wish he had delayed non essential missions until at least partly re-usable vehicles are available for it. That means less science done now but more later if they can capture the savings.
Wow, in the past no presidents pushed for NASA to launch under deadlines. Imagine telling them they need to get to the moon before the end of the decade. Unprecedented.
Good thing we have a large number of CRUD SaaS experts to tell us what's wrong with the space program
JFK set a goal that NASA managed to meet, but it is kind of difficult to see it as a hard deadline considering JFK was dead for years before any of the Apollo launches took place.
But even assuming we do view it as a deadline, the Apollo 1 losses are a pretty good argument that maybe we shouldn't repeat that.
Re: JFK and the 60s, I think the experts were in charge and had the final say on launch decisions with buy-in from all parties. Space exploration is certainly not risk-free.
Then you had Challenger, when experts were not listened to, and people died when they shouldn't have.
NASA got astronauts killed during Apollo, for some reason people forget about that or think it doesn't count because they weren't flying when it happened. After that they pumped the brakes and reevaluated their approaches, but the whole program remained extremely risky.
NASA was also far better funded back then and didn’t have to fight congresspeople and the aerospace giants lobbying them. Things move a lot more quickly when money isn’t a concern and you’re not having to scatter R&D and manufacturing across the four corners of the earth to get congress on board with you.
The moon landing and first walk are near the top of the highlight reel of my whole life. But the fact that we haven't gone back in 53 years argues that the main reason we went was performative, even if it was the best performance I ever saw.
I'm glad this is getting overhauled, the existing plan was a bit of a mess and NASA can't afford mistakes on a program of this scale. Hopefully we get safer and more effective result out of this.
More frequent launches with less ambitious progress per launch makes good sense,
and follows the old-school approach used through Apollo to mitigate risk.
Having a lunar lander test in earth orbit,
for example,
is roughly the same mission as Apollo 9, is a good call.
Validating everything works together has been a sort of sore spot for the Artemis program.
And even the Apollo 10 mission which went 99.99% of the way from the Earth to the moon, just 15km from the surface (but couldn't have landed on the moon- LM structure was too heavy) was incredibly important step. The sort of thing that people today would want to skip, it doesn't seem flashy or necessary. Why take all the risk of going into lunar orbit and separating the modules (requiring the very first rendezvous not in in Earth orbit) but not actually land on the Moon? It was about getting all of the ground crew proved and worked out, and proving that the rendezvous would work and they could get home, so that the actual landing mission could focus their efforts on just working out the last 15km, confident that all of the other problems were already dealt with. Trying to do all of that in one mission would have been a gigantic mess- A11 crew felt a lack of training time as it was.
Orion doesn't seem operationally or financially capable of launching more than once a year. It's not that they don't want to do test flights, it's that they can barely do anything.
If you visit US, I really recommend a detour to the Kennedy Space Center if you can, there's a ton of interesting stuff especially about the Apollo program.
Why does it seem like we can’t do shit anymore? Was it always like this and there was no news coverage of all the failures? If not what is the main cause of failure right now? Is it onerous regulations and bureaucracy? Stressed work environments?
We're doing really complicated stuff. And think about it though, in the 60s/70s we had one organization - NASA. That was it. Today, we have RocketLab, SpaceX, Blue Origin, and NASA, plus Boeing I guess.
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?
I wonder which approach is more capital efficient? Which is more time efficient?
(It seems that Artemis cost is $92B, where as SpaceX's Starship costs are less than $10B so far, give or take. So it seems that SpaceX is a more efficient approach.)
that would be such a culture change you'd have to disband NASA and start it over.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxIiiwD9C0E&t=1440s
This seems so ridiculous in the abstract. Like, what is that exactly supposed to entail in the context of launching rockets?
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-resour...
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.
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.
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.
The question is whether you have the appetite for killing three astronauts on a test run like the Apollo team did.
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.
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.
Godspeed to them, hopefully I'm being overly dour.
Good thing we have a large number of CRUD SaaS experts to tell us what's wrong with the space program
But even assuming we do view it as a deadline, the Apollo 1 losses are a pretty good argument that maybe we shouldn't repeat that.
Then you had Challenger, when experts were not listened to, and people died when they shouldn't have.
I don't understand the hostility.
If you've never seen a gator then looking in the ditches by the road during the bus tour is a good bed.
Explaining Why NASA's Starliner Report Is So Bad > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L96asfTvJ_A