EPTNASA and the Private Sector - Page 126
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Keep debates civil. | ||
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hypercube
Hungary2735 Posts
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LegalLord
United Kingdom13775 Posts
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hypercube
Hungary2735 Posts
What Tom Mueller says that despite it being more difficult they finally figured it out with Block 5. So countering that rockets aren't like cars is a non-sequitur. Obviously they aren't. That's why it took more time. You are free to believe Tom Mueller or not. But you are countering an argument that was never made. Hence my point that you need to read slower. | ||
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LegalLord
United Kingdom13775 Posts
It's a shitty analogy, oft-repeated, including here, second perhaps only to "why is a car that weighs five times as much as a rocket engine so much cheaper?" He can say that they have it "figured out" all he likes, it doesn't mean jack shit until they prove it. SpaceX is all about making bullshit claims about how much further they've gotten than everyone else with analogies that are laughably bad to prove it. Because they were originally developed as ICBMs, and of course that’s not reusable, so nobody ever really thought to make them reusable. It’s the only form of transportation I can think of where people don’t think of it as being reusable. They just think of it as expendable. Can you think of anything else you would throw away after one use that, that, you know, as a form of transportation? Yeah, that's why no one ever reused it, because no one ever thought of it before. Fucking lol. Whatever progress they have actually made, their spokesperson said it with about the technical prowess of Donald Trump and his ramblings. | ||
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hypercube
Hungary2735 Posts
As far "bullshit claims", sure they are claims. You are free to believe them or not. But when the question is "how much will reuse cost" the opinion of the person who actually designed the rocket should be mentioned. | ||
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LegalLord
United Kingdom13775 Posts
At some point you just have to admit that what we really have is a Charles Ponzi for an internet era. | ||
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hypercube
Hungary2735 Posts
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LegalLord
United Kingdom13775 Posts
If you look at F9 from only a dispassionate technical perspective, it's a fine rocket; profitability is SpaceX's concern, not ours. But if you look at the company as a whole, the amount of bullshit being spouted is incredible. | ||
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CuddlyCuteKitten
Sweden2586 Posts
As I see it the difference between single use and reuse is not that big in theory since both want to make the cheapest rocket possible. But in practice there is a huge difference in that the reusable rocket is avalible for inspection and evaluation after most launches while the single use rocket blows up. Sure you can start to make more efficent parts on your single use rockets untill they blow up but you either dont know which part failed or if you make one change at a time it will take thousands of launches to fully evaluate it. So single use would like to be made out of paper and handle exactly one launch but in reality they will always be severly overbuilt and inefficent. With reuse you can overbuild initially and then scale up or down components as you need over succesive launches. The inital rocket will have shit efficency initially but it will improve over time. I would argue that even if you didnt reuse the stages landing them when possible would be usefull just for that information. | ||
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LegalLord
United Kingdom13775 Posts
If there is a successful reusability scheme, it won't come out of "science magic" waving away the problems of the past. It will come from understanding why, in the past, reusability wasn't considered worth it, and patching those problems. The short version is that you're launching a fragile gigantic missile that will explode from even small manufacturing defects, destroying your entire cargo. And a single run chars the inside and requires significant rebuilding. What reason is there to believe SpaceX solved this issue from the perspective of economic reuse? Because they said so, coated in heavily feels-based language. Well they aren't known for being good at telling the truth or at making profits, so color me unconvinced. | ||
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CuddlyCuteKitten
Sweden2586 Posts
At the same time investment into tech companies is a gamble but apparantly its one that the investors are currently willing to take and its not just because of massive use of buzzwords. SpaceX wont disclose their financials to the public but they are telling their investors something and that something is getting vetted by people who know their shit. Could it still fail? Sure. But there is no way its as certain as you try to make it out to be. | ||
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LegalLord
United Kingdom13775 Posts
"Investors aren't gullible idiots" going to have to call [citation needed] on that one. While it's true that they have a nice, hefty concentration of very smart people there, there are also plenty of investors who are dumb as a brick. The only qualification to be an investor is to have money, and the US has a fantastic counterexample to the idea that a moneyed individual can't be an idiot. Elon Musk has the incredible ability to get people to buy into a delusion. Look at any of his companies and you will see that profit is not happening. WSJ leaked some financial internal documents from SpaceX a while back, and those painted a not-so-great picture of a company losing quite a hefty chunk of change. You can look at Tesla or SolarCity to see the trend: flashy and cool, bleeding money out the wazoo. Musk's great innovation is to figure out that you can get investors and politicians to fork out billions for "flashy and cool." To be fair, though, let's take a moment to look at Falcon 9 from just the numbers. It has a pretty nice payload capacity, its reliability is not great, not awful, it's been launched roughly 30 times, and it's quite cheap. Cheap enough that it is definitely not profitable, but if I have a satellite to launch for my company and can pay some money for insurance, it doesn't really matter to me if SpaceX is losing money on that launch. I get what I want. But that's not what they claim to be. They always have these delusions of grandeur: profitable reusability in 5 seconds, astronauts into space in 3 minutes, to the Moon in an hour, and by the end of the week we'll reach Mars! Oh, but it turns out that the reusability isn't as good as we thought and we're still not anywhere near delivering on Commercial Crew, but we're still gonna get all that shit we promise. Musk's companies are always "one step away" from getting to that magical goal. It's an impressive Ponzi scheme, with some decent technical accomplishments along the way, but my god, the almost universal dickriding that Musk gets from the internet generation is genuinely dangerous to real, practical work. Because when the whole cult of Musk comes crumbling down, as it inevitably will with the financial trend of all his enterprises, SpaceX will take a nosedive as well. The "you just don't dream hard enough" fluff doesn't change the realities of how the Musk-esque promises compare to reality. For at least a decade, one step away from that thing that will finally make everything work out. | ||
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hypercube
Hungary2735 Posts
On June 12 2017 06:40 LegalLord wrote: The company still exists? Yeah, it does, because if investment exceeds operating loss, you will still have money. Also NASA giving SpaceX a few nice sweetheart deals is a great boost as well. We've been through this before: The ISS resupply missions are significantly cheaper than what NASA had before. For the Crew contracts developing Crewed Dragon costs $2.6bn or about two Shuttle flights. Boeing's CST-100 costs $4.2bn. And finally, the slightly larger Orion capsule will cost about $16bn according to NASA's estimates (not to mention take a lot more time to develop). NASA got a fantastic deal on both CRS and Commercial Crew. And both of these are fixed priced contracts, unlike SLS and Orion which are cost plus (meaning that any delays by the contractor are likely to cost NASA extra). Even Boeing's contract is a steal compared to the usual prices NASA pays. | ||
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LegalLord
United Kingdom13775 Posts
I'd also want a $1.6 billion discount to ferry astronauts on a rocket that has failed 10% of its missions. No surprise there. Let's see if it's not delayed for another decade considering it's been promised to us since 2014. And Orion is quite obviously a different beast from CC altogether considering it's meant for much farther than just LEO. Moderate-risk, moderate cost option. That's what SpaceX's rocket is. Not the godly super-craft that its fanboys claim it is. | ||
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hypercube
Hungary2735 Posts
I think they were a fantastic deal for NASA (and the US space program as a whole) but I would be happy to hear your opinion. | ||
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LegalLord
United Kingdom13775 Posts
One thing is for sure, though: a big part of the reason SpaceX is still alive is because NASA threw a lot of money their way. SpaceX owes a lot more to NASA than the "SpaceX saved NASA money" crowd is willing to acknowledge. | ||
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hypercube
Hungary2735 Posts
On June 12 2017 08:14 LegalLord wrote: was a rather big show of faith, even after the one they lost. It was a big show of faith when it was awarded, since Falcon 9 hadn't flown before. It helped them secure commercial contracts, yes. But by the time CRS-8 failed, SpaceX had more than enough good will from their customers where NASA's "show of faith" hardly mattered. I suppose it's not a bad deal for NASA, though the mission they lost is definitely worth more to NASA than just the cost of the lost cargo. Probably still less than a single Shuttle flight though. As far as I can see NASA didn't really have a choice. It was either paying for some new and slightly riskier systems or continue flying the terribly expensive Shuttle. They didn't even have the money to develop a replacement and keep flying Shuttle at the same time. Hence the gap in US manned space flight. One thing is for sure, though: a big part of the reason SpaceX is still alive is because NASA threw a lot of money their way. SpaceX owes a lot more to NASA than the "SpaceX saved NASA money" crowd is willing to acknowledge. The point is that it was a mutually beneficial arrangement. NASA owes as much to SpaceX as SpaceX owes to NASA (or rather to Obama, for making NASA accept commercial space). | ||
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{CC}StealthBlue
United States41117 Posts
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LegalLord
United Kingdom13775 Posts
A careful reading of his document shows a very different view of things. Even the usual mix of SpaceX fanboys in the chat was partially willing to acknowledge that this was just twisting a "worst case" number into some sort of meaningful average launch cost. | ||
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CUTtheCBC
Canada91 Posts
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