Or perhaps they are losing people with the passion for the mission.
"How happy are people at this company?" is a non-negligible performance differentiator.
Yet somehow CEOs seem blindsided when everyone at a company hates it and is mailing it in. (Probably because they're only listening to the management chain, which is concealing the problem)
Amazon was pretty notorious for poor culture and high employee turnover yet the company performance has been stellar. Covid-era twitter clearly cared a ton about employee morale but the product stagnated.
I find it's often the opposite causality, IE the success/trajectory of the company is the primary component that determines morale. An increasing stock price makes employees happy.
Hard things fail from time to time. When you aim for something really at the edge of human enginuity, it might work or it might not, and if it works, it will probably still be a close call.
But somehow years ago already SpaceX and it's followers convinced everyone that Starship will definitely happen. And it still might, but if it does, I still think it will be a rocky road.
I would say SpaceX has been extraordinarily lucky for years (not in the sense that they fluked it, but rather that they achieved so much and made it look easy), and this is just reversion to the mean.
Note that Booster appears to be coming along pretty well. But Ship, which has a much, much more difficult mission profile than Falcon 9, is really struggling, because going to orbit and back is far more difficult than going most of the way to orbit and back. (Please forgive the abstraction - I don't have the relative numbers at hand.)
SpaceX may also have lost Musk as the referee who makes quick decisions and keeps things moving forward. I think people like Thorvalds, Gates, Jobs and Musk are a superpower for organizations. Their decisions may not always be perfect but at least a decision is made so people can proceed. Otherwise you end up with the usual committee decisions that take forever and are mostly driven by internal politics and not about the product.
So I’ve heard working for him can present challenges.
As it happened, the only people willing to pay von Braun to build rockets were Nazis, so (shrug) Nazis it was. If the Americans had recruited him in the 1930s, he would have become a loyal American and a credit to his adopted country, just as he ended up doing after the war. If Stalin had been willing to sponsor him, well, he'd have raised the red banner and become a loyal Communist.
There was never any point in prosecuting von Braun as a Nazi, or even thinking of him as one. Treating him as a war criminal, even though he technically was one, would have been a pointless, performative waste of badly-needed talent, like destroying captured V2s instead of studying them.
Elon Musk? He has no such excuse. Musk can be anything, do anything, say anything. He came to America early and made his fortune doing things that a lot of us respected and even envied him for. Then he chose to attach his name to far-right causes, throw Nazi salutes, and do the Kraft durch Freude dance at Trump rallies. Turned out Musk didn't care about building rockets or going to Mars quite so much as he cared about being an immature asshole. In that sense he took a path diametrically opposite that of Wernher von Braun.
So, yeah, if I worked for SpaceX, I wouldn't exactly bust my ass to make the leader's vision happen after losing trust in the integrity of said leader. I'd simply leave and find employment elsewhere, leaving behind people with fewer options.
Turns out skillset usually trumps justice, as long as you're willing to make the right post-hoc mea culpas.
As a developer I'll manually change those numbers if and when they appear.
however..
when he started spamming political misinformation on twitter i had to block him. very concerned he was burnt out and brainwashed into into politics. the nazi salute, then making nazi jokes about it, was just insane.
doge is a joke, he lost the plot.
now i barely check updates on whats happening at starbase, cheer on when the rockets explode, couldn't care less about tesla.. it's a real shame. all that great work by thousands of talented people in his companies..
he needs to resign from everything and go hide under a rock for a few years until he finally gets into orbit and burns up on rentry.
And Musk was personally responsible - not just for that atrocity, but for poisoning the world's leading progressive social media site, for being complicit in the neutering of countless world-leading science projects, for defunding basic research at NASA and firing hundreds of employees with solid achievements and genuine passion for space science, for gutting the FAA, and so on.
I cannot say enough unkind things about the man. The fact that he has any kind of following at all after the last year is both shocking and disappointing.
No, he did not. I still can't believe people bought his BS so easily - "it must be true, because he said it!" No, it isn't, never was, never will be. And I don't even care about that salute - Musk lost all his credibility around 2015 when he promised self-driving cars (coming next year! for the past 10 years, and counting), then by lying about the Solarcity roof tiles (and basically committed fraud for which he didn't go to prison - go figure).
It is also quite dehonestating to those _real_ engineers working for Tesla or Spacex, who actually know their stuff. It was them who made Musk possible, not the other way around.
> all that great work by thousands of talented people in his companies..
Exactly.
I still have to respect Starlink, accelerating adoption of EVs and the work SpaceX does. His businesses have reshaped several industries big time. It takes a lot of courage and insight to pull this off.
If you're loud, that collapses into a more realistic appraisal.
All the failures have happened with Starship v2, where the ambition is to put 100 tons to Low Earth Orbit. The previous design, Starship v1, was only (theoretically) capable of lifting 80 tons.
20 tons is a huge difference, basically what Falcon 9 can lift when launched in expendable mode.
We also have that Falcon 9 that blew in space due to a leak.
I think they're skimping on quality control.
https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/1lfayba/em_update_o...
So yeah, a QC problem, it seems.
It's not the most likely cause, but in a world where people have been torching Tesla dealerships, I'm sure there's a lot of people now who really want to see Starship fail.
This approach had worked with the R7 rocket (the Sputnik and Gagarin's booster, predecessor of Soyuz). But at this larger scale, it seems things break apart much easier if not properly tested in parts.
Also compared to Super Heavy & Starship, they had more stages (4 vs 2) and most importantly, were not able to test the stages separately - which was possible for the Saturn V & IIRC all its stages exploded on the test stand at least once.
Both Super Heavy and Starship can be tested separately & Starship exploded during such testing, without taking the rest of the rocket with it, like N1 regularly did - including demolishing the super expensive launch pad during at least one occasion.
I mean, I would note that the first stage of this has 33 engines (N1 had 30, Saturn V had 5).
I suspect that Musks desire to have everything reusable has severely eaten into those margins though. I personally think he'd have been better off making only the first stage ('booster') reusable for the first few years, which then lets you develop more things in parallel later (the first landers can be on mars whilst you're still figuring out second stage reusability)
Going fully reusable may change that equation, but first stage reuse probably isn’t enough to make the program even close to worthwhile.
It's pretty clear there is barely enough commercial launch demand for falcon 9 (it already has ~100% of the non-foreign launch market, and there isn't a huge amount of price elasticity), so no reason at all to develop starship, apart from humans in space.
The current wave of problems is likely caused by optimizations in the v2 of the rocket. Starship v1 was very conservatively built and mostly worked. They are trying to squeeze extra 25 per cent of payload capacity from v2 (from 80 to 100 tons on LEO), and they are running into the edges of multiple envelopes.
Raptor v2 BTW seems fine, the main issues are around the plumbing that feeds propellant into the engines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vectron_(locomotive)
Now that would be high-speed rail.
An Abrahams tank would be one designed to carry the Holy Hand Grenade.
:)
Why can't they be? NASA seems to test them on Earth. https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19960007443/downloads/19...
Government-run vs private-run (partially govt-bankrolled). Single use vs fully reusable. Moon vs Mars. Traditional development vs iterative ("hardware heavy") development. There's just no parallels whatsoever.
Will the result be the same? We'll see. But the history says don't bet against Elon.
Btw N1 was a failure arguably due to Korolev's death, not his ineptness.
I don't think the comparisons are very apt.
The parts are not what are failing. It's the overall system.
The wet (loaded with propellant) to dry (empty of propellant) mass ratio is determined via the rocket equation to be the exponential of delta V divided by exhaust velocity.
Certain parts of the rocket, such as the external tank structure, scale sub-cubically with the rocket's dimension, as do aerodynamic forces; whereas payload and propellant mass scale cubically.
Hence if the rocket is smaller than a critical threshold size, the requisite vehicle structures are too large relative to its propellant capacity to permit the required wet:dry mass ratio to achieve the delta V for orbit.
At exactly this size, the rocket can reach orbit with zero payload.
As the rocket increases in size beyond this threshold, it is able to carry a payload which is increasingly large relative to the rocket's total mass.
I understand vaguely that those operate and scale based on the area (a square function of their length) of their lifting surfaces, and are pulled down by their mass (a cube function of their length).
A little Estes toy rocket lifts off the pad much more aggressively (in the blink of an eye!) than a full size rocket...
(There's a large difference between staged combustion generally and gas-generator engines, which throw away performance by dumping fuel out of the turbine exhaust).
So there's some sort of curve, zero at both ends, between overall rocket size and the payload to orbit. The question is where Starship sits on that curve, and to your point it seems likely that it's looking good on that metric alone.
But then you have another curve that I think starts small and increases near-monotonically, which is the complexity/likelihood-to-fail factor to the size of the rocket. It's (relatively) easy to launch a toy rocket, (fairly) simple to build a missile-sized sub-orbital rocket, difficult to build a small-to-medium orbital rocket, and apparently very difficult to build a Saturn/N-1/Starship-sized rocket. More props to the crazy '60s team that pulled it off.
This doesn't follow. Engineering complexity is not a limit on payload to orbit, it is a fundamentally different parameter. Yeah building a mile tall rocket would be hard, but it would get a shit ton of payload to orbit. There is no maximum beyond which making a bigger rocket starts to reduce your payload to orbit.
> But then you have another curve that I think starts small and increases near-monotonically, which is the complexity/likelihood-to-fail factor to the size of the rocket. It's (relatively) easy to launch a toy rocket, (fairly) simple to build a missile-sized sub-orbital rocket, difficult to build a small-to-medium orbital rocket, and apparently very difficult to build a Saturn/N-1/Starship-sized rocket.
Complexity does not increase with size, people just become more risk averse with size. Toy rockets fail all the time, just nobody really cares. No one would bet the lives of multiple people and hundreds of millions of dollars on a successful toy rocket launch. If complexity increases, it is with capability. If you want to land on the moon, you need something a bit more advanced than a hobby rocket. There is no reason to believe a floatilla of physically smaller rockets capable of achieving any given mission will be less complex in aggregate than a single physically larger rocket.
(edits:) It's clearly not ideal for a short lunar landing, considered in isolation. But: what else would you do? Whatever you build, it would land on the moon perhaps once, and never again. Would you, being in charge, design a one-off vehicle for one or two moon landings—spend that R&D budget, in that way? That's not cheaper than 15 Starship launches; it's considerably costlier. (But the Apollo engineers didn't need to worry about this; it's was their express remit to spend $200 billion on one-off designs that would never be used again).
And: I hope no one suggests the "just make a unique lunar Starship variant that's simply a bit smaller". There's no "simply" resizing things in engineering. Recall that the last time Starship's length was altered by 2 meters, new mechanical resonances appeared, and it blew up three times in a row. Any "one-off" change for lunar landings is a less-tested, less-understood machine you'd be putting human lives on.
But it would also never land on Mars, so it would be a waste to build it for that. Build it for what it will actually spend its life doing.
Not saying SpaceX won't go to Mars, but if/when they do it will likely be several rocket generations later and possibly with specialized rockets, with a significant portion of it being one-time-use as you ain't returning.
for up to 0.8% US GDP per year. Today that would be $200B/year, pure spent. Where is Space X today is making, ie. it has a revenue, $15B/year.
>Perhaps web development is not the only thing that is susceptible to bloat.
similarly - web dev today can be done on $300 laptop by any schmuck. Even simple programming back then required a computer which cost a lot, and it was an almost academic activity.
Total lunar effort from 1960-1973, adjusted for 2024 USD: $326 billion
Launch vehicle costs (Saturn V): $113 billion
I think this is what should be compared against the total Starship program cost starting from 2020 until such time it completes 6 lunar landings (not counting SLS or other costs).
Or, for the year that Starship actually lands on the moon, compare against the Saturn V launch vehicle costs for 1969, inflation adjusted: $5.9 billion. See: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vTKMekJW9F8Z...
Source: https://youtu.be/Dar8P3r7GYA?si=RHZ8lWFYKrd7qQhy&t=321
0.8% US GDP in 1969 would be about 8B/yr today. Very different answer
The likes of SpaceX are reporting costs in the range of $15B/year because NASA front loaded the cost of trailblazing launch technology half a century ago, with the technology available half a century ago.
Let's not fool ourselves into believing the likes of SpaceX are reinventing the wheel.
Also, those $15B are buying a fraction of the capabilities of SaturnV, and while SaturnV was proven effective and reliable 50 years ago, here we are discussing yet another "anomaly". Perhaps half these "anomalies" wouldn't exist if they weren't lean'ed into existence?
That's what happens with most domains. At first people don't know the dangers and can go fast and loose: surgery, radioactive material, planes, cars, trains, rockets. Then people start losing their lives or part of their bodies to "easily preventable accidents". So some rules are enacted. Decade after decade, accident after accident, more rules, more red tape: things cost more, take more time. But you get a lot less victims.
So yeah, with a good budget and in a less strict country you could get something to the moon in no time. And potentially many people' parts all over your launchpads too.
Gas pipework: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pR486zloao0
Do you know the McMurdo permanent Antarctica base is costing us far more than the dogs, sleds, and tents of Admundsen and Shackleton? Incredible, isn't it?
Starship is “the program to build a permanent base in the moon”. It’s not even the only vehicle involved in the moon program. It’s a rocket designed to take astronauts from moon orbit to the moon’s surface. The astronauts will actually fly to the moon in SLS.
So far it’s proved incapable of being launched, attaining orbit, and returning to earth as designed. That’s without a payload.
It has no life support system built and is literally years behind schedule.
Rather than making progress it is being redesigned on the fly to mitigate fundamental problems with its capability which Musk laughs off as “moving fast and breaking things”.
The problem is we aren’t moving fast at all.
The rocket is a disaster. Saturn V was better by an order of magnitude and likely cheaper if you consider how much fundamental work went into creating it which is now easy to buy off the shelf.
Comparing the programs while ignoring the fact that hobbiest regularly reach the Karman line is deceitful.
Starship is doing this on easy mode and it’s failing.
No, OP is comparing a launcher that worked reliably (it's in the history books) with a launcher which never performed a mission and is reporting "anomalies".
That's complete nonsense. 10-15 Starship launches would land a lander that can carry like 100tons of payload orbit.
Saturn V landed 15000kg on the moon, but most of that isn't payload.
But of course with Saturn V you are throwing away a rocket that cost 1 billion $ or more per launch.
You are comparing 'thing lands on moon' to 'things lands on moon' without any nuance.
But you are right Apollo was insane in how fast it was done.
The burning question that I have now is whether a Starship explosion during lunar testing will be visible from Earth. I sure hope they would do it during a new moon too for maximum effect.
So yes, I suppose that is more inefficient, in a way.
The shuttle was a deathtrap. It had inadequate abort modes and a launch process that practically guaranteed minor (until it wasn't) damage to the heat shield during launch.
Classic example of https://danluu.com/wat/ --- the normalization of deviance.
STS crews were lucky that only two of the things got violenly disassembled.
Does Starship have launch abort boosters? Seems infeasible with the amount of fuel and mass on it since it also serves as a second stage, but maybe they solved that somehow?
Your arguments are strange, a mirage concocted to fit a narrative of denigration and darkness. You mock with zeal, yet have no point to the mocking.
Always with the mocking, you cause an ache which cannot be balmed. Cease, I pray you. Stop these machinations, this mad canter.
Falcon was built the same way. It blew up many times too, explosions aplenty. Now it is the most successful lift on the planet.
I think the only reasonable comparison would be after cost equivalency. The Starship has a long way to go, to catch up.
And Saturn V never had a military mission, neither had Shuttle.
Operations cost. They are sublinear on payload/size. At least this is what Space X/Musk seem to go for.
There's also many advantages to being able to lift something large/heavy in one go, rather than smaller payloads that need to be unfolded (like JWST) or assembled in space, which can drastically increase the development costs.
So far in history, we didn't have enough to launch. If the volume we launch increases then a larger rocket flying often is helpful.
We are at the peak of what a rocket the size of Falcon 9 can do. If you want full re-usability, the size helps you out quite a bit.
And hauling the 'orbiter' into 'orbit' is only wasteful if you can't reuse it. I would argue what's actually wasteful is throwing the second stage in the ocean, even when it costs minimum 10million $, and likely more.
Disagree. The overall Starship system's problems are obviously in Starship, not in the Super Heavy booster. The latter is far heavier. But it only has to do 2 things well - sub-orbital launch, and sub-orbital precision return. And the launch tower's chopsticks give it a lot of help with the latter.
Vs. the Starship has to do far more things - all of them mission-critical - while being ruthlessly optimized for weight.
I want to do Apollo again.[0]
We knew from the Soviet that it was going to be really hard but after the successful flights I thought they had it in the bag.
We might be touching on the limits of SpaceX constant tweaking fail fast approach.
But SpaceX's brand of rocket development is certainly exciting
I think about the countless engineering success stories I’ve read where you can tell the people involved were just living and breathing the problem.
https://www.comparably.com/companies/spacex/culture/seattle
https://www.comparably.com/companies/spacex/enps
U.S. tech companies are notorious for high turnover and SpaceX doesn't seem particularly bad.
Then again, they are launching tons of rockets, and any cult leader has his followers, so what do I know...
Especially with how hot the field is these days. I suspect "key" SpaceX engineers do not lack for lucrative offers.
I like the idea of hardware-rich development, but it seems they might have fiddled too much here or maybe just tried to go too fast.
If an engine blows up, because its pulling in bubbles, its not the engines fault.
I think Raptor 2 has a few issues still but as we can see on the booster, the can perform fine for what most rocket engines have to do.
The problems all started with v2.
Still in hindsight, a couple more flights to test the improved heat shield could help move that are forward & reduce some of the unknowns.
It doesn't mean the approach SpaceX is taking isn't valuable in some contexts, but it's certainly not the only method.
Sadly, this would make a rocket too heavy to reach orbit. So they end up being 1.1x stronger than anticipated loads. And it's hard to exactly anticipate loads. Vibration can add to a peak load, and it's notoriously hard to model how much vibration might happen. SpaceX rockets are filled with cryogenic methane at -160C, which causes everything it touches to shrink which creates forces between the parts that get cold and the parts that don't. A rocket-sized tank contracts by inches, but has to be supported by the structure around it. A single support member that doesn't move the right way can cause a fracture. So it's actually a hard problem.
As a result we got booster landings delayed by 20 years - and SpaceX would also not get there with Falcon 9 if they would call it quit after spcetacular failures (see Falcon 9R test bed).
This could be a "simple" production error (think "cracked pipe") which can be fixed with more effective monitoring of the construction, and not a major design flaw.
It might be someone forgot a wrench somewhere for what we know.
The real problem is the damaged infrastructure. They don't have several launch towers in the pipeline like they have Starships. This is a "pause and rebuild" scenario, with the wait time much harder to parallelize with something else. Whatever time they spend until they have the second launch tower functional, I'd bet about half of it will be an overall addition to the whole project.
There's a simple fault, and then there's the question of why did it happen anyway?
Good luck trying to get launch insurance for that without a full root cause and proof in double triplicate that this has been fixed.
Are you going to put you payload on one of those, a payload that will take 3 years to rebuild, and might end the company?
AMOS-6 was a pretty similar situation where a rocket exploded prior to a static-fire, and in fact is the reason that static fires are done without payloads, though Starship would not yet have a payload. The difficult to explain nature of the explosion, alongside some quite compelling circumstantial evidence, caused a theory of sabotage (sniping an exact segment of the rocket) to become widespread. Of course the cause here could be more straight forward to pin down - we'll know a lot more in a few days!
And also (IIRC) the reason Starship abandoned helium COPV tanks and switched to autogenous pressurization.
https://old.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1lf8huf/preli... ("Preliminary data suggests that a nitrogen COPV in the payload bay failed below its proof pressure...")
No wonder there's a v2 and v3 with much, much larger fuel tanks and less payload.
A three stage rocket is something you’d use for one-way missions with smaller payloads, or for putting something in GEO. Starship just isn’t optimised for those missions.
The only succesfull human spacecraft that landed on another body and taken off again used a three stage rocket to deliver a three stage lander,
The Command and Service Module(CSM) which brought the two stages into low lunar orbit The Lunar Lander (LM) contained a descent stage and an ascent stage, the descent stage was used as a platform for the ascent stage.
To say that three stage rockets are just for one way missions is silly, especially considering that more stages enable larger payloads. We've yet to see whether SpaceX's two stage solution will actually be any good. I also do not expect a single stage to the surface of the moon and back to Low Lunar Orbit to be very usefull. Any mars mission will likely follow the exact apollo staging plan.
The soviet plan (if they actually managed to get the N1 to work) was to take the upper stage of that rocket all they way to the Moon (fueled by kerolox BTW) and use it for the final braking burn of the LK lander[1], before eecting the stage to crash on the surface while the lander used its engine for soft landing.
And then the lander would launch directly to lunar orbit using the same (or backup) engine, not dropping any stages, just the landing legs. This was forced by the much lower carrying capacity of the N1. There was just one cosmonaut landing as a result, with another one in the "lunar Souyuz" staying in lunar orbit. So just 2 people versus 3 in Apollo. And there was not even a hatch between the two modules & the cosmonaut was supposed to spacewalk (!) between the two before landing and after meeting back with the Soyuz spacecraft.
So if you can realistically do a single stage to landing & orbit on a body, I'm sure it will be the preferred option going forward, it has a significant benefits.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LK_(spacecraft) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_7K-LOK
Starship is just not a good design for pushing a third stage into a transfer orbit by itself. It’s totally dependent on the idea of in-orbit refuelling and refuelling on Mars. Once you refuel it, the game changes completely.
It’s also not a workable solution for landing on the Moon without refuelling for the same reasons. In some ways the Moon is more problematic because you can’t manufacture methalox on the Moon.
Make rocket launches as frequent and routine as commercial plane flights. Whether they use it for Mars or Moon on Earth-to-Earth or anything in between is irrelevant, this will revolutionize entire industries.
Just look at the share of Falcon 9 comparing to all other launch providers, and that one is only half-reuseable. If they manage to get the StarShip right this will be a game changer.
This is a _very_ off-nominal outcome and the investigation will absolutely involve outside organizations and halting the program during the investigation until the investigation completes with a sufficient determination of faults and accompanying remediation plans.
The linked tweet literally says "it blew up", though. "Anomaly" is just a word used in rocket science lingo that makes for a funnier headline.
Delta 2 rocket exploded during launch, raining flaming debris everywhere and the announcer says we had an anomaly
Chinese static fire accidentally becomes not-static.
Unfortunately just on Twitter, haven't seen much elsewhere yet. But the link seems to work.
The frame of the video has a burnt in clock in the top left corner though, so if you get that to be about 11:01:50 PM CDT you'll be at the point of the explosion.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/1lf3g...
The crack propagation indicates that the line was a weak point on the structure. However, I'm surprised that it was already there. It's too early to make a reliable guess. But if I were to hazard one, I would say that the tank had too much pressure, well ahead of the explosion.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/1lf3g...
I guess how much of a setback this is will be determined by how much damage is there on the facilities and the nature of the cause of the explosion(do they need to re-work the next 6 already being assembled so it doesn't happen again?).
If we compare to the propulsive landing campaign for the Falcon 9 1st stage it's a bit more favorable. The first 8 attempts had 4 failures, 3 controlled splashdowns (no landing planned) and 1 success. I think in general it felt like they were making progress on all of these though. Similarly for the Falcon 1 launches they had 3 consecutive failures before their first success, but launch 2 did much better than launch 1. Launch 3 was a bit of a setback, but had a novel failure mode (residual first stage thrust resulted in collision after stage separation).
Starship Block 2 has had 4 consecutive failures that seem to be on some level about keeping the propellant where it's supposed to be with the first 2 failures happening roughly in the same part of the flight and this 4th one happening during pre-launch testing.
Even if Starship turns out to be a dumb idea the super heavy booster already seems like it might outperform SLS as a reusable heavy-lift stage.
(It'll still be fucked, I just wouldn't expect a crater?)
Still, there was probably more energy stored in the Starship propelants than in the Falcon 9 case.
I really don't get people who be like "Lets undermine all humanity's progress because I don't like Elon Musk". Don't know if you are so stupid or so cynical, but I'm sorry for you anyway.
Importantly this was a test pad a few miles away, not the main launch pad.
I can't really comprehend this statement, since it appears, in a spectacular fashion, that there's some useful information to be learned involving the top half of the ship, especially the flammable bits that you can see burst out before igniting. A rocket ship isn't just its engines, it's a system, with all the bits of it being not only useful, but entirely necessary.
However, that is absolutely not what they were testing for. Whatever the test's purpose, this failed to actually test it.
What they were hoping to test never got started.
To start with, Falcon 9 and Starship may share some technologies. But they use different engines, engine cycles, propellants, structural materials and dynamics and even manufacturing processes. SS and Falcon are more dissimilar than any other two launchers I've seen from a single company. There are a lot of design data and procedures that you simply can't carry over from one to the other. The only thing you can realistically carry over is the zealousness with which the design and production quality is enforced. But problems like the repeated failure of the Starship fuel lines raise questions about that zealousness. (In my experience, a traditional space industry facing such issues during the development phase would simply throw out the propellant circuit design and start from scratch, paying more attention to its structural integrity. Frankly, I've seen worse. But that approach is present in the Raptor design. Look how different v1, v2 an v3 are.)
I think everyone here knows that the 'move fast and break things' culture has its roots in the agile development methodology from the silicon valley. Meanwhile, the traditional space development methodology has its roots at NASA. It's even more rigorous than the waterfall methodology used in the software industry, with numerous levels of elaborate reviews for designs, test plans, tests results, integration, schedules, status and even the documentation. From what I understood, the agile methodology is optimized to maximize revenue in a project where the underlying tech stack is reasonably well understood and proven. But it's a poor match for a project where the costs, stakes, complexity, subsystem interdependence, uncertainty in subsystem reliability and lack of engineering margins are all very high. Space launcher is the poster child of such projects. Agile is not even suitable for software projects where you're developing something novel and complex.
The main problem with Agile is the 'let's push to production and see what fails' approach. I'm aware that there are elaborate QA procedures to augment the methodology. But the project is much more tolerant to QA failures. Unlike that, you can't simply leave a flaw in a launcher or its subsystem design and hope to resolve it later. Such flaws are technical debts that will stay hidden for a while and then fail spectacularly on a random day, like the holes in a Swiss cheese. Remember that subsystem interdependence is very high. Failures cascade in ways you couldn't have dreamt of. And the required corrections are elaborate, costly, time consuming and often spanning multiple subsystems. The only reasonable way to manage so much uncertainty is to design meticulously for all foreseeable failures from the start, validating those assumptions at every step of the way (This is why they sometimes throw away faulty designs entirely). And that takes a lot of time and focus. The current approach of 'we will launch in one month to make up for this failure' makes me a bit uncomfortable.
I'm not trying to dismiss SpaceX's approach outright. The biggest aspect of any launcher development is the management of complexity and uncertainty. Perhaps they will find a good way to do that without slowing down. They sure have a lot of smart and hardworking employees. But if I were asked to manage one again, I will choose the NASA style again over the agile style. I'm not smart enough to manage with any other method, the level of uncertainties and complexities I expect from a mid-heavy launcher design, much less something like the Starship. Remember that the management culture was one of the hottest topics in the investigation of the Challenger disaster. Perhaps it's a good idea to revisit the findings of that investigation, as well as the venerable and effective Apollo design philosophy.
> Remember that the management culture was one of the hottest topics in the investigation of the Challenger disaster. Perhaps it's a good idea to revisit the findings of that investigation, as well as the venerable and effective Apollo design philosophy.
IIUC, the goal of SpaceX's "Agile" approach to lower the costs of putting payloads into orbit via launch vehicle reuse by amortizing the R&D and equipment cost over multiple profitable launches. They are searching for the cheapest route to achieve large payload space launches.
NASA's goal in the Apollo program was to spend whatever was necessary in order to match and surpass the Soviets' accomplishments. While I don't doubt they were scrappy when necessary, I suspect that the reputational cost of repeated failures (to the country and individuals) was such that it was worth investing time into "getting it right". When fatal failures happened, it was treated as a national disaster and the dead are today considered heroes: https://www.nasa.gov/mission/apollo-1/
Today nobody would even consider risking their lives (nor be asked to) in the way that the Apollo astronauts did, perhaps because the goals (for profit or the mars-fantasy) are considered to be less virtuous.
Perhaps the quality control doesn't need to be as high when you perceive there is less at stake and you can just do it again and again (until the money runs out). That's not to say that this approach won't eventually work, but the motivations and guiding narrative seem to be really different than in the past.
> IIUC, the goal of SpaceX's "Agile" approach to lower the costs of putting payloads into orbit via launch vehicle reuse by amortizing the R&D and equipment cost over multiple profitable launches.
An issue that's deeply intertwined with reusability is reliability. We put absolute emphasis on reliability with expendable launchers. But if you think about it, this is even more paramount in the case of reusable launchers. Hardware tends to degrade overtime, increasing the chance of triggering any design or manufacturing flaws. Expendable launchers need to contend with this only once and for a short time. Reusable launchers have to deal with it over several flights, several structural and thermal cycles (causing fatigue cracks) and a large accumulated operating time. Periodic maintenance can eliminate some flaws - but not design flaws. Launchers also tend to be very sensitive to design flaws, due to the very low engineering margins available. So, there is a bigger incentive here to get it right in the first try itself. (For example, consider the fact there are fewer entities with the capability to build the common turbofan engine than to build a rocket engine.)
Another point is that the agile methodology banks on one particular behavior of software. They rarely degrade over time (unless you manage to leak resources wildly). This makes it amenable to rapid trials, failures and corrections. The cost of experimentation is also minimal, since you don't lose hardware in the process. But in hardware projects, many flaws show up only after an extended period of testing. The trials and corrections are also costly and strenuous.
> They are searching for the cheapest route to achieve their goals.
You may have realized by now what I'm trying to convey. I'm not sure if the agile method is the cheapest route in space tech.
Presumably this was all well understood from history/experience before they applied Agile approaches to space launch. What changed that made this a plausible way to proceed? Some fundamental breakthrough or just Musk's deep pockets?
I have to ask if the world needs 365 $100mm fireworks each year.
Fortunately, the rules in well-functioning societies do not allow anyone other than the owner of something to decide how it should be used.
This very same individual was until recently trying to highlight frivolous government spending, surprisingly coming up short, obviously it'd be very cynical of me to suggest even a hint of hypocrisy let alone a conflict of interest so I'll leave it.
The thing detonated from the top down... that was spectacular. Anomaly doesn't really describe that very well.
> the entire program regresses in on itself in terms of milestones.
The alternative would be looking at the competing programs from Boeing, Blue Origin, etc. It's not like they are hitting their milestones particularly well with their more traditional waterfall approach. The point of rapid iteration is that it is an inherently open ended process that has no milestones other than to launch the next iteration within weeks/months of the previous one. Which they have been doing fairly consistently.
If SpaceX gets starship in a launcheable and recoverable state, they'll still have many years of competing against competitors that have to rely on single launch vehicles exclusively. They would be very early to market. And there's a decent chance they might start nailing things with a few more launches.
Now they have regressed to blowing up on the pad during static testing.
Seems very different to me than the Falcon story, 100%. Granted, they had luck too.
Is Blue Origin following waterfall? Why would the founder of Amazon follow the polar opposite strategy of the rest of his businesses?
But there seems to be a lot of progress in reusable launcher development outside the US, mainly in China and apparently also among Japanese car manufacturers!
