The best example being Korolev, possibly the greatest rocket designer in history (certainly up there with Von Braun and Xuesen, and in my opinion more impressive), who died because he was sent to the Gulags by a bitter politician (this is an incredibly short edit of the full story, but that is a factual statement).
Korolev built working rockets the US said were theoretically impossible, and he did it because he couldn't afford to build the rockets the way the US were doing it. So he got resourceful.
Had he not died in 1966, I suspect the Soviets would have beat the US to putting a man on the moon.
I'm not familiar with that history, but I'm quite familiar with Corporate America. One thing I've seen is that when Engineering is great, it gives the company great momentum and allows the Management/"Business"/Strategy/etc functions to lag and get lazy. Good Engineering momentum essentially produces enough residual value for others to leech off from.
It's more of a stereotype to hate on "management" and is lazy thinking.
The engineers would have big problems if they spaceship doesn't work. The politicians are not idiots, its simply that they don't have the same goals as the engineers so the politicians seem like idiots to engineers.
> Had he not died in 1966, I suspect the Soviets would have beat the US to putting a man on the moon.
This is an false take. Many people have looked at this and it simply doesn't hold up. The resources they were investing was not big enough and having korolev couldn't have solved all the many problems they would have still faced.
They had some great engine technology but its a long way from there to the moon.
I'd be happy to learn more if you can point me towards some sources.
Quote from here: https://www.esa.int/About_Us/ESA_history/50_years_of_humans_...
> On 23 March 1938, Valentin Glushko was arrested. To reduce his charges he denounced Korolev, which resulted in his arrest on 7 June and a sentence of ten years forced labour. From that day on, the two men were bitterly opposed to each other.
So as you can see he was not sent to gulag out of spite by Stalin but out of envy and professional competition by his fellow rocket engineer.
While in gulag he was not tortured or sent to gold mines. He and other scientists continued their work in relatively comfortable conditions in so called "sharashka": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharashka
I'm not saying that Stalin was a saint or a winged seraph. But definitely he was anyone but an idiot.
Also Korolev did not died because he was sent to the Gulags. He died from a chronic disease from which he started suffering long before he was imprisoned.
My understanding is Korolev's health greatly declined because of his time while imprisoned, and had he never had to endure it he likely would have lived much longer.
I highly recommend Kotkin's books. You can jump into the second, Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941 if you want to learn more about him as a leader.
> They are depicted as complete morons by the western propaganda - it's true. But propaganda and reality are two completely different things.
They were not idiots, but their intensives didn't align with the goals of the engineers.
> “A high production rate solves many ills,” he said. “If you have a high production rate, you have a high iteration rate. For pretty much any technology whatsoever, the progress is a function of how many iterations do you have, and how much progress do you make between each iteration. If you have a high production rate then you have many iterations. You can make progress from one to the next.”
Why does it need to be super-large? To simulate gravity?
The rocket is already 90+% propellant (fuel & oxydizer), with the few percent left being the engines, structure and payload. So if you want the rocket to have a meaningful payload, it needs to be big.
For example the Falcon 9 weights 350 tons and can place 22 tons to low earth orbit (LEO). So about 6% of initial launcher weight ends up in orbit.
If you want to place the 100+ tons estimated for a reasonable Mars trip, your launcher will be either huge or you will need to do a lot of launches and assemble your ship in orbit with all the overhed that requires.
Starship also aims to be fully reusable, which will eat to your payload yet again but provides a huge benefit of not throwing away any part of your rocket, just burning a lot of propellant, which is dirt cheap compared to rocket hardware (estimates say about 5% of conventional rocket launch is fuel, the less is hardware that you normally simply crash into the ocean after use).
So in short - big payload -> big rocket. Reusable rocket with big payload -> humungous rocket that is really really cheap to operate.
In space vehicles, that means everything gets really, really big.
Launch vehicles tend to scale payload capacity at a greater rate than dry mass. So a small launch vehicle like RocketLab's Electron might have a wet mass of 12,000kg at launch and an LEO payload capacity of 225kg (225/12000 ~ 1.8% payload), the SpaceX Falcon9 has a wet mass of 550,000kg and an LEO payload capacity of 22,800kg (22800/550000 ~ 4.1% payload).
This just tends to mean that, very generally and with exceptions, larger vehicles can get mass into space with less fuel.
Rocket efficiency scales infinitely with size.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsiolkovsky_rocket_equation
But bigger rockets can get closer to that theoretical optimum because some dead weight components remain fixed-size and because some masses scale with surface instead of volume. Rockets can scale better than linearly with size, but they will never exceed the rocket equation.
What am I missing here -- I'm sure I'm overlooking something.
The R7 rocket
- mostly to avoid engine ignition in flight & due to having a lot of nozzles you need to fit on a rocket
- this was then kept for Soyuz even after an additional stage has been added that is started in flight
- Soyuz 2V uses a more efficient engine & uses only the central stage
The proton Rocket
- the central tank has the maximum diameter you can ship via rail from the factory to Baykonur
- by mounting smaller tanks around it that are shipped separately you can avoid building an overly long rocket, that could be fragile and unstable
Saturn 1/1B
- basically a stop gap using existing Jupiter and Redstone rocket tankage tooling
- strap 8 Redstone tanks around 1 Jupiter tank and you get the S-I first stage
Delta IV Heavy/Falcon Heavy
- you have a rocket that can launch by itself with smaller payload or by strapping 3 first stages together can launch a bigger payload
- better economies of scale as you can doe more with a single rocket design instead of maintaining 2 separate one (big and small)
- in Falcon Heavy case you can also save all the first stages from more demanding trajectories where you would otherwise have to expend the regular F9 first stage
OTRAG
- make dirt cheap and as simple as possible standardized "rocket tubes"
- strap a lot of them together
- fire and jettison in the right order to achieve orbit (check your staging! ;-) )
Poorly for the current market using a FH makes sense, but to break to another level, building one big rocket is better. Both the US Saturn 5 and the Soviet N1 were big single tube vehicles.
¹ Superlinear because tank mass scales with a lower exponent than tank volume.
I'm confused here. How are they not both cubic?
On the other hand, ten fuel tanks will mass more than a single fuel tank with ten times the volume.
The science, then, lies in identifying the hardest problems. The art lies in identifying people who can solve these problems.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/2zhad6/spacex_at_gp...
So trial and error, but virtually.
You're telling me we went to the moon on the first try? We went into space on the first try? The Wright brothers were successful on their first flight?
No, it was all trial and error.
So a trial and subsequent error.
The Webb Space Telescope is another example. If it eventually does launch and something goes wrong, we'll have paid >$10 billion for absolutely nothing. These aren't trial and error because the designs are never improved based on the errors. They're just scrapped. SpaceX works in a fundamentally different way.
> "We succeeded in launching the rocket," Zhang told the media. "The experience we gained from evaluating the rocket's flight conditions will help us remodel the rocket as well as advance new rocket research and development."
http://www.bjreview.com/Business/201811/t20181126_800149381....
Plenty of trials and errors here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_artificial_satelli...
For instance, looking at LandSpace - that quote relates to the launch of Zhuque-1, of which there has never been a repeat despite a maiden flight in 2018, and Wikipedia says that a second flight ever happening is doubtful. The company's second launch (and probably any after that, too) will likely be with a completely different, liquid-fuelled design.
THAT's what failure normally looks like in aerospace. Whoops, we fucked up, and so now that design never flies again, or the company goes bankrupt, or everyone panics and goes through a massive design review because everything was supposed to be perfect and now obviously it wasn't.
In this context, "trial and error" means SpaceX builds things out and tests them in real-life not virtually (as opposed to others that tend to validate things virtually for much longer before actually building stuff).
Everyone else is cush and doesn't want to rock the boat (SLS, legacy automaker leadership, etc). For those, innovation has no incentive. "Innovator's dilemma" [1] and all that jazz.
Disclaimer: Not a huge Musk fan anymore, "world's least worst billionaire", but credit where credit due. I don't endorse sweat shops, but he has teached a cohort to yearn for the vast and endless sea. He is a salesperson first, and he is selling the dream.
Less money? Less motivation? Less talent? The number of factors that contribute to success are unmeasurable, what a silly question.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_launch_market_competitio...
> SpaceX's market share increased rapidly. In 2016, SpaceX had 30% global market share for newly awarded commercial launch contracts, in 2017 the market share reached 45%, and 65% in 2018.
Tesla, according to the opinion of a single auto industry expert, has a 7 year head start against legacy automakers [1]. They sell every vehicle they build, and combined, legacy automakers have shed almost 40k jobs in the last year as they attempt to transition to building EVs to compete against Tesla.
A reasonable person might conclude these metrics indicate an achievement of some level of success.
[1] https://cleantechnica.com/2019/07/27/auto-experts-tesla-has-...
And with the Starship, they have gone to an extreme that even for SpaceX seems crazy.
There are tons and tons of interviews and podcasts with experienced people who worked there. Listing to those that came over from NASA is specially interesting.
"Just iterate, baby"
"I’ve spoken with plenty of the earliest engineers who worked at SpaceX, and almost all of them have noted that Musk tackles the hardest engineering problems first. For Mars, there will be so many logistical things to make it all work, from power on the surface to scratching out a living to adapting to its extreme climate. But Musk believes that the initial, hardest step is building a reusable, orbital Starship to get people and tons of stuff to Mars. So he is focused on that.
He knows he won’t get Starship right at first. He employs some of the smartest engineers on this planet, and they’re still, in many ways, fumbling toward solutions for the extremely hard problem of getting a super-large vehicle out of Earth’s gravity well into orbit—then to land it and fly it again. Musk has come to believe the only way to realistically achieve this is through trial and error, by iterating closer and closer to the right design."