The tanks on Falcon are welded using Friction Stir Welding, which was invented in the early 1990s.
The landing algorithm for the first stage uses convex optimization algorithms based on interior point methods, which were not available in the 1960s.
However, something very much like an expendable F9 could probably have been built in the 1980s. Simply evolving the Saturn 1B (which was cheaper, per lb of payload to orbit, than the Saturn V) could have easily beaten the Shuttle's economic performance.
But that wasn't the main problem with creating a new jet, which has a myriad of other issues before certification.
That one's a killer. I was once a project manager at an aerospace company developing a new processor chipset for space applications. Our government customer would run out of money near the end of every fiscal year, forcing us to shut down. Then a few months later they would secure funds and ask us to restart. By then most of my staff would have been reassigned to other projects. It was stupidly inefficient and caused costs to balloon.
I don't know how much it applies, but sometimes evolving something requires switching out components for other ones, which are more expensive. Not everything scales. Marketing isn't the only reason why 50% more capability often costs 100% more. I imagine with rocketry, you're often operating at the edge of the capability for certain materials and approaches.
H-1: https://en.wikpedia.org/wiki/Rocketdyne_H-1
Merlin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Merlin
The Merlin has considerably higher specific impulse and thrust/weight ratios. It also has very fast throttling, a necessity for vertical landing. And, it's remarkably cheap (less than $1M per engine). I don't have the figure for the inflation-adjusted cost of the H-1, but I suspect it was much more expensive.
Is this level of optimisation really needed? I thought most of the landing was having enough fuel margin and then running a PID control algorithm during the landing burn.
https://www.nap.edu/read/23659/chapter/10
https://www.nap.edu/download/23659
"SpaceX uses CVXGEN (Mattingley and Boyd 2012) to generate customized flight code, which enables very high-speed onboard convex optimization."
This is actually a great example of a true NASA spinoff, btw. Lars Blackmore was at JPL before moving to SpaceX. Landing on Mars and landing a first stage back on Earth aren't the same problem, but they're close enough for the work to transfer.
NASA is currently developing the Space Launch System (SLS) and has spent over $20b with almost nothing to show for it.
The dream was that the shuttle could be that system, but it did not turn out that way. And giving in to the 'sunk cost fallacy' they supported the shuttle for the next 40 years.
Arguably you could say we are 50 years behind where we should be. Unfortunately driving down costs is probably the hardest thing for any government organization to do. Given that there is no competition, no shareholders, no profit motive etc..
Not too say this isn't a big deal. Just that it's not all Elon and his wunderkind.
NASA has never been in the business of building tickets. Mercury went up on Army's Redstone, Gemini on Air Force Titan. Routine launches are on ICBM-derived Atlas and Titan.
Boeing and Douglas built Saturn V, Rockwell built the shuttle orbiter.
NASA and their bureaucracy have been sliding out of the "do" category for some time.
And think of the fact that all of this is nothing compared to what a fully-deployed StarLink will do, and what weekly or daily launch capabilities would mean for the U.S. armed forces. The number of satellites to shoot down in a war is going up, and the rate at which they can be replaced is also going up. Moreover, the cost of sending up new interesting military sats is going way down, which means we'll see greatly upgraded capabilities in many areas. Civilian science too will be benefiting greatly.
SpaceX's commercial and non-commercial competition is hobbled by subsidies. Ahhh, what a great demonstration that subsidies are dangerous to business. Otherwise, if they really wanted to, the competition is not that far behind SpaceX, and could catch up, and pretty quickly if they want to, but in the meantime, SpaceX continues to innovate and get ahead.
There is nothing wrong with fear, it's healthy to have a realistic view of things.
It doesn't take any courage to do something you aren't afraid of.
I think that’s a prerequisite to start a rocket company.
I believe this is backwards, SpaceX was created first and it was implied in the biography that it's more as if Tesla was the side project.
https://www.businessinsider.com/how-elon-musk-fired-tesla-ce...
Disclaimer: Long time TSLA investor
This is the part that's exciting for me. Whether it comes in the form of more space stations like the ISS or a much bigger and reinvigorated ISS, either way is a vital step in the right direction toward making humanity less beholden to a single planet.
Lots of challenges still to come, but this is a reminder that those challenges can someday be overcome.
I guess it’s inevitable.
They actually wanted to join the ISS effort, but were given a firm no and had no other option than to do pursue their own. [2]
I don't think we will see any other country-specific stations for a long time, but modular commercial stations that can be shared for research and potential business endeavors (hotels, specialized manufacturing, ...).
If efforts like SpaceX Starship actually succeed in very significantly lowering launch costs, that is. Right now it is simply not affordable either for nations or businesses. A single Starship would actually be a great temporary space station on it's own, comparable to the ISS in usable area.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_large_modular_space_st...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_the_International_...
But yeah, this is definitely a reason why I hope we can keep the ISS going and just keep building on it. Additional space stations should be for good reason (for example: orbiting the moon, or - my crazy dream scenario - one orbiting in the past-GEO graveyard orbit to collect and refurbish dead satellites).
That means we should allow China to participate in the ISS, too. There are some national security concerns, apparently, but we overcame those with the USSR/Russia, and China should be no different.
Realistically, maritime law might be a better reference, given that space stations and other spaceships are informally (if not formally) referred to as "ships".
There are a number of scary mould patches up there, and potentially other pathogens, with no real way to properly clean the whole thing.
But HN is consistent in admiring rocket launches without considering how pointless they are.
Bread and circuses. Nothing's changed since the gladiator days, have they?
The very presence of people on the ISS is "science". The whole point of the ISS is to investigate the effects of long-term space habitation on humans. Plus, the ISS itself is an experiment, demonstrating the feasibility of in-orbit assembly of complex human-habitable structures from individually-launched-and-deployed modules (on a scale far greater than its predecessor Mir). There are even recent examples of this, like Bigelow Aerospace's module demonstrating the feasibility of inflatable space structures.
On top of that, all sorts of other experiments take place on the ISS all the time. There is, mind you, a giant Wikipedia article listing the myriad of experiments done throughout the history of the ISS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_research_on_the_Int...
And SpaceX just brought back a bunch of samples from such experiments as recently as April: https://www.slashgear.com/spacexs-dragon-cargo-ship-returns-...
Not sure where you get the impression that the ISS ain't doing much science, but it's pretty trivial to find a plethora of information indicating the exact opposite.
The ISS orbits at only 250 miles, barely into LEO.
The wikipedia article has a long list of experiments, but the question is, "Do they actually contribute anything?"
Can you name one scientific result from an ISS experiment? I can't.
> the effects of long-term space habitation on humans.
Humans aren't colonizing anything in space. You've read too many scifi books.
Just because the experiments aren't as frequently cited doesn't mean they didn't happen at all, or that they're unimportant.
> The wikipedia article has a long list of experiments, but the question is, "Do they actually contribute anything?"
This one is vital to our understanding of how space radiation affects embryonic development, which is critical for space colonization: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experime...
Or this one, which tested various fire suppressants in microgravity to determine their effectiveness, which is critical for manned spaceflight safety beyond merely the ISS: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experime...
Or this one, where the Michael J. Fox foundation partnered with NASA to conduct research on the ISS to replicate a key protein involved in Parkinson's disease (LRRK₂) in microgravity, allowing for much larger and more uniform growth patterns than possible on Earth: https://www.michaeljfox.org/news/parkinsons-protein-blasting...
Or this one, which evaluated the risks of microbial contamination on interplanetary missions (which could jeopardize the search for extraterrestrial microbes on e.g. Mars) by examining microbes that survived on the exterior of the ISS: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22680691/
> Can you name one scientific result from an ISS experiment? I can't.
That only goes to show your lack of willingness to educate yourself on the matter. Like, a search engine ain't exactly hard to use; I was able to pull all those examples within a couple minutes.
> Humans aren't colonizing anything in space. You've read too many scifi books.
No, I've read "too many" research papers and NASA reports. Evidently you have read none.
Humans absolutely will colonize space. Obviously not right this second, but humankind has been making baby steps toward that goal for as long as it's known of the existence and the vastness of space, and there is no reason to believe that will somehow not continue to be the case. Earth won't last forever, especially at the rate we're destroying it; permanent space colonization is therefore not just an economic and scientific boon, but absolutely imperative for the long-term survival of our species.
SpaceX was founded in 2002, almost two decades ago
Now that we have Falcon 9 and Heavy moon missions are back on the table, but the Shuttle was incapable of supporting any effective Lunar mission profiles.
It was designed to recover satellites and bring them back to Earth safely as part of its military mission. Nothing Space X is offering has such a capability.
Different vehicles for different roles.
The shuttle was very well deigned for what it was intended to do, that's quite right, it's just a shame it was never used to perform one of it's primary tasks. However it also doomed the manned US space programme to operate exclusively in LEO for the vehicle's lifetime.
They can do it of course, Falcon Heavy could launch a car in the general direction of Mars. But they are limited by their use of kerosene in their 2nd stage and its low specific impulse compared to hydrogen.
BFR and it's Raptor engines are better suited for that purpose. But we don't have a BFR yet.
(1) As Dom Toretto always says, American Muscle beats Import every time ;)
It was ridiculously expensive. It was unsafe. And everybody knew that before it flew the first mission.
http://www.iasa-intl.com/folders/shuttle/GoodbyeColumbia.htm...
In theory a new entrant could achieve similar feats with lesser money . For example rocket lab is doing pretty well for their size with some real innovation based out of New Zealand! Extremely likely part of their staff would come from spacex ULA, NASA etc . Similarly spacex would have leveraged from ULA , NASA as well .
NASA also does help them in some areas as part of this program and others and also the money they (and others) have spent during the last 15 years especially without validation. Very few customers would invest in 10 year product development journey they way NASA has with CCS.
That would not possible without NASA’s own budgets being so large to support kind of projects like the shuttles and ISS in the first place . Only then the couple of billion they spent will look small enough to take that risk.
Rocket Lab isn't out of New Zealand, that's a popular underdog myth at this point. They're an American company, funded overwhelmingly by big US venture capital, that built their current technology primarily in the US.
The initial low scale efforts for Rocket Lab originated out of New Zealand, with sounding rockets. They moved to the US because they could go no further with the limited native aerospace and funding capabilities of New Zealand.
Their name is now Rocket Lab USA. Their headquarters has been in the US for most of their existence and progress.
And most of their efforts and expansion are now also focused in the US:
https://www.rocketlabusa.com/news/updates/rocket-lab-expands...
New Zealand didn't have the native aerospace engineering capabilities to build what Rocket Lab has. Most of the advanced engineering was done in California, leaning on the massive aerospace resources of the state.
Australia has only had its own Space Agency since mid-2018, and its budget is minuscule (less than 10 million AUD a year.) I think Australia should aim to spend a similar percentage of GDP on civilian (non-military/non-intelligence) government space spending as the US does. Given the US economy is about 13-14 times bigger than Australia's, this would suggest ASA's annual budget ought to be around 1/13th or 1/14th of NASA's annual budget, which would be at least 100 times bigger than ASA's budget is currently. It really is an investment in the future of the country, ensuring that it doesn't get left behind.
Now, before everyone goes huffy on me, I’m not trying to disregard everything that SpaceX has accomplished.
Also Tesla seems to be extremely focused on r&d.
How does Elon Musk push and run his organisations so differently that he seems to be one of the only few, if not only one, capable of running big organisations that are able to accomplish this extreme level of innovation paired with tangible results?
- he’s technical enough so that he actually understands what he’s doing (unlike a “non-technical cofounder”)
- working on actually inspiring projects (unlike “let’s sell ads” Google, “let’s make rich people richer” finance, “no innovation” Boeing or “Instagram for dogs” bullshit startups)
- he’s rich enough to be able to start his own company with extremely capable people, with less need to please the investors (at least in the short term)
- he’s actually driven, not just money/power-hungry like 99% of billionaires who use their wealth to buy goodwill/influence/art.
How so? Tesla spends a tiny bit of revenue on R&D and a solid chunk of that is on "research" grants that get converted to manufacturing grants (e.g. the NY plant).
See: https://ir.tesla.com/static-files/bbc6e137-897a-4543-857a-59...
Don't get me wrong, I guess there could be research spending elsewhere since Tesla is notoriously bad at financial reporting (e.g. the only company in history to double its factory count without increasing OpEx, or the only company in history to build a factory with zero CapEx spending), but I'm curious what the "extremely focused" claim is backed by.
Established companies have an expectation of success if they just keep doing what they are doing, so anything new is an unacceptable risk.
He seems to be able to benefit from the resources of a big company, while at the same time keep the fresh mindset of a relatively small company.
An actual non-monetary goal is what's missing, IMO, for most companies.
Money is more of a general goal, like happiness. Hard to stay focused.
The only non-reusable part was the external fuel tank.
But yeah, sending something as big as a bus up and down was probably the bane of it.
But to use them again a lot of efforts had to be spent, comparing to what's possible with first stages of F9. That's why Shuttle boosters are called refurbishable.
It turns out not having to "shuttle" half a dozen humans up to orbit every time you want to get something up there is a good idea.
Remember the shuttle "had to" be all things to all people, and the military demands ended up being VERY heavy and expensive.
At this time AFAIK nobody has the technical ability to snatch a Soviet spy sat and take it home, or haul strange and heavy (many ton) electronic warfare payloads over a target and land next orbit on NATO turf. Now, WHY you'd want to, or SHOULD you want to, are outside the bounds of this discussion, but the shuttle certainly had that kind of military stuff as a very expensive and very heavy design req.
At minimum, each mission had a commander and pilot. Then there were missions specialists and payload specialists, which depended on the specific mission the shuttle was carrying out.
There's always a lot of work to do, so it makes sense that they'd maximize for productivity.
Capacity to put mass into low orbit, but building a multipart space station requires far more than cobbling modules together KSP-style. Shuttle and the Canadarm(s) built the space station. SpaceX doesn't have that construction/manipulation capacity. It doesn't have the spacewalk capacity. To match Shuttle and build another ISS SpaceX would need to send people and cargo on the same flight, something that is certainly physically possible but remains logistically complex. NASA doesn't spend millions training astronauts in that giant swimming pool because they like the water.
If you think of all SpaceX has ever done was try to get to this point, with somewhere around 80 flights on the Falcon 9, but for a variety of mission buyers (NASA, USAF, Commercial Sat companies, SpaceX itself!), somewhere around $5b (~$60m a launch) has been spent getting an entirely new, ground-up manned space program up and running to include launch vehicle with a majority re-usability. But along the way, numerous satellites and other stuff ended up in space as well. This allowed NASA to also split the R&D bill with multiple "partners".
To put this into context, the Mercury program ran about $2.25b in today's dollars, Gemini ran $7.3b ($723m per mission!).
The Space Shuttle program had a lifetime cost of $209b ($1.5b per flight!!!) If you think the Shuttle program is not comparable, the F9Heavy program, a derivative of this other work, can put up more mass than the Shuttle, managed to split much of the development costs with the Falcon 9, can land most of its mass, and has a per flight cost of $90m.
We now have the capability to put up another ISS today, resupply it, and staff it, at a fraction of the cost, all with launch equipment made by a single company that started a decade ago as a side project for a guy who was trying to make electric cars after making money on the internet.
This is a ridiculous bargain and Spacex isn't even close to done yet.