True, but they are failing very, very, slowly.

The big difference between NASA and SpaceX lies in how fast they each move, and what they are failing at.

Failing at launching the first private rocket on a tight budget, at landing a rocket for the first time, or at iterating on rocket designs at pace rarely, if ever, seen before is expected. As a matter of fact, it’s success that isn’t expected.

Failing at making yet another (very expensive) rocket built by supposedly experienced manufacturers overseen by a huge public organisation over more than a decade with huge funding? Well, it’s a bit disturbing to say the least.

SpaceX learns by doing, not by years of expensive analysis that ends up not preventing failure anyway.

SpaceX's approach also deals with the real problem, which is a program having the wrong goals, rather than making mistakes in working toward a given goal. How many of you have built a product that ended up working great, but was a failure because it was the wrong product?

Waterfall got us to the moon. Agile will get us to Mars...

Lore suggests that that's a misconception, born of the Agile myth that the only thing that existed before the invention of either XP or Scrum was waterfall.

The truth is perhaps more like this: agility got us to the moon, bureaucracy trapped us in low earth orbit, agility seems to be offering our best hope at getting back out of LEO again, including to Mars.

For example, see https://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240112230/Interview-Fro...

Congress and the Nixon administration trapped NASA in LEO. There was extensive planning inside NASA for applications of Saturn-Apollo technologies [0]. Two of the ambitious ones were a manned Venus flyby [1] and a permanent Lunar base [2]. After the Apollo I fire Congress lost its appetite for space and slashed NASA's budget [3]. The Nixon administration went all-in on the Space Shuttle which ate up all of NASA's manned spaceflight budget. Skylab and the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project were the only AAP projects to survive and only at the cost of Apollo missions 18-20.

The Saturn-Apollo program had a super-heavy lift rocket (Saturn V), a man-rated heavy lift rocket (Saturn IB), a Lunar trajectory capable command and service module, a lunar lander, and a workable wet workshop space station (Skylab).

Congress tossed all of that away. The Space Shuttle program wasn't a bad idea, a heavy lift vehicle that provided a shirt sleeve environment but could support EVA is actually an awesome thing for LEO. But Congress scrapping Saturn-Apollo trapped NASA in LEO because the Shuttle was only capable of LEO. It's not a platform that can support manned Moon missions let alone any more distant bodies.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Applications_Program

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manned_Venus_flyby

[2] https://www.wired.com/2013/11/moonbase-apollo-1968/

[3] https://www.wired.com/2012/08/before-the-fire/

Not only that, but the nuclear rocketry program for Mars was making breakthroughs like the nuclear lightbulb hybrid reactor & closed loop rocket engine [1] - that the public wouldn't see until declassified papers hit JPL's archives in the 2000s. This program was cancelled by Nixon, setting us back at least half a century.

[1] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19730003970

Not really a setback, because there was no place for that technology. Lack of space reactors wasn't and isn't a roadblock. Had that development continued it would have been largely wasted, and the knowledge gained would have decayed away.

It easily functions as a self-breeding terrestrial reactor that reaches criticality with 1/500th to 1/1000th the fuel of existing nuclear reactors (~20kg). The design requires active power that shuts down the reactor on failure, making any accident a complete nonevent. It can even be kickstarted without huge amounts of enriched fuel with the addition of a neutron gun (which they used to test the design without nuclear fuel). The core infrastructure required to support such a reactor are also covered by far less red tape (mostly centrifuges).

It would have changed the face of power generation at a critical time for climate change if it was allowed to reach fruition. Instead it was locked away in UTC & NASA archives.

The requirements for a space reactor, and for a terrestrial reactor, are radically different. No space reactor will make sense for terrestrial power generation. The temperatures are different, power density is different, safety cases are different. A 20kg reactor likely needs highly enriched fuel (space reactors are typically fast reactors too, so we're talking about something that's almost a bomb there.)

An external neutron source does not greatly change the needed enrichment (since any practical subcritical reactor would still need k fairly high, so it is only a bit subcritical.)

Just read the papers. There are dozens on that archive covering the design, theory, and testing - all of those issues are covered. 20kg is actually a high number optimized for a certain plasma temperature that radiates in UV without losing criticality. All things being equal (enriched uranium hexafluoride), at higher temperatures and pressures the reactor needs far less fuel but it causes too much degradation to the reactor walls to be economical or useful except in cold boots.

The terrestrial reactor and the rocket engine versions are different in how they transmit power from the reactor core to do useful work but not radically so - the core irrotational vortex compressing a high temperature plasma in a single crystal beryllium oxide chamber is the same in both designs and has been tested. The difference is in the cooling gas - hydrogen gas seeded with tungsten nanoparticles to absorb the black body radiation of the plasma for the rocket and water going through a steam turbine for terrestrial power generation.

It was the unsustainable expense of the Apollo architecture that did that. The decision to cancel was driven by that, not by a "lack of will".

It would have made some sense to incrementally improve some parts of that architecture (like the Saturn 1B, for example) rather than going down the Shuttle rabbit hole.

In theory the shuttle promised sustainability. But as the years went by it proved to be more expensive and almost 5x deadlier than the Apollo stack.

The shuttle did make sense for some things it was never used (DoD influence there) and it was an incredible piece of technology. It was also the workhorse for a big part of the ISS. But then again, that all happened in LEO, and different things could have been achieved by just iterating over Apollo/Saturn, in LEO and further away.

The engineers knew from the beginning that the Shuttle made no sense. The mission numbers used to justify it were always absurd and assumed a flight rate that they knew wasn't going to be achieved.

Had NASA engineers actually build a better design for Space Shuttle, lots of budget would have been available to do more. The Space shuttle could have done much more much better things if it was designed differently.

And had my father had two X chromosomes, he'd have been my mother. There has to be a reason to entertain contrafactuals; you can't just state them and assume that outcome would have been likely.

The point here being that it was not bureaucracy or the government that trapped NASA in LEO. It was NASA own design process.

Blaming everything always on the congress/president is a way for NASA to never take responsibility. All the success gets credit to NASA but failure is always somebody wrong doing.

The point I was making was there was no plausible way the shuttle could have been designed so it would have been successful.

Totally disagree. With the same budget a much more successful vehicle could have been built.

Simple changes like not going for hydrogen, separating main engines from Shuttle itself, not using hydrogen on the first stage, vertically mounted shuttle and so on.

No, I don't think so. The underlying problem was the Shuttle was a One Big Bite attempt at developing a very complex technology. That doesn't work. Development of something like that has to be iterative. Shuffling the deck chairs with different propellants wouldn't have made any difference.

Fair enough.

I was making a commentary more of what I see the difference between NASA vs SpaceX's approach today. I wasn't around for Apollo, and given their crazy compressed timeframe for getting to the moon back then, there must have been some agility there....

I was really agreeing with the previous commenter, which I guess is a statement about today, and not how NASA operated in the 1960s...

> SpaceX learns by doing, not by years of expensive analysis that ends up not preventing failure anyway.

My mistake for invoking the Agile vs Waterfall debate... (and potentially being wrong!)

Agility, sure, but don't confuse agility with agile

Agile <> agile. In tech jargon, this particular word is case-sensitive.

The Gemeni and Apollo projects were very iterative, and rife with failures.

They launched a new mission every few months!

Apollo burned downed and killed the crew, the next Apollo was up a few months later! The second moon mission was launched a few months after the first.

1960's NASA was a little bit like SpaceX.

That said - we should remember that Space X is iterating on already established tech, at somewhat of a smaller scale. They started smaller. Let's see how it works with their newer, bigger gear that is breaking boundaries.

'Daily standups on Mars' that would make an epic show.

> True, but they are failing very, very, slowly.

I can’t argue with that!

SpaceX gets tons of government funding, while NASA’s was greatly cut over the years..

SpaceX get tons of revenue for selling a product to NASA. This isn't subsidy, this is purchasing a service SpaceX developed on their own.

Why shouldn't NASA take advantage of technology developed by others? NASA has saved a lot of money through this.

What a bunch of nonsense. Please actually inform yourself before just saying things.

NASA budget has actually gone up over the last couple of years.

SpaceX got funding from NASA. So literally part of the funding NASA got was from the NASA budget because NASA bought things from SpaceX.

And SpaceX gave NASA some of the best deals in the history of spaceflight.

SpaceX made failure part of its strategy. Rocket explodes, no big deal, we expected that, the next one is ready.

NASA is not like that, they are more conservative, spend a lot of time and money making sure things work the first time, so when they don't, then it is a problem.

This, BTW, is one thing that killed Armadillo Aerospace.

> Carmack said another mistake the company made was not to go into series production, making several versions of the STIG rockets simultaneously so that the loss of a single vehicle would not be as traumatic. “That was our critical mistake in the last few years, because we should have been able to put more of these together,” he said.

It is not that NASA doesn't have the right to fail, but in their case, it is a major setback, and it is a bit disappointing considering how much SLS went overboard.

Wasn’t this simply a byproduct of Congress trying to control the process? The idea of hard deadlines and low risk.

Apparently they only have until Feb to try to test it again to make sure they can launch this year. That sounds like pure political pressure instead of organizational culture.

Congress tried to cancel this whole test to speed things up so they were apparently fortunate to have done this test at all.

No, it's a pathological NASA problem. It does involve Congress and the public indirectly, since they're both terrible at statistics and mission failures have a huge impact on NASA's budget. Mission success has diminishing returns at about 80% chance of success so (as an example), NASA can spend $250 million on a mission with an 80% chance or $500 million for a 95% chance. The probability of two $250 million missions failing is 4% but the public only looks at the absolute number of failures instead of absolute number of successful missions or their cost so NASA decades ago learned to err on the side of extreme caution for self survival.

This style of risk management has trickled down across the entire agency, compounded by pork barreling, so now pretty much everything NASA does is done as a one off trying to optimize for least number of total failures at the expense of productivity.

They are very different kinds of failure though... This was not an exploratory "try something new" test. This was an integration test to verify that all the "on paper" work was correct. The whole point of SLS is that its use of technology with extensive "flight heritage" is supposed to avoid having to break new ground.

This is like discovering a major issue during the shakedown cruise of a new ship. It's better to find the issue now, and that's why they test, but the point of this test wasn't to learn anything new, it was supposed to just prove that it works as expected.

SpaceX is generally very up front about tests that they think have a high likelihood of failure, and the tests that do fail tend to be doing genuinely "new things" (like belly-flopping a booster).

I'm not a SpaceX fanboy here (I think Elon in particular is pretty insufferable), but it's not really to fair to compare SpaceX's development testing failures with this integration test failure.

I don't think the negativity is directed at NASA so much as Boeing. They've made a business out of grifting, and this is just another example of it.

Shelby is more concerned with staying in office than making advances in space, and it shows. That's not NASA's fault, they're trying to do the right thing IN SPITE of the political pressure to waste money in order for a politician to be able to claim he's "creating jobs" in his state.

http://innerspace.net/congress-2/richard-shelbys-war-against...

NASA probably could be as nimble as SpaceX if they didn’t have to rely on Congress, whose goal is not to build a successful rocket, but to spread the money funnel across the States. Imagine if SpaceX’s board suddenly said “the company’s goal is now not to get to Mars, but to employ as many people and contractors as possible in all 50 states!” You’d basically get NASA.

So basically... government could be as efficient as the private sector if it wasn't government?

It could be a lot more efficient if they stopped trying to be subtle and instead spent more time thinking.

Openly admit NASA is a basic infrastructure assurance program, much like the Interstate highway system is. (Yes, it's Military capable infrastructure, for moving troops and stuff around. It turns out that useful infrastructure improves overall economic fitness and activity as well.)

Then group up all of the infrastructure spending and make sure it gives every citizen roughly equal value. Sometimes this can be justified in lower shipping costs for produced items from farms and backbone redundancy across the country. Other times it's connecting land and sea ports to the cross country grid. Evaluating a fair share of the commons and of resources to maintain the commons is a hard problem.

NASA also falls under various civic services the government proves because it makes sense for just one place to do the work; or at least for a baseline that private entities can compete against. The distribution of these programs also forms part of the weight to balance government improvements programs among areas.

It’s not the fact that they are government, it’s that the incentive structure is wrong.

Companies are incentivized to make money. In this case, the government is incentivized to provide lucrative contracts to contracted corporations.

In the 60s, when a different incentive existed, the government (i.e. NASA) was incredibly efficient.

I don't think that's a charitable reading of the GP. More like "the government is aiming for something other than efficiency, and it gets what it's aiming for".

If the government were aiming for efficiency, we might see NASA taking a different path.

I agree that it isn't the goal, but that's part of the point.

And I don't necessarily think it's always a bad thing for government to government, especially for a program that ultimately has so much of an impact on military capabilities and national security.

But it's also disingenuous to say "We could if we wanted to."

The private sector fails all the time. The problem is not government/private. The problem is large organisations with wrong incentives.

My point isn't so much that private sector can do things efficiently (certainly not always), so much as government generally can't, especially starting from a point of inefficiency.

Yes it's a matter of incentives. The problem is saying incentives for government work could change, is very different than them actually changing. Some of those incentives are inherently rooted as part of what makes government... government.

It's also important to note that while NASA might make multi-year plans they have to deal with a yearly budget from Congress and Congressional mandates. NASA has a relatively small budget but a lot of different tasks, manned spaceflight is only one of those.

They have to drop whole missions after years of planning and construction because the next year's budget is a billion dollars short. It also pushes out things like SLS development because some scheduled testing or purchase gets pushed to the next fiscal year.

Difference is SpaceX welded some tanks on a field. This program spend 20 billion over 10 years designing the whole system on paper with very little iterative testing.

This not a prototype, this is the actual rocket that should fly. It has already spent over 1 year on the test stand to do 1 static fire. SpaceX did 3 static fire in ONE DAY last week.

Consider this, when SLS started development SpaceX Starship literally didn't exist on paper, the engines didn't exist, the facilities they were built in didn't exist, they didn't even have approval to build facilities.

So SpaceX designed a totally new engine, a engine mass manufacturing line, multiple new test stands, designed threw many iteration on the Starship design, build a totally new private space port with a huge manufacturing facility. All of this was done for a budget that is less then what SLS gets PER YEAR and not just a little less.

One year of SLS development could have likely funded all of SpaceX research and development over the last 10 years.

NASA simply should not build its own rocket. And even worse they should not blow unlimited amounts of money into these contracts while they are showing absurdly bad performance. In fact, I think the government should systematically be compensated with stocks of these companies when they go over budget and over time by this amount.

The whole program is political, it serves no function. Payloads like Europa Clippers are fighting politically for the right NOT to launch on SLS. Having SLS around forces NASA into suboptimal moon architectures. SLS is a political straight-jacked for NASA. With the SLS budget alone so many amazing project could be funded, it is hard to even comprehend.

We can 'cut the slack' on this issue, but the issues keep coming and the rate of delay is pretty crazy and the cost are even crazier.

> Let’s not forget also that it’s NASA who have also drastically changed their strategy and have enabled private companies like SpaceX to shine through their partnerships.

Fantastic, totally agree. Lets do more of that, and less giving Boeing and LM money for not performing well.

I don’t mind failure and I understand there are going to be setbacks. I just wish they would fail faster. I love NASA and all they’ve done but 10 years of SLS without a launch makes me doubt this thing will ever get off the ground. With a new administration, I feel like we’re one setback away from the whole thing being cancelled.

> I don’t mind failure and I understand there are going to be setbacks. I just wish they would fail faster.

I do agree with this. I just took issue with the lede being “rocket test fails” as if that’s a bad thing.

The underlying points are all valid, speed, cost etc but a failed test is not the thing to be focussing the argument on in my view.

SLS proponents have been claiming that all of the extra time and money spent on process and formal verification would lead to a rocket that works without having to do lots of trial-and-error like SpaceX. Heck, even the name of the test campaign, the "Green Run," kind of reflects this hubris and shows that NASA expected the tests to largely be a formality.

Doesn't a green run refer to a beginner level course? Like a practice ski hill?

I didn't realize there was any other way to interpret it besides "getting green (successful) results for all of the tests" (there are 8 test stages planned). I think we're both wrong though:

"The term “green” refers to the new hardware that will work together to power the stage, and “run” refers to operating all the components together simultaneously for the first time." --https://www.nasa.gov/exploration/systems/sls/green-run-test-...

I still think these tests should be run more than once though, the RS-25's were originally reusable anyway.

So I listened to a podcast about this... but SpaceX and Boeing/NASA are explicitly taking two different approaches to proving their rocket will work. Obviously we know SpaceX is proving their rocket through system level tests. But for SLS the plan has been to use a long accepted NASA approved method of proving their design where individual parts are so thoroughly tested and proven to work that they don’t need many flight tests of the full system. In fact I believe the original plan was one flight test without humans and then have the second flight be a manned mission! So they really aren’t supposed to fail like this.

So at the core are two different approaches to proving their system, where SpaceX totally expects some failures and SLS is supposed to be proven before it even flies. Personally I’m a fan of the SpaceX method but I can understand why the old guard space developers would choose this slower more cautious method.

Would you mind sharing a link to the podcast? It sounds interesting!

I tried to find it a bit but I’ll do a more thorough search to see if I can figure out where I learned this. I’ll let you know if I find it.

EDIT: Did a thorough google search and looked through my podcast lists but I haven't been able to find it. I did find this podcast in my listening history which may or may not cover the topic, but unfortunately I don't see a transcript I can search through:

https://theorbitalmechanics.com/show-notes/ella-atkins

Appreciate you looking for it! Will give that episode a listen.

Failure at NASA isn't like failure at SpaceX. This was the culmination of 10 years of simulations and pork jobs. For SpaceX its the culmination of a couple weeks of wielding on a tent using private money instead of direct public funds.

My impression is that the big difference between NASA's human spaceflight program and SpaceX is that, where NASA has failures, SpaceX has stretch goals that weren't met.

This is an unfortunate consequence of any insufficiently iterative development process.

Adding to your comment, this closing made me sad: "So what had been viewed as a strength of the program, using heritage hardware, instead became a liability. Saturday was only the first real hardware test for the rocket. It cannot afford too many more liabilities like those on display."

If anything they cannot afford _not_ to have more failures like that. In fact on the spectrum of failures this one was near the best possible outcome since something was learned without destroying the entire assembly. But with this kind of reactive thinking they may turtle up and slow down progress until the program gets canceled.

> Let’s not forget also that it’s NASA who have also drastically changed their strategy and have enabled private companies like SpaceX to shine through their partnerships.

That's because they're required to by law. There's an entire section of the United States Code that's dedicated to this.

> A lack of failure is a sign of a lack of trying anything new.

I may just have blindspots in my history knowledge here, but the moon landing was pretty much an unqualified success, no?

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make?

My comment (in support of NASA) was that an isolated test failure shouldn't be looked upon as a failure of their entire programme. Instead it's actually a signal of progress being made (however slow that progress may be).

There were plenty of isolated testing failures like this (some much worse) leading up to the moon landing.

It did go very well overall, but 3 astronauts died in testing (totally avoidable), several of the test-launches of the rockets didn't go to plan, and later Apollo missions had various incidents.

It was a pyrrhic success. It was so expensive it was a dead end.

Its actually wasn't. If you actually look at the cost involved. Putting all the funding into Shuttle simply made the Apollo architecture to expensive.

A much, much, much, much better strategy would have been to keep the Appollo hardware and evolve it. Plan for 1-2 Saturn V flights every year. Use the F1 engine on a smaller vehicle (like Saturn 1B) and use that vehicle as the work horse for both the military and NASA.

This would have allowed them to mass produce the engine, reuse the same pads. It would have given them much more capability compared to Shuttle and it would have been considerably cheaper.

It was bad engineering choices, not simply the budget. They cut the wrong things.

That wouldn't have been continuing Apollo; that would have been salvaging something from the effort. I do agree it (or something else, like Schnitt's MCD booster concept) would have been far better for the country, even if they wouldn't have gotten Nixon as many votes in California.