SpaceX gets too much publicity.

I prefer to think of it as that SpaceX gets the right amount of publicity, and their competitors get too little.

Competitors like Orbital deserve very little publicity. I know something about engineering practices at Orbital (my spouse used to work there) and they're just not comparable to SpaceX at all.

Please explain their engineering practices.

An engineering culture obsessed with never innovating. Do you know what happens when an Orbital engineer wants to verify that a satellite will have enough battery power throughout its lifetime even given eclipses? They copy an excel spreadsheet from a shared network drive that has the analysis for the last satellite they worked on. This spreadsheet performs numerical integration using recursive cell references. It takes several minutes for excel to crunch through it. Of course, it involves lots of complicated formulas that are easy to get wrong, especially given excel's interface (this is really, really not what excel was designed for), and you can't even use modern features of excel (like named cell references) because the group forbids their use since not everyone understands them. You can't write code either for the same reason. You certainly can't use matlab because that costs money and the company is unwilling to pay. When you do find defects in the spreadsheets (say, for example, when doing a power budget, the spreadsheet calculates current and tries to compare it to the max current available but someone screwed up and instead compared 1/current to the max current available), management will insist that you NOT go back and fix the bug in the older spreadsheets for satellite that have already flown: who cares whether or not they're going to fail in space, we've already shipped them!

Most of the aerospace industry is like this: it is filled with people who devote themselves to one singular goal: don't fuck up in a new way. You can fuck up, you can even do so catastrophically. That's allowed. But if you fail doing something new, your career will be terminated with extreme prejudice.

Well, isn't that to be expected? It's a big company and seems NASA-y

I'm not a fan of Orbital either - thanks for sharing your insight though! - I think SpaceX's approach is far superior. But nonetheless, it's nice to hear about the competition occasionally, too.

I was curious when I saw that Cygnus was/will be destroyed on re-entry , while Dragon is reusable. I don't know anything about spacecraft, but that seems like a fundamental difference in engineering in favor of SpaceX

Considering that SpaceX is superior in virtually every facet of the game and is a much younger company, I'm not so sure.

Didn't they just complete a successful launch for Canada mere minutes ago? With completely new hardware? And an untested launch profile?

As we speak, Elon's private plane is over the pacific to observe a simulated return by the first stage: http://www.flightaware.com/live/flight/N887XF

Too much publicity? HAH!

> Didn't they just complete a successful launch for Canada mere minutes ago?

Orbital Sciences has completed over 100 successful launches in 30 years.

Edit: corrected myself down by an order of magnitude to 100. The perils of relying on memory...

Yet they don't iterate as quickly as SpaceX.

If I'm putting a couple hundred thousand dollars aside for my Mars ticket, my money is on SpaceX.

That's why its launch is non-news.