On the surface, the changes appear logical.
The difference in philosophy between NASA's current approach and SpaceX is quite stark. SpaceX has launched 11 Starships in the two and a bit years, with a lot of them blowing up. Where as Artemis is trying to get it near perfect on each run.
I wonder if NASA could start to adopt SpaceX like approaches? Where one doesn't try to get everything correct before acting?
I wonder which approach is more capital efficient? Which is more time efficient?
(It seems that Artemis cost is $92B, where as SpaceX's Starship costs are less than $10B so far, give or take. So it seems that SpaceX is a more efficient approach.)
Given that SLS is the part of Artemis that has actually shown it works, and Starship is the part that is nowhere near schedule, and doesn't work, it's very funny to suggest that NASA should learn from SpaceX and not the other way around.
SpaceX hasn't even had the confidence to put Starship in LEO yet, and has not carried 1kg of real payload (and barely a few kg of test payloads) - while SLS did an orbit of the Moon, with real payload satellites.
It's not like SLS is on schedule either, and it is absurdly more expensive than Starship. It's very likely that Starship will eventually be operational with lower total costs by any accounting measure. (And I say this as a current NASA contractor and current anti-fan of Musk)
I agree that SLS is not an efficient project by any stretch of the imagination, and they have their own problems. I don't really see a reason to believe that Starship will ever achieve the goals that were declared for it. In particular, their plan for how to achieve the Moon mission, requiring an unclear number of missions to fuel a single flight in orbit.
Even if Starship completely fails, SLS is a pointless and ludicrously expensive dead end. Terminating it is the only logical thing to do.
The whole moon thing is a pointless and ludicrously expensive dead end. But if one wants to do it, one should choose between the working approaches.
Orion is actually pointless, I don't understand why the mission goals are valuable. Partial success would be meaningless. Success is meaningless.
Starship in contrast has a variety of meaningful objectives. Even if Starship only achieves proving that cryogenic fuel transfer in LEO is possible that's a valuable mission goal in and of itself.
If you really think "the whole moon thing is pointless" NASA is pointless.
Might as well get some ROI out of it though.
IMO the Blue Origin hate was overhyped. They're clearly the only ones who know what they're doing. NASA and SpaceX both are way in over their heads.
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You don't have long to wait to see an obvious reason, the first v3 starship is in preflight testing right now.
And do you think the this next launch will deploy actual satellites in orbit around the Moon? If not, I still don't see why you'd compare it to SLS's current success. Or do you think this will deploy 100 tons to orbit for less than $10/ton, or fly to Mars, since these are the stated goals for Starship?
We have no idea what starship has cost. It's a private company.
Even if a Starship needs to be scrapped after landing, the Super Heavy booster works, returns nominally to the launch site, and can be reused. This alone should make the whole thing cheaper than SLS.
Only if the SuperHeavy booster can achieve the same performance as the SLS (payload to orbit), with similar levels of operational complexity.
The SLS has already proven it can fly to lunar orbit and back on one single launch. In contrast, even if everything goes according to plan, Starship requires at least a dozen re-fueling flights while it hangs in orbit around the Earth to be able to then fly to the Moon.
Will one Starship launch, when it eventually works, be cheaper than SLS? Very likely. Will 12+ Starship launches + the time in orbit be cheaper than a single SLS launch? Much, much less likely.
I don't think "no idea" is fair. We don't have exact numbers, but there are various statements out there that give clues. Even the highest estimates I can put together put Starship far cheaper than SLS.
You have to consider that Starship has not reached anywhere near the operational goals for Artemis, and there is no realistic time line for when it might. So we really do have no idea how much it might cost by the time it reaches the milestone SLS has already cleared (successful flight in lunar orbit, with a full payload that it successfully deploys).
I think it's actually a reasonable comparison.
To OP's point, Artemis has cost $92 billion over 14 years. This has produced exactly one launch.
It's hard to put an exact timeline on Starship since a lot of its development overlaps with Falcon 9 using the same components, but it's inarguable that it has cost one tenth Artemis so far.
I agree that Starship has been plagued by delays and the capabilities are so far mostly just talk. However, it has flown a number of times, and I would be willing to make a strong bet that it will orbit the moon with real payload long before it catches up to Artemis in budget.
Starship has not yet flown even a fraction of what SLS has, so I think the comparison is premature. If it takes another ten years to get to a point that it can successfully achieve its Artemis objectives, I doubt it will remain cheaper than SLS. And given that it has already been delayed way beyond the first estimates for when it might be ready (it was supposed to have flown to Mars with astronauts on board by 2022, I believe), I don't see why another 10 years is any worse an estimate than others.
SLS has flown once. What are you talking about?
> the capabilities are so far mostly just talk
lol what? They've caught and successfully reflown the super heavy booster, and they've mostly successfully done a soft landing of Starship in the sea. How is that remotely "just talk"?
Isn’t SLS still costing like $4 b’s per launch?
This is why I do not believe in America setting up a permanent lunar base.
The Chinese are basically going to launch a few astronauts up there with a modern Saturn 5. But for them that would be a success because it is their first time.
You only get to land on the moon once before people stop giving a shit.
> You only get to land on the moon once before people stop giving a shit.
Depends on what happens once on the moon. If all you do is send 2 people at a time to collect rocks, then it does get boring to the general public. If each landing assembles the next section of a moon habitat, then I think the interest sticks around longer.
> You only get to land on the moon once before people stop giving a shit.
If America (or China) says the best spots on the moon belong to America (or China), suddenly it's Space Race 2.0 and everyone cares.
This is what will happen once any building actually starts happening.
This reminds me of my all-time-favourite HN comment[0] (and a life lesson too):
This idea is captured nicely in the book "Art and Fear" with the following anecdote: "The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.
His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot – albeit a perfect one – to get an “A”.
Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay."
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This works if there's no cost of failure in the meantime.
If we're putting humans into rockets into space, I'd like to think we adopt a balanced approach.
Isn't this a non-sequitur though? Artemis presumably doesn't have to actually load up humans on the rockets to flight test them.
It works perfectly well when you’ve got deep pockets and unmanned test vehicles though.
Now tell the fake story about the moneys and the ladder too.
The actual real world result is the opposite. When you score on quantity you get James Patterson, not F Scott Fitzgerald.
Congress is fickle enough without rockets blowing up, even if NASA explains up front that it's going to happen. There is much which is suboptimal about NASA, not just their attitude towards perfection, which is downstream of the political reality they have to deal with. For instance, a project that could be done in one year given adaquate funding will instead be spread out over ten years or more, to spread out the costs and keep NASA's monetary requirements as smooth and predictable as possible, for the sake of Congress.
2cents from a kid who grew up in a NASA family during the shuttle years - As others have commented, NASA’s baseline objective is to not kill astronauts. My understanding of their ethos growing up was that there was absolutely no excuse not to pursue excellence and prioritize safety when people’s lives were on the line. One would have to think that goal is fundamentally incompatible with SpaceX’s way of doing things (see the many exploding rockets - who wants to get in that?). And from what I’ve read and heard through the grapevine, working with SpaceX as a contractor on Artemis has certainly had pain points related to these mismatched priorities.
SpaceX has the most reliable orbital launch vehicle ever made. Falcon 9 block 5 has had 550 successful launches out of 551 attempts, giving it a 99.8% success rate. For comparison, Soyuz-2's success rate is 97%, Ariane 5 is 95.7%, and the Space Shuttle was 98.5%. All of these are worse than Falcon 9's block 5's landing success rate of 98.9% (552 out of 558 attempts[1]).
The current Starship launches are part of a development and testing program. They expect quite a few failures (though probably not as many as they've experienced). But since each Starship launch is only 1/25th the cost of an SLS launch, SpaceX can afford to blow up a lot of them. And they won't put people on them until they have a track record of safe operation. Falcon 9 didn't have crew on it until the 85th launch.
1. The number of landing attempts is higher than the number of launches because Falcon Heavy results in multiple landings per launch.
You risk it when there are no people on board to find the issues. Fix issues, rinse repeat.
NASA/Congress pushes the armchair quarterback approach. Analyze forever, fail because analysis isn't the same thing as real world experience, get stuck using 50 year old rocket technology. Each engine on SLS cost more than the entire Starship super heavy launch vehicle.
By weight the RS-25 engines cost about 70% of that of building their 7000lb mass dry mass out of gold. That's insane.
The shuttle lost two crews. Maybe pushing its limits in unmanned testing would have prevented those incidents.
Testing wasn't really the issue with the loss of the two shuttles. In both cases, it was mostly a management issue. For Challenger NASA had seen o-ring erosion in earlier launches, and decided it was not a big risk to the crew. Then they launched Challenger against the recommendations of the engineers in charge of o-ring seals. For Columbia, they has seen foam strikes in earlier launches, but since they had not caused catastrophe in the past, they decided that foam strikes were acceptable. Even when it was clear that a large foam strike had occurred on the launch of Columbia, management wasn't concerned enough to try to get ground-based images of the shuttle to check for damage. Could Columbia's crew have been saved had they known the extent of the damage? No one can say of course, but not even trying to do everything possible was inexcusable.
I don't think so, because both losses were due to bad management decisions under irrational political pressure, not any lack of engineering knowledge that more unmanned testing could have provided.
Challenger was lost because NASA ignored a critical flight risk with the SRB joint O-rings. And by "ignored", I mean "documented that the risk existed, that it could result in loss of vehicle and loss of lives of the crew, and then waived the risk so the Shuttle could keep flying instead of being grounded until the issue was fixed". They didn't need more unmanned testing to find the issue; they needed to stop ignoring it. But that was politically unacceptable since it would have meant grounding the Shuttle until the issue was fixed.
Columbia was lost because NASA ignored the risks of tile damage due to their belief that it couldn't be fixed anyway once the Shuttle was in orbit. But that meant NASA also devoted no effort to eliminating the risk of tile damage by fixing the issue that caused it. Which again would have been politically unacceptable since it would have meant grounding the Shuttle until the issue was fixed.
> They didn't need more unmanned testing to find the issue; they needed to stop ignoring it.
Should such testing have been needed? No.
Was such testing needed, given NASA's political pressures and management? Maybe. Unmanned testing in similar conditions before putting humans on it might've resulted in a nice explosion without loss of life that would've been much harder to ignore than "the hypothesizing of those worrywart engineers," and might've provided the necessary ammunition to resist said political pressures.
> Unmanned testing in similar conditions before putting humans on it might've resulted in a nice explosion without loss of life that would've been much harder to ignore
The loss of the Challenger was the 25th manned orbital mission. So we can expect that it might have taken 25 unmanned missions to cause a similar loss of vehicle. But what would those 25 unmanned missions have been doing? There just wasn't 25 unmanned missions' worth of things to find out. That's also far more unmanned missions than were flown on any previous NASA space program before manned flights began.
Even leaving the above aside, if it would have been politically possible to even fly that many unmanned missions, it would have been politically possible to ground the Shuttle even after manned missions started based on the obvious signs of problems with the SRB joint O-rings. There were, IIRC, at least a dozen previous manned flights which showed issues. There were also good critiques of the design available at the time--which, in the kind of political environment you're imagining, would have been listened to. That design might not even have made it into the final Shuttle when it was flown.
In short, I don't see your alternative scenario as plausible, because the very things that would have been required to make it possible would also have made it unnecessary.
> So we can expect that it might have taken 25 unmanned missions to cause a similar loss of vehicle.
That doesn't follow. If those were unmanned test flights pushing the vehicle limits you can't just assume they would have gone as they actually did.
They very nearly lost the first shuttle they launched. Jumping straight into manned testing was quite reckless, but politically necessary. If they had tested the shuttle without crew, that would have gotten people thinking that crews probably aren't necessary for a lot of shuttle missions, in particular launching satellites. It also would have prompted people to compare the cost of shuttle launches to other unmanned rocket launches, in particular for commercial satellite launches (which they were doing until the Challenger disaster.) These are comparisons that would have been very problematic for NASA as a political entity.
> They very nearly lost the first shuttle they launched.
Which mission are you referring to?
If it's STS-1, AFAIK there were no close call incidents during the actual flight, but the mission commander, John Young, did have to veto a suggestion to make that mission an RTLS abort instead of an actual orbital flight. Doing that would have been reckless, yes: Young's reason for not doing it was "Let's not practice Russian roulette."
The overpressure caused by the SRB ignitions exceeded predictions due to the geometry of the launch pad. This overpressure forced the orbiter's bodyflap away, beyond the design limits of the hydraulic system that controls it. John Young said that if he had known this, he would have ejected, which would have caused the loss of the shuttle.
Ah, I see. But in fact the body flap was not inoperative, and the Shuttle landed safely. So this looks to me like a case where Mission Control turned out to be justified in not telling the crew what had happened.
One thing I wonder about is whether it would have been possible to test the flap while in orbit, to see if the hydraulic lines were actually ruptured or not.
The lesson is that people can be irrational even it the logic is sound.
NASA is beholden to politicians and voters who get easily ruffled when politicians can point to explosions and say "those are you tax dollars." NASA needs to be perfect and impress people or they get their budget cut even further.
SpaceX's move-fast-and-break-things approach was lauded and NASA panned as being stuck in the past until <checks notes> the zeitgeist turned against Musk at which point the drones and tech blogs they read and write now view SpaceX as dangerous and wasteful at all costs. When a mere few years ago they couldn't shower them with enough praise.
I have no skin in this game other than to say the old school methods resulted in a janky ship that stranded two astronauts in space for months until they could catch a ride home on a SpaceX ship.
Starship is starting to be a very long and not so cheap project though that doesn't seem to be making significant iterative improvements - Rockets are still exploding regularly where you'd expect them to have moved beyond that phase.
Sorry, what? Starship 11 proceeded with a totally nominal ascent, orbit, descent, and powered landing that would end up with it standing on the ground, were it not deliberately landed into water.
What SLS currently has achieved had been achieved by Falcons and Dragons years ago, only way more cheaply and successfully.
No matter what we may think about Mr Musk, SLS is dead end.
NASA should not do what businesses do, because by definition their job is to do what businesses cannot or will not do.
They should not adopt spacex practices, they should adopt spacex lift vehicles (once proven).
NASA has been directed by Congress to use the remaining Space Shuttle RS25 engines on SLS. There aren't that many RS25's left, so Artemis requires that they make the most of each launch. Getting more RS25's produced is one of those "nobody's made them in a long time and it would be terribly expensive and time-consuming to do so" type of situations.
correction: there are 16 RS25's left, but production has begun on more for the Artemis V mission. However, production is slow so they can't just yeet SLS's into space and test rapidly.
Neither craft have achieved their missions so it's a bit early to make that call.
Well the SLS has already sent a capsule around the Moon. And it has kept a lot of people employed. That's pretty much what it was intended to do.
Only the latter achievement was a real intention. The former is just the malarkey useful to sell it
Also interesting to hear what the NASA people assigned to work with SpaceX say:
> I wonder if NASA could start to adopt SpaceX like approaches? Where one doesn't try to get everything correct before acting?
that would be such a culture change you'd have to disband NASA and start it over.
Yeah there is no way they do that with THREE LOCVs in their history. The fire, Challenger, and Columbia.
It's a risk-averse culture for a reason.
I think we're all misunderstanding SpaceX. I think it's more of an engine factory disguised as a general space company that managed to borrow the dad's card.
The only thing SpaceX truly has an edge is its engines.
They have perfected the engine for a ship like a giant Mars class rockets. And that engine has been in full scale series production for years, while the actual Starship keeps blowing up. The reason they developed their hoverslam landing technology, also, was because they wanted their precious engines back.
It's as if they handed groups of gamers a credit card and they went onto plunder stocks of RTX cards from 20 miles around with some Roombas bought on reward points. It's just inches below the threshold for typical BS detector if it weren't specifically tuned for the relevant topics.
All makes sense if everything was an elaborate ploy to get someone to pay for specifically the engines.
Systemic inefficiencies aside. I wonder how much of that is a public funding feedback loop? The cost gets higher, because the standards, requirements, and processes are stricter, because there is the need to validate the use of public funds, exacerbated by being higher, increasing the standards/requirements etc etc... Especially in a political environment where there is no shortage of sniping funding for points.
Regardless, first thing it reminded me of was that interview quote about how if nasa had SpaceX track record they would have lost funding long ago. Is there a US political landscape, even back to 2008-2016, where that isn't the case?
I wonder how much is a cost-plus billing issue, too… and a contrast between primes with a single customer in mind and a commercial firm chasing a bigger pie than the immediate program at hand
If I were to bet, even with no information. I would wager that the private company is more capital efficient than the government ran one
Maybe go read the report on Starliner before making that call? Boeing is a private company too and no one is this deferential about it.
My suspicion is ULA can’t manufacture SLS quickly enough, at high enough quality, to meet multiple, gradual tests.
It's everything. NASA doesn't have the money, brainpower, efficiency etc. to implement SpaceX development method. They can't fab it fast enough, nor can they iterate on the engineering fast enough, nor are they will to sustain the optics of a "government rocket blowing up" like Musk is. They don't have the caliber of engineering talent available or a workflow setup (high autonomy, long hours, better pay).
SpaceX doesn't have investors itching to take AWAY money from their programs. they are obligated to be perfect on the first run. Public vs. private.
If NASA switches to the Space X approach of just blowing up its rockets it would soon need to change its name to "Need Another Seven Astronauts".
I think the public funding aspect complicates this, NASA is probably not in a position where it can blow up a bunch of rockets and still get funding for the next year.
They used to depend on the Army to blow up the rockets for them.
The Artemis mission is manned. I assume the Starships are unmanned.
The risk profile is very different.
Boris Chertok's memoir[0] on early Soviet space program is essential reading.
inexact quote: "You know, we're throwing towns into the sky" related to the early mishaps of R-7 program development, but they kept doing it. After that R-7 derivatives became the most reliable launch vehicle.
[0] https://www.nasa.gov/history/history-publications-and-resour...
> inexact quote: "You know, we're throwing towns into the sky" related to the early mishaps of R-7 program development
I have not looked at the source (in Russian) for several years; now that I am curious I will check at home tonight. But as far as I remember "we are shooting towns into the sky" remark was not in reference to the R-7, but in reference to N1-L3, a hellishly expensive competitor to the Apollo manned Moon mission rocket. The meaning of the phrase was that each and every test should be taken extremely seriously as the cost of each flight is comparable to the cost of building a new city.
R-7 was developed much earlier when Korolev and his team at OKB-1 were iterating rapidly on much cheaper models that were primarily funded as rockets for strategic thermonuclear strike warheads. The civilian (Sputnik and later Gagarin) flights were an offshoot of that and were small enough that it happened as a side project. R-7 was a comparatively simple and cheap design, which may be why that family became a workhorse from the late 50s to carrying crews to the ISS. And the super expensive N1-L3 was a stillborn.
That's my recollection, need to recheck the sources.
"For all Mankind" is a great alternate history show that imagines the N1 succeeding.
I read it last some years ago too but I think it was in relation to many early moonshot failures - first half of Luna program and also early attempts at Mars and Venus.
Have to reread it too.
Still, while R-7 was initially funded as ballistic missile system, that was abandoned quite early, since it was very unwieldy, basically unusable.
Ballistic program in OKB-1 continued separately resulting in superchilled-LOX R-9.
N1 failure is attributed mostly to Korolev - Glushko rivalry that resulted in N1 lacking engines in time. It is widely belived that Kuznetsov bureau delivered just a bit too late - Korolev died, Moon race was lost and N1 project was literally buried.
EDIT: Mishin (OKB-1 head after Korolev) had no administrative push, and Glushko ended up heading it and building Energia-Buran. It's all a sad story of unchecked emotions leading to monumental waste.
> N1 failure is attributed mostly to Korolev - Glushko rivalry that resulted in N1 lacking engines in time.
That is a viable version. But I think this was one of the problems and there were plenty of others. While Chertok does point to the engines as a major problem, he also admits that the whole system became way too complex to succeed.
His description of electrical components (for which IIRC he was the chief engineer) and checkouts is telling. He also describes the feeling of "good envy" as the Russian engineers were listening in on comms between the Earth and the Apollo 13 during its mission. Which drove home the point of how much advantage US had, at least in electronic, and how powerful it was for its successful lunar program.
> It's all a sad story of unchecked emotions leading to monumental waste.
I have a softer view. Both Korolev and Glushko wanted their own leadership, which is normal. Korolev ran his shop in a dictatorial fashion, as that was the only way he could operate efficiently. Which is also fine and can produce spectacular results (and it did early on). But it comes with its own risks, including motivating strong leaders to branch out. I would not call it unchecked emotions that Glushko, after many years at OKB-1 went to run his own projects.
Living in a someone's shadow while under his dictatorial control is not for everyone. I can see the arguments for both sides. My 2c.
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NASA did have SpaceX like approach. Much more aggressive as a matter of fact. They cooked the occupants of Apollo 1 and they sent another mission out broken so they had to fix it live in space.
The question is whether you have the appetite for killing three astronauts on a test run like the Apollo team did.
EDIT: Fine, I’ll clarify. By “SpaceX like approach” I mean iterative design. By “more aggressive” I mean risk tolerance much greater than SpaceX to the degree that they do things that SpaceX wouldn’t do.
This is ignoring the massive distinction between manned flight (where failure is not an option) and unmanned tests. NASA and SpaceX both know this well.
Calling it a "SpaceX like approach" and connecting to Apollo 1 is a neat trick, but SpaceX wouldn't (and doesn't) adopt that risky approach during manned flights.
It's all about "the right risk for the job." You can't be risky with human safety, but you also don't want to be overly timid and failure-averse during safely managed R&D tests, or your R&D grinds to a halt.
Insane that this is getting downvoted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociotechnical_system
NASA and SpaceX are fundamentally incomparable, considering how these two organizations are established and the motivations that drive all the actors within. Sure, NASA could start to adopt certain approaches but I don't imagine it to work in a way anyone else would imagine it to.
They've blown up 11 Starships without any of them making it to orbit. Artemis I flew around the moon and came back already.
And don't compare costs because Starship does not and may never work so I dont care how much cheaper it is. If we are comparing fictional rockets I have a $1 rocket that can fly to Jupiter.
> They've blown up 11 Starships without any of them making it to orbit.
They purposely were not trying for orbit from my understanding. The last one did orbit the earth at suborbital heights and release satellites. It did seem to do what they wanted it to do, it wasn't a failure.
Not only were they not trying to reach orbit, they are specifically trying to do risky things that they can learn from. It's not exactly destructive testing because they hope to succeed, but it's close.
That just seems like a huge waste of money
Each Expendable Starship Super Heavy launched costs less than a single engine on the Artemis program.
Every time you see a Starship launch what you aren't seeing is manufacturing processes corrected, issues in launch protocols and field issues resolved. All the little things that build up to make your system reliable. Do you want the doctor who has done a hundred successful surgeries, or the one who has done one or two but spent a long time in school watching videos.
The big difference is in the end, Starship gets built faster, costs much less, and can do more. It's not even close.
You can't compare costs for a rocket that doesn't work yet. It's fictional. As I said in my post, if we are comparing fictional rockets then I have a $1 rocket that can fly to Jupiter.
Of course you can. It wasn’t fictional when Superheavy flew back and was caught, was it? It costed real money, not fictional. What kind of mental gymnastics are you doing?
Until it actually works every dollar is waste.
It wouldn't if you were scheduled to fly on it.
Elon Musk's net worth now (sadly) near a trillion dollars... :/
Easy not to fail when you are purposefully not trying to succeed
I doubt they set out to launch eleven times without reaching orbit.
They very explicitly were not setting out for orbit for most of them.
Yes, but if you asked someone at SpaceX before flight 1 where they would be by flight 11, I doubt they would have been happy about the reality.
And?
Not a single one of them had reaching stable orbit in the flight plan.
This is why NASA can never adopt the SpaceX philosophy. People don't understand the concept of test fight.
> I wonder if NASA could start to adopt SpaceX like approaches? Where one doesn't try to get everything correct before acting?
This seems so ridiculous in the abstract. Like, what is that exactly supposed to entail in the context of launching rockets?
When SpaceX launches a rocket, they think it will work. When NASA launches a rocket they know it will work.
The cost of going from "I think this will work" to "I know this will work" is really expensive. It might be cheaper/faster to fail a few times and fix those problems than it would be to verify everything up front.
> When SpaceX launches a rocket, they think it will work. When NASA launches a rocket they know it will work.
That is such an ignorant thing to say. You think Falcon 9 has had 500+ successful launches because they _think_ it will work?
The difference is that SpaceX is a private company that has the ability to iterate fast. NASA is a jobs program and Artemis/SLS a barrel of pork, simple as that.
Again, that is put so vaguely as to be actionably useless.
So let's say you want to check something like a new fuel nozzle.
SpaceX might design and build the nozzle, then put it in the rocket and launch it. It might work how they intended, or it might not, but they'll find out immediately. They'll make changes, build a new nozzle, launch another rocket, and continue until it works like they want.
NASA will do a lot more testing, simulation, redesigning, etc. until they KNOW that the nozzle will perform perfectly on the first try.
On the surface, NASA's approach sounds cheaper because you aren't wasting rockets. In reality it looks like SpaceX's approach might be better.
You don't test the nozzle on _launch day_, what kind of ridiculous statement is that? You think the Air Force is paying SpaceX so they can test things the day it flies?
All components go through several test campaigns on the ground, while iterating on the design to address issues. These campaigns take months/years. That's why changes are stacked into "blocks", which are the equivalent of rocket versions. Each block must be certified by the Air Force and NASA to be deemed worthy of flying their payloads.
SpaceX is willing to blow up a rocket, even if it exploding is fully planned and expected. That's it, really not hard to comprehend.
Columbia. Challenger.
The real question is which is more likely to avoid catastrophic failures in practice.
And we 'tried until it didn't blow up immediately' is not a great sign.
>> And we 'tried until it didn't blow up immediately' is not a great sign.
But everything that didn't blow up has been tested 11 times already. Things that did fail have had more than one design iteration tested. One approach has gains more real-world test experience.
NASA is constrained by the triple-whammy of taxpayer dollars, an administration that hates public science, and a market that rewards private enterprise more than them.
JPL would blow up a rocket every week, if the budget had room for it. Alas, we don't see that testing pace outside defense procurement.
So is Artemis cheaper than Starship then?
Are you familiar with the definition of the word "constrained"?
I was referring to the quote “JPL would blow up a rocket every week, if the budget had room for it.” That makes it sound as if JPL can’t afford to follow the SpaceX strategy, hence my question.