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Hondas in Space
mikejz84 writes "Fast Company takes a look at SpaceX's attempt to challenge the high cost of space. This cost cutting philosophy includes buying equipment on eBay, looking to milk trucks for tank design ideas, and rummaging though junk yards. CEO Elon Musk remarks 'A Ferrari is a very expensive car. It is not reliable. But I would bet you 1,000-to-1 that if you bought a Honda Civic that that sucker will not break down in the first year of operation. You can have a cheap car that's reliable, and the same applies to rockets.'"
A Ferrari is a very expensive car. It is not reliable. But I would bet you 1,000-to-1 that if you bought a Honda Civic that that sucker will not break down in the first year of operation. You can have a cheap car that's reliable, and the same applies to rockets How can you compare automobiles to spacecraft? The reason those Civic's are so damn reliable is that they've been making them for years. It really is not feasible to mass produce rocket ships in this manner. Especially when they're talking about buying spare parts off of eBay! When a car breaks down everyone doesn't DIE. Rockets are not cars. They are ridiculously more complicated and there is too much at stake when an error occurs. These things should be left to NASA.
Do you see how my mind works? It's like a laser!
The analogy also sucks because cars are mass-produced by the millions. If they only ever built 20 Honda Civics, they would cost a lot more than they do. The cost of developing the design of the Honda Civic is known only to Honda, but I could easily imagine it approaching the price of a typical space system; especially if you factor in the cost of its predecessors whose designs it borrows from (since that borrowing is not nearly as easy to do in a space system which is not merely a yearly update of a previous model). Only by selling hundreds of thousands of cars does Honda recoup that cost.
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In SpaceX's case, the reusability aspect with ocean recovery of parts means a single rocket is not going to be cycled through the entire launch operation in a day even though it is theoretically possible to do so with an ocean launch system. However, with a small fleet of vehicles, it might be feasible to get the whole system cranking out a couple of launches a week.
That's when it starts to look like an aerospace "Honda" since you start applying Deming's statistical methods to the operation.
Seastead this.
It seems no one is talking about experience curves here, and they are vital to the discussion.
An "experience curve" is a way of explaining that the price per unit for any device decreases with the sum of the production repititions.
This means that it's the area under the curve that matters, the total number of produced items. A Wikipedia article explains it here.
The multiplier for how much it decreases obviously varies with the device. Any number of examples abound. For one, Photovoltaic cells are decreasing in per-unit price in good accordance with the sum of the cells ever produced. The idea of the government purchasing or subsidizing the purchase of items (examples: ethanol, PV-cells) fits in nicely to this function.
Rockets have not followed the curve because artificial limits (trade secrets, military secrecy, launch licenses, technology transfer) and purchasing uncertainties (NASA defending their turf) has clamped down on information transfer. If info flows freely, everyone benefits from cheaper devices.
This may not be what we want. Rocket tech = missle tech = N. Korea lobbing a nuke at us = maybe we'd better not publish the cheap rocket designs in Popular Science today, eh? (fearmongering).
Check out the wikipedia article link above, you'll see it directly applies to this situation.
--Kevin
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