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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.'"
You can have a cheap car that's reliable, and the same applies to rockets.
Or you can have a cheap car that is also a rocket!
Be relentless!
You can pick up way more hot chicks with a Ferrari than you can with a Honda. 'Nuf said.
OK, let's look at the recent manned launchers. Which one shall we pick. Soyuz? Not a single manned launch accident in 20 years. Errm, that's not NASA and not even US. Russians got that one right (shame about L1 though).
They aren't meant to be reliable. They're meant to be fast, and cool, which they are. But they aren't meant to be everyday drive-it-to-work cars, and they are in the shop a lot more often than your average Honda Civic.
If it costs $1,000,000 per pound to send somebody to space, virtually nobody goes to space, no matter how "safe". At that cost, it isn't worth it.
However, when the cost comes down enough, SO WHAT if a few people die?
Now, it sounds callous, but when you look at statistis, Motorcycles (AKA murder-cycles) are MIGHTY DANGEROUS..
NOBODY IS BANNING THE KAWASAKI, ARE THEY?
When you see somebody get on board a relatively cheap, fast, murder-cycle, do you tell them about the risks?
See, when space travel is cheap and "good enough", people will use it, even if it's as dangerous as a (gulp!) murder-cycle.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
"There is no technical car service in the space." You have not been to space have you?
Come on, although the poster might have a point in saying that Hondas are extremely reliable, he just cannot say Ferraris are not reliable and will break-down.
I am the -lucky- friend of a Ferrari owner's son. He's had a Maserati cambiocorsa and now owns a 575 Maranello.
Yes these things have un-satisfiable thirst.
Yes they cost a shit load in insurance.
Yes you will change the tires every 5000 Miles
However,
No they will not break-down as you go for a WE trip
People will break-down with ferraris just a much as any other car when all you do is trash it at the green lights (kills the clutch, transmission and tires).
A lot of these people go out on the tracks come bitching about brakes screaching and all is normal.
Pretty much any car, will have reduced life expectancy if you abuse it. And I think there is a higher tentation trashing a Ferrari than a measly Civic LX.
There is a good reason why Ferraris are the best selling super-sport cars (besides Porsche). And yes reliability is increasingly a reason for that.
Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity
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.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
...from the movie Armageddon (ya, the movie sucked)
Rockhound: "You know we're sitting on four million pounds of fuel, one nuclear weapon and a thing that has 270,000 moving parts built by the lowest bidder. Makes you feel good, doesn't it?"
Life is not for the lazy.
It's not so much the cost part as the simplicity part or finding the right way to do something. He mentions this in the linked article but it seems to be missing from the story above.
An AK47 assault rifle is more reliable than an M16 because it was designed to be simple and mass-produced, not designed to be cheap. A Honda Civic is more reliable than a Ferrari because it has less moving parts and is mass produced, ditto the Soyuz space capsule that the Russians use - on a per mission basis, it's had less failures than the shuttle.
It doesn't mean the rocket is being made with bits from scrapyards and eBay, just that the ideas are being lifted from non-rocket science thinking, and some of the tools are secondhand. Either way, getting someone into space on top of a controlled explosion is not cheap however you look at it, and if they can cut down on the peripheral costs, then good luck to them.
but I'll bet a honda civic costs more money to -develop- than a ferrari does...
the russians have fairly reliable rockets - but they do fail. the reason they've done so well with safety is that they have great backup systems.
the soyuz launch system has a mechanism that can eject the entire capsule if something goes wrong on launch. it's been used and it works.
I suspect reasonable reliabilty + good backup systems is the way to go. oh, and -no- parts from the junkyard....
The reason falcons will be cheap is not because they use cheap components, but because they have a different approach than old defense contractors like boeing and lockheed.
In fact they use very high quality materials such as a titanium thrust frame in the first stage. But they can afford that because the first stage is reusable.
They also try to avoid any hazardous materials like explosive bolts and dangerous chemicals since that makes working with the rocket before launch much safer and thus cheaper. The falcon I is the first rocket that is allowed to fly without an explosive flight termination system because of redundant thrust termination systems. So there is no bomb on board.
Take a look at the falcon launch complex. It is basically just a simple concrete building and a flatbed truck. The satellite is integrated while the rocket is horizontal, so they do not need a huge building for satellite integration.
The launch control center is a truck trailer, so they only need one for all launch pads and do not have all that expensive computer hardware sitting around idle.
Now compare that with the launch complex for the boeing delta IV. There is a vertical integration building for fitting the payload, a huge umbilical tower and all kinds of facilities to handle the huge quantities of liquid hydrogen that the delta IV needs.
The only large rocket that has a comparably clean launch pad like the falcon is the russian/ukrainian Zenit (also used by Sea Launch), which is also the cheapest of its class.
The falcon I will also have a very benign launch environment for the payload. The amount of vibration is much lower than with other rockets since the falcon does not use solids. See the payload users guide for details.
Private property is the central institution of a free society (David Friedman)
Usually the price tag for developping a new car for mass production is estimated between US$ 2 and 2.5 billion. If a car sells 1 mio units during its production cycle, it's still between US$ 2000 and 2500 development cost per car.
So if you build a rocket for X-Price with the hope to get 5 units running, and it would cost you about US$ 2 billion to design it, then the price per rocket will still be at 400 mio US$, much mor than the original X-Price is worth.
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
Unitarian Church: Freethinkers Congregate!
It's even outlived its successor, the MX "Peacekeeper" from the Reagan era. MX has been retired, but the Minuteman III lives on. They're "remanufactured" every few decades, on a slow upgrade cycle. The basic vehicle lives on.
So the "cheap booster" is quite feasible, if you order a thousand at a time.