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Lockheed, SpaceX Trade Barbs
Lockheed Martin and Boeing have been getting all government launch contracts for the past six years. That is, until SpaceX demonstrated they could reach the International Space Station successfully this year. Asked about the new competition brought by SpaceX, Lockheed CEO Robert Stevens made light of the younger company's success. "I’m hugely pleased with 66 in a row from [the Boeing-Lockheed alliance], and I don’t know the record of SpaceX yet," he said. "Two in a row?" When he was asked about the skyrocketing price of launching his sky rockets, he said, "You can thrift on cost. You can take cost out of a rocket. But I will guarantee you, in my experience, when you start pulling a lot of costs out of a rocket, your quality and your probability of success in delivering a payload to orbit diminishes." SpaceX CEO Elon Musk was blunt about the source of the price difference between the companies: "The fundamental reason SpaceX’s rockets are lower cost and more powerful is that our technology is significantly more advanced than that of the Lockheed-Boeing rockets, which were designed last century." The Delta IV and Atlas V rockets of Lockheed-Boeing average about $464 million per launch, while SpaceX's Falcon 9 launches for $54 million. Its upcoming Falcon Heavy will go up for $80-125 million.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
- some baldie
Lockheed traded Barb Williams to SpaceX in return Barb McIntosh and a sum of $3 million. No word yet on what that will do for their chances of winning the Goddard Trophy, the long-time rocketry championship, but the expectation is that this will allow Lockheed to unload an unfavorable contract while making SpaceX more competitive in the playoffs.
I am officially gone from
Musk, is essentially running a massive experiment to see what costs can be squeezed out of building and operating launch systems. Much of it has to do with using off the shelf technology (as opposed to the proverbial gold-plated screws...), and flattening his supply chain.
Obviously, it's working, as the old guard are getting butthurt that they're uncompetitive after growing fat and lazy off government space and defence contracts.
Gotta love free markets when they work well.
I, for one, welcome our new SpaceX overlords.
"Chance favors the prepared mind." ~Me
You can not accurately say that just because an organization is not accredited by X body that its quality is lower.
"Chance favors the prepared mind." ~Me
Nah, the government goes with the lowest bidder. Cost is something that is totally irrelevant.
Ah yes, CMMI, where you fork over a bunch of money to get a piece of paper that says you have a process. Not a good process, but a process. So it has to be better!
If you think SpaceX has no repeatable processes, documentation, you are insane.
There's some truth to it. SpaceX is built like an Internet startup - failure is always an option. The "old technology" is from an age when every launch was a national news event and failure was no option.
Read this:
http://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff
and then realize that while everything NASA seems to be luxury spending, their software development manages to have at least two orders of magnitude fewer bugs than any commercial software company.
If your life depends on it - would you rather fly a NASA Space Shuttle or a Microsoft Rocket ?
SpaceX deserves a lot of credit, no doubt. Among other things, they have revitalized the "space exploration is cool" meme. And with it the willingness to take risks.
But how about we talk about costs when they've had their first two or three explosions and resulting fallout in costs, publicity, etc.?
I'd be mightily surprised if the learning wouldn't go two-way. Old tech learns from SpaceX how to cut costs while SpaceX learns from old tech which costs you shouldn't save on.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
"You can thrift on cost. You can take cost out of a rocket. But I will guarantee you, in my experience, when you start pulling a lot of costs out of a rocket, your quality and your probability of success in delivering a payload to orbit diminishes."
Fishy argument. Most of the payload I gather is pretty cheap stuff to make astronauts' life on ISS possible.
In a way, price gauging of the launchers has resulted in the reactive price gauging of the payload. But if one can cheaply transport materials to the ISS, some stuff can be actually built and assembled right there - instead of creating the stuff on surface up to the very high standards, required for it to survive the lift off.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Thank you for repeating your point from the article, Lockheed CEO Robert Stevens.
Considering a lot of people in Congress and the Senate until recently did not want to fund SpaceX (Falcon 9) or Orbital (Antares) for COTS i.e. ISS ressuply and continue paying even more to the Russians, or even more than that to ULA, well things have proceeded as usual. Not to mention that SpaceX can only ramp up their business so quickly. These things take time to mature.
Having worked as a contractor for Goddard Space Flight Center years ago on a few projects, I can assure you that SpaceX's way of doing business is completely different than the old school space business. Coming from NASA, which trickles down to Boeing and Lockheed, the standard mentality is do everything at least twice, and usually triple checking all of that. New processes are frowned upon and twenty year old technology is still considered new, potentially even unproven. It is a frustrating way to work for a lot of people because it moves so slow. However, it is fairly safe and effective.
Now, enter SpaceX. I suspect they have a lot of the old NASA engineers, so they have the experience to cut corners. However, they've designed the thing intentionally to tolerate failures - they stuck 9 engines on the rocket. And you definitely want to tolerate failures, however, it does lead to mistakes. Look what happens though when one engine fails - the extra burn time meant the Orbcomm secondary payload on the last mission failed and never made it into orbit. That wasn't highly publicized, but it was a partial failure.
Now, what we're going to run into the standard cost/benefit of the extra work that goes into Boeing rockets. Is it worth it? Well, I suspect once you start sticking people on the top of the rockets the tolerance for failure goes down. Personally, I love what SpaceX is doing and I think a lot of the stuff is cutting edge. It is the direction we need to be headed, and I personally think the risks are worth it.
Better - Faster - Cheaper
You only get two.
----- obSig
And for the last 40 years Lockheed has been the world leader in jacking up costs once their "low bid" has been accepted. Now don't get me wrong, their work on the P-38, U2, SR-71 and F117 is the best of the best, but the F22 and F35 debacles are the biggest financial crimes against america ever.
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
Musk once alluded to a better manufacturing process for actually building rockets. So, instead of saying that he's taking shortcuts and what not and doesn't have layers of bureacracy, what if he just has a cheaper way to build rockets that are better?
This is my sig.
Insurances premiums still would not exceed the cost of launch and cargo. Which means insurance will not more than double launch cost. Which is still not half what the competitors want. You can insure for that as well, either with additional insurance or just build two of everything and sell any leftover units. Still cheaper than the other provider. At some point cost savings of this magnitude change the market that much.
If launch + cargo cost $150million, then you can take three attempts and still break even. Which means if you can get the job done in two attempts, you do it that way every time.
Not really. NASA generally goes with what appears most "credible" to them within the cost cap. The most important factor in credibility is matching their detailed estimates of costs, created using "parametric" methods. These methods take historical costs into account and then allow for inflation. Imagine estimating the cost of a computer by scaling from an IBM 709, assuming every performance enhancement costs money, and multiplying by inflation. Then, you refuse to try anything cheaper, because it's "risky".
The result? The bidder must propose not only a high price, but must justify that price based on costs. You must demonstrate the ability to put together and manage very inefficient processes. It usually doesn't even help to have done similar jobs efficiently: the cost "experts" don't find actual experience in conflict with their databases to be "credible". Their databases are full of previous examples of projects approved and planned with the same methodology, so the reasoning is almost perfectly circular.
Historically, nobody has been able to develop an orbital launch vehicle without government subsidy, so this credibility problem has been an impenetrable barrier to exploiting real high tech methods, where deflation, not inflation is normal. But Musk has deep enough pockets, and a talent for PR that has made it impossible to dismiss the success of Falcon as an aberration.
You can if you are Carnegie Mellon University and you are not getting your cut of the accreditation business.
Have gnu, will travel.
Solid+Liquid can be the best way to go performance-wise, although there's that cost penalty from heterogeneity.
The problem with solid fuel rockets is, you can't turn it off and back on once you light it. With the proper engineering, you can with a liquid fueled rocket.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
That's not the case with a hybrid. In that setup, you have a solid fuel and a liquid oxidizer. By varying the oxidizer feed you can control the thrust.
If you're talking about the DC-X, well it became a complete failure after NASA took it over. But prior to that, it was a complete success. It achieved all of its design goals and its mission purpose. Which were:
1. Build a working scale model of the proposed Delta Clipper ship. Fly it as an X program. (a real X program that flies stuff like the X-1, not a computer simulation only-deal like the X-33)
2. Demonstrate the feasibility of a vertical takeoff / vertical landing rocket. Done. Test SSTO (single stage to orbit) concepts and operation procedures in test flight. Done. Prior to this, it wasn't thought possible to fly a vertical takeoff and landing ship at low speed, or to control its attitude from vertical to horizontal and back to vertical.
Afterwards, NASA took over the program, somewhat reluctantly since they already had a competing big-budget program (the X-33). Some might say NASA wanted it to fail. Regardless, it didn't crash, not even in NASA hands. On its last flight, it landed flawlessly. It just toppled over after landing because a NASA technician forgot to connect the landing gear control mechanism and one of the gears folded. It exploded from toppling over and spilling fuel due to a careless mistake, not because of any flaws in the ship design or the program itself.
Some viewpoint from people involved with the program:
Jerry Pournelle's Space Papers
What is an X Program?
Ad-hominem attack? Not meant in any way, sorry.
By the time the Mariner missions were finished the military had everything they needed for the ICBM program. Face it, throwing half a ton of something into a ballistic orbit and making sure it lands within half a kilometer of your target isn't that hard, not even with 1960's tech. The really revolutionary advance that the Pentagram got from the Apollo program was 'zero defect manufacturing', nothing like it had ever been done outside small craftsman shops.
The real point of Sputnik (as seen from the Kremlin, rather than the Pentagon) was Krushev's desire to highlight the supposed superiority of Soviet technology during the International Geophysical Year. Sergei Korlolev, the head of the Soviet space program, was adamant that his program was about the exploration of space, and once upbraided a Soviet general that, "we are NOT building missiles, our program is much more important than your bombs." The Soviet ICBM program didn't take over in importance from the civilian program until Krushev had been removed.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin