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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.
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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
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
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.
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.