Sounds like all of the fun that Gracenote did with the CDDB several years ago. A very much for-profit company who collected a ton of information from volunteers and then turned it into a for-profit business that screwed over the volunteers who couldn't even access the database for their own contributions without paying a licensing fee.
I like Open Street Map, and that was my first thought when I heard that Google was letting volunteer contributions in. Google has in fact been a real pain in the behind to that project and does view it as the "competition".
Orbital Science is to me the real surprise here, as I expected them to do better. They seem to "get it" in terms of what NASA is expecting with the COTS/CCDev proposals and has been able to get money in the past for some very interesting work, especially with their Taurus II vehicle.
As for ATK, they seem to be going into a rabbit hole. Living in Utah, I have some neighbors who work at the Plymouth, Utah facility, where they are convinced that the solid rockets are the only way to get into space. I don't know where to start there, but I will say that I've seen the SRB tests and there is some impressive although expensive engineering that has taken place. They are really struggling in terms of what to do with that facility now that the shuttle program is over.
As for Excalibur Almaz, I had no idea that a non-US based company could even compete in the CCDev process. They are a scrappy little company in a very unusual place for spaceflight development (Isle of Man), but I was under the impression that American companies need only apply. I like their products and I have high hope that they will eventually become a major player in the spaceflight industry. They certainly are a company to watch for in the future and I don't think them failing to get an award is necessarily going to hurt them for any future projects.
Blue Origin is the company that stood out the most in terms of getting an award. They have been hiding in the shadows for some time, where they seem to produce anti-vaporware. Essentially, they don't announce anything until after it is ready for flight, and only then if they are required by law to actually file for a flight permit. They stay very quiet in terms of commercial space development and seem to show up at seemingly odd times (compared to other spaceflight development companies). Because they are receiving money from the government, they have to be a bit more open now than they typically have been in the past.
It is nice to know that you live in an alternate universe that has different laws of physics. I don't understand the laws of the universe you inhabit, but I do understand those in this particular universe.
While this is obviously flaming away without hard facts, I agree with the sentiment. The original poster above doesn't have a clue as to what he is talking about, either with Tesla Motors (ever heard of the Model "S" or the "Bluestar"?) or with SpaceX.
Ponzi scheme? I doubt that poster even knows what those words even represent.
I'm replying here because I want moderators to know this response was short, articulate, and to the point. Moreover, it is all the GP post deserved in reply.
That isn't just government contracts, and those are people who have signed, put money down, and have formally become a "customer" for SpaceX. They've sold quite a few contracts, and the list on this particular web page seems to keep getting longer and longer as I watch it.
SpaceX is already turning a profit, so I'd dare say that they can certainly remain profitable for the next five years, if not much longer. About the only thing that would stink and change this is if LA became ground zero in a nuclear war, but the future of SpaceX would hardly be a pressing issue at that point.
Perhaps, and I'll leave this as an open question, SpaceX might have a series of failures where the quality of their rockets will go downhill, and thus lose customers and have nobody else signing up. That isn't a lack of customers, however, that is the problem.
China might be able to copy the blueprints, but they don't have the skilled workers (SpaceX has raided the workforce of several long-time aerospace companies, including Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, and others), the industrial infrastructure (the SpaceX factory is a former Boeing plant that made 747s), and far and away more important:
The competitive drive coming from running Silicon Valley start ups that deliberately cuts out bureaucracy and hates hierarchical organizations as only a necessary evil. The People's Liberation Army is not going to reverse-engineer SpaceX without them becoming essentially a "liberal" democratic society that respects human rights and permits freedom of speech, thoughts, and actions.
China wants central planning and control. That works fine for some projects, and is the way that NASA has been running things for decades. It is also the source of problems for NASA and why nothing new seems to be coming from JSC or for that matter any other NASA center that actually makes it into the skies.
What keeps SpaceX on their toes isn't the major "traditional spaceflight" companies like Boeing and Lockheed-Martin, it is the dozens or more start-ups that can all easily take their place as the darling new aerospace company, some of which are doing things even more efficient and perhaps better than SpaceX. There isn't anything special about this one company, other than they have a sugar daddy who had some money (now spent mostly) to get them going in the first place. Remember where Elon Musk got his start, and that explains quite a bit about how he is running his companies too.
The main advantage of multiple smaller launchers is that you can in theory put the launchers into a production queue so you can start to achieve economies of scale in terms of part production and maintaining worker efficiency. Everything from part suppliers, fabricators, assemblers, and even the launch crew at the tower can "practice" their craft and be able to become efficient and very skilled at their jobs. This can significantly lower costs to the point that the negative aspects of having to do in-orbit assembly may not be be nearly so bad.
Also, if you are assembling something like the NAUTLUS-X spacecraft out of say ten smaller components and one of them fails to launch or blows up during the launch (causing that part to be destroyed), you can certainly have spares available to replace that one part. The trick there is that you make more than just one "spaceship" or whatever it is that you are building in space.... for the same reason that economies of scale work for launchers.
The only time it makes sense for a larger launcher in practice is if you are sending up so much stuff so frequently that you are getting a traffic jam at the launch facilities, where larger vehicles are needed to take the crushing demand and the frequency of use is going to be such that similar economies of scale can be used to make the larger vehicles profitable. That is precisely what is happening with SpaceX right now, where they have effectively shut down their Falcon 1 production line because the demand for the Falcon 9 vehicles can meet the market needs for those who previously expected to fly on the smaller vehicles.
so replacing Boeing/Lockheed with SpaceX does exactly what for a privatized space industry? Or are people just realizing that the space industry at the current time just can't be private and they want to replace their child of space payola?
What is missing with this sentiment is that SpaceX is not operating on a cost-plus contract basis. Boeing and Lockheed-Martin develop and launch their rockets where the government pays the actual cost, plus a predetermined profit (the "plus") that is built into the contracts. Those companies assume little liability in terms of rocket failures or even inflation in terms of increased costs of doing business. All extra costs simply get passed onto the customer, which is the government in almost all cases.
What SpaceX is doing differently is that they have a set, mostly "fixed" price for a launch and you can take it or leave it if you are a customer. SpaceX allows negotiation for multiple launches at a discount, but you still have a price that is predictable. SpaceX assumes all profit liability from that price, so if the price of Titanium or Niobium starts to soar, it is SpaceX that has to cover the cost. Contract prices are fixed when a customer books the flight.
BTW, this is also why commercial customers are flocking to SpaceX, because the prices are predictable and that you can build a business model to calculate profits for other activities that might happen in space. Neither Boeing nor Lockheed-Martin currently offer that type of contract for commercial customers, at least not without considerable negotiation. It is offered by the ESA and RKK Energia, and the Chinese have been trying to crack into that market too, which is why this entire slashdot thread is notable.
It was made fun of in the series "Get Smart", starring Don Adams in the late 1960's, although it was mostly by reference to the fictional C.H.A.O.S. organization that did the same thing. It was also a common running gag among many other sitcoms including "I Love Lucy" to even being mentioned in the "Twilight Zone" on a couple of occasions. The "Tonight Show" with Johnny Carson also made frequent mention of the issue.
The sad thing is that not only was it a running gag, it was also something that frequently came from official press releases from TASS (the Soviet news agency) and interviews of various Soviet leaders. It became a running gag because the Soviets would claim origination on so many things ranging from airplanes to television that it became a standing joke that was generally understood within the Cold War culture of America in the 1950's and 1960's.
That you may not remember any TV series with the gag only shows your age. By the 1970's and later the Soviet Union generally wasn't so obvious with such propaganda, and the joke sort of died out from overuse by that time. It just stopped being funny.
SpaceX most clearly has credibility in terms of launching larger payloads into orbit. I guess the Dragon capsule doesn't count as something credible?
As for anything that Senator Shelby wants to fund, most especially the SLS system, I have my doubts that anything will clear the launch tower much less actually make it into space. It is going to be canceled before it gets built, much like Constellation before it, and the dozens of other NASA projects for manned spaceflight that all showed promise but never really went anywhere.
The last manned spaceflight program to actually make it to orbit was the Space Shuttle, and that was originally started under the Johnson Administration (although the heavy work on it happened during the Nixon Administration). The singular failure of NASA to put any sort of meaningful program together is a sign of what that bureaucracy is able to accomplish, and I doubt any change in the Presidency is going to make any difference on that. Neither Ronald Reagan nor Bill Clinton were able to make any significant moves in that arena... except for the ISS project if you want to give both of those Presidents at least a little bit of credit.
I'll believe that China has a credible space program when they can accomplish a manned orbital rendezvous. I would venture to bet that SpaceX is going to beat China to that accomplishment. SpaceX going to do that unmanned some time next year.... if their public schedule is followed to some degree.
If Chinese Astronauts make it to the Moon on Chinese rockets, I would dare say they will likely be met by Americans or others who went up there first... as private citizens. I wouldn't put it past Richard Branson to personally greet the Chinese for their "accomplishment" on the Moon itself.
As can be seen, I'm not really all that impressed with the Chinese space program. They are trying, and doing better than other countries, but they haven't yet even accomplished many of the things done by the Gemini program, much less anything else beyond those relatively modest missions. Their last major accomplishment was to essentially replicate Ed White's EVA on Gemini 4.
The Falcon XX does not have real specs. It has design goals for what it ought to look like if the engineers ever actually sat down to work on the thing, and what an educated guess might be able to say if the green light ever was given to develop that vehicle. About the only thing known about the Merlin 2 engine is that it is supposedly going to have similar propulsion and fuel requirements (including the Kerosene/LOX fuel currently in use with the Falcon rockets already) as the F-1 engines used on the Saturn V. Assuming modern composite materials, new discoveries in metallurgy, and some tweaking by SpaceX engineers, it may even exceed the performance of the F-1 and certainly be comparable to the Space Shuttle Main Engine. That is a lofty goal by itself.
The Falcon 9 is supposedly going to launch with just one Merlin 2 engine for the first stage, if it gets developed, with a slight performance improvement if built too.
One difference with Armadillo as compared to SpaceX is that I don't think any current group has ever test fired more rocket engines than Armadillo, with perhaps the sole exception being Estes Industries. Rocket propellant has been one of their major expenses... something you would be hard pressed to find with almost any other research team even hoping to achieve sub-orbital flight, much less orbital. Armadillo, through Space Adventures, has also sold over 100 passenger flights (seats I guess) on their upcoming manned sub-orbital vehicle. They certainly are going to be in competition with Scaled Composites (and Virgin Galactic).
The real dark horse so to say with commercial space flight is Blue Origin, as money is being spent, engineering being hired, land is being acquired, and stuff is happening but they are being more quiet than the engineers at Area 51 in terms of what they are up to. Their last public test flight was a couple of years ago, so it might be interesting to see what they will eventually come up with. Jeff Bezos certainly isn't short on money at the moment.
One of the problems facing the Saturn rocket program is that Werner Von Braun was ramping up for a production run of well over a hundred rockets. He was striving for economies of scale.... none of which were realized due to the premature cancellation of the program in the late 1960's. I say premature because after all of that infrastructure was put into place, it was then abandoned afterward.
In fact, some of those systems were later used for the Shuttle system (particularly the barges and docks at KSC for the external tanks), and ironically the Falcon 9 with the Merlin engines are using the same test stand that was originally built for the testing and development of the F-1 and J-2 engines used on the Saturn family of rockets. Assembly lines were built and a huge team of people put together to make these rockets.
I very much disagree with the assertion that Apollo was at the end of its life, and the other rationale you are using here doesn't fly either. Pure Oxygen atmosphere? Yeah, that was an issue, but was it a bad thing in space? The reason Nitrogen is used on the Space Shuttle has to do with modern electronics and the need to cool down laptops and other similar equipment. To me, that is some lazy engineers, but we can argue that point separately. It certainly has little to do with human physiology which can certainly survive with just a partial pressure of enough oxygen to breathe.
Non-standard docking? They had a standard.... the Apollo docking standard. It was used on Skylab and the Apollo-Soyuz missions too. It certainly was better than the hole in the heat shield that was used with Gemini and planned for the MOL program. As for solar panels.... why would they be needed with the mission profiles being used? That was also a brand-new technology in the 1970's. Those are all excuses.
Any numbers that you find now for the cost of a Saturn launch is based upon data that was inflated explicitly to kill the program and make the Shuttle program look good. BTW, I've seen costs well above $1 billion to almost $2 billion per launch for the Shuttle, again depending on how you do the accounting. And the Shuttle did amortize the hard infrastructure costs over more than a hundred launches.
My argument is that it wasn't as expensive as it has been claimed, and that the expensive aspects of building a Saturn rocket had already been spent by 1970. It was engineers who were used to creating the next big thing and a congress trying to aggressively cut back on space exploration which led to the pressures put upon building the Shuttle. I admit it is 20/20 hindsight, but I still assert that for the cost of the Shuttle program as a whole, a similar sort of space exploration program could have been developed as happened with the Shuttle, and with far more flexibility in terms of doing stuff beyond LEO... which is certainly a major limitation of the Shuttle. That is also why the Constellation/Orion program was put together, in part because a Shuttle II program would leave American astronauts stuck in LEO again. Unfortunately, Constellation was even worse than had the Saturn rockets been re-created.
There are many problems with socialized medicine, not the least of which is that there isn't a limit to what care can be provided, or that the limit is something dictated by a government bureaucracy.
Back about a hundred years ago, there were hard limits in terms of what a physician could do to help you out if you got sick. Giving you a couple pills, prescribing you some cocktail of chemicals mixed with alcohol, and some rudimentary surgery was about all that could be done, and none of that was really all that expensive.
At the moment, in theory most people's lives could be extended almost indefinitely provided you have the cash to get that accomplished. It isn't really so much a matter of if somebody can be healed, but how much that is going to cost. While not extremely common, I do know of some people who have run up medical bills totally more than a million dollars using modern health care practices. Tens of millions of dollars in care for a single person is certainly not impossible any more.
My point with all of this is in terms of how the decision is made to simply say "enough!" and that somebody who is injured, sick, or cursed with some genetic defect can receive or be denied that medical treatment, especially since not everybody around us is a multi-millionaire that can pay for this level of care. This is why health care expenses are spiraling out of control, because the ability to do this kind of treatment forces a hard examination of how much somebody is actually worth in terms of chewing up scarce resources (whatever that resource might be). Medical care is a limited resource and it is impossible to treat EVERYBODY as if they are all of unlimited worth.
I would dare say that even the very notion of health care and how it is administered needs to really be rethought down to fundamental levels and perhaps whole new systems put into place.
Getting back on topic, the question at had isn't if somebody who needs medical care should or should not be treated, but if the system is one of central planning with a central bureaucracy literally allocating the decision of your life or death, or if perhaps a less centralized system ought to be put into place that preserves personal liberties. For myself, I strongly distrust central planning groups because they almost never have my interests and needs in mind, or for that matter even care if I live or die. If your ability to live and see tomorrow depends strictly on your political connections (or lack thereof), something is seriously wrong and sick with the society as a whole.
The whole reason to force everybody to get these IDs is strictly to know who has better political connections so they can get better treatment over the "proletariat" commoners who lack those connections. Yeah, that is something I want to support.
There are no formal plans for the Falcon XX either, but that doesn't stop the discussion for how big these rockets might get.
The real issue with anything larger than a Falcon 9-Heavy is one of market interest, and if anybody might have a project that could legitimately use such a heavy lift vehicle. As demonstrated with this announcement, there certainly are economies of scale and improved efficiencies which come from a larger vehicle, and that holds true even more for much larger rockets than the Falcon 9.
Since the F9-H is going to be the largest rocket on the market, there simply aren't customers who have even anticipated this sort of launcher size, much less something even larger. Some have suggested they can use the extra capacity, but it will be interesting to see just how far that will go.
There is a demand for larger rockets, but that is for projects that typically show up only once or twice per decade. Maintaining an army of workers to support a rocket that only is used once in a blue moon is not an efficient way to build rockets, which drives up deployment costs as well. What is needed to get something larger built, like the Falcon XX, is one of getting a project put together that can use the launcher size. In the meantime, I think the Falcon 9 is going to be more than sufficient for most of the current concepts of getting something into space, together with what is available from other companies.
It is also noteworthy that SpaceX is hardly the only commercial spaceflight company, or even the only one who might challenge the traditional major aerospace manufacturing companies. They are merely the first of what may be a long line of companies who are willing to challenge traditional presumptions about what it takes for getting into space. Not mentioned is how Armadillo Aerospace was set to launch a new class of rockets capable of getting into space this past weekend, and on their own path into orbital spaceflight. If Armadillo is able to get their act together, SpaceX is going to be considered a dinosaur with inefficient pricing models. We are living in exciting times in terms of American spaceflight development.... and most reporters are bemoaning the fact that the traditional spaceflight companies are dying.
Please explain how the Roadster is more or less technically sophisticated than the Prius?
The design goals for the two vehicles were hugely different, and Tesla was explicitly going after the high-end auto consumer market with the Roadster, where $100k is not really a problem. If you knew anything about economics at all, you'd realize that the strategy Tesla is using is a much better way to build cars.
Besides, have you seen the "Model S" specs lately? Tesla is working for cheaper vehicles, and there is another vehicle in the works that is aimed squarely at the Prius market slated to cost about $30k each. Are you complaining because you don't have that $100k right now to own a Roadster?
The audio link on the Falcon launches by SpaceX is real. If you had been riding those vehicles, there most certainly would be many sounds which you can hear through the vehicle, as the structural frame itself can act as a sound medium. Sure, you can't hear the sounds if you are outside of the vehicle, but inside of it there most certainly is sound coming from the motors.
The audio in this case is an excellent engineering diagnostics tool to make sure what you want to happen is going on when you want it to be happening. An "unusual sound" is something you especially want to be listening for in such a recording.
So you want to use the Stargate that is found in Cheyenne Mountain? Wake me up when that bit of fiction becomes reality. Or are we going to do the Edgar Rice Burroughs method of space travel and simply use our minds to transport ourselves to Mars?
I'll also admit that going to Mars with a manned mission is a tough nut to crack. Heck, even landing on Mars is seemingly a tougher challenge than almost any other spaceflight technical challenge for a number or reasons, mostly because Mars has an atmosphere which exists (so it has to be dealt with) but not thick enough to be useful. Landing on Mars would be much easier if it simply lacked an atmosphere altogether. That is one of the reasons why even now a successful landing on Mars is still a hit or miss proposition, where the "hit" too often is fatal even for robotic missions. Yeah, I get the challenges involved, where seemingly pure luck is a mission requirement when dealing with Mars.
If the NATLUS-X concept ever gets some attention, it may be possible to use something like the Falcon 9-H to assemble a serious mission to Mars with a dozen flights or so. That puts the price tag for a mission to Mars down to mere billions and would require some of the in-orbit assembly experience gained from building the ISS. Even so, that is going to require some substantial R&D even to get to that stage and a commitment from somebody with a pile of cash willing to put the thing together (with looks at the federal government).
The speculation about using the Falcon 9-Heavy for a manned cislunar flyby (aka recreating the Apollo 8 flight) sounds a bit more interesting. The Dragon capsule would be more than sufficient for such a journey (perhaps even a bit roomy compared to the Apollo command capsule) and the technical challenges aren't nearly so huge. The only tough challenge would be building a service module for the Dragon that could have the delta-v to go from LEO to the Moon and back. I would dare say anybody taking such a trip would get instant world-wide media attention that would rival the Apollo flights.
I know that the initial development work on the Merlin 2 engine has started, but it is currently a low-priority project and hasn't received full funding yet (from within SpaceX). I think Elon is hoping to get a government development project for it as it will be an expensive engine to develop, although as you indicate it can be something used incrementally on the Falcon 9 to boost performance too.
If that Falcon XX ever gets built, I would stand in awe to watch it go up. Just imaging a fully loaded 747 being launched into space (aka about 400 tons) is enough to drop my jaw.
Yeah, trying to think of who might use such a vehicle sort of shows why that is decades away from being built, if it ever will be built at all. Elon has stated elsewhere that he wants to personally go to Mars, even if he has to build the rocket to get there first. The F9-H is certainly a good step in that direction.
It also wasn't that hard to sell potential employees with real skills to work for SpaceX. All Elon had to say is "would you like to work on a clean-sheet design for a new rocket that will actually fly?" When asked for who is going to pay for the thing, Elon said "I will".
Nothing burns out engineers faster than spending nearly a lifetime of effort on something only to see the project canned as if you never existed in the first place. NASA has been doing that for decades where one project after another get started and then terminated. After many folks have been on that treadmill for all of these years, it is refreshing when you build something, use it, and then tear it apart afterward to see where you made your mistakes or if your presumptions were accurate. Having to wait in limbo over congressional appropriations hearings and knowing your job is on the line each time congress meets in a committee hearing can't help either.
In other words, SpaceX is doing real engineering for real things, and is now where stuff is happening. As a result, they are getting the best and brightest, where earlier the best rocket engineers were going to Wall Street instead.
Which is just a little less than the cost of the Ares I-X demonstrator flight that proved nothing other than ATK had engineers who could design a rocket that would clear the tower and to help show off the pretty launch tower that cost a couple billion dollars by itself.
Congress spends a billion dollars merely when a member of congress clears their throat. Even at that higher figure, it still is impressive as hell.
If you add in the seed money from NASA and the USAF, you might get a little over a billion dollars invested into SpaceX over this past decade, but not much more than that. USAF money was used for the development of the Falcon 1.
All SpaceX said is that this is going to be the largest rocket currently in production. Can you refute that statement? The other headlines are things which were produced by clueless reporters who grabbed the first things that was said and made that as a headline. The press conference clearly emphasized many other things, including the substantially cheaper cost to orbit (rockets are much more efficient when they are larger) and some design concpets such as the booster stage interconnect that hasn't been used before. If you had bothered to watch the bloody press conference itself you would see that SpaceX talked about a great many other things besides "gee, we got a big rocket, don't we?"
BTW, while I don't always agree with DerekLyons and his conclusions, the last thing I would ever accuse him of being is clueless. For space related topics, he is perhaps one of the most clueful people I have seen post on Slashdot. Calling him otherwise only demonstrates your immaturity and inability to actually read what he has written.
SpaceX is also getting contracts from governments other than the U.S. government. That is where it is going to be doing something different from the other American launchers. They are underbidding ESA and even RKK Energia, something other American companies haven't done for decades.
Yes, American federal contracts are going to be a source of significant revenue too, but that certainly isn't going to be the only customer for these rockets.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like all of the fun that Gracenote did with the CDDB several years ago. A very much for-profit company who collected a ton of information from volunteers and then turned it into a for-profit business that screwed over the volunteers who couldn't even access the database for their own contributions without paying a licensing fee.
I like Open Street Map, and that was my first thought when I heard that Google was letting volunteer contributions in. Google has in fact been a real pain in the behind to that project and does view it as the "competition".
Orbital Science is to me the real surprise here, as I expected them to do better. They seem to "get it" in terms of what NASA is expecting with the COTS/CCDev proposals and has been able to get money in the past for some very interesting work, especially with their Taurus II vehicle.
As for ATK, they seem to be going into a rabbit hole. Living in Utah, I have some neighbors who work at the Plymouth, Utah facility, where they are convinced that the solid rockets are the only way to get into space. I don't know where to start there, but I will say that I've seen the SRB tests and there is some impressive although expensive engineering that has taken place. They are really struggling in terms of what to do with that facility now that the shuttle program is over.
As for Excalibur Almaz, I had no idea that a non-US based company could even compete in the CCDev process. They are a scrappy little company in a very unusual place for spaceflight development (Isle of Man), but I was under the impression that American companies need only apply. I like their products and I have high hope that they will eventually become a major player in the spaceflight industry. They certainly are a company to watch for in the future and I don't think them failing to get an award is necessarily going to hurt them for any future projects.
Blue Origin is the company that stood out the most in terms of getting an award. They have been hiding in the shadows for some time, where they seem to produce anti-vaporware. Essentially, they don't announce anything until after it is ready for flight, and only then if they are required by law to actually file for a flight permit. They stay very quiet in terms of commercial space development and seem to show up at seemingly odd times (compared to other spaceflight development companies). Because they are receiving money from the government, they have to be a bit more open now than they typically have been in the past.
It is nice to know that you live in an alternate universe that has different laws of physics. I don't understand the laws of the universe you inhabit, but I do understand those in this particular universe.
While this is obviously flaming away without hard facts, I agree with the sentiment. The original poster above doesn't have a clue as to what he is talking about, either with Tesla Motors (ever heard of the Model "S" or the "Bluestar"?) or with SpaceX.
Ponzi scheme? I doubt that poster even knows what those words even represent.
I'm replying here because I want moderators to know this response was short, articulate, and to the point. Moreover, it is all the GP post deserved in reply.
http://www.spacex.com/launch_manifest.php
That isn't just government contracts, and those are people who have signed, put money down, and have formally become a "customer" for SpaceX. They've sold quite a few contracts, and the list on this particular web page seems to keep getting longer and longer as I watch it.
SpaceX is already turning a profit, so I'd dare say that they can certainly remain profitable for the next five years, if not much longer. About the only thing that would stink and change this is if LA became ground zero in a nuclear war, but the future of SpaceX would hardly be a pressing issue at that point.
Perhaps, and I'll leave this as an open question, SpaceX might have a series of failures where the quality of their rockets will go downhill, and thus lose customers and have nobody else signing up. That isn't a lack of customers, however, that is the problem.
China might be able to copy the blueprints, but they don't have the skilled workers (SpaceX has raided the workforce of several long-time aerospace companies, including Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, and others), the industrial infrastructure (the SpaceX factory is a former Boeing plant that made 747s), and far and away more important:
The competitive drive coming from running Silicon Valley start ups that deliberately cuts out bureaucracy and hates hierarchical organizations as only a necessary evil. The People's Liberation Army is not going to reverse-engineer SpaceX without them becoming essentially a "liberal" democratic society that respects human rights and permits freedom of speech, thoughts, and actions.
China wants central planning and control. That works fine for some projects, and is the way that NASA has been running things for decades. It is also the source of problems for NASA and why nothing new seems to be coming from JSC or for that matter any other NASA center that actually makes it into the skies.
What keeps SpaceX on their toes isn't the major "traditional spaceflight" companies like Boeing and Lockheed-Martin, it is the dozens or more start-ups that can all easily take their place as the darling new aerospace company, some of which are doing things even more efficient and perhaps better than SpaceX. There isn't anything special about this one company, other than they have a sugar daddy who had some money (now spent mostly) to get them going in the first place. Remember where Elon Musk got his start, and that explains quite a bit about how he is running his companies too.
The main advantage of multiple smaller launchers is that you can in theory put the launchers into a production queue so you can start to achieve economies of scale in terms of part production and maintaining worker efficiency. Everything from part suppliers, fabricators, assemblers, and even the launch crew at the tower can "practice" their craft and be able to become efficient and very skilled at their jobs. This can significantly lower costs to the point that the negative aspects of having to do in-orbit assembly may not be be nearly so bad.
Also, if you are assembling something like the NAUTLUS-X spacecraft out of say ten smaller components and one of them fails to launch or blows up during the launch (causing that part to be destroyed), you can certainly have spares available to replace that one part. The trick there is that you make more than just one "spaceship" or whatever it is that you are building in space.... for the same reason that economies of scale work for launchers.
The only time it makes sense for a larger launcher in practice is if you are sending up so much stuff so frequently that you are getting a traffic jam at the launch facilities, where larger vehicles are needed to take the crushing demand and the frequency of use is going to be such that similar economies of scale can be used to make the larger vehicles profitable. That is precisely what is happening with SpaceX right now, where they have effectively shut down their Falcon 1 production line because the demand for the Falcon 9 vehicles can meet the market needs for those who previously expected to fly on the smaller vehicles.
so replacing Boeing/Lockheed with SpaceX does exactly what for a privatized space industry? Or are people just realizing that the space industry at the current time just can't be private and they want to replace their child of space payola?
What is missing with this sentiment is that SpaceX is not operating on a cost-plus contract basis. Boeing and Lockheed-Martin develop and launch their rockets where the government pays the actual cost, plus a predetermined profit (the "plus") that is built into the contracts. Those companies assume little liability in terms of rocket failures or even inflation in terms of increased costs of doing business. All extra costs simply get passed onto the customer, which is the government in almost all cases.
What SpaceX is doing differently is that they have a set, mostly "fixed" price for a launch and you can take it or leave it if you are a customer. SpaceX allows negotiation for multiple launches at a discount, but you still have a price that is predictable. SpaceX assumes all profit liability from that price, so if the price of Titanium or Niobium starts to soar, it is SpaceX that has to cover the cost. Contract prices are fixed when a customer books the flight.
BTW, this is also why commercial customers are flocking to SpaceX, because the prices are predictable and that you can build a business model to calculate profits for other activities that might happen in space. Neither Boeing nor Lockheed-Martin currently offer that type of contract for commercial customers, at least not without considerable negotiation. It is offered by the ESA and RKK Energia, and the Chinese have been trying to crack into that market too, which is why this entire slashdot thread is notable.
It was made fun of in the series "Get Smart", starring Don Adams in the late 1960's, although it was mostly by reference to the fictional C.H.A.O.S. organization that did the same thing. It was also a common running gag among many other sitcoms including "I Love Lucy" to even being mentioned in the "Twilight Zone" on a couple of occasions. The "Tonight Show" with Johnny Carson also made frequent mention of the issue.
The sad thing is that not only was it a running gag, it was also something that frequently came from official press releases from TASS (the Soviet news agency) and interviews of various Soviet leaders. It became a running gag because the Soviets would claim origination on so many things ranging from airplanes to television that it became a standing joke that was generally understood within the Cold War culture of America in the 1950's and 1960's.
That you may not remember any TV series with the gag only shows your age. By the 1970's and later the Soviet Union generally wasn't so obvious with such propaganda, and the joke sort of died out from overuse by that time. It just stopped being funny.
SpaceX most clearly has credibility in terms of launching larger payloads into orbit. I guess the Dragon capsule doesn't count as something credible?
As for anything that Senator Shelby wants to fund, most especially the SLS system, I have my doubts that anything will clear the launch tower much less actually make it into space. It is going to be canceled before it gets built, much like Constellation before it, and the dozens of other NASA projects for manned spaceflight that all showed promise but never really went anywhere.
The last manned spaceflight program to actually make it to orbit was the Space Shuttle, and that was originally started under the Johnson Administration (although the heavy work on it happened during the Nixon Administration). The singular failure of NASA to put any sort of meaningful program together is a sign of what that bureaucracy is able to accomplish, and I doubt any change in the Presidency is going to make any difference on that. Neither Ronald Reagan nor Bill Clinton were able to make any significant moves in that arena... except for the ISS project if you want to give both of those Presidents at least a little bit of credit.
I'll believe that China has a credible space program when they can accomplish a manned orbital rendezvous. I would venture to bet that SpaceX is going to beat China to that accomplishment. SpaceX going to do that unmanned some time next year.... if their public schedule is followed to some degree.
If Chinese Astronauts make it to the Moon on Chinese rockets, I would dare say they will likely be met by Americans or others who went up there first... as private citizens. I wouldn't put it past Richard Branson to personally greet the Chinese for their "accomplishment" on the Moon itself.
As can be seen, I'm not really all that impressed with the Chinese space program. They are trying, and doing better than other countries, but they haven't yet even accomplished many of the things done by the Gemini program, much less anything else beyond those relatively modest missions. Their last major accomplishment was to essentially replicate Ed White's EVA on Gemini 4.
The Falcon XX does not have real specs. It has design goals for what it ought to look like if the engineers ever actually sat down to work on the thing, and what an educated guess might be able to say if the green light ever was given to develop that vehicle. About the only thing known about the Merlin 2 engine is that it is supposedly going to have similar propulsion and fuel requirements (including the Kerosene/LOX fuel currently in use with the Falcon rockets already) as the F-1 engines used on the Saturn V. Assuming modern composite materials, new discoveries in metallurgy, and some tweaking by SpaceX engineers, it may even exceed the performance of the F-1 and certainly be comparable to the Space Shuttle Main Engine. That is a lofty goal by itself.
The Falcon 9 is supposedly going to launch with just one Merlin 2 engine for the first stage, if it gets developed, with a slight performance improvement if built too.
One difference with Armadillo as compared to SpaceX is that I don't think any current group has ever test fired more rocket engines than Armadillo, with perhaps the sole exception being Estes Industries. Rocket propellant has been one of their major expenses... something you would be hard pressed to find with almost any other research team even hoping to achieve sub-orbital flight, much less orbital. Armadillo, through Space Adventures, has also sold over 100 passenger flights (seats I guess) on their upcoming manned sub-orbital vehicle. They certainly are going to be in competition with Scaled Composites (and Virgin Galactic).
The real dark horse so to say with commercial space flight is Blue Origin, as money is being spent, engineering being hired, land is being acquired, and stuff is happening but they are being more quiet than the engineers at Area 51 in terms of what they are up to. Their last public test flight was a couple of years ago, so it might be interesting to see what they will eventually come up with. Jeff Bezos certainly isn't short on money at the moment.
One of the problems facing the Saturn rocket program is that Werner Von Braun was ramping up for a production run of well over a hundred rockets. He was striving for economies of scale.... none of which were realized due to the premature cancellation of the program in the late 1960's. I say premature because after all of that infrastructure was put into place, it was then abandoned afterward.
In fact, some of those systems were later used for the Shuttle system (particularly the barges and docks at KSC for the external tanks), and ironically the Falcon 9 with the Merlin engines are using the same test stand that was originally built for the testing and development of the F-1 and J-2 engines used on the Saturn family of rockets. Assembly lines were built and a huge team of people put together to make these rockets.
I very much disagree with the assertion that Apollo was at the end of its life, and the other rationale you are using here doesn't fly either. Pure Oxygen atmosphere? Yeah, that was an issue, but was it a bad thing in space? The reason Nitrogen is used on the Space Shuttle has to do with modern electronics and the need to cool down laptops and other similar equipment. To me, that is some lazy engineers, but we can argue that point separately. It certainly has little to do with human physiology which can certainly survive with just a partial pressure of enough oxygen to breathe.
Non-standard docking? They had a standard.... the Apollo docking standard. It was used on Skylab and the Apollo-Soyuz missions too. It certainly was better than the hole in the heat shield that was used with Gemini and planned for the MOL program. As for solar panels.... why would they be needed with the mission profiles being used? That was also a brand-new technology in the 1970's. Those are all excuses.
Any numbers that you find now for the cost of a Saturn launch is based upon data that was inflated explicitly to kill the program and make the Shuttle program look good. BTW, I've seen costs well above $1 billion to almost $2 billion per launch for the Shuttle, again depending on how you do the accounting. And the Shuttle did amortize the hard infrastructure costs over more than a hundred launches.
My argument is that it wasn't as expensive as it has been claimed, and that the expensive aspects of building a Saturn rocket had already been spent by 1970. It was engineers who were used to creating the next big thing and a congress trying to aggressively cut back on space exploration which led to the pressures put upon building the Shuttle. I admit it is 20/20 hindsight, but I still assert that for the cost of the Shuttle program as a whole, a similar sort of space exploration program could have been developed as happened with the Shuttle, and with far more flexibility in terms of doing stuff beyond LEO... which is certainly a major limitation of the Shuttle. That is also why the Constellation/Orion program was put together, in part because a Shuttle II program would leave American astronauts stuck in LEO again. Unfortunately, Constellation was even worse than had the Saturn rockets been re-created.
There are many problems with socialized medicine, not the least of which is that there isn't a limit to what care can be provided, or that the limit is something dictated by a government bureaucracy.
Back about a hundred years ago, there were hard limits in terms of what a physician could do to help you out if you got sick. Giving you a couple pills, prescribing you some cocktail of chemicals mixed with alcohol, and some rudimentary surgery was about all that could be done, and none of that was really all that expensive.
At the moment, in theory most people's lives could be extended almost indefinitely provided you have the cash to get that accomplished. It isn't really so much a matter of if somebody can be healed, but how much that is going to cost. While not extremely common, I do know of some people who have run up medical bills totally more than a million dollars using modern health care practices. Tens of millions of dollars in care for a single person is certainly not impossible any more.
My point with all of this is in terms of how the decision is made to simply say "enough!" and that somebody who is injured, sick, or cursed with some genetic defect can receive or be denied that medical treatment, especially since not everybody around us is a multi-millionaire that can pay for this level of care. This is why health care expenses are spiraling out of control, because the ability to do this kind of treatment forces a hard examination of how much somebody is actually worth in terms of chewing up scarce resources (whatever that resource might be). Medical care is a limited resource and it is impossible to treat EVERYBODY as if they are all of unlimited worth.
I would dare say that even the very notion of health care and how it is administered needs to really be rethought down to fundamental levels and perhaps whole new systems put into place.
Getting back on topic, the question at had isn't if somebody who needs medical care should or should not be treated, but if the system is one of central planning with a central bureaucracy literally allocating the decision of your life or death, or if perhaps a less centralized system ought to be put into place that preserves personal liberties. For myself, I strongly distrust central planning groups because they almost never have my interests and needs in mind, or for that matter even care if I live or die. If your ability to live and see tomorrow depends strictly on your political connections (or lack thereof), something is seriously wrong and sick with the society as a whole.
The whole reason to force everybody to get these IDs is strictly to know who has better political connections so they can get better treatment over the "proletariat" commoners who lack those connections. Yeah, that is something I want to support.
There are no formal plans for the Falcon XX either, but that doesn't stop the discussion for how big these rockets might get.
The real issue with anything larger than a Falcon 9-Heavy is one of market interest, and if anybody might have a project that could legitimately use such a heavy lift vehicle. As demonstrated with this announcement, there certainly are economies of scale and improved efficiencies which come from a larger vehicle, and that holds true even more for much larger rockets than the Falcon 9.
Since the F9-H is going to be the largest rocket on the market, there simply aren't customers who have even anticipated this sort of launcher size, much less something even larger. Some have suggested they can use the extra capacity, but it will be interesting to see just how far that will go.
There is a demand for larger rockets, but that is for projects that typically show up only once or twice per decade. Maintaining an army of workers to support a rocket that only is used once in a blue moon is not an efficient way to build rockets, which drives up deployment costs as well. What is needed to get something larger built, like the Falcon XX, is one of getting a project put together that can use the launcher size. In the meantime, I think the Falcon 9 is going to be more than sufficient for most of the current concepts of getting something into space, together with what is available from other companies.
It is also noteworthy that SpaceX is hardly the only commercial spaceflight company, or even the only one who might challenge the traditional major aerospace manufacturing companies. They are merely the first of what may be a long line of companies who are willing to challenge traditional presumptions about what it takes for getting into space. Not mentioned is how Armadillo Aerospace was set to launch a new class of rockets capable of getting into space this past weekend, and on their own path into orbital spaceflight. If Armadillo is able to get their act together, SpaceX is going to be considered a dinosaur with inefficient pricing models. We are living in exciting times in terms of American spaceflight development.... and most reporters are bemoaning the fact that the traditional spaceflight companies are dying.
Where do you think the name Falcon came from?
Please explain how the Roadster is more or less technically sophisticated than the Prius?
The design goals for the two vehicles were hugely different, and Tesla was explicitly going after the high-end auto consumer market with the Roadster, where $100k is not really a problem. If you knew anything about economics at all, you'd realize that the strategy Tesla is using is a much better way to build cars.
Besides, have you seen the "Model S" specs lately? Tesla is working for cheaper vehicles, and there is another vehicle in the works that is aimed squarely at the Prius market slated to cost about $30k each. Are you complaining because you don't have that $100k right now to own a Roadster?
The audio link on the Falcon launches by SpaceX is real. If you had been riding those vehicles, there most certainly would be many sounds which you can hear through the vehicle, as the structural frame itself can act as a sound medium. Sure, you can't hear the sounds if you are outside of the vehicle, but inside of it there most certainly is sound coming from the motors.
The audio in this case is an excellent engineering diagnostics tool to make sure what you want to happen is going on when you want it to be happening. An "unusual sound" is something you especially want to be listening for in such a recording.
So you want to use the Stargate that is found in Cheyenne Mountain? Wake me up when that bit of fiction becomes reality. Or are we going to do the Edgar Rice Burroughs method of space travel and simply use our minds to transport ourselves to Mars?
I'll also admit that going to Mars with a manned mission is a tough nut to crack. Heck, even landing on Mars is seemingly a tougher challenge than almost any other spaceflight technical challenge for a number or reasons, mostly because Mars has an atmosphere which exists (so it has to be dealt with) but not thick enough to be useful. Landing on Mars would be much easier if it simply lacked an atmosphere altogether. That is one of the reasons why even now a successful landing on Mars is still a hit or miss proposition, where the "hit" too often is fatal even for robotic missions. Yeah, I get the challenges involved, where seemingly pure luck is a mission requirement when dealing with Mars.
If the NATLUS-X concept ever gets some attention, it may be possible to use something like the Falcon 9-H to assemble a serious mission to Mars with a dozen flights or so. That puts the price tag for a mission to Mars down to mere billions and would require some of the in-orbit assembly experience gained from building the ISS. Even so, that is going to require some substantial R&D even to get to that stage and a commitment from somebody with a pile of cash willing to put the thing together (with looks at the federal government).
The speculation about using the Falcon 9-Heavy for a manned cislunar flyby (aka recreating the Apollo 8 flight) sounds a bit more interesting. The Dragon capsule would be more than sufficient for such a journey (perhaps even a bit roomy compared to the Apollo command capsule) and the technical challenges aren't nearly so huge. The only tough challenge would be building a service module for the Dragon that could have the delta-v to go from LEO to the Moon and back. I would dare say anybody taking such a trip would get instant world-wide media attention that would rival the Apollo flights.
I know that the initial development work on the Merlin 2 engine has started, but it is currently a low-priority project and hasn't received full funding yet (from within SpaceX). I think Elon is hoping to get a government development project for it as it will be an expensive engine to develop, although as you indicate it can be something used incrementally on the Falcon 9 to boost performance too.
If that Falcon XX ever gets built, I would stand in awe to watch it go up. Just imaging a fully loaded 747 being launched into space (aka about 400 tons) is enough to drop my jaw.
Yeah, trying to think of who might use such a vehicle sort of shows why that is decades away from being built, if it ever will be built at all. Elon has stated elsewhere that he wants to personally go to Mars, even if he has to build the rocket to get there first. The F9-H is certainly a good step in that direction.
It also wasn't that hard to sell potential employees with real skills to work for SpaceX. All Elon had to say is "would you like to work on a clean-sheet design for a new rocket that will actually fly?" When asked for who is going to pay for the thing, Elon said "I will".
Nothing burns out engineers faster than spending nearly a lifetime of effort on something only to see the project canned as if you never existed in the first place. NASA has been doing that for decades where one project after another get started and then terminated. After many folks have been on that treadmill for all of these years, it is refreshing when you build something, use it, and then tear it apart afterward to see where you made your mistakes or if your presumptions were accurate. Having to wait in limbo over congressional appropriations hearings and knowing your job is on the line each time congress meets in a committee hearing can't help either.
In other words, SpaceX is doing real engineering for real things, and is now where stuff is happening. As a result, they are getting the best and brightest, where earlier the best rocket engineers were going to Wall Street instead.
Which is just a little less than the cost of the Ares I-X demonstrator flight that proved nothing other than ATK had engineers who could design a rocket that would clear the tower and to help show off the pretty launch tower that cost a couple billion dollars by itself.
Congress spends a billion dollars merely when a member of congress clears their throat. Even at that higher figure, it still is impressive as hell.
If you add in the seed money from NASA and the USAF, you might get a little over a billion dollars invested into SpaceX over this past decade, but not much more than that. USAF money was used for the development of the Falcon 1.
All SpaceX said is that this is going to be the largest rocket currently in production. Can you refute that statement? The other headlines are things which were produced by clueless reporters who grabbed the first things that was said and made that as a headline. The press conference clearly emphasized many other things, including the substantially cheaper cost to orbit (rockets are much more efficient when they are larger) and some design concpets such as the booster stage interconnect that hasn't been used before. If you had bothered to watch the bloody press conference itself you would see that SpaceX talked about a great many other things besides "gee, we got a big rocket, don't we?"
BTW, while I don't always agree with DerekLyons and his conclusions, the last thing I would ever accuse him of being is clueless. For space related topics, he is perhaps one of the most clueful people I have seen post on Slashdot. Calling him otherwise only demonstrates your immaturity and inability to actually read what he has written.
SpaceX is also getting contracts from governments other than the U.S. government. That is where it is going to be doing something different from the other American launchers. They are underbidding ESA and even RKK Energia, something other American companies haven't done for decades.
Yes, American federal contracts are going to be a source of significant revenue too, but that certainly isn't going to be the only customer for these rockets.