Who is going to use this "super heavy" rocket? There are customers for the Delta IV Heavy and a proven market for geo-synch satellites. For much larger vehicles, the proven market simply isn't there or comes up so seldom that it is really not worth building.
Oh, on a rare occasion, perhaps once or twice a decade, there is a legitimate project that could use a larger rocket. That isn't enough of a demand to justify building such a huge vehicle and even RKK Energia couldn't justify keeping rockets of that class in their product line for the same economic reason.
If there was a major project that required multiple copies of such a super-heavy launcher, such as building a replacement for the ISS, another manned lunar exploration program, or a manned program to Mars, building such a large rocket might be justified. Get the program going first and the launcher will come so such a large rocket can be justified and that more than one can be built. Unfortunately for these rocket manufacturing companies, Congress doesn't want to authorize and pay for such a program which would actually use such a vehicle.
This isn't just "updating the blueprints", it is maintaining the entire supply chain so that you can build the thing when you need it. If you only build one per decade, you don't maintain that supply chain.
Congress also failed to give any reason or note any program that was going to use the rocket. Its only purpose: To keep aerospace engineers busy over the next decade. It was a stinking WPA program doing the space equivalent of moving a mountain of rocks from one side of the highway to the other and then back.
This is a rocket whose first action after it has flown the first test rocket is to terminate the program and send everybody home..... sort of like how the Ares I-X flew just one flight (sub-orbital at that) and then the whole Ares program was terminated as not cost effective. And we want that whole process repeated?
NASA should not be a jobs program for engineers. Besides, making a rocket program and then canceling the program before it flies is a good way to burn out perfectly good engineers. Engineers want to build something that works, not just collect a paycheck. Then again, these companies involved likely don't have any real engineers left who want to build stuff.
SpaceX has to be deliberately vague about commercial partners because many of them don't want their names plastered all over the news... at least not until there is a proven flight system that has a record of successful flights.
SpaceX would not be building this vehicle if there wasn't customers already in the pipeline ready to use the vehicle, just as there is already a fairly substantial manifest of customers waiting in line right now to be using the F9 and F1e. The customers are there, but they are not being so open about them until after the test flights have been completed.
SpaceX clearly thinks there is a market for this vehicle, and I am inclined to believe them when they say that they can produce a steady stream of about 10 launches per year of the F9-H. It may not be nearly so many, but with the drop in price there certainly are going to be some customers who previously wouldn't have purchased a launcher which now can afford it.
The real trick that SpaceX is going to face is if they have hit upon an elastic or inelastic supply/demand curve. It can be argued successfully that at least for the current generation of people who buy spaceflight services that the number of flights and the amount of money available to spend upon these flights is pretty much fixed. If you cut spaceflight costs, all that really happens is that the payloads get a few extra bells and whistles that otherwise wouldn't be there. The same number of launches still happen (a pitiful few) and it is the payload manufacturing groups who get to keep the money instead of the launcher companies.
What SpaceX is hoping for is that new markets will emerge and that prove the preceding philosophy as being in error and that there are a great many people who would go into space for various things... if only there was a rocket cheap enough to be able to justify going up into space in the first place.
About the only new market I can definitively count upon to justify this substantially lower price point is space tourism, which indeed grows faster as you drop the price. Still, even at $1000/kg, you are going to be hard pressed to find millionaires willing to spend their fortune for the privilege of going into space except for the hard-core space geeks. Other proven space related markets are already quite saturated and really don't care about substantially lower prices for access to space.
I've argued many times that had NASA simply abandoned the Shuttle design (looking back to the 1970's with 20/20 hindsight and not really something which could have been anticipated back then) and stuck with the Saturn series of vehicles, it is very likely that NASA could have flown all of the astronauts, missions, and even built the ISS for the same cost if not substantially cheaper than using the STS system that was eventually built.
Sticking ISS modules on the top of a Saturn V certainly would have been much cheaper than flying them on the Shuttle, and they would have been much roomier too, with fewer flights needed as a side benefit.
In a retro-fiction speculation, it would be interesting to think about what the Saturn V would have looked like in the 21st Century with several decades of incremental changes and more or less continuous usage of the Apollo flight systems. Certainly there would have been "glass cockpits" that were eventually added to the Shuttle as well as refined avionics and other components that certainly would have been added too. A 21st Century Apollo spacecraft would have been a completely different vehicle, but still would have a clear heritage and it would have been a solid workhorse of a spacecraft.... as the Soyuz spacecraft currently is.
The sad thing is that nothing NASA is currently doing has any heritage at all. It seems like any time any sort of project gets going, it is going to be terminated, sometimes before "metal is bent". Of all of the things NASA has worked on, the last manned spaceflight system they have been able to get from the drawing board to the launch pad has been the Space Shuttle, and that happened during the Nixon administration. That sounds like a strong record to work from and one to have some faith that the next big thing might actually get built.
If that was the case, why were signs plastered all over the major contractors that proclaimed "waste anything but time" during the Apollo era?
Yes, the Apollo program did have a budget and they were pushing to being able to have something which was affordable given the goals and circumstances, but given the huge portion of the federal budget which went towards NASA in the 1960's, cost was not really a major driver other than ideas so outlandish that they simply couldn't be used at all were dropped and ignored.
After about 1966-68 (roughly) cost considerations became much more important and there were huge pushes to cut back on Apollo. Even while Apollo 8 was going around the Moon, missions were starting to be cut already and activities for future missions in space were significantly scaled back. Still, in terms of getting to the Moon in the first place NASA was pretty much given a blank check and told to do whatever it took to achieve the goal.
The numbers they are quoting is rather conservative in terms of making a profit. From what I've seen, they only need a dozen or so flights to be able to recoup the costs of the R&D.
SpaceX is a very lean manufacturing company in terms of expenses for making the rockets they are building, and they are really able to make a whole bunch of money even at this low price. Some of the ways they are reducing costs is through massive automation (they are using some advanced robotics for many of their manufacturing processes), and the fact that they outsource almost nothing. Since the entire manufacturing chain from raw materials to the finished product all happen within a block of each other and everybody involved are all SpaceX employees, they are also able to cut out waste and paperwork.
Since the whole project is being built with private funds and not a government contract, they don't give a damn about paperwork except for what is purely needed for FAA clearance to get the thing off the ground. Quality assurance is happening, but they don't have a NASA or Air Force inspector breathing down their neck 24/7/365. If there is some way to do the project cheaper, all they have to do is ask a manager (ultimately just Elon Musk, who has an office on-site) and the change happens. No fuss, no fancy approval process, and certainly no ass-kissing to some congressional aide.
In spite of the fact that SpaceX has really only sent up one successful commercial payload and received a partial payment for the successful completion of the Dragon capsule with the most recent flight from NASA, SpaceX is being "forced" by the IRS to report profits and has actually been a "profitable company" for the past 3 years. Investment capital, such as is flowing into the company right now, is mainly being used to accelerate the growth of the company and is not strictly needed in terms of general operating costs. SpaceX is very much a for-profit business, and they are making a profit even now.
On top of all of that, the most complex part of the whole product line really is the Merlin engine, which is being used on all of their products, from the Falcon 1, Falcon 9, and now the Falcon 9-H. Since the number of engines being produced certainly is substantially greater than "1", they are able to apply production line economies of scale to their manufacturing processes. I heard Elon Musk say that they were planning on a production capacity of at least 100 engines per year, which is about 2-3 engines per week. He is actually anticipating going as large as 10x that production rate eventually if the market can keep up, which is a couple of engines each day, or about a dozen launches per year between all of the various launch vehicles. At that production rate, some very interesting economies of scale can certainly happen that haven't been applied to the rocket launcher business before.
Personally, I think SpaceX and especially Elon Musk is going to be laughing all of the way to the bank with the pile of money he will be making with these rockets.
The Space Shuttle could never go to Mars, even if you somehow put an external tank into orbit, fully fueled, and ready to burn the shuttle main engines to perform a maneuver needed to acquire the delta-v necessary for a mission to Mars. Simply put, it was never designed for that mission in mind.
The least of which is that the Shuttle has components that break down after about 30 days in space. With some careful swapping out of components assuming it is also docked to the ISS, it might survive up to about 90 days pushing it real hard, but then it wouldn't be reliable enough to bring back to the Earth and would have to be scuttled (left to drift back hoping it would crash into the Pacific Ocean on some uninhabited piece of open water).
There are many reasons why the Shuttle never left LEO, and it is more than just fuel.
The F9-Heavy is certainly going to be able to put more mass into LEO than the Delta IV-Heavy, which has routinely put vehicles on Mars over the past couple of decades. As for a sample-return mission, yes, that hasn't been done yet, but the requirements for such a mission are certainly well known and putting something on Mars would not be a problem for a vehicle like this Falcon 9-Heavy.
Believable numbers? I guess Spirit and Opportunity are simply wandering around somewhere in Arizona and it is a fiction that those photos they are sending back represent anything real on another planet. Since these fictional vehicles never got to Mars, I guess we don't know anything about how large of a rocket is needed to put vehicles like these on that other planet. Uncertainties? Well, if you never got off the Earth in the first place and have never actually been in space (these vehicles are wandering around next to the Apollo studios where the astronauts did the lunar landings) I suppose nobody knows what it takes to actually launch something into orbit in the first place.
I would dare say that the calculations for going to Mars are known quite well, with plenty of real-world experience and real missions that have already happened. Think about it.
...so if they want to they can send it to pretty much anywhere in the inner solar system that they want.
Nope. The Falcon Heavy goes to orbit, carrying 50 tonnes of rock. If they want to replace those 50 tonnes of rock with a 50-tonne spacecraft that will go from Earth orbit to Mars (or elsewhere), they have to design, fund and build that, too.
That doesn't seem to be a particularly tough problem for SpaceX, and getting something to work in space isn't nearly as difficult of a problem as getting something up to LEO in the first place. Throw on some sort of prototype ion drive propulsion system on something like the "RatSat" that SpaceX flew on their Falon 1 launch #4, and there might be something interesting going on.
SpaceX flew a wheel of cheese with their last Falcon 9 launch, I wouldn't put it past Elon to try something a bit more audacious for this launch of the Falcon 9 Heavy. He might offer a "free ride" to some of the Google Lunar X-Prize teams at the very least, who would be more than willing to provide the spacecraft systems once they get to LEO.
While not a primary objective so far as SpaceX is willing to sacrifice the boosters as is customary for most rocket systems on the market today, SpaceX is trying to make at least the first stage of their rockets to be fully reusable, or at least recoverable so they can be reviewed for engineering purposes and provide some feedback to improve manufacturing quality.
If SpaceX is able to recover the 1st stage boosters, it will be an improvement over the Shuttle and most other system, and could conceivably offer a huge drop in price if refurbishing those booster stages for reuse could be done cheaply too.
The Space Shuttle never achieved the fruits of its reusability for many reasons, most of which is because some stupid choices were made in terms of what components could be reused and the fact that "reuse" on the Shuttle was almost a complete tear-down and rebuilding of the Shuttle after each mission. It was good in concept, but poorly implemented on the Shuttle.
If you wanted to go to Mars on a SpaceX vehicle, wait for the Falcon XX-Heavy launcher, which is supposed to have the equivalent of 27 engines all of the equivalent of the F1 motors that were used on the first stage of the Saturn V. SpaceX is calling them "Merlin 2" engines if you want to Google the specs. That is some serious tonnage to space, but still on the future drawing boards for the company.
What happened today is that the F9-Heavy, one of the original concept vehicles from back when SpaceX was first formed (actually the Falcon 5-Heavy, but that idea morphed into the F9-H shortly thereafter) has finally had the main design formally set down instead of a rough concept and goal. The design has been formally set down on paper down to the nuts, bolts, wires, and everything needed to build the thing. The design is done now, and all that is really needed is to build the thing. Since the engines are already flying on the Falcon 9 and have even been into space already, it is mostly an incremental improvement of the basic concepts that have already flown.
The big deal design concepts are the tank interconnects between the side boosters and the main core engine, which will drain the side booster tanks first before they are jettisoned, turning the vehicle into essentially a 3-stage craft. It is a novel design idea that I'm not familiar with being used before except by some experimental rockets on a small scale.
Still, you most certainly could use the Falcon 9 Heavy to launch nearly a hundred passengers, life support, flight attendants & crew, and stowage for those passengers into low-earth orbit if that is something you wanted to try. That was the point of the comment, especially how Musk talked about how the F9-H could also be used to repeat the Apollo 8 cis-lunar orbital trajectory with the Dragon Capsule and a crew of at least 3, plus food, life support for a week, and fuel for orbital maneuvering. The only thing you would lack would be a lunar lander, and that conceivably could even be sent up on a second launcher for an in-orbit rendezvous if you wanted to repeat Neil Armstrong's adventure. The Dragon capsule is being rated for such a return trajectory from the Moon.
And all that for less than a billion dollars in R&D, including test launches.
The launch is going to be from Vandenberg. Please be more informed if you are going to keep repeating this lie. Other launch pads that SpaceX has include Cape Canavaral (Elon Musk said he might end up getting one of the Shuttle/Apollo pads, and is currently in negotiation for that) and their facility at Kwajalein Island in the Republic of the Marshall Islands. All three facilities have been used by SpaceX in the past, but they've had difficulties launching rockets from California due to bureaucratic red tape and lack of flexibility on the part of the Air Force to give a launch window for their activities.
If the payloads are Air Force payloads, I think that problem isn't going to be too hard to solve. SpaceX is hoping to get the USAF as a customer.
The article says the rocket will be assembled at Vandenberg, it says nothing of a launch from there.
The launch is going to be from Vandenberg, where SpaceX has had a launch pad for a great many years and even did a hold-down test fire for the Falcon 1. No launches have happened there, however, because of the huge piles of red tape that the Air Force requires, and several other "higher priority" launches from other companies.
The rocket assembly and manufacturing (other than the final integrated assembly) is taking place at the main plant in El Segundo, California (a suburb of Los Angeles), and the rocket motors are tested in Waco, Texas for formal certification prior to launch.
As for what the article says.... the author is significantly misinformed about a great many things and I wouldn't trust most of what was said other than a big press conference was held by SpaceX today (or yesterday as it were depending on your timezone). That is the only big news, not this fine minutae and quibbling over details the reporter likely got wrong anyway.
Software architecture documents are something that I personally find very useful when coding. Still, those who start to follow that document slavishly usually get themselves into a world of trouble and it does bite them hard when you start getting into the development cycle.
The largest problem with software development is that the development team rarely knows the full problem domain until after the application has been finished, and even then it can be debated.
This comparison to McDonald's Restaurants and the bun bakeries is really missing the point here, and not very accurate. There are several factors that apply to why bakeries are not "brought in-house" for the restaurant, not the least of which is the screwed up employment rules that often exist where McDonald's may be prohibited by law from even baking bread in the first place. Add in union membership (presuming most bakeries are unionized in the area), unemployment compensation, other taxes, and "human resource management", it becomes nuts to get started.
Add onto that economies of scale where one central bakery can much more efficiently produce many more buns than if some bread oven was put into each restaurant, and that pushes the case over the top to give the edge to some contractor.
McDonald's did have to go so far as to buy farms, hire farmers and ranchers (for the cattle), and even built their own slaughterhouses and potato processing plants when they moved into China and Russia. If you can't get what you want when you want it, sometimes the stuff does have to be brought in house. You might be surprised to find some bakeries that are in fact owned in part or in whole by some franchisee or perhaps the McDonald's corporation itself. I certainly wouldn't dismiss the potential.
It doesn't have to be all that mysterious. Any spending of government money requires oversight, which is many layers of management to make sure that you are spending the money where it is supposed to be going. That introduces huge cost overhead that doesn't exist in small businesses.
On average, I've found that it takes at least a full sheet of documentation for each roughly $500 that you spend of government money as a contractor, sometimes even more or even several times that. This not only starts with the RFP process (request for proposals) but then you have to show a budget for whatever it is that you are doing, include regular progress reports, and literally account for each and every penny spent, including how the time was spent for those getting paid to do work on the contract. You need at least a couple accountants to keep track of the money, and middle managers who write up the reports and explain what it is that you've done.
Once all of that money has been spent and the reports generated, somebody has to read all of this too. All of those people reading the reports also have to have their own management team, accountants, and other administrators making sure that they aren't simply goofing off either. To watch the watchers, there is yet another whole team with its own budget too.
So simply put, to replace a $5 light bulb in a socket, the government typically spends about $500 with all of the overhead and supervision to accomplish that task... presuming that of course the light bulb is in a public place where no security or classified issues are present, which adds an extra 10x+ multiplier to the whole process.
A small business would simply replace the bulb and be done.
This is on top of specialized parts for exotic equipment like perhaps a helicopter rotor gasket that may require setting up equipment or even tooling a whole production line in order to get it built. In that case, it costs hundreds of thousands or dollars (or even millions of dollars) to set up the production line, and some inefficient government procurement processes will spend that money for just a couple of gaskets, when the marginal cost for each additional part is perhaps just a buck.
If you decide to "streamline" the process to cut out this overhead, then you do get people goofing off or embezzling the funds anyway, so it is better to have the overhead. For myself, I'd rather get rid of the government spending in the first place. If it is important to be doing, if I have the money in my own wallet I can make that decision for myself and get whatever it is that needs to be accomplished so it will be done.
Japan doesn't have the federalized system of government like exists in America with dual sovereignty and a federal government that literally can't act until after the state government gets its act together. Katrina was a royal screw up of the Louisiana government (not to mention New Orleans itself was in total chaos effectively without a government after Katrina), but that fact was lost on most international news media.
FEMA, after Katrina, acted about as fast as it was legally permitted to act. That Louisiana had effectively no emergency response system in place is the blame of the citizens of Louisiana. It was the waiting on Uncle Sam that was the problem there, not the inaction on the part of FEMA.
BTW, Biloxi was hit almost as bad as New Orleans by Katrina, yet it recovered much faster. I don't think that was just a coincidence.
One of the things that I hate about educational memes in America right now is the idolization of the Japanese school system as having produced better engineers and scientists than the American educational system. While there are certainly problems with schools in America, I don't think it is necessarily a good thing to push kids to suicide, wear uniforms, and have such a structured and rigid environment that original thoughts are driven from their consciousness.
I'm not trying to stereotype Japanese educators, but sometimes the worst practices are adopted instead of the best when you see something that "works" and then try to emulate it. It is the intense pressure placed upon kids, particularly kids at a young age, that is making me pissed off as a parent. My kids in kindergarten often had more homework than my kids in high school have. Something is seriously messed up when I see that.
That's right. They need to remove Hatch from Washington if they can't control him.
We are working on that. My problem is that I don't like the potential successors to Orrin Hatch, and Mike Lee is likely to be a bigger thorn in the side than Hatch ever was. The real problem is finding somebody who can step up and do the job to replace Hatch. That isn't as easy as it should be.
If you don't mind reading original sources of information and doing some data mining, as well as listening to hours of legislative debate, you can always go to this site:
I'm not a huge fan of how this site has been administered, but it at least provides a counterpoint as to what has been happening. Does that give you the details you are craving?
Even then, presuming that the documents were created and used electronically for their entire lifetime (still not a given even today), there sometimes is either "classified" references or perhaps personal and/or private information such as SSNs and other personally identifiable information that normally ought to be removed.
If you applied for food stamps (a government document by the standard proposed here), should that information be available for anybody to read and use how they see fit? What about passport applications? Military pay vouchers?
There certainly are government documents that can and should be kept private or perhaps even documents that might need to be made public but contain private information that needs to be removed before publication.
I should note that even Wikileaks goes through the documents it has to remove this kind of private information, and I consider that a good thing. Going through documents to remove this kind of information is labor intensive and takes time to accomplish, even if the document was made electronically. With a document being only available on paper makes this all that harder to accomplish.
If this happened 100 years ago in Utah, the People's Party would have simply held a sustaining vote on any legislation... that came from the 1st Presidency's office.
While the LDS Church doesn't get involved much any more with legislation like that, the political leadership likes to think they have a calling from God himself to be in the positions they are at... forgetting that Utah public officials don't represent just Latter-day saints nor are they really acting with much piety either. It is simply raw thirst for power.
Utah has seen the restoration of the People's Party and the Liberal Party.... they've just changed names. Neither major political party in Utah really resembles much the national parties they are nominally associated with.
That does exist... after a fashion. There is a paper trail in terms of amendments and discussion (sort of like a Wikipedia talk page) for most legislation, but it is so chaotic and haphazard that to pull that information together is usually to easily done. It certainly is not usually done electronically, except that the documents are scanned and put "on line" for those legislative bodies who do so.
What makes the Utah legislature so bad is that the Republicans have a super-majority (about 70% of the legislature) so they conduct most of their business in the "caucus" meetings. That would be like a developer only putting the debuged/final release version into CVS and all previous development efforts simply didn't use a version control at all.
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Who is going to use this "super heavy" rocket? There are customers for the Delta IV Heavy and a proven market for geo-synch satellites. For much larger vehicles, the proven market simply isn't there or comes up so seldom that it is really not worth building.
Oh, on a rare occasion, perhaps once or twice a decade, there is a legitimate project that could use a larger rocket. That isn't enough of a demand to justify building such a huge vehicle and even RKK Energia couldn't justify keeping rockets of that class in their product line for the same economic reason.
If there was a major project that required multiple copies of such a super-heavy launcher, such as building a replacement for the ISS, another manned lunar exploration program, or a manned program to Mars, building such a large rocket might be justified. Get the program going first and the launcher will come so such a large rocket can be justified and that more than one can be built. Unfortunately for these rocket manufacturing companies, Congress doesn't want to authorize and pay for such a program which would actually use such a vehicle.
This isn't just "updating the blueprints", it is maintaining the entire supply chain so that you can build the thing when you need it. If you only build one per decade, you don't maintain that supply chain.
Congress also failed to give any reason or note any program that was going to use the rocket. Its only purpose: To keep aerospace engineers busy over the next decade. It was a stinking WPA program doing the space equivalent of moving a mountain of rocks from one side of the highway to the other and then back.
This is a rocket whose first action after it has flown the first test rocket is to terminate the program and send everybody home..... sort of like how the Ares I-X flew just one flight (sub-orbital at that) and then the whole Ares program was terminated as not cost effective. And we want that whole process repeated?
NASA should not be a jobs program for engineers. Besides, making a rocket program and then canceling the program before it flies is a good way to burn out perfectly good engineers. Engineers want to build something that works, not just collect a paycheck. Then again, these companies involved likely don't have any real engineers left who want to build stuff.
SpaceX has to be deliberately vague about commercial partners because many of them don't want their names plastered all over the news... at least not until there is a proven flight system that has a record of successful flights.
SpaceX would not be building this vehicle if there wasn't customers already in the pipeline ready to use the vehicle, just as there is already a fairly substantial manifest of customers waiting in line right now to be using the F9 and F1e. The customers are there, but they are not being so open about them until after the test flights have been completed.
SpaceX clearly thinks there is a market for this vehicle, and I am inclined to believe them when they say that they can produce a steady stream of about 10 launches per year of the F9-H. It may not be nearly so many, but with the drop in price there certainly are going to be some customers who previously wouldn't have purchased a launcher which now can afford it.
The real trick that SpaceX is going to face is if they have hit upon an elastic or inelastic supply/demand curve. It can be argued successfully that at least for the current generation of people who buy spaceflight services that the number of flights and the amount of money available to spend upon these flights is pretty much fixed. If you cut spaceflight costs, all that really happens is that the payloads get a few extra bells and whistles that otherwise wouldn't be there. The same number of launches still happen (a pitiful few) and it is the payload manufacturing groups who get to keep the money instead of the launcher companies.
What SpaceX is hoping for is that new markets will emerge and that prove the preceding philosophy as being in error and that there are a great many people who would go into space for various things... if only there was a rocket cheap enough to be able to justify going up into space in the first place.
About the only new market I can definitively count upon to justify this substantially lower price point is space tourism, which indeed grows faster as you drop the price. Still, even at $1000/kg, you are going to be hard pressed to find millionaires willing to spend their fortune for the privilege of going into space except for the hard-core space geeks. Other proven space related markets are already quite saturated and really don't care about substantially lower prices for access to space.
I've argued many times that had NASA simply abandoned the Shuttle design (looking back to the 1970's with 20/20 hindsight and not really something which could have been anticipated back then) and stuck with the Saturn series of vehicles, it is very likely that NASA could have flown all of the astronauts, missions, and even built the ISS for the same cost if not substantially cheaper than using the STS system that was eventually built.
Sticking ISS modules on the top of a Saturn V certainly would have been much cheaper than flying them on the Shuttle, and they would have been much roomier too, with fewer flights needed as a side benefit.
In a retro-fiction speculation, it would be interesting to think about what the Saturn V would have looked like in the 21st Century with several decades of incremental changes and more or less continuous usage of the Apollo flight systems. Certainly there would have been "glass cockpits" that were eventually added to the Shuttle as well as refined avionics and other components that certainly would have been added too. A 21st Century Apollo spacecraft would have been a completely different vehicle, but still would have a clear heritage and it would have been a solid workhorse of a spacecraft.... as the Soyuz spacecraft currently is.
The sad thing is that nothing NASA is currently doing has any heritage at all. It seems like any time any sort of project gets going, it is going to be terminated, sometimes before "metal is bent". Of all of the things NASA has worked on, the last manned spaceflight system they have been able to get from the drawing board to the launch pad has been the Space Shuttle, and that happened during the Nixon administration. That sounds like a strong record to work from and one to have some faith that the next big thing might actually get built.
If that was the case, why were signs plastered all over the major contractors that proclaimed "waste anything but time" during the Apollo era?
Yes, the Apollo program did have a budget and they were pushing to being able to have something which was affordable given the goals and circumstances, but given the huge portion of the federal budget which went towards NASA in the 1960's, cost was not really a major driver other than ideas so outlandish that they simply couldn't be used at all were dropped and ignored.
After about 1966-68 (roughly) cost considerations became much more important and there were huge pushes to cut back on Apollo. Even while Apollo 8 was going around the Moon, missions were starting to be cut already and activities for future missions in space were significantly scaled back. Still, in terms of getting to the Moon in the first place NASA was pretty much given a blank check and told to do whatever it took to achieve the goal.
The numbers they are quoting is rather conservative in terms of making a profit. From what I've seen, they only need a dozen or so flights to be able to recoup the costs of the R&D.
SpaceX is a very lean manufacturing company in terms of expenses for making the rockets they are building, and they are really able to make a whole bunch of money even at this low price. Some of the ways they are reducing costs is through massive automation (they are using some advanced robotics for many of their manufacturing processes), and the fact that they outsource almost nothing. Since the entire manufacturing chain from raw materials to the finished product all happen within a block of each other and everybody involved are all SpaceX employees, they are also able to cut out waste and paperwork.
Since the whole project is being built with private funds and not a government contract, they don't give a damn about paperwork except for what is purely needed for FAA clearance to get the thing off the ground. Quality assurance is happening, but they don't have a NASA or Air Force inspector breathing down their neck 24/7/365. If there is some way to do the project cheaper, all they have to do is ask a manager (ultimately just Elon Musk, who has an office on-site) and the change happens. No fuss, no fancy approval process, and certainly no ass-kissing to some congressional aide.
In spite of the fact that SpaceX has really only sent up one successful commercial payload and received a partial payment for the successful completion of the Dragon capsule with the most recent flight from NASA, SpaceX is being "forced" by the IRS to report profits and has actually been a "profitable company" for the past 3 years. Investment capital, such as is flowing into the company right now, is mainly being used to accelerate the growth of the company and is not strictly needed in terms of general operating costs. SpaceX is very much a for-profit business, and they are making a profit even now.
On top of all of that, the most complex part of the whole product line really is the Merlin engine, which is being used on all of their products, from the Falcon 1, Falcon 9, and now the Falcon 9-H. Since the number of engines being produced certainly is substantially greater than "1", they are able to apply production line economies of scale to their manufacturing processes. I heard Elon Musk say that they were planning on a production capacity of at least 100 engines per year, which is about 2-3 engines per week. He is actually anticipating going as large as 10x that production rate eventually if the market can keep up, which is a couple of engines each day, or about a dozen launches per year between all of the various launch vehicles. At that production rate, some very interesting economies of scale can certainly happen that haven't been applied to the rocket launcher business before.
Personally, I think SpaceX and especially Elon Musk is going to be laughing all of the way to the bank with the pile of money he will be making with these rockets.
The Space Shuttle could never go to Mars, even if you somehow put an external tank into orbit, fully fueled, and ready to burn the shuttle main engines to perform a maneuver needed to acquire the delta-v necessary for a mission to Mars. Simply put, it was never designed for that mission in mind.
The least of which is that the Shuttle has components that break down after about 30 days in space. With some careful swapping out of components assuming it is also docked to the ISS, it might survive up to about 90 days pushing it real hard, but then it wouldn't be reliable enough to bring back to the Earth and would have to be scuttled (left to drift back hoping it would crash into the Pacific Ocean on some uninhabited piece of open water).
There are many reasons why the Shuttle never left LEO, and it is more than just fuel.
The F9-Heavy is certainly going to be able to put more mass into LEO than the Delta IV-Heavy, which has routinely put vehicles on Mars over the past couple of decades. As for a sample-return mission, yes, that hasn't been done yet, but the requirements for such a mission are certainly well known and putting something on Mars would not be a problem for a vehicle like this Falcon 9-Heavy.
Believable numbers? I guess Spirit and Opportunity are simply wandering around somewhere in Arizona and it is a fiction that those photos they are sending back represent anything real on another planet. Since these fictional vehicles never got to Mars, I guess we don't know anything about how large of a rocket is needed to put vehicles like these on that other planet. Uncertainties? Well, if you never got off the Earth in the first place and have never actually been in space (these vehicles are wandering around next to the Apollo studios where the astronauts did the lunar landings) I suppose nobody knows what it takes to actually launch something into orbit in the first place.
I would dare say that the calculations for going to Mars are known quite well, with plenty of real-world experience and real missions that have already happened. Think about it.
...so if they want to they can send it to pretty much anywhere in the inner solar system that they want.
Nope. The Falcon Heavy goes to orbit, carrying 50 tonnes of rock. If they want to replace those 50 tonnes of rock with a 50-tonne spacecraft that will go from Earth orbit to Mars (or elsewhere), they have to design, fund and build that, too.
That doesn't seem to be a particularly tough problem for SpaceX, and getting something to work in space isn't nearly as difficult of a problem as getting something up to LEO in the first place. Throw on some sort of prototype ion drive propulsion system on something like the "RatSat" that SpaceX flew on their Falon 1 launch #4, and there might be something interesting going on.
SpaceX flew a wheel of cheese with their last Falcon 9 launch, I wouldn't put it past Elon to try something a bit more audacious for this launch of the Falcon 9 Heavy. He might offer a "free ride" to some of the Google Lunar X-Prize teams at the very least, who would be more than willing to provide the spacecraft systems once they get to LEO.
While not a primary objective so far as SpaceX is willing to sacrifice the boosters as is customary for most rocket systems on the market today, SpaceX is trying to make at least the first stage of their rockets to be fully reusable, or at least recoverable so they can be reviewed for engineering purposes and provide some feedback to improve manufacturing quality.
If SpaceX is able to recover the 1st stage boosters, it will be an improvement over the Shuttle and most other system, and could conceivably offer a huge drop in price if refurbishing those booster stages for reuse could be done cheaply too.
The Space Shuttle never achieved the fruits of its reusability for many reasons, most of which is because some stupid choices were made in terms of what components could be reused and the fact that "reuse" on the Shuttle was almost a complete tear-down and rebuilding of the Shuttle after each mission. It was good in concept, but poorly implemented on the Shuttle.
If you wanted to go to Mars on a SpaceX vehicle, wait for the Falcon XX-Heavy launcher, which is supposed to have the equivalent of 27 engines all of the equivalent of the F1 motors that were used on the first stage of the Saturn V. SpaceX is calling them "Merlin 2" engines if you want to Google the specs. That is some serious tonnage to space, but still on the future drawing boards for the company.
What happened today is that the F9-Heavy, one of the original concept vehicles from back when SpaceX was first formed (actually the Falcon 5-Heavy, but that idea morphed into the F9-H shortly thereafter) has finally had the main design formally set down instead of a rough concept and goal. The design has been formally set down on paper down to the nuts, bolts, wires, and everything needed to build the thing. The design is done now, and all that is really needed is to build the thing. Since the engines are already flying on the Falcon 9 and have even been into space already, it is mostly an incremental improvement of the basic concepts that have already flown.
The big deal design concepts are the tank interconnects between the side boosters and the main core engine, which will drain the side booster tanks first before they are jettisoned, turning the vehicle into essentially a 3-stage craft. It is a novel design idea that I'm not familiar with being used before except by some experimental rockets on a small scale.
Still, you most certainly could use the Falcon 9 Heavy to launch nearly a hundred passengers, life support, flight attendants & crew, and stowage for those passengers into low-earth orbit if that is something you wanted to try. That was the point of the comment, especially how Musk talked about how the F9-H could also be used to repeat the Apollo 8 cis-lunar orbital trajectory with the Dragon Capsule and a crew of at least 3, plus food, life support for a week, and fuel for orbital maneuvering. The only thing you would lack would be a lunar lander, and that conceivably could even be sent up on a second launcher for an in-orbit rendezvous if you wanted to repeat Neil Armstrong's adventure. The Dragon capsule is being rated for such a return trajectory from the Moon.
And all that for less than a billion dollars in R&D, including test launches.
The launch is going to be from Vandenberg. Please be more informed if you are going to keep repeating this lie. Other launch pads that SpaceX has include Cape Canavaral (Elon Musk said he might end up getting one of the Shuttle/Apollo pads, and is currently in negotiation for that) and their facility at Kwajalein Island in the Republic of the Marshall Islands. All three facilities have been used by SpaceX in the past, but they've had difficulties launching rockets from California due to bureaucratic red tape and lack of flexibility on the part of the Air Force to give a launch window for their activities.
If the payloads are Air Force payloads, I think that problem isn't going to be too hard to solve. SpaceX is hoping to get the USAF as a customer.
The article says the rocket will be assembled at Vandenberg, it says nothing of a launch from there.
The launch is going to be from Vandenberg, where SpaceX has had a launch pad for a great many years and even did a hold-down test fire for the Falcon 1. No launches have happened there, however, because of the huge piles of red tape that the Air Force requires, and several other "higher priority" launches from other companies.
The rocket assembly and manufacturing (other than the final integrated assembly) is taking place at the main plant in El Segundo, California (a suburb of Los Angeles), and the rocket motors are tested in Waco, Texas for formal certification prior to launch.
As for what the article says.... the author is significantly misinformed about a great many things and I wouldn't trust most of what was said other than a big press conference was held by SpaceX today (or yesterday as it were depending on your timezone). That is the only big news, not this fine minutae and quibbling over details the reporter likely got wrong anyway.
Software architecture documents are something that I personally find very useful when coding. Still, those who start to follow that document slavishly usually get themselves into a world of trouble and it does bite them hard when you start getting into the development cycle.
The largest problem with software development is that the development team rarely knows the full problem domain until after the application has been finished, and even then it can be debated.
This comparison to McDonald's Restaurants and the bun bakeries is really missing the point here, and not very accurate. There are several factors that apply to why bakeries are not "brought in-house" for the restaurant, not the least of which is the screwed up employment rules that often exist where McDonald's may be prohibited by law from even baking bread in the first place. Add in union membership (presuming most bakeries are unionized in the area), unemployment compensation, other taxes, and "human resource management", it becomes nuts to get started.
Add onto that economies of scale where one central bakery can much more efficiently produce many more buns than if some bread oven was put into each restaurant, and that pushes the case over the top to give the edge to some contractor.
McDonald's did have to go so far as to buy farms, hire farmers and ranchers (for the cattle), and even built their own slaughterhouses and potato processing plants when they moved into China and Russia. If you can't get what you want when you want it, sometimes the stuff does have to be brought in house. You might be surprised to find some bakeries that are in fact owned in part or in whole by some franchisee or perhaps the McDonald's corporation itself. I certainly wouldn't dismiss the potential.
It doesn't have to be all that mysterious. Any spending of government money requires oversight, which is many layers of management to make sure that you are spending the money where it is supposed to be going. That introduces huge cost overhead that doesn't exist in small businesses.
On average, I've found that it takes at least a full sheet of documentation for each roughly $500 that you spend of government money as a contractor, sometimes even more or even several times that. This not only starts with the RFP process (request for proposals) but then you have to show a budget for whatever it is that you are doing, include regular progress reports, and literally account for each and every penny spent, including how the time was spent for those getting paid to do work on the contract. You need at least a couple accountants to keep track of the money, and middle managers who write up the reports and explain what it is that you've done.
Once all of that money has been spent and the reports generated, somebody has to read all of this too. All of those people reading the reports also have to have their own management team, accountants, and other administrators making sure that they aren't simply goofing off either. To watch the watchers, there is yet another whole team with its own budget too.
So simply put, to replace a $5 light bulb in a socket, the government typically spends about $500 with all of the overhead and supervision to accomplish that task... presuming that of course the light bulb is in a public place where no security or classified issues are present, which adds an extra 10x+ multiplier to the whole process.
A small business would simply replace the bulb and be done.
This is on top of specialized parts for exotic equipment like perhaps a helicopter rotor gasket that may require setting up equipment or even tooling a whole production line in order to get it built. In that case, it costs hundreds of thousands or dollars (or even millions of dollars) to set up the production line, and some inefficient government procurement processes will spend that money for just a couple of gaskets, when the marginal cost for each additional part is perhaps just a buck.
If you decide to "streamline" the process to cut out this overhead, then you do get people goofing off or embezzling the funds anyway, so it is better to have the overhead. For myself, I'd rather get rid of the government spending in the first place. If it is important to be doing, if I have the money in my own wallet I can make that decision for myself and get whatever it is that needs to be accomplished so it will be done.
Japan doesn't have the federalized system of government like exists in America with dual sovereignty and a federal government that literally can't act until after the state government gets its act together. Katrina was a royal screw up of the Louisiana government (not to mention New Orleans itself was in total chaos effectively without a government after Katrina), but that fact was lost on most international news media.
FEMA, after Katrina, acted about as fast as it was legally permitted to act. That Louisiana had effectively no emergency response system in place is the blame of the citizens of Louisiana. It was the waiting on Uncle Sam that was the problem there, not the inaction on the part of FEMA.
BTW, Biloxi was hit almost as bad as New Orleans by Katrina, yet it recovered much faster. I don't think that was just a coincidence.
One of the things that I hate about educational memes in America right now is the idolization of the Japanese school system as having produced better engineers and scientists than the American educational system. While there are certainly problems with schools in America, I don't think it is necessarily a good thing to push kids to suicide, wear uniforms, and have such a structured and rigid environment that original thoughts are driven from their consciousness.
I'm not trying to stereotype Japanese educators, but sometimes the worst practices are adopted instead of the best when you see something that "works" and then try to emulate it. It is the intense pressure placed upon kids, particularly kids at a young age, that is making me pissed off as a parent. My kids in kindergarten often had more homework than my kids in high school have. Something is seriously messed up when I see that.
People of Utah, your work isn't done.
That's right. They need to remove Hatch from Washington if they can't control him.
We are working on that. My problem is that I don't like the potential successors to Orrin Hatch, and Mike Lee is likely to be a bigger thorn in the side than Hatch ever was. The real problem is finding somebody who can step up and do the job to replace Hatch. That isn't as easy as it should be.
If you don't mind reading original sources of information and doing some data mining, as well as listening to hours of legislative debate, you can always go to this site:
http://le.utah.gov/~2011S1/2011S1.htm
That gives you at least the public face of information you may be wanting to learn about.
In terms of "the opposition", you can also go to this website:
http://savegrama.org/
I'm not a huge fan of how this site has been administered, but it at least provides a counterpoint as to what has been happening. Does that give you the details you are craving?
Even then, presuming that the documents were created and used electronically for their entire lifetime (still not a given even today), there sometimes is either "classified" references or perhaps personal and/or private information such as SSNs and other personally identifiable information that normally ought to be removed.
If you applied for food stamps (a government document by the standard proposed here), should that information be available for anybody to read and use how they see fit? What about passport applications? Military pay vouchers?
There certainly are government documents that can and should be kept private or perhaps even documents that might need to be made public but contain private information that needs to be removed before publication.
I should note that even Wikileaks goes through the documents it has to remove this kind of private information, and I consider that a good thing. Going through documents to remove this kind of information is labor intensive and takes time to accomplish, even if the document was made electronically. With a document being only available on paper makes this all that harder to accomplish.
If this happened 100 years ago in Utah, the People's Party would have simply held a sustaining vote on any legislation... that came from the 1st Presidency's office.
While the LDS Church doesn't get involved much any more with legislation like that, the political leadership likes to think they have a calling from God himself to be in the positions they are at... forgetting that Utah public officials don't represent just Latter-day saints nor are they really acting with much piety either. It is simply raw thirst for power.
Utah has seen the restoration of the People's Party and the Liberal Party.... they've just changed names. Neither major political party in Utah really resembles much the national parties they are nominally associated with.
That does exist... after a fashion. There is a paper trail in terms of amendments and discussion (sort of like a Wikipedia talk page) for most legislation, but it is so chaotic and haphazard that to pull that information together is usually to easily done. It certainly is not usually done electronically, except that the documents are scanned and put "on line" for those legislative bodies who do so.
What makes the Utah legislature so bad is that the Republicans have a super-majority (about 70% of the legislature) so they conduct most of their business in the "caucus" meetings. That would be like a developer only putting the debuged/final release version into CVS and all previous development efforts simply didn't use a version control at all.
Governor Herbert just jumped the shark with this special session. Confidence? What little I had went away with this proposal.