[MP-Ryan]

Elon Musk and a mission to Mars.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/10/ff-elon-musk-qa/

Musk: Six years after we started the company, we launched our first rocket, Falcon 1, into orbit in 2008. And the price—not the cost, mind you, but the total price to customers per launch—was roughly $7 million.
Anderson: How did you get the price so low?
Musk: I tend to approach things from a physics framework. And physics teaches you to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. So I said, OK, let’s look at the first principles. What is a rocket made of? Aerospace-grade aluminum alloys, plus some titanium, copper, and carbon fiber. And then I asked, what is the value of those materials on the commodity market? It turned out that the materials cost of a rocket was around 2 percent of the typical price—which is a crazy ratio for a large mechanical product.
Anderson: How does that compare to, say, cars?
Musk: It depends on the car. For Tesla it’s probably 20 to 25 percent.
Anderson: An order-of-magnitude difference.
Musk: Right. So, I thought, we should be able to make a much cheaper rocket given those materials costs. There must be some pretty silly things going on in the market. And there are!
Anderson: Like what?
Musk: One is the incredible aversion to risk within big aerospace firms. Even if better technology is available, they’re still using legacy components, often ones that were developed in the 1960s.
Anderson: I’ve heard that the attitude is essentially that you can’t fly a component that hasn’t already flown.
Musk: Right, which is obviously a catch-22, right? There should be a Groucho Marx joke about that. So, yeah, there’s a tremendous bias against taking risks. Everyone is trying to optimize their ass-covering.
Anderson: That’s a nice phrase.
Musk: The results are pretty crazy. One of our competitors, Orbital Sciences, has a contract to resupply the International Space Station, and their rocket honestly sounds like the punch line to a joke. It uses Russian rocket engines that were made in the ’60s. I don’t mean their design is from the ’60s—I mean they start with engines that were literally made in the ’60s and, like, packed away in Siberia somewhere.

[Dragon]

Aversion to risk in aerospace industry is understandable. One tiny mistake is enough to doom the mission and kill the crew if there's any. See Columbia and Challenger disasters. Russian engines from the '60s have an advantage of being tested and built like a rock. With new stuff, you always run the risk of the rocket exploding, flying 6 inches off the ground and dropping back down, or burning up on reentry. All because one part had a minor defect (the aforementioned 6 inch flight? caused by one too short cable). Given how dangerous aerospace disasters are, I see why they're not fond of taking risks.

[MP-Ryan]

I shouldn't need to say this, but read the whole article.  That's a tiny excerpt from page 2.

[The E]

Elon Musk certainly seems to have a robust Kerbal attitude towards the whole Mars thing.

Not that I think that he's going to throw away little green people, or even actual humans, but his "Okay, so how would we do a space program today" approach is certainly the most promising thing ever.

[Nuke]

who here wouldn't volunteer to be a jeb to test a shoddy rocket? sure you have a 90% chance in dieing, but you also have a 10% chance of visiting space, which is a hell of a lot better than what i have now. sign me up. id even fly something akin to my spinneh station launcher, which likes to go boom a lot.

[Luis Dias]

Aversion to risk in aerospace industry is understandable. One tiny mistake is enough to doom the mission and kill the crew if there's any. See Columbia and Challenger disasters. Russian engines from the '60s have an advantage of being tested and built like a rock. With new stuff, you always run the risk of the rocket exploding, flying 6 inches off the ground and dropping back down, or burning up on reentry. All because one part had a minor defect (the aforementioned 6 inch flight? caused by one too short cable). Given how dangerous aerospace disasters are, I see why they're not fond of taking risks.

Right, let's use rockets from the 60s forever!! What can go wrong with that attitude?


edit, this passage is quite scary relating to another can of worms, patents:

Musk: I can’t tell you much. We have essentially no patents in SpaceX. Our primary long-term competition is in China—if we published patents, it would be farcical, because the Chinese would just use them as a recipe book. But I can give you one example.

.... highlighting the exact problem of getting rid of patents.

[Nuke]

the skylon people seem to be taking a similar approach. they show off their actual 400MW heat exchangers, and keep their de-icing solution a closely guarded secret. america keeps pissing away its space superiority, so i figure whoever makes it to mars will not be an american. i for one welcome out brittish overloards (il still shoot at you though).

[NGTM-1R]

Right, let's use rockets from the 60s forever!! What can go wrong with that attitude?

Very little, which is why people do it.

The components have advanced but the technique hasn't moved that much. (If anything it might be retrograde.) There hasn't been a revolutionary change in the design and assembly of rockets. Designs from the '60s are cheap, sturdy, proven. Trading those in for possible incremental improvement in performance via shaving a few hundred pounds off isn't a worthwhile investment in most cases.

[Dragon]

Musk: I can’t tell you much. We have essentially no patents in SpaceX. Our primary long-term competition is in China—if we published patents, it would be farcical, because the Chinese would just use them as a recipe book. But I can give you one example.

.... highlighting the exact problem of getting rid of patents.

This makes sense. China is problematic, because it doesn't really care about patents. Aside from Space-X, there are few companies that do similar things to them. The Russian Excalibur-Almaz, for example, uses a completely different approach, so I don't think there's much of a threat of plagiarism.

Right, let's use rockets from the 60s forever!! What can go wrong with that attitude?

Very little, which is why people do it.

The components have advanced but the technique hasn't moved that much. (If anything it might be retrograde.) There hasn't been a revolutionary change in the design and assembly of rockets. Designs from the '60s are cheap, sturdy, proven. Trading those in for possible incremental improvement in performance via shaving a few hundred pounds off isn't a worthwhile investment in most cases.

Precisely. Also, it's rather difficult to get new stuff certified, due to rigorous standards they have to pass. Doing things old-style simplifies a lot, and is very safe. If a car breaks down, you can usually just coast to a stop, get out and call the road assistance. Not so with the rocket, which has a good chance of disintegrating if something gores wrong. 60s stuff is proven and safe, and it does it's job well enough in most cases. The aforementioned Excalibur-Almaz (essentially a Russian version of Space-X) is using old VA capsules and plenty of technology from the cancelled TKS program, and they seem to be doing just fine. The VA has already flown unmanned, so it should be easy to certify for manned flight than a completely new design.

[Scotty]

Right, let's use rockets from the 60s forever!! What can go wrong with that attitude?

Very little, which is why people do it.

The components have advanced but the technique hasn't moved that much. (If anything it might be retrograde.) There hasn't been a revolutionary change in the design and assembly of rockets. Designs from the '60s are cheap, sturdy, proven. Trading those in for possible incremental improvement in performance via shaving a few hundred pounds off isn't a worthwhile investment in most cases.

While this is an understandable position, it's also a terrible attitude to have in a field that requires constant advancement to maintain even the same level of proficiency.  The rampant over-aversion to risk has stagnated the entire industry aside from a few investors and thinkers like those featured in the article.  While it's folly to completely ignore risk, it's just as bad to allow the chance of a risk to halt progress.

[NGTM-1R]

It's not even really a risk-aversion issue, however. It's an issue of cost-benefit. Making improvements is literally not worth the money most of the time because, again, you're just shaving small amounts of weight off a design in exchange for higher costs. The greater chance of failure is merely icing on an ass-shaped cake as far as most commercial applications of the technology are concerned; they wouldn't bother with it before that was a factor.

[Scotty]

If it were an issue of cost-benefit, then the subject of the article wouldn't have been able to drive down the price of sending a human into space to $7 million.  Making the improvements increased the cost-benefit ratio of the equipment used.

The issue here is that innovation and advancement is discouraged in favor of safer, more proven technologies.  That's the definition of risk-aversion.

[Klaustrophobia]

if "old and proven" was truly better, we wouldn't be decommissioning the enterprise here shortly, and it wouldn't be affectionately referred to as "the floating chernobyl."

[Polpolion]

if "old and proven" was truly better, we wouldn't be decommissioning the enterprise here shortly, and it wouldn't be affectionately referred to as "the floating chernobyl."

Are you talking about the shuttle, or the aircraft carrier? Wait, don't tell me, the answer is the same: it's a completely irrelevant example.

[Thaeris]

It's not irrelevant in the slightest:

Older technology will remain effective, at least in some measure. But if you want to advance in the sciences and the field, you must commit to innovation. The article notes how older manufacturing processes are expensive and wasteful, and you may even correlate that to a CVN from the 1960's. And you may consider how many of the old rocket powerplants are now comparatively inefficient and outdated, and you may further correlate how eight recators in an old 1960's CVN are far less efficient than the two reactors in a modern CVN...

So it's not a completely irrelevant example at all. In fact, it's quite a novel one.

[Klaustrophobia]

also, the secondary point of that post was that physically old things can't be expected to hold up just because they are "proven."  "they don't build them like they used to" doesn't apply.  the CVN-65 is a floating kludge held together by paper clips and chewing gum.  if common fluid systems can't hold up for that long, i have to imagine it's worse for large tubes whose job it is to basically contain a controlled explosion and point it out the back end.


and there's a REALLY simple fix for the "it's not proven" problem.  test it. 

[NGTM-1R]

also, the secondary point of that post was that physically old things can't be expected to hold up just because they are "proven."  "they don't build them like they used to" doesn't apply.  the CVN-65 is a floating kludge held together by paper clips and chewing gum.  if common fluid systems can't hold up for that long, i have to imagine it's worse for large tubes whose job it is to basically contain a controlled explosion and point it out the back end.

Assumption: we are discussing rockets that have been in storage rather than new manufactures of what are sixties designs.

Hint: we are not.

[Scotty]

Well, that's only half true.  One of the points of the article is a competitor's design that was centered around sixties' era rocket engines that had in fact been in storage for that long.

[The E]

And the other point was that by not doing things the old way and doing experiments to find a better way, SpaceX has been able to discover areas where massive savings could be had.

[NGTM-1R]

Well, that's only half true.  One of the points of the article is a competitor's design that was centered around sixties' era rocket engines that had in fact been in storage for that long.

That still leaves aside the issue that he's comparing a system in near-continuous operation to one that's never actually been used.

Also that he's got the nickname reasoning completely wrong. (The nickname of the CVN-65 dates considerably older and has to do with the fact she was outfitted with the same number of reactors as a more conventional carrier design would have boilers. Later CVNs only had 2, to the Enterprise's 8.)

So sadly it's still a completely irrelevant comparison on Klaustrophobia's part.