Comment on Why are people impressed with SpaceX?
BastingChemina@slrpnk.net 2 months ago
Imagine you want to build a cabin in a very remote place in Alaska.
Getting there is quite difficult, you did it a few times in the 60’s but the path is so bad that you had to throw the truck away each time (around $45,000 per trip, for the truck + gas)
You are still planning to build your cabin but having to buy a new truck for each trip is not great, plus the fact that only one company can make this SLS truck so you can’t get more than once a year.
Building a cabin in these circumstances is close to impossible.
Now SpaceX makes a new Starship truck that can go all the way AND be reused. The trip from the hardware store to the build site now only costs you around $100 for the gas plus truck expenses AND you can now do the trip to the hardware store multiple times a day !
Now building the cabin becomes way more accessible.
Replace the Alaskan cabin with a scientific base on the moon or Mars and multiply the amounts by 100,000 and you have an approximation of the situation
Now SpaceX makes a new Starship truck that can go all the way AND be reused.
Not much of a spacex fan, but the fact that they were able to prove reusability on the falcon 9 and starship when the main players - ULA, Boeing, fuck, everyone said it was decades away IF EVER gets my attention. it illustrates how there are blind spots in all industries where people have to be shown what is possible because they’ll never believe it and that dogma can stifle innovation for ages when left unchallenged.
farngis_mcgiles@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
NASA could have done this if they had the budget. Instead we’d rather give huge tax cuts to billionaires so they can build a private sector NASA to charge NASA exorbitant sums to use their private vehicles. It’s the most asinine and innefficient way of going about it.
BastingChemina@slrpnk.net 2 months ago
No, NASA has the budget. They already spent $50 billion on the development of SLS and Orion, Starship development cost is estimated to be around $10 billion.
So in theory with the money they spent on SLS they could have built 5 starship program.
The problem is that NASA has to follow political interests, sometimes the political interests align with technical interest and we get great things like the Apollo program.
Someonelol@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months ago
They also have a very tight tolerance of failure. Every failure made in the engineering process brings more and more scrutiny by those holding the purse strings in Washington.
DacoTaco@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Specially this. How space x handles failures is a very hard nono in my book. “But we test in the field” is what space x says, and as a software developer its like saying “we test in production”.
Yes youll get something use able faster, but its way way more costly in the long run and is nasty in between.
My arse they cant test this stuff on earth. We have simulations, models, calculations, test, everything. Yes, things can and will sometimes still fail when going in production ( in flight ) but you want to lower the risk of it failing cause its costly as fuck.
They dont seem to care though
farngis_mcgiles@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
That’s a good point.
Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Space X has less bureaucracy and can pursue other commercial ventures. The amount nasa pays is high, but it’s still cheaper than continuing their old program
AA5B@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Plus NASA can’t afford the risk. If SpaceX failed, no big deal. We would have lost some money and everyone would ridicule Musk. If NASA tried it and failed, they would not only have lost five times the money, but would be parylized by investigations, audits, cutbacks. NASA does a LOT more than just rockets and it would all be at risk