Anecdotally as somebody sitting on the east coast in a start-up's office right now, everyone in this room is wearing a t-shirt with jeans/shorts. I see some flip flops peeking out here and there too.
I think it's more of a Start-up vs. Corporate office attire. SpaceX's culture is more Fresh Silicon Valley Startup than it is corporate.
And of course there is a huge concentration of Start-ups on the west coast.
The whole private industry thing is not about who's funding it right now, but the business model. SpaceX is not completely under NASA's wings, they have their own goals and schedule. They sell services to NASA (and others), and a future where most of their revenue doesn't come from government contracts isn't that far.
The NASA's decision to support SpaceX with money and expertise is a step in the right direction.
NASA (and Roscosmos) should delegate to private companies all of the operations in LEO. They should focus their efforts on sending humans deeper into space.
I want to see a day when docking at the ISS is considered a boring affair.
The goal of spaceflight is not merely exploration, it is also colonization, and adventure. The rest of the Universe is just a place, and humans will go there. Not because it is the only way to learn about it, but merely because we can.
Machines will never describe the surface of a new world as "magnificent desolation".
Not really - some day, they'll share this trait with humans - but it will take some time. I want humans to experience this, even if briefly, before our much more capable successors take the lead from us relics.
There are 3 relevant costs for a single Shuttle mission.
There is the incremental cost. How much it would take to squeeze in another Shuttle mission in a given year, if possible. That cost was around $450 million in the last two decades or so of the Shuttle program. This is a useful cost estimate if you need to decide how much it's going to cost to launch or not launch a single Shuttle mission, for example, but doesn't actually give you a sense of how much it costs to operate the Shuttle overall. As an analogy, if you have a car and you want to decide whether you can hop in and make a long drive to a nearby city the cost that is relevant to you just then is the cost of just the gas to get there. However, the actual cost to you should take into account maintenance, insurance, oil changes, parking, car washes, tires, etc.
So, there is also the overall "operational cost" per flight, which takes into account all of the cost of the fixed overhead (Shuttle personnel, mission control, etc.) for the Shuttle program. In the latter years of the program this cost was around $1 billion per flight, though it fluctuated from year to year based on flight rate. There were a few years where NASA still spent billions of dollars on the Shuttles and yet no flights were happening (after Challenger and Columbia), for example. This is probably the fairest measurement of Shuttle costs since it tells you how much it costs to keep the Shuttle program going.
Finally, there is the total cost to the tax payers of the entire Shuttle program from development through the last flight, divided by the total number of flights. This is about $1.5 billion per launch. It's the best "what if we'd done something else instead of build the Shuttle" cost estimate and gives us a sense of the opportunity cost of STS but it's not entirely the best cost for deciding whether to keep the program running (since it includes sunk costs that shouldn't affect future decision making).
By any measure the Shuttle was far and away the most expensive launch vehicle to be used so frequently.
I'm going from memory here, so am possibly treading on thin ice, but I believe your numbers are on the high side. To my recollection, the marginal cost of each shuttle flight (additional consumables and labour) was on the order of $65M to $120M -- a seeming bargain. But the fixed cost of maintaining the Shuttle workforce -- the "standing army" of over 25,000 people -- was around $2.2B per year, which worked out to $300M to $600M per launch, depending on the flight rate. So in the pre-Challenger high-flight-rate days, it was possible to launch a Shuttle for around $400M total, but as NASA became more cautious in later years and the flight rate dropped, the cost of each mission climbed precipitously.
I believe you're correct about the all-up amortised cost of the entire Shuttle program. An expensive beast by any measure.
Much of SpaceX's cost-effectiveness comes from clever engineering, of course -- but a larger part comes from making sensible managerial decisions to minimise workforce costs. They don't split their workforce into umpteen zillion congressional districts in order to keep their political base satisfied; this minimises coordination costs and allows for a vastly more appropriate manager:engineer ratio. This has allowed them to develop and run the Falcon and Dragon vehicles with less than 1/10th the workforce that the Shuttle required. At the end of the day, that actually matters a hell of a lot more than achieving absolute engineering perfection.
Well, I oversimplified a bit, it's actually a bit more complicated than either description in terms of the incremental costs. The theoretical marginal cost of adding an additional Shuttle flight to the manifest is around $110 mil, but that doesn't include certain necessary operational costs (astronaut training and handling, etc.). It's a difficult thing to estimate accurately and sort of moot regardless because of the extreme limitations due to the small size of the Orbiter fleet and the amount of time it takes to refurbish them after each launch.
As far as the average annual cost you have to keep in mind that the total amount of money spent on Shuttle operations was more than just the spending on the Shuttle's standing army of maintenance workers. There was additional Shuttle related spending that in total added up to a figure of about a billion dollars per flight. Also keep in mind that near the end of the program the flight rate was quite low, and was often only 3 or 4 a year. Additionally, the Shuttle expenditures were higher back in the mid '80s than in the 2000s, when adjusted for inflation, so even though the flight rate was higher the per launch cost was similar (the best time being in 1985 when they managed 9 flights with a budget of $5.6 bil (in 2010 dollars)). Up through the 80s and 90s there were a few good years where the cost per flight was as low as $600 mil, but in mediocre year that cost could be as much as $1.2 bil, and in a bad couple of years that cost could be as much as $5 bil or even $7 bil (in the 3 year periods just after the Challenger and Columbia disasters, for example).
For SpaceX, much of what keeps their costs low is just bog standard common sense. The biggest problem in spaceflight over the last 4 decades has been a lack of common sense.
Consider a few salient points. The more components you add to a vehicle the less reliable and more costly it is to operate. One big problem that typical launch vehicles have had is being undersized. And this comes because nobody thinks to build any margin into the design. During the Apollo program Von Braun sandbagged the Saturn V's quoted payload capability, knowing that the Apollo spacecraft would go over its mass budget. Instead of having to go back to the drawing board, everything was fine because the Saturn V was scaled to take into account that overrun. These are the sorts of things that we know are common. But what has happened with so many vehicles is that they end up adding on solid fueled boosters to the vehicle to increase the payload capacity. Well, this dramatically changes the engineering of the whole beast, and makes the vehicle less safe and more expensive in the processes. It's better to scale the vehicle right from the get go and avoid using solid rockets at all. If you look at the Falcon 9 you can see where that has been a huge advantage to them, allowing them to do an on pad abort and a fast recycle without endangering the mission even when there was a problem with the rocket. And it also makes range safety a lot easier.
Then you have the fascination with using LOX/LH2 in lower stages. The earliest orbital launchers typically used LOX and Kerosene. This is a very straightforward design with a lot of advantages because the high density of Kerosene and the relatively mild cryogenic character of LOX allows you to achieve very high mass ratios on lower stages using little more than ordinary airplane grade engineering and a modicum of thermal shielding. LOX/LH2 has a higher Isp though, and it produces stages with a lower total weight so you can create a launcher with a lower "GLOW" (gross liftoff weight). Each of these factors has been enormously enticing to launch vehicle designers for decades and has got a hold of their minds regardless of common sense. The downsides of LH2 in a lower stage are extreme. It is super-cryogenic so it requires a lot of specialty construction and extra insulation in the fuel tanks. Moreover, it is very low density so it requires using exotic materials (such as Al-Li alloys) to achieve reasonable mass ratios. The thing is, rocket performance scales exponentially with respect to both mass ratio and Isp, so it's important to make a smart tradeoff between them. As far as GLOW, it's just a number, and it doesn't mean a whole lot since most of it is just propellant which is cheap compared to the total cost of the vehicle. If you were making a very low cost vehicle then GLOW might be a concern, but we are about 2 orders of magnitude away from that realm so focusing on it is actually an extreme anti-optimization. Worse yet, LOX/LH2 tends to generate less thrust than LOX/Kerosene for similar rocket engine sizes, so often (as is the case with Ariane V, the Shuttle, the Japanese H-IIA, and others) LH2 fueled rockets rely on the extra thrust of solid boosters to get the vehicle off the ground. This adds complexity, cost, and reduces reliability and safety.
Now, there is also the annoying idea that "simple" rocket designs such as an ordinary 2 stage LOX/Kerosene booster are old hat, they've been done, they're outmoded technology. New rockets need to make use of more cutting edge technology such as reusable space planes, or linear aerospike engines, or SSTOs, or helicopter/rocket hybrids. The fallacy here is that we hadn't explored simple rocket designs nearly enough. There's nothing wrong with taking a proven, traditional design and making it even simpler, more robust, more reliable, and reducing cost.
And that's exactly what SpaceX has been doing. Their rocket design is not the smartest or most innovative launch vehicle in history, it's actually closest to the dumbest possible idea that's workable. Why not build a 2-stage LOX/Kerosene rocket and put a capsule on top of it? It's not a new idea, it's not innovative, it's not high-tech. It's a design that would be intimately familiar to anyone who had worked on the Saturn IB rocket or the Gemini capsule or the Soyuz rocket / spacecraft going back nearly 50 years ago. Granted, they've put a lot of high-tech work into the vehicle, but it is ultimately just a very common sense design. The only reason nobody else has done the same sort of thing is because they haven't had the guts.
Once you start from there, with a foundation of making sound design and business decisions based on good, well rounded common sense then the benefits to the whole system flow out from there. Then you can avoid red tape and bureaucracy and make the sensible decision based on the full truth at each step, which tends to have a multiplicative effect. The end result being a company like SpaceX, which even when it does little more than launch boring rocket designs into orbit nevertheless revolutionizes the entire industry, because no one else had thought that boring could be so smart.
GREAT summary of what makes SpaceX so exciting. Personally, I knew all of this (I've been following the alt.spacers since way before they were cool), but clearly you know what you're talking about, and I hope that others see this post!
$1.5B refers to the commercial resupply contract, which is quite separate from the COTS contract which funded the development and demo program.
Just to add to the confusion, the next Falcon+Dragon flight could be end up being either CRS-1 (if things go well tomorrow) or COTS-3 (if it looks like another demo is needed). But they really are separate contracts.
I wouldn't fear any uber-patriotic nationalism from them just because they have flags on their desk. HR probably just hands them out with the name plates to everyone when they're hired.
My mother works for a city government office and they handed out those flags for birthdays last year. She wasn't happy about it at all.
What it's a sign of is some Chinese company making a lot of money off cheap trinkets.
I was watching 'The Aviator' just the other day and I realized that at some point someone will make a movie called 'the Astronaut' or something like it about Elon Musk.
If SpaceX goes public I'll buy stock. To me it will mean investing in humanity and in our collective future.
In a 60 Minutes interview [1], Scott Pelley [2] asked Garrett Reisman [3]:
Pelley: "You know, I'm curious... you have so much background in engineering, you could have easily gotten a job at Boeing, or at Lockheed, but you came here..."
Reisman: "If you had a chance to go back in time, and work with Howard Hughes when he was creating TWA, if you had a chance to be there, at that moment, when it was the dawn of a brand new era, wouldn't you want to do that? I mean, that's why I'm here."
They've done the correction burn to put them in the same orbit, but 2.4 lower than the ISS. They will undertake in an hour or so from now, passing between the ISS and the Earth.
When some distance ahead they will burn again and rise into a slower orbit and let the ISS undertake them, thus dropping behind. Finally, they will go back down to a holding point, and wait till tomorrow while they check all the data.
Tomorrow they do a similarly detailed set of moves, ending up a hundred metres away, when they will be captured by the robotic arm, and docked.
Today, SpaceX is just testing/demonstrating to NASA that the Dragon capsule is, in fact, capable of performing the precise navigation required to dock with the ISS. So the diagram they keep showing on NASA TV is the scheduled "test track" which will take the capsule around the space station. Additional and more precise maneuvers will be tested tomorrow before the docking takes place.
Due to the vaccuum of space, firing the rocket engines (a "burn") is required for any change in direction (the effects of gravity nonwithstanding). The burns we are looking at right now are to move the Dragon capsule closer to the ISS in the vertical dimension: First one burn to accellerate it upwards towards the ISS, and then a second burn to level it off and stop moving upwards. It will still have its _horizontal_ velocity relative to the space station after the second burn.
It's weird how much time they spend with copying (talking) numbers back and forth over a crappy voice connection. Wouldn't a simple text chat (IRC maybe) make this way more efficient and less error prone?
Typing in weightless conditions is tricky, and when you're also performing a task, talking is way, way easier. The back-and-forth is a formal protocol designed to minimise (prevent!) errors, and the rate of communication is rarely the limiting factor, and for many, speaking, even with the repetitions, is faster than typing.
Interesting. It never occurred to me that typing with your hands floating around may not be as easy as on earth.
I was just watching as one crew member was calibrating a camera, probably by using a laptop(?), and he had to repeat a number 3 times till ground copied correctly. I just thought "damn, he could just copy and paste these numbers into a chat session". But then again, why aren't these numbers transmitted automatically in the first place?
It's really, really hard to figure out how to get absolutely every possible thing you might ever want to be accessible all the time. It's really, really easy in a given instance, with hindsight, to say - "Why not just transmit that all anyway?"
Yes, it's a good question, but it's a better question when you think to ask it 10 years before you need the data.
I work remotely with safety-critical systems, and sometimes I curse the lack of foresight on the part of the engineers and designers who came before me. Then I wonder what equipment people will be using 5 years from now to interface with the systems I'm trying to get out the door on time and on budget.
I wished worldwide events were announced with local time and some unique universal time the whole world would agree on (gmt ? umt? utc? sw@tch ?) that could easily be converted once you know your location's offset. It would make my life easier.
edit:
man date
date -u
jeudi 24 mai 2012, 11:00:31 (UTC+0000)
TZ='America/Los_Angeles' date
jeudi 24 mai 2012, 04:00:55 (UTC-0700)
date --date='TZ="America/Los_Angeles" 11:30pm'
vendredi 25 mai 2012, 08:30 (UTC+0200)
Might be handy to keep that under my belt for future references. Of course events reported or announced at the time they are happening are going to throw me off by a day.
Friday 6:30am UTC, with first burn at 8am
and then second at 8:43am
The burns took place on Thursday 8am and 8:43am UTC.
Many NASA and SpaceX announcements do include UTC times, although not all. I also wish there were consistency, but it's not as bad as you seem to be implying.
