Comment by me_me_me

Comment by me_me_me 20 hours ago

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this doesn't even scratch the surface. Slow motion cameras and real time sensors for debugging hardware issues, computer simulations, 3d printing.

Apollo program directors would advocate to start a nuclear war with ussr if they could get hands on that kind of tech.

But also NASA landed two SUVs on mars first try, using skycrane, Full remote. they developed and built mars helicopter/drone (rip). First try. But spaceX gets the glory because... break things??

drillsteps5 17 hours ago

Apollo program was a major achievement, probably the largest in the history of humanity as of yet. But SpaceX definitely should get a credit for "breaking things", or for running agile dev cycle with hardware ("hardware heavy"). Let's just strap engines to a fuel tank and try to fly it. Let's just build a body by welding steel plates together and see what happens. Let's just launch this thing to 20 miles and see if we can make it aerobrake and land it with the engines. Iterate by learning and constantly improving. Nobody done it at that scale as of yet.

(Which of course is only possible if you have the Founding Father with a few billion $$ just laying around)

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saberience 19 hours ago

This seems like a fairly disingenuous comment.

SpaceX gets credit and rightly so because they have achieved things which no national space agency nor private company has ever done before, and done it faster and at a lower budget than anyone has done before.

Every other national space agency and private company had both infinitely more money, time, and engineers than SpaceX did (when founded) yet they were making zero progress on reusable rockets, cheap super heavy lift capacity to orbit, and America had no way of taking their own astronauts to the space station!

Musk (hate him or love him) founded a company from nothing which has exceeded the capabilities of nasa and the us government, the European space agency, and the russian space agency, as well as ULA, Boeing, Lockheed etc.

They have the first rocket ever made which can take payloads to orbit and then be reused. They have the most cost effective rocket ever made for taking loads to orbit. They have reused rockets up to 20 times! They have build the most powerful rocket ever built which is fully reusable. They have built the most efficient and powerful rocket engines ever built before. And they have done it all incredibly quickly starting from nothing.

Oh and they also built a massive internet constellation providing fast and cheap satellite internet to the whole world, saving countless lives and also helping stimulate economies across the world as well as enabling more remote work etc.

So much of what they have done was considered impossible or not economical or not practical or so difficult other countries or companies didn’t even TRY.

So yes. Given their success it’s worth trying to understand their development methodology, which is iterate fast and fail lots and learn lots. Given how much they’ve kicked the shit out of the SLS program in capability and budget and also how they’ve crushed Blue Origin (which started earlier with more budget) who both operate in a more old fashioned way, I would certainly say it’s important to acknowledge they may be doing something right!

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  • tsimionescu 19 hours ago

    The achievements you quote are highly overblown. SpaceX sells capacity to orbit somewhat cheaper than anyone else on the market, but not by some huge margin - half the cost or so, at best.

    They also don't have any fully reusable rockets today, and Starship is still probably a year or more from being production-ready. It remains to be seen how reusable Starship will actually be, how long it will take to refurbish and get ready for spaceflight, and how many reentries it can actually take. And it still remains to be seen how much Starship will actually gain from being fully reusable, by the way - landing a rocket costs lots of extra fuel, so it's not a no-brainer that a fully reusable rocket would have a much better cost/kg-to-orbit than a non reusable one. Especially for anything higher than LEO, Starship can't actually carry enough fuel, so it depends on expensive additional launches to refuel in orbit - a maneoveur that will probably take another year or more to finalize, and that greatly increases the cost of a Starship mission beyond LEO.

    Finally, Starlink is nice, but it's extremely expensive for most users outside very rich areas of the world, and has in no way had the impact you are claiming. Laying out cable internet is FAR cheaper than satellite internet can ever be, especially in rural areas, so beyond cases where cables and even wireless are completely impossible (ocean, war-torn areas), it doesn't and won't ever have any major impact. I'm also very curious where you got the idea that it "saved countless lives".

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    • jve 18 hours ago

      Feels weird to read such comments on HN.

      10 years ago people were talking that landing rockets is impossible. Then whether they can be reused. Then whether there is any economical gain doing so.

      As for starlink - they have explosive revenue growth. Alot of businesses want one. Planes, ships, trains, military, rural areas, they are actually profiting from the operations and not loosing money and I still have to read comments like that.

      Btw ULA reasonable launch price of today is because of SpaceX competition

      > ULA was awarded a DoD contract in December 2013 to provide 36 rocket cores for up to 28 launches. The award drew protest from SpaceX, which said the cost of ULA's launches were approximately US$460 million each and proposed a price of US$90 million to provide similar launches.[16] In response, Gass said ULA's average launch price was US$225 million, with future launches as low as US$100 million.

      I suspect SpaceX margins are very high and they can fund the starship development. Margins/prices may change as BO reaches reusability.

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      • tsimionescu 18 hours ago

        > 10 years ago people were talking that landing rockets is impossible.

        Maybe some. Others had been working on this in the 90s already. Not to mention Spaceshuttle, which achieved these milestones (with a vastly different design) in production.

        > Then whether they can be reused. Then whether there is any economical gain doing so.

        Reuse is currently partial. The economic advantages have largely failed to materialize, at least to the extent that they were promised.

        > Btw ULA reasonable launch price of today is because of SpaceX competition

        Why compare to ULA? Look at Ariane 6, or Soyuz-2 - they have similar numbers to Falcon 9. Falcon 9 is 22 800 kg to LEO for $70M. Ariane 6 is 21 500 kg to LEO for $115M. Soyuz-2 is 8600kg to LEO for $35-48M (so about $92-129M for a Falcon 9's worth of cargo). More expensive, but not by some huge margin.

        > As for starlink - they have explosive revenue growth. Alot of businesses want one. Planes, ships, trains, military, rural areas, they are actually profiting from the operations and not loosing money and I still have to read comments like that.

        This is a completely different take than the previous comment. Sure, it's successful in the developped world in certain industries. This is nothing like "saving countless lives" or "helping stimulate economies across the world", which is what I was responding to.

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    • ufmace 2 hours ago

      > cheaper than anyone else on the market, but not by some huge margin - half the cost or so, at best.

      I feel we should point out that none of us know what it actually costs SpaceX to run these rockets. Given that they have very ambitious goals, if their actual costs were much lower, the obvious move for them would be to price their launches only somewhat lower than their competitors anyways, take that extra money, and invest it right back into Starship development.

      Indeed, one would think that if there wasn't actually that big of a gap between their costs and the prices they're charging, they'd never have enough money to even think about developing Starship. I don't see any other sources of big consistent $$$ for them, and surely they wouldn't bother trying if they weren't highly confident they'd have sufficiently reliable income to take the Starship all the way through development to a successful commercial version.

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    • templeOSdotcom 4 hours ago

      >Laying out cable internet is FAR cheaper than satellite internet can ever be, especially in rural areas

      considering the US has earmarked hundred of millions of dollars to expand rural internet with nothing to show for it-- I don't know how true this is.

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    • burnerthrow008 14 hours ago

      Half the cost is not "some huge margin"?!?

      So, like, if you found a 50%-off sale on a car, you're telling me you wouldn't test drive it because it's not a very good deal?

      What color is the sky in your world?

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      • tsimionescu 12 hours ago

        Given how little we know about the cost structures of any of these space launch systems, yes.

        Consider that Russia was charging less per seat to the ISS in 2007, back when they ahd to compete with the Shuttle, then SpaceX is charging NASA today. And not a little less - almost half ($25M in 2007 dollars, $38M in today's dollars, vs SpaceX charging $55M today).

        Does this mean that the Soyuz was much cheaper than Falcon 9? Probably not, it just means that there is so much margin on both sides that we can't estimate much.

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  • cma 18 hours ago

    > They have the first rocket ever made which can take payloads to orbit and then be reused.

    The space shuttle did this over 40 years ago. You can argue SpaceX have the first economical one 40 years later, but the second stage isn't reusable. Once they get starship working they might have it.

    Their finances aren't public but there is some stuff to go on where we can say Falcon is probably economical despite not recovering the second stage.

    This TED talk from Gwynne Shotwell says they will have reuse of starship so dialed in that in 3 years (from now) they will be competitive with commercial airliners and be operating for consumers in production:

    https://www.ted.com/talks/gwynne_shotwell_spacex_s_plan_to_f...

    To be safe enough for that I would have expected thousands of flawless flights by now. They said in 2020 it was still on track for 2028 but the Dear Moon project was canceled since that last update.

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    • saberience 16 hours ago

      The space shuttle lol?

      Are you not considering the fact that the huge external tank and the two SRBs were destroyed every time? Not to mention the insane costs of refurbishing each space shuttle, not the mention the insanely bad safety of the shuttle and the 14 astronauts who died in it!

      Space shuttle, while cool, was really, really bad design, bad safety, and totally uneconomical. It was definitely cooler than Soyuz, but Soyuz was cheaper and more safe.

      There's a reason the US abandoned space shuttle and had to beg the Russians to use Soyuz to send their astronauts to the space station.

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      • EncomLab 15 hours ago

        The Shuttle program only failed to recover 4 SRB's out of 270 launched - and 2 of those were on Challenger.

        Why should we care what you think if you can't get something that basic right?

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      • cma 16 hours ago

        The SRBs could land in the ocean with parachutes and be recovered and refurbished. Shuttle wasn't economical as I mentioned, and definitely the space shuttle wasn't safe.

        What you claimed was: "They have the first rocket ever made which can take payloads to orbit and then be reused." That was known as the space shuttle.

        The ~$40 million tank was expendable so you are right it wasn't full reuse either. Starship jettisons parts too, I believe the hot staging ring? And the Falcon series throws away the whole upper stage.

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  • me_me_me 19 hours ago

    > SpaceX gets credit and rightly so because they have achieved things which no national space agency nor private company has ever done before

    Such as?

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    • jve 18 hours ago

      Maybe this will help you see it: https://x.com/dpoddolphinpro/status/1874191808751972447

      The whole world combined VS SpaceX has less mass to orbit.

      Either whole nations are not interested in that much mass to orbit or they don't have the capability. Or financial means/incentive to compete against that commercial entity.

      But they do and at least in China they start to work on reusable rockets and ULA is for sale because they don't have one.

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      • me_me_me 18 hours ago

        I guess that's an 'achievement'?

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    • jbgt 19 hours ago

      Landing boosters, reducing costs etc etc

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      • me_me_me 19 hours ago

        Is that it? Landing boosters is not saving money as of now. Because a rocket engine is not a rental bike.

        Hmmm I wonder if there was a tech that recovered a spacecraft and tried to reuse it to cut costs... hmmm... no, nothing comes to mind

        Also SpaceX is charging Nasa more than russians did when they had monopoly over space flights.

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        • inemesitaffia 17 hours ago

          Landing boosters saves money and helps with cadence.

          SpaceX is charging NASA less. Even Boeing is charging NASA less than Russia.

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ceejayoz 16 hours ago

> But also NASA landed two SUVs on mars first try, using skycrane, Full remote. they developed and built mars helicopter/drone (rip). First try. But spaceX gets the glory because... break things??

NASA lost a good number of probes in the process of getting the expertise to do that.

And likely quite a few test devices in building out the skycrane.

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templeOSdotcom 4 hours ago

SpaceX is a boon to NASA. NASA does great work but as they are a government entity they move at a slower pace.

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Albatross9237 15 hours ago

SpaceX getting credit for innovating in their own way doesn't mean NASA doesn't get credit for all the great things it has done.

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