Blue Origin thread.

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

Cost Plus 

 

 

30 minutes ago, Meecrob said:

I get the US was embarrassed in the late 50's with all their launch failures, and don't want a repeat of those "dark days" of failure after failure

I don't think this is it. 

I think that there are few people who are actually brave enough to be entrepreneurial and smart enough to be rocket scientists... And they got us to space and the moon through those failures. 

However, literally as soon as things become even a little routine all the business school grads came in to make a buck. 

There is a serious problem in corporations where people don't care about the company or the future - they want to meet short term goals (regardless of long term cost), look good, get promoted and do it again. 

Edited October 5, 2021 by JoeSchmuckatelli

[Staticalliam7]

woah look luigi!

 

 

it's sue origin

On 11/10/2017 at 10:55 AM, tater said:

 

everyone in 2021:

[StrandedonEarth]

The thing is, failure is a great teacher. If you learn nothing from failing then you will continue to fail. SpaceX learned a lot about COPVs from the destruction of AMOS-6. 

Edited October 5, 2021 by StrandedonEarth

[mikegarrison]

55 minutes ago, Meecrob said:

"How did they get so successful so quickly in those early days?"

They spent MASSIVE amounts of government money. The "space race" was mainly actually about a Cold War race to build nuclear weapon delivery systems.

[mikegarrison]

The Apollo program cost about $200B in today's money. Even Jeff Bezos would have trouble paying that much.

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

24 minutes ago, mikegarrison said:

They spent MASSIVE amounts of government money. The "space race" was mainly actually about a Cold War race to build nuclear weapon delivery systems.

So much unrealized truth to this.  

FWIW - things like 'landing a probe on the Moon and returning a sample' or a 'lander on Mars' are just as much a reminder to others that if you can hit far away targets - you can hit close ones.  It showcases mature technology and command and control. 

Oh, yeah, and science 

[sevenperforce]

1 hour ago, Meecrob said:

Which begs the question of why did so many smart people decide to have such a stupid process? I mean I get the US was embarrassed in the late 50's with all their launch failures, and don't want a repeat of those "dark days" of failure after failure, but the fact that nobody took a step back and asked "How did they get so successful so quickly in those early days?" boggles my mind. The answer is they failed!

I would argue that they didn’t get successful quickly in the early days. The USSR did, but the USSR concealed its failures. We didn’t get successful by embracing fast failure; we got successful by gratadim ferociter — albeit much more ferociter than Blue.

We used a lot of competition to push innovation, which meant we had everything already in place once it was time for Apollo. But that culture of competition engendered a notion that distribution of responsibility enhances safety, which drove costs through the roof. And once the money dried up, so did the innovation.

[tater]

Yeah, comparisons to the space race are not super great. It was vast amounts of money in constant dollars, and "cost plus" absolutely made sense, the goal was pushing stuff out where there would certainly be constant change orders, and indeed even mission evolution. They started on booster dev before they had really even nailed down LOR as their architecture.

As my friend put it to me (and I may have mentioned up thread), when you look at Boca Chica running 3 shifts 7 days a week, they are doing a normal rate of dev—times ~4.2. BO is running 40 hour weeks, SpaceX is running 168 hour weeks. SS/SH dev has taken 10 years in "normal" time, slower than Apollo if you scale it to normal work weeks.

[Hannu2]

5 hours ago, mikegarrison said:

They spent MASSIVE amounts of government money. The "space race" was mainly actually about a Cold War race to build nuclear weapon delivery systems.

This was also space race's Achilles' heel. Development of military missiles separated from orbital rockets during 60's. Military developed smaller nuclear bombs (in mass and volume) and wanted storage properties, hitting accuracy etc. instead of increased thrust and ISP space exploration needed. Missiles became simple solid propellant rockets which was easy to store in caves or submarines for decades and launch immediately after command. Saturn V with high energy hydrogen stages was clearly something military did not need. Therefore USA canceled 3 scientific Apollo missions and did not develop much space tech based on Apollo and moved to Shuttle, completely different spacecraft, which army thought to be useful in military operations.

[tater]

I'd argue it was more geopolitical signalling about the capabilities of each worldview to modernize the "third world." Third world was really the "unaligned world," the countries that had not picked a side in the cold war.

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

2 minutes ago, tater said:

I'd argue it was more geopolitical signalling about the capabilities of each worldview to modernize the "third world." Third world was really the "unaligned world," the countries that had not picked a side in the cold war.

Had a very interesting argument with my son about the definitions. 

Context: you would always hear 'third world country' describing a place like Ghana. Then, back in college (80s) an economics professor argued that the 'First - Third' world definitions were insufficient and that scholars should look at nations in a 'First to Fifth World' framework (First being the economically developed leading Western Democracies (US, England, France, Germany), Second being highly developed but not leading (Canada, Four Tigers, Russia, Belgium etc) Third being Developing economies (Mexico, Greece, Turkey, Philippines etc) on down to Fifth being economies with major problems (Mali, Afghanistan Somalia, etc) 

Blithely told my son that the First - Third world definition was economics based... Only to be corrected (he's 14).

First = NATO aligned 

Second = USSR aligned

Third = not aligned 

 

How I never understood that remains a mystery. 

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2015/01/04/372684438/if-you-shouldnt-call-it-the-third-world-what-should-you-call-it#:~:text=The First World consisted of,has always had blurred lines.

 

[tater]

Yeah, and the point of course was to attract the unaligned countries to one side or the other... "See! We can do all the things! We're the winning side, join us!"

[wumpus]

14 hours ago, mikegarrison said:

They spent MASSIVE amounts of government money. The "space race" was mainly actually about a Cold War race to build nuclear weapon delivery systems.

This was the main reason that the US reacted so strongly to Sputnik.  The assumption was that US fighters could simply intercept any bombers that the USSR could deliver, and that WWIII would be fought entirely on European soil.  The moment they heard Sputnik's "beep, beep, beep...", they knew that this was completely untrue and that R7s could strike the US homeland at will.

It isn't entirely true that the Apollo missions were entirely based on ICBMs, but certainly Mercury was.  And the comical attempts at launching satellites simply proved that the US completely lacked the ability to directly "return fire" for a year or so (it didn't help that the US had previously announced an intention to launch a satellite during the"International Geophysical Year" and presumably had what they thought was a working launcher ready).  What was clear that the Apollo mission was paid for specifically as a cold war stunt to gain "soft power" by regaining status as the world technological leader.  This isn't historical analysis, JFK clearly lays this out as the reason in his "we choose to go to  the Moon" speech.  I didn't know this until after playing KSP (I had thought it was sold as a science project, but it really was originally sold as such a stunt, watch the "we choose to go to the Moon" speech on youtube).

Space fans love to point out "spinoff technologies" that are inevitable when spending so much money on R&D anywhere.  One spinoff of the Apollo program was the accelerometers used could accurately guide ICBMs directly to the Kremlin or specific missile bases.  Presumably fairly good accuracy for submarine launches as well.  But the whole idea that Apollo was used to design ICBMs ignores that nearly all NASA launches used liquid fuel and liquid oxygen (some Gemini used hypergolics): these aren't a good combination for ICBMs unless you are confident that they can be filled faster than the time you have between warning and impact (possibly increasing the freakout over missiles in Cuba).  Minuteman I used solids and was used in 1962, Titan II used hypergolics and was used by 1965.  After the 1980 explosion of a Titan II missile in all its hypergolic gory, sold rocket ICBMs became much more popular in the US.  I had thought there was an "Atlas missile" still in service by 1980, but apparently was mistaken.

[Beccab]

15 minutes ago, wumpus said:

I had thought there was an "Atlas missile" still in service by 1980, but apparently was mistaken.

Yeah, Atlas would have been a really bad ICBM even without alternatives

[mikegarrison]

Gemini and the Mercury orbital flights literally used ICBMs as their launch vehicles, and they were part of the Apollo program.

Anyway, that wasn't the main issue here. The main point was to respond to the idea that Apollo moved quickly because they were not afraid to fail. Well, to the extent they really were not afraid to fail, why was that? Because they had a huge budget! A nearly limitless budget.

Also, they should have been a little more afraid to fail than they were, because they killed one Apollo crew and very nearly killed another one.

[tater]

Absolutely. They had a very specific goal, they had a finite time frame to accomplish it, a huge budget, and astronauts who were almost all military pilots, and anything but risk averse. The nearly bottomless budget was almost more of a side effect of the time-limited goal. Ie: they can  fail, because they need to then just push on and accomplish the goal, money be damned.

 

[wumpus]

22 hours ago, mikegarrison said:

Gemini and the Mercury orbital flights literally used ICBMs as their launch vehicles, and they were part of the Apollo program.

Anyway, that wasn't the main issue here. The main point was to respond to the idea that Apollo moved quickly because they were not afraid to fail. Well, to the extent they really were not afraid to fail, why was that? Because they had a huge budget! A nearly limitless budget.

Also, they should have been a little more afraid to fail than they were, because they killed one Apollo crew and very nearly killed another one.

It was a bit of a miracle that none of the Mercury astronauts weren't killed.  I've heard they had to get someone else to press the button to "light this candle" for Alan Sheppard as the original guy thought it would kill him.  I think the engineers on the job gave him a 50/50 chance of living.  They may have been pessimistic after the satellite flights (while Sheppard simply looked at the Mercury test flights), but they still seem a deathtrap.  And don't ask about the rigid thinking that launched  Vladimir Komarov on a rocket that clearly wasn't ready.

There was also a huge amount of re-work after NASA killed the first three astronauts (presumably they thought being ahead of their goal was a good thing, but they cut way too many corners to get there).  But don't forget they lost two Gemini astronauts jaunting around in T-38s.   Micheal Collins seemed to think they were more dangerous (to astronauts) than space (presumably because of crazy test pilot antics).

[sevenperforce]

48 minutes ago, wumpus said:

It was a bit of a miracle that none of the Mercury astronauts weren't killed.  I've heard they had to get someone else to press the button to "light this candle" for Alan Sheppard as the original guy thought it would kill him.  I think the engineers on the job gave him a 50/50 chance of living.  They may have been pessimistic after the satellite flights (while Sheppard simply looked at the Mercury test flights), but they still seem a deathtrap.  And don't ask about the rigid thinking that launched  Vladimir Komarov on a rocket that clearly wasn't ready.

There was also a huge amount of re-work after NASA killed the first three astronauts (presumably they thought being ahead of their goal was a good thing, but they cut way too many corners to get there).  But don't forget they lost two Gemini astronauts jaunting around in T-38s.   Micheal Collins seemed to think they were more dangerous (to astronauts) than space (presumably because of crazy test pilot antics).

The ejection seat on the Vostok was absolutely not strong enough to get Gargarin high enough for his chute to open in the case of a pad abort, so they strung a net around the launch site to catch him if they had to abort on the pad.

And as we all know, "trapped in a net next to an actively failing launch" is just a wonderful place to be.

As for Gemini, I know there's some degree of disagreement over whether the ejection seats would have actually burned the pilots alive or not....

[StrandedonEarth]

Sorry, can't resist...

 

[tater]

Wonder if they fired their old PR person.

 

 

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

Right - and completely talking past 'who qualifies as an Astronaut'. 

Is it 'anyone who touched space' or a professional designation? 

[tater]

I'm glad Shatner gets to go.

I think at the current time, and given his advanced age, the flight is about right for him. Orbital flight increases the chance of getting sick (it's like a 50%, right?), then there is the toilet situation—it's just not there yet for tourism.

As for the "astronaut" thing, I would imagine a decent % of actual astronauts probably don't have a problem with assigning that label to Captain Kirk.

[tater]

 

 

[wumpus]

On 10/4/2021 at 8:44 PM, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

Cost Plus 

I don't think this is it. 

I think that there are few people who are actually brave enough to be entrepreneurial and smart enough to be rocket scientists... And they got us to space and the moon through those failures. 

However, literally as soon as things become even a little routine all the business school grads came in to make a buck. 

There is a serious problem in corporations where people don't care about the company or the future - they want to meet short term goals (regardless of long term cost), look good, get promoted and do it again. 

This shows up in government as well, often more often.  The most obvious case is the dreaded "bungee boss", someone who comes in knowing that they will have a short time to show improvement, so makes plenty of changes (to show what they are doing) to optimize some specific metric they can then show off.  Since the appointing office (president, governor, county executive, whatever) tends to churn every few years, the "bungee bosses" know that they have little time to make a splash and are only driven by short term goals, often hoping to leapfrog from one position to the next (changing everything to match short term goals as they go) before their patron is no longer in office.

In corporations this happens when either the chain of command is so long that you "can't see the forest for the trees" and middle managers are judged entirely by how they manage their budgets, and also happens across the entire corporation when the founder leaves and the new CEO understands that he is only as good as his last quarter (according to Wall Street), while the old founder typically had some sort of ego tie to the corporation and thus cared about long term prosperity.

Note that "founder" is more about how the founder (and sometimes the public) view the situation.  Elon Musk technically didn't found Tesla, but for all intents and purposes he can be considered the founder.  Thomas Watson didn't found IBM (I think it was Hollerith), but once he became "Mr. Big Blue" he might  as well have been.  And  then Thomas Watson Jr. became "Mr. Big Blue jr" when he ran the show.  Bill Ford has similar ties to Ford, but doesn't really have the deep understanding of how the company runs that a founder would.  To be even slightly on topic I'd point out that Bezos more or less acts as a "board of directors" to Blue Origin and has pretty much exactly the corporate culture inherited from old space, even if they started as an entrepreneurial startup before he bought them.

While this does happen to business all the time, I'm not sure that this is the big difference between Apollo and the Shuttle program.  I strongly suspect that many engineers from the Apollo program would become managers and try to limit newer approaches to "the way we've always done it" short of the extreme deadlines of the Apollo era.  Also if you look at the Shuttle design vs. the requirements, I was astonished at how well it managed to meet such divergent targets and still manage to get into orbit >100 times.  Most of the issues with NASA seem to come from Congressional meddling, although you could argue that Spacex and Orbital  succeeded in the commercial carrier business by a more "hands off" approach by NASA (and I suspect Orbital did as well) while Rocketplane Kistler didn't (entreprenueurial means a certain expectation of failure, and Kistler couldn't make ends meet).

A better example of how chasing budgets ossified an organisation would be the effects of launching the Shuttle flights as opposed to building the Shuttle.  Launching Shuttle flights made sure NASA had a full "crewed operations" budget, and they only had to keep doing the same thing over and over for roughly 30 years.  There simply wasn't any room for innovation (at least for crewed flight, probes could innovate all they wanted without Congressional meddling) as their missions were constrained to the LEO paths Shuttle could go and cutting costs would merely cut the overall NASA budget.

A corporate example would have to be Seymour Cray's continual goal to make the "fastest computer in the world".  So when some executives broke off from Univac to for CDC, they obviously needed to poach him.  Thus began the CDC6600 and an improved (mostly compatible) version called the CDC7600.  CDC wanted later machines to be compatible with the first, but that would limit the options and slow down "absolute fastest" progress, so Cray left and formed the "Cray Inc" (I think there was a failed computer start at CDC as well).  He thus began the Cray 1 and Cray 2 (incompatible with each other), before leaving to found "Cray Computer Corporation".  Unfortunately, by that time it was increasingly hard to beat machines built from parallel microprocessors, and he resorted to using GaAs* ("the technology of the future and always will be") and both the Cray 3 and Cray 4 failed (some employees insist the Cray 4 prototype worked, but they couldn't get someone to buy enough computers to cover the debts).  Seymour Cray died in a car crash before making significant progress on anything more.  But it was always clear that building the "most powerful computer" was rarely the profitable way to build a computer, even in the "money is no object" world of 1960s-80s supercomputing.

* I suspect that Cray wasn't happy about GaAs and that was one of the reasons he left.  Also, there are mutterings of commercial use for the stuff (finally) in RF and maybe even computing.  Supposedly nanosheet transistors are more compatible with weird technology than previous transistor designs (and Si is running out of umph), so perhaps time will tell.

[tater]

Moving flight to Wednesday due to winds. Windy up here, too.