Nibb31

SpaceX has scaled its factory to produce 400 engines per year. They are currently at around 100, which counts as mass production in the aerospace industry. By comparison, SNECMA produces less than a dozen Vulcain engines per year. But you're right, the benefit of reuse goes against the benefit of mass production. That is one of the factors that goes into the balance when people discuss reusable stages. Reusability means that your production volume decreases and the unit cost increases. SpaceX uses 3D printing for prototyping. In many respects, Space is old-school when it comes to actual design work. They tend to rely a lot on tinkering, prototyping, and blowing stuff up. Traditionally, most aerospace companies do their designs and simulations on computer models and only cut metal when the design is 99% complete. It's a very different approach. Yes, that's correct, and it's a problem they will have to deal with. There's also the fact the engine that you have is cheaper than the engine that you don't have yet. The Merlin engine was based on NASA's Fastrac reference design.

Economies of scale.

Problem is that you're competing against folks who want: More money for education More money for child care More money for medical research More money for social protection More money for arts and culture More money for the environment More money for creating jobs More money to fight terrorism and Lower taxes You're in for a rough fight.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_registration After the country code, each national authority has their own rules and special allowances. Airlines or manufacturers for example can reserve batches of numbers. Airbus has F-WWxx and F-WXxx numbers for pre-delivery and test flights (mimicking the French W "garage plates" for pre-registered cars). They have a special allowance to swap these numbers around between different aircraft at the factory. Some of them are cool, like the first A-380 prototype was registered F-WWOW, and the second was F-WXXL. The first A350 was F-WXWB (Extra Wide Body).

Do we really need another thread on the subject?

The report was paid for by ESA but led by REL. They're not going to say that it isn't possible. Do you have a link to that report? I was unable to find it, so I really can't comment on it. However, I did find a 2011 report, which was technical but not very detailed on the economics. I do know that the figures that have been produced in the past make absolutely no sense. Unfortunately, for plenty of political reasons, I don't see ESA funding a UK company without the UK government spending a lot more money ESA, which they aren't prepared to do. ESA funds projects proportionally to the participation of each country, which is why most ESA money goes to France, Germany, and Italy. Arianespace is in charge of launcher development and the UK or BAe Systems isn't part of it. We are pretty much at the same stage we were 6 months ago, except that SpaceX has gone quiet about its constellation plans. I don't remember saying much about quadrotors. I said that oversized blimps would remain a niche for oversized cargo, like the An225 or Skycrane helicopter. I haven't seen that being contradicted. Oooh ! So NASA is ok when they agree with you? I thought they always screw up... NASA is not a monolithic entity. It is many people working in many labs throughout many centers. NASA didn't make a concept mission. Someone at NASA did. There are all sorts of people at NASA working on all sorts of stuff and trying to attract attention to get funding. Anyway, I haven't seen NASA switching their Mars plans to Venus plans. This is getting personal and off topic. So I'll leave it here.

Yeah, and it was done in the 60's with Corona capsules. The difference here is the size of the pod. It's going to need a seriously heavy lift helicopter, like a CH-53. I'm not sure it's going to be cost-effective.

No, I'm trying to say that the other companies are at least as innovative as SpaceX. They are not idiots like you try to portray them. I've given up trying to convince you. I'd just like to avoid some newcomers to this forum from drinking the SpaceX fanboy Koolaid. It's way too easy to portray one company as having all the answers and the others to be idiots. Try getting an engineering degree and a few decades of experience in the business and then you might be qualified to issue a judgement on how an entire industry operates. How SpaceX does what? SpaceX is cheaper than others for several reasons: They hire mostly starry eyed newbie engineers who are cheap and willing to work 60 hour weeks. They don't have more experienced workers that require higher wages, nor do they have pensions. They have a leaner organization with less levels and less history. They make as much as they can in-house and cutting out traditional aerospace suppliers. They use parts that aren't necessarily aerospace-certified (like the helium tank struts on CRS-7). I suppose that all makes a good business strategy. Other companies have larger structures that result from decades of mergers and past projects. The result is higher overhead and less agility. They work in a different environment, with a different history, different customers, different requirements, different rules and procedures, but they are not stupid. JWST in 4 years? You're just pulling stuff out of your rear end again. You simply have no idea how complex something like JWST actually is. It's not something that you can build in your garage. Sure, it's been a poorly run project in terms of cost management. That doesn't prove that "NASA is cost-inefficient in everything they do", nor can you provide an example of "companies doing the same thing", because most of what NASA does, nobody else does. If NASA wasn't around, there would be no space industry in general and no SpaceX in particular, so quit the NASA-bashing. From your arguments bashing thousands of real aerospace engineers and scientists, you clearly have no idea how computers work, how industries work, how R&D activities work, how project management works, how quality assurance works, how politics or economics work. I don't know what you're background is, but I can tell it isn't engineering, let alone aerospace engineering. True wisdom is knowing what you don't know.

If you get excited by "new space" PR, you're signing up for a lot disappointment in life.

Von Braun wasn't fired, he resigned because he didn't agree with the direction NASA was heading. Saturn V was cancelled because Apollo was cancelled and there was no need for it any more. Apollo was cancelled because it had served its purpose, and public apathy, and Viet Nam. So what? Nothing lasts forever. Rubbish. It was supposed to be much cheaper and to make routing access to space affordable. From there, they could build space stations and return to the Moon for a fraction of the price. That was the plan anyway. Most obvious? Failed what? Grow a brain cell or two...

I don't think Elysium is in GSO. It looks like it's in LEO. They seem to use magical force fields and magical propulsion to beeline directly wherever they want. It's Hollywood, not accurate physics.

Same here. It's rather unethical to change the question after people have answered.

Number of patents filed in 2014: Boeing: 911 Lockheed Martin: 263 ULA: 2 SpaceX: 0 General Motors: 1470 Honda: 1099 Ford: 804 Tesla: 61 Who says they are? Again, Musk doesn't publish any financial records because he doesn't have to, so it's hard to say how well they are actually performing compared to the rest of the industry. On the other hand, SpaceX's workforce is underpaid and overworked, many of them only work there 50 to 60 hours per week out of a cultish devotion to Elon Musk. It's easy to make money when you're not paying your engineers the salary that they deserve. No. You should use what's available now. Technology changes fast. Adapting and certifying the top technology every year makes the cost skyrocket. You really have no idea what you're talking about. Test campaigns costs a lot of money. In fact, if you have ever worked in any kind of industry, you'd know that it typically costs more that 50% of the actual production work. I work in software, and we actually have as many quality engineers as we have developers. The same is true for most advanced manufacturing facility. Environmental testing costs even more, because it requires specialized facilities. Quality is expensive. Aerospace quality is even more expensive. That's why they save money by using certified hardware with certified software. They still needed to be certified through vibration testing, RF testing, electrical testing, thermal testing. You don't want the batteries to explode. You don't want RF interference with equipment on the ISS. You don't want the cooling to rely on convection. You don't want toxic or out-gassing materials. You don't want the item to become a fire hazard... No. Certified aerospace hardware has a longer support lifetime because the projects they are used in have a longer lifetime. The computers on a 25 year-old A320 or F-15 are still supported by their manufacturer. When you're in a 15 year project, you can't afford to switch technology every 3 years and start over again. If you do that, you're never going to launch, because there is always better stuff coming out, and you will spend your time integrating new systems and writing and certifying new software over and over again. Introducing new technology in the middle of a project only introduces more delays and wastes the money you spent on the original system. I explained why: it uses general purpose flight computers that each run a specialized task, but are capable of running the task of another computer. You don't just carry along spare computers as dead weight for redundancy. They are interchangeable. And because they each only do limited tasks, they can be smaller and use less power than your average PC. And the software is simpler too, which means that it doesn't need to be rewritten and recertified. It's more like RAID5 than RAID1 (look it up please). You are suggesting RAID1 (duplicate everything), the industry uses RAID5 or 6 (spread the load over multiple assets with built-in redundancy). No, there are many other requirements than "deterioration" that are necessary to certify a component for spaceflight. Flight computers don't need to run Flash or Candy Crush.

Redundant ships simply aren't practical. Some early Mars mission designs involved sending two ships so that one is a backup of the other, but there are multiple problems with this architecture: - If your two ships are identical, then they both have the same failure modes. If one has a technical problem, then the other is likely to have the same problem at one point, and you end up with two stranded ships and crews instead of one. - Sending one interplanetary ship and keeping the other at home waiting for a rescue simply isn't practical because RV with the other ship on a solar orbit requires either a huge expenditure in dV or waiting for the proper window which can take years. Solar orbits are big ! - If you send your two ships on the same trajectory, they will tend to drift apart and will require a lot of dV to RV if necessary. You might as well save yourself the trouble and just dock them before they leave Earth, In that case, you have one big ship with twice everything. Since each ship probably has its own redundancy, you save weight by having one big ship that shares those redundancies. In the end, you might as well just build one single ship in the first place.

"Fulfilling" and "cool" are not relevant requirements for a national space program.

The concept appeared early in the Shuttle program and was immediately discarded. The whole point of the Shuttle was to replace the Saturn V, which was considered too expensive. The Shuttle was supposed to fly often, so using a Saturn V to launch it would be totally counter-productive.

Vertical landing is a billion billion billion percent cooler, and more elegant engineering. Look at the effort that went into making the Shuttle recoverable, compared to the effort that went into making the F9 recoverable.

Who cares about TWR in space ? TWR is important for launching and landing, neither of which you would really want to use a NERVA for anyway. For interplanetary stuff, you don't really care if your burns go on over several weeks. NASA plans on scaling SEP for larger payloads for the ARM mission.

How does that help with all the huge design flaws of a side-mounted spaceplane ?

I'm not. Nobody is seriously considering space elevators.

We don't really need NERVA any more. We have SEP, ion, VASIMIR, and so on. They have much better ISP.

Because you don't need wings in space. In fact, you only need the wings for the last few minutes of the mission, and with those wings come landing gear, control surfaces, hydraulics, and super large area to protect with a TPS. And there goes your payload fraction... I don't understand the fascination that some people have for winged space ships.

Luckily for us, the industry doesn't care what you think about them either? Exactly. That's the process that's referred to as "certification". It involves a lot of testing, design work, and it costs a lot of money. Which is why space-rated hardware costs more. You can't afford to put systems through certification every year. Once it's certified, Of course, the certification process is more stringent for vital systems that are exposed to space than for auxiliary systems like a laptop or a watch than fly inside a shirt-sleeve environment. Yes. And those laptops went through a whole certification process to make sure that they don't present a hazard to the space station. The same is true for the Nikon cameras. Any piece of hardware that goes up to the ISS has to go through a screening process to make sure that it doesn't put the crew or the station in danger. The certification is not as hard as for rad-hardened life-support equipment, but it still exists. If NASA needs laptops for Orion, they will need to be rad-hardened and vacuum-hardened. Oh, and because that screening process takes a lot of time, many of the items are not "off-the-shelf" because they are actually obsolete. NASA uses Thinkpads that are sometimes a couple of generations behind, not because they are stupid, but because it makes good sense to use certified hardware instead of certifying new hardware every year, and because it makes sense to minimize spares by having only one or two different laptop models on the station to minimize spare parts., even when you need to send up a new one. You said "just add 3 for redundancy". If you have one certified system you don't always need 3 of them. Redundancy isn't just adding 3 of everything, especially when you're using an identical off-the-shelve system that wasn't designed to be used in space. If you expect it to fail, then adding 3 of the same is just adding dead weight, not redundancy. Good redundancy is to have systems that serve different functions but can be used in place of something else. For example, instead of sending one big computer with 2 spares, you split the functions between 4 smaller computers and add 1 spare. In computer terms, that would be RAID5 vs RAID1. That's why avionics computers don't need to be 2016 Alienware gaming machines, even if the Alienware machines are cheaper. The Orion computers are actually the same off-the-shelf flight computers as the Boeing 787. They are not old or energy intensive. They are hardened and custom built for the job, with MIL-STD interfaces. This is what a certified off-the-shelf avionics computer looks like: Good luck replacing it with a cheap laptop. NASA isn't in the business of launching commercial satellites.

That's not how aerospace engineering works. If you use the last tech that is available commercially, and you find out that it fails due to the extreme thermal, vibrational, or radiation environment, then the other 2 or 3 systems that you added for redundancy are likely to suffer the exact same fault. You've just added 3 times the necessary weight and lost a mission because you skimped on the price of using aerospace certified equipment. Another example is SpaceX using off-the-shelf struts for its helium tanks instead of certified hardware. Sure, those struts were probably much cheaper and on paper they had the same strength, but once exposed to extreme cold and extreme vibration, they were used outside of their design parameters and failed. There are some places where you can use off-the-shelf parts, but in most cases there are perfectly good reasons why aerospace engineers stick to certified components.

There's also a lot of Ada in the embedded aerospace industry. It's often easier to use old code that is reliable and certified than to rewrite, test, and certify code in a new language.