Would you say SpaceX is doing better than NASA?

[Sirad]

Since Wernher von Braun left the Nasa, they more and more started to gain the needed level of Bureaucracy, that allowed them to fail in Missions by miscalculating inches with millimetres.

[PB666]

1 hour ago, Sirad said:

Since Wernher von Braun left the Nasa, they more and more started to gain the needed level of Bureaucracy, that allowed them to fail in Missions by miscalculating inches with millimetres.

Its interesting you should say this because NASA has defied the Mars curse more than any other space agency except INRU, that's only because they have one mission. Everything is relative, you can say whatever you like about NASA up until the moment someone ask you if the is a better space agency you can point and at that moment the conversation evaporates. Then it will pop up again a month later with some fool pulling necro on the ~150 successful mission space shuttle thread calling it a mistake. 

Edited June 9, 2016 by PB666

[RenegadeRad]

22 hours ago, DDE said:

If NASA's willing to design a closed-cycle nuclear turbojet/scramjet/afterburning thermal rocket/power-generating reactor, they might get some nice results. But then no-one even lets them make the really cool stuff.

wot

This is like comparing a father to a son, the son may be ambitious and more better to the coming generation but the father also had a history and the son would never exist if the Father was not there

or maybe, he is adopted

[lugge]

3 hours ago, cantab said:

Except Falcon Heavy won't put as much to LEO as SLS. FH looks set to be a great rocket, 50 tons in LEO is awesome, ...

I didn't say anything about FH.

What I said is: with SpaceX (or any other commercial company) you will get more rocket per R&D dollar in a shorter time. Thats a simple matter of structures and bureaucrazy, not because they have better engineers. In every country in every kind of business: a goverment agency cannot compete with private, commercial companies.

NASA is great in science and exploring space, but when it comes to rocket development you should still with privates.

Give SpaceX the funds NASA had for SLS and you will get... Wow, I cannot imagine what SpaceX can do with these funds...

[DDE]

16 minutes ago, RenegadeRad said:

wot

It's called a qualitative breakthrough. NASA has a longer history of those, too.

The concept comes from Purnelle's fiction, and I don't see how they can't create a closed-cycle Project Pluto-LANTR hybrid, which would make winged SSTOs quite advantageous. Because now, they really aren't.

[Sirad]

1 hour ago, lugge said:

I didn't say anything about FH.

What I said is: with SpaceX (or any other commercial company) you will get more rocket per R&D dollar in a shorter time. Thats a simple matter of structures and bureaucrazy, not because they have better engineers. In every country in every kind of business: a goverment agency cannot compete with private, commercial companies.

NASA is great in science and exploring space, but when it comes to rocket development you should still with privates.

Give SpaceX the funds NASA had for SLS and you will get... Wow, I cannot imagine what SpaceX can do with these funds...

Nasa:

N ot

A ny

S paceship

A vailable

Yah, you are right thats the stuff those 'uh ah NASA is best' People dont understand. NASA (now) HAVE smart Scientists, for sure, but anything 'cool' and 'smart' will get drowned in the sheer abundance of overwhelming, slow, money eating Bureaucracy and you have to follow the line to first ask the guy above you if you are alloved to punch an additional hole in formular XC-101-1123.112(-i-have-an-idea-)

So why throw Money to old Dinosaurs if you could have 100 times the Efficiency elsewhere ?

Is the Government afraid of Uprisings and Riots if they Close down the Nasa and Reopen it with only those who really WORK there ? (even at ESA we have that Problem and i bet the Russians suffer too)

 

2 hours ago, PB666 said:

Its interesting you should say this because NASA has defied the Mars curse more than any other space agency except INRU, that's only because they have one mission. Everything is relative, you can say whatever you like about NASA up until the moment someone ask you if the is a better space agency you can point and at that moment the conversation evaporates. Then it will pop up again a month later with some fool pulling necro on the ~150 successful mission space shuttle thread calling it a mistake. 

You didnt understood what my Post was all about.

Are you from the USA ?

[Nibb31]

7 minutes ago, Sirad said:

Nasa:

N ot

A ny

S paceship

A vailable

Yah, you are right thats the stuff those 'uh ah NASA is best' People dont understand. NASA (now) HAVE smart Scientists, for sure, but anything 'cool' and 'smart' will get drowned in the sheer abundance of overwhelming, slow, money eating Bureaucracy and you have to follow the line to first ask the guy above you if you are alloved to punch an additional hole in formular XC-101-1123.112(-i-have-an-idea-)

So why throw Money to old Dinosaurs if you could have 100 times the Efficiency elsewhere ?

Is the Government afraid of Uprisings and Riots if they Close down the Nasa and Reopen it with only those who really WORK there ? (even at ESA we have that Problem and i bet the Russians suffer too)

You are totally missing the point of NASA:

1. It maintains and develops technology that keeps the country on the edge.
2. It employs valuable skilled workers that would go elsewhere if they weren't at NASA.

If you shutdown NASA:

• You put thousands of skilled workers out of a job who will either have to emigrate to other countries or resort to flipping burgers. Either way, you lose the technological knowledge while other countries catch up. Eventually, if you fall behind technologically, you fall behind economically.
• Unemployed government workers don't hire nannies, buy houses, or pay taxes. Every government job creates more jobs. NASA employees go to restaurants, buy cars, houses, go to doctors and dentists, employ plumbers, gardeners, etc... Every dollar you spend on government employees and contractors is demultiplied in the economy.

Money spent on government pork is *never* wasted. It always trickles down into the economy, generating more jobs, and returns to the government through taxes paid by all those people. Although on the outside it might seem more efficient to outsource, cutting spending and reducing the number of employees is nearly always detrimental to the economy in the end.

In the end, the actual projects that come out of NASA, Shuttle, Constellation, SLS, are a nice bonus, but they are not the reason NASA exists.

 

[Sirad]

35 minutes ago, Nibb31 said:

In the end, the actual projects that come out of NASA, Shuttle, Constellation, SLS, are a nice bonus, but they are not the reason NASA exists.

 

This is exactly the reason why a Goal like 'Landing on Mars' will be stretched and blocked forever.

When i was young I've seen Men walking and driving on the Moon.

NASA actually going nowhere. If they hadn't used Wernhers Saturn5 drawings as Toilet Paper then they could have pulled out something really reliable and cheap out of the drawer (i say CHEAP) to go back to space after the end of the shuttle program...... uuuuh oooooh wait...

What if they STILL have the Plans of the Saturn5 somewhere but pretend to have lost them to maintain a reason for big Salarys big and Expensive Stuff from the Government instead of Pulling out that (reliable old Craftmanship) Rocked without any Costs, Slab it together and enter Space again ?

Did i asked the wrong question ?

 

[PB666]

1 hour ago, Sirad said:

Did i asked the wrong question ?

You asked a political question, once upon a time people had dreams above themselves, the dreams were fullfilled, along with PCs and cell phones and all the treasures the space age built. Then our dreams were that of smart phones and chat rooms and facebook profiles, 2 story houses with zero percent down loans. NASA and science seem to be someone else's dream. Of course with resources why not, but one mans dream is another mans theft, so that explains the budget constraint, and that's all you need to know.

[Exploro]

As some may have already pointed out by now the question is poorly thought out.

There is no denying SpaceX has been making great strives in developing more efficient and semi-reusable launch systems. What is more it has succeeded in flying a reliable launcher at prices that beat it's competition. That said however to say that this success translates to the launch provider is somehow "better" than NASA is a flawed premise.

There is no doubting that NASA is a complex buearcratic organization with a somewhat deserved reputation of being too accomodating to contractors and hampered by mismanagement and a lack of vision in recent years. That said the fact that NASA has been utilizing the services of companies like SpaceX to cut cost and allow the organization to refocus from LEO operations to deep space exploration indicates the agency is trying to overcome the problems that has been a blight to them for decades

SpaceX; while demonstrating it can offer lower cost access to space, has not demonstrated it is "better" at space exploration. NASA has over 50 years of experience of surveying the solar system; all eight major planets, Vesta, Ceres, Pluto, several asteriods and comets. NASA is presently charting the boundaries between Solar and Instellar Space via the Voyager spacecraft And obviously it has conducted significant surveys of the Cosmos with combination or ground based and space based sensory platforms. SpaceX has not conducted any type of scientific investigation of its own In fact much of the R&D information the company has used to develop the Falcon 9 series of launchers, the original Dragon, and Dargon V2, is from NASA. SpaceX has benefited from using NASA owned testing facilities. Needless to say SpaceX might not be where it is today had it not been for the existence of NASA.

To paraphrase "Lost in Space: The Fall of NASA and the Dream of a New Space Age" Private venture and government agencies need each other to succeed in the quest of developing and exploring space. The present commercial servicing missions to the ISS was one of things Klerkx was hopeful would happen. It would represent the start of allowing NASA to get back to being the powerhouse it was during the height of the Apollo program and give entities like SpaceX the ability to develope space with latitudes unheard of during the shuttle program.

 

Edited June 10, 2016 by Exploro
Spelling corrections

[wumpus]

8 hours ago, Nibb31 said:

You are totally missing the point of NASA

1. It employs valuable skilled workers that would go elsewhere if they weren't at NASA.

To other countries?  Or simply adjust technologies and perhaps migrate to San Jose and build websites?  Or possibly even work for spacex/ULA/Orbital-ATK?  (Of course I'm just talking about the contractors.  The GS-nn "NASA Employees" would simply migrate to NIST/NIH/DOE (if Goddard: JPL, Houston, and others would migrate to different government agencies).

[responding to a different post] As far as government agencies and companies, it has more to do with the size of the typical government agency vs. the size of the company.  Not that far from NASA Goddard is Montgomery County Maryland, which (unlike other MD counties) has "county liquor stores".  Unlike most ABC stores, these are clean, well stocked, and reasonably priced (don't expect decorations, but don't expect to get a better price in many nearby locations, especially anywhere in VA).  I don't think FedEx has a prayer in taking the USPS's <$.50/letter business (USPS is an odd organisation.  It does what it does reasonably well, but it can't handle changes *at all*.  Don't even think of try building a system that moves that much mail without a bureaucratic nightmare, and don't ask how badly Congress is tying their hands.

The real issue with NASA vs. a non-government organisation is derived from Nibb31's point.  NASA really can't stop doing *anything*.  Once a project is started, it shambles on in zombie form forever (I think voyager no longer sends messages and *might* be shut down, but they tracked that lost soul forever).  NASA's shuttle lives on in the SLS project (employing as many of the same people as it can).  Selling programs might rely on claims of cost saving, but once they are sold it goes into infinite cost-prolonging.  Mission creep happens, and it becomes zombie creep.

PS.  Put my vote in for blueberries.  Because we are asked to choose between apples and oranges.

[Nibb31]

11 hours ago, Sirad said:

NASA actually going nowhere. If they hadn't used Wernhers Saturn5 drawings as Toilet Paper then they could have pulled out something really reliable and cheap out of the drawer (i say CHEAP) to go back to space after the end of the shuttle program...... uuuuh oooooh wait...

What if they STILL have the Plans of the Saturn5 somewhere but pretend to have lost them to maintain a reason for big Salarys big and Expensive Stuff from the Government instead of Pulling out that (reliable old Craftmanship) Rocked without any Costs, Slab it together and enter Space again ?

Of course they still have drawings of the Saturn V. It's an urban legend that they were thrown away or lost.

But the idea of resurrecting a 50 year old design is idiotic at best. There is nothing that you could do with 1960's drawings these days, because there isn't a single supplier or aerospace-grade machine shop that takes paper drawings any more. You would need to convert each and every drawing to a modern CAD/CAM file. But it's not just a matter of converting each piece from 2D to 3D. You would actually need to redesign them from scratch because most of those parts would be produced differently today. Manufacturing techniques have evolved. Tools are different. CNC machining has replaced forging and casting. Welding techniques are different. Materials are different. Coating techniques are different. New adhesives have been introduced. QA processes have evolved. Some chemicals have been banned. And of course, you couldn't supply most of the electronic parts even if you wanted to.

To rebuild the Saturn V with the 1960's blueprints would require a massive redesign of pretty much every single part, including supplier sourcing, testing and recertification. You would need to build a supply chain, a whole industry, based on obsolete technology. 

Remember however, that the Saturn rockets were kludges, slapped together with parts that were available. They were good enough to get a man on the Moon in a couple of years, but they were far from being an optimal design. So even if you did duplicate the Saturn V, you would still en up with the same suboptimal design, which would be designed to meet the requirements of a cold-war Moon race, not a sustainable launch architecture.

So if you want to replicate the capabilities of a 1960's Saturn V, is is much cheaper to design something with similar capabilities, using techniques, tooling, suppliers, and parts that are available today, with mission requirements of today. Which is pretty much what NASA is doing.

11 hours ago, Sirad said:

Did i asked the wrong question ?

Yes.

[Sirad]

3 minutes ago, Nibb31 said:

Of course they still have drawings of the Saturn V. It's an urban legend that they were thrown away or lost.

But the idea of resurrecting a 50 year old design is idiotic at best. There is nothing that you could do with 1960's drawings these days

As you believe the Plans exist (some say there are still Microfilms at the JPL, i shall ask if i ever come 'round there) i can prove that old Drawings can be used.

The Company im at work supplies High End Medium Voltage Motorstarters. The last 10 Years we built Equipment for: ESA, CERN and ITER and several other Big Dinosaurs.

Some of our Drawings/Plans, and Normative Elements are from 1978(just seen today) and still in use. So i am an Idiot working in a Idiotic company.

Thank you, Yay America is Great!

 

 

[Nibb31]

22 minutes ago, Sirad said:

As you believe the Plans exist (some say there are still Microfilms at the JPL, i shall ask if i ever come 'round there) i can prove that old Drawings can be used.

The Company im at work supplies High End Medium Voltage Motorstarters. The last 10 Years we built Equipment for: ESA, CERN and ITER and several other Big Dinosaurs.

Some of our Drawings/Plans, and Normative Elements are from 1978(just seen today) and still in use. So i am an Idiot working in a Idiotic company.

That's a very specific example that might apply to a handful of components. Maybe the technology for medium voltage motorstarters hasn't changed much since the seventies. But it certainly doesn't work for most of the mechanical engineering. Hand building rocket engines with thousands of parts and tankage structures like they did in the 60's would be totally uneconomical.

[KSK]

1 hour ago, Nibb31 said:

*snip*

Remember however, that the Saturn rockets were kludges, slapped together with parts that were available. They were good enough to get a man on the Moon in a couple of years, but they were far from being an optimal design. So even if you did duplicate the Saturn V, you would still en up with the same suboptimal design, which would be designed to meet the requirements of a cold-war Moon race, not a sustainable launch architecture.

So if you want to replicate the capabilities of a 1960's Saturn V, is is much cheaper to design something with similar capabilities, using techniques, tooling, suppliers, and parts that are available today, with mission requirements of today. Which is pretty much what NASA is doing.

They're still using kludges, slapped together with available parts though. I guess some things never change huh?

[Nibb31]

8 minutes ago, KSK said:

They're still using kludges, slapped together with available parts though. I guess some things never change huh?

Sure, like pretty much every industry (SpaceX's non-aerospace certified helium tank struts for example...). The point is that when using standardized parts, you want to use those that are available today, not reopen production lines and recertify suppliers for stuff that was made obsolete 40 years ago.

Edited June 10, 2016 by Nibb31

[lugge]

I think everone (well, most) around knows rebuilding the 60's Saturn V is a dumb idea, not worth discussing.

So lets not open this side discussion here.

[PB666]

1 hour ago, lugge said:

I think everone (well, most) around knows rebuilding the 60's Saturn V is a dumb idea, not worth discussing.

So lets not open this side discussion here.

No need to rebuild, there almost complete one lying on its side about 20 miles from here. 

[RenegadeRad]

One word - I don't care how anyone comes up with a clever argument or mocking but I hate the government, because they are a bunch of pseudo surrealists who don't care about the real aspect of science and humanity, They just care about them being in power and making agendas. I may be wrong but this ideology wont change for me.

On the main note, *IF* SpaceX land's a man on Mars before NASA, I will start to align towards SpaceX because I honestly feel that after the shuttle program Nasa is directionless... Kind of, who knows?

And I wonder, what will be our next main location after Mars? Titan? Europa? Pluto?

[PB666]

1 minute ago, RenegadeRad said:

One word - I don't care how anyone comes up with a clever argument or mocking but I hate the government, because they are a bunch of pseudo surrealists who don't care about the real aspect of science and humanity, They just care about them being in power and making agendas. I may be wrong but this ideology wont change for me.

On the main note, *IF* SpaceX land's a man on Mars before NASA, I will start to align towards SpaceX because I honestly feel that after the shuttle program Nasa is directionless... Kind of, who knows?

And I wonder, what will be our next main location after Mars? Titan? Europa? Pluto?

Well now that we know that your a hater, we can handle your points of view from there. Governments are essential, and if the gov't is broke, look at the peeps for the ones who broke it. From my point of view everything is relative, the fact we are comparing SpaceX to NASA is one thing, but there are two peas in a pod, because its NASA that is providing the expertise to get SpaceX off the ground, no money transfers, but the knowledge base and background critiques so that they don't make any program ending mistakes. Government is providing contracts to SpaceX, but the US and foriegn governments. So from that point of view, with out some government impetus, the space programs in general probably would not be anywhere close to where they are today. I'm not a punk, lived on the rock for a long time, and I have seen all kinds of attitudes, those that build and those that destroy. Never going to say that a gov operates a perfect store, but by the same token I know lots of govs, not mine, in the world that are but the worst enemies of the common man, and yet they still seem to get voted into office over and over again.

I'm not going to sit here and lets this excrementation go unchallanged, you can't sit around and casually say that the single most successful, by almost a magnitude, space program is somehow fallen, or broken at its core. You don't call a delivery systems with 135 launches, 1 mission failure, 1 post-mission failure (about 1000 people in space with the loss of a dozen)  in the comparative world of space launching a failure. I see alot of NASA bad-mouthing, where are the comparables out there. Before anyone starts jumping up and down flailing their hands and saying NASA big ole sucks bad government  hated kind of stuff, you need to have something to compare with, and if you don't you are just talking trash. 

[RenegadeRad]

I never said NASA is bad read my earlier comment.

are you triggered?

[razark]

By the time NASA was 14 years old, ten men had walked on the moon.

Scaled Composites Tier One started in 1996, and in eight years managed three manned spaceflights with two astronauts.

 

SpaceX was founded in 2002, and has yet to put a person into space.

[wumpus]

On rebuilding a Saturn V.

First, NASA *has* built an F-1 engine (the main "lost tech" of the SaturnV), pretty much as a minor project (I'm guessing about the backing): http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/how-nasa-brought-the-monstrous-f-1-moon-rocket-back-to-life

Second, I remember reading in the 1980s (possibly printed in the 1970s) that although NASA still had a Saturn V in the rocket garden, even if it was ready to launch (it wasn't).  The idea was that you couldn't learn the entire countdown sequence from what was in the NASA documentation, and too many people were dead, retired, and time had robbed them of the complete memories needed to do the complete procedure.

My guess is that a modern Saturn V manufacturer would not be interested in any control systems or much other than the F-1 engine (and possibly the hydrogen engine above it.  I'm not much of a fan of the F-1 due to its lousy TWR and how much fuel it burns just to keep itself going).  From the linked article, it isn't just that we lost the plans [see below], but that it would be unlikely that a government contractor would be willing to hire and pay for the needed welding skill.  Fortunately [the absolute top of the line] 3d printing was able to rescue them and build the "impossible" welds.

Way back before google and much of the world wide web (thus making it next to impossible to google), NASA decided to get rid of complete duplicated documentation (in microfiche) during an era that (I think, it was a while ago) included Apollo (maybe just Skylab or Gemini, but it should have included Apollo).  One of the copies wound up at the University of Maryland technical library.  I'd go look there for as much documentation as you can.

The real problem with building a Saturn V is the same as the SLS.  Great rocket, but nobody willing to pay to go anywhere with it.  Presumably the moment you could come up with a sufficient reason to build a new Saturn V, Congress would finally have a reason to build the SLS.

[DDE]

6 hours ago, PB666 said:

No need to rebuild, there almost complete one lying on its side about 20 miles from here. 

And what makes you think that a museum exhibit is to any degree usable. Sure, it's not covered in as much bird crap as this 95% complete second Buran:

But it's still an unflyable hunk of metal.

[PB666]

50 minutes ago, RenegadeRad said:

I never said NASA is bad read my earlier comment.

are you triggered?

NASA is not directionless, and since you have contributed nothing to their missions your feelings are immaterial. Check the list posted by other authors. NASA has many current missions, including some that are over 40 years old and still producing data. NASA is underfunded, that's it, that's the problem. With under-funding do you not help out the contractor that is going to do your mission but at a lower cost, yes, you do. Again, the problem is not with NASA, although it has its problem, its has been, for the last 35 years, been asked to do more with less, and in response, they have done more with less. This includes several active programs on Mars. This includes several missions that are operating several times (even magnitudes) longer than their programmed life. One launch, known as Hubble, which is the most important science equipment ever created by mankind and still has several years of life left. With what penny have you contributed to this? Talk is cheap, unless the naysayers have contributed anything, what is your ground for critique?

If you really think NASA has died, just search any published article list serve and search with the names of the Glenn Research Center, NSIDC, NOAA, Goddard flight space center, NASA, and the other cooperating US sanctioned space science institutes. In pubmed alone, for the first 5 months of this year there are 200 published articles published in medical journals. What have you published lately that you are one to judge?

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=NASA

http://nsidc.org/research/publications.html

http://facilities.grc.nasa.gov/

http://science.gsfc.nasa.gov/sed/index.cfm?fuseAction=home.main&&navOrgCode=600&navTab=nav_about_us

http://crgis.ndc.nasa.gov/historic/Johnson_Space_Center

NASA is in many cooperative missions with ESA, RSA, ISS, etc.

Stop spreading misinformation.

6 minutes ago, DDE said:

And what makes you think that a museum exhibit is to any degree usable. Sure, it's not covered in as much bird crap as this 95% complete second Buran:

But it's still an unflyable hunk of metal.

Well we got a rocket over at the space center you can strap it onto if you can find a way. :^). Of course I was joking, but that was a back up rocket one time for any mission that might have failed. I sure some industrius organization could scavenge the engines. LH2 though aren't so popular anymore as launch engines. You don't need to fix the windows, I understand most of the buran missions were unmanned anyway, lol.

 

Edited June 10, 2016 by PB666