Why are people impressed with SpaceX?
Why are people impressed with SpaceX?
So I've heard and seen the newest launch, and I thought for a private firm it seemed cool they were able to do it on their own, but I'm scratching my head that people are gushing about this as some hail mary.
I get the engineering required is staggering when it comes to these rocket tests, but NASA and other big space agencies have already done rocket tests and exploring bits of the moon which still astounds me to this day.
Is it because it's not a multi billion government institution? When I tell colleagues about NASA doing stuff like this yeaaaars ago they're like "Yea yea but this is different it's crazy bro"
Can anyone help me understand? Any SpaceX or Tesla fans here?
Disclaimer: Fuck Elon Musk and all the shady shit he's been pulling off.
That said, this is one of the most impressive things I've ever seen in terms of the potential it holds to shape the future.
Up until 5 short years ago we had:
- No main booster recovery
- No rocket nearly as powerful as this one
- No successful flight of a full-flow stage engine
- Nobody even considering the catch with chopsticks thing
- No private company testing super heavy lift vehicles (BO is about to enter the chat as well)
- No push for reusability at all
This was all built on top of the incredible engineering of NASA, but this one launch today has all of the above ticked.
This is like making the first aeroplane that's able to land and be flown again. SpaceX uses this example as well, like, imagine how expensive any plane ticket would have to be if you had to build a brand new A380 every single time people wanted to fly and then crashing it into the sea.
Going to space is EXPENSIVE. If this program succeeds it will both massively reduce the cost to space and spin off hundreds of companies looking to do the same in various ways.
Look at any new rocket currently in development, they all include some level of reusability in the design and that's all thanks to the incredible engineers of SpaceX paving the way, first with Falcon 9 and now with Starship.
We're talking industrial revolution levels of progress and new frontiers in our lifetimes, which is very, very exciting.
I hate Elon just as much as the next guy, but pretending that this wasn’t a marvel of engineering is really disingenuous. People with intelligence beyond my comprehension made that a reality, and just because the company had his face on it, it doesn’t make it any less impressive
SpaceX is not run by Elon and he's kept from being involved closely by a buffer of people that keep him from getting too close to making any "elon" level changes.
SpaceX is successful despite Musk, not because of. And the woman who runs it knows that and keeps Musk away from any important decisions or impacts.
So the stuff they're doing is legit, cool aerospace stuff.
It's just not something Musk should take credit for. He does/will. But he shouldn't. He's a hack.
There are a few things that are different from what NASA has done in the past:
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SpaceX Rocket is the most powerful rocket ever, surpassing everything that NASA or anyone else has ever done.
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they are landing the rockets, with the aim of being able to recover them. If you skip the technicality that SpaceX first stage is suborbital but is part of an orbital launcher, that makes SpaceX the only entity who has achieved that, with some comparison to the Space Shuttle and Buran, though both were losing significant sections of the initial launcher, with very difficult repairs once on the ground.
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the cost of the launcher. In terms of capabilities, NASA's SLS is probably close to Starship. However, it costs around $2B/launch, and nothing is recoverable. Starship is meant for low cost. It is estimated that the current hardware + propellant for a single launch is under $100M. With reusability, a cost per launch under $10M is achievable in the mid term (10 years I would say) once the R&D has been paid ($1.4B/year at the moment, I would guess the whole development for Starship will be $10-20B, so same if not less than SLS).
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the aim for high speed reusability - SpaceX aim is to launch as much as possible, as fast as possible, with the same hardware. While it is a bit early to understand how successful they will be (Elon was saying a launch every 1hr, which seem to be very optimistic, I would bet 6-12hrs to be more achievable). That was NASA's original goal for the Space Shuttle, and they failed that.
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finally, orbital refueling means you have a single vehicle that can basically go anywhere in the inner solar system without much issues, and minimal cost.
Also, what gets people excited are the prospects of what this enables. A 10-100x decrease in the access to orbit changes completely the space economics and opens a lot of possibilities. This means going to the Moon is a lot simpler because now you don't need to reduce the mass of everything. This makes engineering way easier as you do not need to optimise everything to death, which tends to increase costs exponentially. And as for Mars, Starship is what makes having a meaningful colony there possible. Doing an Apollo like mission on Mars would have been possible for decades, but at a significant price for not much to show for. With cheap launch, you can just keep sending hardware there.
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Wait, when did NASA land a fully reusable rocket like fucking Buck Rogers?
Then do it again, but capture it with the freakin' launch tower?
When did NASA even have a reusable rocket? Oh, the shuttle, the bastardized money pit for NSA/NRO/Air Force, that appears to have been designed to orbit a surveillance satellite chassis, which most people know as Hubble (it's one of many, this one being used to surveil the universe, instead of the earth).
And the shuttle was a quasi-reusable orbiter, not a rocket.
NASA, nor anyone else, has done this before. I'm not sure what you're referring to when you say NASA did this already.
What you're asking is akin to: why are people impressed by the airplane? We've already reached the Americas and India by boat.
SpaceX, and others actually are not advancing science per se, but are greatly improving/optimising the engineering so that it can be used in cheaper ways by others.
There's also the issue that after the moon landing we didn't really improve that much and much of the knowledge faded
For me being impressed with SpaceX is kinda like loving a piece of art even though the creator turned out to be an asshole. Or liking Star Trek, even though Berman was shady af to put it mildly.
What SpaceX does is very impressive from a technical point of view. Even if the rocket never amounts to anything except this one successful test, it's still amazing they pulled it off. It tickles my engineer brain. And I think it's worth to honor all the people that made it happen, despite them having to work for Musk. Combine this with what could be in the future and you can hopefully see why people hail this test flight.
Now I still have serious doubts about Starship in the moon program. The on orbit refueling seems very sketchy and unproven at this point. Sure they will get two rockets into orbit, mate them up and transfer some fuel, that's a given at this point. But how much fuel are we talking? And how fast does the turnaround need to be to prevent losing a lot of it? How many ships and how many launches? Will this completely offset the cheaper launch costs due to reusability? It's a huge unknown and will push back the moon program to well into the 2030s.
Not a Tesla fan and I absolutely despise the cult around Elon. SpaceX is a bit different though. Luckily with Elon's many, many side project misadventures he's pretty hands-off with SpaceX. Ultimately it comes down to being largely engineer driven and given sufficient (but yes, still government) funding to try new things without the scrutiny of direct government agencies. The hours are usually terrible from what I hear, but this varies team to team.
My biggest complaint is that they do lowball engineers using the stock as reasoning for why it's worth accepting. FWIW historically that has been the case, and many engineers there do effectively have golden handcuffs. But expecting infinite golden handcuff level growth forever is unrealistic.
I remember an interview with a former NASA engineer that said NASA would never be able to do anything near what SpaceX (or any other private company) can do. The reason given is that SpaceX spent billions after billions on what were essentially very expensive fireworks until they finally achieved a breakthrough. A breakthrough that wasn't a guarantee. Even Musk himself had said he would have eventually closed SpaceX if they hadn't achieved something and it would have been a multi billion dollar failure. He, and everyone else really, got very lucky.
Imagine NASA asking taxpayers for another billion dollars after blowing up the last billion with no guarantee this next billion would produce anything but another explosion. How many times would the public foot that bill? Not even once. Not while people don't have healthcare and homelessness and hunger exist. The government can't justify it and that's just how it is. The only way we get space travel, with our current system, is to hope someone with a lot of money is willing to bet it on a breakthrough. It sucks but the problem isn't Musk, it's the system that makes us reliant on billionaires for nice things.
Here's some solid numbers:
The Shuttle was so expensive that it might have been better to keep using the Saturn V. It accomplished a lot, but was ultimately a failure at its original goal of a reusable rocket with a fast turnaround. Some of the old hopes for it were to launch 100 Shuttle missions per year. As problems were found, it was clear it would never be close to that.
Falcon 9 was already an order of magnitude drop from what came before. Being able to grab the Starship booster by the chopstick method means it can quite possibly do the quick turnaround the Shuttle promised. That could mean another order of magnitude drop. Possibly even two orders of magnitude.
That's transformative. It's not just cheaper. It let's things be done that weren't possible before.
One subtle thing that's already come out of this is related to Starlink. Now, this has a whole lot of problems that I won't get into here, but it does have one fascinating effect. A rocket coming back down generates plasma that blocks radio signals to the ground. This means there's a blackout time where everyone in mission control stands by nervously while waiting to hear if it blew up or not.
What Starlink does is provide a high bandwidth link above the rocket, letting them relay data back to the ground. This means that not only do we have full communication during reentry, but even a live video feed of the exterior. This was not possible until fairly recently.
It should also be noted that we SpaceX didn't do this on their own. They benefited from decades of NASA R&D, launch facilities, and funding. Their biggest success comes from working around the pork barrel politics that hangs around NASA's neck.
Rapidly reusable orbital launch vehicles were unheard-of until Falcon 9. The Space Shuttle was supposed to fill that role, but NASA, ULA, and government elements have made it a horrid overbuilt pile of feature creep that was, at the same time, the crowning achievement of American aeronautical engineering, which was impossible to refurbish quickly. The same thing that is currently happening to SLS.
Propulsive landing of a first stage booster was an insane idea. Even massive space nerds like Everyday Astronaut were skeptical, and I watched him cream his jeans live when the first booster landed. That alone, the ability to reuse both the structure and the engines of the booster, as opposed to ditching them in the ocean (or in China's case, on top of villages), has made access to low Earth orbit significantly cheaper, and affordable to underfunded scientific organizations.
That being said, competition is closing in. Rocket Lab (New Zealand) is targetin the same industry with the Neutron rocket (CEO Peter Beck literally ate his hat when the announcement was made) and is experimenting with recovering its smaller Electron rocket using mid-air capture by a helicopter. Astra (USA) is developing a rapidly deployable small orbital launch rocket that can fit inside a standard shipping container. There's also Jeff Bezos and his massive overcompensation of a dick rocket that can also land propulsively, but not worth discussing.
Because no one else is doing space things as well as spaceX is even if you think they suck.
Rockets are just cool tech. So is space tech. It grabs our imagination in a way that most terrestrial things dont.
Imagine you want to build a cabin in a very remote place in Alaska.
Getting there is quite difficult, you did it a few times in the 60's but the path is so bad that you had to throw the truck away each time (around $45,000 per trip, for the truck + gas)
You are still planning to build your cabin but having to buy a new truck for each trip is not great, plus the fact that only one company can make this SLS truck so you can't get more than once a year.
Building a cabin in these circumstances is close to impossible.
Now SpaceX makes a new Starship truck that can go all the way AND be reused. The trip from the hardware store to the build site now only costs you around $100 for the gas plus truck expenses AND you can now do the trip to the hardware store multiple times a day !
Now building the cabin becomes way more accessible.
Replace the Alaskan cabin with a scientific base on the moon or Mars and multiply the amounts by 100,000 and you have an approximation of the situation
I don't know they just launched and caught a rocket yesterday, that's pretty fucking cool.
If SpaceX landing and reusing rockets is not impressive to you then what is?
Short answer economics. Long answer a reusable rocket platform reduces the cost per launch to a fraction the price of traditional launches. That reduced the price per kg of mass in space making far more possible in space. I think ultimately its selling the idea that humanity can be a multi planetary species where we shall own the stars.
A lot of people pointed out a lot of firsts, huge cost reductions, regular flights, but let’s look from the opposite direction …..
Mass to orbit. SpaceX came from nowhere not too many years ago, jumped ahead of established manufacturers, until now they launch most of the worlds satellite mass to orbit, with an unparalleled success record, even with the recent failures. And this is with a rapidly growing space market
Everything they’ve achieved has not only let them scale up far surpassing the rest of the industry across the world, combined, but with reliability and cost to attract all that business
I don’t know what it would take for you to call it a revolution, but the impact on space business is revolutionary
first of all, allow me to State my opinion of Elon musk in one short sentence.
second of all, I will answer your question.
This was right below your post in my feed:
People like space and his company is doing a lot of space
Building your qualifications to teach advanced courses in being blasé?
NASA makes extensive use of contractors. The moon hardware was largely designed, built and tested by private companies.
Lots of people here with very well fleshed out takes. Mine is simpler though, and by no means mutually exclusive:
Good marketing.
They know how to advertise themselves as a brand. They're easy to follow on any social media platform. For one or another, people are going to be looking at them- either in admiration, comparing it to others, just to be critical, or simply out of curiosity.