Yes. SpaceX has done bad things and deserves to be criticized for them. But (and I think this is analogous to a lot of issues) the problem here isn’t that SpaceX isn’t NASA; it’s that NASA doesn’t have the political room to experiment and inevitably sometimes fail that SpaceX does. This is too complex an issue to fit all the layers and nuance into one honk, but “SpaceX is bad because their rockets explode” is not a good analysis. https://chaos.social/@russss/110249195107310284
Public ownership of gray, stable, safety-of-life infrastructure that should not be run at a profit is clearly necessary. It does not follow that everything publicly owned should be boring and reliable.
@vruba I think they're bad because they're spending a shit-ton of public money blowing things up and polluting their ecology while trying to reinvent the wheel, when we had systems in the pipe that they could have built on and pushed to develop in a real partnership 🤷🏿♂️
@Wolven Are you connecting that to what I said with “… and I would rather the conversation about them focus on that and not irrelevant things” or with “… so I think any attack on them is legitimate, even if it might promote misunderstanding” or with some other thing I’m missing?
@vruba The first, but also, using that to broaden it out to larger discussions on what you mention about, y'know, properly funding and supporting NASA.
Because, yes, imagine if NASA was given to tools, leeway, and respect their track record deserves. Sure would be nice.
@Wolven Yeah. Sometimes I dare to hope that improving this situation, as unimportant as it seems to the big picture, might provide some inspiration for progress on more pressing issues.
@vruba I'd like to see more weird-but-might-work stuff, but I'd be happy with Congress not running big parts of the space program as a pork barrel jobs program.
@vruba I also feel like some of the failures that NASA gets dinged on, like risk aversion, are also mixes of private failures, eg Boeing or Northrop Grumman
@vruba There’s also some hard-to-say-if-it’s-willful ignorance about NASA’s goal of developing a private space industry. I’ve seen people say, “imagine if NASA had [astronomical monetary figure representing SpaceX’s R&D since 2002].” They did! They gave it to SpaceX!
@robinsonmeyer Exxxactly. This is the system working as designed at the moment.
@robinsonmeyer @vruba Before that they used it to develop the shuttle, a system that was touted as eventually leading to launched every other week or so as costs went down.
They had an opportunity to create cheap launch capacity, pre-SpaceX, and… it never happened.
NASA’s future is in executing scientific missions, not focusing on launch capacity.
@vruba agreed, the rocket took off. they got a ton of telemetric data they can use to iterate. I'm not a rocket scientist so can't comment on how many boosters failing how quickly counts as an out-and-out failure. but seems more damning how badly they damaged the launchpad and the environmental destruction they're wreaking on the nearby wetlands. those seem like more predictable consequences but they seem to not care?
@dantheclamman Yeah: the explosion wasn’t the concerning part here.
@vruba @dantheclamman From watching the videos, one of my big questions is why the range safety officer didn’t deliberately end the flight before it inadvertently exploded.
@asmallteapot @vruba @dantheclamman it appears they did! But the flight termination system took a while to actually terminate the flight. Which seems...bad.
@russss @vruba @dantheclamman Ahh, well, that’s a whole other kettle of fish 😑
@asmallteapot @russss @vruba @dantheclamman
on the contrary, it very likely worked as intended: you want it to activate when (1) the rocket disintegrates (because after that it might no longer function) and (2) when the rockets impact point moves outside of the defined hazard area.
Blowing up the rocket too soon just spreads debris over a larger area.
@vruba The biggest problem with NASA isn’t that things explode sometimes — that’s just rocket science, to an extent — it’s that they’re institutionally incapable of providing low-cost, efficient launch capacity.
Remember the talk of a shuttle going up every week or two? That didn’t happen. It was never going to happen.
And, to be honest: It doesn’t need to.
Let NASA hand the pure science. That’s their strength. Let private industry handle cheap launch capacity.
@vruba This isn’t to say that there can’t or shouldn’t be better oversight on certain aspects of private space companies.
That can be done, I think, without overburdening them with NASA-like bloat or reducing their cost savings too much.
@vruba Since roughly 1968 NASA has mostly been a jobs preservation program for aerospace engineers. They're seen as strategically necessary lest the sector wither up and die as it more or less did in the late sixties: engineers don't grow in fields. So NASA is like an agricultural subsidy program. Anything useful it does is a side-effect of keeping the engineers from getting so bored they take up farming instead.
@cstross @vruba Plus the objective of distributing money on congressional districts. NASA gets science done despite, not because of, its funder's imperatives. (Especially with respect to climate; remember the Bush administration congress that refused to let an earth observation satellite fly?)
Plus no known economic rationale; cheap space access does not make it up on volume and leads to fewer aerospace engineers over time. (Cheap space access Kessler-cascades itself out of business.)
@cstross @vruba Except Musk killed Starlink by making it clear it works by his whim and by giving the PRC the idea that they need to do that for military purposes. (They're not wrong.) It's no longer a commercially viable product.
It's not a bad entry in US subsidy capture, because they need it for military purposes, too, but the trick would be getting out of subsidy capture and that's highly non-obvious. (How many starship loads to a solar gigawatt at the terrestrial rectenna in Oslo?)
@graydon @vruba Actually, I ran some numbers on that last year: space-based PV cells are ridiculously light and getting cheap: a starship payload by my BOTE, is good for 50-100MW in LEO (but also needs structural mass and boosting to GEO or beyond plus a relay transmitter). Certainly it'll be cheaper than new-build nuclear within a decade, and possibly MUCH cheaper.
@cstross @vruba I believe I had some vague recollection. :)
"Cheaper than new build nuclear" creates politics, because the people who most want it can't build it. (As the black flag events start happening, all of this changes, and the possibility of ship-launched gets much more important.)
But, anyway; if (say) Norway decides to decarbonize by buying orbiting solar power at 200% redundancy at five-to-ten starship flights per gigawatt, that escapes subsidy business models for launch services.
@cstross @vruba For Kessler Syndrome, yeah.
There are some atmospheric chemists who have difficulty remaining calm when discussing what raining tonnes of metals into the upper atmosphere is likely to accomplish. Atmospheric dumping doesn't scale very well and even less so when stuff is coming down into the rarefied upper parts.
And once you've got Starlink, the Chinese equivalent, and the inevitable third competitor doing this, it's an awful lot of mass.
@graydon @rbos @vruba I would not be surprised if the mass of comsats being proposed leads to regulation of their materials composition. If they could use carbon fibre for structural elements instead of aluminium that'd replace the aluminium ion problem with boringly familiar carbon dioxide (in tiny quantities, compared to routine emissions).
@cstross @rbos @vruba There are some fixes there.
Argon ion thruster propellant wouldn't be much of a concern; I'd expect many other propellant options would be. (Probably best to used charged tethers.)
I suspect batteries, flywheels, and major portions of the inescapable radios can't be made from materials that are safe for atmospheric dumping, though. Which is sort of the whole conceptual problem.
@graydon @cstross @rbos Two mechanical failures, in fact,
if I recall. I think https://spacey.space/@TheSpaceAboveUs should have got there by now; I’ll have to pick it back up.
@vruba Let's face it, NASA doesn't have the political room to do the stable stuff, either
See also: why the ISS only has a crew of 3
@vruba SpaceX is bad because nazi billionaires ruin everything if you let them.
@vruba it's the peril of the "Failure is not an option" mindset. It can be inspiring, but it's also a set of handcuffs...
@vruba The problem is not private space flight companies or rockets exploding. The problem is that Elon has decided (likely ignoring advice from his own engineers) to not have proper constuction of the launch pad. He himself even advertised the decision of not having a flame diverter as a kind of chad forward thinking move ;). He is simply delusional.
Damage of launchpads after launch happens (remember the blown-out door after SLS launch?). But what went on in Boca will take *months* to repair making the advertised quick turnaround of Starship (24h was claimed?) weapons-grade bullshit. This means that the entire launch architecture of starship usage (which requires multiple launches of starship tankers for on-orbit refuelling) is unworkable. Which means that NASA's Artemis Human Landing System for which Spacex was chosen could be jeopardised. This is the true clusterfuck. Not that Elons dick enlargement device blew up.
Plus don't even mention the risk of flying concrete damaging the tank farm nearby. How beat up can the tanks get until they loose safety certification or fail? I guess we'll find out ;).
@vruba Agreed - Nasa has lost rockets and people and has learned from those experiences.
They have fed into the science for further work.
It seems that Elon is not interested in the science, just is putting things in space. He doesn't learn from his failures, because he has the money to keep making mistakes.
For now.
@vruba absolutely true. That said, it's difficult from a satirical angle to not link flying exploding choad-shaped events to the flying off the handle, emotionally explosive choad associated with 'leading' them.
@vruba The problem looks a lot like a certain individual making bad decisions.
Absent the unnecessary back-blast, it's not clear that launch wouldn't have worked.
I think a lot of people who favor public ownership of publicly important things get tricked this way, into thinking that we should have the status quo but with different structures on paper.
Imagine a NASA that wasn’t being dogwalked by Congress, that got to apply most of its budget to weird-but-might-work stuff like New Horizons and the helicopter on Mars. Imagine a NASA with a 35% failure rate but a 65% “holy fuck, whoa” rate for uncrewed space missions.