With 50 years of technological advances in pretty much every area of science that went into planning the Apollo missions (computers, materials, fuels, learned knowledge, communications, batteries etc.etc.) how much easier would a manned moon mission be these days?
The Apollo mission was roughly 8 years from conception to stepping foot on the lunar surface using a massive rocket containing massive amounts of fuel, limited computing power, inefficient batteries, bulky materials, analog radio signals, etc.
Would a modern moon mission be a somewhat simple task comparatively with all the advancements we’ve made?
With unlimited resources (which the Apollo missions seemed to have) could we send a couple of astronauts to the moon within 2 years if we wanted to in a way more efficient manner?
I think we already have a rocket developed that could launch such a mission.
The SLS has more than enough power, not sure if it is considered ready for use yet, but it must be close.
So I would guess if we had an imperative need to get people on the moon, 2 years would be plenty of time.
No and no.
It is true that we have the benefit of experience with respect to the last sixty years of human spaceflight, and advances in certain areas, primarily computing and environmental control and life support systems (ELCSS), but chemical rocket propulsion still has the same fundamental limits as it had in the Apollo era, and the modest improvements in material capabilities is only of marginal improvement in reduced inert mass.
NASA probably couldn’t get a prime integrator and major system contractors through the competitive bidding process and on contract in two years, but setting aside the contract issues, they would still have to develop all of the individual systems essentially from scratch; assuming the Lunar Orbit Rendezvous mission profile used in the Apollo Lunar Landing program, it would require an Earth ascent vehicle (comparable to the Saturn V), a trans-Lunar injection stage (S-IVB), a command and service module (Apollo CSM), and a lunar descent and ascent module (for Apollo, the Lunar Module which was a two stage vehicle).
The NASA Space Launch System (SLS) is not “ready for use yet”, and Artemis 1 test launch of an uncrewed SLS launcher and a mostly-functional Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV) is scheduled for “No Earlier Than” (NET) January 2022. Assuming that goes without significant issues to prevent qualification (such as it is with a single flight), the first crewed launch of the system into Low Earth Orbit (LEO) is NET September 2023. The current date for the first Lunar mission is NET October 2024, although that schedule is entirely risible as NASA does not even have a lunar module in design much less on path to be qualified for flight by that date. There was a thread a number of years ago on this same topic in which I laid out a schedule that would be a minimum of 5 and more like 7-10 years for even a highly directed Lunar landing program. And no, we could not just refurbish Apollo-era hardware and fly it on some kind of “crash mission”, unless you are using that term literally. Of course, we’ve been “on track”, so to speak, for a Lunar landing program since the early days of the W Bush administration with very little to show for it other than cancellations, massive schedule revisions, and the occasional mostly successful test of ancillary and emergency escape systems.
And before someone pipes up with “Elon Musk will do it!”, I’ll point out that while NASA did award SpaceX a contract under the previous presidential administration and Jim Bridenstein’s tenure as NASA Adminstrator, neither “Starship” nor its as-yet unflown carrier rocket are anywhere near the point of even missions to LEO much less for a Lunar mission, nor is “Starship” in any way designed for a Lunar landing on uncompacted regolith, much less refueling and ascent from the Lunar surface, and notwithstanding all of the other issues with assuming the use of a long-way-from-crew-qualified vehicle that has spent more time self-immolating than it has in flight.
Stranger
I think it was @Stranger_On_A_Train who pointed out in an earlier thread that Apollo was a crash program. (One of the reasons that it wasn’t sustainable long term IMO).
Michael Collins book is a wonderful resource. It was written a few years after Apollo program ended and was based on his notes from when he was an active Astronaut and as he says, considering the risks that the6 took, it’s a miracle that they only killed 3 guys and only almost killed the crew on every flight….bar ironically Apollo 11.
Actually, the reason Apollo wasn’t sustainable beyond the first few Lunar missions is because it had no objectives beyond that. Once the United States demonstrated technological dominance over the Soviet Union by putting footprints and flags on the surface and the public lost what interest it had (which was never more than 50% approval at any time during the program) the program rapidly coasted toward dissolution, to the point that even proposals to use spare hardware only resulted in the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project and the abortive Skylab, with several Saturn V flight sets and Apollo CSMs virtually complete scrapped or used as display pieces.
It didn’t help that Nixon had zero interest in continuing a program started under Kennedy and heavily promoted by Johnson, but the fact that it had no real goals beyond slightly longer Lunar J-class survey missions and no planned infrastructure for a sustainable human presence in space meant that beyond keeping contractors pockets full of cash there was no impetus to continue the program. Space Transportation System (“Shuttle”) was started primarily to keep the contractors employed, but lacking a space station to support it had few dedicated mission needs, hence the decree that all government satellite launches would be by the Shuttle program even if it made little sense to do so, and the abortive and costly “Blue Shuttle” program in which the USAF would borrow NASA Shuttles to be flown from Vandenberg AFB out of SLC-6 before the Challenger disaster put an end to Air Force interest in being involved in Shuttle.
Apollo was a very fast, highly integrated program; I woudn’t quite call it a “crash” effort, although the artificial decree that Kennedy set for landing men on the surface of the Moon did result in taking on a lot of risk that would be unacceptable by modern safety standards (and rightfully so). There were technical experts giving the Apollo XI mission only a 50% chance of success, although what the actual basis for that was I cannot say because the system was so complex that reliability estimates would only be guesswork.
Meanwhile, uncrewed programs have visited every planetary body in the Solar System, have increased our knowledge of planetology and astronomy by orders of magnitude, and have cost a tiny fraction of the crewed program efforts which are largely concerned with just keeping human astronauts alive and marginally functional. The Mars rovers, and especially Curiosity and Perseverance, are marvels of compact and reliable technology, and the Voyager, Galileo, Ulysses, and Cassini-Huygens missions have collected information we could never have achieved with human exploration. I knew crewed exploration gets space enthusiasts’ juices flowing but on a scientific value per dollar basis crewed missions are like owning a yacht; you are basically just throwing bags of money in a pit and setting it on fire.
Stranger
I just want to say this is one of the most awesome paragraphs I’ve read this week. 
Apollo 6, the SIVB does not reignite for TLI. Apollo 8 is flown regardless. Apollo 10, the vibrations during TLI nearly destroy the stack, and the LM control is lost during ascent stage, the vessel spins end over end and the astronauts barely regain control. Apollo 11 flies as scheduled.
Cannot imagine that happening today.
Armstrong’s own estimate was 50/50, though that was 50/50 they would,be able to pull the mission off in totem. He had a much lower estimate of a fatality, about 1/10 if memory serves.
I agree with the rest of your post. Skylab only got the go ahead due to the success of the Russian Salyut program and politics created Apollo Soyuz.
I don’t think either the US nor Soviet successes in spaceflight during the 1960s would have ever happened without the infrastructure and military-industrial cultures built to win WWII. Those kinds of feats require a war footing like that which existed in the aftermath of the war and continued through the Cold War. Breakthroughs in cyber warfare and counterinsurgency have no utility for space exploration.
Wow. I know you hate Elon Musk and SpaceX, but there is no reason to downplay their current testing program with Starship. The lunar variant is the only selection so far for the Artemis moon landings, because the other vendors turned in piss-poor attempts at winning. As for ‘self immolating’, that’s what is supposed to happen when you build minimum viable rockets to accelerate development. Exploding is part of the process of this kind of development.
As for not ‘anywhere near’ being ready to fly to orbit - it may be closer than SLS. The pad is built, Starship has been cryo tested and the heat shield installed, The engines are installed. The booster has been fit-tested on the pad and Starship stacked on it, and static fire tests will be starting very soon. There could be an orbital launch by the end of the year if all goes well. Given that this rocket system has only been in development for a couple of years, that’s amazing progress.
In the meantime, NASA has been trying to build a new heavy-lift rocket since the 1990s. SLS itself was funded in 2011, and was supposed to fly in 2016. It’s now five years late. Hell, it was supposed to fly before Starship was even a gleam in Misk’s eye, and just during its schedule overrun peiod for SLS Musk has built Falcon Heavy, the Dragon capsule, Starship, and the Super-Heavy booster.
Why do you say Lunar Starship is not capable of landing on an uncompacted surface? The landing rockets are 100 feet up in the air and angled such that impact on the regolith would be minimal. You are the first person I’ve heard, including the people who awarded the contract, to claim that the lunar starship would need a compactified landing pad.
Starship is still not proven. There are a lot of very difficult milestones ahead, and the pace will no doubt slow down. The whole project could still fail. But then the same is true of SLS.
I think you also know that the HLS Starship does not need to refuel on the moon, but will first be fueled in orbit by tanker versions, and if that works as planned it will be able to land on the moon and return to LLO or the Gateway’s Halo prbit without refueling on the ground.
These are all high-risk programs, and that includes SLS which is a ridiculous rocket that will only fly once or twice per year at $2 billion per launch. That assumes it will be ready and problems won’t be found in testing fhat ground it for another year.
SpaceX is running rings around old space. Elon’s timelines are way optimistic, and his estimates for cost also. But he’s actually delivering, whereas Boeing can’t even deliver their capsule that they got paid almost twice as much to develop over SpaceX’s Dragon, which is soon going to be flying yet another crew to the ISS, and NASA is now offloading crews from Boeing’s capsule to Dragon for future launches.
My money is on SpaceX. Artemis will likely be pushed out closer to the end of the decade. NASA can’t even get their space suits done in time.
Setting aside the attempt to frame the discussion as “Starship” versus SLS (which I’ve already indicated has a ridiculously optimistic schedule and as I’ve discussed elsewhere started out as the Jupiter proposal as a interim Shuttle-derived heavy lift rocket that was intended to require minimum requalification and ground system redesign to keep flying until a successor vehicle could be developed but has since essentially become Ares IV Mk 2 with all of the complexity of the Constellation program that was critiqued by the Augustine Commission report), the SpaceX vehicle is a terrible concept for a Lunar landing vehicle even when and if it gets to the point of not distributing itself as shrapnel and burning fuel all over the Las Palomas Wildlife Management Area and blowing out windows on houses that SpaceX hasn’t managed to buy or bully out of their properties. From a purely technical standpoint the “Starship” is a poor collection of features for landing on an airless moon.
For one, as noted, it requires being fueled by propellant transfer on orbit; a technology that has not been demonstrated on anything like the necessary scale. Dealing with fluids in freefall is a very tricky problem even when you aren’t transferring them from one vehicle to another by some unspecified means. This alone begs the question of how soon this vehicle would be ready for any purpose, although in usual fashion SpaceX glosses over these challenges as inconsequential, which is why Elon Musk is almost always completely accurate in his boastful estimates of when the company will achieve grandiose goals. Second, “Starship” is clearly designed for atmospheric entry (hence, the angled fins) which are nothing but parasitic weight for landing on an airless moon. With enough excess impulse it isn’t prohibitive, just dumb. The bigger problem is that “Starship” is designed for landing in an Earth gravity field and on a solid pad; of course, it lifts off from an elevated stand to give clearance for the plume (and to allow for on-pad inspection and processing of the engines and thrust vector control systems), but even if we assume that the elevated stand isn’t needed and it will have some kind of deployable legs to stabilize it, it would have to be able to throttle down to the 0.17 g acceleration level to be able to hover and soft land. Can the engines throttle down to that extent with the necessary finesse?
But assuming it can actually land tail first on the lunar regolith without falling over or mashing itself, then the real fun begins. The cargo/crew section is over 30 meters above the base. I’ve seen the ‘artists renderings’ of some of cantilevered platform that is apparently mounted on rails going down the length of the vehicle to allow crew to descend to the surface without having to rappel down or use their Buck Rogers jetpacks that some artist decided to throw in for fun. I’m not sure what happens when that platform gets jammed with the gritty, electrostatically charged regolith dust that plagued even the system mechanisms of the Apollo missions, but I’m sure the astronauts will enjoy climbing up and down an emergency ladder and jury-rigging some kind of crane for any equipment that needs to land on the surface. Given that the vehicle structure is all stainless steel with no thermal shielding it should do really well at absorbing the unfiltered solar insolation during daylight, which should make it a pretty good bread oven and/or barbecue slow roaster, although unfortunately not hot enough for pizza or very comfortable for astronauts, and certainly not great for the liquid oxygen.
SpaceX has done a fine job of building a pretty conventional rocket system and eating ULA’s lunch on EELV, and they’ve made an impressive show of landing their rockets (although despite inaccurate claims, they are not the first to propulsively land a rocket), although whether the reuse is actually the massive cost savings they’ve qualitatively claimed is another question that certainly isn’t reflected in the prices. But this idea that Elon Musk is some kind of aerospace genius (despite the fact that he routinely misuses terminology and misrepresents concepts that actual engineers working at SpaceX have tried to explain to him) and that “Starship” is some kind of do-all vehicle to explore the Solar System from tip-to-tail is just short of high fantasy. Even if it can be made to work for the purpose of a Lunar lander—which I question—it is a poor vehicle to do so, and is the sort of idea an eight year old might come up with after watching James Bond turn his Lotus Esprit into a mini-submarine.
Stranger
Tiny point, but if nothing else, at least the computers would do far more for far less weight. I can’t recall the exact figures, but basically, today’s computers weigh far less but have many thousands of times more computing ability than the Apollo onboard computers did. So if nothing else there’s at least that.
And just to be clear, I’m not opposed to human spaceflight in principle, although after becoming more educated on the current state of space physiology and medicine I’m not terribly optimistic about how functional or healthy humans will be in long duration space exploration until we can either recreate terrestrial conditions or modify the human form to be better adapted to the space environment, both of which are well into the future before they are viable. Humans have a place in space exploration because it is ultimately a human endeavor, but we also understand that the limitations of certain types of environments dictate using tools rather than ourselves; we don’t send people to the bottom of the ocean, or inside the caldera of an active volcano, and of course we can’t see molecular or cosmic structures with our bare eyes, and we’re fine with using tools for that.
But in terms of the scientific value, crewed missions are mostly about keeping the crew alive, not doing useful science, and the oft-stated argument that human astronauts can do so much more or go further than a rover or probe assumes that the human is operating in a shirt sleeve environment with all of the necessary infrastructure to keep them alive, versus a vehicle like Curiosity which, aside from commands sent by its human controllers (who are still in a cognitive sense its crew) has been able to operate for almost a decade with no provisions or external resources whatsoever. An as autonomous systems get better at following complex mission directives, the need for even quick human judgement and problems with communication delays will become less significant.
In any case, any real long term human habitation in space will require automation to proceed us and do much of the grunt work of extracting resources and building habitats because humans cannot camp in space or trek long distances across airless worlds subsisting off of the available resources. Those kinds of stories like The Martin; make for great drama but they are actually a cautionary tale for how poorly adapted we are to survive outside of a terrestrial environment and how dependent we are upon tools to do a lot of the work for us. Autonomous and remotely operated probes and rovers are really just an extension of the club, blade, lens, and dynamo that have let us get this far as a civilization, and we shouldn’t eschew their utilization into exploration out of some sense of regressive pride.
Stranger
I suspect that that is half right. The AGC was not actually all that heavy. It was a miracle of the time, and just able to achieve its requirements. A modern spacecraft computer system may turn out to be not significantly lighter, but would of course be expected to do vastly more. Replacing a lot of physical controls and displays helps. There are likely lots of gains to be had with modern communication buses versus huge wiring looms and things like the inertial navigation system should shrink dramatically. However I suspect this is mostly fiddling about at the margins. The really big ticket items are the mess of systems that keep the astronauts alive, and that hasn’t really gotten much lighter or easier. Fleshbags are demanding things.
That’s a really good point. A Scuba diver or mountain climber looks just as encumbered with equipment now as they did 50 years ago.
The inefficiencies are still there. Keeping the astronauts alive is a big one. Also, at some point let’s get crazy. Let’s say we have an Earth space station and a Moon space station and for each of the three legs you have a specialized ship that is custom made for that leg (Based on a Heinlein story: Earth to space and back, space to space, space to Moon and back). How do you get ALL of that into position? Sure after N number of flights it would be much more efficient than one ship but how big would that N be?
It has one big advantage - it uses much of the same technology stack as Starship itself, saving a lot,of money in design and development. The only really new things are the ringed thrusters around the middle for landing.
Another big advantage - if it works, it can put 100 tons on the Moon at a time. Since Artemis is claimed to kickstart a permanent presense on thr Moon and not just another ‘flags and footprints’ mission, being able to move a lot of tonnage is critical.
Let’s face it - if Artemis is done with SLS, Gateway and a traditional type of lander, it WILL be ‘flags and footprints’ at best. At proposed SLS flight rates, you’d be lucky to put a few tons of material on the Moon per year, at $2 billion per fliht plus the cost of the lunar lander. That’s simply not enough to build and sustain a permanent manned lunar base, nor is it cheap enough to be sustainable.
Starship may be a long shot, but right now it’s the only game in town if you want cheap access to beyond-LEO space.
Yep, this is definitely going to be challenging. But I think what you aren’t getting is that reusable rockets make these challenges MUCH more likely to succeed. You can try something and if it fails, launch again in a month or two and try again. NASA couldn’t do it because of their costs and schedules. When you fly once per year, trial-and-error is not viable unless you want to dick around with the problem for a decade and spend billions solving it.
There are a lot of challenges ahead for the Starship/SuperHeavy system. In order:
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Will they be able to launch a 29-32 engine booster without a flame trench or water deluge system for acoustic suppression? I am worried about that.
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Will the thing be stable on re-entry? Will the thermal protection system work? Musk himself thinks this will take a few flights to get right, and doesn’t expect the first orbital Starship to survive re-entry.
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In-space refueling may be a bitch to figure out.
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The need to launch six times to refuel Starship in orbit will be a killer if the costs per launch cannot be lowered dramatically. If it costs $100 million to launch a tanker Starship to orbit, every mission to the Moon would be $700 million at minimum. Still cheaper than SLS, with a lot more capability, but not cheap enough to achieve Musk’s long-term goals.
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As they pass each milestone, Starship will get more expensive, and take longer to build. The pace of iteration will slow. The current atmospheric test vehicles probably cost $5 million or so. But an orbital Starship with TPS and a full complement of engines will be a lot more. And a Superheavy booster with 29 engines will be very expensive to blow up. And if a Stacked Starship/Superheavy blows up on the pad it will destroy their new, very expensive launch tower and nearby equipment.
So yeah, lots of challenges and lots of ways to fail. But the reward at the end is game-changing if they get it working. Every fan of space should be hoping that the system works, as it would enable manned and unmanned missions we could only dream about with old space tech.
I wonder how much attention you are actually paying to this program, because HLS Starship has no fins, has no TPS, may have a different engine configuration, and has the ringed thrusters for landing. It shares the same basic steel shell as the main Starship, and that’s about it.
And you need to recalibrate your thinking around what’s ‘dumb’. In the old space way of thinking the rocket equation makes every kilo sent to the moon crazy expensive, so you build lunar landers out of very lightweight materials and strip them down to nothing, then leave half of them on the moon when you leave.
If you can refuel in orbit, the game changes. Now you can put 100 tons on the Moon in a single landing, and suddenly the weight of the vehicle matters less, and it might be cheaper and better to just use a variant of the proven rocket system than to make a bespoke vehicle just for Moon landings. at least at first. If we get to the point where we actually have regular supply trips to the Moon, a shuttle between the two with a custom ship,would be better, and we will see evolution towards that.
And for HLS Starship, it is assumed that on-orbit refueling will be used, because without it any Starship can’t get out of LEO.
Again, I don’t think you are keeping up with HLS Starship. It is not designed for landing on Earth. The main engines are not used for landing. The main engines are used to within some hundreds of feet on the surface, then a ring of midships thrusters set it down. These are purportedly more like the SuperDraco thrusters, and of course they will be designed to 1/6 G landing needs. That also eliminates the need for a compactified landjng pad.
The whole system is designed to not disturb the regolith much. Probably less than a traditional, lighter lander with an engine on the bottom. HLS Starship will not be capable of landing back on Earth. It is stripped down, has no thermal protection, no ‘wings’ and may only have vacuum engines.
The landing leg design has not been finalized, but I assume SpaceX engineers are smart enough to figure out landing lega that won’t cause the rocket to tip over.
The same goes for regolith jamming the tracks of the elevator. Lunar dust is a known problem. Whatever final design they come up with will at least attempt to take that into account, and will no doubt have an emergency descent/ascent system. For example, if the tracks are just for stabilization, if they jam it might be as simple as disconnecting the platform from them and letting it sway a bit as it descends. Who knows? It’s silly to criticize a system that has yet to be designed, based on some early artist’s rendering.
A ‘show’? And when did they claim to be the first to propulsively land a rocket? They’ve always said they were the first to propulsively land an orbital class booster, which is true. Neither DC-X nor New Shepherd were/are orbital class rockets, and as you know the difficulty level of what SpaceX has managed is orders of magnitude above shooting a rocket straight uo and bringing it back down.
As for the cost savings, that should be clear by now. Reusability eats about 40% of payload, and according to SpaceX refurbing Falcon 9 cores is about 10% the cost of building a new one. So you break even if your core flies twice, and you start coming,out ahead with each successive flight of the core.
I seem to recall that you were highly skeptical that the boosters could be refurbed cheaply, or that they coild fly enough times to make it cost effective. But several boosters have now flown more than 10 times, and the fastest turnaround was about a month.
That’s one reason why Falcon 9 launch prices are only about 25% of ULA’s.
Aside from selling prices, which are determined by the market and not necessarily reflective of SpaceX’s cost, we can tell that Falcon is flying very inexpensively by the sheer number of Starljnk launches SpaceX has self-financed. Specifically, to date they have launched 30 Starlink missions on their own dime, with four more launches coming this year. If it was costing them anywhere near $100 million per launch, they’d already be into this for over $3 billion dollars, and they are just getting started. My guess is that the incremental cost of a Starlink flight is closer to $30 million.
Gwynne Shotwell says they can get that down to $15 million plus the cost of the Satellites. Shotwell doesn’t make crazy statements like Musk sometimes does. Try doing that without reusabiluty.
This sounds like sour grapes. Who cares what Elon Musk says or whether he’s a genius rocket engineer? I think his super-power is more about finding good people and understanding how to organize a company for rapid development and how to motivate them to achieve big things… It takes a big ego to override risk-averse experts.
Jeff Bezos showed how it’s not done: He knew he wasn’t a rocket engineer, so he just hired an old space guy and set him free to build an old-space company. And now they’re getting old-space results. SpaceX with its crazy ‘know-nothing’ Elon Musk running the show is running rings around Blue Origin with its experienced rocket managers running the show.
This is not clear to me at all. Apollo 17’s rover was driven 35.9 km in less than 5 hours of driving. That’s further than Curiosity has driven in a decade. It may be that a few astronauts on Mars could discover more in a day than we’ve managed in decades of robotic exploration.
Arguably the biggest discovery on the moon, of the ‘orange soil’, happened because an astronaut spotted it and was capable of walking over to it and grabbing a bunch of samples.
Maybe, maybe not. This sounds a bit like saying cars will never replace horses because horses can eat off the land and cars can’t, and you need prepared roads for cars which we don’t have, and you’d have to carry gas for the entire trip unless you propose some crazy future where gas can be purchased from all over the place. So we should forget about those nutty car people and get on with using horses as God intended…
SCUBA divers are a lot less encumbered than the helmet divers that came before them. And that’s a better comparison, because current space suits are more like helmet divers in terms of mobiity. They are huge, heavy, hard to get into and out of, and then they are difficult to move in and tire out astronauts because they are always fighting internal air pressure.
The future of space suits is almost certainly going to be based on mechanical counterpressure. Rather than fill a suit with air, you make it out of a material that compresses your skin. Then you can move around like a normal person.
Early prototype:
The classic movie…
So, is it “the same technology stack” or “…shares the same basic steel shell as the main Starship, and that’s about it”? Because if it is the latter, any supposed advantage of adapting already developed technology is a non sequitur, and in fact it makes little sense to use the same planform for two very different applications based solely on structural commonality.
“…according to SpaceX” is not a qualification I would put a lot of weight on, nor is the notion that the construction of the downstage being 90% of the cost of the vehicle in any way consistent with…well, reality. There are other reasons for reuse, and specifically throughput (not having to have enough manufacturing capacity to build a new first stage for every launch) but I’ll believe “according to SpaceX” when they actually present a detailed breakdown of manufacturing, testing, and integration costs.
The liftoff costs (not the bare manifest price that doesn’t include payload processing, modal testing and multiple cycles of coupled loads analysis, additional trajectory or mission analysis for special on-orbit operations, access to component pedigree data, et cetera) for Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy is about 40%-60% of ULA, which is entirely unsurprising because I worked on a study long before SpaceX was even in the picture that showed that ULA could cut their costs to ~60% of EELV contract costs without cutting any services, and this was including that they were a FAR Part 15 contract versus the FAR Part 12 “commercial procurement” that SpaceX is contracted under with essentially no reporting requirements. In other words, they’re eating ULA’s lunch on EELV not because they are doing anything technically remarkable, but because they just aren’t charging a massive overhead for non-productive work. I’m quite happy about that (and personally enjoyed watching ULA’s Tory Bruno whinge about it) but it isn’t evidence of the cost savings from reusability or any other particular technical innovation.
I’m not really interested in getting into a “Bezos vs Musk” smackdown or framed as being as a Blue Origin fan but this whole “OldSpace vs NewSpace” mentality that space enthusiasts promote as some kind of paradigm change is really anything but. All of the things that “NewSpace” companies are doing are essentially the same things that “OldSpace” companies did when they were first finding their way in developing rocket propulsion technologies and ended up maturing out of because outside of a shitty late ‘Seventies made-for-TV movie you can’t actually slap a bunch of junkyard parts together and fly to the Moon.
SpaceX, as it has matured from a company that failed three out of three first launches due to obvious oversights (typical for any new contractor and new flight system) to a company capable of reliably launching orbital vehicles has also adopted a bunch of those “OldSpace” methodologies for doing systems engineering (even if they refuse to call it that), qualifying components to industry-accepted standards and best practices, implementing design changes and tracking effectivity of inventory, doing risk and discrepancy tracking, and so forth, for the most part using the same “blizzard of paperwork” although thankfully almost all in electronic form. SpaceX is essentially in the same place organizationally as, say Convair or McDonnell Douglas circa 1965, which I suppose were the “NewSpace” of that era. There is nothing particularly special or magic about “NewSpace” other than perhaps more focused corporate goals compared to established aerospace contractors that are run as much or more by accounting statements than engineering accomplishments.
Stranger