Don't forget pilots and atheists. It makes me wonder: if an atheistic, cross-fitter, vegan pilot met you at a party; which would he tell you about first?
T- 1 hour, 35 minutes Watch it here: https://www.spacex.com/launches/mission/?missionId=starship-flight-8
I'm really starting to wonder if its a good idea to have 22 year old kids building these rockets. I get that they're in new territory with various things, but you would think that with 60 years of engineering experience from thousands of previous flights, this all would be going a bit quicker and with less failures. At the end of the day, Starship and Super Heavy are stainless steel tubes with fuel tanks inside and motors on the bottom.
I'm not sure you can compare the two.... NASA had very little background experience to work with, very little compute power, and they were a large bureaucratic org saddled with politics. SpaceX purports to be something very different from that. We're 5+ years into the Starship development and things are still RUD'ing.
At the end of the day, we bring our bikes right back to the start/finish line. It's really pretty simple. You can ask the experienced engineers at NASA (really just ULA, Boeing, etc) how they're doing. SLS and Orion (the capsule that goes with it) have spent somewhere around $50 Billion (with a B) of taxpayer money over the last 15-20 years on developing a system. And that's not including the Constellation program that it came from before that. They've launched exactly one time (near flawlessly), and estimated cost per launch is $2.5 billion. Heck, just the mobile launcher being developed to handle upcoming rockets is going to cost almost $3 billion to make (originally budgeted for less than $400 million). I'd like Starship to be ready quicker too. But the alternatives are not even close. Starship's tax money spent on it will be close to $3 billion after all its milestones getting to the moon with people on it. Looks like pretty awesome value to the taxpayer to me.
Just for comparison, how fast is Jeff Bezos rocket company launching rockets that actually get to orbit? Let alone just go up and down? What about the ULA rockets? How many/how fast are they launching new rockets? Or old ones for that matter? And how about Boeing? How many times has their new manned craft gone to space? Is it considered safe for humans yet? Oh wait, the people that went up, are still up there, waiting for a Dragon to allow them to come home. I'd say SpaceX is doing just fine.
NASA = Waterfall projects. Space X = Agile iterative projects. NASA = do it once and do it right (hopefully) and take all the time needed. Space X = iterate through many versions and learn quickly from failures.
Pretty much. Gov't can't function like this most of the time, it can't (usually) have multiple visible failures without impacting project funding (getting pulled in front of congress). This requires someone who has the stomach for visible risk and can keep throwing money at it. Ultimately "agile" iterative projects (in general) tend to be more successful and cheaper but it requires a higher risk & uncertainty appetite. In reality, waterfall projects end up having time and cost over-runs unless they're simply doing something that's already been done before and is well understood but... they initially give the appearance of controlling costs and risks. Skunk Works by Ben Rich was a good read if you like aerospace stuff.
Not trying to be dense, but if there's an inside joke here I'm missing it. If my comment was considered political after Sean's comment, then my bad.
