Artist impression of a Falcon 9 lifting off from Cape Canaveral. Credit: SpaceX
SpaceX released this message from CEO Elon Musk earlier today:
“The static fire took place on Saturday [20 Sep 2008, CA time], as expected, and no major issues came up. However, after a detailed analysis of data, we decided to replace a component in the 2nd stage engine LOX supply line. There is a good chance we would be ok flying as is, but we are being extremely cautious.
“This adds a few extra days to the schedule, so the updated launch window estimate is now Sept 28th through Oct 1st [CA time].”
Dude….No major issues? Except for that part in the fuel line? That you replaced?
Ah….that Silicon Valley double speak. I know it well. Maybe too well.
Come to think of it, Elon is a Silicon Valley mogul who works in Los Angeles and is funded by a government agency based in Washington, DC. All three cities are chin deep in double, triple and quadruple b***speak. It makes your head spin and your stomach churn. I know. I’ve lived in all three areas.
On a related note, Elon is already seeking more funding from the government to speed up development of his company’s much larger, as-yet-unflown Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon orbital spacecraft, Discovery News reports.
“With a successful Falcon 1 mission, Musk plans to start lobbying for a follow-on contract to develop the Falcon 9-Dragon to transport space station crews.
‘We haven’t pushed hard yet, even though I think it’s like blindingly obvious as the thing to do because we’re hoping to get to orbit and then on the back of getting to orbit and push hard … because otherwise our detractors have too much ammunition,’ Musk said. ‘They’d say, “How can you trust the future of the American space program to a company that hasn’t gotten to orbit?” That’s the obvious attack. So we hope to get to get to orbit and then they can’t use that attack.’”
Blindingly obvious? To whom? It’s certainly an obvious path for Elon, who by some accounts has sunk about $100 million of his own money into the venture. That type of expenditure - and three straight failures to reach orbit - tend to put matters in rather stark perspective. Maybe too much perspective.
As for NASA (and the taxpayers), they will want to see multiple successful flights of both Falcon vehicles before handing any over any more money to SpaceX. One successful flight won’t really do it. That would only raise the Falcon 1’s reliability to 25 percent, far too low to start investing significant public funds.
Go launch your rocket, Elon. Good luck with it. I mean that. If you turn out to be as good at rocket science as you are at spin, you could really have something there.
So to accuse somebody of doublespeak and bullsh*t, you use the same tactics?
Let me point out a few issues I have with your writing:
1) “Dude….No major issues? Except for that part in the *fuel line*? That you *replaced*?”
I hope you’re aware of the fact that rockets are extremely complicated objects, and while quality control for a cell phone is one thing, QC for a rocket is extremely tough and rigorous and even then they can’t catch everything. Just look at what they missed on the Apollo 13 capsule, Soyuz 11 (1971), and the more recent Soyuz ballistic re-entries. And he said they’re being cautious, when you’ve had three failures, you’d be unwise not to be.
2) “Elon … has sunk about $100 million of his own money into the venture”
My problem here is the word “sunk.” First of all, SpaceX is far from sinking, they’ve failed 3 times, yes, but each failure make the possibility of success more likely (see: learning from your mistakes; it’s what rocket scientists do). And in any case, it’s not about the money. It’s about making humanity a space-faring civilization, to use Musk’s words. Call me naive, but if he wanted to “sink” his money, he could have found something far more useful than this.
Each launch of the Falcon rocket produces valuable flight experience and generates a great deal of useful telemetry data. This data increases their understanding of the behavior of the rocket under actual flight conditions and thus improves the chances that subsequent launches will be even less likely to fail. As the previous commenter noted, engineers learn a great deal from failures, but they also learn a lot from the data generated by the parts of the rocket that do not fail.
It is unfortunate that most people think that each failed launch attempt reduces the overall reliability of the rocket. In fact, each iteration of the Falcon incorporates lessons learned from the previous flights, resulting in a more reliable rocket, not less.
Despite your closing remarks, the sentiment in this post seems to indicate that you expect them to continue failing. I, on the other hand, expect each launch to perform better than the last. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with the design of the vehicle that would prevent them from eventually finding and eliminating any remaining bugs in the system. It therefore follows that they will be able to attain orbit in the very near future, and the lessons learned on the smaller, cheaper Falcon 1 will be put to good use on the Falcon 9.
Hey guys. Thanks for your comments.
What Elon is doing is extremely difficult. It’s not easy trying to build a new rocket, especially a low cost one. I agree with everything you guys have said about the difficulty and complexity of what he’s doing. And props to him for trying.
I really don’t know if he’s going to succeed. There’s the technical aspects of getting these rockets to work reliably. And Dragon to function properly. When you make a leap from robotic to crewed vehicles, things get exponentially more challenging because you’re dealing with human lives.
And then there’s the business issue of whether you can really produce them and make money with the cost structure that they’re advertising. Low cost, highly reliable, able to launch almost anything you need into LEO. A tall order. There’s an assumption that they’ll succeed in the space community. People are certainly rooting for him. We’ll see if he can do it.
When I used “sunk,” I meant it primarily in a business sense. Sunk costs. How much money he’s invested in the venture. I didn’t mean that the company is going down financially. That was misconstrued.
Thanks again. An interesting discussion.
Oops, sorry, I guess I got a little carried away!