[sillysaurus3]

Right, and both of those had some consequences regarding PR.

I meant to call attention to the fact that we're doing manned missions soon. It's a bit different having an unmanned rocket explode.

Hopefully it won't matter at all. The world might be ready for a "Well, that sucked. Let's move on" type mindset.

[Inconel]

Disclaimer: I work at SpaceX as a technician.

Certainly manned missions have an added element of concern due to the risk to human life, but even unmanned failures have consequences beyond bad PR for those involved in the launch. This isn't specific to SpaceX, I'm sure it's the same for anyone involved in the launch industry, and there's no way to sugar coat it, but its an extremely shitty feeling to work on a piece of flight hardware for weeks/months at a time, see it go through build, test, certification, and then see it fail during launch.

In many ways it's even worse when you realize that your rocket is carrying a payload that many other people worked just as hard on, often over even longer periods of time, and in the case of some scientific payloads may not have the ability to relaunch due to budget/time constraints, and they have entrusted you to get this payload to orbit and you have failed them. I wish I had a more sophisticated way of describing it, but its overall just a very shitty feeling.

[issa]

Disclaimer: I build web apps that don't really mean much at the end of the day.

Not sure if this will help that shitty feeling when things go wrong, but SpaceX has given me an AMAZING feeling that I was a little worried humanity as a whole wouldn't feel again. All the hard work is appreciated!

[Inconel]

I'm just a low level cog in the wheel here, but hearing things like that is certainly very nice.

I wouldn't sell yourself short though, rocket launches tend to make for good press, and often make the front page of HN, but anyone who works hard at a job is worthy of respect whether they're building web apps, or spaceships, or anything else.

[mikeash]

I just want to add that there are a whole lot of us rooting for you and worrying every time you guys launch, and doing our best to share your pain after the failures. Low level cogs are still important and you're doing amazing stuff.

[TeMPOraL]

> I wish I had a more sophisticated way of describing it, but its overall just a very shitty feeling.

Maybe a song would do?

I mean, there is some relatively obscure but otherwise great music praising the dream of space and the work of people involved. See e.g.:

- https://youtu.be/6zotaRLROtw - A Toast For Unknown Heroes

- https://youtu.be/GbL3oNEDvJ0 - The Ballad of Apollo XIII

- https://youtu.be/ab_mH8R0KTM - One Way to Go (possibly the single work of art I ever found that plausibly praises capitalism)

(lyrics googlable by song title)

Also see pretty much all the work of Leslie Fish and Julia Ecklar.

I feel that now might be a time to start developing songs for the coming second Space Age - and hopefully to reinforce the dream this way. If anyone here does music / songwriting (or knows someone who does), I urge you to try (or suggest it). We need it :).

--

Also, to lighten the mood:

  (This verse is dedicated to the management of Morton Thiokol.)

  So first let's pray to Vulcan, ugly god of forge and flame,
  And also wise Minerva, now we glorify your name,
  May you aid our ship's designers now and find it in your hearts
  To please help the lowest bidders who've constructed all her parts!

  So pray to great green Mother Earth and the grim old god of Space,
  And the gods of flame and metal whom we've summoned to this place.
  Oh you gods of flight and physics, now you have us in your care;
  We hope that you will listen to a rocket rider's prayer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WLE6FpAcVs ;).

[babyrainbow]

How much refurbishing goes into preparing a previously used rocket before it is reused?

What technological breakthrough of recent times has made this sort of quick inspection and reuse possible, that was not possible earlier?

[Inconel]

I don't mean to be evasive, but there are a couple of reasons why I'm uncomfortable answering such direct questions that may involve internal procedures:

1. I'm not nearly knowledgable enough about the overall refurb process to give you an in depth answer. The best answer I could probably point you towards is this article[1] quoting our President Gwynne Shotwell. It won't give you the specifics you're looking for, but it will give you an idea of the costs in relation to a new build. Seeing as labor is a fairly large cost component of the rocket overall, this gives you some idea of the potential extent of refurbishment vs building a new rocket.

2. Even if I did have the requisite knowledge to answer your question, those kinds of internal procedures aren't something I could share. My apologies.

As to what breakthroughs make this sort of inspection and reuse possible, and I'm not saying this to be pithy, the biggest component is simply that the stage lands on a solid base rather than being dunked, or slammed into to be more accurate, highly corrosive salt water. Reusability isn't so much a function of any huge advancement in inspection so much as the ability to execute a controlled landing of the first stage. Although there are quite a few advancements in metallurgy and materials science, not to mention NDT procedures, that do increase the life span of components.

I know this probably does a very poor job of answering your questions but it's the best I can do.

[1]http://spacenews.com/spacex-gaining-substantial-cost-savings...

[babyrainbow]

> so much as the ability to execute a controlled landing of the first stage...

Pardon me if I am wrong here. But it seems to me that you are suggesting that most of the damage that a rocket sustains, that makes it not fit for reuse, does not happen during the launch and re-entry, but during landing and salt water?

But if that is so, why was this the case with space shuttles?

> Although the Space Shuttle Main Engines (SSME) were reusable and going to be used on the SLS rocket, NASA doesn't plan to reuse them. The refurbishing and recertification costs make reuse more expensive than manufacturing new engines.

https://www.quora.com/Havent-other-space-companies-thought-o...

[Inconel]

Apologies again for not understanding, but I’m unsure exactly what you’re asking with the question why was this the case with space shuttles.

With regards to the SSME, the SSME is an engineering marvel, but it is significantly more complex than the Merlins you’ll find on Falcon, both in initial build as well as refurb. I know a few techs here who used to work on them at Rocketdyne. Raptor will be more analogous to the SSME but there have been significant advancements in metallurgy and materials science since the introduction of the SSME, which should hopefully lead to easier reuse. Also, it should be noted that the SSME were in fact refurbed and reused when they were part of the Shuttle program.

As to your quote from Quora, I find it somewhat ambiguous. Again, the SSME was routinely refurbed and reflown as part of the Shuttle Orbiter. I’m no expert on the SLS program, although I do keep up with things space related, but I’ve yet to see any cost breakdowns of refurb vs new build in regards to SSME specifically. That quote makes it unclear to me whether NASA found that reusing the SSME as part of the SLS program is cost prohibitive, or whether making the first stage of the SLS reusable, which happens to use the SSME, is cost prohibitive. It should be noted that the SSME and RS-25 are largely the same engine, and later flights of SLS will switch to a cheaper non-reusable version of the RS-25. In any case, the first stage of the SLS is going to end up in a giant pond of salt water, along with the attached SSME/RS-25s. SLS was never designed for propulsive landing, and can not be made to do so now, so those engines are ending up in the ocean no matter what. Perhaps the poster means that NASA found the refurb costs of the SSME to be prohibitive after they have been dunked in salt water, again, since this is the only possible outcome with SLS. Obviously if the first stage of SLS landed on solid ground, or a ship at sea, the refrub cost of the SSME would be completely different.

[nickik]

I think we don't yet know what the rebuilding of the production line for the RS-25 will cost. They did promise quite a bit of cost saving because they need not be reusable anymore but as you probably know better then I setting up a completely new rocket engine production will not be cheap.

[mikeash]

What damages a rocket depends on the rocket.

For the SSMEs, it was just plain use which damaged them. The SSMEs were engineering marvels, but the ludicrous nature of the Shuttle demanded extreme performance, which meant that they ran on razor thin margins. By the time they finished a ~8 minute burn, they had taken enough of a beating to need a lot of refurbishment. SpaceX's Merlins, on the other hand, are much lower performance and built more for robustness.

Think of it like an F1 race car, which needs a lot of work after every race and a new engine several times a season, versus a daily driver which can probably go 50,000 miles without ever opening the hood. (Not that this is recommended.)

[babyrainbow]

But what specific thing does the SSME's had to do that Merlins doesn't?

In your race car example, you can differentiate it from a daily driver that the F1 car has to endure tremendous accelerations, cornering and down forces acting on it and an engine that reaches insane rpm's that puts tremendous amount of stress on all the critical engine components..

Can you differentiate between these rocket engines in that way?

[nickik]

I think after the landing the reentry is probably the most problematic. If you can prevent them from burning up and you can land them (and one is implied by the other) you are on a good road.

I think the Space Shuttle engines would have been capable of more direct relights. They test fired them quite a bit and the were reusable. NASA was just taking a now risk approach and did not really push the technology forward.

Boeing has just received a contract for a first stage with wings that should fly 10 times in 10 days and it essentially uses a SSME. So they seem to believe that they don't need to do that much to make it work.

[manicdee]

When the inevitable human fatalities are realised, we will see that everyone involved had done their best: SpaceX doing everything they can to make their rockets more reliable, a launch escape system that works all the way to orbit, and dozens of successful launches on the same hardware.

[babyrainbow]

> When the inevitable human fatalities are realised, we will see that everyone involved had done their best:

Have you seen the movie called "the challenger disaster". If not, you should see it. It might helps to gain a bit of perspective about these things.

[Inconel]

I don't always have the best reading comprehension but this seems somewhat cryptic. I don't have time to watch a movie at the moment but what was the perspective you gained from it?

Also, I'm always a sucker for a good space related movie, was it any good? I'm not sure which one you're talking about but these are the two I was able to find:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Challenger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Challenger_(1990_film)

[babyrainbow]

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2421662/

The Challenger Disaster(2013) : Factual drama exploring the truth behind the space shuttle Challenger's 1986 disintegration.

Your comment reminded, specifically this part " When the inevitable human fatalities are realized, we will see that everyone involved had done their best:" reminded me of the speech given by someone in charge of the investigation at the start of it..

>I appreciate you all coming together at short notice. We have a huge, vital task ahead of us, upon which might depend the future of manned space flight in this country. Now, I intend for this investigation to follow an orderly and proper procedure. We are not going to conduct it in a manner that is in any way unfairly critical of NASA. Because we believe, and certainly I believe, that NASA has done an excellent job. And I believe that the American people think so too. Anyone?

Of course, it turned out to be not so pretty...

[Inconel]

So this exchange is veering dangerously close to me going full on SpaceX shill mode, which I have no desire to do, one for the good of the HN community as I don't think that would be appreciated here, but also for the simple fact that I'm off the clock right now and Elon will need to increase my pay if he intents me to run PR on my off hours.

Thank you for clarifying your previous post as this is what I was thinking you meant, but I didn't want to say anything without being sure. With that being said, and at the risk of sounding overly defensive, I do find it somewhat unkind to call into question the ethics and professionalism of those who work at SpaceX based on a movie about a completely different set of organizations and corporations. This of course isn't to say that there aren't valuable lessons to be learned from those past events, or that we are somehow immune from making similar mistakes, but implying that if such an event befell a SpaceX launch it would immediately be due to a lack of people giving it their best seems somewhat premature.

I do have a well read and marked up copy of both the Rogers Commission Report as well as the CAIB report on my bookshelf, so I can assure you that I and many others do take the lessons learned from those events very seriously. Thanks for the movie recommendation, I'll add it to my to-watch list.

[mikeash]

An explosion on a manned flight shouldn't result in anything more than some bruised and disappointed astronauts.

[babyrainbow]

> The world might be ready for a "Well, that sucked. Let's move on" type mindset....

"Well, that sucked (that people are dead)?, but let us move on (like nothing has ever happened?)", is that the mindset you want the world to adopt?

[ufmace]

Pretty much, yeah. Exactly what mindset do you want the world to adopt?

We don't want to be careless with human lives, but it's also not helpful to play a finger-pointing blame game every time there's an accident.

[babyrainbow]

>but it's also not helpful to play a finger-pointing blame game every time there's an accident..

It sure is helpful if it can prevent loss of human life in the future, even it slows down the "progress" a bit and some company loses some of its valuation and business...

[SmellyGeekBoy]

Is this not what happened with the Apollo and Shuttle programmes? I'm not saying loss of human life is acceptable but the astronauts know the risks when they sign up.

[babyrainbow]

>but the astronauts know the risks when they sign up.

You should see this movie

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2421662/