[jameshart]

I don’t feel like a field that has in its entire history only produced a handful of actual successful designs at all can possibly rate this kind of ‘world weary cynicism’ style of writing.

Nobody has the experience or ability to be able to say ‘trust me I’ve built a few spaceships, this is the hard won truth of how it is’. There are exactly nine spacecraft that humans have ever flown in. Only the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo programs really accumulated any kind of experience and that experience was extremely specific to a particular place and time and organization.

So sure, some general engineering truisms in here have the ring of wisdom to them and us non-spacecraft engineers can nod at them and quote them with the cachet they get from being associated with NASA.

But ‘trust me I have been teaching people to design spacecraft for decades’ doesn’t really count for much when during those decades no new spacecraft designs were actually getting made and launched.

[SahAssar]

Setting the bar at "spacecraft that humans have ever flown in" seems very restrictive to what experience you count.

That'd be like saying no one can talk about websites in the same way because we probably only have at the most 9-ish "successful" social media services. The list also mentions many things that are learned from non-human space flight programs, or non-successful programs.

Is everything in it true? Probably not. But from an outsider perspective it seems to contain some insights that most definitely are. I think of it sorta like https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks is for devs. Cynical humor that contains a lot insights.

[themadturk]

"A handful of actual successful designs"? Perhaps we should get the definition clear: a spacecraft in this context is any human-built vehicle flying in space, not just those that carry humans. There are thousands of earth satellites, extra-terrestrial orbiters, landers, rovers, and now even interstellar spacecraft that are very successful. They all needed launch vehicles.

[jameshart]

“If you screw up the engineering, somebody dies” does not apply to unmanned spacecraft. In fact, unmanned spacecraft generally operate further away from humans than anything else does. When they go wrong the last thing that’s likely to happen is a human getting hurt.

[themadturk]

That’s the only thing on the list that applies specifically to human spaceflight. It certainly doesn’t invalidate my point.

[visviva]

What makes you think this is limited to human-rated spacecraft?

[tonyarkles]

Hell, I work in unmanned small autonomous aircraft and almost all of these apply to my day-to-day.

[jameshart]

The multiple references to human spaceflight?

[visviva]

As far as I can tell, only 1 out of the 45 laws (#45) potentially refers to human spaceflight.

[rzimmerman]

Absolutely. A lot of back-patting and inside jokes about 40 years of building expensive space systems that often failed. Self-aggrandizing crap about how “space is hard”. Space was hard in the 60s when you had to invent microprocessors to get off the ground. It’s well understood and should be common and cheap now (at least for Earth orbiting systems). This old boys club nonsense might feel fun but space is changing, access is becoming easy, and anyone that tries to spend 10 years and a billion dollars on a project won’t last long.

[iainmerrick]

Most of these are not "do it this way because it works", but "don't do this, because it doesn't work".

[themeiguoren]

It’s written from a human spaceflight point of view for sure. Old space was (sometimes still is) extremely analysis heavy because everything was too expensive to have it not work. This is the environment in which NASA developed its culture.

The newspace paradigm is downstream of costs coming way down. Now you can afford to iterate a few times - it’s much faster and you learn more by flying and testing against nature instead of recreating the environment perfectly on the ground and refining your analysis to the n’th degree. In this world, a good number of these laws are dated and miss the mark.

The old way is still more true in human spaceflight, because there are people on board. But even there, humans are now passengers with computer pilots, so you can do unmanned test missions that chip away at the old delays.

[jiveturkey]

Yup. It especially rubs the wrong way for the last point, #45.

> If you screw up the engineering, somebody dies

So, shouldn't something like cars get this level of diligence then? Coal-fired power plants maybe? Nursing home care??? Spaceflight deaths, even on a log scale graph, don't even make it on the chart vs any of those others.

It's far more about the perceptional impact to the program as a whole, if someone dies, many billions will have been wasted and many thousands will lose their jobs.

Still, it's fun and I've used it for a decade now. I really like #41.

> 41. There's never enough time to do it right, but somehow, there's always enough time to do it over.

Never mind that it's in direct contradiction to some of the other laws. I still love it.

[quartesixte]

>So, shouldn't something like cars get this level of diligence then?

They do. At least the, "engineering of the vehicle itself and then manufacturing it" part.

A lot of Aerospace designing, testing, and manufacturing is built off the foundation the automotive world laid down. Heck, one of the key standards, the SAE standard, is called such because it literally stands for Society of Automotive Engineers.

Cars may be involved in a lot of deaths every year. But rarely do people die because their car spontaneously combusted/fell apart while someone drove it.

[regularfry]

There was a joke running round the European car manufacturers a couple of decades ago that the European Space Agency literally couldn't hire rocket scientists because they'd all been poached to work on drive-by-wire systems. I don't know how true it actually was, but the point is that in a lot of cases it's not just going to be the same standards, it's literally the same individuals.

[leashless]

I think satellites count?

[Animats]

> But ‘trust me I have been teaching people to design spacecraft for decades’ doesn’t really count for much when during those decades no new spacecraft designs were actually getting made and launched.

That's an excellent point. Not until Space-X started launching Falcon-9 boosters was there a significant US advance since the Space Shuttle, for which design began in 1969. The Russians are still launching Soyuz. China has been developing and flying new boosters, and is now flying the Long March 7 and 8, with the Long March 9 in development. NASA, though...

[T-A]

> There are exactly nine spacecraft that humans have ever flown in. Only the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo programs really accumulated any kind of experience

From the "classic" era:

Mercury: 6 crewed flights. [1]

Gemini: 10 crewed flights. [2]

Apollo: 15 crewed flights (including Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz missions). [3][4][5]

Vostok: 6 crewed flights. [6]

Soyuz: 147 crewed missions (and counting). [7]

There have been four generations of Soyuz [8], so it's unclear whether it should be counted as one, four (or more?) spacecraft types. That doesn't include China's derivative,

Shenzhou: 11 crewed flights. [9]

Moving on to modern times, we have

STS: 135 crewed flights (counting orbital only). [10]

Dragon 2: 10 crewed flights and counting. [11]

Counting Apollo's LEM but not different Soyuz generations as a separate spacecraft gets us to 9, but out of those, it's STS and Soyuz which stand out as having accumulated most experience.

And all that's ignoring space stations, which arguably are spacecraft too and easily account for the bulk of time spent in space by humans [12][13]:

Salyut: 6 orbited, 34 crewed visits.

Skylab: 1 orbited, 3 crewed visits.

Mir: 1 orbited, 39 crewed visits.

Tiangong: 3 orbited, 10 crewed visits.

ISS: 1 orbited, 88 crewed visits.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Mercury#Crewed

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Gemini#Missions

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Apollo_missions

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylab#Mission_designations

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo%E2%80%93Soyuz

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vostok_programme#Crewed_flight...

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Soyuz_missions

[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_(spacecraft)#Variants

[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shenzhou_(spacecraft)#Launch_r...

[10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Space_Shuttle_missions...

[11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Dragon_2#Crew_Dragon_fl...

[12] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_space_stations

[13] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight_records#Du...

[carabiner]

The secret to success: work hard. Who said it? Albert Einstein.