[ballooney]

Quite incorrect. If we rewind to the golden age in the 60s, the US's Saturn V had 5 F-1 engines on the first stage. The UK's Black Arrow had 8 identical engines in 4 pairs. Russia's Soyuz has 20.

Similarly, if you ask anyone at SpaceX they would tell you it's difficult to underestimate how much they owe to the old grey-beards from NASA who are still around and who helped them get up to speed quickly, avoiding many hundreds of thousands, indeed millions of dollars of blind alleys and reinventing the wheel.

SpaceX is a wonderful example of good engineers - old nasa ones and fresh graduates, united by a common mindset, with enlightened (for which private is often but not strictly a prerequisite) management. That's where they succeed, I think. They look at where they are now, where they want to be, and keep the string taught between the two. But don't think SpaceX could have done this in a vacuum (hohoho). Of the several SpaceXers I've met, including Elon Musk himself back when he had time to give talks at SEDS conferences, none would make such a claim, certainly.

[burgerbrain]

> "he US's Saturn V had 5 F-1 engines on the first stage."

Ah yes... but what did the second stage have?

Not more F-1's, but J-2's, which did not even use the same fuel! Compare this with the route SpaceX is taking: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merlin_(rocket_engine)#Revision...

[ballooney]

Yes indeed, and even sillier was that the engines were built by an entirely different company in a different state. But that just goes back to why private money is smarter - it's not allowed near senators who each want their slice of cake. The current SLS (waggishly called the senate launch system in some circles) has had most of its major technical decisions made on the basis of politics - eg having to use shuttle derived solid rocket boosters to keep that factory open. I think Apollo only got away with it because money was no object.

Again I think this is where the strength of SpaceX lies (modulo the obvious like hiring smart and/or very experienced people) - they are quite free of all this nonsense, their PMs and designers and fabricators are all under once roof and can close the loop on design and manufacturing feedback and iteration. It's very much like skunkworks back in the day.

Having said all that, they're not immune to interference. Dealing with NASA and the ISS means you have to renormalise what constitutes 'exciting' and 'newsworthy' so where in the early days we had things about engines tests and re-entry tests, now we get releases beginning with sentences like 'Today, Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) announced it has successfully completed the preliminary design review...'[1]. I've worked on projects with which NASA or ESA have suddenly got involved and I've seen first hand how the innocence get lost, you go from running to wading through treacle, and you have a bizarre out of body experience where you sit in on one of the meetings and wonder how it has taken three hours for them to agree that a decision should be made about something (but not actually make a decision).

If you've not read skunkworks, I'd highly recommend it. A lot of it details how one of Kelly Johnson's key strengths was being rather brutal to his 'customers' (DoD usually) to prevent their incompetence, expense and geological timescales leaking into his outfit. I can quite understand this offensive form of defence, having seen what government tentacles can do to an otherwise good project.

[1]http://www.spacex.com/press.php?page=20111020

[burgerbrain]

I'm not sure I'm comfortable with the implied assertion that the Saturn V was the product of senator meddling (absolutely no argument with the shuttle however). The Saturn V was a von Braun rocket, and as far as I am aware was designed with a similar mindset as the earlier Saturn and Jupiter rockets. (It is my understanding that) they basically made it as good as they could as fast as they could, damn other considerations.

So basically the Saturn V used LOX/RP-1 in the first stage but LOX/LH2 in the second and third because that was the best configuration, but SpaceX is using LOX/RP-1 in all of them because it's simpler but it gets the job done. (note that SpaceX is apparently considering developing LOX/LH2 upper stage engine for heavier loads: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raptor_(rocket_stage) )