[somenameforme]

The problem is that when the proof is wrong, as in this case a related conjecture held up for 40 years, which is not a "proof" per se, but still ostensibly an extremely high reliability indicator of correctness.

Another example is when SpaceX was first experimenting with reusable self landing rockets. They were being actively mocked by Tory Bruno, who was the head of ULA (basically an anti-competitive shell-but-not-really-corp merger between Lockheed and Boeing), claiming essentially stuff along the lines of 'We've of course already thoroughly researched and experimented with these ideas years ago. The economics just don't work at all. Have fun learning we already did!'

Given that ULA made no efforts to compete with what SpaceX was doing it's likely that they did genuinely believe what they were saying. And that's a company with roots going all the way back to the Apollo program, with billions of dollars in revenue, and a massive number of aerospace engineers working for them. And the guy going against them was 'Silicon Valley guy with no aerospace experience who made some money selling a payment processing tool.' Yet somehow he knew better.

[necovek]

All the cases you bring up are not "proofs": a conjecture is very much not one, it's just that nobody bothered to refute this particular one even if there were results proving it isn't (cited in the paper).

Similarly, ULA had no "proof" that this would be economically infeasible: Musk pioneered using agile ship-and-fail-fast for rocket development which mostly contradicted common knowledge that in projects like these your first attempt should be a success. Like with software, this actually sped things up and delivered better, cheaper results.

[somenameforme]

The Apollo missions, of which Boeing was a key player, were also a 'ship and fail fast' era. It led to some humorous incidents like the strategy for astronaut bathroom breaks to simply be 'hold it' which was later followed up by diapers when we realized on-pad delays happen. Another one was the first capsule/command module being designed without even a viewport. Of course it also led to some not so humorous incidents, but such rapid advances rarely come for free.

In any case Musk definitely didn't pioneer this in space.

[eru]

> Of course it also led to some not so humorous incidents, but such rapid advances rarely come for free.

Luckily, you can run a lot higher risks (per mission) when going unmanned, and thus this becomes a purely economic decision there, almost devoid of the moral problems of manned spaceflight.

Manned spaceflight has mostly been a waste of money and resources in general.

[somenameforme]

The first man on Mars will likely discover far more in a week than we have in more than 50 years of probes.

There's a fundamental problem with unmanned stuff - moving parts break. So for instance Curiosity's "drill" broke after 7 activations. It took 2 years of extensive work by a team full of scientists to create a work-around that's partially effective (which really begs a how many ... does it take to screw in a light bulb joke). A guy on the scene with a toolkit could have repaired it to perfection in a matter of minutes. And the reason I put drill in quotes is because it's more like a glorified scraper. It has a max depth of 6cm. We're rather literally not even scratching the surface of what Mars has to offer.

Another example of the same problem is in just getting to places. You can't move too fast for the exact same reasons, so Curiosity tends to move around at about 0.018 mph (0.03 km/h). So it takes it about 2.5 days to travel a mile. But of course that's extremely risky since you really need to make sure you don't bump into a pebble or head into a low value area, meaning you want human feedback with about a 40 minute round trip total latency on a low bandwidth connection - while accounting for normal working hours on Earth. So in practice Curiosity has traveled a total of just a bit more than 1 mile per year. I'm also leaving out the fact that the tires have also, as might be expected, broken. So it's contemporary traveling speed is going to be even slower.

Just imagine trying to explore Earth traveling around at 1 mile a year and once every few years (on average) being able to drill hopefully up to 6cm! And all of these things btw are bleeding edge relative to the past. The issue of moving parts break is just an unsolvable issue for now and for anytime in the foreseeable future.

----------

Beyond all of this, there are no "moral problems" in manned spaceflight. It's risky and will remain risky. If people want to pursue it, that's their choice. And manned spaceflight is extremely inspiring, and really demonstrates what man is capable of. Putting a man on the Moon inspired an entire generation to science and achievement. The same will be true with the first man on Mars. NASA tried to tap into this with their helicopter drone on Mars but people just don't really care about rovers, drones, and probes.

[eru]

For the cost of sending a guy, you can probably just send ten probes.

[somenameforme]

You get extremely diminishing returns with probes. There's only so much you can do from orbit. Rovers are substantially more useful, but are extremely expensive. Curiosity and Perseverance each cost more than $3 billion. As the technology advances and we get the basic infrastructure setup, humans will rapidly become much cheaper than rovers.

A big cost with rovers is the R&D and one-off manufacturing of the rover itself. With humans you have the added cost of life support, but 0 cost in manufacturing and development. The early human missions will obviously be extremely expensive as we pack in all the supplies to start basic industry (large scale Sabatier Reactions [1] will be crucial), energy, long-term habitation, and so on.

But eventually all you're going to need to be paying for is food/life support/medicine/entertainment/etc, which will be relatively negligible.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabatier_reaction

[ExoticPearTree]

Yeah, but then you are going to get a very little return from those 10 probes.

Sending a person there for a one way mission would probably give us more data than 100 probes. And I have a feeling that there are a lot of people willing to go on a such a mission.

[bluGill]

Eventually you cannot run high risks in unmanned. If a rocket fails getting a satellite to orbit just build a new one. However missions to the outer planets are often only possible once every several hundred years (when orbits line up) and so if you fail you can't retry. Mars you get a retry every year and a half (though you get about a month). If you want to hit 5 planets that is a several hundred year event. And the trip time means if you fail once you reach the outer planet all the engineers who knew how the system works have retired and so you start from scratch on the retry (assuming you even get the orbits to line up)

[eru]

> However missions to the outer planets are often only possible once every several hundred years (when orbits line up) and so if you fail you can't retry.

Just send ten missions at the same time. No need to wait until you fail.

[bluGill]

Ten that fail in the exact same way is a real possibility.

[necovek]

Sure, it's better to frame it as "reintroduction": for those early attempts to be succesful with Soviets pushing on the other side as well, it is a strategy that works the fastest.

Thanks for the funny incidents as well, and my empathy for the not so funny ones!

[vkou]

Also, SpaceX was exactly one failed launch (with every prior one being a failure) from bankruptcy.

Had that one also been a failure, he wouldn't be running the US government and we'd all be talking about how obviously stupid reusable rockets were.

[necovek]

Had they received the same grant money as Boeing ($4.2b vs $2.6b), it wouldn't have been such a close call.

I'd also note that they were also late by 3 years or so: this did not produce miracles, it was just much cheaper and better in the end than what Boeing is still trying to do.

[Manabu-eo]

He is talking about Falcon 1, not CCDev. There was no close call at CCDev, nor any grant money for Falcon 1.

[necovek]

Thanks for the correction/clarification.

Still, I would be surprised if SpaceX did not greatly benefit from knowledge gained in Falcon 1 development when building their Falcon 9 rocket and then optimizing it for reusability — they started development of Falcon 9 while Falcon 1 was still operating.

[NateEag]

This illustrates beautifully how stupid labeling ideas stupid is.

To know that that an idea or approach is fundamentally stupid and unsalvageable requires a grasp of the world that humans may simply not have access to. It seems unthinkably rare to me.

[WalterBright]

On the other hand, I knew from the beginning that the Space Shuttle design was ungainly, looking like a committee designed it, and unfortunately I was right.

(Having a wing, empennage and landing gear greatly increased the weight. The only thing that really needs to be returned from space are the astronauts.)

[kruador]

It was designed to support a specific Air Force requirement: the ability to launch, release or capture a spy satellite, then return to (approximately) the same launch site, all on a single orbit. (I say 'approximately' because a West Coast launch would have been from Vandenberg Air Force Base, returning to Edwards Air Force Base.)

The cargo bay was sized for military spy satellites (imaging intelligence) such as the KH-11 series, which may have influenced the design of the Hubble Space Telescope. Everything else led on from that.

Without those military requirements, Shuttle would probably never have got funded.

I'm listening to "16 Sunsets", a podcast about Shuttle from the team that made the BBC World Service's "13 Minutes To The Moon" series. (At one point this was slated to be Season 3, but the BBC dropped out.) https://shows.acast.com/16-sunsets/episodes/the-dreamers covers some of the military interaction and funding issues.

[somenameforme]

You're saying the same thing he is, but with more precise examples. There were also plenty of more useless requirements which is what he was getting at with it being 'designed by committee.' It was also intended to be a 'space tug' to drag things to new orbits, especially from Earth to the Moon, and this is also where its reusable-but-not-really design came from.

It's also relevant that the Space Shuttle came as a tiny segment of what was originally envisioned as a far grander scheme (in large part by Werner von Braun) of complete space expansion and colonization. The Space Shuttle's origins are from the Space Transportation System [1], which was part of a goal to have humans on Mars by no later than 1983. Then Nixon decided to effectively cancel human space projects after we won the Space Race, and so progress in space stagnated for the next half century and we were left with vessels that had design and functionality that no longer had any real purpose.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Transportation_System

[somenameforme]

Let alone on launch. It's amusing that NASA is supposed to be this highly conservative safety-first environment, yet went with a design featuring two enormous solid rocket boosters. We knew better than this even during the Saturn era was very much a move fast and break things period of development.

[bluGill]

There is nothing wrong with solid rocker boosters for that application. The issue is they failed to figure out figure out the limits and launched when it was too cold. (they also should have investigated when they saw unexpected non-fatal seal issues)

Solid boosters are more complex and so Saturn could not have launched on time if they tried them. So for Saturn with a (arbitrary) deadline not doing them was the right call. Don't confuse right call with best call though: we know on hindsight that Saturn launched on time, nobody knows what would have happened if they had used solid boosters.

[somenameforme]

I wasn't referencing Challenger in particular. I'm speaking more generally. SRBs are inherently fire and forget. This simply increases the risk factor of rockets substantially, and greatly complicates the risks and dangers in any sort of critical scenario. In modern times when we're approaching the era of rapid complete reuse, they're also just illogical since they're not meaningfully reusable.

[bluGill]

The SRBs were resued. Like everything on the shuttle there was far more rebuilding needed before they were reused, but they were resued.

[scheme271]

Do we know that the economics work for SpaceX? It's a private company and it's financials aren't public knowledge, it could be burning investor money? E.g. Uber was losing around 4B/yr give or take for a very long time.

[somenameforme]

You can't know anything for certain but most of every analysis corroborates what they themselves say - they're operating at a healthy (though thin) margin on rocket launches and printing money with Starlink.

The context of this of course is that they've sent the cost of rocket launches from ~$2 billion per launch during the Space Shuttle era, to $0.07 billion per launch today. And the goal of Starship is to chop another order of magnitude or two off that price. By contrast SLS (Boeing/NASA's "new" rocket) was estimated to end up costing around $4.1 billion per launch.

[varjag]

To be fair cost per launch was in that ballpark already ($$0.15-0.05) with Ariane, Atlas and Soyuz non-reusable vehicles. SpaceX maintains the cost just about to undercut the competition.

[eru]

I think they maintain the price there. They'll want to drive the cost as low as possible, because price - cost = profit for them. A penny saved is a penny earned.

[withinboredom]

Most of their income comes from government subsidies and grants. So, it is rather funny to see the owner of the company running around the government and "cutting" costs.

[somenameforme]

SpaceX's total funding from government grants and subsidies is effectively $0. They do sell commercial services to the government and bid on competitive commercial contracts, but those are neither grants nor subsidies.

[withinboredom]

Ummm... you know the government granted them a bunch of money to go to the moon, right?

[somenameforme]

No, they didn't. The government wants to get to the Moon via the Artemis program (which will never go anywhere, but that's a different topic) and so NASA solicited proposals and bids for a 'human landing system' [1] for the Moon. SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Dynetics all submitted bids and proposals. SpaceX won.

Amusingly enough Blue Origin then sued over losing, and also lost that. They were probably hoping for something similar to what happened with Commercial Crew (NASA's soliciting bids from companies to get astronauts to the ISS). There NASA also selected SpaceX, but Boeing whined to Congress and managed to get them to force NASA to not only also pick Boeing, but to pay Boeing's dramatically larger bid price.

SpaceX has since not only sent dozens of astronauts to the ISS without flaw, but is now also being scheduled to go rescue the two guinea pigs sent on Boeing hardware. They ended up stranded on the ISS for months after Boeing's craft was deemed too dangerous for them to return to Earth in.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_HLS

[withinboredom]

> so NASA solicited proposals and bids for a 'human landing system' [1] for the Moon. SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Dynetics all submitted bids and proposals. SpaceX won.

To go to the moon ... in 2021 ... yet we just keep giving them more and more money.

[eru]

If they can keep raising money from investors, that seems proof enough to me that the economics must be good enough.

Ie investors would only put up with losing money (and keep putting up money), if they are fairly convinced that the long run looks pretty rosy.

Given that we know that SpaceX can tap enough capital, the uglier the present day cashflow, the rosier the future must look like (so that the investors still like them, which we know they do).

[kevin_thibedeau]

They undercut every other launch provider. There's no way they're burning investor money to achieve that at the scale of their operations. This is all due to the cost savings of reusable F9. If they wanted to they could jack up their rates and still retain customers and still be the cheapest. There is no reason to believe they are unprofitable.

[baq]

The economics very likely didn’t work. It’d be irresponsible for a launch company to model Starlink without a customer knocking on your door with a trailer full of dollars to sponsor the initial r&d and another bus of lawyers signing long term commitments. Vertical integration makes the business case much more appealing.

[mike_hearn]

Does SpaceX have any investors other than Musk? I thought he bootstrapped it.

[skissane]

Musk owns 42% of SpaceX's total equity and 79% of the voting equity.

The non-Musk shareholders range from low-level SpaceX employees (equity compensation) through to Alphabet/Google, Fidelity, Founders Fund.

There are actually hundreds of investors. If you are ultra-wealthy, it isn't hard to invest in SpaceX. If you are the average person, they don't want to deal with you, the money you can bring to the table isn't worth the hassle–and the regulatory risk you represent is a lot higher

[mike_hearn]

Thanks, that's interesting!

[eru]

> Musk owns 42% of SpaceX's total equity and 79% of the voting equity.

How much of their balance sheet is debt vs equity?

Eg in theory you could have lots and lots of (debt) investors and still only a single shareholder.

[skissane]

> How much of their balance sheet is debt vs equity?

I believe it is almost all equity, not debt.

There is such a huge demand to invest in them, they are able to attract all the investment they need through equity. Given the choice between them, like most companies, they prefer equity over debt. Plus, they have other mechanisms to avoid excessive dilution of Elon Musk's voting control (non-voting stock, they give him more stock as equity compensation)

[eru]

> Given the choice between them, like most companies, they prefer equity over debt.

What do you mean by 'most companies'? Many companies use debt on their balance sheet just fine, and even prefer it. Banks, famously, have to be restrained from making their balance sheet almost all debt.

[baq]

The easiest way to get upside exposure in Starlink and wider spacex is to buy alphabet.

[ExoticPearTree]

I think Musk had a better imagination and the money to fund that imagination without constraints or internal politics.