[bhouston]

On the surface, the changes appear logical.

The difference in philosophy between NASA's current approach and SpaceX is quite stark. SpaceX has launched 11 Starships in the two and a bit years, with a lot of them blowing up. Where as Artemis is trying to get it near perfect on each run.

I wonder if NASA could start to adopt SpaceX like approaches? Where one doesn't try to get everything correct before acting?

I wonder which approach is more capital efficient? Which is more time efficient?

(It seems that Artemis cost is $92B, where as SpaceX's Starship costs are less than $10B so far, give or take. So it seems that SpaceX is a more efficient approach.)

[tsimionescu]

Given that SLS is the part of Artemis that has actually shown it works, and Starship is the part that is nowhere near schedule, and doesn't work, it's very funny to suggest that NASA should learn from SpaceX and not the other way around.

SpaceX hasn't even had the confidence to put Starship in LEO yet, and has not carried 1kg of real payload (and barely a few kg of test payloads) - while SLS did an orbit of the Moon, with real payload satellites.

[0xffff2]

It's not like SLS is on schedule either, and it is absurdly more expensive than Starship. It's very likely that Starship will eventually be operational with lower total costs by any accounting measure. (And I say this as a current NASA contractor and current anti-fan of Musk)

[margalabargala]

I think it's actually a reasonable comparison.

To OP's point, Artemis has cost $92 billion over 14 years. This has produced exactly one launch.

It's hard to put an exact timeline on Starship since a lot of its development overlaps with Falcon 9 using the same components, but it's inarguable that it has cost one tenth Artemis so far.

I agree that Starship has been plagued by delays and the capabilities are so far mostly just talk. However, it has flown a number of times, and I would be willing to make a strong bet that it will orbit the moon with real payload long before it catches up to Artemis in budget.

[hvb2]

Do you want to put a dollar amount per kg to orbit on that? Because if you're spending orders of magnitude more, the expectations also go up, no?

And mind you, SLS isn't a new system. It's old space shuttle engines. It's old solid rocket boosters that were extended by a segment. So, it should be cheap and fast?

I think the point here is really that SLS should be a walk in the park. Mostly old tech, reused with not a lot of innovation.

Starship might not have put a real payload into orbit yet but it has already delivered vastly superior engine technology (full flow staged combustion), a new way to land rocket boosters to allow for reuse and many more smaller things.

If you're going to innovate, things will not be smooth because you're learning things. You should be celebrating those achievements, especially as it didn't cost you a dime

[stinkbeetle]

Artemis is nowhere near schedule, had vast cost blowouts, and it's a commercial dead end though. It's incredibly expensive boutique warmed-over 50 year old technology.

NASA absolutely should learn from SpaceX, they were the company that liberated US astronaut's access to space from Russian rockets after NASA had lost that capability. And they have brought down the cost of payload to orbit enormously, and they have been finding viable commercial non-government markets for space. They've been launching around 90% of global mass to orbit. An order of magnitude more than all other corporations and governments in the world combined.

All other serious commercial space companies have taken lessons from SpaceX, so has the Chinese space program. To suggest NASA should not learn from SpaceX is just astounding. That's the kind of think you'd only hear from western government bureaucrats.

[mpweiher]

They are not trying to accomplish the same thing or on the same schedule, so your comparison is per-se invalid.

One could also ask "how many times has the SLS booster landed and been reused?". This would be a silly question to ask, because SLS is not trying to reuse the booster.

[cheschire]

Isn’t SLS still costing like $4 b’s per launch?

[panick21]

Difference is SLS has received 2 billion $ a year for 15 years in a row, while SpaceX get that much once and has to actually cover any extra cost themselves. Why do people just totally ignore money when it comes to SLS.

Not to mention that SpaceX got funding in like 2021, and SLS in 2011.

And SLS works, then why can it only launch every couple of years. I mean what good is a rocket that is so hard to produce that the whole politics and everything around it changes between launches. They basically have to teach a whole new group of people about SLS for each launch.

> while SLS did an orbit of the Moon, with real payload satellites.

If you want things launched to the moon, SpaceX, BlueOrigin or ULA could have done that many times every year for the last 15 years just as well.

Starship isn't just another 'look we can launch some stuff to the moon', its much more, and therefore much more difficult.

You are praising SLS for doing the very, very, very minimum that it should have been doing since 2017. And it will do it at most 3 times until 2027.

[dyukqu]

This reminds me of my all-time-favourite HN comment[0] (and a life lesson too):

This idea is captured nicely in the book "Art and Fear" with the following anecdote: "The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.

His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot – albeit a perfect one – to get an “A”.

Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay."

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22105478

[nixpulvis]

This works if there's no cost of failure in the meantime.

If we're putting humans into rockets into space, I'd like to think we adopt a balanced approach.

[gamblor956]

The actual real world result is the opposite. When you score on quantity you get James Patterson, not F Scott Fitzgerald.

[ajam1507]

I would think that it's just as likely that the quantity group would sit around philosophizing about what constitutes a "pot" so that they could get away with doing the least amount of work and still earning an A.

[ahoka]

Now tell the fake story about the moneys and the ladder too.

[linehedonist]

If I was being graded solely on quantity, why would I bother caring at all to make anything good? Make the minimum quality necessary to be counted as a pot and move on with your life. That was basically my real world approach to ceramics back in HS, and I still feel good about my B+.

[dweinus]

I'll take Things That Never Happened for 500 please.

[Arthurian]

2cents from a kid who grew up in a NASA family during the shuttle years - As others have commented, NASA’s baseline objective is to not kill astronauts. My understanding of their ethos growing up was that there was absolutely no excuse not to pursue excellence and prioritize safety when people’s lives were on the line. One would have to think that goal is fundamentally incompatible with SpaceX’s way of doing things (see the many exploding rockets - who wants to get in that?). And from what I’ve read and heard through the grapevine, working with SpaceX as a contractor on Artemis has certainly had pain points related to these mismatched priorities.

[ggreer]

SpaceX has the most reliable orbital launch vehicle ever made. Falcon 9 block 5 has had 550 successful launches out of 551 attempts, giving it a 99.8% success rate. For comparison, Soyuz-2's success rate is 97%, Ariane 5 is 95.7%, and the Space Shuttle was 98.5%. All of these are worse than Falcon 9's block 5's landing success rate of 98.9% (552 out of 558 attempts[1]).

The current Starship launches are part of a development and testing program. They expect quite a few failures (though probably not as many as they've experienced). But since each Starship launch is only 1/25th the cost of an SLS launch, SpaceX can afford to blow up a lot of them. And they won't put people on them until they have a track record of safe operation. Falcon 9 didn't have crew on it until the 85th launch.

1. The number of landing attempts is higher than the number of launches because Falcon Heavy results in multiple landings per launch.

[elictronic]

You risk it when there are no people on board to find the issues. Fix issues, rinse repeat.

NASA/Congress pushes the armchair quarterback approach. Analyze forever, fail because analysis isn't the same thing as real world experience, get stuck using 50 year old rocket technology. Each engine on SLS cost more than the entire Starship super heavy launch vehicle.

By weight the RS-25 engines cost about 70% of that of building their 7000lb mass dry mass out of gold. That's insane.

[NetMageSCW]

NASA says its baseline is to not kill astronauts and yet it is currently planning to send astronauts on a mission in space with an Environmental Control System on its first space flight in a capsule that has flown in space once, and was different on that one flight, and had unexpected heat shield problems with another different heat shield and on a untested return path that is guessed to fix the issues. Actions speak louder than words.

[zardo]

The shuttle lost two crews. Maybe pushing its limits in unmanned testing would have prevented those incidents.

[mikkupikku]

Congress is fickle enough without rockets blowing up, even if NASA explains up front that it's going to happen. There is much which is suboptimal about NASA, not just their attitude towards perfection, which is downstream of the political reality they have to deal with. For instance, a project that could be done in one year given adaquate funding will instead be spread out over ten years or more, to spread out the costs and keep NASA's monetary requirements as smooth and predictable as possible, for the sake of Congress.

[tokyobreakfast]

SpaceX's move-fast-and-break-things approach was lauded and NASA panned as being stuck in the past until <checks notes> the zeitgeist turned against Musk at which point the drones and tech blogs they read and write now view SpaceX as dangerous and wasteful at all costs. When a mere few years ago they couldn't shower them with enough praise.

I have no skin in this game other than to say the old school methods resulted in a janky ship that stranded two astronauts in space for months until they could catch a ride home on a SpaceX ship.

[XorNot]

Starship is starting to be a very long and not so cheap project though that doesn't seem to be making significant iterative improvements - Rockets are still exploding regularly where you'd expect them to have moved beyond that phase.

[kdheiwns]

NASA is beholden to politicians and voters who get easily ruffled when politicians can point to explosions and say "those are you tax dollars." NASA needs to be perfect and impress people or they get their budget cut even further.

[sfifs]

SLS/Artemis seems mostly to be just a program designed to funnel money to traditional aerospace contractors so that they don't close down their space business (SpaceX has already made their business unviable without government subsidy) and force a lot of their skilled engineers and technicians out of space jobs just in case these are needed for some future war. A trickle of rockets, lots of people employed practicing hand building and engineering skills for space skills crafting something every couple of years. It doesn't look like a real program designed to create any significant value, much like the some of the government fusion programs seem to be primarily a way to keep nuclear scientists and engineers employed.

[Galxeagle]

I had a lightbulb moment when someone said 'the point of iterative approaches is not to find bugs, it's to do something (small) successfully and build confidence+learn'. There's a subtle but important difference between the iterative approach that SpaceX takes and 'debugging through exhaustive retries', and I'm worried NASA would look like the latter (and admittedly, some of the more recent starship launches look that way too).

The ability to pick a small-but-well-defined goal as an interim milestone - and stay focused on it - is a key skill, and too often I've seen waterfall-like companies slowly scope-creep their first MVP until it's a lumbering mess. You almost always need someone with a strong personality to push team to 'get it done', and that level of ownership is really hard to come by in an organization historically built around ass-covering.

I think Commercial Crew is the right model for NASA. Pick the design objectives, provide some level of scaffolding regulation (i.e loss-of-crew calculations), and then contract out to private sector to actually 'get it done'. (Yes Starliner was a failure, but Dragon is definitely a success. A 50% hit rate and success of the program overall is better than Artemis)

[jvanderbot]

NASA should not do what businesses do, because by definition their job is to do what businesses cannot or will not do.

They should not adopt spacex practices, they should adopt spacex lift vehicles (once proven).

[lstodd]

Boris Chertok's memoir[0] on early Soviet space program is essential reading.

inexact quote: "You know, we're throwing towns into the sky" related to the early mishaps of R-7 program development, but they kept doing it. After that R-7 derivatives became the most reliable launch vehicle.

[0] https://www.nasa.gov/history/history-publications-and-resour...

[ptero]

> inexact quote: "You know, we're throwing towns into the sky" related to the early mishaps of R-7 program development

I have not looked at the source (in Russian) for several years; now that I am curious I will check at home tonight. But as far as I remember "we are shooting towns into the sky" remark was not in reference to the R-7, but in reference to N1-L3, a hellishly expensive competitor to the Apollo manned Moon mission rocket. The meaning of the phrase was that each and every test should be taken extremely seriously as the cost of each flight is comparable to the cost of building a new city.

R-7 was developed much earlier when Korolev and his team at OKB-1 were iterating rapidly on much cheaper models that were primarily funded as rockets for strategic thermonuclear strike warheads. The civilian (Sputnik and later Gagarin) flights were an offshoot of that and were small enough that it happened as a side project. R-7 was a comparatively simple and cheap design, which may be why that family became a workhorse from the late 50s to carrying crews to the ISS. And the super expensive N1-L3 was a stillborn.

That's my recollection, need to recheck the sources.

[schiffern]

Also interesting to hear what the NASA people assigned to work with SpaceX say:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxIiiwD9C0E&t=1440s

[connoronthejob]

Neither craft have achieved their missions so it's a bit early to make that call.

[verzali]

Well the SLS has already sent a capsule around the Moon. And it has kept a lot of people employed. That's pretty much what it was intended to do.

[mmooss]

If you want to choose example of a failed approach to space exploration, NASA is your worst option. It's like choosing Netflix as an example of a failed approach to video multicasting.

NASA's approach to space exploration remains incredibly successful. Look at all the missions operating all over our solar system, including on Mars' surface, and beyond. No other organization comes close.

> I wonder which approach is more capital efficient? Which is more time efficient?

How we frame the debate - if you like, the specs that define the rfp - determines the outcome. You define it by efficiency, which is what businesses prioritize and is SpaceX's strength. They take a well-established technology, orbital launch, and make it much more efficient.

NASA prioritizes ground-breaking (space-breaking?), history-making exploration and technology - things never done before and often hardly dreamed of by most people. That can take time and money but they deliver at a very high rate - think of how many missions have failed, compared to recent private missions, such as moon missions, and even those of other space agencies.

[NetMageSCW]

Perhaps it is best to accept that SpaceX is a unicorn.

What exactly is ground breaking about SLS and not quite getting back to the moon with it?

[chasd00]

> I wonder if NASA could start to adopt SpaceX like approaches? Where one doesn't try to get everything correct before acting?

that would be such a culture change you'd have to disband NASA and start it over.

[kunai]

Yeah there is no way they do that with THREE LOCVs in their history. The fire, Challenger, and Columbia.

It's a risk-averse culture for a reason.

[palmotea]

> The difference in philosophy between NASA's current approach and SpaceX is quite stark. SpaceX has launched 11 Starships in the two and a bit years, with a lot of them blowing up. Where as Artemis is trying to get it near perfect on each run.

> I wonder if NASA could start to adopt SpaceX like approaches? Where one doesn't try to get everything correct before acting?

My understanding is the difference is politics. The US political system is dysfunctional, and so riven by anti-government factions, that there's too much pressure to not fail.

If NASA tried the SpaceX approach, after the second rocket blew up NASA's administrator would have been hauled in front of Congress and interrogated over the "waste of taxpayer money" and then the program may get canceled.

[godelski]

  > I wonder if NASA could start to adopt SpaceX like approaches? Where one doesn't try to get everything correct before acting?

With humans inside?

Move fast and break things has its place, but when putting humans in things you should be very concerned about... you know... not killing them...

The reason NASA does things this way is because they essentially have one shot. Failure is not an option. When they fail, funding gets pulled and you don't get to try again. NASA doesn't get to launch 11 and have half of them fail. This puts a weird spin on things because in many industries you have the saying "why is there always time to do it twice but never to do it right" but NASA (and plenty of other sectors) have the reverse "there's always more time to do it right, but never time to do it twice".

Truthfully, the optimal path is somewhere in between, but what is optimal is highly dependent on many different environmental factors. For example, when there are humans on board, well... you don't have the luxury of doing it twice. When those people are gone, they're gone. But when unmanned, well... early NASA also blew up a bunch of shit while it was figuring things out and had a much less regulated budget. Move fast and break things is a great strategy when you're starting and still needing to figure things out. But also when things become successful and working, people in charge look less fondly on mistakes. Doesn't matter if it is reasonable (e.g. human lives should be protected) or more unreasonable (you can't make dinner without getting the dishes dirty).

What I'm saying here is when SpaceX gets successful they'll shift gears too. Did we not see the same evolution in every big tech company? Seems to happen in every business and what is the government if not a giant organization? It really seems like as companies get larger and more powerful they start to look much more like governments.

[MSKJ]

If I were to bet, even with no information. I would wager that the private company is more capital efficient than the government ran one

[XorNot]

Maybe go read the report on Starliner before making that call? Boeing is a private company too and no one is this deferential about it.

[leonflexo]

Systemic inefficiencies aside. I wonder how much of that is a public funding feedback loop? The cost gets higher, because the standards, requirements, and processes are stricter, because there is the need to validate the use of public funds, exacerbated by being higher, increasing the standards/requirements etc etc... Especially in a political environment where there is no shortage of sniping funding for points.

Regardless, first thing it reminded me of was that interview quote about how if nasa had SpaceX track record they would have lost funding long ago. Is there a US political landscape, even back to 2008-2016, where that isn't the case?

[alwa]

I wonder how much is a cost-plus billing issue, too… and a contrast between primes with a single customer in mind and a commercial firm chasing a bigger pie than the immediate program at hand

https://www.thespacereview.com/article/4498/1

[topspin]

> I wonder which approach is more capital efficient? Which is more time efficient?

I don't. I wonder whether US astronauts are going to die on the surface of the moon while the world watches in 4K. I believe, to my great relief, that by some minor miracle, we've ended up with a NASA administrator that is wondering the same thing, and also has the temerity to make some really hard calls, despite what is doubtless an enormous amount of pressure. I've been analyzing his words and speech. There is just no bullshit in him, and he clearly doesn't suffer fools. You can see it. He's like something out of SAC from the Cold War.

NASA is in desperate need of exactly that. Perhaps that's not the correct, permanent disposition for all things at all times, but if the US and NASA are actually going to engage in another Space Race, this time with China, we very much need it at this time.

[api]

There were no humans on those Starships that blew up.

Most of the delays in Artemis are not around the launch system but the spacecraft and lander and life support and associated systems.

Not saying it couldn't be done more efficiently, but comparing Artemis to SpaceX is apples and oranges. The SLS is old expensive disposable rocket tech but it's also solid and tested and we pretty much know it will work. It's not the problem.

So how did we do it in the 60s? With a blank check and luck. The insane accomplishment of Apollo wasn't just landing people on the moon but doing it without killing anyone. The fact that nobody died on those flights is incredible, and luck was certainly a factor. We very nearly lost a crew on 13. If we'd kept flying Apollo rigs we'd have lost people. That whole mission was way ahead of its time technologically and generally unsustainable. It was an early proof of concept.

[tencentshill]

SpaceX doesn't have investors itching to take AWAY money from their programs. they are obligated to be perfect on the first run. Public vs. private.

[terribleperson]

NASA can't adopt SpaceX's approach, because any failure will be used to attack them in Congress and in the media.

[jiggawatts]

> Where one doesn't try to get everything correct before acting?

That only works if the unit cost is low. A single SLS rocket engine costs about the same as an entire starship launch including 39 engines.

[baggachipz]

NASA has been directed by Congress to use the remaining Space Shuttle RS25 engines on SLS. There aren't that many RS25's left, so Artemis requires that they make the most of each launch. Getting more RS25's produced is one of those "nobody's made them in a long time and it would be terribly expensive and time-consuming to do so" type of situations.

correction: there are 16 RS25's left, but production has begun on more for the Artemis V mission. However, production is slow so they can't just yeet SLS's into space and test rapidly.

[renewiltord]

NASA did have SpaceX like approach. Much more aggressive as a matter of fact. They cooked the occupants of Apollo 1 and they sent another mission out broken so they had to fix it live in space.

The question is whether you have the appetite for killing three astronauts on a test run like the Apollo team did.

EDIT: Fine, I’ll clarify. By “SpaceX like approach” I mean iterative design. By “more aggressive” I mean risk tolerance much greater than SpaceX to the degree that they do things that SpaceX wouldn’t do.

[schiffern]

This is ignoring the massive distinction between manned flight (where failure is not an option) and unmanned tests. NASA and SpaceX both know this well.

Calling it a "SpaceX like approach" and connecting to Apollo 1 is a neat trick, but SpaceX wouldn't (and doesn't) adopt that risky approach during manned flights.

It's all about "the right risk for the job." You can't be risky with human safety, but you also don't want to be overly timid and failure-averse during safely managed R&D tests, or your R&D grinds to a halt.

[freejazz]

Insane that this is getting downvoted.

[DSMan195276]

I think the public funding aspect complicates this, NASA is probably not in a position where it can blow up a bunch of rockets and still get funding for the next year.

[kevin_thibedeau]

They used to depend on the Army to blow up the rockets for them.

[riffic]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociotechnical_system

NASA and SpaceX are fundamentally incomparable, considering how these two organizations are established and the motivations that drive all the actors within. Sure, NASA could start to adopt certain approaches but I don't imagine it to work in a way anyone else would imagine it to.

[jachee]

First Time NASA did that was how we got Apollo I and lost three astronauts.

They learned a few lessons, but then 1986 they let “getting things perfect” slip a bit more. It’s happened a few times since.

Personally, I’d rather not lose any more astronauts.

[NetMageSCW]

SpaceX managed their methodologies with Falcon 9 and Dragon without losing any crew.

That’s because, unlike NASA, they don’t risk crew with untested systems and first time flights.

[gwbas1c]

The Artemis mission is manned. I assume the Starships are unmanned.

The risk profile is very different.

[bregma]

If NASA switches to the Space X approach of just blowing up its rockets it would soon need to change its name to "Need Another Seven Astronauts".

[panick21]

Except of course that SpaceX is launching Astronauts right now and has a perfect safety record and operate the safest space vehicle ever built.

[HaloZero]

Doesn't Artemis intend to launch humans? It seems like Space X Starship approach is hella dangerous for astroanuts.

[mavhc]

Once Starship has launched 1000 times without problems it'll be obviously safer despite having no abort system

[fnord77]

The Saturn V never blew up, either.

I suspect that Starship will never get a human rating

[NetMageSCW]

A human rating is only necessary for NASA missions. Do you think Falcon 9 will never fly crew because of all the explosions SpaceX had developing it and landings?

[JumpCrisscross]

My suspicion is ULA can’t manufacture SLS quickly enough, at high enough quality, to meet multiple, gradual tests.

[carabiner]

It's everything. NASA doesn't have the money, brainpower, efficiency etc. to implement SpaceX development method. They can't fab it fast enough, nor can they iterate on the engineering fast enough, nor are they will to sustain the optics of a "government rocket blowing up" like Musk is. They don't have the caliber of engineering talent available or a workflow setup (high autonomy, long hours, better pay).

[NetMageSCW]

ULA has nothing to do with SLS.

[Whatarethese]

Like others have said, its easy to blow shit up and improve when you dont have congress breathing down your neck and threatening to cut your budget.

[shiandow]

The real question is which is more likely to avoid catastrophic failures in practice.

And we 'tried until it didn't blow up immediately' is not a great sign.

[phkahler]

>> And we 'tried until it didn't blow up immediately' is not a great sign.

But everything that didn't blow up has been tested 11 times already. Things that did fail have had more than one design iteration tested. One approach has gains more real-world test experience.

[freejazz]

> I wonder if NASA could start to adopt SpaceX like approaches? Where one doesn't try to get everything correct before acting?

This seems so ridiculous in the abstract. Like, what is that exactly supposed to entail in the context of launching rockets?

[RandallBrown]

When SpaceX launches a rocket, they think it will work. When NASA launches a rocket they know it will work.

The cost of going from "I think this will work" to "I know this will work" is really expensive. It might be cheaper/faster to fail a few times and fix those problems than it would be to verify everything up front.

[2OEH8eoCRo0]

They've blown up 11 Starships without any of them making it to orbit. Artemis I flew around the moon and came back already.

And don't compare costs because Starship does not and may never work so I dont care how much cheaper it is. If we are comparing fictional rockets I have a $1 rocket that can fly to Jupiter.

[bhouston]

> They've blown up 11 Starships without any of them making it to orbit.

They purposely were not trying for orbit from my understanding. The last one did orbit the earth at suborbital heights and release satellites. It did seem to do what they wanted it to do, it wasn't a failure.

[ThrowawayTestr]

This is why NASA can never adopt the SpaceX philosophy. People don't understand the concept of test fight.

[numpad0]

I think we're all misunderstanding SpaceX. I think it's more of an engine factory disguised as a general space company that managed to borrow the dad's card.

The only thing SpaceX truly has an edge is its engines.

They have perfected the engine for a ship like a giant Mars class rockets. And that engine has been in full scale series production for years, while the actual Starship keeps blowing up. The reason they developed their hoverslam landing technology, also, was because they wanted their precious engines back.

It's as if they handed groups of gamers a credit card and they went onto plunder stocks of RTX cards from 20 miles around with some Roombas bought on reward points. It's just inches below the threshold for typical BS detector if it weren't specifically tuned for the relevant topics.

All makes sense if everything was an elaborate ploy to get someone to pay for specifically the engines.