Why the US can beat China: The Facts about SpaceX Costs

http://www.spacex.com/updates.php

by cwan • 15 years ago

259 100 15 years ago

burgerbrain2• 15 years ago

That 300Million figure to develop Falcon 9 seems stunningly low. Fascinating stuff.

hugh32• 15 years ago

I've always wondered why rocket development should be nearly as expensive as NASA makes it sound. It's mostly a plumbing problem, surely -- pump the fuel to the right place and let it burn. I'm sure there are a few added complexities, but the tricky bits were all figured out decades ago.

dman2• 15 years ago

Winning the world 100m is just about running faster. A Nobel prize is won if you think just a little bit harder... Pushing the envelope has always been heroically hard and always will be.

philh• 15 years ago

It's also a risk-mitigation problem: making sure that nothing goes wrong with the solution to the plumbing problem.

NASA probably isn't optimally cost-effective, but I suspect that eats more money than the plumbing problem itself does.

stcredzero3• 15 years ago

The difference is that most plumbing problems result in nothing worse than loss of property and even truly egregious disasters might not make even the local news. Plumbing problems with manned rockets can result in deaths which are almost always international news.

Dove4• 15 years ago

Hey, now. Rockets have gimbals and nozzles and aerodynamic considerations. Rocket Science may not be as tough as NASA makes it out to be, but it definately involves advanced math and control systems and stuff like that.

Calling it as a plumbing problem is like calling software engineering a typing problem.

protomyth2• 15 years ago

I'm glad that SpaceX is so concerned with cost. It is sometimes hard for a company to stay focused on that when they get a government contract.

As for the rest, I would imagine when robots get good enough, then the incentive to use cheap labor in China drops and factories in the US become more economically viable.

mousa2• 15 years ago

It's nice that we have freer enterprise and I'm happy to see SpaceX doing well, but China is pivoting hard. It's not a zero-sum game so it doesn't really matter who wins but they're not planning on being just the manufacturers forever. We have freer markets, but they have a big edge too in that they value education a lot more, especially now with the one child policy.

tel• 15 years ago

I'm going to keep that line in hand for the next 20 years: "China is pivoting hard". Anyone who's thinking of them as merely cheap labor for much longer is going to be very surprised.

protomyth2• 15 years ago

I'm not sure valuing education is enough. Japan didn't pass the US and it surely valued education more than the US. It is the combination of virtues and the chaos of individuals that allows the US to work. If the US gets its debt under control, I don't really see the "win" being China's. China is chaos adverse.

techiferous• 15 years ago

I see a black cloud looming for China. The "One Child" policy is making their age distribution very top-heavy (much more so that the U.S. "Baby Boomer" phenomenon). Also, two-thirds of men in China smoke (and over half of male doctors). Furthermore, as a populace gets richer, its diet tends toward eating more animal-based products and obesity and cancer rates rise. I see a very large health-care problem in China's future that will certainly slow down their economy.

pradocchia6• 15 years ago

I have often wondered whether free trade of goods has retarded the development of more sophisticated automation & robotics. What technology advancements have we missed out on when it's been cheaper to move manufacturing to China, rather than make capital investments at home?

Note that any decision to off-shore is distorted by a) limits to the free movement of labor and b) currency manipulation. So at the margin, you might replace an efficient domestic operation w/ an inefficient foreign process, and make up the difference in currency and labor cost arbitrage. In such cases, free trade of goods alone has a detrimental effect on technological progress. Or at least that's the speculation.

Dove4• 15 years ago

I don't mind. Sending manufacturing jobs overseas raises the standard of living there and introduces technology and industry to the region. The folks doing those jobs won't be stuck at that income level forever.

I think my standard of living is pretty good. If I could have super robots next decade, or I could have them in three decades after conditions around the globe have equalized a bit . . . well, I don't mind the wait.

gaius• 15 years ago

Sure it has. But that's always been the case. Why didn't the Ancient Greeks have steam engines? Well they did! But since they had slaves, it was never worth developing them further.

http://library.thinkquest.org/C006011/english/sites/heron_bi...

jerf2• 15 years ago

"I have often wondered whether free trade of goods has retarded the development of more sophisticated automation & robotics."

I doubt the effect has been that profound. From what I can see of the history of robots and automation, the choke point over the past 50 years has not been cheap labor, but expensive real-time computation. We only recently got CPUs that we could really do anything with. Even 320x200x15fps in black and white, a resolution you'd have a hard time actually "living" in as your only sensory input (and if humans find it hard, computers even moreso), is about a million things a second. When you've got processors running at 33MHz, it's hard to get very far, just as one example.

nl• 15 years ago

It's not just that the robots need to be good enough - in fact they are already for most areas.

The problem is that using robots in manufacture involves large upfront capital costs, and that can be avoided using human labor.

bcl• 15 years ago

SpaceX gives me hope that we can become a space-faring nation once again. The added bonus is that it is private industry doing it, not the behemoth bureaucracy that NASA has become.

jmarbach• 15 years ago

This is an inspiring mark of American spirit that has seemed to escape our minds amidst international business pressures. I'm grateful that we have hardworking leaders such as Elon who take risks when others won't, and are dedicated to living their dreams.

mixmax4• 15 years ago

Although it's a bit of an apple to oranges comparison Copenhagen suborbitals are on the trajectory to launching a human into space in around three years time. In a months time they'll have their first testflight from Bornholm in the baltic sea. They're doing this whole thing based on nothing but sponsors and goodwill. Their budget is around $8000 a month - orders of magnitude lower than spacex. They also built the worlds largest homemade submarine btw.

Until now they've developed solid rocket boosters, parachutes, recovery programs, astrouanut survival and cockpit, etc. etc. and have not run into major problems yet.

Some links:

Website: http://www.copenhagensuborbitals.com

Static test of solid rocket booster (110.000 HP): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3g_xjGOJRws&feature=relat...

TEDx talk by Christian Von Bengtson: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ua9oGxNNGd0

All their technology is open source by the way.

Shameless plug: These guys survive on donations, and a few months ago I helped start a support organization to help them survive economicvally. It's $20 a month to be a member, and we really need more members so we can get these guys into space. If you feel this is a worthy cause and want to join send me an e-mail (it's in my profile). Our website is http://raketvenner.dk/ (currently only in Danish...)

pdelgallego2• 15 years ago

Are you guys developing any kind of software?

I am a web developer, so I don't know much about C, but I am sure a lot of people here can help if you put a repository.

mixmax4• 15 years ago

We (the support organization) only do financial and moral support :-)

But Copenhagen Suborbitals is pretty software heavy - uplinks, sensors, communications, ballistics, etc. require a lot of software. They're extremely busy right now preparing for the June launch, but I'll try to talk to them whether this would be a good idea. It seems like it to me, although safety might be an issue if you have someone "unknown" developing mission critical stuff.

Thanks for the idea!

sukuriant2• 15 years ago

Just a head's up. If there are human lives involved and at risk based on software development, it is incredibly, incredibly important that the software go through the highest possible level of testing, including every possible codepath, every input partition, everything. If it crashes midflight due to a bug, there's about nothing you can do about it. And people will die.

Remember that when you're considering developing mission critical software. It is the most dangerous sort of software to write, and needs aggressively comprehensive testing.

KVFinn• 15 years ago

You guys should do a kickstarter with each flight. Spondors get their photo taken into space or something.

mixmax4• 15 years ago

We've thought about that, but the support organization is only a few months old, so we haven't quite gotten around to it yet.

narrator• 15 years ago

Does Copenhagen Suborbitals reminds anyone a bit of "The Gun Club" in Jules Verne's "From Earth To The Moon"? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_the_Earth_to_the_Moon)

upgrayedd• 15 years ago

Crazy how far a bunch of Goons from Something Awful can go. Kudos to you all and wishes of great success!

jigg4joe2• 15 years ago

How can they afford fuel on 8k per month?

mixmax4• 15 years ago

A few reasons:

- They only make liveburns a few times a year.

- They experiment with different cheap fuels. One rocket ran on rubber and actually worked quite well.

- They're quite known around Denmark, so they get unbelievable prices on fuel from companies that want to be associated with the project.

bugsy• 15 years ago

I've been following Copenhagen suborbitals. It's a great enthusiast club. Their submarine is really neat but is certainly not a commercial submarine, nor are the subs built by Columbian drug runners using similar technology and sophistication.

To say they are 3 years from launching humans into space is very amusing.

There is no chance they will be doing that in 3 years. No chance at all.

burgerbrain2• 15 years ago

I don't think you could pay me enough to climb on top of a solid booster stack (while there is little limit to how much I'd pay to go into space on a properly mature liquid fuel rocket).

lostbit• 15 years ago

Fine. This is definitely good news. It proves a company is doing a great job, it gives hope and inspiration to other business try to be innovative and bring back the American spirit. But what will happen to space programs if American economy goes into a harder crisis? People will probably vote not to launch anything, not to look at the sky, but to spend money on land issues instead. My big concern is regarding the end of the dollar as the world's reserve currency. That could bring many succesfull companies down, specially those on American markets only. China can be a big issue to America if it starts no to believe in dollar currency anymore. In this context, beating China on innovation at Space programs might not mean Americans won.

erikpukinskis3• 15 years ago

COTS has proven that under the right conditions, a properly incentivized contractor — even an all-American one — can develop extremely complex systems on rapid timelines and a fixed-price basis, significantly beating historical industry-standard costs.

If the "right conditions" include having Elon Musk as CEO, then "proven" is probably a reasonable word.

Alex39172• 15 years ago

Exactly. Don't get me wrong, this article is extremely inspirational. But I doubt if there are more than a couple dozen people in America talented enough to pull this off. And, similarly, the vast majority of people in the government aren't capable of recognizing who the people this talented are, or if they are then they are unable to act on it.

jmtame• 15 years ago

I didn't see this before, but the SpaceX office tour is pretty awesome: http://spacex.com/multimedia/videos.php?id=26

olalonde• 15 years ago

I don't want to sound too pessimistic but the trend in China is towards more free market capitalism whereas the opposite is happening in the US. Of course, trends can change and China is still far behind in terms of economic liberty.

Symmetry• 15 years ago

An illuminating anecdote:

A while ago my friend from work was at an base where SpaceX would be launching from. However, during the launch an anomaly was discovered and the countdown was suspended. At this point all the Air Force people went home, since they were used to this sort of thing taking a week to sort out, but the SpaceX people quickly isolated the problem and the launch only ended up being delayed an hour.

VB6_Foreverr• 15 years ago

That blog post is written in such an unpretentious way. Space travel with feet firmly planted on the ground

breathesalt• 15 years ago

"Beat" China? Why not work together?

timsally• 15 years ago

Because as much as we'd like to pretend otherwise, there are significant ideological differences between the US and China. China just enacted a 3 month ban on all spy dramas on TV [1] and I'm about go home and watch Casino Royal with a bottle of scotch [2]. And as JFK says, our leadership in science and in industry, our hopes for peace and security, our obligations to ourselves as well as others, all require us to make this effort, to solve these mysteries, to solve them for the good of all men, and to become the world's leading space-faring nation. [3]. This may seem nationalistic to you, but I think JFK is right.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/06/world/asia/06briefs-China....

[2] Citation not needed.

[3] http://er.jsc.nasa.gov/seh/ricetalk.htm

dev_jim• 15 years ago

Exactly. It's not a zero-sum game. China getting better economically is good for the U.S. and vice versa. Anyone who thinks differently needs to take ECON101.

IsaacL• 15 years ago

Working together on commercial space technology is good. But space technology also has military uses, in which case both China and the US have strategic reasons for being competitive.

Example: a few years ago China decommissioned one of its weather satellites by firing a rocket at it from Earth. Some speculated this new technology could be used to wipe out the USA's anti-nuclear system, leaving it vulnerable to an attack.

spartanfan10• 15 years ago

Though I really don't like the idea of an "Us vs. Them" mentality in global development (it's been commented many times that this is not a zero sum game, there doesn't have to be winners and losers like in football), this article is inspiring. Congrats to Elon and SpaceX on their wonderful innovation.

adnam• 15 years ago

It's funny, but this is the opposite of what happened during the 1950s space race. Russia, having less cash to spend, contracted work out various bidders, whereas america established the massively centralized NASA.

JoeAltmaier3• 15 years ago

And Russia killed and maimed hundreds in their pell-mell race to the moon. So it was cost-effective and politically expedient, sure. But there are towns still expunged from Russian maps that were blighted by that irresponsible program.

Why the US can beat China: The Facts about SpaceX Costs

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