SpaceX’s entire development philosophy is “test early, test often and learn from failures”. This is a much quicker pace than simulating every imaginable failure scenario and leads to faster progress in development.
Is it? Starship has been in development since at least 2012-ish (as the “mars colonial transport” or “its” or “bfr” or a few other names). It hasn’t done a succesful mission yet. ULA’s Vulcan was anounced in 2014, and it works just fine. So I don’t really think it’s actually faster or better, but it IS more showy.
They’re turning enough of a profit to develop the Starship largely on internal funds
No they’re not.
SpaceX has reported 1 quarter in 2023 with positive cashflow of 55million dollars out of 1.5b in revenue, and has then gone completely silent again. SpaceX has done 33 commercial launches and 63 starlink launches. Some very basic math shows that there is no way Starlink can pay for that (63 launches times 62 million per launch divided by 2.6 million subscribers = 1500$ per user per year, which is every single subscription dollar). So two-thirds of SpaceX launch income comes from a company that itself is unsustainable and operating on purely on venture capital.
Point 3: SpaceX were the only ones with more than designs and mockups to present
Absolute and complete lie. Its exactly the opposite. SpaceX did not, and still DOES NOT have a solid design or mockup of HLS. Dynetics and Blue Origin had both.
I see no problem with awarding a contract to a bid that actually fits into the budget.
The problem is that SpaceX had a bid at the same level of the others, but they lowered it when Kathy Lueders gave them a call (and not the other parties) to lower it. This is spelled out in NASA’s own document: www3.nasa.gov/…/option-a-source-selection-stateme… (note how it’s fully written in the first person by Kathy herself). This is primary basis, massive favoritism by a NASA employee who then immediately started working for SpaceX. I’ll leave the motivations of her doing these things as an exercise to the reader.
When the other two parties found out, they offered not just to match SpaceX bid, but beat it. Of course, since Kathy Lueders didn’t show them the same favoritism, they didn’t find out till after the bidding process closed.
Multiple options was always part of the plan.
No, the contract stated that anything between zero and three were options, based on funding. They said the goal was two, but then budget was reduced. Nobody was told this. The number of contracts was also reduced to one as a result. Nobody was told this. And then Kathy Lueders gave SpaceX a call, and not the others, to share this information.
assassin_aragorn@lemmy.world 6 months ago
This is a catchy statement, not an actionable philosophy. There’s many ways to do it, and it’s entirely possible that SpaceX is doing it poorly.
There’s a lot of value in brainstorming every imaginable failure scenario. It’s industry standard to do so in fact with HAZOPs. There’s failures that you may not necessarily see in testing – especially those that are rare but catastrophic. This is a field that should be acutely aware of that given past events.
There’s also a right way to do testing and a wrong way to do testing. You typically consolidate tests and do several at a time, depending on the stage in the project. And you don’t typically risk precious equipment in doing so.
Bimfred@lemmy.world 6 months ago
There’s a point at which you learn more from actually building something and putting it through its paces than simulating. It’s a tough balance to strike , no argument there. Simulating until you’ve covered every conceivable edge case and failure mode is ludicrously costly and time consuming. Relying entirely on yeeting shit and seeing how it fails risks missing the edge cases. But so far, I’ve seen little reason to doubt that SpaceX has found a working balance between simulation and practical testing. They’re certainly progressing faster than the industry historically has and the F9 has had no failures, even partial ones, in over 200 flights. That’s a track record that most launch vehicles can’t meet. It’s definitely possible there’s a 1/1000 flaw in the Falcon 9, but until it actually happens and they lose a rocket and/or a payload (gods willing it won’t be crew), it’s nothing but a hypothetical “but what if…” scenario.