Generic Synthetic

The maiden flight of the SpaceX Falcon 1 rocket ended in tears yesterday. Anyone who paid attention to such things knew that their chances of success were fairly low. The founder of SpaceX made his money selling PayPal to eBay, and by the time he's done he'll might have spent it all with little to show for it.

It's not just that spaceflight is difficult, it's that it really can't be done by hobbyists. And everything that has come out from the company has smelled like it came from people who really had no idea what they are up against.

The rocket was first supposed to launch almost 2 years ago. I believe the first time I heard about a delay, the excuse was that the government was imposing too many logistical and safety restrictions on them, so they weren't going to make their date. As if it was just some paperwork snafu's. A year later they were still doing test firings of their main engine. More recently they had a long delay because, after an aborted launch, they supposedly hadn't brought enough rocket fuel out to the island with them, and had to wait for a month before it could be brought out by boat. And then the next time, the fuel tank suffered a structural failure when they fueled it.

Even if you take these press releases at face value, and there is no reason you should, these are things that just don't happen with real companies. OK, yes, there are mishaps all the time. But for the most part they are actual accidents, not predictable problems caused by lack of planning.

The kids on Slashdot are sad about this. They always like rooting for the underdog, and in this case they believe SpaceX's marketing which claims they will be able to launch satellites into space for a tenth the cost of the next competitor (full disclosure: which is built by my employer and just had it's 23rd consecutive successful launch this week.) And yeah, that sounds like a great goal. But if I had a billion dollars I could sell you a car for $100, and that doesn't make me a genius. It means I'm selling you a lemon and still losing money on it.

One guy on Slashdot, “O2H2″, apparently another professional, is the only person in that thread who isn't deluded:

As a designer of very successful rockts I can tell you why making a rocket fly is much harder than making darn near any other machine function properly…you are trying to harness enormous energies which do more than just push the rocket upward. The vibration and shock environments are beyond anything you probably have experienced. […] And you cannot simulate and predict everything. Weird system interactions are par for the course. You can only get first flight success with a lot of painful experience. SpaceX do not have this level of experience.

That is why demonstrated reliability cannot be replaced by calculation. Spacex bragged about their high reliability but it is all on paper. Successful rockets have tens of thousands of hours of debugging of problems built into them. You just never see it. Nothing can replace hours in the air. And they come slowly and at great expense.

Elon is now going to learn firsthand why spaceflight is so damn expensive. It is not the lack of innovation or intelligence at Lockheed Martin or Boeing- it is the brutal reality that nature imposes on lack of attention to detail and ignorance. It ain't the metal in the rocket - its the know-how in the people.

SpaceX's biggest talent seems to be in marketing. They have a number of launch contracts already signed up, although I think some of them were contingent on this one being a success. They have a new larger rocket being built as a competitor to Delta II, and recently got some attention by showing off some drawings of a manned vehicle to go the ISS. Remind me not to sign up for that flight.