What makes you think SpaceX engineers know more about moon-earth re-entry heat shields than NASA and Lockheet engineers? (high velocity re-entry is a very different beast than LEO re-entry). This whole premise that SpaceX are the only ones that can have capable engineers seems a bit unhinged to me.
I was thinking they have more experience with heatshields in general as they launched dragon 2 like 23 times and built 9 of them as opposed to Orion that had 4 of them built and 2 of them launched.
True, but none of that really matters when talking about lunar return heatshields - it's a totally different regime. I totally agree that getting more data matters, and it really sucks for the Orion team that they don't have the chance to fly a few more test articles, but that's not the engineers fault.
All these aerospace companies use the same pool of labor, the fact that one of them is much more efficient, faster, cheaper than the rest means they are doing something wrong, and more specifically, they have shitty management and distorted incentives after many years of monopoly, lobbying and fat defense contracts.
Here fits well Napoleon's quote about lions. If you have the best engineers in the world, but the management is crap, you'll build crap with a 300% overbudget and 10 years late and a good manager can even make idiots do something useful more or less within budget and deadlines
My reasoning would be based on how much better of a job SpaceX did at creating Dragon compared to Boeing creating Starliner, during their parallel developments. (Boeing being 1/2 of ULA, and Lockheed being the other half).
And, to a lesser degree, how much better SpaceX has been at making F9 rockets than any other company or country has been at making rockets, in recent years (less directly related than SpaceX's demonstrated capsule proficiency with Dragon, but still indirectly says a thing or two about their skills in general).
I don't think someone has to be a SpaceX fanboy at this point to recognize that SpaceX has pulled pretty far ahead of Lockheed/Boeing in this general territory. I'm sure you could play pretty good devil's advocate with a variety of counter-arguments if you wanted to, but, I mean, c'mon, it's pretty obvious at this point who is better at it by now. It's not even close anymore.
edit: the funny thing about this is I feel like I'm in a Twlight Zone episode right now, given that normally I'm the one on here playing devil's advocate to people who are being overly SpaceX Fanboys, and end up getting downvoted for saying stuff like I hope Blue Origin and other competitors do well and become stronger competitors in coming years.
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>This whole premise that SpaceX are the only ones that can have capable engineers seems a bit unhinged to me.
I don't think SpaceX are the only ones that can have capable engineers, and I agree that would be unhinged if that was my position. I'm not viewing this as black-and-white/all-or-nothing, though. I'm viewing it as a sliding scale, with SpaceX being significantly better at space engineering type of stuff than them and everyone else in the world, right now.
My point isn't that Lockheed would never be able to do it at all. Given enough time and money, obviously they'll eventually do something with it, and probably even succeed.
My point was that SpaceX pretty obviously has the best engineering team in this sector in the world right now, by a wide margin, based on results in recent years, and even at capsules (Dragon) even if not identical scenario, still, seems extremely likely that they would be able to help out quite a bit and probably speed things up/improve things.
I'm genuinely surprised people disagree with that aspect.
I figured most people would take that aspect as obvious, and that the debate/discussion area would be more to do with whether or not SpaceX would want to help out a competitor company, if it meant speeding up the overall Artemis (and thus, Mars, thereafter) timeline (which Elon clearly wants).
I didn't think the main argument point would be about whether SpaceX is better at this stuff/has anything to offer than these other companies that it has blatantly soared way, way past in recent years by such an extreme margin. I am seriously surprised anyone has strong disagreements about *that* part of the overall topic.
> (high velocity re-entry is a very different beast than LEO re-entry)
the relevant bit from dgkimpton's comment. comparing F9/dragon to orion or starliner is classic apples vs. oranges.
One of the reasons Dragon was so robust is that it was designed for interplanetary reentry speeds. Way back when it was first designed, they still had designs on using it for red dragon and other missions. I don’t know if the extra heat shielding was retained for D2, but that was one reason it was highly reusable for LEO missions.
>is classic apples vs. oranges.
Disagree.
More like somewhere between green apples vs red apples, and oranges vs tangerines.
If the best red-apple grower, or tangerine grower in the history of the planet (by a wide margin) decided to help out a mediocre green apple grower, or orange-grower, I think his farming skills that he was better at on a similar fruit than anyone else on earth, would be of pretty significant value, at the minimum. I don't think he would show up and be like "eh, slightly different fruit. No clue. Shrug. I dunno." and just sit there uselessly. That seems extremely unlikely to me. Much more likely if the other grower welcomed his help and caught him up to speed on the technical situation at hand, he would have a treasure trove of valuable things to say and do that the other person, who was a significantly worse farmer overall, didn't know how to do as well, or what have you.
despite the new info about the state of orion's heatshield, it did make it. so they are "in the lead". sure spacex is movin fast and doing great stuff but... they have only been to low earth orbit.
and again, re-entry speeds from the moon are far different than the speeds from low earth orbit.
i also dont think its a problem of lack of engineering skill/knowledge on lockheed or boeing's part. its the very structure of the corporation and managment style.
My point was that SpaceX pretty obviously has the best engineering team in this sector in the world right now, by a wide margin...
That's a bit of a stretch. They probably have the least risk averse management and the most agile management, however, you've no idea what constraints the engineers at Lockheed or NASA are working under - they might be absolute rockstars chained down by paperwork and admin. I don't know, but then neither do you. Claiming SpaceX engineering is better than NASA engineering without a shred of evidence is ridiculous. The only thing we can see by their success is that the *company as a whole* is better geared to getting amazing results quickly.
>I don't know, but then neither do you. Claiming SpaceX engineering is better than NASA engineering without a shred of evidence is ridiculous.
Eh, I think at a certain point, the proof is in the pudding. The results matter. They outdid the rest of the world by such a huge margin in recent years, that I think that just HAS to mean something pretty significant about genuine difference and skills advantage of some very tangible sort between them and all these other teams. And I mean, it's not like, say, Boeing's Starliner team was unfairly chained down while SpaceX's Dragon team was given free reign. If anything the government was trying to give Boeing more aid and go-ahead and favoritism than SpaceX rather than the other way around, during their developments, and SpaceX still blew past them with ease anyway.
And then ditto for F9 vs all the competitor rockets, but to an even more extreme degree.
I just don't think SpaceX magically ends up dominating the world so massively in this sector if they don't have some actual serious engineering advantage of some kind. This kind of outcome differential over the course of the same (or in some cases, shorter, for SpaceX) timeline doesn't just happen by accident.
Btw, on a sidenote, just want to say, from my perspective there is some strange irony or something going on here in this thread, in that I'm in the strange role of coming across as some huge SpaceX fanboy, when, normally, I've had to play the opposite role, of playing devil's advocate, whenever the topic comes up about Blue Origin or other SpaceX competitors, of trying to convince everyone not to hate the competition too infinitely, and that it would be good for SpaceX to have some serious competition in rocketry, in the long run, and that not all of its competitors are "pure garbage" or anywhere near it, just, not as good as SpaceX at the moment, but not "garbage" by any stretch, and so on. Then I leave for a few months, and come back, and suddenly pointing out that SpaceX is pretty obviously the most dominant team of engineers in this sector by a wide margin is super controversial or something.
I'm not even saying it as a debate tactic, like, honestly, I genuinely, seriously didn't even think that aspect would even be considered controversial or debated in the slightest. I figured that part would be taken as a blatantly obvious given, and that the whole debate in here would be to do with the game theory stuff relating to helping out a competitor on a combined mission in regards to Artemis, and how it relates to the Mars timeline and so on. I'm genuinely super surprised that the engineering team skill ability disparity thing ended up being the main sticking point of the thread. That's just bizarre to me. I don't mind it, honestly, it would be pretty boring if people just agreed with everything I said all the time. I just really didn't expect *that* specific point to be the point that most people would disagree about.
>I just don't think SpaceX magically ends up dominating the world so massively in this sector if they don't have some actual serious engineering advantage of some kind
that advantage? landing boosters. re-usability. being small and vertically integrated compared to Lockheed and Boeing doesnt hurt either.
Yea, I mean, that was one of the huge forks in the road that got the ball rolling down a very different and much better path than everyone else.
But, once that turning point was passed, let's be serious here, SpaceX has pretty clearly gotten a massively disproportionate amount of the cream of the crop of engineering talent of the sector compared to its competitors this past decade or so, and ever increasingly so over the course of that decade, more and more each year than the year before it.
Those key decisions were crucial, of course, and are what enabled those other edges to develop in their aftermath. But, there were additional things, like talent disparities in hiring in the aftermath, that came thereafter. Not just purely the rewards reaped from the raw key decisions purely in and of themselves, alone.
Not to even mention the sum is greater than its parts effects of putting such a large amount of the pinnacle of aerospace engineering talent all together, working on problems together, discussing/debating the most cutting edge problems together and succeeding at these things together for the past decade.
They are basically the 1927 Yankees of engineering right now. And people are acting like if the Yankees Murderer's Row had DH'd into the top of the batting lineup for the 1927 Detroit Tigers, the Detroit Tigers still would've gone 82 and 71 that year, because the '27 Yankees used hickory bats and the Tigers used ash-wood bats or had a differently shaped stadium or what have you. Yea right.
not a sports guy at all, but yeah.... spacex is good at hiring folks.
but the small and vertically integrated thing is equally important, IMO. allows spacex to offer services at eye-popping prices and still make a profit.
I don't think you will find a soul here that doesn't think SpaceX have done (and are doing) an amazing job. The controversial point is saying it's because their engineers are better when it most likely has way more to do with their engineers getting the freedom and financing to actually do the job which is (in all honesty) a very unusual situation 🤷
Yea, I mean, I think that has a significant effect as well. I just thought it was also considered obvious/non-controversial of a thing that SpaceX hired a disproportionately large amount of the cream of the crop of best up and coming engineers for the past decade or so, and so also had a major advantage in the skills/talent department as well, COMBINED with the stuff you mentioned making the gap over the competition all the greater than it otherwise would've been.
(And the two are of course strongly related, in that the *reason* SpaceX was able to hire such a disproportionate amount of the pinnacle of aerospace engineering talent, was because of the thing you just said. That was why a lot of the best of the best wanted to work at SpaceX rather than old space companies in the past decade or so)
>But, on the other hand, SpaceX probably doesn't want Artemis to keep getting delayed, either, and wants the timeline to speed up, not slow down, if possible.
Loool, SpaceX wants that others get delayed, so they don't get singled out as to "the thing that is holding back Artemis", even though they got to do the hardest job, on a shoestring budget and on an unrealistic timeline ( something that finally even the NASA director admitted).
IMHO we will either see Artemis 2 get delayed another full year, and Artemis 3 in late 2027-28,
or get a much more reasonable Artemis 2 as a test for the Starship-orion configuration, like Apollo 7-9, then make Artemis 3 rehearsal for that landing and a crewed test of Orion around the moon, mashing up Apollo 8 and 10, and then with Artemis IV do the landing.
Yea, I think this is a good point actually.
A mild to moderate delay probably plays to SpaceX's favor, for the reason you said.
I still think a *severe* delay, on the other hand, would be bad (once its severe enough to outlast even the added time-cushion SpaceX wants for developing the lander), so, there is a tipping point past a certain point with it.
So, yea, depends just how severe of a delay it would be.
But overall, I think you are probably correct.
Probably not unless asked. And SpaceX uses a proprietary heat shield based off the NASA PICA designs. LockMart and Orion use a totally different formulation called Avcoat. So SpaceXs Expertise isn’t that useful unless LockMart decides to totally redesign the heat shield.
Also I have a feeling that there might be a little bit of Schedule Chicken going on right now between Orion/Lander/Suits. All of which seem to have issues per the GAO/NASAIG that could delay the program but none of them want to come out as the one that will delay the landing.
Like just for SpaceX and the lander they need to
* design and fly the tanker variant of starship
* design and fly the depot variant
* fill up the depot variant
* build and fly the lander with refueling and landing tests
* prove out large zerog cryogenic propellant transfer (prob before tanker and depot designs are finalized)
* get an amended EIS for Boca to allow for more flights (once FAA says they can launch without the full review process every single time) OR get KSC/CCSFS launch pads up and running
So there is still a lot of open items for the lander that a delay on Orion could make SpaceX look better because they were the one that delayed the program it was the capsule that started design in like 06 and has only flown twice in the almost 2 decades that has issues.
If there weren't any politics or other factors involved other than just pure technical aspects of the mission, I would agree.
But, as things are in the real world, I just don't think NASA/The U.S. government is gonna allow Orion to get cut out and replaced with Dragon, for the Artemis missions.
I bet it'll happen. Orion is a lemon. Eventually its going to come down to cut Orion, or let SpaceX have a private mission to moon or Mars before Artemis II. Then they'll cut Orion and brand SpaceX's mission as Artemis 2 as the least embarrassing outcome.
How old are you? Why would SpaceX volunteer engineers to help another company fix their system? SpaceX doesn’t know anything about Orion. They would be basically useless. Holy fuck…
>Why would SpaceX volunteer engineers to help another company fix their system?
That is exactly the question OP poses to be discussed. So discuss it with an actual answer. The heat shield technical knowledge and research of one space capsule is almost certainly applicable to another capsule. (A capsule, we're not talking Shuttle or Starship here.)
It's that simple. Cursing over a simple post and making someone out as a child without actually answering the question is about as childish as it gets.
>Why would SpaceX volunteer engineers to help another company fix their system?
Well, Elon seems pretty blatantly to want the Artemis timeline to speed up (and by proxy, the Mars missions, since overall timeline-wise, it hinges on it to some degree, for NASA/political reasons, and also tech reasons to some degree) rather than slow down.
A normal CEO in his shoes wouldn't want this, since it increases the risk of his own company being seen as the hold-up, if the timeline went quick enough that we ended up having to wait on the Starship-lander to be finished to use in a mission.
But Elon doesn't seem to care about that, and seems to genuinely want everything to speed up as much as possible, so he can get the Artemis stuff out of the way ASAP, so that NASA/U.S. government will allow him to get the Mars show on the road sooner than it otherwise would if the Artemis timeline went slower overall.
>SpaceX doesn’t know anything about Orion. **They would be basically useless**
I strongly doubt they would be "basically useless" to the Orion team. I wouldn't be surprised if they could shave a year or more off the timeline if they helped out (depending on how egotistical the Orion team was about accepting help, that is).
Based on the disparity of Dragon vs Starliner (ULA), and F9 vs The World, it seems that SpaceX genuinely is better at space machine type of stuff than everyone else by a pretty wide margin right now.
I don't think it is all just random chance and luck. I think the results in recent years tell us a lot, even if we don't know the exact causes behind the scenes, we know they're happening, due to the enormous disparity in results.
Even if they wanted to, Starship engineers would probably make suggestions to change stuff, stuff that has been already engineered into Orion, stuff that would cost a billion dollars to change now.
SpaceX is using NASA technology with PICA. That was used for the Stardust sample capsule with 14 km/s entry speed which is well above 11 km/s for return from the Moon.
PICA is denser than Avcoat so Orion would grow in mass a bit but it is the obvious solution. From a practical point of view co-manifested payloads with Orion may never be a thing so a bit of mass growth is not the end of the world,
Nah. Dragon technically can re-enter with moon return speeds but heat shield would be single use.
Just upgrade life support and they can replace Orion with a dragon.
So far, not a single SpaceX mission has returned to Earth at lunar speeds. SpaceX has no experience or advantage in this matter. They better focus on the problems with the Starship's heat shield which is already destroyed before they even attempt to deorbit
Eh... I'm not sure this matters so much, given that it applies fairly strongly to the current crop at Lockheed as well, and SpaceX seems to have a better overall engineering team at this point than they do, at the moment, in the more general sense, by a wide margin.
As an analogy:
Let's say for some reason no humans had climbed Mt. Everest for the past 50+ years, and there was some regular, average guy who was Edmund Hillary's grandson saying he wanted to climb it, and then there was some freak athlete who won the Olympic Decathlon just recently, but had no friends or family who ever climbed Everest, who said his new focus starting right now was to climb Mt. Everest. And let's say he also just recently climbed Lhotse and Nuptse and some other Himalayan peaks, in record time, smashing all kinds of records and doing it better than anyone else ever has. And say Hillary's grandson barely even managed to climb Lhotse or Nuptse at all, let alone in world-changing fashion of destroying the competition by a mile the way the freak guy just did. I would suspect the athletic freak guy would have a significant edge over Hillary's grandson, in such a scenario, even though he hadn't climbed Everest before, and the other guy's grandfather did.
But Orion literally just "climbed the Everest" and before that on EFT-1 "climbed higher peak than competitor" (though it was different heat shield design, with honeycomb structure iirc). And they tested reentry on Artemis I with significantly higher speed than nominal and though heat shield was damaged it still was within safety margins.
If anything I think SpaceX might want to get full access to A1 reentry data and learn from it.
I've been following SpaceX and the Artemis program before it was called the Artemis program and been on this sub for a lot of years. You've laid out an interesting discussion and I'm sorry you're being treated so roughly. One thing that sucks about this sub is the "blood in the water" effect. If a number of people start responding harshly then more and more do, and down votes are clicked with barely a thought.
In a practical sense I think it's likely the SpaceX team could aid Lockheed Martin, if LM could swallow their pride. (It'd be a big ego bruise for anyone.) Since NASA said the underlying problem hasn't been found it might not be fruitful to dig deep into extensively redoing the LM design, though, especially timewise. It'd almost certainly be easier to build a new version of a SpaceX heat shield to fit onto Orion. It seems it would be straightforward to upgrade the current SX shield to handle lunar return velocities. The devil is in the phrase "seems". I'm just an armchair engineer.
So... would SpaceX want to withhold this intellectual property? There are clear patent laws that are well enforced in the space industry. A large number of engineers have worked for more than one of the major companies. From some things I've read, for top engineers it's the norm to make a move or moves. Specific IP that's been used quickly results in a lawsuit. I don't think the tech SpaceX might provide to LM will then be disseminated across the industry. And that may be moot. Elon Musk has had Tesla release several important patents because it advances the EV movement overall - and because he believes the best approach to competition is to advance a lot faster than one's rivals. SpaceX is committed to Starship and I'm 99.999% sure I've read that its tiles are made of a different material than the PICA-X used on Dragon. SX plans to phase out use of Dragon as soon as it can. Even if some demand arises for a 10 person LEO capsule SX will be able to produce one a lot faster than anyone else. Caveat: the same research base behind PICA-X might be involved in the Starship tiles. Only someone familiar with the programs and deeply knowledgeable about how the intellectual property would flow to LM can truly answer that - and that's not the kind of answer one can get on reddit, lol.
Hell no. It would be crazy for SX to stick their toe in this disaster.
I was hoping SpaceX would steer clear of Artemis since even before this it was a very expensive, high risk concept for maybe a 10 day lunar surface stay every 2 years. But they just can't say no to government money.
And Lockheed is going to pay how much to SpaceX for this? SpaceX is a commercial Space company. Lockheed Martin is a socialized corporation. That is the government pays for everything Lockheed does. SpaceX would no sooner help Lockheed than dump its Falcon rockets in the water and not reuse them.
I don't really see SpaceX expertise being helpful here. Orion is too different, and their approach is too different to yield helpful inputs. Not dissing either team but they lack the necessary foundation for the exchange of ideas.
Nah if Orion is broke, make a contract proposal to use the proven Dragon for Earth to Orbit passenger delivery, and have them load up onto an HLS in Earth orbit. Use the HLS for Earth Moon transfer. Refuel in Luna orbit from another depot, then proceed with landing as planned.
HLS as planned and certified for Artimis IV landing, can do all of Artimis mission without Orion, all you need is a certified Earth launch/return vehicle for crew... and Dragon is right there in regular flawless use.
I don’t think people realize that SoaceX has by far the most heat shield experience in the world at this point. They operate the only mission capable heat shield in America currently and are developing the largest heat shield ever.
I am seeing comments about how it is different coming from the moon, but the engineers that did that are all dead or over 80. China, Russia, Boeing, SpaceX. Those are the entities with current heat shield experience, who you gonna call? A guy who worked on the shuttle 40 years ago?
It has been 18 months since launch and they want to fly the fix in 16 months, but they have yet to identify the source of the problem!!!
Hell yeah, it is reasonable to ask if SpaceX would help out. And Orion isn’t any kind of serious competitor to SpaceX. If anything, each Orion mission mandates additional SpaceX missions.
I think a lot of people fundamentally misunderstand SpaceX as a company, because they are used to the business practices of publicly traded corporations who have fiduciary obligations to maximize shareholder value. Anybody who is wondering when SpaceX will IPO or if they will spin off an IPO for starlink is fundamentally misunderstanding the company’s mission. SpaceX is not designed to maximize profits from investment. As a private business it is not required to. SpaceX’s company wide responsibility is to making humans a multi-planetary species. If the company decides that sending engineers to help solve the heat shield issue on Orion will be the best use of that resource towards making humans multi-planetary, then that is where their responsibility lies.
Now, just to clarify, obviously SpaceX making a profit is part of becoming a multi-planetary species, they aren’t trying to not make money. But, they are looking to do it in the manner that gets them to Mars most efficiently. More money to them means more money to engineering hardware for Mars. But, they are getting a big chunk of money to do engineering work towards that goal from the Artemis program. If that funding is at risk of being delayed and SpaceX assets can be used to prevent the delay, management actually has a responsibility to the investors to provide that assistance.
I think what it will really come down to is 2 factors:
1. Is the heat shield being used on Orion a system that SpaceX engineers actually have the necessary expertise to address or is it fundamentally different in a way that their experience does not apply?
2. Does Lockheed actually want help from SpaceX and are they willing to be seen accepting that help?
If both of those are a yes, then I don’t see how a faithfully acting executive could turn down the request, unless SpaceX is in a spot where their own heat shield research is seen as more of a bottleneck than the HLS program moving forward towards Mars.
an interesting article from Berger about Starliner.
https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/05/the-surprise-is-not-that-boeing-lost-commercial-crew-but-that-it-finished-at-all/
Obviously no come on
What makes you think SpaceX engineers know more about moon-earth re-entry heat shields than NASA and Lockheet engineers? (high velocity re-entry is a very different beast than LEO re-entry). This whole premise that SpaceX are the only ones that can have capable engineers seems a bit unhinged to me.
I was thinking they have more experience with heatshields in general as they launched dragon 2 like 23 times and built 9 of them as opposed to Orion that had 4 of them built and 2 of them launched.
True, but none of that really matters when talking about lunar return heatshields - it's a totally different regime. I totally agree that getting more data matters, and it really sucks for the Orion team that they don't have the chance to fly a few more test articles, but that's not the engineers fault.
PICA was used for Stardust at 14 km/s so is totally suitable for Lunar return at 11 km/s.
All these aerospace companies use the same pool of labor, the fact that one of them is much more efficient, faster, cheaper than the rest means they are doing something wrong, and more specifically, they have shitty management and distorted incentives after many years of monopoly, lobbying and fat defense contracts. Here fits well Napoleon's quote about lions. If you have the best engineers in the world, but the management is crap, you'll build crap with a 300% overbudget and 10 years late and a good manager can even make idiots do something useful more or less within budget and deadlines
My reasoning would be based on how much better of a job SpaceX did at creating Dragon compared to Boeing creating Starliner, during their parallel developments. (Boeing being 1/2 of ULA, and Lockheed being the other half). And, to a lesser degree, how much better SpaceX has been at making F9 rockets than any other company or country has been at making rockets, in recent years (less directly related than SpaceX's demonstrated capsule proficiency with Dragon, but still indirectly says a thing or two about their skills in general). I don't think someone has to be a SpaceX fanboy at this point to recognize that SpaceX has pulled pretty far ahead of Lockheed/Boeing in this general territory. I'm sure you could play pretty good devil's advocate with a variety of counter-arguments if you wanted to, but, I mean, c'mon, it's pretty obvious at this point who is better at it by now. It's not even close anymore. edit: the funny thing about this is I feel like I'm in a Twlight Zone episode right now, given that normally I'm the one on here playing devil's advocate to people who are being overly SpaceX Fanboys, and end up getting downvoted for saying stuff like I hope Blue Origin and other competitors do well and become stronger competitors in coming years. ------------------------------------------------------------- >This whole premise that SpaceX are the only ones that can have capable engineers seems a bit unhinged to me. I don't think SpaceX are the only ones that can have capable engineers, and I agree that would be unhinged if that was my position. I'm not viewing this as black-and-white/all-or-nothing, though. I'm viewing it as a sliding scale, with SpaceX being significantly better at space engineering type of stuff than them and everyone else in the world, right now. My point isn't that Lockheed would never be able to do it at all. Given enough time and money, obviously they'll eventually do something with it, and probably even succeed. My point was that SpaceX pretty obviously has the best engineering team in this sector in the world right now, by a wide margin, based on results in recent years, and even at capsules (Dragon) even if not identical scenario, still, seems extremely likely that they would be able to help out quite a bit and probably speed things up/improve things. I'm genuinely surprised people disagree with that aspect. I figured most people would take that aspect as obvious, and that the debate/discussion area would be more to do with whether or not SpaceX would want to help out a competitor company, if it meant speeding up the overall Artemis (and thus, Mars, thereafter) timeline (which Elon clearly wants). I didn't think the main argument point would be about whether SpaceX is better at this stuff/has anything to offer than these other companies that it has blatantly soared way, way past in recent years by such an extreme margin. I am seriously surprised anyone has strong disagreements about *that* part of the overall topic.
> (high velocity re-entry is a very different beast than LEO re-entry) the relevant bit from dgkimpton's comment. comparing F9/dragon to orion or starliner is classic apples vs. oranges.
One of the reasons Dragon was so robust is that it was designed for interplanetary reentry speeds. Way back when it was first designed, they still had designs on using it for red dragon and other missions. I don’t know if the extra heat shielding was retained for D2, but that was one reason it was highly reusable for LEO missions.
>is classic apples vs. oranges. Disagree. More like somewhere between green apples vs red apples, and oranges vs tangerines. If the best red-apple grower, or tangerine grower in the history of the planet (by a wide margin) decided to help out a mediocre green apple grower, or orange-grower, I think his farming skills that he was better at on a similar fruit than anyone else on earth, would be of pretty significant value, at the minimum. I don't think he would show up and be like "eh, slightly different fruit. No clue. Shrug. I dunno." and just sit there uselessly. That seems extremely unlikely to me. Much more likely if the other grower welcomed his help and caught him up to speed on the technical situation at hand, he would have a treasure trove of valuable things to say and do that the other person, who was a significantly worse farmer overall, didn't know how to do as well, or what have you.
despite the new info about the state of orion's heatshield, it did make it. so they are "in the lead". sure spacex is movin fast and doing great stuff but... they have only been to low earth orbit. and again, re-entry speeds from the moon are far different than the speeds from low earth orbit. i also dont think its a problem of lack of engineering skill/knowledge on lockheed or boeing's part. its the very structure of the corporation and managment style.
My point was that SpaceX pretty obviously has the best engineering team in this sector in the world right now, by a wide margin... That's a bit of a stretch. They probably have the least risk averse management and the most agile management, however, you've no idea what constraints the engineers at Lockheed or NASA are working under - they might be absolute rockstars chained down by paperwork and admin. I don't know, but then neither do you. Claiming SpaceX engineering is better than NASA engineering without a shred of evidence is ridiculous. The only thing we can see by their success is that the *company as a whole* is better geared to getting amazing results quickly.
>I don't know, but then neither do you. Claiming SpaceX engineering is better than NASA engineering without a shred of evidence is ridiculous. Eh, I think at a certain point, the proof is in the pudding. The results matter. They outdid the rest of the world by such a huge margin in recent years, that I think that just HAS to mean something pretty significant about genuine difference and skills advantage of some very tangible sort between them and all these other teams. And I mean, it's not like, say, Boeing's Starliner team was unfairly chained down while SpaceX's Dragon team was given free reign. If anything the government was trying to give Boeing more aid and go-ahead and favoritism than SpaceX rather than the other way around, during their developments, and SpaceX still blew past them with ease anyway. And then ditto for F9 vs all the competitor rockets, but to an even more extreme degree. I just don't think SpaceX magically ends up dominating the world so massively in this sector if they don't have some actual serious engineering advantage of some kind. This kind of outcome differential over the course of the same (or in some cases, shorter, for SpaceX) timeline doesn't just happen by accident. Btw, on a sidenote, just want to say, from my perspective there is some strange irony or something going on here in this thread, in that I'm in the strange role of coming across as some huge SpaceX fanboy, when, normally, I've had to play the opposite role, of playing devil's advocate, whenever the topic comes up about Blue Origin or other SpaceX competitors, of trying to convince everyone not to hate the competition too infinitely, and that it would be good for SpaceX to have some serious competition in rocketry, in the long run, and that not all of its competitors are "pure garbage" or anywhere near it, just, not as good as SpaceX at the moment, but not "garbage" by any stretch, and so on. Then I leave for a few months, and come back, and suddenly pointing out that SpaceX is pretty obviously the most dominant team of engineers in this sector by a wide margin is super controversial or something. I'm not even saying it as a debate tactic, like, honestly, I genuinely, seriously didn't even think that aspect would even be considered controversial or debated in the slightest. I figured that part would be taken as a blatantly obvious given, and that the whole debate in here would be to do with the game theory stuff relating to helping out a competitor on a combined mission in regards to Artemis, and how it relates to the Mars timeline and so on. I'm genuinely super surprised that the engineering team skill ability disparity thing ended up being the main sticking point of the thread. That's just bizarre to me. I don't mind it, honestly, it would be pretty boring if people just agreed with everything I said all the time. I just really didn't expect *that* specific point to be the point that most people would disagree about.
>I just don't think SpaceX magically ends up dominating the world so massively in this sector if they don't have some actual serious engineering advantage of some kind that advantage? landing boosters. re-usability. being small and vertically integrated compared to Lockheed and Boeing doesnt hurt either.
Yea, I mean, that was one of the huge forks in the road that got the ball rolling down a very different and much better path than everyone else. But, once that turning point was passed, let's be serious here, SpaceX has pretty clearly gotten a massively disproportionate amount of the cream of the crop of engineering talent of the sector compared to its competitors this past decade or so, and ever increasingly so over the course of that decade, more and more each year than the year before it. Those key decisions were crucial, of course, and are what enabled those other edges to develop in their aftermath. But, there were additional things, like talent disparities in hiring in the aftermath, that came thereafter. Not just purely the rewards reaped from the raw key decisions purely in and of themselves, alone. Not to even mention the sum is greater than its parts effects of putting such a large amount of the pinnacle of aerospace engineering talent all together, working on problems together, discussing/debating the most cutting edge problems together and succeeding at these things together for the past decade. They are basically the 1927 Yankees of engineering right now. And people are acting like if the Yankees Murderer's Row had DH'd into the top of the batting lineup for the 1927 Detroit Tigers, the Detroit Tigers still would've gone 82 and 71 that year, because the '27 Yankees used hickory bats and the Tigers used ash-wood bats or had a differently shaped stadium or what have you. Yea right.
not a sports guy at all, but yeah.... spacex is good at hiring folks. but the small and vertically integrated thing is equally important, IMO. allows spacex to offer services at eye-popping prices and still make a profit.
I don't think you will find a soul here that doesn't think SpaceX have done (and are doing) an amazing job. The controversial point is saying it's because their engineers are better when it most likely has way more to do with their engineers getting the freedom and financing to actually do the job which is (in all honesty) a very unusual situation 🤷
Yea, I mean, I think that has a significant effect as well. I just thought it was also considered obvious/non-controversial of a thing that SpaceX hired a disproportionately large amount of the cream of the crop of best up and coming engineers for the past decade or so, and so also had a major advantage in the skills/talent department as well, COMBINED with the stuff you mentioned making the gap over the competition all the greater than it otherwise would've been. (And the two are of course strongly related, in that the *reason* SpaceX was able to hire such a disproportionate amount of the pinnacle of aerospace engineering talent, was because of the thing you just said. That was why a lot of the best of the best wanted to work at SpaceX rather than old space companies in the past decade or so)
>But, on the other hand, SpaceX probably doesn't want Artemis to keep getting delayed, either, and wants the timeline to speed up, not slow down, if possible. Loool, SpaceX wants that others get delayed, so they don't get singled out as to "the thing that is holding back Artemis", even though they got to do the hardest job, on a shoestring budget and on an unrealistic timeline ( something that finally even the NASA director admitted). IMHO we will either see Artemis 2 get delayed another full year, and Artemis 3 in late 2027-28, or get a much more reasonable Artemis 2 as a test for the Starship-orion configuration, like Apollo 7-9, then make Artemis 3 rehearsal for that landing and a crewed test of Orion around the moon, mashing up Apollo 8 and 10, and then with Artemis IV do the landing.
Yea, I think this is a good point actually. A mild to moderate delay probably plays to SpaceX's favor, for the reason you said. I still think a *severe* delay, on the other hand, would be bad (once its severe enough to outlast even the added time-cushion SpaceX wants for developing the lander), so, there is a tipping point past a certain point with it. So, yea, depends just how severe of a delay it would be. But overall, I think you are probably correct.
Probably not unless asked. And SpaceX uses a proprietary heat shield based off the NASA PICA designs. LockMart and Orion use a totally different formulation called Avcoat. So SpaceXs Expertise isn’t that useful unless LockMart decides to totally redesign the heat shield. Also I have a feeling that there might be a little bit of Schedule Chicken going on right now between Orion/Lander/Suits. All of which seem to have issues per the GAO/NASAIG that could delay the program but none of them want to come out as the one that will delay the landing. Like just for SpaceX and the lander they need to * design and fly the tanker variant of starship * design and fly the depot variant * fill up the depot variant * build and fly the lander with refueling and landing tests * prove out large zerog cryogenic propellant transfer (prob before tanker and depot designs are finalized) * get an amended EIS for Boca to allow for more flights (once FAA says they can launch without the full review process every single time) OR get KSC/CCSFS launch pads up and running So there is still a lot of open items for the lander that a delay on Orion could make SpaceX look better because they were the one that delayed the program it was the capsule that started design in like 06 and has only flown twice in the almost 2 decades that has issues.
Remember The Algorithm: Step 1: Question every requirement. Is Orion *really* required? No, cut Orion. The end.
If there weren't any politics or other factors involved other than just pure technical aspects of the mission, I would agree. But, as things are in the real world, I just don't think NASA/The U.S. government is gonna allow Orion to get cut out and replaced with Dragon, for the Artemis missions.
I bet it'll happen. Orion is a lemon. Eventually its going to come down to cut Orion, or let SpaceX have a private mission to moon or Mars before Artemis II. Then they'll cut Orion and brand SpaceX's mission as Artemis 2 as the least embarrassing outcome.
How old are you? Why would SpaceX volunteer engineers to help another company fix their system? SpaceX doesn’t know anything about Orion. They would be basically useless. Holy fuck…
>Why would SpaceX volunteer engineers to help another company fix their system? That is exactly the question OP poses to be discussed. So discuss it with an actual answer. The heat shield technical knowledge and research of one space capsule is almost certainly applicable to another capsule. (A capsule, we're not talking Shuttle or Starship here.)
It's that simple. Cursing over a simple post and making someone out as a child without actually answering the question is about as childish as it gets.
How ironic that your response smacks of immaturity. There is no need for such a rude and dismissive response. We are all friends here.
The man who asks a question is a fool for a minute, the man who does not ask is a fool for life.
>Why would SpaceX volunteer engineers to help another company fix their system? Well, Elon seems pretty blatantly to want the Artemis timeline to speed up (and by proxy, the Mars missions, since overall timeline-wise, it hinges on it to some degree, for NASA/political reasons, and also tech reasons to some degree) rather than slow down. A normal CEO in his shoes wouldn't want this, since it increases the risk of his own company being seen as the hold-up, if the timeline went quick enough that we ended up having to wait on the Starship-lander to be finished to use in a mission. But Elon doesn't seem to care about that, and seems to genuinely want everything to speed up as much as possible, so he can get the Artemis stuff out of the way ASAP, so that NASA/U.S. government will allow him to get the Mars show on the road sooner than it otherwise would if the Artemis timeline went slower overall. >SpaceX doesn’t know anything about Orion. **They would be basically useless** I strongly doubt they would be "basically useless" to the Orion team. I wouldn't be surprised if they could shave a year or more off the timeline if they helped out (depending on how egotistical the Orion team was about accepting help, that is). Based on the disparity of Dragon vs Starliner (ULA), and F9 vs The World, it seems that SpaceX genuinely is better at space machine type of stuff than everyone else by a pretty wide margin right now. I don't think it is all just random chance and luck. I think the results in recent years tell us a lot, even if we don't know the exact causes behind the scenes, we know they're happening, due to the enormous disparity in results.
Even if they wanted to, Starship engineers would probably make suggestions to change stuff, stuff that has been already engineered into Orion, stuff that would cost a billion dollars to change now.
Lockheed and NASA will figure it out, I'm pretty confident in that. The question is how much more time and money will it take?
SpaceX is using NASA technology with PICA. That was used for the Stardust sample capsule with 14 km/s entry speed which is well above 11 km/s for return from the Moon. PICA is denser than Avcoat so Orion would grow in mass a bit but it is the obvious solution. From a practical point of view co-manifested payloads with Orion may never be a thing so a bit of mass growth is not the end of the world,
Nah. Dragon technically can re-enter with moon return speeds but heat shield would be single use. Just upgrade life support and they can replace Orion with a dragon.
So far, not a single SpaceX mission has returned to Earth at lunar speeds. SpaceX has no experience or advantage in this matter. They better focus on the problems with the Starship's heat shield which is already destroyed before they even attempt to deorbit
> Starship's heat shield which is already destroyed before they even attempt to deorbit missing a few is not "destroyed".
chill
Eh... I'm not sure this matters so much, given that it applies fairly strongly to the current crop at Lockheed as well, and SpaceX seems to have a better overall engineering team at this point than they do, at the moment, in the more general sense, by a wide margin. As an analogy: Let's say for some reason no humans had climbed Mt. Everest for the past 50+ years, and there was some regular, average guy who was Edmund Hillary's grandson saying he wanted to climb it, and then there was some freak athlete who won the Olympic Decathlon just recently, but had no friends or family who ever climbed Everest, who said his new focus starting right now was to climb Mt. Everest. And let's say he also just recently climbed Lhotse and Nuptse and some other Himalayan peaks, in record time, smashing all kinds of records and doing it better than anyone else ever has. And say Hillary's grandson barely even managed to climb Lhotse or Nuptse at all, let alone in world-changing fashion of destroying the competition by a mile the way the freak guy just did. I would suspect the athletic freak guy would have a significant edge over Hillary's grandson, in such a scenario, even though he hadn't climbed Everest before, and the other guy's grandfather did.
But Orion literally just "climbed the Everest" and before that on EFT-1 "climbed higher peak than competitor" (though it was different heat shield design, with honeycomb structure iirc). And they tested reentry on Artemis I with significantly higher speed than nominal and though heat shield was damaged it still was within safety margins. If anything I think SpaceX might want to get full access to A1 reentry data and learn from it.
I really, really like this analogy.
I've been following SpaceX and the Artemis program before it was called the Artemis program and been on this sub for a lot of years. You've laid out an interesting discussion and I'm sorry you're being treated so roughly. One thing that sucks about this sub is the "blood in the water" effect. If a number of people start responding harshly then more and more do, and down votes are clicked with barely a thought. In a practical sense I think it's likely the SpaceX team could aid Lockheed Martin, if LM could swallow their pride. (It'd be a big ego bruise for anyone.) Since NASA said the underlying problem hasn't been found it might not be fruitful to dig deep into extensively redoing the LM design, though, especially timewise. It'd almost certainly be easier to build a new version of a SpaceX heat shield to fit onto Orion. It seems it would be straightforward to upgrade the current SX shield to handle lunar return velocities. The devil is in the phrase "seems". I'm just an armchair engineer. So... would SpaceX want to withhold this intellectual property? There are clear patent laws that are well enforced in the space industry. A large number of engineers have worked for more than one of the major companies. From some things I've read, for top engineers it's the norm to make a move or moves. Specific IP that's been used quickly results in a lawsuit. I don't think the tech SpaceX might provide to LM will then be disseminated across the industry. And that may be moot. Elon Musk has had Tesla release several important patents because it advances the EV movement overall - and because he believes the best approach to competition is to advance a lot faster than one's rivals. SpaceX is committed to Starship and I'm 99.999% sure I've read that its tiles are made of a different material than the PICA-X used on Dragon. SX plans to phase out use of Dragon as soon as it can. Even if some demand arises for a 10 person LEO capsule SX will be able to produce one a lot faster than anyone else. Caveat: the same research base behind PICA-X might be involved in the Starship tiles. Only someone familiar with the programs and deeply knowledgeable about how the intellectual property would flow to LM can truly answer that - and that's not the kind of answer one can get on reddit, lol.
Hell no. It would be crazy for SX to stick their toe in this disaster. I was hoping SpaceX would steer clear of Artemis since even before this it was a very expensive, high risk concept for maybe a 10 day lunar surface stay every 2 years. But they just can't say no to government money.
And Lockheed is going to pay how much to SpaceX for this? SpaceX is a commercial Space company. Lockheed Martin is a socialized corporation. That is the government pays for everything Lockheed does. SpaceX would no sooner help Lockheed than dump its Falcon rockets in the water and not reuse them.
I don't really see SpaceX expertise being helpful here. Orion is too different, and their approach is too different to yield helpful inputs. Not dissing either team but they lack the necessary foundation for the exchange of ideas.
Nah if Orion is broke, make a contract proposal to use the proven Dragon for Earth to Orbit passenger delivery, and have them load up onto an HLS in Earth orbit. Use the HLS for Earth Moon transfer. Refuel in Luna orbit from another depot, then proceed with landing as planned. HLS as planned and certified for Artimis IV landing, can do all of Artimis mission without Orion, all you need is a certified Earth launch/return vehicle for crew... and Dragon is right there in regular flawless use.
I don’t think people realize that SoaceX has by far the most heat shield experience in the world at this point. They operate the only mission capable heat shield in America currently and are developing the largest heat shield ever. I am seeing comments about how it is different coming from the moon, but the engineers that did that are all dead or over 80. China, Russia, Boeing, SpaceX. Those are the entities with current heat shield experience, who you gonna call? A guy who worked on the shuttle 40 years ago? It has been 18 months since launch and they want to fly the fix in 16 months, but they have yet to identify the source of the problem!!! Hell yeah, it is reasonable to ask if SpaceX would help out. And Orion isn’t any kind of serious competitor to SpaceX. If anything, each Orion mission mandates additional SpaceX missions. I think a lot of people fundamentally misunderstand SpaceX as a company, because they are used to the business practices of publicly traded corporations who have fiduciary obligations to maximize shareholder value. Anybody who is wondering when SpaceX will IPO or if they will spin off an IPO for starlink is fundamentally misunderstanding the company’s mission. SpaceX is not designed to maximize profits from investment. As a private business it is not required to. SpaceX’s company wide responsibility is to making humans a multi-planetary species. If the company decides that sending engineers to help solve the heat shield issue on Orion will be the best use of that resource towards making humans multi-planetary, then that is where their responsibility lies. Now, just to clarify, obviously SpaceX making a profit is part of becoming a multi-planetary species, they aren’t trying to not make money. But, they are looking to do it in the manner that gets them to Mars most efficiently. More money to them means more money to engineering hardware for Mars. But, they are getting a big chunk of money to do engineering work towards that goal from the Artemis program. If that funding is at risk of being delayed and SpaceX assets can be used to prevent the delay, management actually has a responsibility to the investors to provide that assistance. I think what it will really come down to is 2 factors: 1. Is the heat shield being used on Orion a system that SpaceX engineers actually have the necessary expertise to address or is it fundamentally different in a way that their experience does not apply? 2. Does Lockheed actually want help from SpaceX and are they willing to be seen accepting that help? If both of those are a yes, then I don’t see how a faithfully acting executive could turn down the request, unless SpaceX is in a spot where their own heat shield research is seen as more of a bottleneck than the HLS program moving forward towards Mars.
an interesting article from Berger about Starliner. https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/05/the-surprise-is-not-that-boeing-lost-commercial-crew-but-that-it-finished-at-all/