I sincerely hope this doesn’t destroy his career.
His career is on YouTube these days, he'll be fine.
Yes he's done a lot with NASA in the past but even if they blackballed him completely (unlikely) it's not the end of the world.
I was scared To say this to NASA (But I said it anyway) – Smarter Every Day
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Re: I was scared To say this to NASA (But I said it anyway) – Smarter Every Day
#32He seems really worried about offending people and hurting his relationships with NASA execs. I wonder if NASA people are more prickly, less, or the same in terms of taking negative feedback as compared to programmers and hackers. I suspect since we spend all day with compilers telling us we made silly errors, we're a bit more inured to criticism than the general public.
Really doubt coders are much better at taking negative criticism than the general population haha.
Re: I was scared To say this to NASA (But I said it anyway) – Smarter Every Day
#33He seems really worried about offending people and hurting his relationships with NASA execs. I wonder if NASA people are more prickly, less, or the same in terms of taking negative feedback as compared to programmers and hackers. I suspect since we spend all day with compilers telling us we made silly errors, we're a bit more inured to criticism than the general public.
Really doubt coders are much better at taking negative criticism than the general population haha.
They definitely aren't. If anything I'd say worse. There are a couple of people I've had to work with who took any suggestion for changing anything as a personal attack.
Re: I was scared To say this to NASA (But I said it anyway) – Smarter Every Day
#34My TLDW: He's (not so) indirectly critical of Space X's Starship program and tribal groupthink. He may be "scared" of NASA because he's calling out one of their giant Artemis contracts. Some longer takeaways: - Simplify. We went to the moon 50+ years ago, but we are reinventing the wheel in some significant ways in Artemis. Why? We are supposedly going to the moon in two years, but we have never attempted a cryogenic…
Idk how you took away that he was criticizing the Starship program at all. SpaceX pivots designs on a swivel, conducts tons of incremental tests, and ends up succeeding at the claimed impossible time and time again. If anything, NASA should be taking a cue from them. He’s being directly critical of Artemis and Orion/SLS, which is not at all built that way, was basically architected by politics, and will probably not…
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Re: I was scared To say this to NASA (But I said it anyway) – Smarter Every Day
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
Q: 'How many Starship launches are needed to execute the Artemis III lunar landing?' NASA: 'We don't know but at least 15' Video: 'Oh well that's a huge problem to have a complex project like this and we don't even have an exact answer'
Isn’t this disingenuous? As far as I can tell, Starship can make it to the lunar surface with a significant payload without refueling. The refueling launches are only required if you want to maximize the payload per lunar trip.
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Re: I was scared To say this to NASA (But I said it anyway) – Smarter Every Day
#36My TLDW: He's (not so) indirectly critical of Space X's Starship program and tribal groupthink. He may be "scared" of NASA because he's calling out one of their giant Artemis contracts. Some longer takeaways: - Simplify. We went to the moon 50+ years ago, but we are reinventing the wheel in some significant ways in Artemis. Why? We are supposedly going to the moon in two years, but we have never attempted a cryogenic…
> We went to the moon 50+ years ago, but we are reinventing the wheel in some significant ways in Artemis. Why? Because if we do it the same way we did 50+ years ago, we learn absolutely nothing and the whole thing is a pointless waste of money. In order to progress and learn and improve you must do things you've never done before. You must be ambitious and you must attempt things that are difficult and will probably…
> Because if we do it the same way we did 50+ years ago, we learn absolutely nothing and the whole thing is a pointless waste of money.
I would argue that if we did it exactly as we did back then that we would actually learn something because we forgot how to do so much. Literally can’t build an F-1 engine. It would take a ton of work just to recreate it.
However, the benefit is that we would then have plans (diagrams, specs, etc) to build it and one built we can iterate.
But building what we had is already a tremendous challenge because of the lost knowledge. Were it not for that, I would agree with you.
Re: I was scared To say this to NASA (But I said it anyway) – Smarter Every Day
#37Does NASA and their contractors have any true believers in leadership positions?
The complexity and safety concerns have been pointed out multiple times. I stopped paying attention because this program appears to be on bureaucratic autopilot. Government contractors deliver parts, without control or accountability about the performance of the entire system. The complexity indicates that Artemis will get cancelled once it fails to achieve goals. I hope nobody dies.
The top engineering talent of the U.S. is not in this program. Poor engineering leadership is inevitable. Artemis looks like a jobs program.
Re: I was scared To say this to NASA (But I said it anyway) – Smarter Every Day
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We went to the moon 50+ years ago, but we are reinventing the wheel in some significant ways in Artemis. Why? Because if we do it the same way we did 50+ years ago, we learn absolutely nothing and the whole thing is a pointless waste of money. In order to progress and learn and improve you must do things you've never done before. You must be ambitious and you must attempt things that are difficult and will probably…
> Because if we do it the same way we did 50+ years ago, we learn absolutely nothing and the whole thing is a pointless waste of money. I would argue that if we did it exactly as we did back then that we would actually learn something because we forgot how to do so much. Literally can’t build an F-1 engine. It would take a ton of work just to recreate it. However, the benefit is that we would then have plans (diagram…
I agree - there would be tremendous value in taking the 1960s approach, keeping it simple, and optimizing with modern electronics.
What they seem to be doing is a code rewrite while adding features.
Re: I was scared To say this to NASA (But I said it anyway) – Smarter Every Day
#39Good video, many good points.
"Focus on the mission"
What's the mission? We're "returning to the Moon" - what does it mean? Boots on the regolith? I somehow doubt that. USA did that half a century ago, we're supposed to go farther. What's the mission this time?
We're going to the Moon for a more serious, longer exploration this time, right? That's the mission, right? So, we want more people at the same time on the Moon, we want more payloads, we want longer duration stays on the surface - in fact, we state that we want to establish a permanent "outpost", to use it for exploration and future uses and as a basis of something - some Moon-based station even bigger and better. Right?
What options do we have now? Especially - do we have good options to do that now given that we plan to land in about 2 years?
It's kind of a hard technical question, and many would be tempted - with pretty good arguments - to answer negatively to that. Apollo program didn't have this as a good option - it actually turned out to have a tragedy of Apollo-1 and "successful failure" of Apollo-13 to have man on the Moon within 1960-s, with 6 landings. Should we say today "no, we don't have that kind of the urgency today, and we do have much more elevated safety requirements, so we should do things differently than what we can accomplish in 2 years"?
Maybe it's a good idea to still try to work as if we have some urgency. That is, we don't know when to land - we choose the time ourselves - and, frankly, this time the mission isn't just land and come back, as it was before - so we could justify a schedule slip. But how big? How long we can shift our plans to the right? Maybe we should do a waterfall-ish style rethinking and replanning and have a good, rather realistic plan for a modest sub-goal - say, analog of Apollo-10, or even Apollo-11, with "just" landing - but in such a way that it would lead us not to Apollo-17 and "bye", but towards the desired Moon outpost?
I don't quite agree with Destin's skepticism regarding multiple launches to refuel on LEO. We didn't do that before, but we didn't do a lot of things before Apollo which are practically taken for granted today, like successful launches from Earth and successful dockings. It's an interesting technical problem to solve for SpaceX, and I do believe they'll have a working solution (I'd probably start thinking with expandable flexible displacement device, inflatable with some gases, in the tanks), but I don't think it will be a show-stopper for orbital refueling plans.
However what Starship HLS brings us - and what other proposed solutions for lunar landers seems not to - is that transition from "boot on the regolith" missions to "permanent outpost" state. Yes it's harder to get to in the first place, and it's likely we won't have Starship HLS on the Moon in ~2 years, but it's still a pretty good component of what we need to have missions which go beyond Apollo achievements. So it might make sense to keep developing Starship, and LEO refueling, and if other Moon lander options will come first - good, if not, we'll have a landing system which is capable to scale for a bigger missions worthy of our century.
Re: I was scared To say this to NASA (But I said it anyway) – Smarter Every Day
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hey - you put in the time. Can you please help the rest of us out and post a TLDR?
TL;DR: - Apollo simple, Apollo success. - Artemis very complex, many unknowns. - Stated reasons for doing things are clearly not the real reasons. - Providing honest negative feedback seems to be the the key to success. - Artemis engineers might fear talking honestly. --- Personal comment: The timeline was fubar from the beginning. Remember when VP Mike Pence made a surprise announcement that NASA goes to the Moon 20…
Also:
- Apollo simple with many redundancies, design for failure, culture of risk management (after Apollo 1)
- Artemis very complex, many unknowns, unanswered questions, poor communication