361–370 of 420 posts
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Mini-factories in space could become a thing, supposedly a lot of industrial processes are only difficult because of friction and gravity.
I hear this touted a lot, but I never hear any specific examples. Do you know any?
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> But on the other hand we also no that leadership is incredibly important. I was with you until this part. The general common sense and MBA consensus is that leadership is important. And I suspect that it is more so with smaller companies. But the data seems mixed with large companies and some research seems to point out that high level leaders don’t have an appreciable impact.
Hard disagree. If you turn around the question, and ask how many amazingly successful companies that are at the very front of technology development and have strong growth, do it with bad leadership. Also there is a difference between short term and longterm. Most companies don't have the same leadership for 20+ years. Musk has been leading SpaceX for 20+ years and SpaceX has been consistently growing and consistentl…
Metaculus shows a 74% chance Starship reaches orbit in 2024, and a projected date of March 26 for the next launch. That seems pretty bullish to me! Next year (2025) will probably see the beginnings of practical customer usage of Starship. [0] https://www.metaculus.com/questions/?status=open&has_group=f...
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It’s not a foregone conclusion that it is a good thing. Some strategists like Peter Zeihan think if Ukraine “wins” it will prompt a defensive nuclear exchange from Russia. In that case, history might look at Musk differently.
The most likely "Ukraine wins" scenario is a frozen conflict (e.g. Korea) in which Ukrainians can feel relatively secure about their future albeit without regaining all of their prewar territory. In this scenario, a nuclear tantrum from Russia seems extremely unlikely. Rather, they would probably cope by claiming they won and the rest of Ukrainian territory was sour grapes anyway. Ukraine actually managing to retake…
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The downside is that rapid iteration doesn't always give the same insight in terms of scientific understanding. E.g., Design_A fails. We quickly pivot to Design_B, which works. However, we don't spend the time ultimately understanding why Design_A failed. This can be operationally great, but it can also risk conflating being lucky with being good. If you don't fundamentally understand why the thing failed the first t…
Some counter-points: 1) The failures themselves aren't all too complex (relatively speaking), and by the time the design made it to a flight vehicle it has been vetted for all immediately knowable risks. The rest you discover during flight. And even then the actual nature of the problems rarely (if at all) are esoteric or present breakthrough scientific discoveries. 2) Failure in rocket launches are catastrophic leav…
>The failures themselves aren't all too complex
The COPV failure mechanisms may not be terribly complex (e.g., voids or delamination), but managing the processes to mitigate them isn't.
>by the time the design made it to a flight vehicle it has been vetted for all immediately knowable risks.
SpaceX has already shown some bad processes that disprove this statement. E.g., the strut failure was due to poor supplier quality control, which is a relatively mature process in the industry. I'd give them the benefit of the doubt and say they've gotten better as they've matured as a company.
Failure in rocket launches are catastrophic leaving behind very little evidence.
The difference, I think, is that you are constraining this to launch failures. I'm talking about knowledge and data about individual component failures, from which you can derive the overall reliability of the design.
if a pivot means going away from a complex cloud of possible failures (known and discovered) to more robust, more deterministic, more reliable, you should do it.
I don't disagree that more simple tends to be more reliable. However, the point was that iteration doesn't necessarily advance knowledge of failure. I think these two points are not mutually exclusive. A good business case doesn't mean it makes for good engineering or good science.
At what level do you stop and go "this is fundamental enough"?
It's a tough question. But if you can't characterize why a failure mode occurred reasonably well, that's probably not good enough. So if they say, "We know voids in the COPV manufacturing process contributed to the failure" they should probably make sure they have a good understanding of why they occurred. (And maybe they have at this point)
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The downside is that rapid iteration doesn't always give the same insight in terms of scientific understanding. E.g., Design_A fails. We quickly pivot to Design_B, which works. However, we don't spend the time ultimately understanding why Design_A failed. This can be operationally great, but it can also risk conflating being lucky with being good. If you don't fundamentally understand why the thing failed the first t…
Luck tends to average out over many trials.
1) Risk on safety critical operations is not something people tend to want to roll the dice with.
2) The nature of the industry makes each trial pretty expensive. Over decades, the shuttle only had something like 135 launches and the managers still didn't have a good handle on the actual risk.
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The downside is that rapid iteration doesn't always give the same insight in terms of scientific understanding. E.g., Design_A fails. We quickly pivot to Design_B, which works. However, we don't spend the time ultimately understanding why Design_A failed. This can be operationally great, but it can also risk conflating being lucky with being good. If you don't fundamentally understand why the thing failed the first t…
> However, we don't spend the time ultimately understanding why Design_A failed Did you read TFA? It's about the release of an extensive report documenting why Design_A failed and what corrections are to be made regarding each specific failure.
Also, from the HN Guidelines: "Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "
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The downside is that rapid iteration doesn't always give the same insight in terms of scientific understanding. E.g., Design_A fails. We quickly pivot to Design_B, which works. However, we don't spend the time ultimately understanding why Design_A failed. This can be operationally great, but it can also risk conflating being lucky with being good. If you don't fundamentally understand why the thing failed the first t…
You're dealing with incredibly smart people here. Now of course perfect knowledge is almost impossible. But each of the designs is probably specked out with at least pluses and minuses and theory is as to whether or not the design is viable, which ways it will perform well or fail. This is just basic science: theory experiment result. And with all the documentation and instrumentation on the flights, The theories can…
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To put a finer point on it, those seem like rather blunt instruments for prediction compared to how risk is typically measured by aerospace reliability engineers.
Think of it like top down budget va bottom up budget. RAMS engineers do a bottom up analysis. However, it is fairly typical for the to be subtlety biased in a way that changes the final answer. (Usually by ‘rounding up’ on individual hazards). Top down takes an outside view and says ‘this looks like these other past projects. It should land in around the same place.’ I’ve found top down tends to be more accurate proj…
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Atlas 5 is already completely obsoleted by the Falcon Heavy which costs about half as much, for a reusable launch, and carries about 3x as much. But for Starship, most people don't seem to realize what a potential game changer this is. The goal for Starship is to get costs down to about 15x less than Falcon Heavy. When you can start sending stuff to space for a few dollars per pound, we're not talking about just prob…
> When you can start sending stuff to space for a few dollars per pound, we're not talking about just probes, but rather opening the door to the complete commercialization and exploitation of space. It almost sounds too good to be true or something.
That's a greater than 40x reduction in costs, which sounds too good to be true - but the problem is that even at $700/lb, that's still far too expensive to do anything remotely interesting. But take that down again and suddenly everything changes and we, more or less instantly, enter into an entirely new stage in human development and history. It'll be akin to the automobile. Henry Ford didn't make the first automobile, but he did make the first commercially affordable one. And, in the blink of an eye, society permanently changed because of it.
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As a fun aside, when doing a web search to grab the numbers above somehow this [1] ended up in the search results. It's from 2012 and somebody pondering SpaceX's wild claims of being able to get costs below $1,100 per kg ($1,500 inflation adjusted).