Vocal Voices

Who? Boeing.

Sky has an article talking about how SpaceX is embarrassing Boeing over their Starliner fiasco for getting crew to the ISS.

Whilst Sky did stick the knife in a bit, they could have stuck it in a LOT More. 4.2bn and still going. SpaceX was $2.5bn and it's done, they bring back Crew3 in a few days and NASA have bought more trips from SpaceX as Boeing continues to screw it up. All for the want of a bit of sticky stuff to seal the electrical connections on a whole bunch of critical valves. The valves corroded and stuck in position when they were opened, couldn't be closed.

Also Boeing is delivering the core stage for the $10bn Space Launch System (SLS), which failed wet dress rehearsal because, no you won't ever guess, valves which opened then stuck open on the core stage and the launch platform. It is rolling out again but the launch platform broke down then one of the covers over the windows fell off. SLS should have flown this month. Won't fly before September now.

Then if they wanted to troll Boeing even more, here are two images, one from the extremely Modern named "Starliner". The second one from the Crew Dragon.



Right out of the 1990's



Right out of the 21st century.

Boeing and NASA are inflicted with 'institution syndrome', they are not unique. They have been there 'forever' and so think they know everything; then along comes a start-up with new ideas. It's industrial evolution and it will not end. Goodbye Boeing, hello SpaceX, goodbye SpaceX, hello...??? One day SpaceX will be the 'institution' then SmartY will come along.

Sailing ships to bunker fuel burners, propellers to airbreathing jet engines, ICE to battery buggies, the quill to fountain pen to ball point - it's how things go.

Evolution is so Darwinian though. The latest space conference SpaceX was saying "the industry needs to gear up for our rate of lift to orbit". a.k.a known as Starship. The incumbents were sitting there glaring daggers at the SpaceX guy (not Musk), knowing their heavy lift capacity was scheduled at 1 per year (except 2026) at $1bn a go.

Suff wrote:Evolution is so Darwinian though.

But necessary. it's how things work. It's why we are not flying intercontinental biplanes, watching CRT TVs and making electricity from coal. Without it we would still be in caves.

Nothing is forever, not even the Universe or SpaceX.

I don't expect SpaceX to be forever. Although it will be for quite a long time. Reading on how SpaceX came to be, shows a business raised on government funds and unwilling to let go of that lifeline. Graduates who could look forward to the delights of designing a better space nut to fasten things for at least 7 years before being allowed to touch a "real" rocket. Moved to SpaceX and were encouraged to start building stuff, right away.

Eventually other businesses will come up and they will have SpaceX DNA and not NASA DNA. This will create furious competition at which point the existing dinosaurs will go extinct, all over again.

My take? SpaceX has more to worry about with action through the government to break them up than through actual competition. But with SpaceX being a private corporation, the government might just find they lost the most profitable space company ever rather than controlling its activities.

Long way to go for that one though.

Hmm, the AI you love so much will soon make you redundant. Androids will do the physical stuff like plugging in the ethernet cables and servicing your self-drive EV buggies, coding.

Hello Wall -E.

They won't, however, make me redundant because nobody is looking at PM or senior technical jobs. They are looking at cleaners and lift operators and, as you say, network cable management etc.

Software has already got rid of a whole load of network admins, we now have software defined networks where the entire backbone is one huge mesh on which VLAN's can be applied to almost every port without having to go and physically plug the boxes together.

Automation has already swung a mean scythe. Just imagine how many accountants spreadsheets got rid of? Or, even more, how many more were removed by spreadsheets and databases and a bit of smart programming.

This is something I often say to finance guys who bemoan IT as being just "too expensive". I sugest that we all go away and they can have 2,000 accountants to prepare the ONE and only ONE quarterly report.

They usually go away mumbling.

As for space? Currently a very niche area of our lives. About to become a whole load less niche.

Then the AI robot cleaner cum coder in Malaysia says "see you later, buddy".

"Humans, not even EUmans or even sovereign UKmans are needed in our brave new world", so said iRobot 7 of 9.

"If only we could climb stairs" said Davros the Dalek leader "we could rule the Universe"

Tip of the iceberg.

However one thing remains true. The level of original thought and inventiveness required to do the job sets the barrier for AI. The more originality the less AI is able to do the work.

So pushing a brush is easy, politics is impossible because most humans don't understand the full range of human interactions and manipulation.

It is little wonder that self driving vehicles have been so difficult. Yes driving a vehicle is a technical skill. It is also spatial and situational awareness and social interaction.

If you step back and think about it for a minute, the geeks who work on this stuff tend to suck at all of the points I just mentioned.

So I won't be worrying about AI taking over the world any time soon.

Following up today I was trying to get some solid stats on the weights of the two distinct stages of the SLS rocket. It is rather hard. Then I looked for thrust figures. That's even harder. I see loads of articles talking about how the SLS is the most powerful rocket that will ever have flown, more powerful than the space shuttle and the saturn V. 8m lbft they say.

I must admit I'm struggling with this. NASA give figures for the boosters. 1.6m lbft force. So that's 3.2 for the two solid rocket boosters. Then it has 4x RS25 rocket engines. A bit of digging shows they have improved the thrust to 113% of the original shuttle engines. 113% of 418,000 is 472,340. There are 4 of those. 1.9m lbft force. 5.1m lbft force in total. Where 8m comes from I don't know.

Then I did a quick check of the Raptor 2. This is an engine which is far more advanced than the RS25 engine on the SLS. In fact it was thought to be impossible to do in volume cheaply before SpaceX did it. The engine was tried by the Russians and shelved. The US tried some prototypes and shelved it as too expensive. This creates a rocket motor much smaller than the RS25 but delivers more power. 510,000 lbft each. Nearly the same as 472? Yes. But the SLS launch stage is 8m across and can only fit 4 RS25. The Starship is 9m across and can fit 32 raptors.

If you are on you calculator, that is 16.3m lbft force for the Starship. Yet SLS will lift, eventually, 150t of cargo into space. Starship, with the uprated raptors, up to 18m lbft force, will lift 150t of cargo into space.

At this point you might wonder what SpaceX is doing wrong. Partly this is to do with the magic of solid rocket boosters as opposed to liquid fuel. Power density is way higher and the rockets are way simpler. But the other part is this, SLS brings back to earth, for re-use, the two boosters and one tinly little capsule at the top of the rocket. The rest? Thrown in the sea. What does SpaceX bring back to be re-used? All of it! Yes that means NASA is keeping the really simple rocket boosters and throwing away, with every launch, those incredibly complicated rockets. Just as well there are only 4 of them.

This is where access to space is going to change. Put in the words of Musk. Space flight costs are like flying a jumbo from LA to Sydney and then throwing the plane away and building another one. It is not hard to imagine the cost difference when you simply re-fuel the Jumbo and fly it back again.

Not only is SLS unimaginably expensive, it is also one of the biggest waste of resources humans have ever carried out. Certainly on a per human basis it is.

For those who are interested.

This is the logical design of the RS25 engine on the SLS



Here is the logical design of the raptor engine



It doesn't look too different although more efficient.

Here is the actual design of the RS25




And the Raptor engine



When you stick a bunch of incredibly brilliant people in a room and say "I don't want to know what you can't do, JFDI", this is what comes out of it.

If NASA and Boeing think they are embarrassed today, they're going to be even more so in a few years time. Begging congress for $1bn to $2bn per launch whilst SpaceX will be offering a space taxi service for ~$10m per launch. Granted SLS is designed to go to the moon and Starship can only get to orbit with the fuel it has. But Starship is designed to re-fuel in low earth orbit. OK 5 launches to get to the moon. $50m. Still looking better than even $1bn.

I keep images of a Dodo just for occasions like this.