do y'all want more of my spaceflight opinions and sass on here?
are they entertaining/informative?
this is all stuff i've just thought about while out on bike rides or chatting on discord in the days since Thursday, a lot of it is adapted from discord chatlogs with friends who are more knowledgable than i am like @rocketlaz
i do suppose on that note i should clarify that I Am Not Formally Educated Or Credentialed In The Industry Or The Field In General. I'm a college dropout who loved space on and off from a young age but fell back in love with it permanently over Kerbal Space Program in 2015, right as things were starting to pick back up after Shuttle. The first launch I watched online was MAVEN, back when NASA used livestream.com.
Everything I know is from following the industry as an enthusiast and from making really smart friends who set me on the rigth path. the only times I have been given insider access are when I was on a NASA Social for the Parker Solar Probe mission, and when I was a guest of ULA for the SBIRS-5 launch to accompany my roommate. That was kind of a make-a-wish thing, they'd just been diagnosed with terminal cancer.
all this to say, I may make the occasional mistake and it may occasionally be prudent to fact check me. I do my best and I always tend to run my thoughts by folks who DO know their shit, but even so. I just want to put that out there.
all the assorted thoughts under the cut
something about testing methodology
"space is hard, this is why we test" only applies when efforts are made to make sure the testing methodology is sound, and testing is done with a duty of care to ensure there aren't any errant variables contaminating your results. The SpaceX team at Boca does not have a history of doing so, and has regularly taken shortcuts in testing that consistently call into question whether all this "data they gathered" means anything at all, or if the test was so flawed that it contaminated and/or invalidated any results they might have gathered from it.
They were in such a rush to fly a previous starship, SN9, that they looted engine parts from the wreckage of the prior flight of SN8 (a flight test they performed despite not having a launch license from the FAA), parts contaminated with beach sand from being strewn across the beach after SN8 exploded. Like. They were so impatient that they both flew SN8 without a launch license, and then when it blew up, they scavenged parts from a rocket that blew up to fly another rocket.
Between that, and being in a similar rush to fly last week's orbital test despite knowing how smaller tests had damaged the concrete, having a mitigation strategy for that almost ready to install, and other oddities like choosing to skip some intermediate tests on the full stack like an WDR or full-stack static fire, one has to call into question if this is remotely productive testing at all.
"we should stop giving spacex money"
this is kind of a comment response; only one person made the comment here, but the post got crossposted to a few sites and people started commenting similar on it there too:
i alluded to it in the original post, but i want to make it more explicit: there are two entities trading under the SpaceX name here.
The major one is an extraordinarily competent launch provider with no shortage of success under its belt, a management structure that keeps it on track (one that pretty much has handlers in place to keep the child executive officer in check), and despite many flaws (i called it a meat grinder for good reason, they're absurd about crunch and taking advantage of "passion", not to mention that there have been several lawsuits about workplace conditions and hiring practices even beyond the crunch) they are generally well regarded.
The other half is a cowboy program run by a toddler of a man who escaped to texas to avoid his handlers, and started playing with fireworks in a state that would hassle him as little about regulation as possible. It drains the resources of the competent half, makes them look less competent by way of existing.
if we stop giving them money altogether we can't do like, the actual meaningful shit we pay them for, like launching science missions like Psyche/Europa Clipper, or sending crews and science to the ISS. Given what Russia's been up to lately, the ISS hangs in a very delicate balance right now, and if we gave up Dragon that would be very bad.
The competent half gets paid to launch the kind of stuff our half a penny on the tax dollar actually benefits from us doing, because the true secret of NASA is that it's not about being a space program. It's a public works program from the era of Johnson's Great Society, designed from almost the beginning to support an entire industry that otherwise wouldn't exist without government support, support academic research that would otherwise be vastly unprofitable, and provide jobs in both industry and academia nationwide. there's also the whole soft power/diplomacy angle it serves, but all of that's a future post though, enjoy this summary for now.
vibe check
it's impressive. starship is the first flown rocket to have been entirely designed by Vibes, and with almost no basis in engineering principles or practices.
and not just any vibes at that, the vibes of someone who ripped up caution tape at his car factory because he thought the color yellow ruined the aesthetic.
if this testimony recorded on the NSF forums is to be believed and frankly, i have no reason not to, the few competent people who did initially follow him to texas to try to help make this stupid idea work all got kicked out. He really just did this on his own.
It's the "unplugging random servers because he doesn't like their vibe" way of building rockets. "oh, we don't need (a flame trench/sms 2 factor)"
more on shuttle comparison
this is a response to someone's completely bizarre comment on a forum the original post got reposted to, where they entirely misread the post or only skimmed it to find things to misconstrue:
in making the shuttle comparison where i called starship an everything vehicle, i was fully aware that there will be more than one version of spacex's bastard battleship, with some tailored for specific roles like lunar lander/tanker/etc. this in no way invalidates my point. it will be a compromise because the very foundations its built on have to support all of that.
case in point: the f-35 lightning. 3 different branches of the military wanted 3 different things to replace 3 different planes, and it was decided to try and do it all with one plane. Even with the A, B, and C variants all being heavily specialized, they all had to share the same airframe which meant that it still got dragged down by the different roles it had to be built to fill. in that way, both shuttle and the f-35 were hampered by having to be so many different things, and so too is starship.
okay that's everything for now, this is mostly my follow on to finish out the starship line of thought. In the future, i want to expand on what I alluded to about NASA being a public works program disguised as a space agency, and largely spared from the axe of austerity by administrations using it to legacy shop, and something about Cape history and how Boca Chica's development serves as an even more insidious repeat of that.
both of those ideas were originally twitter threads but I would of course reformat them and update them with new understanding.
