I’m such a fool. You’d think competition and privatization would improve the space program, but now we’ve got multiple examples of corporate failure.
I’ve mentioned the embarrassment of Boeing’s Starliner capsule, which seems to be a total piece of junk. It got astronauts up to the International Space Station, but it’s so untrustworthy that they’re considering using SpaceX to rescue them.
Except…Boeing and SpaceX space suits are incompatible. The astronauts might be stuck up there for as much as 8 months, or they can chance it and descend in a capsule with no suits. It’s probably OK. They have an old-fashioned fix: prayer.
Meanwhile, another billionaire has stepped up and is buying a trip into orbit. This is not just a joyride, he says, they’ve got a serious scientific purpose. That purpose is unclear. They’re going to go into a high orbit on a SpaceX Dragon capsule, high enough that it will pass through the Van Allen belts, and while they’re there, Jared Isaacman and one of the crew will go on a tethered spacewalk, exposing themselves to increased radiation. I don’t know why. It seems to be more of a daredevil gimmick.
Extra bonus stupidity: the Dragon capsule does not include an airlock, so they’re simply going to vent all of the atmosphere inside the capsule, forcing the other 3 crewmembers to sit in their spacesuits so Isaacman can go outside and wave at the camera. Yay! Decompression is fun!
Can we just put NASA back in charge? Bring back the grown-ups to run the show.
It reminds me of the movie, “Marooned.”
No, exposing oneself to space radiation is more of a Fantastic Four gimmick.
/rim shot
That’s COMMUNISM!!!
When I saw the words “Boeing” and “Space Capsule” in the same sentence, my heart sank.
Boeing’s recent history of engineering and manufacturing isn’t all that good. Planes and pieces of planes that keep falling out of the air aren’t supposed to happen.
I would not have flown on a space capsule made by Boeing, at least until it had been tested many times first.
This is made worse because I remember when Boeing was the world’s leading aerospace firm. They made the B-52s, still flying after all these years. The ICBM Minuteman missiles. The first successful commercial jet plane, the 707, was from Boeing. I was a kid when I flew on my first jet plane, which was a Boeing 707.
In northwest Washington, the area I grew up in, Boeing was the major employer. Everyone knew people who worked at Boeing at some time.
With spacecraft visiting the van Allen belts, and submersible trips to the wreck of the Titanic, yachts off Sicily…what a wonderful time, where there are SO MANY ways for billionaires to self-dispose of themselves!
Please proceed.
Someone pointed out that this space tourism phenomena is similar to some of the antics pulled by the rich with the first automobiles. I don’t know how true that is but I can’t think of a better group to test out near Earth space travel than billionaires. Sure, we might lose a few, but we’ve got several thousand right now. Let them have their adventures…as long as they’re paying for it and any cleaning up after the trip.
Since this is an atheism-friendly zone, I’m going to commit heresy:
more efficient ≠ better
contrary to heterodox economic dogma (which might as well be religion verging on theocracy).
I don’t mind these excursions too much. Aside from the self-selection out of the human race factor, I keep in mind that most of the money spent on these things goes to many people’s salaries..
What is worse? Big business who skimp and cut corners to save a buck, or big government who has so many layers filled with loopholes it is almost impossible to complete a project.
By all accounts, it’s not a question of safety, so much as it is an issue of making sure they know exactly what happened. They’re having trouble replicating the problem precisely on the ground, and the damaged section gets jettisoned to burn up. So they want to take more time to run experiments.
@7 Jaws: This has been known by economists for some time. A lot of economists don’t like to think about the problems mapping their simple economic models to the real world. Even more business people prefer to overlook it because they can make more money gambling that no major accident will happen then preparing to deal with it.
In a lot of systems higher efficiency means the system is more brittle and less resistant to errors. A simple example is just in time part delivery. If a factory reaches the point of perfect just in time delivery they don’t need to spend any time or money on an inventory of parts. It also means that a single missed delivery shuts down the entire factory.
Since the real world always means some degree of errors and accidents actual optimal efficiency means accounting for that. Considering the rate of errors and doing something less then theoretical optimal efficiency so that actual production is as high as possible.
JM @ 11
The near-collapse of the global supply chain after COVID-19 shows just-in-time delivery is BAD. Fuck efficiency.
BTW can some english-speaking reader define the difference between effective and efficient?
Efficient means there’s a low amount of waste (of energy or time or water or money, etc). Effective means there’s a high amount of value. (NOT necessarily economic value).
birger @12: ‘effective’ means ‘gets the job done’. ‘efficient’ means ‘done with minimum waste of time and/or effort’.
“Efficiency” is one of those words where since everyone knows what it means, no one actually knows what it means. Until the important inputs and desirable outputs—as well as the waste to minimize—are defined, the term is more or less the same as “I want”.
Whose accounts would those be, and why should we believe them?
I can’t load the QC link, why can’t they just send two compatible Space X suits up with the rocket to save the astronauts?
I worked for a small-time capitalist as well as for several international corporations. The small-time capitalist was being pushed into just-in-time delivery of materials by his customer (an international corporation) because they did not want to have too much material being booked in stock. It did not work and he was losing money and had trouble keeping workers because he could not keep a reliable workflow. It was only after he – in part due to my insistence – inserted several buffers into the manufacturing process where materials and semi-finished products could accumulate in times of slack and be taken out of in times of higher demand that things ran more smoothly.
The work for bigger corporations taught me that those are pure evil and should be broken up by force. Just in time is pure idiocy and it is one of many short-term-profits-over-long-term-stability things that MBAs in charge of these behemoths do.
I was never a fan of the privatization of space travel. There are several things that simply should not be privatized because private companies are not interested in delivering good products or services, just in making profits. And whilst there still are many who naively think that profits are inherently bound with delivering good products, it is not true in the real world. Especially when monopolies/oligopolies are involved.
A news report said that NASA Administrator, Bill Nelson, may make the final decision to return in Starliner or not. Nelson is a lawyer, politician and he did fly a shuttle mission in the 90’s. It’s Dirty Harry meets the Challenger: how lucky do you feel? The article also stated that Starliner wasn’t equipped to be returned empty, something about the “self-driving” software not installed. (Calling Tesla for an update!)
If in fact the old myth of “lessons learned” has any value remaining, the decision should be strictly on engineering grounds. If they can’t fix the problem, then work on Plan B.
Oops, spoke too soon! Plan B it is, coming down in a Dragon in February.
Starliner will return unmanned once that get that sorted out.
@5 You’d think this was a Dwarf Fortress game.
@ 20
Great, let’s give more tax money to the fascist, billionaire, nepo-baby.
KG @16 – NASA’s. They reported that during testing, some of the damaged oxygen valves seem to have restored function in ways they couldn’t replicate on the ground. They want to get all the data they can before they have to jettison the service module.
Yes, what a collosal disaster. Welcome to the dark ages (again)
Boeing is the sound you hear when one of their marketing weasels shakes their head and their tiny brain bounces around in their skull. I read that, to save money the Starliner thrusters (which seem to fail whenever they are used) were designed for satellites, not anything as big as a manned capsule. At least Boeing makes safe commercial aircraft (ROFLMAO)
Well, it looks like the GIANT EGO of the elongated muskrat has shown itself again.
1) Boeing and SpaceX space suits are incompatible. Even garden hoses mostly have standard fasteners.
2) Dragon capsule does not include an airlock, so they’re simply going to vent all of the atmosphere . . forcing the crewmembers to sit in their spacesuits. This will likely also happen when the starliner astronauts must board it NEXT YEAR!? Brilliant (ROFLMAO)
And, speaking of standardization, What the hell is NASA doing not requiring standardization in docking, suits, etc. when they pour billions in taxpayer money into these shitty corporations???
Efficiency is one of those terms that means something particular in the science/engineering context but when applied outside that realm means absolutely nothing at all. Adherents to the market-economics faith might define it as ‘minimizing waste’ or ‘delivering the most shareholder value/dollar of revenue’, but those definitions will be purposely vague and smuggle in many unstated assumptions.
Is a business ‘more efficient’ if it guts its future earnings potential by chasing short-term stock price gains at all costs? Apparently the board and voting shareholders of Boeing think that meets the definition, given that they’ve rewarded the people who decided to do just that. They are, after all, likely banking on the federal government to step in and bail them out – likely at no cost to shareholders, and definitely at no cost to the executives and board. Which will be ‘efficient’, since anything that transfers government money as directly as possible into the hands of the ‘makes money by owning’ class is definitionally efficient to the marketists.
If you liked the Titan submersible, you’ll love the Dragon capsule! All the destructive hubris of the first disaster but now it’s in SPACE!!!
Mercury, Gemini, Apollo CM, LEM, space shuttle – no airlocks.
An example of completely misunderstanding efficiency that I experienced when I was working in the hospital system in Melbourne, Australia in the 1990s:
Some senior idiot decided it was incredibly wasteful to have all these paediatric ICU beds open when they rarely had more than 80% occupancy, so they closed about 20% of the beds and saved a considerable sum on nursing salaries and maintenance…until the roughly once-every-year-or-two surge of children needing ICU at the same time. You can’t reopen ICU beds with a snap of the fingers. It takes trained and rostered staff and integration with a properly resourced clinical unit. As a result, dozens of children were flown to ICUs in other states. Now, I’m sure you can imagine how much of those ‘savings’ were left after paying for emergency high-dependency plane flights, penalty overtime rates for all the clinical staff pulling extra shifts to keep those kids alive until they could be moved, and reimbursing the other states for using their high-cost services…not to mention the disruption in care and risk to vulnerrable patients from transporting them and the risk of spreading the system overburden to other states.
By and large the Victorian state health department was excellent at both policy and implementation, so I suspect this was the direct involvement of the health minister, probably over the objections of the health department.
@27– I didn’t know that! I had assumed that the early spacewalks all used an airlock, but I looked it up and you’re right. Interestingly, the very first spacewalk did use an airlock — this was Alexei Leonov in 1965. The Soviets needed an airlock because their capsule design required air cooling to keep from overheating, and you obviously can’t do this if you’ve evacuated all the air, and also their weight limit was too tight to carry the extra gas to repressurise. The American capsules did not require an air lock, so it was simpler to just depressurise until the spacewalker returned then repressurise.
The other interesting thing is that Leonov’s famous near-fatal obstruction attempting to get back into the capsule was partly the fault of the capsule needing an airlock — the entrance was so narrow and long that he got stuck when his suit overinflated in vacuum.
@ 26. Walter Solomon : “If you liked the Titan submersible, you’ll love the Dragon capsule! All the destructive hubris of the first disaster but now it’s in SPACE!!!”
Did you mean the Starliner capsule there?
The Space X Dragon capsule has proven remarkably successful.
Also not sure “hubris”is quite the word that applies here.
Dude, NASA killed fourteen astronauts in the space shuttle program alone! Not enough for you?
Also, as noted, the first NASA spacewalks (in Gemini) evacuated all the air – the other guy had to sit there in a vacuum in his spacesuit.
However…
@ 27 starskeptic
The shuttle absolutely had an airlock. I mean there were payload specialists in the orbiter, in the pressurised environment, monitoring and directing the work when someone was doing an EVA. How could that be possible without an airlock?
Okay, that video is from the ISS, try this one from repair of Hubble in the 90s before there was an ISS:
(At roughly 1:20 in that video you’ll be someone in the orbiter looking at someone outside.)
Scott Manley has this good clip here – SpaceX Astronauts Will Fly Higher Than Any Human Has This Century on that SpaceX flight.
@shermanj
Cause it doesn’t pay off, simple as that. Standardization IS expensive and if you build just a couple of satellites or crew vehicles it just doesn’t pay off. I worked for an ESA sub-tier suplier for the Sentinel program and that was considered high volume with 10 satellites.
In recent years the rise of the cube-sats resulted in standardization as they build literally hundreds of cubes a year. Same for the constellations like Starlink, those use a lot more standardized components. Else it ist cheaper to have interface control documents that specify the mechanical, electrical and data interfaces for e.g. power supply A to pump B.
The Soviets standardised their later Luna space probes so both the ones landing on the moon and those orbiting it had the same basic chassi.
billmcd@23,
Thanks.
Raven @7
Dehavilland Comet in the late 1940s.
If we had understood about metal fatigue would have been a world beater.
Paved the way for planes like the 707 though.
See the book by John Donahue: “The Privatization Decision”
Brief summary: achieving a successful privatization is HARD.
StevoR @30
The Titan was successful until it wasn’t. And I was specifically referring to Jared Isaacman’s spacewalk stunt which will be done with a Dragon capsule.
Silentbob @31
Except for Columbia, shuttles used an EXTERNAL airlock in the payload compartment.
The only airlock I was ever concerned with was the one I would have been sorely tempted to shove Captain Janeway out of.
@40. Walter Solomon
(Italics and quotation marks added for clarity.)
Well, in that case I really don’t get or disagree with your comparison in #26 between the Titan submersible (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_(submersible) and the Dragon capsules (plural & in different classes -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Dragon because the Dragon capsule has proven safe and has passed safety tests set by NASA and achieved a huge amount whilst the Titan sub has regular issues and failures on its missions -especially its last fatal one (understatement!!!!1ty!) – and did not get NASA approval. Dragon has proven to be reliable and safe whereas Titan was neither.
So, yeah, really no valid comparison. As for Isackson’s Polaris Dawn stunt, well, it is an odd kinda thing to do and a dare-devil one but who am I or you to tell this presumably informed and consenting adult what to do if its not hurting or risking the health anyone else against wills? (Everyone on board knows the plan so, yeah, all volunteers and making that choice.)
Incidentally, Scott Manley now has this ‘The Decision Is Made – Boeing Might Be Safe? But SpaceX Is SAFER!” video which goes for 15 minutes on the plight of those in the flawed Starliner capsule. Sure would be nice if we had a successsful working alternative to mad Musk but seesm not yet..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Dragon
What? Not working?
Clarity fix :
PS. I can’t stand Musk especially what he has turned into since he started drifting waaa-aay to the rechwing seemingly sampling and becoming deleteriously addicted to the worst of the dregs of his own X product. “Mad” was the wrong choice of word in #43 on my part – fascist would’ve been better and more accurate. (I do try to phrase my words to avoid splash damage for mentally neurodivergent people.) I totally disagree with Musk politically and culturally and think he’s become an extremely dangerous threat to Democracy and personal Freedom and is actively making the world worse.
However, SpaceX isn’t Musk and shouldn’t be blamed and attacked for what Musk as an individual is and says and does.
SpaceX has done some absolutely remarkable things and achieved a lot of positive things and made SF dreams literally real and deserve our appreciation for that in my view
See among others :
Source : https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-dragon-capsule-breaks-u-s-spaceflight-records/
Plus :
Additionally, there’s umm, well, this page with some key stats :
https://www.spacexstats.xyz/#upcoming-next
Scroll as well as this minor nit :
Which, yeah, not looking terribly likely that Musk will win that bet now – but again, that’s Musk to blame and not the fault of SpaceX.
Anyhow, that’s the key point here. SpaceX as a private space agency is extremely admirable, has achieved an awful lot and demonstrated its worth whereas Musk as a person is a nazi scumbag who is making the world worse. Please don’t throw out the former because of the latter.
Plus yes, we need working good alternatievs that stop us being reliant on Musk or as we once were before him on the Russians to get people and craft and thuings done in space.
@Ockhamshavingbrush
Why is standardization expensive? I think we all know from our own experience that the opposite is true, at least from the point of view of the customer. Producers like to avoid standardization because it shuts out competition. But designing your own separate interfaces (and so forcing suppliers to meet custom designs) is expensive. Who do you think you are kidding.
A general point about capitalism and efficiency. Capitalism is in principle not a system for optimizing efficiency. Competition is in essence inefficient because it implies duplication and overcapacity. This is part of the reason that capitalism tends towards monopoly. What counts against that is that competition can boost innovation and so while static efficiency is hurt by competition, dynamically the system is capable of evolving to become more efficient. This is why with any system we developing, one of the most important questions to ask is “how can the system evolve?”. If the system cannot evolve (e.g. the United States Constitution) you are in trouble.
@ Jim Brady
Have you ever been to a ISO conference? There ist a daylong squabble to just change one single paragraph. And it costs time to get all the parties to agree to initially set up a standard in the first place. And if you build some vehicle for a very specific purpose (earth observation with the Sentinel program) you design it to fulfill that special purpose as well as possible. You don’t care a lot if your custom made vehicle costs an additional $10 million more to build as the whole fucking satelite costs $350 million a pop.
And you ignored my remark about the cube-sats. They use the standardized cubesat bus (10x10x11 cm) which you can assemble into 1, 2, 3, 6 and 12 units like Lego. Hell, go to nanoavionics.com and you can configure a 6U cubesat online. Try that with some satellite with, oh…let’s say 256 chanel multispectral maging capability from 450 to 2400 nm with a spatial resolution of 30 meters over a 30km wide swath. Good luck. That’s the difference between Old Space (NASA and ESA) and New Space (cubes and constellations).
Oh, and yeah, the custom made vehicles also use standardized parts like screws, bolts and washers If said standard ist available.
StevoR @45
And deserve our criticism for their environmental record. As for our appreciation, their subsidized to the tune of billions with our tax dollars. I think they’re receiving more than enough appreciation.
NASA is in charge. These are flights contracted by NASA to ferry NASA personnel to and from the NASA space station, on spacecraft designed to NASA requirements with NASA funding. NASA made the decision that the one spacecraft isn’t safe enough, so it’ll use the other one.
SpaceX has received $15 billion in Federal government grants and contracts.
Without NASA and the US military, SpaceX wouldn’t exist.
And, Elon Musk has already kicked the US military hard.
They used their Starlink Satellite system to aid Russia and harm Ukraine.
@ ^ raven : That’s true but also Musk’s fault not SpaceX’s. Frankly, Musk should’ve face dmuch worse consequences for that than he has.
@49. Walter Solomon : Fair enough on their envioronmental record I wish they were much better there and hope they improve or get forced to improve. That doesn’t change their successes in what they have done in space travel though. Criticism where criticism is due but praise where its due to.
It is also true that NASA is largely in charge as #50 numerobis has written. I’d be quite happy to have NASA replace Musk as being in complete control and have Musk arrested and jailed and not in charge of anything any more but with Space X incorporated into NASA as a sub-group within it kinda like JPL.
PS. PBS Newshour has a good piece on this :
Source : https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/why-nasa-is-turning-to-spacex-to-bring-boeing-starliner-astronauts-home
Live coverage of latest launch attempt here :
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2024/07/06/infinite-thread-xxxii/comment-page-7/#comment-2235465
first hyperlink.
Isaacman’s EVA happening right now :
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2024/07/06/infinite-thread-xxxii/comment-page-7/#comment-2235815
^ Sarah Gillis is doing an EVA as well – didn’t expect that here. Thought it was just Isaacman.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Gillis
First EVA done – second just starting. History made. Again.