A private sector space mission blew up yesterday. It was not the first: this is the third mission of significance to do so recently. What's happening?
Has space just got so much harder?
Is more technology more likely to fail?
Or is it that the private sector just can't do this stuff?
It may be all of those issues. And of course it could just be chance. Except it's beginning not to look that way.
What seems certain is that it is time for a rethink. Anyone leading that rethink should be reading Mariana Mazzucato: the state does these things best. That's not opinion. That's fact. If it's uncomfortable, deal with it. Progress depends on it.
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hello richard ,
i normally agree but in this case a little unfair
spacex has been asked to do this by nasa as their engineering can do at lower cost .
and failure rates of launches from nasa are not insignificant , and those have cost real people their lives .
Maybe I am not being fair
But lower cost = market undercutting = failure
Is that implausible?
I agree the state is very good at funding this sort of extremely risky work, but I can’t agree with your post otherwise.
Space is really really hard. It’s absolutely at the limits of engineering and management of people and science, even when the choices are to make conservative decisions. If you make a claim like this, you would need to compare with the success and failure of a similar project in national hands, and they too had failures while developing and running the technology. Also, my understanding is much of the development work on national space projects was still subcontracted out – it seems similar to the current situation.
In summary – maybe, but I’d want to see some analysis to justify this.
I was being provocative – but the trend does seem very real
And that was why I chose to stimulate debate
I am concerned that we may be at the limits of technology
Very noticeable that the rocket that the exploded was not a Russian designed rocket, which have an outstanding success rate, access to which the West got handed to them on a plate by that drunken buffoon, Yeltsin – the West’s convenient placeman.
And, of course, ALL that Russian expertise – actually, Soviet expertise, since the Soviet space programme was a multi-ethnic enterprise – was built up by the financial and human capital of the USSR, without which backing it would have got nowhere.
And all picked up for a song by the West, and still being used by us, almost certainly with no “royalties” being paid to Russia or other former USSR states that were part of that great enterprise.
The Clangers are back, who cares about the rest of it?
I suspect its taking the ‘private sector does things best’ mantra to its logical conclusion, when in reality, there is either no difference in performance, or actually the private sector does worse. Healthcare is the prime example.
Its true to say the private sector has always had a hand in the US space program – most famously (and successfully)for the Apollo missions, Grumman made the Lunar lander and NAA made the Command module. And of course it was NASA who took the fateful decision to ignore the warnings and launch Challenger back in 86.
Its a risky old business regardless, but it would be interesting to see how a competition between NASA and a private alternative would unfold for a specific task (say a Mars flyaround) I suspect the private sector wouldn’t like the results and would cry about being ‘crowded out’
Actually, they are doing quite well: one failure in nineteen launches is an outstanding record of reliability in rocketry.
However, there is still some validity in your criticism: the commercial players are using state-developed rocket engines. Yes, they’ve made some improvements; but not the comprehensive makeover that today’s materials and manufacturing make possible.
Today’s private-sector launch technology would be immediately recognisable – and a disappointment – to the 1960’s NASA engineers, and their 1980’s Russian counterparts, who designed and developed it.
Yes, the NASA engineers were partly in the private sector – Rocketdyne, and others – but the resources, the direction, and the underlying science came from the State.
Private companies are good at manufacturing and continuing development, and they are sometimes better at quality control than state-run enterprises; but there are very few examples of transformative technology or large high-risk projects built-out from basic science emerging successfully from the private sector.
Thanks
That was useful for me
There’s only one genuinely transformative innovation centre I can think of in the private sector: Bell Laboratories.
They failed to demonstrate a clear case for shareholder value to AT&T managers in the 1990’s and were downsized and carved out as the standalone companies Lucent and Alcatel.
As for rocket reliability, NASA did very well with their ‘man-rated’ launch vehicles: the bit we don’t talk about is who did all the testing for cargo, before they were rated for human flight, and how many of those classified military launches failed.
I could say ‘failed catastrophically’ but that’s a tautology in rocket science.
I’d be on the same page, that the private/public debate is not really relevant here. NASA too has had it’s problems – it’s a cutting edge risky business.
I’d also argue that this is one of the better examples of private sector doing what it claims to but usually doesn’t, and truly driving innovation. Elon Musk of Space X, like him not, is doing more to drive electric cars and renewables than most, as well as his space activities. We could do with more people engaging in real innovation rather than confusing creating dubious tinancial products and speculating
I remain unconvinced.
An in-depth look at the space program reveals a nest of private companies doing the work, and getting paid by government.
The saturn-5 was developed by Boeing, North American Aviation, IBM and a variety of others. Then used to go to the moon…launching the Apollo capsule (North American Aviation built).
Gemini….built by McDonnell.
Governments build nothing, they pay for it.
Ok, maybe a bit of design and planning.
Plenty of mess-ups as well….two shuttles lost through bad management, basically.
Governments do the science, basic & applied, without which there is no moonshot, no space program. All the feats of engineering stand on the shoulders of the scientists fundamental research that stretch back over generations.
Saturn 5 incidentally was mostly a Werner Von Braun design. The private companies involved built those machines well, but the innovation came from government employees.
Precisely