Elon Musk, redefined success yesterday. His SpaceX rocket crashed to earth within two minutes of launch. He congratulated his team, saying that many lessons have been learned for the next attempt.
I really do not recall NASA having quite so many basic problems with its Saturn V launch rocket in the 1960s.
You might call me, cynical, but I think that might be down to the motivation for the two projects. NASA had a clearly defined public goal, backed by the state.
Musk has an ill-defined private goal, backed by a profit motive, his excessive wealth, and his ego.
I am not, of course, saying that this explains the technical reason for yesterday's failure. But, at a deeper level it might explain why Musk seems to have so many successive failures.
Maybe there are things for which the profit motive is not suited. Let me just float that idea.
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Everyone needs a hobby! Could be model railways, could be life sized rockets. In my view, both pretty bizarre ways to spend time and money…. but that comes from a sailor who likes to “stand in a cold shower ripping up £10 notes” (at Thomas Lipton first put it, I believe). So, what do I know?
I thought £50 notes were the minimum sailing tears up?
And model railways are the cheapest and most environmentally friendly (at least the way I do them) of those three, I suggest 🙂
People normally grow out of playing with model railways at about 13 when more interesting activities present themselves..fascinating someone in their late 60s is still playing with them
True. It’s fascinating.
Why nit ask Rod Stewart, Pete Waterman and Jools Holland why they also do it?
And what is your hobby?
Yes, sailing can be horrifically environmentally unfriendly for a pastime that might appear, on the surface, quite OK.
There have been substantial improvements – but more boats, bigger boats and the rising demand for “walk ashore” parking is swamping any gains. A microcosm of the world at large?
Indeed…..
“And what is your hobby”
Still competitive football (age 38), play competitive cricket, started BJJ, cycling and going to see live music..each to their own.
I grew out of most of those by the time I was 13
Just saying
Now, what was the point of your post?
It is possible to sail very cheaply if you want to, make a coracle!
🙂
The cost of space exploration is justified as necessary for the future of mankind blah blah blah, but as one of the peasants I can’t help but think that this money should be spent on the here & now. If we don’t tackle global warming there won’t be a future & we won’t be there to benefit from it anyway. Life is crap at the moment but not half as bad as the third world countries ravaged by famine & war. What about using that money to improve the lives of the people who are alive now not the vague future people that may not even exist if the planets eco/weather systems collapse?
I agree.
Space should be decided upon as if a public good.
The right decision is to avoid the harm exploring it causes.
You can always make the argument there is a better use for the resources. What did the Moon landings achieve? Columbus should have stayed in Europe, etc. However, that has never been what humanity did. There is always someone pushing the envelope. I have a lot of sympathy with the Gaia idea of the Earth as an organism, and one coming up to flowering and fruiting. In other words spreading beyond the Earth. I think we can either achieve that in the next several hundred years or Nature will write us off and try another route. I will never see it, but I do hope we find a route to the planets and ultimately the Stars. I will confess – SciFi is my favourite genre – of the Star Trek type.
However, whether that should be the task of an eccentric billionaire or would more properly be a US Federal Government or perhaps better a UN project is another matter. There are pros and cons. Musk can just do it without having to deal with the generally short-sighted, short termist and small minded politicians that inhabit most capitals. So it may go a lot faster than would otherwise be the case (though a Kennedy could make Apollo go very fast!). If and when it all works, though, should this really be a private probably monopoly venture? Maybe not. There is also the issue of what it is used for. Holidays in space for billionaires is not a valid choice. Asteroid mining for rare minerals to support our rather large population probably is. As would be a defence system against asteroids (one will hit us eventually). I would tend to the view that a self-sufficient Martian colony would in due course be a genetic insurance policy in case something happens to the Earth (whether by accident or stupidity).
I am firmly of the view there is a way to get around our Galaxy that does not involve thousands of years on a space ship at sub-light speeds. I think we just haven’t found it yet. Just as somebody standing on a Portuguese headland in 1400 could not conceive of how you might get across the Atlantic. Developments in quantum mechanics are indicating that the speed of light is not an absolute upper limit. I think it was recently shown by experiment that two quantum connected particles would mirror each other’s behaviour instantly regardless of the distance between them. In the experiment I think one was on Earth and the other on the space station. That opens a door to e.g. a screen displaying a moving picture here being quantum connected to a screen on the other side of the galaxy showing the same moving image at the same instant without being trapped by Einsteinian relativity. Think ‘Get me Star Fleet HQ on sub-space’.
Just one more serious point in relation to Richard’s post. The Apollo programme did have some problems. Might have been around Apollo 7 but one mission exploded on the launch pad and killed the crew. I suspect there were other problems less serious too.
I deliberately mentioned the Saturn V, because I think that was a capsule problem
In the case of the Apollo programme, there was a fire in one of the capsules (on the pad) and the unfortunate crewmen were burned alive – oxygen helping the flames. Current space progs are frankly daft and confuse getting stuff into space and getting humans into space. Stuff into space is relatively easy: build a mass driver and the energy needed is reduced to perhaps 11kWh per kg into low earth orbit. I will leave the last word to JFK (who had little doubt about the role of government):
“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organise and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win.”
I agree. For me these would include food, water, accommodation, health/social care, all education, transport, communication, as a minimum. I’d also add that there should always be state and collectively-owned alternatives to whatever the private sector does, such as state and collectively owned banks so that people have actual choices based on their politics rather than everyone being corralled into the private sector, ensuring a genuinely mixed economy. These could be funded using the same vast subsidies that the private sector seems unable to survive without, perhaps because it wastes so much money on ineffective space rockets. Still, Elon Musk’s rocket lasting for only two minutes is an open goal for a seaside postcard.
What I love about this is the failure element.
It’s OK for the private sector to fail – indeed, having studied management up to post grad level, failure is seen as a learning opportunity.
But it’s not OK for the public sector to fail – indeed as we have seen this past 13 years, the public sector has been encouraged to fail and its apparent ‘failings’ have led it to being put into the private sector. They robbed the GPO of the parcels service and then wondered why the rest of the system seemed to falter.
So – does that mean that we are going nationalise Musk?
The most sinister element of course is that space is not going to be a public good – as a reader of science fiction since being a boy, the story has been the corporate/private grabbing of the universe – and it looks likely that many sci-fi writers have got this right.
I wonder how much environmental degradation will be wrought by capital when we finally get out there to hollow out the planets?
Interesting twist PSR
“Maybe there are things for which the profit motive is not suited. Let me just float that idea.”
To widen the debate a little I would just suggest the following.
Privatisation of:
Gas
Electricity
Water
The national railway system
Council Housing
I would say that they have all failed. All necessities of life to one degree or another. Many have simply been turned into a private monopoly, a license to print money for themselves. I cannot think of any good the profit motive has done here for the benefit of society as a whole. For many it has made life worse.
We have hung on to public water in Scotland. Even the Scottish Conservatives evade political ‘eye contact’ on the issue …..
Whilst it is true the majestic Saturn V never failed, its success was built on many earlier iterations that did fail, often catastrophically. Yesterday’s launch was expected to fail at some point – like an athlete in training, it’s from the mistakes and failures that you learn the most. What Space X is attempting is extraordinarily difficult, orders of magnitute harder than what the Saturn V so magnificently acheived. I’m not specifically defending Elon Musk or his project, and of course one could argue there are better ways to spend the money (just as many argued in the 1960s), but it is true that in space exploration there is no such thing as failure, only feedback!
There were failures of components in development and testing, and for example Apollo 6 did not work entirely correctly, but there were no catastrophic failures in flight. It is pretty unusual for a space project to work so well, even if state funded. Just look at Ariane, or indeed Soyuz. But it was built on the previous 20 years of development work since the German rocket engineers arrived in the US after 1945.
A large part of the reason may be the $25 billion that the US government threw at the Apollo program (in 1960s dollars: that would be over $160 billion today). A single Saturn V launch would cost over $1 billion today. That makes even the SLS look cheap, and (while I am no fan of Musk) SpaceX has achieved what it has with a small fraction of that funding.
On the other hand, as I tell my students, no one ever learned anything useful from being correct, so failures are in that sense a good thing. Of course, a $3B failure might well not be the best to have chosen to obtain the necessary learnings, and in any case, as you say, it’s profit not learning that musk is after.
Indeed. As Neil Armstrong once said ‘Well, we need to fail. We need to fail down here, so we don’t fail up there’.
SpaceX (and musk) is driven by profit, yes, but if the private sector can get the price down compared to the government-funded SLS, that will make space exploration cheaper for everyone. They’ve already proven that reusable rockets are cost effective and that’s massively shaken up the space transportation sector and drawn the economics of publicly funded disposable launch systems into question. So I think these are good steps, even if they are not perfected yet (lets not pretend that NASA never had its own failures throughout Apollo and later the Shuttles).
That said, musk’s apparent goal of wanting to colonise mars / the moon is silly and a waste of time and resources. If he can make space access cheaper for things that are actually useful, like research and communications, great, but chasing down these ideas just because he once read them in a sci-fi novel isn’t a particularly compelling reason to do them. Especially when to live on mars you’d need to put so much effort into terraforming it to make it liveable in the future. Apparently the thought of terraforming earth to make it liveable in the future hasn’t occurred to him.
Young man! You are not old enough, as I am, to remember the USA’s rocket failures in the second half of the 1950s. Oh how we cheered when the films arrived in the UK to be shown on black and white TV (no Internet then)! A huge rocket rises a couple of metres and explodes, the tiny satellite thrown clear and bleeping pathetically on the concrete. In those days various military organizations were competing, now it’s commercial companies, with similar results. Underfunding, rushed development, just plain hubris.
As noted by others there are so many other more pressing and more worthy priorities which need scare resources. My sense is that ego is the prime motivation for Musk and Branson who has recently abandoned his space project.
Going back to Richard’s post, I’d say that in the UK it’s energy first and foremost that the Government should control. The looking after the old and infirm. There are other areas I’m sure, but those are the 2 that come to my mind at this time.
Presumably the investors in Spacex (Saudi etc) are expecting to reap even more returns eventually from their ill gotten fossil fuel gains. Seems to show how much surplus profits – surplus wealth there is in the world.
It must help that space is more or less unregulated (there may eventually be huge space debris problems, and atmospheric pollution problems if Musk realises his 100 launches a day or whatever ridiculous goals he has).
But he seems also to have made himself part of the state’s efforts – NASA is using his space vehicles.
Musk’s approach to space borrows the current fashion in software, which is so-called “agile”.
It is not well suited to safety-critical applications (among other things).
Though my opinion of Musk himself is extremely low, SpaceX is certainly one of the better things he has done (and Tesla is a decent venture, as well). We certainly need to develop cheaper access to space and the SpaceX plans are to produce reusable rockets and boosters to enormously reduce the cost in comparison to the levels of expenditure of NASA. They’ve already achieved much more in this regard (with reusable boosters) than NASA managed with the Space Shuttle which, as we lest we forget, had two catastrophic failures leading to loss of life.
Starlink is good technology as well.
Musk isn’t always an idiot – well, at least not in relation to SpaceX!
I don’t accept the implied general acceptance of statements like “We certainly need to develop cheaper access to space”. I’d suggest what we certainly need to use our resources for is adequate health care and public transport, along with sustainable food and energy systems.
Surely, reading this site has shown that we don’t need to have an either/or situation here? Our resources aren’t as limited as the convential economic wisdom would have you believe.
Rocketry is expensive to develop and uses up lots of energy to produce the fuel, but this still pales into comparison of the energy used for domestic heating and transport. Developing such technology doesn’t leave us shorn of the ability to provide adequate healthcare or design suitable public transportation systems.
Musk is correct that there is little doubt that if humanity is to survive, we need to have the ability to get off the planet. Given the real risks of a ‘planet-killer’ asteroid impact, having the capability to detect and deflect such rocks is important, in my view.
Also, getting mass into space more cheaply will allow us to perform scientific research not feasible on Earth, potentially helping to develop new technologies which could benefit all. Vast solar arrays harvesting energy to be sent back to Earth via microwave, perhaps? Very sci-fi, but also very possible our lifetimes.
A few billion dollars a year invested into SpaceX won’t impact our ability to deal with other problems and is likely to be very much a net gain in the longer term.
The whole Musk inspired project is basically planned space tourism for the techno-capitalist elite. The likelihood of proles like you reading this, or me writing it, of being able to afford a trip beyond the Earth’s atmosphere on Elon’s ego trip scheme, is low by the amount of many house mortgages. There will be a few non scientists and technicians with limited financial resources, along with a limited number of token women and token persons of colour, who will be shot into space, but the majority will be wealthy – mainly white males and high profile stars like Kirk/Schatner – who will be paying hundreds of thousands, millions perhaps, for the privilege of circumnavigating the Earth and Moon in space. The rest of us will be down here, required to be watching and cheering, just as we shall be for the Coronation of Charley Boy, or the Roman crowd watching Caesar – “the rabblement hooted and clapped their chopped hands and threw up their sweaty nightcaps and uttered such a deal of stinking breath”.
Space tourism might get the headlines, but in the short-term, it isn’t putting people into space which is important. It is having the capability to put mass into orbit which will certainly allow more people (hopefully scientists to the most part) to travel into space and continue learning.
I don’t doubt that Musk is in it for the bottom line, but I don’t for one minute believe his guff about planning to live on Mars.
The standard criticism of space exploration is the money “wasted” on it but the fact, as Richard so often explains, is that money can be created for any purpose at any time. There is enough money to go round. However, as the mystic might say, wherever I go, there I am, so even if Musk is able to colonise Mars, there is no assurance things will be different from the way things are here.
I take a different view of this failure or feedback. Musk’s effort is remarkable, because it offers a reminder that Musk really is a risk-taker. He stands out because the kind of risks he undertakes private capital rarely makes; because, save for the empty propoaganda peddled by ‘entrpreneurs’ (so-called); capital hates taking risks, especially big ones. Space? Nuclear industry? The big risks always fall to the State. If they succeed, the private sector jumps in and carries of the profits. If they fail, it is all the fault of the hopeless public sector.
It is win-win for capital. How do they do it? By spending big to capture Government, Parlaiment, Media and control the message.
People should not profit from other people’s omst essential basic needs. Abraham Maslow defined 5 hierarchies of needs (though the number have been extended over the years), these include:
1 PHYSIOLOGICAL NEEDS: breathing, food, water, shelter, clothing, sleep
2 SAFETY AND SECURITY: health, employment, property, family and social abilty
3 LOVE AND BELONGING: friendship, family, intimacy, sense of connection
4 SELF-ESTEEM: confidence, achievement, respect of others, the need to be a unique individual
5 SELF-ACTUALIZATION: morality, creativity, spontaneity, acceptance, experience purpose, meaning and inner potential
It seems that the first two levels include needs that should be human right, and should not be based on people’s ability to pay.
I am not an engineer but I have an old friend who designed satellites before he retired and his take on SpaceX is, I think, interesting. His company designed satellites for customers and, although they knew that much better solutions were possible, their customers would only accept incremental changes, and no projects were started until solutions were in place for all foreseeable eventualities. Progress was therefore much slower than it could have been.
Musk on the other hand, can please himself, and he can afford to start a project on the basis that he will solve the problems as they arise. That means he can be much more ambitious. There are of course lots of failures, which are the subject of ridicule, until suddenly it works, and we have the sight of two launchers landing back at base, on their tails, in perfect synchronisation.
Whatever you think of Musk, he does think big, and he has an approach which allows him to achieve the apparently impossible. Don’t underestimate him.
Whether he will use his influence and spend his money wisely is of course a whole different question.
It is unusual that I take exception to something that PSR writes, but I do to this
“It’s OK for the private sector to fail – indeed, having studied management up to post grad level, failure is seen as a learning opportunity.”
I work in insurance – failure is not considered an option. Alongside running a capital model resilient to events expected to recur less frequently than 500 years, I report to a board with non-executive expertise drawn from law, banking and accountancy backgrounds. I am subject to both internal and external audit, and overseen by both the Prudential Regulation Authority and the Financial Conduct Authority. I am subject to the Senior Managers and certification regime. The business has a risk and compliance committee under the auspices of a chief risk officer.
it is perfectly reasonable to ask whether this makes failure less likely, and it is also perfectly possible for me to spend my entire working week on dealing with the various and occasionally conflicting requirements of these bodies, without even troubling myself with the day job of providing insurance to commercial business. If I provided insurance to retail customers I would be subject to even greater levels of oversight and compliance. My entire working life is spent trying to avoid being a learning opportunity appearing in post grad management textbooks
But you ignore the fact that private sector enterprise is premised on failure.
In essence you do not work in the private sector.
Regulation removes yo7 from it.
I would disagree
Probably at too much length I can explain why
for every pound of premium my business writes, it spends 60p on paying claims, 12p on paying staff, renting offices, printing policies and so on, and 25p on paying the broker that introduces the business to us. At the end of the day there is 3p left for shareholders. A return of 3p on the capital requirement for one in 500 year exposures is pretty thin gruel (I have ignored reinsurance here, but that is simply us negotiating to rent capital to get our one in 500 year capital requirement down from another business operating with very much the same set of dynamics)
Ideally, I would like to get the admin cost down to say 6p and the amount we pay to brokers down to 20p. We could do this through tech and better risk information sharing with the brokers – currently for example we both need to do money laundering and sanctions checking. If we could do that we could let the claims ratio ease up to 70p in the £1. The combined ratio (my annual performance metric) would go down from 97% to 96%.
I would have happy policyholders (getting a much better value for money product) and happy shareholders (their return have have improved by one-third)
If someone else manages to square this circle – I lose my job. Given the conservatism of the one in 500 year capital requirement, the policyholders would get paid, and I very much doubt that the shareholders would be wiped out. As you say, private enterprise premised on failure, but my failure is the success of others in the sector, bringing a better product to policyholders and better returns to shareholders.
if you believe in the cappuccino economy, this is it in practice, the private sector innovating to deliver better solutions to the benefit of all.
And what happens if you failed?
Would the cover to your customer be protected?