How can NASA be so good at doing science and so bad at doing exploration? @Eager_Space on Twitter Triabolical_ on Reddit / eagernetwork / eager-space-1038430522...
Exactly the right word. Making a video like this - or the Orion one I did recently - tends to leave me in a bad mood and demotivated. Time to switch back to something more technical.
@@EagerSpace I completely understand your experience, unfortunately. I’d like to encourage you to occasionally do videos like this, though, because a) it doesn’t get discussed enough, b) your insight is deeper than most all I’ve talked to on the subject, including psychologists with Ph.Ds, notable scientists, and Silicon Valley CTOs, and c) getting closer to a solution, which I think you can help with, will make the emotional discomfort we feel talking about it feel and actually be worthwhile.
@@EagerSpace Congrats thats awesome! I’ve been sending your vids to my aerospace engineering peers because they’re nerds about this stuff too. You have such a large number of quality videos now its only a matter of time till more people catch on.
Price's Law is ESPECIALLY relevant to government organizations with no profit motive which encourages greater efficiency. Instead, when government agencies fail, the excuse typically given is "we didn't have enough funding, personnel, or control (power)." Price’s Law - "The square root of the number of people in an organization do 50% of the work. As an organization grows, incompetence grows exponentially and competence grows linearly." - Derek John de Solla Price, physicist and information scientist, credited as the father of scientometrics
Interesting how you present "Mission, Values, Game", i.e. at 6:00, which indicates an agency or company have things that are not said or written. Then the mention on how to move up in management is manage up (but ignore those below?). Of course Apollo was easy to understand by everyone because all three categories was "beat the Russians." For the science side of NASA they leave the details to mission teams which makes sense. HSF side of NASA... well I guess that's what happened with SLS.
This is way too accurate. It took coming to SpaceX to realize most of the other companies have this exact problem, definitely not limited to launcher companies.
This is big organizations in general - the management is playing "the game" to advance in their careers and that is decoupled from the point of the organization to various degrees. The only place you typically don't see it is when you have involved founders who are still in charge. SpaceX, Rocket Lab, and a few others are like that. There *is* one other case; if the company is going to go out of business without big change, you might see it but many executives have golden parachutes so it doesn't matter to them.
Saturn V: Send man to the moon but rocket was single use. Space Shuttle: 1st reusability rocket but more expensive and 2 rockets exploded although helped Launch the Hubble telescope, Docked with a foreign space station called mir and construct the ISS. SLS: Recycled space shuttle hardware which took 11 years to launch with Artemis 1 and Artemis 2 got delayed to 2025
2:41 In my experience, as a tech journalist, then as a marketing geek at a large Silicon Valley graphics company, then the same at a small well known startup, then at a small unknown startup where I accidentally got a couple of patents, and spending a decade as a volunteer with a well-known disaster response group, the problem I have found with that set of values, is that a) it means they don’t really want excellence to be able to thrive, and b) having diversity and inclusivity in there as numerical goals instead of quality goals destroys all possibilities of the remaining goals ever being achieved in anything more than a token manner. I think that’s because the D&I are distorted for the purposes of nepotism, though it’s more complex than that.
I did a lot of interviewing and later in my career I would ask myself "what does this person add to the team that we don't already have?" We have loads of young white guys who can code... But I think you have to be able to do the job, and I saw some great candidates who couldn't code. I never worked in an environment with diversity goals, but I would expect that like most goals, they get misused. Thanks for your perspective.
@@EagerSpace I should clarify that I’m not sure any of these orgs had modern D&I goals, but rather it seemed like their goals were to have a diversity of different types of people who weren’t competent. Perhaps it was actually the process by which they played the game you described. There’s an NDA that prevents me from sharing a very interesting story about how bad OpenGL programmers were in a few interesting places. It would blow your mind, although given how much engineering you talk about there’s a good chance you personally experienced or heard of those flat performance curves and can figure out what I’m talking about. Still mad about how much it cost me personally. So that’s why your video really resonated with me. You are really doing amazing content, and I’d love to see more videos like this one. It really gets me thinking more deeply about these important issues.
I've seen software teams of 7 people significantly outperform teams of 75 on pretty much every metric. My view is that problems like that generally stem not from the basic competence of the people - though there can be issues there - but rather from the environment that they find themselves embedded in.
@@EagerSpace extremely interesting. Do you think the larger team sizes lead directly to an environment that are detrimental to performance and hostile work environments? If so, what’s your hypothesis as to the mechanism? I have some thoughts her but don’t want to contaminate your answer.
If/when starship works, it's going to change the environment more than Falcon 9 did, and I think there could be *big* repercussions at NASA. Falcon 9 & Dragon almost single-handedly killed Roscosmos as a commercial venture, and it is probably a smaller effect than starship.
Excellent presentation. NASA's Human Spaceflight effort has been plagued by poor management decisions since Day One. Apollo/Saturn turned out to be a dead-end design--15 flight units built, 13 successful launches out of 13 attempts, and then nothing. The only legacy for NASA's human spaceflight effort was a bunch of Apollo/Saturn V ground facilities. Shuttle was a technological marvel and an economic disaster. Besides, the Shuttle program was plagued by disasterous management decisions (launching Challenger in sub-freezing weather, failure to solve the shedding foam problem before it caused the Columbia disaster). Shuttle turned out to be a death-trap for 14 astronauts. The current SLS/Orion program will also be a dead end ($4.1B per launch, one launch per year) like Apollo/Saturn and Shuttle. NASA showed some glimmer of wisdom by selecting the SpaceX Starship for its Artemis HLS lunar lander. I have high hopes for Starship. But with 33 Raptor 2 engines running at liftoff, I have visions of the Soviet N-1 moon rocket of the 1960s with 30 engines running at liftoff (four launch attempts, four failures). Side note: I was an aerospace test engineer for 32 years (1965-97, Gemini, Apollo Applications, Skylab, Space Shuttle thermal protection system, and numerous other programs).
Thanks for the thoughts... The shuttle management failures are just so maddening. I spent my career in software on big - and buggy - projects and there's certainly the analog of "go fever" there, but we always would be willing to wait a day for something that might be significant. I find Columbia somehow worse; NASA did find some other issues in the challenger investigation but they totally whiffed on the foam shedding problem. And I'm utterly mystified by the management approach to Artemis I - they skip the pathfinder so they're doing fueling tests with flight hardware and they pretend they have a fully tested system. Now they're planning a nighttime launch for a new launcher. I expect that Artemis 1 will be successful once they get to launch, but there is some risk that it won't, and if there are issues not having daytime imagery is going to be a big problem. Have you see the Edx space shuttle engineering course? I found it to be a fascinating overview, though much of it might be stuff you already know. One of the comments from an engineer was, "we were always thinking there would be a shuttle 2.0, and I never understood why we didn't do that". WRT starship, I think 33 engines is weird just because we aren't used to it. Arguably, Falcon 9 was a bigger jump since - with the exception of the russians - everybody was launching with small numbers of engines (Atlas V - 1, Delta IV medium - 1, Ariane - 1), and that's turned out to be a non-problem. Assuming no fratricide and a 1/500 engine, F9 has an engine failure chance of 1.6% and super heavy a chance of 6.4%. 6.4 is quite a bit bigger than 1.6, but super heavy can likely deal with 3 engine failures and that puts the expected mission reliability much, much higher. I don't think N-1 is a good comparison; the russians were essentially doing all-up testing with engines that just weren't ready, and SpaceX does more static fire testing than anybody.
@@EagerSpace I agree that N1 not a good comparison. In general Soviets did not allocate resources for extensive ground tests and other development testing like what NASA did. We all seen the first N1 launch was with all engines clustered and operated for the first time. Also control system technologies much better. However we really don't know what SpaceX is doing or what their real goals are, we get glimpse of it when Elon holds a press conference or observations by RUclipsrs like Everyday Astronaut. Regarding the Soviets, in the book by James Harford "Korolev" one of the engineers that worked with Korolev said when Kennedy announced a race to the moon, Soviets can either enter the race or not. They did neither.
I wonder if you had advantage during your years of having resources to do the job. That is if need some metal, cable, subsystem you didn't have to justify the cost (even for small stuff), file and wait for IT waiver even for non-IT stuff, and other "barriers." I have this impression if a SpaceX employee needs something, they just go ahead and buy it. Though drawback is they may have to work many 16 hour days plus weekends.
@@wrightmf SpaceX goals is simple, you'd see it in one of their T-shirt. Go to Mars & establish a permanent colony That's why they're making more progress than other big aerospace companies (that only wanted to pursue more contracts)
I think he was joking, but something like it might be a good idea. Imagine a board game that teaches you the game theory of how local incentives undermine global optimization. A simple example is ice cream vendors on a beach. The global optimum is even spacing, but the Nash equilibrium is to cluster like Walgreens and CVS: right next to each other in the middle. Most NASA admins really do dream of rapid space development, even as they pursue local-optimized strategies to stay employed for another election cycle. This could be a great game if we could demonstrate the principles by showing how the phenomenon occurs naturally. Don't have a card pop up that cynically says "new president, go back 5 spaces". Instead, let game theory show how the misinentives occur naturally even when people want to pursue a global optimum.
@@WilliamDye-willdye Yes, I was joking. I'm not sure about the "occurs naturally" - a big factor is the "professional management" side, and I'm not sure that's natural or just usual. The game sounds interesting, but given the original purpose of "Monopoly" and the way people think about it now, I'm not sure it's really achieved that goal...
I unfortunately couldn't come up with a better comment here - it was supposed to be an example of how somebody would try to drive traffic to a project for personal gain.
The other day I experienced something truly magical. I am building my own home rocket, and although my design seems good, I just can’t get the Delta V needed. I discovered that unstable combustion was the culprit. I thought the answer would be difficult and expensive. I was so wrong however. I purchased a bottle of Dr. K’s engine elixir and added a small amount to my fuel tank. To my amazement all traces of combustion instability vanished and my rocket was now purring like a kitten. BEST PRODUCT EVER 10/10.
So what is the solution? NASA needs to set clear and long term objectives and a plan of how to get there + stable long-term funding? I see the DoD going through similar problems as well, with the current secretary of defense for acquisition saying DoD should use multi-year contracts so that the defense industry gets the confidence/assurance to actually spend the money to build out and mature the industrial base. Building rockets/weapons is hard, expensive, and takes a long time. These things need industrial bases so you can build it. Building an industrial base is an expensive and long term investment that hinges on contracts to pay it off. And the uncertainty of those contracts flowing is what leads to indecisiveness and delays.
Another example would be US shipyards and the USN. China is building a massive naval force and the US needs more ships to respond. However US shipyards DO NOT have the capacity to build out and maintain a larger navy. Solution? build more maintenance facilities and shipyards. However, US shipyards aren't really doing this. Why? because the USN keeps changing their plan for how many ships they want, and congress + secretary of defense are all fighting over details. Since US shipyards don't know how many ships need to be built, they don't know how much they have to expand their industrial base. So, being private for-profit companies; they will not take the risk to invest in their industrial base, only to find out years later that the USN/congress changed their mind. Is this somewhat analogous as to what's happening at NASA?
It's really up to Congress as they are the ones who are in charge of all this. The commercial space act of 1998 directs NASA to utilized commercial space capabilities "wherever practicable" (weird word, basically means the same as "practical") unless they can prove that they need a capability that only NASA can build, and this has been regularly amplified in NASA authorization bills - see 2004 and 2005 for examples IIRC. NASA has chosen to view this as a challenge, choosing architectures and evaluation criteria that allow them to claim that they need this new expensive complicated approach. Orion is a good example; NASA was headed towards a crew exploration vehicle that would be launched on Atlas V or Delta IV for ISS missions, but the Michael Griffin came in 2005 and we got an orion capsule that was so big and heavy that commercial launchers were out, effectively killing the commercial competition. Great for Lockheed Martin, however, as they have pulled $14.2 billion out of NASA for orion. See my orion video for more information on this. So it's a case of Congress saying one thing and then doing another thing. I'm not an expert on what makes congress tick and it's very much not a monolithic group, but things will change when it becomes politically useful for a majority of congresspeople to change things. Generally that doesn't happen *ever* - shuttle flew 30 years and killed two crews and congress never did anything towards cancelling it - but there may be something going on with Starship. I am in the early stages of a video where I'll talk about the longer term future of SLS/Orion and what could kill it.
Look at everything SpaceX has done. It started out just 22 years ago, AND SpaceX is making about a 50% profit margin on it's launches today...... So not really that hard, expensive, or time consuming..... People doing something badly, doesn't mean it's hard, expensive or slow. That's just how the people doing it badly, explain away their incompetence. With over 350 launches between failures, SpaceX went from not existing, to having the most reliable launch system in history...... Everyone brags about how reliable Soyuz is. But Soyuz has had 1,900 launches and 38 failures. That's a failure every 50 launches.....
I graduated from a school that worked with the NASA Science directorate at every turn. They deserve the highest respect and admiration for their work and their dedication to doing the best, most important and possible scientific effort. I have worked at several other schools that did not have the top-down dedication to science that my grad school had, the difference was truly night and day. I will not tell horror stories here, it's not Halloween. There were some excellent people at those other schools who laboured extremely hard to accomplish much less, I saw them hamstrung by the structure at every turn.
How about we want to create the world's best space vehicles and programs to explore faster and farther than anyone with a high margin of safety. We want the best engineers and managers we can find, and we will reward them appropriately. Or...just the other crap everyone else says and we don't care about the results.
*Very* few big organizations operate that way - management is not rewarded for doing exploratory things that might fail. Companies like SpaceX and Rocket Lab are huge outliers.
@@EagerSpace Yes very true. It is unfortunate that the objectives reflect the operation of the organizational machinery rather than the finished product.
The US never sent any dogs to space. They did kill quite a few monkeys in various early spaceflights though: Alberts I through V, Yorick, Gordo, Miss Able, Miss Baker, Goliath, and Bonny.
Starship is probably not going to work as a spacecraft beyond LEO. What it is useful for, is as a super heavy lift launch vehicle to place payloads in leo for assembly. But the payloads themselves should not be cryogenic. They need to be able to stay on orbit without relying on anything from the ground in the event of mission delays. Think, ISS build method but for very high delta v demand missions. Right tool for the job instead of trying to accomplish the hardest thing we've ever done with a swiss army knife.
This isn't a very good channel for this sort of thing. The fact is NASA didn't want SLS the way it is, SLS came directly from congress. You did know that NASA is directly under Congressional control, yes? In fact not that long ago NASA testified before Congress that the SLS launch expenses were unsustainable. Their own words were unsustainable. But Congress ordered NASA to keep using the cost Plus contracts that it originally told NASA to use.
In other words, what good do you think it will be to shut NASA down and create a new organization, when it's Congress that is making the decisions? Do you think Congress will suddenly start making intelligent decisions if it's not NASA they're telling to do the work?
Your underlying premise is wrong The "Game" that features so prominently in your presentation isn't actually what motivates NASA human spaceflight efforts NASA gets asked to do things by the white house and Congress and get some level of funding to achieve those goals The problem arises when funding is too limited to achieve a "perfect" program, which means there have to be compromises for there to be any human spaceflight program at all. The Shuttle program is the best way to show this, not the most effective human spaceflight strategy but essentially the only one politicians were willing to fund out of the full IPP vision If there was to be any human spaceflight at all it was Shuttle or nothing, and NASA wisely chose the former An imperfect but politically viable program always beats out a perfect program that is unfundable by politicians and ends up going nowhere NASA if properly funded can be as effective at human spaceflight as they are with robotic spaceflight You point out SLS but that has been developed under a flat budget, which is cheaper per year but much more expensive in the long term and stretches out timeliness significantly It also makes the program less flexible to delays and unexpected issues, like how CS-1 had to be used as both a MPTA and a tanking test vehicle to save on budget Many of the problems with SLS would be nonexistent without the constraint of flat budgets Instead of complaining about NASA doing human spaceflight at all, the complaint should be aimed at Congress that is willing to let human spaceflight be funded by low and flat budgets That is what can lead to NASA programs being so ineffective compared to a degree to robotic spaceflight Even then human spaceflight development is inherently much more expensive and time consuming I personally find it admirable NASA has managed to make a Moon rocket and spacecraft without requiring any budget increase under a strictly flat budget and have no doubts SLS and Orion will reach a regular operating cadence once past the first few flights At the end of the day all this noise is made about pennies on the dollar, and there's really no "bad" or "good" parts of NASA Maybe just say "bad is all the programs I don't like and good is all the other bits that don't annoy me as much"
My underlying premise is intended to be that NASA science works well because it has detailed guidance on what is important and functions mostly to hand out funds to numerous small groups. And that human exploration at NASA doesn't have this sort of guidance and - particularly - all the incentives on the HSF side are around big projects that are good for the careers of NASA management, contractor management, and politicians whether they do useful exploration things or not. Congress is obviously part of the problem - especially since SLS was started with a mission purely with the guidance to "build a big rocket" - but I see no reason to absolve NASA of responsibility. And I think Lori Garver's book "Escaping Gravity" is good evidence of the disfunction and misaligned incentives within NASA. I agree that a "give me all the money I want when I want it" budget is more convenient, but budget constraints are present for commercial companies as well and are generally much harsher - your company runs out of money and you need to find a new job. WRT the operational cadence of SLS and Orion, NASA's projections show flights that are *at best* around once a year because SLS is simply too expensive to fly more often. I personally don't think that's a useful exploration program, so it's fair to say that it's a project that annoys me, but the problem is structural, not budgetary.
Brutally true.
Everyone who’s ever worked in a bureaucracy knows that this is the real Game.
Painfully accurate
Exactly the right word.
Making a video like this - or the Orion one I did recently - tends to leave me in a bad mood and demotivated.
Time to switch back to something more technical.
@@EagerSpace I completely understand your experience, unfortunately. I’d like to encourage you to occasionally do videos like this, though, because a) it doesn’t get discussed enough, b) your insight is deeper than most all I’ve talked to on the subject, including psychologists with Ph.Ds, notable scientists, and Silicon Valley CTOs, and c) getting closer to a solution, which I think you can help with, will make the emotional discomfort we feel talking about it feel and actually be worthwhile.
understanding the "game" is so important for fixing all of our broken government institutions, thank you for the great video
Criminally underrated channel 2k should be 2M
I agree 100%
Thanks. I only hit 1k in June, so 2k in October makes me fairly happy.
@@nethoncho Thanks. I only hit 1k in June, so 2k in October makes me fairly happy.
@@EagerSpace Congrats thats awesome! I’ve been sending your vids to my aerospace engineering peers because they’re nerds about this stuff too. You have such a large number of quality videos now its only a matter of time till more people catch on.
It's the game
SLS is a jobs program. Change my mind.
Every program whether it be government or private, is a jobs program under capitalism. The other goals are a bonus.
@@OlCrunch The primary goal of SLS is to keep people employed with a good excuse. It offers no value other than to spend money.
It's a career-enhancement program for NASA managers, aerospace executives, and congresspeople, and having lots of jobs helps all three groups.
Very essential information. Please extend this thesis to today’s launch providers & users, into the future.
Price's Law is ESPECIALLY relevant to government organizations with no profit motive which encourages greater efficiency. Instead, when government agencies fail, the excuse typically given is "we didn't have enough funding, personnel, or control (power)."
Price’s Law - "The square root of the number of people in an organization do 50% of the work. As an organization grows, incompetence grows exponentially and competence grows linearly." - Derek John de Solla Price, physicist and information scientist, credited as the father of scientometrics
Thanks, that's a new one for me.
I certainly agree. I've seen software projects where a team of 10 easily outcompetes a team of 150.
Fantastic video and explanation. It's informative to understand what's happening behind the scenes, how companies operate, the motivationd etc.
A new launch vehicles? SLS engines were built in 1984! It's a 40 year old rocket
Such terrible logic. RL-10 is still used on the Vulcan rocket. Does that make the brand new Vulcan 70 years old?
@@benzene_sandwich yeah, but those are new engines, sls engines were literally built in the 1980s
Thank you for making this video.
Man, this channel is unreasonably good
I shall try to be more reasonable in the future...
And thanks.
Interesting how you present "Mission, Values, Game", i.e. at 6:00, which indicates an agency or company have things that are not said or written. Then the mention on how to move up in management is manage up (but ignore those below?). Of course Apollo was easy to understand by everyone because all three categories was "beat the Russians." For the science side of NASA they leave the details to mission teams which makes sense. HSF side of NASA... well I guess that's what happened with SLS.
Curious where on your list the sequel is about fixing the game.
I'm not sure there is a fix. Big organizations almost inevitably get set up to benefit those who are in charge.
This is way too accurate. It took coming to SpaceX to realize most of the other companies have this exact problem, definitely not limited to launcher companies.
This is big organizations in general - the management is playing "the game" to advance in their careers and that is decoupled from the point of the organization to various degrees.
The only place you typically don't see it is when you have involved founders who are still in charge. SpaceX, Rocket Lab, and a few others are like that.
There *is* one other case; if the company is going to go out of business without big change, you might see it but many executives have golden parachutes so it doesn't matter to them.
I was going to guess Microsoft or SalesForce.
Saturn V: Send man to the moon but rocket was single use.
Space Shuttle: 1st reusability rocket but more expensive and 2 rockets exploded although helped Launch the Hubble telescope, Docked with a foreign space station called mir and construct the ISS.
SLS: Recycled space shuttle hardware which took 11 years to launch with Artemis 1 and Artemis 2 got delayed to 2025
I hate this vide. It's so goood!
2:41
In my experience, as a tech journalist, then as a marketing geek at a large Silicon Valley graphics company, then the same at a small well known startup, then at a small unknown startup where I accidentally got a couple of patents, and spending a decade as a volunteer with a well-known disaster response group, the problem I have found with that set of values, is that a) it means they don’t really want excellence to be able to thrive, and b) having diversity and inclusivity in there as numerical goals instead of quality goals destroys all possibilities of the remaining goals ever being achieved in anything more than a token manner.
I think that’s because the D&I are distorted for the purposes of nepotism, though it’s more complex than that.
I did a lot of interviewing and later in my career I would ask myself "what does this person add to the team that we don't already have?" We have loads of young white guys who can code...
But I think you have to be able to do the job, and I saw some great candidates who couldn't code.
I never worked in an environment with diversity goals, but I would expect that like most goals, they get misused.
Thanks for your perspective.
@@EagerSpace I should clarify that I’m not sure any of these orgs had modern D&I goals, but rather it seemed like their goals were to have a diversity of different types of people who weren’t competent. Perhaps it was actually the process by which they played the game you described.
There’s an NDA that prevents me from sharing a very interesting story about how bad OpenGL programmers were in a few interesting places. It would blow your mind, although given how much engineering you talk about there’s a good chance you personally experienced or heard of those flat performance curves and can figure out what I’m talking about. Still mad about how much it cost me personally. So that’s why your video really resonated with me. You are really doing amazing content, and I’d love to see more videos like this one. It really gets me thinking more deeply about these important issues.
I've seen software teams of 7 people significantly outperform teams of 75 on pretty much every metric. My view is that problems like that generally stem not from the basic competence of the people - though there can be issues there - but rather from the environment that they find themselves embedded in.
@@EagerSpace extremely interesting. Do you think the larger team sizes lead directly to an environment that are detrimental to performance and hostile work environments? If so, what’s your hypothesis as to the mechanism? I have some thoughts her but don’t want to contaminate your answer.
Changes the rules of the game? Are you mad?
For serious, though. Good video!. It really made me even more appreciate that shiny rocket on Texas beach!
If/when starship works, it's going to change the environment more than Falcon 9 did, and I think there could be *big* repercussions at NASA.
Falcon 9 & Dragon almost single-handedly killed Roscosmos as a commercial venture, and it is probably a smaller effect than starship.
Excellent presentation.
NASA's Human Spaceflight effort has been plagued by poor management decisions since Day One. Apollo/Saturn turned out to be a dead-end design--15 flight units built, 13 successful launches out of 13 attempts, and then nothing. The only legacy for NASA's human spaceflight effort was a bunch of Apollo/Saturn V ground facilities.
Shuttle was a technological marvel and an economic disaster. Besides, the Shuttle program was plagued by disasterous management decisions (launching Challenger in sub-freezing weather, failure to solve the shedding foam problem before it caused the Columbia disaster). Shuttle turned out to be a death-trap for 14 astronauts.
The current SLS/Orion program will also be a dead end ($4.1B per launch, one launch per year) like Apollo/Saturn and Shuttle.
NASA showed some glimmer of wisdom by selecting the SpaceX Starship for its Artemis HLS lunar lander. I have high hopes for Starship. But with 33 Raptor 2 engines running at liftoff, I have visions of the Soviet N-1 moon rocket of the 1960s with 30 engines running at liftoff (four launch attempts, four failures).
Side note: I was an aerospace test engineer for 32 years (1965-97, Gemini, Apollo Applications, Skylab, Space Shuttle thermal protection system, and numerous other programs).
Thanks for the thoughts...
The shuttle management failures are just so maddening. I spent my career in software on big - and buggy - projects and there's certainly the analog of "go fever" there, but we always would be willing to wait a day for something that might be significant. I find Columbia somehow worse; NASA did find some other issues in the challenger investigation but they totally whiffed on the foam shedding problem.
And I'm utterly mystified by the management approach to Artemis I - they skip the pathfinder so they're doing fueling tests with flight hardware and they pretend they have a fully tested system. Now they're planning a nighttime launch for a new launcher. I expect that Artemis 1 will be successful once they get to launch, but there is some risk that it won't, and if there are issues not having daytime imagery is going to be a big problem.
Have you see the Edx space shuttle engineering course? I found it to be a fascinating overview, though much of it might be stuff you already know. One of the comments from an engineer was, "we were always thinking there would be a shuttle 2.0, and I never understood why we didn't do that".
WRT starship, I think 33 engines is weird just because we aren't used to it. Arguably, Falcon 9 was a bigger jump since - with the exception of the russians - everybody was launching with small numbers of engines (Atlas V - 1, Delta IV medium - 1, Ariane - 1), and that's turned out to be a non-problem.
Assuming no fratricide and a 1/500 engine, F9 has an engine failure chance of 1.6% and super heavy a chance of 6.4%. 6.4 is quite a bit bigger than 1.6, but super heavy can likely deal with 3 engine failures and that puts the expected mission reliability much, much higher.
I don't think N-1 is a good comparison; the russians were essentially doing all-up testing with engines that just weren't ready, and SpaceX does more static fire testing than anybody.
@@EagerSpace I agree that N1 not a good comparison. In general Soviets did not allocate resources for extensive ground tests and other development testing like what NASA did. We all seen the first N1 launch was with all engines clustered and operated for the first time. Also control system technologies much better. However we really don't know what SpaceX is doing or what their real goals are, we get glimpse of it when Elon holds a press conference or observations by RUclipsrs like Everyday Astronaut.
Regarding the Soviets, in the book by James Harford "Korolev" one of the engineers that worked with Korolev said when Kennedy announced a race to the moon, Soviets can either enter the race or not. They did neither.
I wonder if you had advantage during your years of having resources to do the job. That is if need some metal, cable, subsystem you didn't have to justify the cost (even for small stuff), file and wait for IT waiver even for non-IT stuff, and other "barriers." I have this impression if a SpaceX employee needs something, they just go ahead and buy it. Though drawback is they may have to work many 16 hour days plus weekends.
@@wrightmf SpaceX goals is simple, you'd see it in one of their T-shirt. Go to Mars & establish a permanent colony
That's why they're making more progress than other big aerospace companies (that only wanted to pursue more contracts)
I don't think starship will deliver on its promises and I think it was a pretty bad decision to pick it for HLS.
Fantastic video!
Thanks
Wait, Dr. Koreleov?😂
Kickstarter link 🔗?
I think he was joking, but something like it might be a good idea. Imagine a board game that teaches you the game theory of how local incentives undermine global optimization. A simple example is ice cream vendors on a beach. The global optimum is even spacing, but the Nash equilibrium is to cluster like Walgreens and CVS: right next to each other in the middle. Most NASA admins really do dream of rapid space development, even as they pursue local-optimized strategies to stay employed for another election cycle.
This could be a great game if we could demonstrate the principles by showing how the phenomenon occurs naturally. Don't have a card pop up that cynically says "new president, go back 5 spaces". Instead, let game theory show how the misinentives occur naturally even when people want to pursue a global optimum.
@@WilliamDye-willdye Yes, I was joking.
I'm not sure about the "occurs naturally" - a big factor is the "professional management" side, and I'm not sure that's natural or just usual.
The game sounds interesting, but given the original purpose of "Monopoly" and the way people think about it now, I'm not sure it's really achieved that goal...
I unfortunately couldn't come up with a better comment here - it was supposed to be an example of how somebody would try to drive traffic to a project for personal gain.
Just saying, I wish nasa restructured to be more like space x in money management and operations. They would be able to do more with less money.
To be fair, the issues that NASA has are very common in all big organizations.
Incredible video
The other day I experienced something truly magical. I am building my own home rocket, and although my design seems good, I just can’t get the Delta V needed. I discovered that unstable combustion was the culprit. I thought the answer would be difficult and expensive. I was so wrong however. I purchased a bottle of Dr. K’s engine elixir and added a small amount to my fuel tank. To my amazement all traces of combustion instability vanished and my rocket was now purring like a kitten. BEST PRODUCT EVER 10/10.
Another satisfied customer.
Pretty easy: manned flight bad.
So what is the solution? NASA needs to set clear and long term objectives and a plan of how to get there + stable long-term funding? I see the DoD going through similar problems as well, with the current secretary of defense for acquisition saying DoD should use multi-year contracts so that the defense industry gets the confidence/assurance to actually spend the money to build out and mature the industrial base. Building rockets/weapons is hard, expensive, and takes a long time. These things need industrial bases so you can build it. Building an industrial base is an expensive and long term investment that hinges on contracts to pay it off. And the uncertainty of those contracts flowing is what leads to indecisiveness and delays.
Another example would be US shipyards and the USN. China is building a massive naval force and the US needs more ships to respond. However US shipyards DO NOT have the capacity to build out and maintain a larger navy. Solution? build more maintenance facilities and shipyards. However, US shipyards aren't really doing this. Why? because the USN keeps changing their plan for how many ships they want, and congress + secretary of defense are all fighting over details. Since US shipyards don't know how many ships need to be built, they don't know how much they have to expand their industrial base. So, being private for-profit companies; they will not take the risk to invest in their industrial base, only to find out years later that the USN/congress changed their mind. Is this somewhat analogous as to what's happening at NASA?
It's really up to Congress as they are the ones who are in charge of all this.
The commercial space act of 1998 directs NASA to utilized commercial space capabilities "wherever practicable" (weird word, basically means the same as "practical") unless they can prove that they need a capability that only NASA can build, and this has been regularly amplified in NASA authorization bills - see 2004 and 2005 for examples IIRC.
NASA has chosen to view this as a challenge, choosing architectures and evaluation criteria that allow them to claim that they need this new expensive complicated approach. Orion is a good example; NASA was headed towards a crew exploration vehicle that would be launched on Atlas V or Delta IV for ISS missions, but the Michael Griffin came in 2005 and we got an orion capsule that was so big and heavy that commercial launchers were out, effectively killing the commercial competition. Great for Lockheed Martin, however, as they have pulled $14.2 billion out of NASA for orion. See my orion video for more information on this.
So it's a case of Congress saying one thing and then doing another thing. I'm not an expert on what makes congress tick and it's very much not a monolithic group, but things will change when it becomes politically useful for a majority of congresspeople to change things. Generally that doesn't happen *ever* - shuttle flew 30 years and killed two crews and congress never did anything towards cancelling it - but there may be something going on with Starship.
I am in the early stages of a video where I'll talk about the longer term future of SLS/Orion and what could kill it.
Look at everything SpaceX has done. It started out just 22 years ago, AND SpaceX is making about a 50% profit margin on it's launches today......
So not really that hard, expensive, or time consuming.....
People doing something badly, doesn't mean it's hard, expensive or slow.
That's just how the people doing it badly, explain away their incompetence.
With over 350 launches between failures, SpaceX went from not existing, to having the most reliable launch system in history......
Everyone brags about how reliable Soyuz is.
But Soyuz has had 1,900 launches and 38 failures.
That's a failure every 50 launches.....
Thank you this video is perfect
Thanks, though I would settle for "pretty good"...
As a neurodivergent engineer trying to get into an internship now that im finishing college, this video is really usefull
I graduated from a school that worked with the NASA Science directorate at every turn. They deserve the highest respect and admiration for their work and their dedication to doing the best, most important and possible scientific effort. I have worked at several other schools that did not have the top-down dedication to science that my grad school had, the difference was truly night and day. I will not tell horror stories here, it's not Halloween. There were some excellent people at those other schools who laboured extremely hard to accomplish much less, I saw them hamstrung by the structure at every turn.
How about we want to create the world's best space vehicles and programs to explore faster and farther than anyone with a high margin of safety. We want the best engineers and managers we can find, and we will reward them appropriately. Or...just the other crap everyone else says and we don't care about the results.
*Very* few big organizations operate that way - management is not rewarded for doing exploratory things that might fail. Companies like SpaceX and Rocket Lab are huge outliers.
@@EagerSpace Yes very true. It is unfortunate that the objectives reflect the operation of the organizational machinery rather than the finished product.
Bad NASA: sending a homeless dog to space :(
The US never sent any dogs to space. They did kill quite a few monkeys in various early spaceflights though:
Alberts I through V, Yorick, Gordo, Miss Able, Miss Baker, Goliath, and Bonny.
kinda sounds like chinese totalitarianism deserves to win
How about an informed captain, we don't need to go all the way to ruthless dictator
Oh shoot. This, and "The Space Shuttle: What Went Wrong?", are frankly your two most important videos!
Thanks. Many people focus on the technical side of spaceflight and I think the organizational part is at least as interesting.
Starship is probably not going to work as a spacecraft beyond LEO. What it is useful for, is as a super heavy lift launch vehicle to place payloads in leo for assembly. But the payloads themselves should not be cryogenic. They need to be able to stay on orbit without relying on anything from the ground in the event of mission delays. Think, ISS build method but for very high delta v demand missions. Right tool for the job instead of trying to accomplish the hardest thing we've ever done with a swiss army knife.
I did a simple analysis on using starship as a propellant depot that touches on whether cryogenics in orbit make sense.
NASA needs to be shut, and a new organization with America's goals in mind, not the worker's paycheck.
This isn't a very good channel for this sort of thing. The fact is NASA didn't want SLS the way it is, SLS came directly from congress. You did know that NASA is directly under Congressional control, yes?
In fact not that long ago NASA testified before Congress that the SLS launch expenses were unsustainable. Their own words were unsustainable. But Congress ordered NASA to keep using the cost Plus contracts that it originally told NASA to use.
In other words, what good do you think it will be to shut NASA down and create a new organization, when it's Congress that is making the decisions?
Do you think Congress will suddenly start making intelligent decisions if it's not NASA they're telling to do the work?
Soooooooo, TLDR is that things you like are good, and things you don't like are bad, got it
All i can see from your comment is *Such rationalisation much wow for big orange rocket* lmao
The overhype regarding manned missions needs to end.
Robots can do so much for so little
no
Your underlying premise is wrong
The "Game" that features so prominently in your presentation isn't actually what motivates NASA human spaceflight efforts
NASA gets asked to do things by the white house and Congress and get some level of funding to achieve those goals
The problem arises when funding is too limited to achieve a "perfect" program, which means there have to be compromises for there to be any human spaceflight program at all.
The Shuttle program is the best way to show this, not the most effective human spaceflight strategy but essentially the only one politicians were willing to fund out of the full IPP vision
If there was to be any human spaceflight at all it was Shuttle or nothing, and NASA wisely chose the former
An imperfect but politically viable program always beats out a perfect program that is unfundable by politicians and ends up going nowhere
NASA if properly funded can be as effective at human spaceflight as they are with robotic spaceflight
You point out SLS but that has been developed under a flat budget, which is cheaper per year but much more expensive in the long term and stretches out timeliness significantly
It also makes the program less flexible to delays and unexpected issues, like how CS-1 had to be used as both a MPTA and a tanking test vehicle to save on budget
Many of the problems with SLS would be nonexistent without the constraint of flat budgets
Instead of complaining about NASA doing human spaceflight at all, the complaint should be aimed at Congress that is willing to let human spaceflight be funded by low and flat budgets
That is what can lead to NASA programs being so ineffective compared to a degree to robotic spaceflight
Even then human spaceflight development is inherently much more expensive and time consuming
I personally find it admirable NASA has managed to make a Moon rocket and spacecraft without requiring any budget increase under a strictly flat budget and have no doubts SLS and Orion will reach a regular operating cadence once past the first few flights
At the end of the day all this noise is made about pennies on the dollar, and there's really no "bad" or "good" parts of NASA
Maybe just say "bad is all the programs I don't like and good is all the other bits that don't annoy me as much"
My underlying premise is intended to be that NASA science works well because it has detailed guidance on what is important and functions mostly to hand out funds to numerous small groups. And that human exploration at NASA doesn't have this sort of guidance and - particularly - all the incentives on the HSF side are around big projects that are good for the careers of NASA management, contractor management, and politicians whether they do useful exploration things or not.
Congress is obviously part of the problem - especially since SLS was started with a mission purely with the guidance to "build a big rocket" - but I see no reason to absolve NASA of responsibility. And I think Lori Garver's book "Escaping Gravity" is good evidence of the disfunction and misaligned incentives within NASA.
I agree that a "give me all the money I want when I want it" budget is more convenient, but budget constraints are present for commercial companies as well and are generally much harsher - your company runs out of money and you need to find a new job.
WRT the operational cadence of SLS and Orion, NASA's projections show flights that are *at best* around once a year because SLS is simply too expensive to fly more often. I personally don't think that's a useful exploration program, so it's fair to say that it's a project that annoys me, but the problem is structural, not budgetary.