A review, by Glenn Reynolds, over at Popular Mechanics. A commenter claims that the engine development is having certification problems, but I don’t know how credible the commenter is.
I found this interesting:
Honda is also saving development money by taking advantage of modern computer power. Fujino notes that it’s possible to do serious design work on a laptop nowadays, where not long ago it took an expensive engineering workstation. And Honda is making heavy use of simulations, with a sophisticated whole-aircraft simulator that allows real parts to be swapped in and tested against virtual parts and vice versa, allowing many stages of refinement before parts ever reach the test-flight stage.
I wonder why these kinds of development-technology savings aren’t making their way into the spacecraft design world. But they probably are, actually. It’s one of the reasons that SpaceX has accomplished so much for comparatively little money. And when you’re on a cost-plus contract, you can always find other ways to spend the money.
Fujino notes that it’s possible to do serious design work on a laptop nowadays, where not long ago it took an expensive engineering workstation.
You would need to keep that new video card you purchased. But then again, many at NASA seems to think serious design work is performed via MS Powerpoint.
“But then again, many at NASA seems to think serious design work is performed via MS Powerpoint.”
That’s cold Leland, accurate, but cold.
On that note, I would really like to see a detailed accounting of where all the money is going on Ares I/Orion (That’s $9 billion so far; $40 billion left to go, according to the GAO estimate last summer). I am mightily puzzled by the discrepancy between those numbers and the amount that SpaceX and Orbital are spending on the cargo versions of their new launchers and capsules. Yes, comparing crew and cargo is like apples and oranges, but I don’t think it’s exactly watermelons and grapes, either.
I’m serious. I don’t believe they are actually throwing it away (I mean, they’re not shredding greenbacks and incinerating them), but how can one program develop a capsule and a booster for well under a billion dollars and another program manage to spend nearly fifty billion? Does anyone have any good insight into that? I’d especially love to hear from someone in the business who might have some real insight.
Bill,
SpaceX and Orbital don’t have a small (or large really) army of bureaucrats to field and feed. Design choices can be made without having to worry about whose empire needs to be appeased or to whose congressional district the tribute must be sent.
Fair enough, Chris, but are there 50 extra bureaucrats for every productive worker on Ares I/Orion compared to SpaceX and Orbital? The size of the discrepancy that needs to be explained beggars even such notions as “bureaucratic inefficiency”.
many at NASA seems to think serious design work is performed via MS Powerpoint.
Heh. If by “serious design work” you mean “consensus-building”, aka “the highest virtue at NASA”, then you’re right. I don’t mind the consensus-building via PPT as much as I detest the notion that a Powerpoint presentation is a substitute for a technical report. The overwhelming majority of technical decisions here are documented with a PPT and not a TR.
It’s one of the reasons that SpaceX has accomplished so much for comparatively little money.
Well, I am impressed at their ability to throw testbeds in the air and watch them fail. In many ways this is superior to the NASA approach of studying it to death and planning for a test flight only after many years of development. I think SpaceX has learned a lot from their failures.
I am not so impressed at their ability to do design trades on the computer. Why have they had so many staging problems? Why didn’t they predict some of these problems in simulations and fix them before throwing away their launchers?
I have worked with the staging team here at MSFC and I can vouch for the fact that we have done many many MANY simulations. This simulation work has resulted in a better, more robust staging system than we started with. Meanwhile, SpaceX throws up a launcher that doesn’t even have baffles in the LOX tank? WTF? They must think launchers are cheaper than simulations — or literature searches.
BBB
A lot of the problem with the NASA\Big Contractor way is that about 1% of the people involved are actually productive. The other 99% are either incompetent or are cleaning up after the incompetent ones.
Commercial space has come a long way in a short time, but I worry that the first time there is an issue they will get sued out of existence.
Regarding the Powerpoint remark, that is not only true for NASA, alas. On my last few consulting gigs, most of the engineers knew very little about CAD of any type, had little clue as to how parts/assemblies are actually manufactured, no interest in the shop floor, and many of them couldn’t do stress analysis and related work. But they certainly knew how to do elaborate Powerpoint presentations. These were all people with the full 4 year degree.
It could have been worse, though. I spent two wretched years under a senior engineering manager whose sole academic qualification was a Masters in Child Psychology, and who knew nothing about the work.