Jeff Foust already has a piece up at The Space Review about this past weekend's X-Prize Cup, and the state of NewSpace:

Both the overall Cup and Armadillo’s efforts in the Lunar Lander Challenge illustrated one thing: the entrepreneurial “NewSpace” industry is in a particularly demanding phase of its development. The public’s expectations—and those of some in the industry—have risen because of past successes, like SpaceShipOne. Yes, most companies are still in the earliest phases of developing vehicles and related technologies, a phase prone to failures as new technologies and approaches are tried and often discarded. It’s a steep part of the learning curve, and even more difficult when it’s on public display.

“It’s easier than the professionals think it is, but it’s harder than the amateurs think it is,” Carmack said between flights of Pixel at the X Prize Cup. “You just can’t expect everything to work the first time.”

Yes, space is hard. It's not as hard, and doesn't have to be as expensive, as NASA and conventional wisdom tell us, but it's also not as easy as some of the more facile commenters would indicate. The current "garage," "build a little test a little" approaches will work fine for exhibitions like this, but at some point, the players are going to have to start doing the unfun things, like systems engineering, requirements analysis, configuration management, if they want to have real businesses, with real customers, real insurers, major investors, and regulators. In fact, a little more time and analysis up front might have resulted in a success for Armadillo this past weekend. Structural analysis isn't rocket science--the vehicle legs should have been able to handle the landing loads. And speaking of systems management, Eve Lichtgarn has a review of what looks like an interesting book on that subject for the Apollo program.

Anyway, sometimes lessons learned from personal experience are taken more to heart than lectures from the old timers. I just hope that they learn the lessons before they start actually riding the vehicles, and congratulations to them for a good attempt, and a great show.

Could someone please inform Mr Foust and the other so-called 'analysts' at TSR that a couple of guys building a lander in a shed on weekends is not an 'industry'.

No, but I'll be happy to inform so-called "critics" like you that strawmen are not taken seriously around here.

Didn't a couple of brothers from Dayton Ohio spend weekends in what amounted to a shed to build their flying machine? I guess that didn't amount to much of an industry either.

I guess Carmack's team does not include any mechanical engineers with any landing gear experience. They are in extremely high demand even on the professional side, at dinosaur aerospace companies. More appropo may have been someone with motorized hang glider trike landing gear design and testing experience. Can you say bungee cord shocks?

Rand: You can still "build a little, test a little" as the projects get bigger, higher performance, and more expensive. Incremental development can be applied regardless of the project complexity. The press releases just come out less frequently. :)

A couple of notes on on Stephen B. Johnson (Lichtgarn review): while she describes him as an "academic author," he did put in some years as an engineer at Northrop and Martin Marietta before deciding he was even more interested in how engineering organizations work.

His first book, "The USAF and the Culture of Innovation," covers the evolution of systems management in ICBM programs -- there's maybe 1/3 overlap between that and the Apollo book, but both are very much worth while on how and why those "unfun things" evolved. They're a good antidote to extremes of the "damn the paperwork, let's bend some metal and see if it flies" approach. SBJ interviewed a lot of people who tried to carry that approach from aircraft and sounding-rocket experience over to Atlas and Titan and Thor, and blew up a lot of metal before learning better.

As he says, "I'm perfectly willing to believe some smart guys in a garage can build and fly something without systems management. I just don't think they're likely to do it repeatably."

The current "garage," "build a little test a little" approaches will work fine for exhibitions like this, but at some point, the players are going to have to start doing the unfun things, like systems engineering, requirements analysis, configuration management, if they want to have real businesses, with real customers, real insurers, major investors, and regulators.

And the latter methods utterly fail when you don't have a system to engineer, customers whose requirements can be analyzed, or a configuration to manage. I'm not saying that the methods are useless, just that most of these organizations aren't to a point where formal methods net gain.

Flight testing often works better with reusable designs. :)

Could someone please inform Mr Foust and the other so-called 'analysts' at TSR that a couple of guys building a lander in a shed on weekends is not an 'industry'.

I'll see Mr. Trotter's Wright Brothers and triple the raise:

1) Henry Ford building a car in a shed - the first American car in the first American garage. His intentional invention started an industry. His incidental invention provided the invaluable venue of origin for every subsequent wave of American start-up entrepreneurship.

2) Hewlett and Packard building a tunable oscillator in a garage.

3) Jobs and Wozniak building a personal computer in a garage.

See or fold, Mr. Mann.

As for formal methods vs. seat-of-the-pants cut-and-try, both have their places. The X-plane programs featured quite bit of both as I recall. Do not be distracted from the ends by falsely dichotomizing the means.

>Structural analysis isn't rocket science--the
>vehicle legs should have been able to handle the
>landing loads.

I don't make any excuses for our unacceptable landing legs, but I do seem to recall seeing a lot of video of the original LEM test articles crumpling legs in tests even when they knew exactly what was to be tested.

Given more time we certainly would have (and will) resolved the problem, but we just didn't get there before the event.

John Carmack

John, I think that what you're doing is great, and I really, really hope you keep doing it. I think that it's a much better (and more useful for humanity) hobby than collecting Ferraris. And I'm honored that you're reading this dumb website.

Once again, I salute you, and wish that I'd been smart enough to make a large fortune in some other business, so I could (potentially) turn it into a small one in this one.

But the Apollo guys didn't have the structural analysis tools we do today. As a gamer, you more than anyone should know that. I also hope that you agree that another year will make things much better for the industry, despite the fact that your competitors will also have more of an opportunity to compete.

Ugh. Oh well. Rand's right. It's a factor of the nature of the business, especially if you want to move quickly into flying payloads with large values associated with them.

The lander team made a lot of stuff up from scratch and a lot of the structural engineering science we have today wasn't around in the 60s. Finite Element Analysis tools and the like should make our lives much easier than for the Apollo teams.

What I can suspect is that the supply of the really strong structural guys with a deep understanding of the issues is limited and few of them are in the space fan base.

few of them are in the space fan base.

Just wanted to point out that the distance between "space fan" and "willing to give up a $150K/yr normal job for a $0k/yr space job" is quite large.

Perhaps what we really need is a talent exchange of some sorts - in return for helping solve a technical problem, you get bumped up in the wait list for a flight?

I think "open source rocketry" has been tried but it didn't go far. But maybe on a more modest base it could be a useful model in the internet.

What is special about Armadillo compared to all the other alt space teams is their very open development diaries.

Often people sent advice, especially in the early days. There's still the armadillo q&a thread at spacefellowship.
But it's probably hard to get good advice from strangers and I don't know how many people actively follow the updates to be on the ball where it's going. In such a small team you probably don't spend a lot of time generating documents, so to bring a new guy up to speed to do something might take some resources.

The problem with the OpenSource or advice from strangers approach is that it becomes its own project management nightmare.

It can be ahrd to have people dip in and out of any project, there's usually a lot of stuff to catch up on and the last thing you need is people double checking months old design decisions that have already been through the mill many times. Frankly, that's where a lot of PM dollars go on projects. There are advantages to really small teams where the same group are involved from end-to-end. The trouble is that in my experience in aerospace and software that doesn't scale well. Which is why we end up with the project and process management overheads we do.

The other problem with lack of documents, or even something as simple as drawing controls is that you can end up with people working off old specs and the have to resolve problems at later stages when they crop up. There are good reasons why standards like ISO9000 came about, even if they are black holes for money.

I worked on an engineering project once where we sub'd a bunch of simple mechanical work to a local fab shop. Each week we'd meet them and send them new drawings and they'd get on with it. About a half way through the project we were alarmed that our inspection showed some problems. When we checked, they'd not implemented any method of making sure somebody collected the old drawings from the shop on a Friday and issued new drawings to people on the following Monday. We lost a couple of weeks over that.

Yes, Dave, and those are the kinds of experiences that gradually cause people to realize that systems engineering and configuration management aren't just make-work programs for bureaucrats. At some point, NewSpace companies will realize that not only are such things not unaffordable, but that they can't afford not to do them.

That said, supposedly in business the advent of IT systems has resulted in the need to push decision making "out to the edges of business", where you allow your lowest employees to make decisions. Modern businesses have an empowered employee mindset, while old businesses have a centralized power mindset. The proof of this effect can be seen in the decimation of the ranks of middle management - you just need far fewer managers once you have an excellent IT system in place.

The same is probably true to a more limitted extent with large aerospace projects...