

Elon Musk with the Falcon 9  (Source:












Sources: MSNBC,

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Sounds a Lot...
By mmatis on 9/30/2011 6:26:19 PM , Rating: 2
like Roton's claims. But then what else is new? Note that most of the cost of launching rockets is the standing army needed to do so. There is a specific skill mix required that you do not usually find at your local Temporary Employment body shop. As a result, you end up with a Standing Army that must be paid, regardless of whether you launch any vehicles or not. And for a given size of the Standing Army, and a given launch vehicle design, there are only so many launches per year that you can do. After that, you have to add more bodies, largely in multiples of the original Standing Army.

The startups like SpaceX and Bigelow Aerospace save their money by cutting Quality Inspection and Engineering, and by buying non-space-qualified hardware. Which is all very fine until the hardware manufacturer changes one component of his product and it fails to work in a space environment. I would note that Scaled Composites has been promising commercial "spaceflight" for HOW LONG now? And they are VERY suborbital in their goals.

There is a REASON why they call it "rocket science"...

RE: Sounds a Lot...
By Ringold on 9/30/2011 9:54:12 PM , Rating: 2

So you're saying they dont spend a thousand bucks on a toilet seat, and incorporate industry best-practices in terms of efficient quality control, like the ultra-reliable airlines do? And they don't waste money by trying to have some sort of component of their business spread across as many political boundaries as possible to appease the masses?

Wow, that sounds awful! ...

RE: Sounds a Lot...
By Gondor on 10/1/2011 3:57:39 PM , Rating: 4
From Armageddon (movie):

"Rockhound: You know we're sitting on four million pounds of fuel, one nuclear weapon and a thing that has 270,000 moving parts built by the lowest bidder. Makes you feel good, doesn't it?"


RE: Sounds a Lot...
By mmatis on 10/1/2011 7:54:09 PM , Rating: 2
They are WELL SHORT of "...industry best-practices in terms of efficient quality control, like the ultra-reliable airlines do..."

First of all, it would be nice if you were intelligent enough to understand that the "...thousand bucks on a toilet seat..." was a DIRECT result of the way Congress insisted that they book their R&D costs. The contractor understood that was NOT realistic, but also understood that, if they FAILED to book costs that way, they would NOT get paid.

Secondly, I believe you will find that airlines have configuration control on their aircrafts' parts, including those supplied by outside contractors. When unqual'd parts enter the system, as they have several times in the past, the airlines shut down UNTIL THEY CAN VERIFY that NONE of those unqual'd parts are in use on critical systems. Bigelow was VERY proud of going down to Ace Hardware and buying a regulator for $50 instead of spending $5000 on a qualified part. The folly of doing that has been shown MANY times with catastrophic launch failures. But live and learn, I guess. I'll sit on my back patio with a cold drink and watch the nice fireworks shows.

