Realize the article is written by Andy Pasztor. If there is ever a negative SpaceX angle, he'll find it.
I'm not disputing the factual content of the article, nor do I have reason to believe he's paid off to do hit pieces, but it's important to realize he almost constantly has a chip on his shoulder with respect to SpaceX.
Another thing to keep in mind: SpaceX produces more liquid rocket engines than any other domestic provider by a VERY large margin.
It's good to have someone who's skeptical and willing to travel beyond the spacex fever the tech press is infected with to report on things with a critical eye. This seems like a totally valid article, and as long as the facts are correct as reported it doesn't really matter who the author is.
Agreed - the criticisms here are pure ad hominem. If there is a problem with SpaceX components, then that is surely more important and relevant than who wrote the article publicising it.
Except that the journalistic track record of an author is additional information.
Imagine a person who you know to have a large bias against something. Now imagine they tell you a narrative about that thing. You, being a reasonable person, would use greater scrutiny about that narrative than someone who you know to be uninterested or even marginally interested in the subject.
I agree that the public has an interest in finding out about issues in the rockets its government purchases. The above commenter isn't saying "disregard, it's the anti-SpaceX guy!" It's just more information. Gathering information has a cost; and we can't all fully research every opinion.
I didn't downvote you; it's a reasonable argument to make, and I don't mind giving the counter-opinion in the least.
Generally speaking, not wrt this article, I want to point out that usually the definition of bias is that it's unreasonable—if the concerns are reasonable, then it's not bias. So you can't look at someone, see that they write negative articles, and conclude bias. That's not enough information: you still ought to establish whether they got it wrong (especially in an obvious or lazy way), and only then conclude they are biased. If someone keeps writing negative/positive articles, and you don't know if they're right, then you also don't know if they're biased or not.
Since I don't see anybody pointing out what's obviously wrong with these concerns, I feel safe to assume it's not biased. Figuring out if an argument is biased is at least as hard as examining the argument on merits, and usually much harder. So I think that the commenters were right to call out the ad hominem.
I don't know if this is obviously wrong with these concerns but...
“we have qualified our engines to be robust” to such cracks but are “modifying the design to avoid them altogether.” The pending changes “will be part of the final design” for the Falcon 9, he added, “in partnership with NASA to qualify engines for manned spaceflight.”
In other words this might not have been a meaningful safety issue. I am not qualified to judge robust in that context, but this reads like a one sided hit piece and the writer has demonstrated past bias. EX: bulging backlog is not a neutral statement.
The only thing we can say for sure is it has not been an issue in the last 29 flights, so the actual risk must be greater than 0 and less than ~10%.
PS: I would hope they would take even a specific risk at 0.01% per flight as a serious safety concern. But, again without data we don't know if it was more or less than that.
That's my point: the way figure out if the author is biased is to first answer the somewhat easier question: are the cracks a serious issue or not? I'd much rather have that discussion than the other one. That's also why the ad hominem further up was unjustified.
P.S. hit piece is not exactly neutral on your part either. Bias works both ways, you know.
Hit piece is descriptive. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hit_piece. Do you have a more neutral one For: "A published article or post aiming to sway the public opinion by presenting the false or biased information in a way that appears objective and truthful."
Also, I am not sure the guy is biased, just that the piece is. He got a strong response form HN for that article which drives readership. Which is why Hit Pices are such a common style they promote readership.
The two synonyms are slam piece and hatchet job, so definitely negative, not neutral or merely descriptive. Plus, the bias is not in the term itself, but in you applying the term to the article.
Of the three Hit piece seems the most descriptive. I can directly say it looks like the article is aiming to sway the public opinion by presenting the false or biased information in a way that appears objective and truthful.
It's just more words for the same idea.
IMO, Hit Piece like War has negative connotations because of what they depict, not the tone. Hatchet Job on the other hand tacks on the idea it was written that way with malicious intent, which I don't want to imply as it may simply be a tactic to gain more views.
So, I disagree there is bias when simply describing what it's structure of point and counter point suggests. You could replace the content with talk of muffins and the same structure works to exaggerate concerns.
Because any article like this is filled with non-neutral ways of wording statements.
Andy's information is usually well-sourced. I'm not saying to disregard the objective information in his articles, only be wary of his spin on those facts. There ARE people in the space journalism field that are noted for their professionalism and neutrality. Jeff Foust, for instance, is one of them. Andy P is definitely not.
You can write an article claiming almost anything if you include supporting facts and deliberately ignore dissenting facts. The world is full of noisy data.
You can dismiss any evidence you want by pointing out unspecified dissenting facts that might exist, so you gotta be quite specific. That's why assessing things on merit is right, but pointing out that all data is noisy is not the way to go: it's uninformative.
Pointing out that data is noisy as a counterargument to an article is uninformative. Pointing out that data is noisy to encourage critical thinking and make people wary of manipulation is not uninformative.
Well said. This smells like a hatchet piece put together by the gray hairs at StratCom who've continued to be incredulous that a private enterprise can put things in orbit and have hoped for SpaceX to fail from the outset.
> incredulous that a private enterprise can put things in orbit
What's with this commonly repeated narrative that SpaceX is the only private company in space? I think the formation of ULA between Boeing and Lockheed was garbage as much as the next person. Just like Boeing buying McDonnell Douglas was garbage. But look at a list of rockets to take something to space and they are all private (ULA, Orbital, and SpaceX).
SpaceX plays the game just like everyone else. They hire the retired generals from the military. They bid on government launches. They use government ranges for launching.
All of the incumbent's R&D was paid for by US taxpayers. Their bloated pricing is a product of not having to compete commercially on cost. SpaceX has to seek business where the opportunities are. They in turn plow their profits back into the business rather than waiting for the next handout.
That doesn't explain why ULA has such insane launch costs. It's a classic government fleece job. They've been stealing taxpayer dollars because they could.
SpaceX is charging a fraction of the cost.
ULA has been paying lobbyists and trying to squeeze SpaceX out of bidding. It has been purely due to the hype around SpaceX that they were not successful.
Why the government let Boeing and Lockheed form the ULA is beyond me. The US used to have 3 solid launch providers and went to 1. I'm glad we're back to 2 with SpaceX. We were handing lots of business to Arianespace.
In another article [1], the GAO says that they cannot talk about any information in the report because it is still in preparation and has not been publicly made available, so others cannot even verify the claims of the author. The preliminary report must have been leaked to the author of the WSJ article.
This strikes me as an example of everything in the system working.
-GAO analyzes SpaceX processes and discovers a shortcoming
-Media reports on this to create public awareness
-SpaceX is compelled to respond and fix the problem (something their engineers were probably already aware of anyway)
-Space Travel continues to move safely forward
This is quite refreshing from other government initiatives at the moment.
Really step 2 isn't necessary at all beyond transparency and a voracious curiosity about SpaceX from some circles. NASA would simply not qualify SpaceXs' rockets for manned flight without these fixes.
Isn't it? One wonders what would've followed from a decision on the part of Thiokol's engineers to take to the media their concerns about SRB segment seal reliability. Absent such external pressure, I see no a priori reason to assume NASA management won't make the same errors it did in 1986 and 2003.
With each of those NASA has changed and put more safeguards in place in their process. And (as I recall because the article is refusing to open for me now even through google in incognito) NASA was already requiring changes before the GAO report was coming out. So it seems like this was already behind handled properly by being redesigned before human certification.
I think that totally underwrites the behavior of Elon Musk how I see it. Even if engineers know better that there are problems with certain design decisions and things have to be redone, Elon overwrites and say: "just do it, we will fix it later." That basically to be able to run its marketing machine that he is the innovative guy.
It is this IT thinking principle of MVP with knowing design flaws. "But we will fix the flaws later." which is different from the engineering principle. In the engineering principle if design flaws become obvious, yes things gets delayed, because it has to be redone to eleminate the design flaws from the beginning. Because we know, things you can fix early may delay, but it is cheap. Things you need to fix later are expansive. Like if your production is set up and running and then you need to change things, you need also to change production.
He has shown this behavior with the Autopilot in the Tesla. Now it also becomes obvious for SpaceX: "Industry officials have known about problems with cracked blades on Falcon 9 versions for many months or even years. But cracks continued to be found during tests as recently as September 2016, Robert Lightfoot, NASA’s acting administrator, confirmed in an interview with The Wall Street Journal earlier this week."
Well, considering that they fly 10 of those engines with every Falcon9 launch, and so far only a single of them has actually failed (and just shut off), it does not seem to be an actual problem so far. It might be interesting to see if this changes as the engines are reflown with the recovered first stages. If this might create an actual safety hazard for manned missions, it all makes sense to postpone a final solution till you are getting close to doing the manned flights. No reason to delay cargo missions for something that might affect manned rating.
>The Government Accountability Office’s preliminary findings reveal a pattern of problems with turbine blades that pump fuel into rocket engines
>The crack-prone parts are considered a potentially major threat to rocket safety, the industry officials said, and may require redesign of what are commonly called the Falcon 9’s turbopumps.
>A SpaceX spokesman said “we have qualified our engines to be robust” to such cracks but are “modifying the design to avoid them altogether.” The pending changes “will be part of the final design” for the Falcon 9, he added, “in partnership with NASA to qualify engines for manned spaceflight.”
>For Boeing, these officials said, GAO investigators—among other items—raised questions about the status of tests to determine the reliability of its parachute systems designed to help returning manned capsules land safely.
>The GAO also has determined that both companies face an uphill struggle to meet NASA’s statistical goal of no more than one projected astronaut fatality in 270 flights, industry officials said.
Yes. Though I think it makes more sense to read this as 2 losses in 135 flights (98.5% safety rating), or 14 fatalities among 817 passengers (98.2% safety rating).
(The per-passenger safety rating is slightly less because the only losses carried 7-passenger crews, while about half the flights carried 5 or 6 passenger crews. I didn't include the non-orbital test flights carrying crews of 2, which were arguably more dangerous than orbital flights, and I tried to handle Mir transfers and ISS crew exchanges sensibly.)
Historically, failures in spaceflight result in a loss of all crew (or a loss of no crew, if they have abort capabilities). This suggests an easy way to artificially improve the launches-per-fatality metric would be to reduce the number of crew per flight, so I'd prefer to use numbers for failures-per-launch or fatalities-per-passenger.
I think that's why they stopped doing manned missions - it was too dangerous. This episode of Gimlet's Undone kind of talks about that - https://gimletmedia.com/episode/the-columbia/
They're asking for nearly 2 magnitudes better safety than they could provide. Granted the space shuttle was dumb from the beginning and we'd be flying around in our flying cars and vacationing on Mars if they'd stuck with the far superior Saturn launch system. But who could of known that, besides the plethora of scientists who pointed this out?
It's supposed to be achievable precisely because the shuttle was such a dumb/difficult/unwieldy concept no matter how it was implemented. SpaceX and Boeing get to have abort capability all the way to orbit and inherently simpler capsules.
To torture the shuttle comparison, they shouldn't get damaged by a piece falling of their launching rockets because they get to sit on top and keep their heat shields protected during launch, and they shouldn't be destroyed if the booster explodes because they have launch escape systems. The only two shuttle failures causing fatalities were kind of inherent to shuttle.
Except that the options at the time were space shuttle or NOTHING--not space shuttle or Saturn V.
NASA threw in with the only folks willing to fund spaceflight--the military. And the military demanded an orbiter that could do circumpolar orbits--which was totally crazy from an engineering standpoint.
We already had the Saturn. If you're saying NASA's other choice was nothing, then it was purely political and if they'd stuck to the science the Air Force would have been told to suck it eventually. Instead NASA wasted 30 years of rocket science on a giant turd that was far more expensive than Saturn and killed a person ever 2.5 launches.
> If you're saying NASA's other choice was nothing, then it was purely political and if they'd stuck to the science the Air Force would have been told to suck it eventually.
Yes, it was political. And it wasn't at all impossible that they would just collapse NASA's budget (this was in the recessions of the 1970's), and NASA wouldn't even exist today.
circumpolar doesn't make sense as an orbit. The crazy shuttle design requirement was to return 40 tonnes from a single polar orbit in 1 pass. I.e bring a spy sat back to america without flying over russia.
This means a massive body to hold an object, The earth would move under the craft as it rotated. Without being able to wait for it to rotate around you need wings for the large cross-range capability to glide back to america.
As KSP teaches us you can't put massive wings at the top of a rocket, without even bigger wings at the bottom. But that's got too much drag to get to space and so, the insane launch system that was the shuttle is invented.
They never used this ability for the entire service life of the shuttle.
It means being able to reach more kinds of orbits, which adds requirements. So does reentry capability. Why add those two sets of requirements to the same vehicle, see?
Considering SpaceX plans to launch up to 100 people at a time to Mars with no real abort possible, I think its quite reasonable to ask them for that level of safety on a system with an abort.
My "expected value" knowledge has atrophied, but I'm guessing this is just a weird way of saying a success rate of 99.5% or something. 0.995^135 is about 0.5, so you blow up on average half the time in 135 flights, or once every 270 flights.
> no more than one projected astronaut fatality in 270 flights
> success rate of 99.5% or something. 0.995^135 is about 0.5
Method seems pretty good, but unfortunately that math would only work if there was exactly one astronaut per flight. Per Wikipedia, the capacity is up to 7 crew members, so I reckon at full capacity, that would be 1 full vehicle failure with 7 lives lost in 1,890 flights.
Not a rocket buff but I thought the soyuz rocket (R-7) was one of the most proven and reliable rockets there are. In 60 years that family has had 1,859 launches[1].
So statistics aside it's interesting just how high those standards are if you bore them out. Going to look stupid with some maths here; If spacex launch every 2 weeks which I thought was the goal, that's like 72 years to prove that reliability record.
72.69 = (1890 * 2) / 52
Number of 1 week periods divided by weeks in a year.
How did they discover the turbine cracks? It seems a bit unfair if this is a result of examination of returned engines, since other companies leave evidence of similar problems at the bottom of the ocean.
Any rocket engine design used on modern launch vehicles has undergone extensive ground testing, including multiple full mission duration burns on test stands.
You're talking about a turbopump spinning at several tens of thousands of rpms, at very high temperature. Yes, a couple g's of lateral acceleration adds a bit too those stresses, but it's a fairly minor effect, I'm sure.
I think it's vastly more likely they're cracking from the rotation speed, temperature, and pressure.
I expect this is true, but I'd like to have a whole lot more information than the article contains. Specifically, under what conditions the cracks are observed.
I think this is plausible if they've been increasing performance a lot in the recent years. With a rocket engine, up to level, you can get that mostly by just increasing pump speed.
Charging for your articles to support journalism is a legitimate business practice. Produce something valuable, using skill and effort, and make a living at it.
I'm not disputing the factual content of the article, nor do I have reason to believe he's paid off to do hit pieces, but it's important to realize he almost constantly has a chip on his shoulder with respect to SpaceX.
Another thing to keep in mind: SpaceX produces more liquid rocket engines than any other domestic provider by a VERY large margin.