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Given that SLS is the part of Artemis that has actually shown it works, and Starship is the part that is nowhere near schedule, and doesn't work, it's very funny to suggest that NASA should learn from SpaceX and not the other way around.

SpaceX hasn't even had the confidence to put Starship in LEO yet, and has not carried 1kg of real payload (and barely a few kg of test payloads) - while SLS did an orbit of the Moon, with real payload satellites.

This reminds me of my all-time-favourite HN comment[0] (and a life lesson too):

This idea is captured nicely in the book "Art and Fear" with the following anecdote: "The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.

His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot – albeit a perfect one – to get an “A”.

Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay."

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22105478

Congress is fickle enough without rockets blowing up, even if NASA explains up front that it's going to happen. There is much which is suboptimal about NASA, not just their attitude towards perfection, which is downstream of the political reality they have to deal with. For instance, a project that could be done in one year given adaquate funding will instead be spread out over ten years or more, to spread out the costs and keep NASA's monetary requirements as smooth and predictable as possible, for the sake of Congress.

2cents from a kid who grew up in a NASA family during the shuttle years - As others have commented, NASA’s baseline objective is to not kill astronauts. My understanding of their ethos growing up was that there was absolutely no excuse not to pursue excellence and prioritize safety when people’s lives were on the line. One would have to think that goal is fundamentally incompatible with SpaceX’s way of doing things (see the many exploding rockets - who wants to get in that?). And from what I’ve read and heard through the grapevine, working with SpaceX as a contractor on Artemis has certainly had pain points related to these mismatched priorities.

NASA is beholden to politicians and voters who get easily ruffled when politicians can point to explosions and say "those are you tax dollars." NASA needs to be perfect and impress people or they get their budget cut even further.

SpaceX's move-fast-and-break-things approach was lauded and NASA panned as being stuck in the past until <checks notes> the zeitgeist turned against Musk at which point the drones and tech blogs they read and write now view SpaceX as dangerous and wasteful at all costs. When a mere few years ago they couldn't shower them with enough praise.

I have no skin in this game other than to say the old school methods resulted in a janky ship that stranded two astronauts in space for months until they could catch a ride home on a SpaceX ship.

NASA should not do what businesses do, because by definition their job is to do what businesses cannot or will not do.

They should not adopt spacex practices, they should adopt spacex lift vehicles (once proven).

NASA has been directed by Congress to use the remaining Space Shuttle RS25 engines on SLS. There aren't that many RS25's left, so Artemis requires that they make the most of each launch. Getting more RS25's produced is one of those "nobody's made them in a long time and it would be terribly expensive and time-consuming to do so" type of situations.

correction: there are 16 RS25's left, but production has begun on more for the Artemis V mission. However, production is slow so they can't just yeet SLS's into space and test rapidly.

Neither craft have achieved their missions so it's a bit early to make that call.

Also interesting to hear what the NASA people assigned to work with SpaceX say:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxIiiwD9C0E&t=1440s

> I wonder if NASA could start to adopt SpaceX like approaches? Where one doesn't try to get everything correct before acting?

that would be such a culture change you'd have to disband NASA and start it over.

I think we're all misunderstanding SpaceX. I think it's more of an engine factory disguised as a general space company that managed to borrow the dad's card.

The only thing SpaceX truly has an edge is its engines.

They have perfected the engine for a ship like a giant Mars class rockets. And that engine has been in full scale series production for years, while the actual Starship keeps blowing up. The reason they developed their hoverslam landing technology, also, was because they wanted their precious engines back.

It's as if they handed groups of gamers a credit card and they went onto plunder stocks of RTX cards from 20 miles around with some Roombas bought on reward points. It's just inches below the threshold for typical BS detector if it weren't specifically tuned for the relevant topics.

All makes sense if everything was an elaborate ploy to get someone to pay for specifically the engines.

My suspicion is ULA can’t manufacture SLS quickly enough, at high enough quality, to meet multiple, gradual tests.

Systemic inefficiencies aside. I wonder how much of that is a public funding feedback loop? The cost gets higher, because the standards, requirements, and processes are stricter, because there is the need to validate the use of public funds, exacerbated by being higher, increasing the standards/requirements etc etc... Especially in a political environment where there is no shortage of sniping funding for points.

Regardless, first thing it reminded me of was that interview quote about how if nasa had SpaceX track record they would have lost funding long ago. Is there a US political landscape, even back to 2008-2016, where that isn't the case?

If I were to bet, even with no information. I would wager that the private company is more capital efficient than the government ran one

SpaceX doesn't have investors itching to take AWAY money from their programs. they are obligated to be perfect on the first run. Public vs. private.

If NASA switches to the Space X approach of just blowing up its rockets it would soon need to change its name to "Need Another Seven Astronauts".

I think the public funding aspect complicates this, NASA is probably not in a position where it can blow up a bunch of rockets and still get funding for the next year.

The Artemis mission is manned. I assume the Starships are unmanned.

The risk profile is very different.

Boris Chertok's memoir[0] on early Soviet space program is essential reading.

inexact quote: "You know, we're throwing towns into the sky" related to the early mishaps of R-7 program development, but they kept doing it. After that R-7 derivatives became the most reliable launch vehicle.

[0] https://www.nasa.gov/history/history-publications-and-resour...

NASA did have SpaceX like approach. Much more aggressive as a matter of fact. They cooked the occupants of Apollo 1 and they sent another mission out broken so they had to fix it live in space.

The question is whether you have the appetite for killing three astronauts on a test run like the Apollo team did.

EDIT: Fine, I’ll clarify. By “SpaceX like approach” I mean iterative design. By “more aggressive” I mean risk tolerance much greater than SpaceX to the degree that they do things that SpaceX wouldn’t do.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociotechnical_system

NASA and SpaceX are fundamentally incomparable, considering how these two organizations are established and the motivations that drive all the actors within. Sure, NASA could start to adopt certain approaches but I don't imagine it to work in a way anyone else would imagine it to.

They've blown up 11 Starships without any of them making it to orbit. Artemis I flew around the moon and came back already.

And don't compare costs because Starship does not and may never work so I dont care how much cheaper it is. If we are comparing fictional rockets I have a $1 rocket that can fly to Jupiter.

> I wonder if NASA could start to adopt SpaceX like approaches? Where one doesn't try to get everything correct before acting?

This seems so ridiculous in the abstract. Like, what is that exactly supposed to entail in the context of launching rockets?

The real question is which is more likely to avoid catastrophic failures in practice.

And we 'tried until it didn't blow up immediately' is not a great sign.

Sadly, I feel the same way. Here's a great video of Starliner:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L96asfTvJ_A

You summarized my concerns almost perfectly. My only addition is that you didn't stress enough how much this anti-science administration has destabilized NASA, both directly and indirectly. The institutional decision making has definitely been compromised.

Artemis II is a disaster in progress.

Sadly, the worst thing I'm worried about is the current president pushing for a landing before he leaves office in order to have that feather in his cap. Isaacman seems competent and this article shows they are responding to the concerns of the plan and are "shortening the steps in the staircase" to a landing.

You meant cinematographers, right?

Well to be fair Nasa isn't nearly as good as it once was. The quality of engineer during the Apollo era was far better and more like what can be found at Spacex

I think the main difference was political: for Apollo you had the most powerful nation in history throw their economic and political will into pushing a project forward.

NASA programs today are mainly about creating/maintaining jobs and keeping private industry contractors busy. They lost the political agency and freedom to move fast that they had in the 60s.

More frequent launches with less ambitious progress per launch makes good sense, and follows the old-school approach used through Apollo to mitigate risk. Having a lunar lander test in earth orbit, for example, is roughly the same mission as Apollo 9, is a good call. Validating everything works together has been a sort of sore spot for the Artemis program.

I’d say we’ll look back in a few decades and recognise the Apollo programs as the peak of the USA. Those people did truly amazing things. I recommend “Space Rocket History” podcast if you like Apollo. It’s a wonderful and highly detailed podcast and covers the US and Soviet space race in great detail.

Especially if you can time your visit to Florida with a launch. Seeing the Shuttle launch in real life made me realize what a poor medium television is to actually show you reality.

(I don't know what the current policies are but you used to be able to apply in advance for VIP tickets, or buy them on the secondary market, which gives you much closer viewing of the launch)

Yes! I just got to go there earlier this month for the first time. They even have the lectern from the Kennedy speech (and the speech itself)!

Went to Florida some years ago when my kids were all teens and pre-teens. Did Disney World, Universal Studios, Sea World, the works.

We unanimously agreed KSC was by far the best of all. If you only do one thing in Florida, that would be it.

Make sure you look at ALL the stuff in the rocket garden and make sure you take the bus to the Apollo center and make sure you do them in that order.

If you've never seen a gator then looking in the ditches by the road during the bus tour is a good bed.

I knew a lot of this, and had a good idea of how bad this whole thing was but... damn, how comprehensively horrible a parade of bad, multi-decade decisions this is turning out to be.

The Apollo program budget was immensely large, and the objective was clear: put people on the moon before the Soviet Union.

Artemis objectives are less well defined, more ambitious and with way less money. The big budget is being allocated to brutes killing people in the streets and a decadent ballroom for the emperor. The difference in importance between the two is the cause of all the failures.

it's because we "destroyed the technology" :^)

I feel the same. The Golden Gate Bridge took 3 years to build, start to finish. It was the biggest suspension to have ever been built at the time. Compare that to any modern public works project of today. There are countless examples of how we used to be able to build things before 1970.

I think the narrative is more difficult now, as is visibility of goals. “Land a man on the Moon and return him safely” is a clear objective, while “decarbonize the global economy” or “make AI safe and useful” are fuzzier, and don’t give you a single flag‑planting moment.

But there's no lack of huge achievements. The Mars rovers are amazing: super-sonic parachutes, retro rockets, deploying a little helicopter with no real-time control is huge. So is planting JWST at the L2 point and unfolding it a million miles from earth.

Also, the NASA budget in the 1960's was 10 times higher.

We're doing really complicated stuff. And think about it though, in the 60s/70s we had one organization - NASA. That was it. Today, we have RocketLab, SpaceX, Blue Origin, and NASA, plus Boeing I guess.

Basically because we don't feel like it.

If you look at the unmanned side of NASA, that's going great. NASA can get amazing stuff done.

The manned side gets political attention, and the nature of current politics makes it a bad kind of attention. Results are essentially irrelevant. Jobs and cronyism are the point.

The overall design of the Space Launch System makes very little sense. We know all too well that solid rockets are a bad idea for crewed spaceflight. Hydrogen is a bad fuel for a first stage. It's horrendously wasteful to use expensive, complicated engines designed to be reused, and then throw them away on every launch. Early estimates were over $2 billion per launch, which in the current age is total clownshoes. The actual costs will be much higher still.

So why are they doing it? Because using all this old, rather inappropriate tech allows them to keep paying the contractors for it. If you gave NASA a pile of money and told them to build a moon program, they wouldn't build this. But it's not their choice.

Way more safety and rigid testing procedures and a better understanding - the Apollo program was all done by the seat of the pants engineering that somehow worked all based on the ideas of the team that built the German V2.

Each F1 rocket engine was hand tuned by drilling holes into the "plate" so it would not cause the combustion mixture to vibrate the engine into smithereens.

Such an approach would never be tolerated today by NASA.

Essentially, neoliberalism. The goal of everyone on the project is now higher and higher profits. Delivering a working product doesnt necessarily mean best profits anymore. Spacex would rather drag the project along with ships that dont work than to just make something that works. The government has privatized so much of their workload into so few specialized companies that they really can't stop them from doing this.