We stopped doing serious space development after Apollo and lost a ton of institutional knowledge between then and when SpaceX started picking up where they left off.
Documentation and old drawings, often lacking implementation details, can only take you so far
There's no big secret, if we do a thing a lot we will be able to do it consistently and reliably. Boeing has not done a lot of spacecraft design and manufacturing recently. They've spent a bunch of "time" on it, but haven't actually produced much.
Fortunately other companies, besides just SpaceX, are building lots of spacecraft.
> We stopped doing serious space development after Apollo and lost a ton of institutional knowledge between then and when SpaceX started picking up where they left off.
Yup. This is part of why I really love watching For All Mankind. I love the idea of an alternate history where the space race effectively never ended. In that universe, in 1974 they were farther along than we are today.
(Yes, I know, it's fictional, and even had the space race never ended in real life, the rate of progress would probably not have been as fast as it is in the show. But I can dream...)
> Boeing has not done a lot of spacecraft design and manufacturing recently. They've spent a bunch of "time" on it, but haven't actually produced much.
And, arguably, the Boeing doing spacecraft stuff today is not the same Boeing that did spacecraft stuff decades ago, from a management and organizational culture standpoint.
> Fortunately other companies, besides just SpaceX, are building lots of spacecraft.
I wouldn't say they do too much though.
In USA we have 1) Dragon - an overall good, rather conventional, rather modest in capabilities design. We also have 2) Lockheed's Orion, a rather capable, but quite, quite expensive design. 3) We also have Starliner, and I hope Boeing will at least try to support it, or better make it reliable enough; it's also rather modest, but much better than nothing. 4) We also have Dream Chaser... not quite have yet, and it's in cargo version for now, but still there's hope it will carry humans one day and will be successful. Better than many other designs, and of course not perfect. 5) We have Starship... maybe it will carry humans earlier than Dream Chaser, but that's still at least years away. It's a rather unique design, true. But quite unproven at the moment.
So... the best overall at the moment is still Dragon, and the best candidate to replace it is years away - I'd hope that would be Dream Chaser, though won't bet on it.
Overall... not too much I'd say. Just imagine yourself in place of those several companies which are building orbital stations today. What they're going to use?.. Do you see the problem?
There are lots of spacecraft being built, they just aren't all human rated at the moment. I should mention that I'm including first stages here too because my point is that we have to build the stuff to work the organizational muscles so that we can build more similar stuff which is better performing later.
Rocket lab is launching electron a bunch, working on Neutron which will be a falcon 9 competitor, and is building spacecraft for their customers (e.g. they built some Martian orbiters that should get launched later this year).
Intuitive machines, the folks who built the most recent US lunar lander.
Blue origin is not exactly speedy, but they do fly their rockets semi-regularly now and New Glenn is supposed to fly later this year.
Northrup has a human-rated rocket that flies periodically.
And of course there's ULA.
And those are just the successful ones.
There's also:
Astra
ABL
Firefly
Relativity
Sierra Space
And probably some more that I'm not aware of.
That's a pretty long list of places that are working on these problems and paying American engineers to work on and think about these problems.
We also have X-37 the military space plane, although that’s for the military.
X-33 was a thing, Venturestar by Lockheed. It seemed tantalising in close, a few mishaps and it was cancelled, but surely that would have been worth picking and taking that bit further.
Most of the companies with actual money behind their space station proposals seem to intend to use the IDSS, so theoretically they'd be able to take either of the commercial crew spacecraft. Besides that, iirc one proposal is basically a "basic" cylinder which relies on a docked Dragon to support it. Starship is in an interesting spot because in a sense it's a station in itself. Starship deployable stations currently have the problem that the payload bay opening mechanism and volume aren't set in stone yet.
> Most of the companies with actual money behind their space station proposals seem to intend to use the IDSS, so theoretically they'd be able to take either of the commercial crew spacecraft.
Right, but to be practical, those commercial crew spacecrafts should exist in sufficient numbers to ensure the orbital stations are supplied, preferably without exorbitant price tags, which an insufficient supply could result in.
Agreed, so far, SpaceX seems to be fine with building more Dragons, I had been assuming they were just refitting the 3 they built initially for the free-flying missions, but turns out they have 5 in service at the moment. Boeing seems to have decided to stop at 2 Starliners, and of course too early to say about fleet size for Dreamchaser.
"Not as successful as was originally hoped" is quite an understatement. The program missed all of its economical and operational targets (reliability, cost per kg in orbit, launch frequency) by a factor of one hundred. It was supposed to usher in a new era of scientific, commercial and civilian spaceflight, and competing programs were cancelled and deprioritized because they were about to be obsoleted by this amazing new reusable space lauch system. What it ended up being, instead, was an epic exercise in space budget whoring, which continues to this day with the Artemis program that insists on "reusing" Space Shuttle derived hardware for that exact reason.
Sure, if you define "successful" in the most cynical way possible. I don't disagree with you at all that many projects (even many non-space-related) are just jobs programs masquerading as "progress" or "research" or whatever.
But so what? I don't care about that measure of "success". I care about reliable, reusable, cost-efficient space launches, and all the technological and scientific advances that can bring. By those measures, the space shuttle was a disaster of a failure. That's what we care about.
It explored an idea that ended up being a dead end. But we only know it in hindsight. Decisions need to be judged given the information available at the time. Was there a consensus that shuttle was a bad design at the time? Was it obvious that it will be the case?
Obviously it was not known from the beginning that it would be a dead end. However, engineers have this blind spot for keeping track of bigger-picture objectives, as opposed to technical specifications. If you set out to build a lawn mower, and end up with a rubber duck, this will be deemed a failure. But if you do build the lawn mower, all is good. Even if it costs a million dollars, and all the lawns in the country remain unmowed (except for a handful of government properties). So long as someone is paying for continued development, where's the problem?
In other words, a lot of such government-backed projects utterly fail in their objectives, not so much due to lack of prophetic foresight, but due to inability to re-evaluate when it becomes clear that the previously chosen approach can no longer lead to the envisioned outcome. ITER is another fine example of this.
The first space shuttle prototype (Enterprise) started construction in 1974. The first shuttle launched in 1981. To the best of my knowledge, there were no major upgrades to the design over its career, save avionics. So even though the space shuttle was “serious space development,” it’s been a long time since a new human rated vehicle has been designed.
Yes, also there's a world of difference between a single extremely hard to repeat mission whose only purpose was to win the race to the Moon at any cost for reasons that had more to do with politics than engineering (not to dismiss the huge engineering accomplishments, my point should be clear) and something whose plan is to send stuff in orbit every week and potentially people every month with the goal to do the same on the Moon very soon and Mars in less than a couple decades.
The great accomplishment today isn't reaching a higher orbit than in the 60s, but doing the same every damn month, with significant cargo capabilities, and safely. One can't build a Moon base by sending up there a bag of screws every six months.
What do you mean a "single mission", Apollo put astronauts on the moon 6 times and orbited it another 2 times.
You learn to do things better by doing it repeatedly. The best way to build up to weekly launches is to do it more and more and more often, which is exactly what SpaceX has done.
Stopping the funding that NASA was getting at the time is the reason we lost those institutional muscles and stopped building them up.
> What do you mean a "single mission", Apollo put astronauts on the moon 6 times and orbited it another 2 times.
Possible bad wording on my part. I meant that the cost was hardly sustainable in a long run, so that once it was clear that the US had won the race to the Moon, the lack of significant incentives doomed the project because of high cost compared to the return. Back then there was no or very little interest in placing commercial satellites in orbit and nobody cared about Mars. The shuttle was different as it served as a lab and carrier to put satellites in orbit, and more importantly (replying also to avar here) disasters aside one would still have the shuttle returning after each launch, while every single Saturn V had to be rebuilt. I believe the move to a reusable carrier was obligatory to make short term launches feasible economically, which is what the Shuttle started and now SpaceX is continuing.
I don't buy that the cost was unsustainable. All that money being spent was going directly into the American economy and was stimulating technological development all over the country.
The story that NASA was too expensive during Apollo sounds like political spin to me.
Apollo's single mission was "get to the moon", which it performed admirably more than once. Skylab was an attempt at a secondary mission; others were canceled in early planning (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_V#Post-Apollo_proposal).
IMO the shuttle program did a decent job of preserving American human-spaceflight know-how, especially when measured against what it was feasible to accomplish at the time.
The true problem is that the US government stopped funding space in a serious way and so NASA did not continue pushing the envelope at the rate they did before. We've had some pretty great robotic missions in that time though.
No, the true problem was that the Shuttle program was just a terrible idea. Alternatives (like economical expendable launchers, or even just evolving Saturn) would have been much better.
The shuttle program had several problems, but perhaps the biggest was something of a "design by committee" issue. Too many interested parties wanted it to do too many things, making it somewhere between bad and mediocre at all of them, to say nothing of the costs.
To build reliable, economical rockets and spacecraft (at least those burdened with the task of escaping Earth's gravity well), you need to be able to intensely specialize and streamline them to the greatest degree possible, with what complexity remains pulling its own weight several times over. They need to be really good at one thing, with any other use cases coming as a bonus.
That's not even the root cause. The need for so many parties came from the need for a large enough market to justify the program. And the need for a large market came from the large cost of developing the launcher. And that came from the top down decision for reusability combined with overall inefficiency of the NASA-industry development system. And that is sourced back to Congress viewing NASA and space spending primarily as a pork delivery vehicle, not as an effort intended to achieve real results as economically as possible.
It took SpaceX to slash costs, accelerate development, and choose an approach that really made engineering success to push partial reusability over the finish line. SpaceX was not subject to the perverse incentives under which NASA is forced to operate.
Documentation and old drawings, often lacking implementation details, can only take you so far
There's no big secret, if we do a thing a lot we will be able to do it consistently and reliably. Boeing has not done a lot of spacecraft design and manufacturing recently. They've spent a bunch of "time" on it, but haven't actually produced much.
Fortunately other companies, besides just SpaceX, are building lots of spacecraft.