I was told by a SpaceX VP at the launch that they offered free launches to NASA, Air Force etc. but got no takers. A student developed experiment or early tech demo could have led to even more new knowledge from the mission. The Tesla gimmick was the backup. https://t.co/R00OSjf4DF
According to @NASA PAO #NASA did not officially ask for payload space on the inaugural flight of #FalconHeavy nor did @SpaceX solicit a payload from NASA for that flight.
Because Falcon Heavy has now flown successfully. It can no longer be dismissed out of hand as an “untested launch vehicle that has never flown”. Considering how many times Falcon Heavy faced possible cancellation (Elon Musk said they almost cancelled it 3 times) and how often its schedule has slipped, delaying speaking about this issue was a wise move, IMHO.
I’m reluctant to assign motivation. I don’t know Ms. Garver, but I do know that she’s respected in her profession (and by this page). Maybe this knowledge is wide among the Big Dogs of Space, making the comment something like stating the obvious.
Some call her a ‘SX shill’; the other side of that coin involves reasonable assessment of current space policy and letting chips fall as they will.
The thing that interested me: this comment is obviously inflammatory, at least when heard by some ears.
Ms. Garver is clearly stating the obvious based on the published stats of Falcon Heavy.
The fact that her statements are also “inflammatory” means that there are some people who are living in a world of “alternative facts”. A world where SpaceX is ignored because they “don’t have the decades of experience” or they “don’t have a perfect flight history” or “Falcon Heavy isn’t big enough for NASA” and etc.
In the end, I suspect the genesis of the SpaceX opposition is pretty much “They took our jobs!”.
I agree with Ms. Garver. Since private industry has already developed this technology at no cost to the taxpayer, use Falcon Heavy and cancel SLS, too expensive and way too late.
I can imagine NASA being reluctant to stick a payload on the inaugural flight, with a possible high failure rate. It’s good news if they’ve got payloads on the next couple ones.
He was almost certainly setting expectations. Saying it had a 50/50 chance of success means that if it failed, the popular press wouldn’t be so shocked if it did fail. The popular press is into writing sensational stories, so best to set expectations low.
I think it’s a couple of secondary payload on the third launch (the one for the Air Force.)
But being reluctant to fly for free, because it’s a risky test launch, isn’t obviously the right choice. Ariane 501/Cluster (sometimes called the most expensive float to integer conversion error in history) is a classing example of why you wouldn’t want to do that. But Cluster was a flagship mission for the European Space Agency and cost over a billion (well, over what a billion Euros would be worth today, I’m not even going to think about the pre-Euro accounting they had to deal with…)
On the other hand, it isn’t all that expensive to build a small scientific or technology demonstration payload. It would have to adhere to the “do no harm” principle of secondary payloads. But if it’s cheap enough, it might be worth risking a 50% chance of a launch failure for a flight opportunity. And if you’re willing to do that, you could make it even cheaper by not designing for high reliability. If you can live with an overall 30% chance of success, you could build to typical CubeSat standard (60% success rate if the launch works.) At some point, I think it makes sense to say “why the hell not.” But I don’t see any discussion of what that point is. The NASA position seems to be “never,” and I don’t think that’s correct.
I’m glad to read that. I suggested in one of the earlier posts on the launch that someone could probably have used the payload space even if it did have a high failure rate, and got criticized for thinking that anyone would risk their multi-million dollar spacecraft on it.
But as you said, if it was cheap enough and tolerated a higher failure rate per probe, then it could work fine. It’s like a point you made a while back about redefining the mission so that it includes a series of spacecraft rather than making each spacecraft the mission, so that you can tolerate a higher failure rate per spacecraft as long as the overall mission still gets done at a higher success rate.
Although I’m not sure what useful science stuff might have been put on this launch. It’s just a really elliptical solar orbit that passes Mars and nearly reaches out to the main asteroid belt.
Well, there are a few possibilities for science on the same orbit as the Tesla. About a week ago, NASA released a draft announcement of opportunity for Small Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration (SIMPlEx). That’s CubeSat and ESPA-class planetary spacecraft to launch with future, larger missions. The two relatively near-term opportunities are launching with the Discovery missions Lucy and Psyche. The secondary spacecraft would end up on orbits not terribly different from Mr. Musk’s car.
There are things you could do with that. Asteroid encounters are one possibility. On the other hand, it would require in space propulsion and navigation. At that point, it isn’t clear how much it would cost or whether such a spacecraft would cheap enough to risk on a first launch.
I can’t see a reason why NASA or the Air Force would want to put a payload on such a test flight. Can you imagine what the pubic would say if that payload were lost?
That’s just a matter of spin. You could publicize it in advance as something daring and adventurous, and only risking something a bunch of graduate students put together in their spare time. That’s a bit of an exaggeration, even of we were talking about something like a CubeSat. But if you spin it that way, you could probably avoid a press backlash.
Graduate students don’t have any “spare time”. Perhaps undergrads could have built a cubesat for Falcon Heavy, since those student missions are considered successful if the students merely deliver a working satellite to the launch pad, But anybody who is funded by grant money, which is to say anybody above the level of undergraduate student, would have a hard time explaining to their funding agency how they spent the grant money on a mission that had a 50% chance of failure.
I know there are some universities, departments and professors who think graduate students who don’t work at least 60 hours a week are lazy. But they have trouble attracting and keeping students. Most graduate students do have spare time.
I remember one physics student at Berkeley who built a big Van de Graaff generator, with almost a one meter sphere and which could throw two or three meter electric arcs. He did it in his free time just because he could. (The parts were, I think, discards from various labs; we once came across a 1 Farad, 200 V capacitor that was thrown out because it won’t hold charge for more than a few minutes…)
I also know of a good planetary scientist who, while a graduate student, danced in the Boulder ballet. If memory serves, she was the prima ballerina by the time she defended her thesis. That suggests having spare time as a graduate student.
And more senior people also have spare time. Those are, in general, exempt positions and people will, when necessary, work weekends and long hours. But in general, those sorts of people do have evenings and weekends off and vacation time.
And, even if you insist on billing it to a grant (which would mean proposing to do it, unless you can talk your contract monitor into something), funding for 50% success efforts is obtainable. It’s called “high benefit/high risk.” If you can make the case that the potential benefits of success are large enough, and the cost of trying is low enough, you can get funding.
Not just that, but if your primary area of engineering/research is some kind of tech demonstrator, you might never, ever get funding for a launch. Your funding is only for ground development: proof of principle.
But if someone gives you a free launch, that same limited funding can allow you to do a in-space test of your system. Drastically increasing the value of your research to yourself, your institute and your funders.
In other words, the work on the ground is what is being funding. Testing it in space is gravy.
“When the privately funded experimental Falcon 1 rocket exploded shortly after lift-off, its designers vowed to rebuild it and fly it again (see ‘Private rocket crashes and burns’). But it looks like it’s curtains for the rocket’s payload, an ill-fated little satellite called FalconSAT-2.”
Yes, but at the time, SpaceX wasn’t really seen as a serious competitor to companies like ULA. There weren’t as many people interested in publicizing evidence of poor reliability.
I keep seeing people make the assumption that big and expensive mean the same thing. (It’s even built into some of the more approximate cost models NASA uses; that the cost of an instrument will be proportional to its mass.)
In practice, if you’ve got more than enough mass, there are all sorts of ways to reduce cost. Is there an existing part which is twice as capable as what I really need? Quite often. Could I design something less massive that just did what I needed and no more? Sure, but it would cost a whole lot more. If I’m not facing mass constraints, why just not buy the existing part and live with the higher mass?
Maybe an informal offer was made as a courtesy just in case there was any interest. After receiving a verbal “Thanks for asking but no thanks” there was no need to submit any formal solicitations. The NASA PAO statement doesn’t seem to contradict that possibility.
As an engineer and researcher, I would not lift a single finger to work on a project that had a “50/50” chance of disintegrating before it reached orbit. Next.
Well, as a planetary scientist, I certainly would. If the launch is cheap enough, and I could build two spacecraft, and try again if the first launch didn’t work. That would accomplish as much as waiting for more reliable (and more expensive) launch opportunity and do so sooner.
That’s only looking at the risk, not the potential benefits. Would you, for example, bet money on a coin flip if someone offered you 2:1 odds? Or would you say money is a finite resource and should only be invested in things which are statistically likely?
As a more tangible example, I used to coordinate Cassini and Hubble Space Telescope observations of Saturn. HST can’t look at Saturn all the time. In fact, significantly less than 50% of the time. That can’t be predicted more than a few months in advance, and all the Cassini observations were planned and sequenced over six months in advance. So every time we tried to do that sort of coordination, there was better than a 50% chance it just wouldn’t work out. When it didn’t, we just shrugged it off and tried again.
We felt the value of a successful observation was worth quite a bit more than the time and effort of making the attempt. It’s a matter of making sure the investment is less than the benefits times the probability of success. That involves more than just looking at the probability of success.
I wonder why Ms. Garver made this public? And why the comment was made now?
I don’t know Lori Garver. But you have to wonder why anyone says something publicly after the fact unless they have an agenda or ax to grind?
yep – an agenda of advancing space activities… seems pretty obvious.
Because Falcon Heavy has now flown successfully. It can no longer be dismissed out of hand as an “untested launch vehicle that has never flown”. Considering how many times Falcon Heavy faced possible cancellation (Elon Musk said they almost cancelled it 3 times) and how often its schedule has slipped, delaying speaking about this issue was a wise move, IMHO.
I’m reluctant to assign motivation. I don’t know Ms. Garver, but I do know that she’s respected in her profession (and by this page). Maybe this knowledge is wide among the Big Dogs of Space, making the comment something like stating the obvious.
Some call her a ‘SX shill’; the other side of that coin involves reasonable assessment of current space policy and letting chips fall as they will.
The thing that interested me: this comment is obviously inflammatory, at least when heard by some ears.
Ms. Garver is clearly stating the obvious based on the published stats of Falcon Heavy.
The fact that her statements are also “inflammatory” means that there are some people who are living in a world of “alternative facts”. A world where SpaceX is ignored because they “don’t have the decades of experience” or they “don’t have a perfect flight history” or “Falcon Heavy isn’t big enough for NASA” and etc.
In the end, I suspect the genesis of the SpaceX opposition is pretty much “They took our jobs!”.
I agree with Ms. Garver. Since private industry has already developed this technology at no cost to the taxpayer, use Falcon Heavy and cancel SLS, too expensive and way too late.
I can imagine NASA being reluctant to stick a payload on the inaugural flight, with a possible high failure rate. It’s good news if they’ve got payloads on the next couple ones.
Indeed. No idea what Mr. Musk was saying privately, but his 50/50 assessment was widely quoted.
He was almost certainly setting expectations. Saying it had a 50/50 chance of success means that if it failed, the popular press wouldn’t be so shocked if it did fail. The popular press is into writing sensational stories, so best to set expectations low.
Maybe. But Mr. Musk is so charmingly guileless I’m inclined to take the comment at face value.
I think it’s a couple of secondary payload on the third launch (the one for the Air Force.)
But being reluctant to fly for free, because it’s a risky test launch, isn’t obviously the right choice. Ariane 501/Cluster (sometimes called the most expensive float to integer conversion error in history) is a classing example of why you wouldn’t want to do that. But Cluster was a flagship mission for the European Space Agency and cost over a billion (well, over what a billion Euros would be worth today, I’m not even going to think about the pre-Euro accounting they had to deal with…)
On the other hand, it isn’t all that expensive to build a small scientific or technology demonstration payload. It would have to adhere to the “do no harm” principle of secondary payloads. But if it’s cheap enough, it might be worth risking a 50% chance of a launch failure for a flight opportunity. And if you’re willing to do that, you could make it even cheaper by not designing for high reliability. If you can live with an overall 30% chance of success, you could build to typical CubeSat standard (60% success rate if the launch works.) At some point, I think it makes sense to say “why the hell not.” But I don’t see any discussion of what that point is. The NASA position seems to be “never,” and I don’t think that’s correct.
I’m glad to read that. I suggested in one of the earlier posts on the launch that someone could probably have used the payload space even if it did have a high failure rate, and got criticized for thinking that anyone would risk their multi-million dollar spacecraft on it.
But as you said, if it was cheap enough and tolerated a higher failure rate per probe, then it could work fine. It’s like a point you made a while back about redefining the mission so that it includes a series of spacecraft rather than making each spacecraft the mission, so that you can tolerate a higher failure rate per spacecraft as long as the overall mission still gets done at a higher success rate.
Although I’m not sure what useful science stuff might have been put on this launch. It’s just a really elliptical solar orbit that passes Mars and nearly reaches out to the main asteroid belt.
Well, there are a few possibilities for science on the same orbit as the Tesla. About a week ago, NASA released a draft announcement of opportunity for Small Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration (SIMPlEx). That’s CubeSat and ESPA-class planetary spacecraft to launch with future, larger missions. The two relatively near-term opportunities are launching with the Discovery missions Lucy and Psyche. The secondary spacecraft would end up on orbits not terribly different from Mr. Musk’s car.
There are things you could do with that. Asteroid encounters are one possibility. On the other hand, it would require in space propulsion and navigation. At that point, it isn’t clear how much it would cost or whether such a spacecraft would cheap enough to risk on a first launch.
I can’t see a reason why NASA or the Air Force would want to put a payload on such a test flight. Can you imagine what the pubic would say if that payload were lost?
That’s just a matter of spin. You could publicize it in advance as something daring and adventurous, and only risking something a bunch of graduate students put together in their spare time. That’s a bit of an exaggeration, even of we were talking about something like a CubeSat. But if you spin it that way, you could probably avoid a press backlash.
Graduate students don’t have any “spare time”. Perhaps undergrads could have built a cubesat for Falcon Heavy, since those student missions are considered successful if the students merely deliver a working satellite to the launch pad, But anybody who is funded by grant money, which is to say anybody above the level of undergraduate student, would have a hard time explaining to their funding agency how they spent the grant money on a mission that had a 50% chance of failure.
I know there are some universities, departments and professors who think graduate students who don’t work at least 60 hours a week are lazy. But they have trouble attracting and keeping students. Most graduate students do have spare time.
I remember one physics student at Berkeley who built a big Van de Graaff generator, with almost a one meter sphere and which could throw two or three meter electric arcs. He did it in his free time just because he could. (The parts were, I think, discards from various labs; we once came across a 1 Farad, 200 V capacitor that was thrown out because it won’t hold charge for more than a few minutes…)
I also know of a good planetary scientist who, while a graduate student, danced in the Boulder ballet. If memory serves, she was the prima ballerina by the time she defended her thesis. That suggests having spare time as a graduate student.
And more senior people also have spare time. Those are, in general, exempt positions and people will, when necessary, work weekends and long hours. But in general, those sorts of people do have evenings and weekends off and vacation time.
And, even if you insist on billing it to a grant (which would mean proposing to do it, unless you can talk your contract monitor into something), funding for 50% success efforts is obtainable. It’s called “high benefit/high risk.” If you can make the case that the potential benefits of success are large enough, and the cost of trying is low enough, you can get funding.
Not just that, but if your primary area of engineering/research is some kind of tech demonstrator, you might never, ever get funding for a launch. Your funding is only for ground development: proof of principle.
But if someone gives you a free launch, that same limited funding can allow you to do a in-space test of your system. Drastically increasing the value of your research to yourself, your institute and your funders.
In other words, the work on the ground is what is being funding. Testing it in space is gravy.
There was no outcry after the FalconSAT-2 was destroyed when the first Falcon 1 launch failed. Why would it be different this time?
http://www.nature.com/news/…
“When the privately funded experimental Falcon 1 rocket exploded shortly after lift-off, its designers vowed to rebuild it and fly it again (see ‘Private rocket crashes and burns’). But it looks like it’s curtains for the rocket’s payload, an ill-fated little satellite called FalconSAT-2.”
Yes, but at the time, SpaceX wasn’t really seen as a serious competitor to companies like ULA. There weren’t as many people interested in publicizing evidence of poor reliability.
There’s also the scale. Something going up with Falcon Heavy would likely be larger and more expensive.
I keep seeing people make the assumption that big and expensive mean the same thing. (It’s even built into some of the more approximate cost models NASA uses; that the cost of an instrument will be proportional to its mass.)
In practice, if you’ve got more than enough mass, there are all sorts of ways to reduce cost. Is there an existing part which is twice as capable as what I really need? Quite often. Could I design something less massive that just did what I needed and no more? Sure, but it would cost a whole lot more. If I’m not facing mass constraints, why just not buy the existing part and live with the higher mass?
Maybe an informal offer was made as a courtesy just in case there was any interest. After receiving a verbal “Thanks for asking but no thanks” there was no need to submit any formal solicitations. The NASA PAO statement doesn’t seem to contradict that possibility.
As an engineer and researcher, I would not lift a single finger to work on a project that had a “50/50” chance of disintegrating before it reached orbit. Next.
Well, as a planetary scientist, I certainly would. If the launch is cheap enough, and I could build two spacecraft, and try again if the first launch didn’t work. That would accomplish as much as waiting for more reliable (and more expensive) launch opportunity and do so sooner.
time is a finite resource, and, I would argue, so is passion and motivation. Save it for the opportunities that are statistically likely
That’s only looking at the risk, not the potential benefits. Would you, for example, bet money on a coin flip if someone offered you 2:1 odds? Or would you say money is a finite resource and should only be invested in things which are statistically likely?
As a more tangible example, I used to coordinate Cassini and Hubble Space Telescope observations of Saturn. HST can’t look at Saturn all the time. In fact, significantly less than 50% of the time. That can’t be predicted more than a few months in advance, and all the Cassini observations were planned and sequenced over six months in advance. So every time we tried to do that sort of coordination, there was better than a 50% chance it just wouldn’t work out. When it didn’t, we just shrugged it off and tried again.
We felt the value of a successful observation was worth quite a bit more than the time and effort of making the attempt. It’s a matter of making sure the investment is less than the benefits times the probability of success. That involves more than just looking at the probability of success.