[AR] Re: Future Exploration Policy (was Re: Re: Congrats SpaceX
- From: Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: Arocket List <arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 10 Feb 2018 20:14:07 -0500 (EST)
On Fri, 9 Feb 2018, John Stoffel wrote:
Henry> ...It sure helps if you have cheap launch, yes, but
Henry> then you've got to reform the *payload* builders, which is, if
Henry> anything, even more difficult...
Just look at what happened to Surrey Satellites, didn't they get
bought out and pretty quickly but quietly shutdown or transitioned
into the big bird market away from their base?
Astrium bought them. They're still operating and still building modest
satellites -- they had been slowly moving upward in the market even before
the buyout -- but reportedly their efficient, innovative company culture
didn't really survive the buyout. Astrium had promised to leave their
internal operating practices alone, but apparently, as a lot of us had
expected, that promise didn't last long.
But back to my point, would it have been smarter for NASA (not
political mind you, but smarter) to have built five or six hubbles,
even if they were not as good. Economy of scale, redundancy of one
off failures. Bigger chance of design failures sure.
Probably a somewhat smaller chance of design failure if you're being less
ambitious in the design, although of course if there are design errors,
they would affect the whole fleet.
Would it have been smarter? Maybe. "Not as good" means there are some
questions they couldn't address; Hubble gets used a fair bit for things
that are at the very limit of its capabilities. For tasks that *are*
within the cheaper design's capabilities, you do get more capacity from
multiple satellites. The tradeoff isn't an easy one to do.
However, even disregarding the politics -- it's almost always harder to
sell a series of missions than to sell just one -- the whole culture at
NASA, its contractors, and a lot of its science community pushes the other
way, toward doing unique top-notch missions even if they're very costly.
This is, of course, a vicious circle: the harder the struggle to make the
next one really good, the more it costs; the more it costs, the more it
had better be really really good, and be able to address as many wishlist
items as possible for as many people as possible; and the more it costs
and the more valuable it will be, the more pressure there is to be
absodamnlutely sure it will work, which means more reviews and more
customer oversight, which really drive up cost. Breaking this death
spiral, once it gets started, is very difficult. And just commanding the
culture to change doesn't accomplish anything.
Perfect is the enemy of good enough. I would think that the satellite
builders, esp those from the Iridium and other constellation groups,
would have a very different take on how some things are done.
Yep. But nobody hires them to do top-notch science missions, because it's
"obvious" that they wouldn't know how, so they're not a "qualified
supplier".
Henry
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