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Comment by alfor | Hacker News Reader

SpaceX is showing the way.

No being afraid of failure allow to simplify, accelerate the process and reduce the cost by an order of magnitude

I dislike this comparison because we want many of SpaceX's rockets, but we don't really want many Webbs. The rapid iteration argument isn't amazing.

I mean it'd be awesome to have many, but not realistic in any real sense.

But I 100% agree w/ the cost overruns being a massive problem.

It might be an apt comparison though.

I much rather have reusable rockets than having ISS.

I much rather have in-orbit construction infrastructure than having either hubble or JWST.

I much rather have remote repair and maintenance satellites/crafts than having a robot rover on Mars.

If you keep doing what you barely can do, you'll keep doing it for the highest price possible. Instead you can invest in the infrastructure, and do things as they get cheaper with your current infrastructure.

Send the components up over several launches and build it directly in space?

If you were able to launch and rendezvous in orbit, I wonder how much cheaper something like the JWST gets if it could be built up piecemeal? The unfurling mechanism itself exists because of payload width limits. How much cost is bound up in "we can't just keep launching rockets because rockets are expensive" and how much is bound up in "precision technology for precision observations"?

Exactly. It is so sad to see many great engineers working on decade-long projects with 300-something single failure points.

That time and money should instead be spent on reducing the cost per kg to orbit, as well as in-orbit manufacturing. Then engineers would spend the bulk of their time on actual science goals, not on tangents of fragile deployment sequences or shaving few grams from there and there.

Reducing cost per kilogram sounds like a good idea at first - but then, that means people will become less careful about what they send up, eventually leading to space debris issues. The tragedy of the commons is a thing, even in space. I guess there should be an equilibrium price on kilogram-to-orbit.

Yeah, but it is somewhat like saying as your revenue scales, so does your expenses. And it indeed does. But it is a net win at the end of the day, for 10% of a billion is much better than 10% of a million.

With space debris, come debris cleaning bots, with those bots come more space debris, and next generation of cleaning bots ad infinitum. The net profit/benefit will scale in the meantime, which is what really matters.

This is how the Soviets beat us to orbit. They were less afraid to blow up a few rockets.

And dogs.

Ah yes killing dogs. Much less ethical than the animals that NASA used right?

NASA did animal tests too.

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