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Comment by ugh123 | Hacker News Reader

I think NASA's point is that it's looking for reliability in manufacturing and reliability in the field. Being able to produce AND TEST the engines rapidly will drastically improve both of those fronts.

If you're only able to make 4 a year (as does Rocketdyne, as mentioned in the article) then your ability to respond to failures during testing is abysmal at best. Also your ability to optimize and improve, simplify, harden, etc the manufacturing process and drive costs down also sucks.

Slow iteration for testing and enhancing rocket engines has been the bane of the industry since inception.

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As a kid, I read about Goddard and the early days of rocketry, which was a bit wild. Does anyone know of a good history that touches on the factors that contributed to the increasingly slow iterations in the field prior to SpaceX? My fuzzy knowledge of Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions suggest that they were fairly fast moving. Was the Space Shuttle era when iteration slowed down?

A lot of things happened. Apollo 1 disaster, end of space race, space shuttle not hitting enough launch volume and having unclear requirements, Challenger and Columbia incidents which skyrocketed shuttle between-flight maintenance, continued failure of NLS>Constellation>SLS.

This seems correct.

Things move fast until something bad happens; then layers and layers of oversight are added to avoid bad things happening again. Years go by without bad things happening and people begin to wonder why we need so much oversight so they begin to peel them back. Rinse and repeat.

In that context, a major mishap is a very big risk to SpaceX because it can erode their efficiency. One of the advantages of the CCP approach is that there is much less oversight, so things can move quicker. I'm not so sure NASA will be okay with that if they lose an astronaut.

If manned space travel becomes as routine as Musk seems to desire, we're going to lose some astronauts.

Read "Ignition!" by John Clark. https://archive.org/details/ignition_201612 . Mostly about search for liquid rocket fuels, but talks about the industry as a whole to some extent.

I have a lingering suspicion it was the astronauts. All of those pilots wanting to be in charge of the ship, in an age where is was hard enough to get a computer to do the work without having to cooperate with a human.

A lot of the stuff SpaceX has been able to do is down to automated systems. Maybe we would have had rockets that could land in the late 80’s if that turf war had gone the other way.

IIRC - Shuttle autoland capability was vetoed by the Astronaut Office. There was some capability within the guidance software for it, but it was never demonstrated (some early Shuttle flights got close to demonstrating it though).

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