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Comment by sandworm | Hacker News Reader

I have trouble trusting business statements from companies in the space industry. They play in a world of secrets, classified technologies and continuous background checks. At every launch, over in the corner, sits a uniformed member of the US military and a switch. That switch is to destroy the rocket should it run off course.

SpaceX might be profitable today. It might be very profitable tomorrow. But because of the classified nature of the industry that can change in a heartbeat. Fall out of favour with certain government agencies and suddenly that constant stream of background checks slows, deadlines get missed, and profits become loss. There are many fingers on many kill switches.

Maybe the company is or will be a great success, but that success comes only with permission. Investors beware: Balance sheets are only half the story. The other half is not open for inspection.

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Well the reason for that is because they're given exclusive access to basically launch a missile from US airspace. With a mere change of payload, that rocket can be used to deliver a nuclear warhead. So yeah, it's pretty prudent to have background checks, massive amounts of oversight, and many kill switches. An even if you have all the best intentions, it doesn't take that much to accidentally crash into the ISS and kill everyone aboard. Look at all the maneuvers SpaceX had to do to prove they were capable of docking with the ISS.

Sure, politics comes into play. But the idea of a less-regulated spaceflight industry doesn't seem feasible anytime soon. Even the airline industry is still heavily regulated compared to even automobiles. That's just the risk associated with the massive inherent dangers associated with flight.

To be fair, it's pretty improbable to accidentally hit the ISS. It takes really precise maneuvers and calculations to get there on purpose.

I think the case would be more like you accidentally used the thrusters too much at the last minute and tore a hole in ISS. Or your docking mechanism failed horribly and showed safe when it was not safe

It's probable enough that NASA made them go through days of testing in space before they let them get anywhere near the ISS.

>Look at all the maneuvers SpaceX had to do to prove they were capable of docking with the ISS.

They haven't even proven that yet. This version of Dragon can't dock - they just get within arm's reach (heh) of the station so they can be dragged in.

Yes, there has to be regulation. I think Sandworm's point is that the regulation is an opaque and perhaps even unfair process.

Well, they're offering an economic benefit (cheaper) to those who want it, with the U.S. government (and I imagine primarily military) with interest in seeing this succeed and anything that allows rapid deployment of whatever (slightly terrifying) into space.

That is to assume that those customers care about economic benefit. Frankly, if cost were their only concern, the US military would have abandoned ULA and gone with SpaceX long ago.

I'm reminded of the first calls (90s->2002, not the later programs) for bids to replace the KC-135. There were only two real contenders, Airbus and Boeing. Airbus's first reaction was essentially: "why even bother."

When you're launching a $2B satellite, saving $60mm on the launch is not a slam-dunk. The Air Force had a series of launch failures that made them extremely conservative. Sure, I think they ought to be moving faster with SpaceX, but you should give them credit for having some serious concerns.

A lot of that $2B cost comes from requirement that everything should just work, and therefore thoroughly tested, because customers don't want to have it broken in space where no one can fix things and have to send another one... which costs $2B... see cyclical reasoning? If launches would be cheaper, customers could afford to make less expensive payloads - after all, if it breaks, they can just send another one.

A primary reason why payloads are so expensive is because launch services - used to be - so expensive. With lowering the launch price payloads can become cheaper.

The situation today is that the Air Force has a $2B satellite to launch soon that they ordered a decade ago.

You're right that tomorrow, a different one could be built with the new launch cost in mind. The entire "new space" movement revolves around lowering launch costs and building much cheaper satellites to take advantage of lower launch costs.

That's not entirely correct. The bottom line is that military satellites are just expensive - period. They will always be expensive because of their capabilities.

Agreed. They will always have more capability than a non-military satellite, and so will be more expensive. If it didn't have more capability than a non-military satellite, then it isn't a military satellite.

Why? The military might go far a carefully selected subset of capabilities, and get a cheaper price or more reliability out of it.

I meant it had to be different to non-military satellites in some important ways. Otherwise it'd be just a non-military satellite. Imagine buying a consumer-grade computer. It's cheap to get one with 16gb ram, but if you want a 64gb ram one, it would probably vastly more than the 64/16=4 times as expensive. Each step you go out of the non-military satellite capability curve (with multiple dimension including features, reliability), it gets exponentially more expensive. If the a research-grade computer wasn't different from a consumer-grade computer in some aspect (by having a lot of ram, cores, processing speed), it would just be a consumer-grade computer.

A computer that is substantially cheaper would be hobbyist-grade computer.

Of course I'm only talking about traditional military rather than forces like A* Qda which might make do with whatever they can get their hands on, which is probably what you're referring to.

I suppose a very cheap satellite could be terrorist-grade. ;)

You could argue the same the other way 'round.

Just assume that military is the standard, and in order to qualify as consumer, you need to add extra features.

So far your argument is symmetric.

Yes, except currently military radars and GPSes are more expensive and more capable than versions you can buy in the shop. Same applies for Humvees, Tanks, guns, and even malware. All of the ones used by the military and intelligence agencies cost vastly more to buy and at the same time have more capability than their corresponding consumer versions. So it's only a symmetric argument if you view "military" and "consumer" as symbols in a program without any of the background context, which I did not intend for you to do.

Not all military satellites require some outstanding capabilities - and military does launch cubesats and other small-scale devices today. Reminding that if 50 years ago military requests pushed boundaries of technology, today commercial applications are so demanding - and command such a large market - that it is military devices which piggyback on RND results of commercial ones.

Yes, you may always want a unique, expensive, cutting edge satellite. But you won't always need that - military doesn't directly set the goal to spend as much as possible. X-37 demonstrates a lot of capabilities while being much cheaper than previous reusable space vehicle. So with launch costs going down other, cheaper opportunities open - to everybody, including military. That's beside the idea that cheaper rocket doesn't mean worse rocket, reminding Japanese cars of few decades back.

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