Two on New Space

 

 

I was in aerospace long enough to witness a few rounds of the cost reduction charade.  Here is how it works.

Every decade or so, the Pentagon insists that their aerospace suppliers reduce costs.  Congressmen get in the act, complaining of $5,000 toilet seats and $1,000 wrenches.  Defense procurement officials give speeches in which they all but threaten to hold their breath until they turn blue.  The industry responds by saying the right things, cutting the prices of a few minor items, and promising to do better.  Eventually the whole thing blows over and business proceeds as usual.

In other words, the industry was ripe for disruption.  Elon Musk disrupted it.

Two books, Christian Davenport’s The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos, and Eric Berger, Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX, are engaging and well-written tales of the “New Space” business that also give us some clues as to how Musk did it.

Space Barons covers far more than Elon Musk and SpaceX.  While it mostly toggles back and forth between Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, it starts with the cautionary tale of Andy Beal and his failed attempt to break into the government space launch business.  After NASA decided, in 2000, to go with a traditional government-funded and -controlled development of a new launcher using its usual contractors, Beal folded his cards.  Davenport makes passing mentions of other failed space launch ventures, including Kistler Aerospace and Amroc, which serve to remind the reader how hard it is to break into the business.  Space Barons also devotes a couple chapters to Richard Branson and Virgin Galactic.  In short, it’s a good popular summary of the last twenty years of space launcher development.

But mostly, as the subtitle indicates, Space Barons concentrates on Bezos and Musk and their contrasting approaches to rocket development.  Although both have long range plans for heavy lifters, Musk has been moving much faster.

Musk, with more limited funds, aggressively pursued the orbital launch market, and tailored his Falcon 9 to NASA and USAF launch requirements.  He had to, as he relied on government subsidies to supplement his personal funding.  He has succeeded brilliantly, capturing space station freight and crew ferry business from NASA and breaking the United Launch Alliance’s monopoly on Air Force national security space launches.  On the commercial front, Berger writes that “SpaceX had grabbed about two-thirds of the world’s commercial satellite launch business by the end of the [2010s].  Some large fleet operators spread their business around just to make sure SpaceX’s competitors would not go out of business.”

Davenport tells us that Bezos, on the other hand, has been deliberately playing the turtle to Musk’s hare.  Although his plan is to develop New Glenn and New Armstrong as medium and heavy lifters, Bezos feels that to drastically reduce the cost of space launch, you must first make it really routine, and to make it routine you must launch a lot. “’We humans don’t get great at things we do a dozen times a year,’ Bezos said….  Launching rockets at such a rate was ‘just not enough to get great at it,’” Davenport writes.  To get that experience, he has chosen to initially concentrate on the high-volume business of launching sub-orbital experiments and space tourists on his New Shepherd.  On a parallel track, he has dipped his toe into the government aerospace market by developing the first stage engine for the United Launch Alliance’s new Vulcan space launcher.

Liftoff, written more recently, concentrates on older history.  It tells the origin story of Space X, and then concentrates on the development of its first rocket, the Falcon 1, through its first successful flight in 2008.  Berger then provides a brief summary that brings us up to the present.

It’s a dramatic story, told with verve and making extensive use of interviews with inside sources and the full cooperation of Elon Musk.  Musk had budgeted for three Falcon 1 test launches, and all three failed.  The company was out of money.  But they had parts for a fourth Falcon, and so in an incredible eight weeks, they put together one last shot and it worked, saving the company.  Along the way, Berger gives us pen portraits many of the key employees and a good description of the hard-working, hard-playing company culture.

As an engineer and long-time aerospace veteran, I was interested in how Musk succeeded.  Part of it was chutzpah.  Breaking the rules of the old boys’ club, Musk sued his customers, NASA and the Air Force, to force them to give his company a fair hearing.

Part of it was inspiring people and driving them hard.  80-hour work weeks were common at SpaceX, and they loved it, because they were inspired by the mission and the unusual amount to responsibility Musk gave his young staff.  (The downside of this is burnout: several of the key players at SpaceX have moved on.)

But mostly Musk succeeded in capturing a large share of the business by greatly reducing launch costs.  Most obviously, he did that by partially solving the reusability problem that had eluded government-funded aerospace for half a century.  But it goes far deeper than just developing a reusable stage.  Musk’s approach boils down to keeping cost in front of mind, challenging requirements, and an iterative development process that does not penalize failure.  In short, great engineering.

I remember, decades ago, hearing a guest on NPR define engineering as “Doing for one dollar what any fool and do for two dollars.”  I thought, “Not in my business.”  In my work, meeting the requirements always came first.  Cost was barely a consideration.  Davenport illustrated how different SpaceX’s approach was in this passage:

“Almost every decision that they made had cost built into it,” said Michael Horkachuck, a NASA official, who worked closely with SpaceX on the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program.

“It was unique because I almost never heard NASA engineers talking about cost of a part when they were making design trades and decisions.  They were worried about is it going to work, is it going to work reliably and safely and meet all the requirements?  Cost generally, although a factor, was never really in the forefront as much as mission success.

“Here they were making more trades on, ‘Well, you could do it that way, but this way is a whole lot cheaper and probably just as good.’  That was a different mind-set, and I think something that maybe the rest of the agency needs to look at a little bit more.”

Space Barons includes several entertaining stories on how SpaceX scrounged and innovated to cut costs, such as buying home air conditioners to cool the payload on the pad, saving somewhere between $3 and $4 million.

At my employer, we always complained about all the ridiculous requirements we had to meet.  Some of them went back to WWII and no longer made sense.  But we rarely made an effort to change them: it was easier to just accept them.  Not at SpaceX.  They constantly challenged NASA, forcing the space agency to justify the requirement or change it.  A lot of times a “requirement” is an old solution to a deeper requirement.  Such an exercise forces everyone to remember what’s really important, and often leads to innovative new solutions.

You might ask why SpaceX was so much better at this than traditional contractors?  My guess is the pressure of limited funds – Musk wasn’t yet a billionaire when he launched the company – combined with the fresh approach that comes naturally to a new organization.  In the traditional firms, we didn’t feel nearly the cost pressure because we knew the government would cover our expenses; and our vast institutional experience tended to inhibit new approaches.

As aerospace systems have grown more expensive, the cost of failure has become prohibitive.  Further, in government aerospace, failure has political as well as monetary cost.  This has driven the industry to be very conservative, and to spend huge amounts of time and money analyzing and designing to minimize the chance of failure.  The result, paradoxically, has been spiraling costs.

The alternative is iterative development.  In this approach, you develop a component or a subsystem quickly.  You may even deliberately make it incomplete, building only the parts you’re most worried about.  Then you test it until it breaks, analyze the failure, fix it, and repeat until you have a really robust component.  But the fear of failure is driven so deeply into the DNA of the industry that no-one wants to break things, even out of public sight in a lab.

I had this fear of failure illustrated to me about a decade ago when a retired Marine aviator gave an impassioned talk at a company retreat about the stupidity of “move fast and break things.”  He looked back to his days as an accident investigator (“large organs travel the farthest”) to emphasize the unacceptable cost of failure in our industry.  He was of course, completely misinterpreting it; crashing an airplane isn’t an option.  But to completely reject try/fail/fix as a development approach at any level indicates how deeply ingrained “measure many times, cut once” is embedded in the DNA of the industry.

The culture of SpaceX does not fear failure, even in public.  Several Falcon 9 first stages spectacularly crashed while attempting soft landings.  SpaceX put a good face on it (Musk dubbed the crashes RUD’s, rapid unscheduled disassemblies), figured out what went wrong, and eventually got it right.  First stages are now routinely recovered.

The ironic thing is, SpaceX is actually returning the industry to the practices that made it so successful in the ‘40s through the ‘60s.  Much of the engineering process that Liftoff describes is eerily reminiscent of how Wernher Von Braun’s staff did things in Huntsville.

The two books provide complementary views.  Space Barons is better with anecdotes of cost savings, and how cost was bigger consideration at SpaceX than elsewhere.  Liftoff is better at describing their engineering process and comparing it to traditional practices.

Oh, dear!  I’ve gone on and on about engineering stuff and probably left you with the impression that these are dry technical texts.  They’re not.  Both books are engaging tales of the people and history of New Space, and are of interest to both the general public and to aerospace professionals.  Recommended.

 

William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins, 2021, 288 pp

 

PublicAffairs, Hachette Book Group, 2018, 320 pp

 

Postscript:

Having recently read Test Gods about Virgin Galactic, I find the contrast between Richard Branson on the one hand, and Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos on the other to be instructive.  It’s easy to dismiss them all as playboy billionaires, but that would be a mistake.  Musk and Bezos have done the hard work of teaching themselves about rockets and have actually turned themselves into capable engineering managers.  Branson, on the other hand, comes off as a showman who has neither learned a thing about the business and nor hired the right people to run it.  This judgement may sound harsh, but it is entirely consistent with Virgin Galactic's track record to date.  Virgin Galactic appears doomed to failure, while SpaceX has a bright future.  It may be too early to tell about Blue Origin but, so far, they are doing things right.