NASA/Orbital Sciences : "You see... what had happened was..."

Unmanned rocket go boom



No deaths or injuries so that's good

 

It happened yesterday actually. It's one of 2 private firms NASA subcontracts with to deliver ISS supplies, the other being Elon Musk's SpaceX.

I'm no expert by any means, although I do play one online... but if you look closely about halfway up the rocket seconds after takeoff, it appears there is some leak on the left side. Possibly a fuel leak maybe that ignited?

They had to scrub the launch the night before because there was a ship that wandered into the "risk area"

 

Two in a week. Both technically private enterprise too. Not surprising really. NASA's early attempts at it weren't all that successful at the start.

The Virgin one is more tragic where there was life lost, but such is how we learn sometimes.

The destruct button is not something you ever want to have to use, but it is a necessity in that line of work. That rocket goes into a populated area, then you are talking mass casualties.

In hindsight, maybe the flash paper lined fuel tanks was a bad idea

 

I doubt it will kill either program but it may deter other less-funded groups from jumping in. Both firms are well funded enterprises and it's not all that likely that a setback like these two would make either gut the program and declare all those resources, time and dollars spent in getting to this point a complete waste, even if it were the case for any of those firms that scrapping it would be the best operational decision. Jobs at the top get lost over decisions like that.

I tend to think that given enough time, the private sector could probably do a better and cheaper job than a government agency as in most things, that is in fact the case, but the main issue I have with NASA and the private rockets is that we scrapped our working systems completely and instead decided to rely entirely upon untested upstarts who are still just finding their way through the process for the first time.

We shouldn't scrap something before what we are replacing it with is reliable. Accidents happen even with proven organizations and equipment, but those are multiplied exponentially during the early research and testing phases of these programs

 

If the free market is allowed to operate (which it's no longer allowed to do so in most cases), the best oversight possible is risk of complete loss of investment and a poorly ran company going under. Sadly, we don't seem to allow the market to utilize failure any more as regulatory mechanism. Now if someone big makes catastrophic business decisions, the government just bails them out because they are "too big to fail." That's a load of horse manure. If you make bad business decisions, you go out of business. That's how the system is designed to itself.

If allowed to function as designed, there is far more accountability in the private sector versus the public sector. In the private sector, ultimately you are using your own money and not someone else's.

That's not to say that some level of regulation is useful, in fact it is. There have to be some basic levels of safety restrictions, quality controls and such. It's highly unlikely that this industry as a whole will not have a good deal of that. Look how heavily regulated the various transportation industries are already so, like the automotive industry and the airlines. The problem with the government essentially running everything completely is that the government has no incentive mechanism that rewards success and punishes failure.

Hell, the federal government loses money operating a horse track and a brothel. How is that even possible?

 

Both links are good reads and have something to them.

I do think though that the idea that a $10 million dollar prize was going to be the catalyst to a new birth of space technology. For serious inroads to be made there has to be some easily discernible return on investment. Spending $25 million for a chance at winning $10 million is not a good business decision, it's a hobby by an eccentric that wanted to do something people thought couldn't be done.

I think the comparisons with NASA Apollo program are apples and oranges. Sure there are some similarities and contrasts that are valid considerations, but the route private business will have to go to achieve the space flight being viable goal is considerably different in that it is highly unlikely that any one company is going to complete that developmental journey on there own. NASA could do what it did because cost of doing business isn't a game-breaker. Odds are the journey the private company route will be one of the first company advancing the ball up to a given point, the next coming in and taking what they did a little further, and then a multitude of other baby steps taken by a myriad of other firms.

As the ball gets further down the field, the potential for market returns will grow somewhat as the cost of success will be lowered because much research has already been bought and paid for. At some point, the projected market for a successful endeavor will look less and less like a mirage and more like a reality and then you will see more people jump in to the game.

IBM had similar ups and downs in their production of the PC. Ultimately their idea and initial success made it possible for other companies to make big bucks but as time has played out for themselves, IBM gas pretty much disappeared from the industry they started.

 

The problem that we have today is that we try to take a top-down approach to guaranteeing success by elimination of the risk of failure, that can't be done in a system which people like to think of as a free market. A truly free system has 1 single control mechanism at it's disposal and that is a company that makes bad decisions fails and goes away. Nationalizing losses and only makes "private" companies keep doing riskier behavior because in the end they will never suffer anything negative that may be a result of bad business behavior.

Failure is the economic equivalent of a forest fire for nature. Without either, the system gets so cluttered in overgrowth that nothing new will survive. It just gets choked out and the system becomes stagnant.

 

I agree that this particular result is true all too often, but I'd pin the blame for it on the system the government has in place more than I would on the individual players forced to operate in that system. If some crazy old man in the neighborhood keeps giving alcohol and drugs free to the kids in the neighborhood, the cause of the problem isn't that there are kids living in the neighborhood.

I have the same argument for why I don't blame baseball players for having taken steroids when the powers in baseball set up such a system that encouraged and rewarded that behavior. Now if I was playing and wanted to compete with known takers, I'd either have to take too or look for a different livelihood.

 

If the government wasn't allowed to pick winners and losers then lobbying dollars and payoffs would have no purpose.

 

yep, the old in-out in-out