When We Talk About Space Being Hard

...what we're really saying is there's a very small margin of error.  The people trying to design orbital rockets are not perfect - obviously nobody is - so they're going to make mistakes.  Just like you can ruin a crane or trailer winch by not being sure that it's stronger than the load you're going to lift, you can make up for that with design margin.  If you're going to lift a thousand pound load, you can make sure every part involved in lifting that load is going to be stronger by a defined safety factor.  In something common like lifting a known load, you can buy however much safety factor you want.  

Getting rockets into orbit is different.  The thrust vs. weight costs are a critical design trade.  If you make the rocket stronger, it will weigh more, meaning more fuel is required to lift it, and reducing the payload that can be lifted.  If a part on an engine is going to handle some sort of operating temperature extremes, or a valve has to spin at some number of thousands of revolutions/minute, margin might get very difficult to achieve.  There simply isn't much margin available in the percentage of liftoff weight a rocket can carry.  If the designers don't consider some characteristic or don't even know they need to consider it, the rocket could blow up on the pad or at any point of its mission.  

In my years of design, I referred to margin of error as margin of stupid.  When I screwed up, I owned it.  In some fields with a wide margin of stupid, designers can make lots of mistakes or big mistakes and get away with it.  Things with a wide margin of stupid don't explode in huge fireballs killing everyone and everything around. 

Prior knowledge from lots of research or hiring people who have done it before are the two big ways to get that reduction in stupid mistakes.    

Why am I talking about this?  Meet a small California startup in the rocket design business named Pythom (yes, that's an "m" on the end, not like the snake - or programming language).  Their aim is to beat SpaceX to Mars.  From quite literally nothing they aim to launch for Mars by 2024 - the next closest approach.  If not, definitely by 2026.  Pythom was founded by a married couple who are explorers and adventurers: Tina and Tom Sjögren who think of going to Mars as an analogy to sailing to the New World after Columbus.  Tina Sjögren put it like this:

"When Columbus sailed to America, there were both better boats and sailors. But no one else did it. He did. All it took was three weeks. It was not difficult; it was fear that held everyone back. It was believed that one would fall over the edge of the earth. Or be eaten by sea monsters. He showed... that was wrong."

Over at Ars Technica (first link) Space Correspondent Eric Berger notes:

This seems naïve, of course. Even SpaceX, which from the beginning was well-funded and able to hire excellent early employees, is still years away from sending humans to Mars after its founding in 2002. But the Sjögrens are undaunted. "You have to work hard, but you do not have to be very smart," Tina Sjögren added.

Do you see the huge warning flags in that statement.  Yeah, it is a cliche to talk about it being rocket science, but the saying, "it's not rocket science" didn't invent itself.  There is hard stuff there.  With a goal of launching a lander to Mars in 2024, they're working on developing engines and a small payload rocket called Eiger, which will be capable of launching 150 kg (330 lb.s) to LEO.  Somewhere around developing engines and a rocket, they're also working on developing a Mars lander called Olympus.  

Their philosophy is simple.  Since they claim 90 percent of a rocket's cost in the traditional space industry is related to personnel, their website says, "Pythom runs small teams and tight facilities, building in the spirit of early explorers such as Lewis & Clark and Roald Amundsen."  Having been through 40 years of manufacturing companies always striving to do more with less, my reaction isn't to find fault with that, but that it needs to be done intelligently.  My first department to target for cost reduction might not be the safety and mission assurance department.  Just sayin' because based on a video of a recent test they ran, it might be that they assume the design guys will know everything about safety and mission assurance so they never hired anyone for those jobs.

Personally, the colors in that exhaust/desert dust cloud kind of alarm me.  They kind of scream Toxic Nitrogen Compounds.  The part of the video where a couple of staff members find themselves downwind and run at 90 degrees to the cloud is a highlight, and over on Ars Technica, Berger talks about the initial video being on Vimeo, but he saved it and uploaded it to YouTube (where this is linked from).  After some questions to Pythom, they took down the video and uploaded a more sanitized version to Vimeo.  

Jordan Noone, co-founder of Relativity Space, tweeted in response to the video, "We knew better as untrained college students."  For their part, Pythom responded with a long post on their website, explaining a lot of details that aren't evident in that video.

I don't really know what to make of these guys.  They really do seem to need some adults in the room, but the engine does fire and the rocket doesn't explode - nor does it lift off (so at least they got weight greater than thrust).  Apparently nobody was injured here, but it sure looks more like luck than skill.  That said, I've always observed that "all the knowledge and skills in the world have never beaten pure, dumb, luck."  To go back to my original point, they displayed a lot of stupid, but apparently had enough margin of stupid to handle all of it.

The articles on Warp News are rather flattering and admiring in tone.  Warp News also implies that the flight they're aiming for in '24 will carry Tom and Tina, not the Olympus mars lander.