A Blustery Day

The storm stayed well offshore of the West Coast and I doubt we had even a tenth of an inch of rain.  About a week ago, I stumbled across a new radio station (or one that changed its programming) playing "soft rock" (not what I ordinarily listen to).  By a freak of timing, they were playing an ear worm that stuck with me.  Out of respect for all y'all, I won't tell you what it was but it reminded me of a cartoon I saw long, long ago: Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day.  That alone will be enough to remind some of you of the song.  Sorry.

That's what it was today, a blustery day.  Breezy with spritzes of rain.  While I sang verses of the song to myself, I tried to keep it out of earshot for Mrs. Graybeard.  I doubt we had a tenth inch of rain, and the winds pretty much obeyed the forecast I'd seen on the local NOAA weather site.  Steady winds stayed at 25 or below every time I looked, and the highest gusts I saw were around 40; both of those were exactly what they predicted.  Power never flickered, nor did internet.  I don't see a thing to clean up.  

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The various space-news places I look at only had one interesting piece; Ars Technica has this story on how SpaceX went about recycling fairings for their Falcon 9s. 

When we talk about recovering boosters, hundreds of images come to mind, and everyone understands the advantages of that.  It literally saves SpaceX millions of dollars every time they recover one of those boosters.  Right now, the fleet leaders are at 16 successful flights; originally they said they wanted 10 flights.  Now they've stated they're looking at 20 as the next milestone.  Maybe 30?  With regular maintenance, like a commercial aircraft, is there a limit?  

But there's more rocket left that could conceivably be saved.  They had an engineering team evaluate what they'd have to do to recover the second stages and decided they're throw away too much capability; that is, they'd give up too many pounds to orbit.  

But what about the payload fairing? These are built in two pieces through a laborious process of laying down composite materials, not dissimilar to papier-mâché. The manufacture of fairings is time-consuming, and it costs about $6 million to produce both halves.

Musk famously told the engineering department, "You have six million bucks falling from the sky," figure out a way to go get that money.  And they did.  The problem was they didn't do it smartly and didn't get all the fairings.  You probably remember their first attempts involving ships with big nets and parachutes with built in gliders.  A system that looked like this:

Photo credit: Kiko Dontchev/SpaceX/YouTube

The problem was, to quote Kiko Dontchev, vice president of launch at SpaceX:

"The reality is, most of the time, it's a choppy hot mess with 7- to 9-foot waves, a super short period, and a ton of wind," Dontchev said. "So even though we caught it once, our actual success rate for bringing fairings home was quite low. It was under 50 percent, 40 percent. Our ability to get fairings ready to fly was choking our launch rate."

Eventually, they noticed that the fairings were pretty much fiberglass boats.  They floated.  With some redesign, they helped ensure that the parts that might be damaged by saltwater intrusion were less likely to have that happen, and they started letting the fairings splash down into the ocean and pick them out.  

As a result, SpaceX now has the opposite problem.  They're running out of room. 

"We have more fairings than we have space," Dontchev said. "Fairings are a thing we don't even come close to talking about when it's time for launch. They're always ready, no problem."

This is what success looks like.  

But that's not really the emphasis of the article.  The emphasis is on the process they use for design. 

"When you're fundamentally innovating a new technology, you're wrong," he said. "It's just a question of how wrong. Because your ability to learn is changing constantly. So where you start is certainly not where you're going to end up."

The algorithm begins with two steps: "make the requirements less dumb" and "delete the part or process step." This basically means engineers should think outside of the box and challenge existing requirements. They should then ask whether they're solving the right problem.

Photo credit: Kiko Dontchev/SpaceX/YouTube

If you're a longtime regular reader, this may sound vaguely familiar.  Two years ago, we heard basically the same exact thing from Elon Musk through his interviews with Everyday Astronaut Tim Dodd.