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Wednesday, August 30, 2023

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.  


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.

 

 

16 comments:

  1. Be less complicated. Innovate to the better option. Simple isn't stupid.
    It's almost like SpaceX is trying to make spaceflight boring and normal or something.

    And, yet, we still have Arianespace with their totally non-reusable rocket. And China's Long Marches aren't reusable. Nor India's nor Russia's nor Japan's nor what's left of ULA's launch capability.

    Watching the weekly rundown of what's being torn down and what's being built at Starbase just shows SpaceX is moving at an incredible feat. And they don't have a problem saying they screwed up.

    Regarding the launch pad crater and rebuild, I wouldn't be surprised if SpaceX realized their pad was totally inadequate (proof is all the deep pilings and extra extra layers of rebar and concrete that replaced it) and figured out it would be cheaper to just... blow it away using 33 Raptors rather than trying to remove all the previous concrete and rebar in a more conventional way. "Eh, Elon, we screwed up the pad, it won't, even with the water deluge system, be strong enough." "Well, how can we fix it?" "First we have to remove it all." "Well... here's a thought..."

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    1. Perhaps the single obstacle to innovation is the negative attitude about failure.

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    2. As long as failure doesn't cost lives or create a BIG mess.

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    3. Failure is always an option. The goal is to reduce the probability of failure. Easiest way is to... fail. And then figure out what went wrong. Preferably without losing lives first. Which is why you should always launch, in spaceflight, an unmanned mission before a manned mission using the same equipment.

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    4. Anonymous, I think we have a natural negative attitude about failure because we don't recognize that when an approach doesn't work that's not a "failure". It is a success that shows us why something doesn't work.

      A failure is when something we know should work doesn't. If we don't know, or it has never been tried, any outcome is a success!

      Learning something is never a failure.

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  2. Success is built on a mountain of failure.

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  3. Glad you weathered the storm well. So, just what was the song you heard? I'm not figuring it out from your clue, unless by some chance it was "Windy" by The Association.

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    1. Kenny Loggins did a song called "The House at Pooh Corner" in the early '70s. It doesn't specifically mention "the Blustery Day" but they're tied together in my mind. Wikipedia says:

      "It is told from the perspective of both Winnie-the-Pooh and Christopher Robin, and serves as an allegory for loss of innocence and nostalgia for childhood. Loggins was a 17-year-old senior in high school when he wrote the song."

      A 17 year-old writing about nostalgia for childhood? Let's just leave it there with no comment.

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    2. We heard him in concert in Orange County a few years back and he told the story on how that song was almost buried. It seems some Disney lawyer was claiming license infringement so the song couldn't be released by anyone. Kenny said he moped about it to his girlfriend of the time, and here response was "I'm going to talk to DADDY about this!!!" Said Daddy was a senior enough Disney exec he could call off the legal beagles. The Nitty Gritty Dirt band recorded it and Kenny was off.

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    3. SiG, I remember the song well. It just never clicked in my mind. Then again, I sometimes have to stop and ponder to remember what I ate for supper the night before. Getting old is a challenge, but still better than the alternative.

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  4. My career long tendency as a mechanical designer was just the opposite, I'm afraid. Unless I had a strong willed engineer(s) that knew his stuff, I tended to generate elaborate designs and 3D Unigraphics models that worked extremely well, but were also very expensive to build.
    I generated a switch box for a USN system that had to endure extreme weather conditions that ended up with over 150 3D models, and an 8 page E size assembly drawing. USN liked it, and used it on the Ford carrier, but looking back on it I wince at how complicated it was. LoL!
    I never applied to work at SpaceX in part because of my proclivities(that, and the major issue was the low rate for contract designers).

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    1. I have the same "proclivity", but my process was to build something that worked quickly, to stave off unexpected schedule changes, and then to iterate the design with each new generation simpler than the last. Getting to the right solution was always a process of hoping some other part of the project would get delayed before I absolutely, necessarily, imperatively had to deliver the thing.

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  5. If we used that same process with NASA, 99% of it would be gone in 6 months.

    Then we could expand it to all of government, from the county level to the federal.

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    1. It desperately needs to be done to the fed.gov. Including getting rid of the useless agencies. Which is pretty much all of them after all.

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  6. https://archive.org/details/tvtunes_28074

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  7. Disappointed the song isn't REO Speedwagon's "Ridin' the Storm Out"!

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