Howdy! My name's David - I'm looking for a cool project to fill time before I start a PhD. I have a BS in Mechanical & an MEng in Materials Science & Engineering. I spent the last two years with SpaceX, working on the Starship launch pad at Starbase. If you watched the April launch stream, you saw some of my work. Hit me up if you're looking for a mechanical/structural engineer to do some remote design work/first-principles research/consulting. Definitely open to part-time/contract opportunities as well.
Location: USA, Virginia, New River Valley
Remote: yes
Willing to relocate: no
Technologies: Ansys Mechanical, NX, Teamcenter, Matlab
Let's not oversimplify or cast blame. Sure, most/all of the tech has been around for decades - although Lars Blackmore & the other controls engineers did original work that was arguably absolutely critical - but there hasn't been any milking going on. The most profitable route wouldv'e been to develop this tech & then use it, after all. [Case in point: SpaceX, of course.] There simply wasn't enough interest from the public or Congress to put enough R&D money into any number of cool programs to see them through to commercialization.
Boeing and Lockheed Martin, separately and together under the name of ULA, and Northrop Grumman (as Morton Thiokol, ATK, Orbital ATK and now NGIS) have been milking the taxpayer for decades. Their business plan always involved making everything take longer and be more expensive. That is what they have to do to make more money, because they work on "cost plus" contracts.
An engineer in any one of them who presented a way to make the rocket cheaper to his boss would have been fired for not understanding how the company makes money.
The oversight is supposed to be done by congress, but they are extremely happy to provide good paying jobs in their districts, for decades.
No one even really hides it anymore. Any official, when asked about something like SLS and costs, would answer with "But NASA is going to the moon! Don't you want America to go to the moon?!" and with "tens of thousands of high paying jobs in all 50 states". There is no attempt to say the rising year over year price of orbital launch (before SpaceX), the exorbitant price of SLS + Orion, the use of solid boosters for crewed launches, etc, make any sense except to support the existing contractors to the detriment of the tax payer and space exploration.
(Or see anything by Dr. Robert Zubrin, or see the story of how the shuttle derived design that lost to RAC-2 (a Saturn V like design) was chosen to be "SLS": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNZx208bw0g&t=1970s)
I'm familiar with both Zubrin (two of his books within arms-reach as a I type this) and generally how NG/Innovation Systems does business (having worked at a legacy ATK plant).
I don't disagree that they often make money via cost-plus contracts, that SLS is mainly a jobs program, or any of that. What I disagree with is your apparent inherent assumption that it's malicious. Nobody's "milking" anything - Hanlon's razor, remember. Never assume malice when stupidity (I'd prefer "incompetence") is an adequate explanation. The project managers at ULA, at Boeing, at Lockheed, at Northrop, aren't monsters trying to squeeze more money from the taxpayer. They, quite simply, believe that this is the way you have to build a rocket and you can't possibly do it any cheaper. They do pride themselves on being able to deliver things ahead of schedule and under budget, except they can't because everybody expects projects to be behind schedule and over budget, since that's the way it's always gone. Traditional expectations have a stranglehold on the oldspace industry. I've also worked for a newspace company - there was none of that attitude.
Don't assume the astronautics primes are evil. They're just... old.
But it's not incompetence, these companies have made exorbitant amounts of money doing this. Congress rewards being late, overbudget, and inefficiently structured. The companies extoll the benefits of manufacturing in practically every state. We know Boeing was in bed with NASA, per Doug Loverro's removal. There's even the story of Boeing killing ULA's fuel depot ambitions because it threatened SLS.
> "We had released a series of papers showing how a depot/refueling architecture would enable a human exploration program using existing (at the time) commercial rockets," Sowers tweeted on Wednesday. "Boeing became furious and tried to get me fired. Kudos to my CEO for protecting me. But we were banned from even saying the 'd' word out loud. Sad part is that ULA did a lot of pathfinding work in that area and could have owned the refueling/depot market, enriching Boeing (and Lockheed) in the process. But it was shut down because it threatened SLS."
Even if the majority of employees are just there to work on the future of rocketry, if the incentives all reward the companies for being as overbudget and underperforming as possible, they are going to respond by being overbudget and underperforming.
Weighing in with a personal account for added authenticity with the acknowledgement of bias.
I was homeschooled K-12, and my experience falls in line with what I've heard as the standard perspective: generally pretty average outcomes, possibly weighted toward greater academic success. High standardized test scores are normal. I'm surprised you've just assumed homeschooling is straight up less successful.
I haven't seen speed benchmarks or anything like that, but out of the six browsers on my computer (Chrome, Vivaldi, Waterfox, Firefox, Tor, IE) I'd be using Waterfox if I wasn't so Google-dependent. It's fast, with a good UI, and somewhat less clunky than Firefox. Plus it's less likely than Chrome to be spying on me.
I switched to Opera to escape some of Google's tentacles, and that was a smooth transition. If you want a compromise, it's worth a shot.
I then went the whole hog to Firefox.
uBlock Origin, Self Destructing Cookies, and a VPN (PrivateInternetAccess) and I figure I'm getting as good as I can.
The lack of Flash is a non-issue nowadays for me, especially now the BBC are trialing HTML5.
(Although I generally use get_iplayer anyway.)
My primary issue with Firefox is it seems to be really poorly optimised for multicore CPUs. That's entirely anecdotal, but Opera runs just fine on a low clockspeed quadcore system whereas FF is unusable for me.
On my main machine, I get one core with moderate to high usage, and next to nothing on the other cores. Even if it's maxing out one core and lagging.
That just made me think...could you poison Google's 'did you mean...' feature that we sometimes use as a defacto spellcheck by seeding the web with a consistently misspelled word all over the place?
Having used both, LDD has a much better UI, but LeoCAD is probably overall the better program. It's able to export to more file formats than LDD, and is generally more of an open program.
The difference is comparable to Maya (LDD) vs. Blender (LeoCAD).
