Main Engine Cut Off - T+148: Gerst to SpaceX, and Why Landing is Part of Mission Success

Episode Date: February 19, 2020

Long-time head of human spaceflight at NASA, Bill Gerstenmaier, has joined SpaceX as a consultant, but everyone is excited for the wrong reasons. And SpaceX missed a booster landing on their most recent Starlink launch, which prompted a new round of debates over whether booster recovery is part of mission success or not.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 37 executive producers—Brandon, Kris, Pat, Matt, Jorge, Brad, Ryan, Nadim, Peter, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, John, Moritz, Joel, Jan, Grant, Mike, David, Mints, Joonas, Robb, Tim Dodd the Everyday Astronaut, Frank, Julian and Lars from Agile Space, Tommy, Adam, and six anonymous—and 335 other supporters.TopicsSpaceX hires former NASA official William GerstenmaierGerst the Politician, Gerst the Engineer - Main Engine Cut OffStarlink Mission - YouTubeSpaceX launches fifth batch of Starlink satellites, misses booster landing - SpaceNews.comThe ShowLike the show? Support the show!Email your thoughts, comments, and questions to [e-mail] @WeHaveMECOListen to MECO HeadlinesJoin the Off-Nominal DiscordSubscribe on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn or elsewhereSubscribe to the Main Engine Cut Off NewsletterBuy shirts and Rocket Socks from the Main Engine Cut Off ShopMusic by Max Justus

When I was thinking about recording this episode today, I realized more and more that it was likely going to turn into an episode of Anthony rants in two short segments about how people are misunderstanding SpaceX stories from the week. But that's okay. We're going to do that here today on Main Engine Cutoff. I'm Anthony Colangelo. Let's dive in with the first news story that came out last week that Bill Gerstenmaier, longtime head of NASA's human spaceflight division, was joining SpaceX, which was incredibly unexpected. I actually had no idea what to make of the news when I first heard it because it did seem wrong,

just given the respective cultures of where Gerst is coming from, Gerst as he likes to be called, and where SpaceX is at in the modern day. There didn't seem to be a lot of really, you know, synchronicity there. So it was kind of shocking to see the news. I would have expected other companies for Gers to go to. But a little backstory before we get into analyzing that. Bill Gerstenmaier was at NASA for an incredibly long time. He started way back in the day on the shuttle program and worked there through shuttle and station and everything else that has come since and has went from you know engineer on the shuttle program and worked all the way up through the chain and and as you know a government agency like nasa works eventually that chain does

lead to washington where he's been for a long time now many years and in his last role there he was running the Human Exploration Division. And he was, you know, a very influential player in not only the SLS Orion plans that have been developing for, you know, 20 years now, but was also one of the people that were in those decision-making rooms through commercial cargo and commercial crew, which have been, you know, tentpoles of SpaceX's work over the last decade. They were a big player, and both of those still are today. And Gerst was involved in many of those decisions that were happening back then. Now, Gerst was the guy who would be sent to Congress

to explain a lot of things that were going on at NASA, and in recent years was one of the people that was there defending SpaceX when they were working through the various anomalies that have happened from CRS-7 to AMOS-6 to, you know, whatever else they had to happen. Gerst was there to really talk about it and say that they're standing by SpaceX and, you know, was very publicly supportive of them and in times when they needed that from somebody in the government. So it's not that excited by any of these things, and part of that could be that he was in the halls of Congress getting ridiculed about something or other.

He does seem to be of the team within NASA that is very much for the slow and steady approach that they've been working on in recent years. There was a lot of political wrangling going around last year about whether the Lunar Gateway was the right direction or skipping the Lunar Gateway. And it sounded like Gerst was on the side that the Lunar Gateway was the way to go because it is that slow, steady build out that he likes to see. And in his capacity as the head of the Human Exploration Division, he's not necessarily the most risk-prone person at NASA. So a lot of these things seem to be directly at odds with SpaceX's, you know,

move fast, break things, ship things, let's launch and try again, let's test as we fly, fly as we test, let's do this stuff as quick and efficiently as possible, and let's try new things, let's, you know, make sure that if we're not failing, we're not pushing hard enough. Let's make sure that we're always pushing the edge. So that has put them at odds with this kind of older mindset of the Gerst era NASA. So for those reasons, it was shocking to me to see this happen. Because I think when you talk about those personality traits that we've seen from Gerst in recent years, you start thinking of a lot of other companies first. And I'll let you fill in whoever you're thinking of, because I could be convinced that you're thinking of Boeing, I could be convinced that you're thinking of Blue Origin.

So, you know, pick your poison there. But I would have been much more, you know, I would expect to see him land somewhere like that before SpaceX. But it's huge news that he did go to SpaceX. Now, the initial reaction to this piece of news was that Gerstenmaier was obviously heading to SpaceX to be a person there to help the relationship that SpaceX has with NASA, with Congress, with other parts of the government, and maybe even other governments entirely to win work or to help them win work better. Because SpaceX has been winning a lot of work from NASA in the recent years, obviously, but that he would be there as a guy who knows the ropes, that would help them with all of the insight that he has. And that ignores two main pieces of info about this move from NASA to—oh, I should mention why this is even a story. Bill Gerstenmaier was ousted from NASA last year. It was sort of like he became one of the, you know, one of the

sacrificial lambs for why the SLS Orion and related roadmap was moving so slow. He was ousted along with Bill Hill, who was running the SLS program by the Jim Bridenstine run NASA, and that put him out available on the job market. He was hanging around a little bit to transition out of NASA, left in the fall, and then this story was broken just last week by Michael Sheets over at CNBC. So back to the collective reaction that people had to this. They thought that he would be going there as a sort of go-between between SpaceX, NASA, and the rest of the government. And that ignores a couple of main points. Number one is, he's going to have pretty strict ethics restrictions on what he can do at

SpaceX and the kind of communication that he can have. Given that he was just coming from NASA, he will not be able to speak on behalf of SpaceX to NASA, especially to parts of NASA that he was kind of in charge of historically. So I believe these do have some sort of sunset clause, like a year or so, or maybe even a little more than that. People can write in and correct me because I've never worked for the government and then went to the private sector, so I don't know. But there are these very strict ethics restrictions that are in place to prevent

you from going from the government, going to a company, and then being able to get some favored status from that. So he won't be able to interact with NASA in that capacity. Congress may be, but there's going to be strict restrictions around what he can deal with. And a lot of that would be given his experience with the exploration roadmap, commercial cargo, and crew. Those are all the lucrative things that SpaceX would want a part of from NASA if you're somebody who was kind of developing this theory. The other, maybe more important point that was missed in that sort of analysis is that Gerstenmaier is joining Hans Koningsman's team at SpaceX.

Hans is the head of the flight reliability team at SpaceX. Hans is the head of the flight reliability team at SpaceX. He is based in Hawthorne. He is not based in DC. So he's there in Hawthorne working on the actual hardware that SpaceX is flying and making sure that that stuff's reliable. So that goes for the boosters and the rocket stages, but also the spacecraft themselves. And that's the team that Gerst is joining as a consultant. So that piece of info really says that Gerst is not going to SpaceX to talk to customers. He's going there to talk with the team and to work on the hardware and to let his influence be felt on that hardware specifically. And I think, my sense is that after all that time

in DC, Gerstenmaier wants to throw things back a little to his roots as an engineer, maybe pass on some of that knowledge that he's built up over the years, because he was there through the design, the development, and the operational history of shuttle, of station, of so many eras of crewed spaceflight, that he's got a lot of stories from the successes and the failures of all those programs. And during his time there, think about all of the things that happened. There was multiple losses of space shuttle. There was multiple successes of what shuttle was capable of. There was the entire buildout of the space station, and all of that hardware that went up was all done when he was there at NASA.

So he has a massive amount of knowledge and context from those years that I'm sure as a guy like he is at this point in his career, that engineer mind never really goes away or is quieted or anything. So I could see him saying, you know, it's time for me to go somewhere that I can pass this on to the next generation in a really hands-on way, not as a leadership way, but as a really, you know, hands-on kind of wise engineer way that he can do when he's out at Hawthorne working with SpaceX engineers. So that's my hunch about what Gerst is going out to SpaceX to do. You know, head out there, really dig into some of the details on the projects that SpaceX is working on, everything from, you know from the reusable Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy, all the way up through Dragon,

crewed spaceflight, and all the way to Starship. I think he's got a lot of stories and a lot of tales to tell from the design and development of pretty incredible hallmarks of spaceflight that would be really useful, especially as we see certain parts of Starship look a lot more like Shuttle than they have in the past. There is a lot that he's going to be able to pass on out on the team at SpaceX. And I know that I've heard in the past that SpaceX had reached out to people that had worked on the Shuttle thermal protection system and were interacting with people that had worked on shuttle previously. And obviously, out at the Cape, SpaceX has a lot of people that used to work out at Pad 39A on the shuttle that are now working on their pads out there. So it's not like they're a stranger to picking up these

people that have been around the block at NASA. But in Gerst's case, I really do hope that he's getting back to those engineering roots, that he's going to pass on some of that knowledge, getting back to those engineering roots, that he's going to pass on some of that knowledge. And that maybe the personality traits that I was attributing to Gerst himself was from Gerst, the politician, not Gerst, the engineer. And when he gets back out into Hawthorne, when he gets his hands on some hardware, maybe that will kind of revitalize his personality from back in the day when he was working on this stuff day in and day out. And I really hope for his sake, for my sake, for SpaceX sake, for everyone who cares about either SpaceX or Gerst or NASA for that matter, that if that's what he's looking to do, he can really go do that at SpaceX and enter that new

chapter of his work at this point in his career. And I'm hopeful to see that. I think my hunch is right. I think these pieces make sense in this way. So I'm hopeful that we'll hear that. I don't think we'll hear a lot out of Gerst from his SpaceX time. I'm still waiting on that best-selling book that Gerst is going to write someday about all the tales from his time through NASA, and then maybe that'll include SpaceX. But I wouldn't bet on us hearing a lot about Gerst's work at SpaceX. But that's my hunch on why everyone else was kind of analyzing this story wrong. And hopefully that gives you a little insight on what might be happening there in the halls of Hawthorne. Now, there's one other story that I want to kind of take down and rant about.

But before we do that, I need to say a huge thank you. It's a huge, huge part of this that this show is entirely listener supported. So if you like what you're getting out of this that this show is entirely listener-supported. So, if you like what you're getting out of this, if you like what you're hearing, if you want a little bit more of that, head over to mainenginecutoff.com slash support and do it there and help make this show better. It is a huge help. It helps us produce a lot more on this show. It helps me travel to events like last fall at IAC, hopefully this spring down to DM2. We'll see what other kind of travel I can get into this year. But all of that is made possible by your support. There are 372 of you supporting

the show every single month, and 37 executive producers were responsible for this episode of Main Engine Cutoff. Thanks to Brandon, Chris, Pat, Matt, George, Brad, Ryan, Nadeem, Peter, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, John, Moritz, Joel, Jan, Grant, Mike, David, Mintz, Eunice, Rob, Tim Dodd, The Everyday Astronaut, Frank, Julian, and Lars from Agile Space, Tommy, Adam, and six anonymous executive producers. Thank you all so much for your support. I want to do a quick note real quick. Talk about this from time to time in this segment here, but if you are a supporter at $3 a month or more, you get access to the headline show that I do. Every single weekend, I run through the stories from that week, and I keep you up to date on everything that's happening in the world of space.

And I give my little takes on things that I might not bring up here in the main show. And usually that runs, I don't know, 10, 15 minutes, depending on what happened. This last week was 35 minutes. That's how much happened last week. So, if you think you missed a story or two, head over there and check it out. You might find that it's a great supplement to your space diet. Let me do the work for you to keep you up on the space news. So, head over there, check that out if you want to see what's going on. And otherwise, thank you all so much for your support, as always. It is a huge help. I could not do it without you, so thank you. much for your support as always. It is a huge help. I could not do it without you, so thank you. All right, so the second story this week is about SpaceX's recent Starlink launch. They launched another batch of 60 satellites, and all of that went well, but the first stage failed on its

landing. We don't know exactly what happened yet. I haven't seen a report of what failed on this yet. I'm recording this just a little bit after we had that launch, so there hasn't been a lot of news on what happened there yet. But from what we could see, you know, there was the classic webcast shot of the drone ship out at sea waiting for this first stage booster to come back down and land on it. We were waiting for any visual of the booster, but instead what we saw was a kind of burst of water off the frame, off the right side of the frame, and a big cloud of water. And eventually, we found out that the stage did, in fact, soft land in the ocean. It was floating. I don't know the current status of it. But it totally missed the booster and is not going to be, from what we guessed, not going to be able to be recovered and reused.

And in the wake of that, I saw a lot of talk about how this shouldn't be considered part of mission failure. This was a total secondary objective. It doesn't have anything to do with mission success. This isn't a failed launch. There was a lot of that kind of protectionism, if you will, about how... And I get the fear that this will be covered as SpaceX fails landing rather than SpaceX launches 60 of these next generation communication satellites. I totally get that. But I also think the take that this is not part of mission success is just outright wrong. We are in a new era here with SpaceX. And that's the thing that we love about SpaceX. We love that they are in this new era of space flight, that they are pushing boundaries, that they are recovering boosters and flying them

frequently. That was going to be their 50th landing. So this is not something that they're still in the experimental stage of. This is straight up an operational failure of that booster. And yes, failure is okay at SpaceX. But I don't think that we should say, ah, that was secondary. We don't care about that anyway, because all of SpaceX's plans and their business model for Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy relies on those landings becoming routine, relies on those landings happening every single time, especially in the era that we're in where, you know, the idea has been floated that Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy production could one day stop and they could have a flying fleet of boosters. If you ever want to get to that point, you have to land every single booster. And, you know, one of the

main pushbacks on counting this as mission success is, well, like, Atlas V, Antares, Soyuz, all these other boosters don't count it as their mission success. So when we compare our metrics, they'll be totally off in the Falcon 9's case. And I understand the reasoning behind that. But again, I think it's really flawed. If we want to always keep things the way they are, are we ever going to get to something new? I think it's okay to compare the new thing and the old thing differently. We've done that throughout various other points in history, where there's a paradigm shift and we're going to compare something differently against what we have done historically. So if SpaceX and Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, and eventually New Glenn and others that are like it, that come along, that are reusable, if those start

getting additional metrics, I think that's okay. I think it's okay that there's payload success and landing success and total mission success. And if you want to just compare payload success of Falcon 9 to Atlas 5, do that. If you want to compare landing success, you're going to get whatever landing rate SpaceX is at now and 0% for Atlas 5. And that is okay to have these multiple metrics. But I really do think that we are in the era of these landings being part of mission success. We are in the era, staunchly, that SpaceX is now delaying certain launches because the weather in the recovery zone is bad and it would prevent them from recovering that booster. So that right there shows you that recovery is

not a nice to have at this point. It is part of the mission. Aside from the fact that every time they lose a booster that's tens of millions of dollars of assets that are literally being sunk to the bottom of the ocean. It's also tens of millions of dollars of future value, because they could have flown that several more times. And every time they do that, they're making more money on that booster. So it is not just a loss of that asset right there. It's a loss of future revenue for SpaceX. And that is something that is key to their business model for the Falcon family of rockets, but even more so when you get into the Starship era. That's a huge, huge rocket that's going to need to be very reliable if they want to do the things that they're trying to do with it.

So at some point, we have to take this jump. And we've been here before with SpaceX because they just have this relentless progress through the industry, where we've had to take time to reassess the way that we think about things and the way that we think about things with SpaceX. There was a time when SpaceX was charging less for reused boosters than they were for new boosters because people didn't trust reused boosters yet. And I said then that what the model should really be is we'll charge you less if we can get that booster back. And if you want to buy the expendable version of that thing, then you're going to have to pony up some extra cash. And in the case of Blue Origin,

when they start flying New Glenn, there is no expendable Blue Glenn. Blue Glenn, that's a good one. New Glenn. There is no expendable version of New Glenn. That is the version of New Glenn. It's going to land on that boat. And in Blue Origin's case, they're going to have to land that thing every time because they're not planning on building very many for the first couple of launches of those. And in SpaceX's case, when they've floated the idea of stopping production and saying, yeah, we'll have like 10 Falcon 9s around and we'll fly those each 10 to 20 times or whatever, it's a couple hundred launches. That requires this to be a level one mission success priority. So this is a loosely formed rant that just says,

I think we need to change our terms here. I think it's okay that we change our terms. And if you want to compare apples to apples, that's always hard anyway. And we always fudge the math anyway. So let's have mission success. Let's have payload success. Let's have recovery success. But to me, that on Monday was a failure. That was a failure of the part of the mission for SpaceX. I'm not mad at them for it. I'm sad for them because they lost a booster. But that absolutely was part of mission success. And I'm sure everyone on that team at SpaceX feels that way as well. And we're super bummed that day and immediately started digging into the problem to figure out what went wrong that time. So that is my abridged mission success rant. I'm sure we will get back to this point at some time in history. We're going to be here a lot with other launch providers as we go forward. But I'm

excited for the new era. So for now, that is it. Thank you all so much for listening. Thanks again for your support over at mainenginecutoff.com slash now, that is it. Thank you all so much for listening. Thanks again for your support over at mainenginecutoff.com slash support. And I will talk to you in a couple of days. Bye.