Q&A: Explorer and Robotics Engineer on Historic SpaceX Flight

Wired's Q&A with explorer and robotics engineer Bill Stone on the upcoming historic SpaceX flight.



In the near future, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket will liftoff the launchpad, bringing the Dragon spacecraft to dock with the International Space Station. Until now, only the U.S., Russia, Japan, and the European Union have accomplished such a goal. If SpaceX succeeds, it will become the first private company to do so.

This week, Wired interviews experts in the spaceflight community to discuss the ways this historic launch will impact NASA and mankind’s presence in space. Is it a giant leap, or just a baby step?

Today we have Bill Stone, explorer, inventor, cave diver, and robotics engineer who has designed machines capable of searching the Antarctic ice and the moons of Jupiter for new discoveries. Stone is CEO of Stone Aerospace. He also serves as Chairman of the Board for the Texas-based Shackleton Energy Company, a private space resources company that intends to send an expeditionary team to Shackleton Crater on the moon’s South Pole and mine water for fuel.

Wired: Will this launch be a big game changer for how spaceflight is done?

Stone: It will be a game changer provided two things happen. One, that they succeed and don’t have any accidents—they don’t have anything like what happened with the Progress approach to Mir in 1997, where it crashed into one of the solar panels and knocked out one of the modules. And two, they do it at radically lower prices than what the other ELV costs would be.

The big guys can get technical success, but it will cost you a lot of dough. The real question for Elon, is can he do it cheaply?

__Wired: __How do you think this will this impact NASA?

Bill Stone is an explorer, inventor, cave diver, and robotics engineer who has designed machines capable of searching the Antarctic ice and the moons of Jupiter for new discoveries.Stone: I hope Space X succeeds in putting Boeing and Lockheed out of business, or at least makes them humble and reduce their launch prices, or learn that it is possible to reduce their prices. But they have to succeed. There have been others who have gone down this path. Orbital Sciences was the latest and greatest thing in the early ‘90s. They were going to reduce the cost of going into space, but in the end, they were just absorbed into the system. They became just another high-priced aerospace company.

I hope that doesn’t happen to Space X. I don’t think it will, because people like Elon Musk and the engineers he has working for him are a different breed of cat. They’re smart. They know what they’re doing—a lot of them have jumped ship from established companies because they believe in what they’re doing. They want to be where the action is happening. They’re all motivated. Space X is unlike a big organization where you’re one tiny cog in a massive wheel. This is a lean, mean organization. Everyone is involved to the hilt. No one’s sitting at a desk worrying about collecting their retirement after working for years on missions that will never fly. They are doing things.

__Wired: __How much closer does this bring us to a future where manned spaceflight is cheap and quick?

Stone: I’ve heard various numbers for this mission — that it’s a half, a quarter, a fifth the cost of going rates. But you have to be careful which numbers you pick. If you said, Elon versus the space shuttle, in dollars per kilogram lifted, you might be gunning for a tenth of the cost. If you said, Elon versus Delta IV Heavy, you might be looking at a fifth of the cost. Versus Atlas V 551 would be different, and so on. You have to compare your vehicles. Everybody’s got a different rate.

The thing that’s really most unfair about the whole business is that it’s not a free market. If it were, people who wanted to get stuff into orbit could freely go and contract with the Russians for a Proton or a Soyuz at the real going rate, not the jacked-up rate that you have pay because of the artificial restrictions placed by our government. It’s all set up right now so that launches are beneficial to Lockheed and Boeing, with Atlases and Deltas, so people will go with them instead of the Russians.

If it was really a free market, the Russians would already be one half to one third the cost per launch of an Atlas or a Delta. There’s politics to the hilt. How Elon will end up in the mix remains to be seen.

__Wired: __What happens if it doesn’t work?

Stone: If they fail, I’ll ask the same question: Did they fail cheaply? If they got within half a kilometer of the space station, and one of their RCS units failed to provide orientation and they had to abort, I’d say, that’s pretty cool. How much did it cost?

In the end, these guys have the technical wherewithal to pull this off. Nothing has ever happened in the space business without initial failures. Go back and look at the history of Mercury, Gemini or Apollo. They had lots of failure. That’s normal.

But what Elon is doing that is new is mass producing and paralleling their systems so that economies of scale creep in. What kills things like Delta and Atlas is they only launch a couple per year, and each one is built like a Mercedes Benz, by hand. If you want to save money, you can’t go that way.

Image: 1) SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket has its second stage separation. NASA 2) Bill Stone