Thread by @kamilkazani

Rocket Science

As I have already pointed out, general audience, analysts, strategists & decision makers included holds unrealistic notions of how the global economy is organised. Now that is because they never see the back end of industrial civilisation

So let me show you some

There is a major delusion of seeing Europe as a sort of retired continent that "lags in tech" or even "doesn't produce anything". To some extent, it is just American hubris.

But there is more in there than just hubris. There is also some honest, sincere ignorance. The thing with most people is that they see only facade of industrial civilisation. They never ever had a chance to look behind the curtains

Whatever there is behind, is a total mystery

Now we come to the neat part. "Most people" includes almost the entire governing class of the West. Recruited from the service economy, it was never introduced to the back end. It has never been behind the curtains.

The governing class has no idea.

Seeing facade only means seeing only the final product. In this case the Angara rocket launch. We see it, we register it, we base our conclusions upon it. What we don't see, however, is the back end infrastructure supporting it all, hardware & software included.

Roscosmos is the Russian corporation responsible both for civilian space launches and for the ICBM production. In theory, civilian and military sectors are separated.

In reality, there is a certain overlap. Space rocket is not that different from an intercontinental missile.

The structure of Roscomos is typical for a Russian megacorporation. On the very lowest level, there are production facilities, manufacturing plants. They belong to the R&D facilities, Design Bureaus. So, these Design Bureaus form the vertically integrated companies of their own

One of these vertically integrated companies within the Roscosmos structure is Khrunichev Space Center. A smaller doll within Roscosmos, it has even smaller dolls (= manufacturing plants) inside. Again, visualising it all as a sort of of matryoshka can be very helpful.

Now let's go even further down the Roscosmos, structure. The manufacturing plant Polet. You can frame this production facility as the smallest doll within the gargantuan matryoshka. Producing the Angara space rockets, it also makes parts for other rockets & aircrafts.

Let's have a look at the Polet's 80th anniversary video. Published in 2021, it is very much available on youtube. Short as it is, it gives some glimpse into the back end infrastructure standing behind the space rocket production.

See a relevant fragment:

So, let's zoom in into some hardware & software we can register in this 3 minutes long video above.

Siemens 🇩🇪 CNC controller on what is very possibly a Dufleux 🇫🇷 milling machine.

(I believe MMS on the screen may refer to the Milling Mirror System)

FPT Industrie 🇮🇹

FPT Industrie 🇮🇹

(You may not see it very well, but this is a very large Dinomax machine ) fptindustrie.com/eng/products/v…

LK Metrology 🇬🇧

We think of the UK as of a deindustrialised country. And there is certainly lots of truth in that. Still, it has some sophisticated, high end machinery production, for example of measuring equipment. We just don't see it, because it's all in the back end.

DMG Mori AG 🇩🇪 This seems to be an entire workshop equipped with DMG machines.

So what do wee see on this limited, 3 minutes long sample giving a glimpse to the Polet production facilities? We see German, Italian and French precision cutting machines. We see German CNC control systems. We even see the British metrological equipment.

Damn, it's all Europe.

What we see, is that the space rocket production relies on the computerised, software dependent machinery, 100% of our sample being recent European production.

Nothing Asian. Nothing American. And more interestingly, nothing old. All new stuff.

This is a very recent development. Until basically yesterday, the very same plant relied on manual, conventional methods. Extremely laborious, extremely difficult. Effectively semi artisanal. You do it all with your fingers, literally. Requires extreme eye to hand coordination.

Not that all people who could do that are dead (though most are). It's that these skills have never been passed to the younger generation. Younger workers do not know how to do precision machining by hand and not going to learn. They rely on modern, user friendly CAM & CNC.

Still, hardware makes for only part of the picture. Software is at least equally important. What you see here is instrumental for understanding the organisation of knowledge either on this specific plant, or in the aerospace industry in general.

See the red circle

How it used to work before? You draw the designs by hand. You make the calculations by hand. After many and many and many adjustments you send it to the workshop, only to make new adjustments after. It was the enormous investment of time and effort.

Much of this investment was inefficient. What one person did could be indecipherable to another (esp. the unfinished work). Much of the work done was lost or forgotten. So you would redo the same again, and again, while the 100% perfect design is lying in a dusty box somewhere.

Perhaps, no single factor has revolutionised the aerospace industry (aircraft & rockets included) as much as the implementation of fully integrated solutions by Siemens. You can see Teamcenter as an operating system, not of a plant, but of an entire production chain, top-down.

By this point, the Siemens integration turned into the key for the normal functioning of a modern aerospace plant. Being non-alternative, it is the foundation everything else is built upon. Any other CAD, CAE, ERP whatever else is tested for compatibility, and must be compatible

I will cover in more detail later. For now you need to believe