[HN Gopher] SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket will launch NASA's Europa...
___________________________________________________________________
SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket will launch NASA's Europa Clipper to icy
Jupiter moon
Author : _Microft
Score : 127 points
Date : 2021-07-24 14:27 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.space.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.space.com)
| matthewfelgate wrote:
| Nice.
|
| Would we not learn a lot more by landing on these moons?
| natemcintosh wrote:
| We might, and we are (just not Jupiter's moons)! The Dragonfly
| mission (https://dragonfly.jhuapl.edu), will launch in 2027 and
| arrive at Saturn's moon Titan in 2036.
|
| Dragonfly is a nuclear powered octo-copter, that will fly
| autonomously on the moon. Titan's small gravitational field and
| dense atmosphere (about 1.45x Earth's atmospheric pressure)
| make it one of the best places in the Solar System for flight.
| The general flight plan is to charge up batteries with the
| MMRTG (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-
| mission_radioisotope_the...), take off, scout a new potential
| landing area, land in a previously scouted landing area. On one
| battery charge, it will be able to fly up to 10km, and stay
| aloft for up to 30 minutes. Dragonfly will carry out scientific
| sampling both on the ground and in the air.
|
| To quote Wikipedia
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonfly_(spacecraft)) about
| why Titan is an interesting spot for science:
|
| > Titan is similar to the very early Earth, and can provide
| clues to how life may have arisen on Earth. In 2005, the
| European Space Agency's Huygens lander acquired some
| atmospheric and surface measurements on Titan, detecting
| tholins,[29] which are a mix of various types of hydrocarbons
| (organic compounds) in the atmosphere and on the
| surface.[30][31] Because Titan's atmosphere obscures the
| surface at many wavelengths, the specific compositions of solid
| hydrocarbon materials on Titan's surface remain essentially
| unknown.[32] Measuring the compositions of materials in
| different geologic settings will reveal how far prebiotic
| chemistry has progressed in environments that provide known key
| ingredients for life, such as pyrimidines (bases used to encode
| information in DNA) and amino acids, the building blocks of
| proteins.[33]
|
| > Areas of particular interest are sites where extraterrestrial
| liquid water in impact melt or potential cryovolcanic flows may
| have interacted with the abundant organic compounds. Dragonfly
| will provide the capability to explore diverse locations to
| characterize the habitability of Titan's environment,
| investigate how far prebiotic chemistry has progressed, and
| search for biosignatures indicative of life based on water as
| solvent and even hypothetical types of biochemistry.[6]
|
| > The atmosphere contains plentiful nitrogen and methane, and
| strong evidence indicates that liquid methane exists on the
| surface. Evidence also indicates the presence of liquid water
| and ammonia under the surface, which may be delivered to the
| surface by cryovolcanic activity.
| stickydink wrote:
| If there's a chance there's any kind of life over there, don't
| rush into touching it - something could potentially wipe the
| whole place out.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| IIRC all stuff we send into space going to other planets is
| _sanitized_ here via gamma radiation so we don 't contaminate
| other planets.
|
| Who knows, maybe the life started on Earth as contamination
| from foreign objects from space.
| krisoft wrote:
| Could it?
|
| My understanding about planetary protection is that you don't
| want to contaminate the new environment, because then you
| can't say for certain (that easily) if the life you are
| detecting is native to the environment or the contamination.
|
| I also understand that the native population of the Americas
| suffered badly from the diseases carried in by the europeans.
| But those diseases landed in an environment much like the one
| they evolved in. The humans were humans, the atmosphere were
| the same, the temperature were the same, etc.
|
| If the space-probe gets contaminated with some earthly
| bacteria, virus or prion they not only have to survive the
| travel there, but then they have to quickly adapt to the new
| environment. Different temperature, different chemical
| composition, different life forms. How often does it happen
| that you sneeze at a fungi and the fungi gets infected with
| your cold? Doing one of these adaptation alone is a big ask,
| doing all of them at once would be a huge leap.
|
| Imagine that you move to a new place. You move there in a
| salted barrel, not designed for human occupancy. The locals
| speak a different language, have different customs, you can't
| get food you are used to and the climate is way out of your
| comfort zone. Would you be outcompeting the locals quick? I
| don't think so.
|
| I wouldn't worry about wiping out a whole ecosystem unless
| the ecosystem is much much more similar to our own's.
|
| But of course being cautious is always a good idea.
| Furthermore I already think we should avoid contamination. If
| for no other reasons than to avoid arguments about what the
| detected life really means.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| AFAIK Jovian radiation is very strong and our current machines
| have hard time surviving in proximity of the planet for any
| significant time. Even Clipper will stay a healthy distance
| away most of the time and only visit the inner Jovian system
| shortly.
| mabbo wrote:
| Maybe, but slowing down enough to land is the problem.
|
| To convert from a flyby to landing, you need to burn a lot of
| fuel, to slow down. To get that fuel to the destination, you
| need to bring it with you. Which means a much higher take off
| mass, which needs an even bigger rocket.
|
| Mars has a very light atmosphere, which lets us aerobrake- slow
| down by hitting the atmosphere, that way you don't need any
| extra fuel. Europa's atmosphere is basically non-existent.
| nradov wrote:
| In theory a spacecraft could partially aerobrake in Jupiter's
| atmosphere to save fuel. Then use a rocket to enter Europa's
| orbit.
| enraged_camel wrote:
| The problem is the intense radiation emitted by Jupiter, I
| think.
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| _> Would we not learn a lot more by landing on these moons?_
|
| Probably, but it's also a lot harder. Not only does it require
| more delta-V, you now need to design, build and test a lander
| in addition to a spacecraft, and you need to build everything
| to be able to operate in Jupiter's harsh radiation environment
| (Europa Clipper will only do fly-bys of Europa and spend most
| of its orbit further away from the high radiation environment).
| nradov wrote:
| There are so many science fiction stories about exploring and
| colonizing Jovian moons. But somehow the authors always gloss
| over the radiation issue. Unshielded humans would probably be
| dead in a matter of days.
| gordon_freeman wrote:
| If anyone is interested there is a nice book[1] written on
| SpaceX's early days when they were developing Falcon 1.
|
| [1] https://www.amazon.com/Liftoff-Desperate-Early-Launched-
| Spac...
| bengale wrote:
| This is a great read, I couldn't put it down.
| mmcconnell1618 wrote:
| I must be impatient due to everything moving at internet speeds.
| The idea that this probe won't arrive until 2030, then it might
| identify a landing spot for an actual lander that will need to be
| budgeted, built, launched and travel to Europa for another decade
| is a little disappointing.
|
| I understand there are huge technical challenges, vast distances
| but sometimes it feels like things are moving very slowly. On the
| other hand I watch SpaceX cycle through revisions on a crazy fast
| timeline and I have hope that we will have some breakthroughs in
| spacefaring technology sooner than expected.
| jostmey wrote:
| I would be happy working on a grand project exploring a
| distance moon, contributing to humanities future knowledge, and
| building that future, even if it takes decades. I think it
| would be a life well-spent
|
| But if the probe blew up that would really suck
| notjustanymike wrote:
| Douglas Adams really sums it up:
|
| "Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-
| bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way
| down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to
| space."
| gameshot911 wrote:
| That quote has more to do with the physical size of space,
| whereas OP is primarily referring to the speed of space
| program development.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| The issues the poster cites, like "this probe won't arrive
| until 2030", are in part due to the physical size of space.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| Ehh... it's due to the technical challenge of getting
| enough fuel into space to get to Jupiter quickly without
| a bunch of gravity assists.
|
| Never going to be a weekend hop, but there are definitely
| technical advances that make it a 3 month trip rather
| than a 3 year trip.
| EvilEy3 wrote:
| Such as?
| Cederfjard wrote:
| The former is relevant to the point when the trip itself
| will take half a decade.
| maverick-iceman wrote:
| People who mention savings are incorrect. They should talk about
| reduced loss.
|
| This mission is a total financial loss until proved otherwise.
|
| As of today the only people who managed to make money in space
| are the brokers and lawyers who negotiated private tourism trips
| to the ISS in the 90s and again this new wave of space tourism.
|
| There's an irrational exhuberance about space in my opinion
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| Humans are drawn to the unknown. This desire is how we have
| dominated a planet. Regardless of the risk there will always be
| someone willing to go for the sole purpose of being first.
| Embrace the irrational exhuberance. It is how we got to where
| we are now. It is how we advance into the future. Even if we
| fail to become a spacefaring species we will learn many new
| things in the endeavour.
| crecker wrote:
| LMAO. You're using internet technology to post this message and
| you consider a space mission as "waste". A space mission pones
| a lot of problems, from communication to logistic management. A
| few of the problems they had in the past with the first space
| missions were resolved, and technologies were ported to Earth
| and everyday life.
| maverick-iceman wrote:
| What is there for us on Jupiter? Nothing.
|
| The progress which matters always happens in some guy's
| brain. Imaginary journeys, not real ones.
|
| Einstein didn't need to travel around massive objects to come
| up with relativity.
|
| The cost of that theory was basically the rent, food and
| water for him.
| merpnderp wrote:
| Me buying a taco is a 100% loss. Tires for my car? 100% loss.
| Maybe the toothpaste has residual gains if forgone dentistry
| expenditures. But my Netflix bill is definitely a 100% loss.
|
| Sending another mission to Jupiter though will likely result in
| serious returns on investments, even if they are non-obvious at
| this point.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| What do you consider a loss? It's not like they're setting
| money on fire.
| maverick-iceman wrote:
| Usable knowledge to improve quality of life.
|
| And no, hope and hype about Europa being able to sustain life
| is not quality of life. It's a sugar high you get when you
| read the news or see the anchor losing it on tv.
| Xplune13 wrote:
| and why should everything be about quality of life? It is
| an important point, but not the only one.
|
| Edit: Also, I think the problem is not of we having 'less'
| quality of life (although it can still be improved), it is
| more of how can we distribute that better quality of life
| to everyone.
| maverick-iceman wrote:
| > and why should everything be about quality of life? It
| is an important point, but not the only one.
|
| Because quality of life gets everybody on board. This
| sort of expeditions are paid for with the money of people
| who don't agree with the spending.
|
| These people are generally talked some sense into when
| they disagree with military spending, or infrastructure
| spending or entitlements spending. The theme is always
| "even if you don't benefit from it yourself, people
| around you do and so over time will you!"
|
| A leftist version of trickle down, I call it trickle up
| or trickle laterally. I can see the point in having a
| discussion.
|
| The talk doesn't even happen with space, it seems like if
| you are for containing space spending you hate America or
| something
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| We have evidence of scientific and engineering
| advancements spreading from space programs out to the
| world. We also have evidence of trickle down economics
| not working. What more do you want?
|
| (The biggest difference to explain that, I would say, is
| that a scientific/engineering advancement can deliver
| value magnitudes greater than development cost, but
| trickle down at best transfers some of the money. And
| that's what most of the budget is going into on a project
| like this, not basic equipment assembly or the
| proportionally tiny fuel cost.)
| maverick-iceman wrote:
| > The biggest difference to explain that, I would say, is
| that a scientific/engineering advancement can deliver
| value magnitudes greater than development cost
|
| Nothing fungible will come out of this Jupiter mission
| and you know it.
|
| If this was education budget or brain research I'd
| totally be onboard with it.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Ew, don't tell me what I 'know'.
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| Not everything in life is nor should be about financial gain.
| LightG wrote:
| There's a perfectly good Saturn V rocket sitting right now at the
| Rocket Park, NASA Johnson Space Center.
|
| Why didn't they just use that?
|
| What a waste of money.
|
| https://spacecenter.org/exhibits-and-experiences/nasa-tram-t...
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aAxALzVJYo
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Saving NASA $3B by doing so. It would have cost $2B to use the
| SLS rocket that Congress wanted them to use, and it would have
| cost another billion to rebuild Clipper to withstand the intense
| vibrations from SLS's solid rocket boosters.
| fnord77 wrote:
| dumb question - why are we using Saturn V derived rockets?
| afaik none of these new rockets can match its max payload
| mlindner wrote:
| I assume you typoed and meant to ask "why aren't" instead.
|
| We aren't because the Saturn V moon rocket (and related
| projects) were consuming over 4% of the US government's
| budget, way more than even the SLS and definitely more than
| the Falcon Heavy.
| meepmorp wrote:
| Starship exceeds Saturn V's lift capacity.
| lmilcin wrote:
| Not true.
|
| Saturn V's lift to LEO was 120-140 tonnes
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_V) while SpaceX
| claims Starship's is "over" 100 tonnes
| (https://www.spacex.com/media/starship_users_guide_v1.pdf).
| ceejayoz wrote:
| It exceeds Saturn V on the _second_ launch that day. ;-)
| zzt123 wrote:
| Don't final inspections with payload attached by itself
| take more than a day? Or is that going to be a relic of
| the past?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| I doubt anyone knows for sure at this point, but I'd
| imagine the goal is something more akin to loading cargo
| into the belly of an airliner; consistently sized modules
| with standardized attachments for power etc.
| lmilcin wrote:
| Well, if you have a 140t payload it doesn't matter how
| many 100t payloads you can lift per day, it just isn't
| going to lift it.
|
| On the other hand, obviously, payloads are planned for
| the rocket they are going to be lifted by, so most likely
| somebody will set constraints on their project to either
| have smaller payload or split it into parts.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Right; I think Starship, if it pans out, is going to
| entirely change how we plan, build, and carry out space
| missions, both manned and unmanned.
| avmich wrote:
| Starship brings any 100 tonnes to orbit, while of Saturn
| V's 120+ tons a half constitutes the 3rd stage with
| unspent fuel. So it's less of payload per ce for Saturn V
| compared to Starship.
|
| On the other hand, Starship didn't fly to orbit yet.
| We'll see better how it goes when it does. And we can't
| fly Saturn V now anyway. And Starship - even if
| supposedly with lower payload - promises to be much
| cheaper. And...
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| In Skylab mode it was pure payload.
| avmich wrote:
| Which weighted less than 80 tons - much less than what
| other superheavy rockets are bringing to LEO - Energiya,
| SLS, BFR...
| midasuni wrote:
| That's looking at a single launch and neglecting the
| refuel ability.
| scrumbledober wrote:
| And will be able to refuel in orbit
| skykooler wrote:
| We don't have the infrastructure to build them anymore, and a
| lot of the design wasn't captured in the blueprints because
| things were tweaked by hand to make them work. We could build
| something with Saturn V-like performance, but it would be a
| new rocket, not just resuming production of the older line.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| That was seriously considered. It was rejected because
| schematics consist only a small portion of the knowledge
| necessary to build a rocket, most of the rest had been lost
| to time.
|
| A massive amount of redesign was required to build the
| shuttle derived SLS, deriving from Saturn would have been
| worse.
|
| But the real reason was that deriving from Shuttle kept those
| employees employed. SLS has never been a rocket program, it's
| always been a pork program.
|
| SpaceX's Starship has twice the thrust of Saturn, so could be
| tweaked to send more payload by sacrificing reusability. But
| they have an even better plan -- refueling allows massive
| payloads.
| lmilcin wrote:
| In particular, all Saturn V engines were completely hand-
| built and the process was not documented. A lot of very
| fine craftsmanship went into that that we can't replicate
| today.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Seems like that situation where the first engineer builds
| an inscrutably clever codebase. Lots of fine
| craftsmanship indeed.
| akiselev wrote:
| Nitpick: we can replicate it, it's not like we've
| technologically regressed. We're just not willing to
| spend the money - at it's peak NASA's budget was ~4.5% of
| federal spending when the Saturn V was designed (it's now
| only 0.5%).
| foobiekr wrote:
| Actually, you'd be surprised how many techniques have
| been lost. They're just not relevant, for example the
| actual practice of riveting battleship hulls is gone, but
| that changes suddenly when you want to replicate the
| past.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| > Nitpick: we can replicate it, it's not like we've
| technologically regressed.
|
| Saturn's materials and computer technology are more than
| 50 years old. Not only would we have to want to recreate
| this historic technology, we would have to recreate the
| knowledge, skills and competencies of the experienced
| craftsmen that used it, across the massive supply chain,
| as well as the tooling required.
| influx wrote:
| Do you have a source on that? There was an industry I was
| adjacent to, losing all their skilled metal workers to
| retirement, and there was no next generation who were
| skilled enough to do the machining. They were literally
| filming them working in the hope they could at least
| train someone down the road.
| lmilcin wrote:
| No, we can't replicate it because there is simply not
| enough description. For example, there aren't even specs
| for parts.
|
| The entire thing would have to be re-designed from
| scratch with modern manufacturing process in mind.
|
| And for things like F1 engine the available manufacturing
| methods have a lot of influence on the design, so the
| result will be basically a different engine than F1.
| treeman79 wrote:
| My dad was in the airline industry. Engineers kept lots
| of secret techniques to prevent them from being replaced.
|
| One had to due with adding strings to some foam mixture
| to get it to set correctly. Not documented anywhere. When
| cheap labor was brought in they couldn't reproduce the
| work. So old people had to be hired back at a lot more
| garmaine wrote:
| That's because federal spending has increased across the
| board. NASA's funding isn't that much different now than
| then.
| adventured wrote:
| NASA's spending was near $5 billion in the mid 1960s. [1]
|
| That's equal to $42 billion today per the BLS. NASA's
| fiscal 2021 budget is $23.2 billion. So while you're
| correct that Federal spending has increased as a share of
| the economy (declining NASA's share of spending even
| faster), NASA's funding is realistically down by at least
| half now vs then when you adjust for inflation.
|
| That BLS figure is also the questionable official
| conservative take. Gold was $35 / ounce back then, it's
| around $1,800 now (51 fold increase). The average new car
| was near $3,000 in the mid 1960s, it's now $41,000. Oil
| was $3 / barrel in the mid 1960s, it's in the $70s now.
|
| [1] https://history.nasa.gov/SP-4012/vol4/ch1.htm
|
| - NASA's spending fell to $3 billion by 1974. Inflation
| adjusted that would be $17.5 billion today, so at least
| they're ahead of that.
| garmaine wrote:
| So adjusted for inflation, NASA's budget is merely half
| what it was in the peak of the 1960's, whereas the
| statistic quoted makes it sound like it is 1/10th.
|
| Cherry-picking a peak date is a bit dubious though. If
| you average over the duration of the Apollo program, you
| get a number much closer to today.
|
| So most, maybe even all of the difference in budgetary
| size is due to increase in size of the rest of the
| federal budget.
| bumby wrote:
| To be fair, the GP comment said "at its peak". They
| weren't cherry picking, just following the initial
| thread. But your point about relative % of GDP may not be
| the best measure
| Someone wrote:
| We can't make them the way they used to make them, but
| likely could do at least as good fairly easily _if_
| sufficient funds were made available.
|
| I'm basing that on
| https://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/how-nasa-brought-
| the..., which tells me we now know quite well how these
| engines (or rather: the particular one they looked at)
| were constructed. I also get the impression we could
| create those parts using other means such as 3D printing.
| lmilcin wrote:
| Nobody says we can't build an engine _like_ F1. We just
| can 't build _F1_ , because we don't know how the
| original ones were built.
|
| Machines like that are designed with the manufacturing
| process in mind.
|
| An engine designed to be manufactured with today's
| manufacturing processes will look different than an
| engine designed to be manufactured manually by ultra-
| skilled metalworkers and welders.
| read_if_gay_ wrote:
| I would like to read more about this. Is there a source or
| anything?
| lmilcin wrote:
| Sure. Not a source but still interesting.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovD0aLdRUs0 (Why Can't we
| Remake the Rocketdyne F1 Engine?)
|
| TLDR: everything was handcrafted, notes were not made or
| lost, people have retired or passed away and today's
| engineers don't know the tricks that the original
| engineers used. Effectively, existing blueprints are not
| enough to rebuild the engine.
| nradov wrote:
| It's sort of like how a new cook can follow a recipe from
| an expert chef but the final result won't taste as good.
| There's a lot of tacit knowledge assumed which can't
| necessarily be communicated in written form.
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| Looking at the "LEO Payload" column here:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_heavy-
| lift_launch_vehicl... Saturn V: 310,000 lb
| SLS: 209,000 lb planned Falcon Heavy: 126,000-141,000
| lb Starship: 220,000-330,000 lb planned
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Of course, the benefit of Starship is that it can (in
| theory) do that several times a day.
| fnord77 wrote:
| wasn't that the promise with the space shuttle, too?
| eloff wrote:
| Maybe at one point, but the final design did not allow
| rapid turnaround. Starship could actually do it the way
| is being designed. They have a good shot at pulling it
| off.
| gpt5 wrote:
| Realistically, what stage of testing/maturity starship need to
| pass so that SLS is officially cancelled?
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| It's irrelevant. For Congress, SLS is primarily a jobs
| program. They want it to continue as long as they can make up
| any reason to do that, regardless of the practical use.
| akiselev wrote:
| The jobs program is the practical use - national security
| requires maintaining an industrial base, or at least that's
| the theory (don't know how valid it is).
| foobiekr wrote:
| If only there was such a project for advanced fabrication
| for chips maybe we wouldn't find ourselves in the current
| situation.
| cma wrote:
| We do, EUV LLC. was subsidized by the US govt (via DARPA)
| and a US industry consortium in the 90s. Lots of the tech
| went to European allies in I think a sale/collaboration
| at some point but we maintained power due to that initial
| seed and have used it for things like trade restrictions
| on the technology.
|
| (1998) https://www.semiconductoronline.com/doc/euv-llc-
| enters-devel...
| khuey wrote:
| Senator Richard Shelby's retirement, for one.
| themgt wrote:
| If Starship works, it's going to be almost a state-change
| moment in the space industry. They aren't just building a
| single test vehicle for a demo mission, they're building
| factories churning out engines, rockets, GSE, building launch
| pads, etc. They might take a few tries to nail a first
| orbital launch, once that happens (and assuming no undue
| regulatory hurdles) their launch cadence may start picking up
| dramatically within 3-6 months of a success.
|
| If eighteen months from now Starship has launched a ~dozen or
| more times and SLS once, I'd imagine they might wrap up SLS
| with Artemis 2, which should be mostly complete by then. At a
| total program cost of ~$24 billion for 2 flights it would be
| quite ... something, but it's hard to see them continuing
| much beyond that. They'd just figure out a way to use Crew
| Dragon/Starliner to get to Starship for lunar missions
| (assuming they're not going to want to launch/land humans on
| Earth on Starship for a while).
| paulsutter wrote:
| When. When Starship works
| flafla2 wrote:
| I share your optimism but I think it it is unrealistic to
| unquestionably assume that SpaceX will continue to
| succeed. The very nature of the problems that they are
| trying to solve is such that failure is always a
| possibility.
|
| I don't say this as a slight to SpaceX... on the contrary
| the risk is what makes them so exciting!
| martythemaniak wrote:
| Not explicitly mentioned: this saves NASA almost $2 billion, or
| half the cost of the actual spacecraft. The previous SLS-mandated
| launch was estimated to cost about $2B per launch with no
| guarantee that there'd be an actual rocket available. Though, the
| savings mean it'll take longer to get there, 3.5 years vs 5
| years.
| [deleted]
| enraged_camel wrote:
| >> Though, the savings mean it'll take longer to get there, 3.5
| years vs 5 years.
|
| I thought this was no longer the case, as NASA had determined
| that Falcon Heavy was not going to have to travel to Venus to
| get a gravity boost from it first, and could go directly to
| Europa like SLS.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| SLS is an enormous boondoggle.
|
| People love to hate Musk, but without SpaceX and private space
| companies in general, we could forget about any significant
| progress in space activities. The price tag would be
| suffocating.
|
| It is also an interesting example of "throwing money at a
| problem does not always buy you a better solution". People too
| often come to conclusion that if some system is defective (e.g.
| schooling), more money would automatically help. Not
| necessarily.
| gpt5 wrote:
| We would have seen space progress. It wouldn't have come for
| the US though.
| adrr wrote:
| Because congress forced them to use Space shuttle components
| and NASA can't go to the open market and find other
| components. Space shuttle suppliers are fleecing NASA.
|
| Here's an example: The SLS/Space Shuttle RS-25 engines are
| $125mm a piece when they could buy RD-180 engines for $25m a
| piece. There are 4 engines on SLS and they are expendable.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| It's certainly an element, but NASA's culture today would
| simply never tolerate the rapid explosion cycles necessary
| to build a reusable rocket. SLS would be 50% cheaper maybe,
| but they would never have built the F9, much less a
| Starship.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Congress is positioned between "we actually need some
| functional space industry whose total expenditure cannot
| rise to high heavens" and "it would be so nice if some
| government-funded jobs were created in my constituency, so
| let us make the supply chains as complicated as possible".
|
| I am still positively surprised that they opened up some of
| the processes to competition.
| HenryKissinger wrote:
| Maybe Elon Musk's makeshift submarine will find a new purpose.
| _Microft wrote:
| Maybe Starship has matured enough by then to launch Europa
| Clipper on it? It might be able to put the probe on a much faster
| trajectory than Falcon Heavy could. Does anyone know of
| (informal?) plans regarding that?
|
| Keep in mind that Artemis 3 [0] is scheduled to launch in
| september 2024 and the mission includes a moon landing with the
| planned Starship human landing system (HLS) [1]. Mr Maezawa's
| flight around Moon is also scheduled for the early 2020ies (no
| earlier than ("NET") 2023), so Starship is meant to be reliable
| enough for crewed missions then.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_3#Mission
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship#Starship_Human...
| mlindner wrote:
| Starship isn't a functional vehicle yet. It's a long way from
| being able to be a launch vehicle for NASA's most expensive
| payloads.
| rst wrote:
| NASA tends to be extremely conservative regarding booster
| technology -- allowing reused boosters only after commercial
| customers had thoroughly proved them out, for example. Which is
| justifiable -- most commercial launches are communications
| satellites for which it's possible to insure the launch for
| enough to buy another, while NASA's payloads are unique and far
| more expensive.
| mabbo wrote:
| It would be odd to change the contact that late, I would
| imagine. But it's an interesting possibility.
|
| Still, Starship has a long way to go.
| Causality1 wrote:
| The first step toward launching a melt probe and having a look at
| that ocean. I can't wait.
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