[HN Gopher] Starship is still not understood
___________________________________________________________________
Starship is still not understood
Author : wwilson
Score : 264 points
Date : 2021-10-28 12:00 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (caseyhandmer.wordpress.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (caseyhandmer.wordpress.com)
| ncallaway wrote:
| I'm kinda confused by the criticism of the industry and NASA not
| designing for Starship.
|
| The author argues that NASA doesn't understand Tempe game changer
| that Starship is, but I don't think that's accurate. I think the
| risk to NASA of assuming the benefits of Starship before it's
| proven are just too high.
|
| If NASA (or other industry players), assume Starship will deliver
| the benefits it promises, they to fundamentally alter their
| approach to space. But that leaves them with no backup plan in
| the event that Starship fails to materialize or deliver on its
| promises.
|
| Whereas this other approach, of treating Starship like a much
| better vehicle but integrating it into its old processes, gives
| them an out if Starship fails in some way. Because they're still
| using the "old" assumptions, they can fall back to other "old
| space" style providers.
|
| I think once Starship has proven itself capable of deliver on its
| promises, you'll see NASA changing its approach radically in the
| manner the author describes.
|
| So, fundamentally, I think it's not a lack of "understanding",
| but a different calibration of "risk". This also applies to many
| existing space companies, and I also think this gives
| opportunities for new companies that have a higher risk tolerance
| to take advantage.
| natch wrote:
| I would buy your argument if they weren't assuming the benefits
| of SLS before it's proven. Why give SLS, but not Starship, the
| benefit of the doubt?
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Because Nasa is calling the shots on SLS, but Elon could
| cancell starship with a tweet, or OD on crack and kick the
| bucket, or go bancrupt, or end up in jail for calling someone
| a pedo.
|
| There is a real non-zero risk of something bad gappebing to
| him and then future of SpaceX is in question, its not a
| robust institution like NASA
| panick21_ wrote:
| Elon going to prison would not stop Starship. Neither would
| it stop if he died.
|
| And in some absurd crazy scenario NASA could basically
| 'take' it because its relevant for future mission. NASA has
| done so before if a company they needed went bankrupt.
|
| SLS depends on a incredibly long list of suppliers. Far
| longer then Starship.
| ncallaway wrote:
| I don't think NASA really wants to give the benefit of the
| doubt to SLS. It's a congressionally mandated program, that
| NASA regularly proposes reducing the budget and
| responsibility for (e.g. https://spacenews.com/nasa-budget-
| proposal-targets-sls/), and Congress regularly rebuffs them
| and demands SLS.
|
| If Congress passes a budget with $7B in funding specifically
| for SLS, you can't really blame NASA for spending that money
| on SLS.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _I think the risk to NASA of assuming the benefits of
| Starship before it's proven are just too high._
|
| This seems to be a theme of many of Elon Musk's ideas: assume
| they will work and talk about what a difference it will make.
| Just look at the media coverage surrounding the Tesla Robot.
|
| So, this stuff is cool and I'm glad it's happening, but there's
| a ton of capability to prove before any sort of external
| organizational budget should be allocated to the Starship
| project. It's still a rough prototype.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| I think Shotwell keeps Elon away from SpaceX, and that's
| secret to SpaceX's success compared to Elon's other ventures.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| Or maybe SpaceX is more successful because improvements in
| that industry are easier to achieve and the technology of
| the competition is relatively primitive. I mean, it's not
| exactly brain surgery.
| soperj wrote:
| >I think once Starship has proven itself capable of deliver on
| its promises, you'll see NASA changing its approach radically
| in the manner the author describes.
|
| Like how SLS has proven itself?
| bvogelzang wrote:
| I have to agree with you here. Given NASA's position it has to
| wait and see how successful Starship will be. NASA cannot
| afford to lose ground financially, politically, or publicly if
| they bet on Starship only for there to be issues with it down
| the line. They're not the owners of this tech which gives them
| time and flexibility to wait for the right moment to capitalize
| on it.
|
| I can only assume they are internally very excited at the
| prospect of what Starship can be to them in the future but that
| can't be fully expressed if something out of their control has
| not been fully proven. They _will_ jump on this as soon as the
| risk is outweighed by the benefit which, as the author argues,
| is in the process of happening.
| giantrobot wrote:
| The author trots out the "$10,000 a pound" launch cost which is
| really indicative of the overall quality of the article.
|
| For non-Space Wonks, the "$10,000/lb" to orbit number was the
| rough cost of launching some payload _on the Space Shuttle_ to
| orbit. Costs for the Space Shuttle were basically NASA 's
| entire manned spaceflight budget divided by the number of
| Shuttle launches performed in a year. It's not just a naive
| number it's wholly misleading.
|
| No/few commercial space launch approach $10k/lb. It's a
| meaningless number for any discussion of launch costs since the
| Space Shuttle is retired and was not a commercial launch
| vehicle anyways. Even the most expensive ULA rockets aren't
| even close to that price.
|
| If you're going to talk about space launch capabilities and
| bring up stupid numbers it impacts your credibility.
| spacemark wrote:
| As someone who has worked on NASA contracts pretty much my
| whole career, you're quite right. Starship is _still_ extremely
| unproven. If you look at the history of rockets, mayyyybe 1 in
| 5 that make it to an orbital launch debut (which is like 1 in
| 50 paper rockets) in turn make it to commercial rollout.
|
| The author's claim that the potential benefits of Starship are
| not understood by NASA is cringeworthy naive. Everyone at NASA
| is rooting for SpaceX but they have been burned many times by
| the promises of the next shiny rocket: DC-X, VentureStar, NASP,
| Ares, SLS, hell even the shuttle despite its "success" only
| fulfilled a small fraction of the desired results.
|
| Makes me wonder how old the author is.
| JulianMorrison wrote:
| It seems a little unfair to compare a program with flying
| test vehicles and production already in progress, with flying
| Powerpoints that got cancelled because you can't make a
| cryogenic hydrogen tank out of scrith.
| panick21_ wrote:
| > The author's claim that the potential benefits of Starship
| are not understood by NASA is cringeworthy naive.
|
| > Makes me wonder how old the author is.
|
| The author works for JPL.
|
| > Starship is still extremely unproven. If you look at the
| history of rockets, mayyyybe 1 in 5 that make it to an
| orbital launch debut (which is like 1 in 50 paper rockets) in
| turn make it to commercial rollout.
|
| How many of these had 10+ prototypes fly and had a dedicate
| launch site near to complete?
|
| How many had a working next generation engine for there first
| and second stage?
|
| How many were designed by companies that had already
| developed the largest rocket in the world?
|
| > burned many times by the promises of the next shiny rocket:
| DC-X, VentureStar, NASP, Ares, SLS,
|
| Non of those were even remotely close. DC-X was a sub-orbital
| technology demonstrator. Even had it been successful it would
| have been nothing more. NASP is another technology
| demonstrator.
|
| VentureStar was far, far away. Comparing it to Starship is
| just not accurate. It was basically almost delusional to
| think it would ever happen. And many people even back then
| were very skeptical of a SSTO Spaceplane. And beyond that
| politically it getting the needed funding was also not gone
| happen.
|
| Ares, SLS are basically just warmed up shuttle concepts.
| These are designed to keep contractors employed, not to solve
| the problem. They no potential to solve anything.
| spacemark wrote:
| Jeez dude, these were just random programs off the top of
| my head to illustrate industry distrust of launch vehicle
| promises. My comment wasn't meant to initiate a debate but
| offer the perspective of someone who is quite literally
| writing proposals about launch vehicle selection for NASA
| missions. But hey, you can read Wikipedia, so...
|
| In any case to those reasonable out there, don't worry. If
| SpaceX can prove reliable launch to orbit and deliver on
| their promises, change will come. It's kind of silly to
| write articles about how everyone should change the way
| they operate NOW because change is coming. Of course it's
| coming, everyone accepts it's likely, and things will move
| quickly once it does and is proven. What more do the
| fanboys want!?
| p_j_w wrote:
| >The author works for JPL.
|
| As a software person. JPL employs over 5000 people. The
| vast majority of them don't have knowledge of the sort of
| systems and business dynamics relevant to the matter of
| NASA using Starship.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _The vast majority of them don 't have knowledge of the
| sort of systems and business dynamics relevant to ..._
|
| If experience from private sector is any indication,
| that's usually question of caring. It's not _hard_ to
| gain such insight from the inside - but you need to walk
| around a bit, talk to people outside of your team, and
| most importantly, _pay attention_.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > Ares, SLS are basically just warmed up shuttle concepts
|
| Not really. They were started before SpaceX proved the idea
| of reusable boosters. They are a safe Plan-B, using engines
| and concepts that were already available. It's a shame they
| decided to improve upon the existing hardware and took much
| longer than initially expected, but that's what life with
| rockets used to be before SpaceX showed rapid iteration is
| a better path.
|
| Also, Congress would be very upset with a bunch of failed
| launches, but that's also how iterative development works.
| hindsightbias wrote:
| Maybe not everyone. JSC community strongly opposed much of
| the ISS rework (they were designing something that required
| 40 hours of spacewalks a week), opposed Shuttle C (which
| seemed completely illogical given the work base), and as far
| as projects like DC-XA... I was in Bldg. 30 watching its
| amazing flight and when it caught fire and fell over, the
| combined contractor and MCC staff cheered and broke out in
| applause.
|
| Perhaps it's changed, but not sure how relevant many of them
| would be in a Starship world.
| prox wrote:
| This would be true perhaps if this wasn't SpaceX. _They
| already moved the goalpost with Falcon_
|
| And I don't think the author wrote what you said. His main
| point was that not one of NASA's powerpoints even as much
| acknowledges that something like Starship might come round.
| The new constraints by Starship are a game changer.
| ARandumGuy wrote:
| Past success does not guarantee future success. And when
| you're dealing with space travel, which is inherently
| expensive and extremely dangerous, then you can't afford to
| buy into any hype.
| panick21_ wrote:
| If it was just 'hype' why did NASA select them for HLS?
|
| They had all the data and they officially declared it was
| very doable and that SpaceX had a path to get there.
|
| So its ok to plan for it but pretend it only exists for
| that one thing they contracted if for, and ignore if for
| everything else.
| ncallaway wrote:
| > So its ok to plan for it but pretend it only exists for
| that one thing they contracted if for, and ignore if for
| everything else.
|
| No one here is saying "NASA should ignore Starship for
| everything else".
|
| I'm saying that NASA isn't "failing to understand"
| Starship when they don't push all their chips to the
| middle of the table on Starship. You can't use the fact
| that NASA was willing to make a $2.9B bet on Starship as
| evidence that they should have been willing to go all-in
| on Starship.
|
| It'd be like saying if you wager me $1,000 on an outcome,
| then you should also be willing to bet your house on it.
| That's not how risk works!
|
| Would I personally like to see NASA continue to evaluate
| and select Starship for future programs? Yes!
|
| Would I personally like to see NASA start kick off early
| concept-phase work for payloads that would be enabled by
| Starship? Yes!
|
| Do I think that NASA decided not to completely re-orient
| everything that they do around Starship _right now_ means
| they don 't understand Starship? No! Of course not! It
| means there's too much risk right now around doing that.
| panick21_ wrote:
| The point is that you have to start to think differently.
|
| Not just have the same circle of programs, selecting a
| launcher and on.
|
| You need to fundamentally rethink how you approach space.
|
| And there is little evidence of that happening, specially
| from a leadership standpoint.
| ncallaway wrote:
| Sure. And my point is that, for an organization like NASA
| (which is basically our government's "approach to space")
| "fundamentally rethinking how you approach space" is
| basically saying: "fundamentally transform everything
| about how the organization operates".
|
| Which, if Starship delivers on its promises (and I'm
| quite optimistic and hopeful that it will!), then NASA
| _will_ have to fundamentally transform everything about
| how the organization operates.
|
| But that's a _huge_ transition to make on the back of a
| program that hasn 't proven its key value proposition
| yet. I'm happy for NASA to wait the extra 2-3 years for
| Starship to _prove_ that it can deliver on its promises,
| before NASA commits to a reorganization and restructuring
| at such a fundamental level.
|
| If NASA commits to such a restructuring _now_ , and in 2
| years we learn that Starship's economic dream fails to
| materialize and the program ends up as an improvement
| (but an ordinary one) over Falcon 9. NASA how has to
| unwind all of that organization restructuring and program
| development. It seems...wise to me for NASA to wait a
| handful of years to see Starship prove itself before
| committing to such a transition.
| panick21_ wrote:
| > "fundamentally transform everything about how the
| organization operates".
|
| Its more about starting to thinking on how to do that.
| And initiate some trail projects that take a different
| approach.
|
| At the moment, in most parts of NASA its simply ignored.
| That Starship launch system got funded is more of an
| accidental byproduct of the HLS.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _But that 's a huge transition to make on the back of a
| program that hasn't proven its key value proposition
| yet._
|
| The article agrees! Author's point, as I read it, is that
| if NASA does not plan for the transition now, then by the
| time Starship "has proven its key value proposition",
| both NASA and its usual contractors will be out of the
| game, as a new breed of private companies takes over most
| of space activity. The author doesn't expect NASA to bet
| on Starship, but rather to at least make some internal
| noises and initial movements towards that transition -
| but he failed to find any indication of that for the past
| 2 years.
| prox wrote:
| Exactly, the could keep a small budget aside already to
| do feasibility studies, along the lines of "instead of
| 50T a year, what and how do we approach the ability to
| shift 100,200T etc, to the moon?"
| JulianMorrison wrote:
| If they were trying something genuinely new - like
| falling out of orbit and making a propulsive upright
| landing of a wingless booster - then some skepticism
| would be justified.
|
| But what's new in Starship?
| ncallaway wrote:
| > But what's new in Starship?
|
| The planned recovery mechanism (the aerodynamic fall,
| with a very late righting maneuver and landing) is still
| quite new. They've successfully tested it once (which is
| great!), but the Starship concept really hinges on that
| being an extremely high reliability maneuver.
|
| I would argue that, until SpaceX can demonstrate that
| landing maneuver is high reliability, that the Starship
| concept isn't proven.
|
| I say this as a _massive_ fan of Starship, and someone
| who is _extremely_ excited by the promises of Starship of
| they come to fruition.
| humanwhosits wrote:
| They can take the mass penalty of performing a large re-
| entry burn to reduce heat-load and land falcon9-style. It
| would mean _much_ less mass to orbit, but the cost
| savings of reusing the vehicles would still be there.
| JulianMorrison wrote:
| Except that one of the Starship's big new things is
| refuelling in orbit.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Propulsive landing of an orbital stage is pretty new.
|
| (You can make an argument for Soyuz's just-before-landing
| rockets, but it wouldn't be a fair one.)
| JulianMorrison wrote:
| Okay, I'll grant you that. Not a huge step from what they
| already do, but it is a step.
| macintux wrote:
| Given the uncertainty around heat tiles (and the impact
| on rapid turnaround) plus the sheer size of the rocket,
| it seems like a huge step to this ignorant observer.
| vanattab wrote:
| Orbital flight vs suborbital flight is a bigger step then
| you might think. For orbital flights the vehicle is
| traveling at least 28,000 km/h where as to reach 125
| miles above Earth, a suborbital vehicle only needs 6,000
| km/h. This can dramatically effect the survivability on
| reentry. Orbital and sub orbital flights are very
| different.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > Propulsive landing of an orbital stage is pretty new.
|
| It is, but those are largely separate features. Each half
| of that combo has been done, and combining them doesn't
| cause any massive engineering conflicts.
| macintux wrote:
| No one has, to my knowledge, de-orbited a spacecraft
| _ready to launch again immediately_ , which is where Musk
| thinks Starship is headed. That's a big jump.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| _That_ is, yes, but jumping that hurdle doesn 't really
| matter if the landing is propulsive or not.
| [deleted]
| modeless wrote:
| Nitpick: the booster does not achieve orbit. If it did it
| would need a heat shield like the upper stage.
|
| What's new in Starship? Rapid turnaround. Catching the
| returning rocket with the launch tower. A durable heat
| shield that needs zero refurbishment for back-to-back
| flights. The sheer number of engines on the first stage
| and the volume of engine production needed for that.
| Orbital refueling. The landing flip maneuver.
|
| There _is_ a lot of new stuff in Starship, and not all of
| it is proven yet. Personally I think the biggest
| remaining risk is the heat shield. I 'm no expert, but my
| speculation is that there will be several reentry
| failures, and refurbishment will limit turnaround speed
| for a long time. I've also heard a lot of people saying
| that orbital refueling will be very difficult. I'm also
| worried that landing failures will wreck the ground
| support equipment. And I think it's very unlikely that
| the reliability of the whole system can ever be good
| enough for the airliner-like earth-to-earth passenger
| service that SpaceX has proposed.
|
| All that said, I'm very much in agreement with the
| article that NASA needs to radically change their future
| plans, because while Starship is not completely proven,
| it is clearly derisked to the point where it's going to
| be revolutionary, even if some of the above risks prevent
| the total potential from being realized. HLS was the
| first time NASA showed that they realize this, but they
| are still doing tons of stuff outside HLS that makes
| little sense in a Starship world.
| prox wrote:
| Even for some reason Starship can not return in its early
| development, it still triumphs SLS by a wide, wide
| margin.
| ncallaway wrote:
| > His main point was that not one of NASA's powerpoints
| even as much acknowledges that something like Starship
| might come round
|
| That's just not true, though. NASA awarded the HLS program
| solely to SpaceX as a Starship lander. The Source Selection
| Statement of that program (https://www.nasa.gov/sites/defau
| lt/files/atoms/files/option-...) discusses the benefits and
| drawbacks of Starship in good detail.
|
| It seems wild to claim that NASA doesn't acknowledge that
| Starship might come around, when they're paying SpaceX
| specifically for the Starship program, for moon landings
| with Starship in 2024 (I think we all know that date will
| slip, but that's the official plan).
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Author mentions HLS contract, but their argument is that
| it's not taking any advantage of economies offered by
| Starship. It's like a 10th century trader took an offer
| to use modern long-haul trucks at a fraction of what they
| pay for horse and cart transport, but failed to update
| the business to take advantage of the improved range,
| speed, reliability and cargo capacity.
|
| The argument is potent particularly because space mission
| architectures are designed primarily around constraints
| of the space launch systems, so choosing Starship as the
| launch vehicle seems to merit a large expansion in scope,
| if not total redesign of the program.
| fasteddie31003 wrote:
| I'm not sure that NASA designs much. JPL designs and builds
| most of the probes launched by NASA. JPL is an anomaly in the
| Federal Government where it gets good results. It would be
| interesting to look into how JPL does so well relative to other
| agencies and contractors such as Boeing (which is a national
| embarrassment).
| jacobr1 wrote:
| JPL employees are actually private employees of CalTech not
| federal employees.
| basementcat wrote:
| JPL is the only NASA center that is staffed by non civil
| servants and managed (under contract) by a private
| organization (Caltech). By law this gives them certain
| flexibility that other NASA centers aren't afforded (e.g.
| Caltech has lobbyists in Washington DC). It may make more
| sense to categorize JPL with other Federally Funded Research
| and Development Centers such as Johns Hopkins Applied Physics
| Laboratory.
| Loic wrote:
| People with passion. JPL people were/are (and I hope will
| continue to be) believer in the purpose of what they are
| doing.
| aero-glide2 wrote:
| Interestingly, the author himself works for JPL.
| dr_orpheus wrote:
| I think part of the point that the author misses is that while
| designing a spacecraft for a Starship launch does remove a lot
| of the constraints there is not the infrastructure to take
| advantage of that (yet).
|
| There have been some preliminary studies on spacecraft that
| could take advantage of a Starship launch capability, but we
| currently can't transport a spacecraft that large over the
| road. It would most likely have to be transported by ship from
| the manufacturing facility to the launch site. Additionally,
| new test facilities like thermal vacuum chambers, acoustic
| cells and anechoic chambers would likely have to be created to
| handle the large spacecraft that a Starship could enable. And
| NASA is not going to make that investment until there is a
| higher probability of the Starship succeeding.
|
| Those in the industry are pretty cautious about Elon's
| promises. Back in 2011, SpaceX advertised that the first Falcon
| heavy flight was going to be in 2013 [0], but the demo flight
| didn't occur until 2018, with the first launch of an actual
| payload in 2019.
|
| [0] https://www.reuters.com/article/space-business-rocket-
| idUSN0...
| panick21_ wrote:
| > Those in the industry are pretty cautious about Elon's
| promises. Back in 2011, SpaceX advertised that the first
| Falcon heavy flight was going to be in 2013 [0], but the demo
| flight didn't occur until 2018, with the first launch of an
| actual payload in 2019.
|
| This is misleading. SpaceX pushed Falcon 9 so much that it
| actually reached the targeted Falcon Heavy payload years
| before that. Many early Falcon Heavy costumers launched on
| Falcon 9.
|
| There was very little market for Falcon Heavy and the main
| costumer was DoD and their launch was scheduled for pretty
| late.
|
| The simply didn't work on Falcon Heavy until Falcon 9 was at
| the end of its evolution and they had figured out re-
| usability. However the end result was more then double as
| powerful then the version announced in 2013.
| dr_orpheus wrote:
| But what was supposed to be the first launch of the Falcon
| Heavy (USAF STP-2) was initially scheduled for March 2017.
| So maybe 2013 to 2019 isn't fair to compare, but 2017 to
| 2019 is still launching 2 years late.
|
| This is not to say that what SpaceX is doing isn't
| incredible. But I get frustrated when articles like this
| take the promises of things like "<$10m per launch, and up
| to thousands of launches per year" as an absolute truth.
|
| Edit: Had the original contracted launch date for the STP-2
| mission wrong
| panick21_ wrote:
| That is fair, but in the space world that is not so much.
| I mean even if it is 10x more expensive and 3 years
| later, changing the approach is still needed sooner
| rather then later.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Conversely, I get kind of frustrated when people take
| "Elon time" as an argument that SpaceX can't deliver on
| what it promised. It does deliver. Just a year or three
| late. Given the amount of transformation they're causing,
| compared to previous 30 years of developments in space
| industry, these kinds of delays are irrelevant. It's like
| considering a million dollar software project a failure
| just because a couple sprints run a week late.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| When your primary customer says that they will never man-rate
| your rocket, as NASA's administrator Bolden did, it's more
| surprising that they actually went on to finish Falcon Heavy
| than that it was late.
| dr_orpheus wrote:
| Yeah, that's fair. But the original first operational
| launch of the Falcon Heavy (USAF STP-2) was to help certify
| it for the National Security Space Launch. So one of their
| main targets was to get classified business that was going
| to the Delta Heavy rockets. So I don't know how much/little
| NASAs planned use of the Falcon Heavy affected their
| decision.
| JulianMorrison wrote:
| They're happy enough to put all their eggs in the even more
| untried SLS basket.
|
| I've read that the fundamental problem for NASA is that they
| are a political football. They have at most 8 years of one
| administration before the next comes in, and Congress can
| change hands several times even in that span. As such, the only
| way to create a program that won't be announced to great
| fanfare one year and cancelled the next, is to make it out of
| solid, Congressional grade pork. Which would be SLS. Since
| nobody benefits by cancelling it, it won't be cancelled. Even
| if it becomes an obsolete and ridiculous white elephant.
| panick21_ wrote:
| > to make it out of solid, Congressional grade pork. Which
| would be SLS. Since nobody benefits by cancelling it,
|
| There are always other people who think 'maybe those Alabama
| $ could go to Texas instead'.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| SLS pork is spread to all 50 states. Texas gets a good
| chunk of it. A small fraction of $2B is more than all of
| $10M.
| panick21_ wrote:
| NASA budget will not change that much so the money will
| still be spent. You can compare launch cost like that.
|
| And while it might use all 50 states, in reality the
| waste majority of money is spend in a very few locations
| as paying labor is huge part of the cost.
| JulianMorrison wrote:
| The waste is not even a downside.
| gameswithgo wrote:
| Yeah if starship gets to orbit and lands both stages, NASA will
| start talking about it more. At the moment brief static fire
| tests still knock off multiple heat tiles. Still a long way
| from knowing it will be viable for humans to fly on.
| Yizahi wrote:
| Latest post is more of a continuation of this one:
| https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/03/04/sls-what-now/
|
| I'm going to presume what author thought and quote him:
|
| ------
|
| What does NASA do with teams that cost a few billion dollars a
| year to feed and whose main expertise is building rockets and
| space probes whose entire architectural philosophy is
| threatened by current launch costs, let alone the order of
| magnitude improvement that's in the pipeline?
|
| The Perseverance Mars rover cost $2.4 billion, which works out
| to a few thousand salaries for just under a decade. Thousands
| of people are needed to build this rover because landing stuff
| on Mars is so hard that subsystem masses must be tracked to a
| tenth of a gram, on a system that weighs a tonne. The whole
| thing is meticulously handcrafted from custom silicon, PCBs,
| titanium tubes, motors, cameras, and other awe-inspiring
| instruments. Starship will be able to land 100 of them per
| flight. Now what? How can NASA feed a team that makes one
| feather light rover per decade for a billion dollars if the
| demand just jumped by a factor of a thousand and the unit cost
| fell by the same amount? Set up a production line? Work out how
| to make them with a team of ten? Build one every two weeks?
|
| In short, in a world where SLS's ongoing failure is justified
| and/or ignored while Starship races towards transformational
| capabilities, NASA needs to think very deeply about its place
| in a human spaceflight program that appears poised to proceed
| without NASA at its center.
|
| -----
|
| So the point is it seems to be a question - what is NASA
| planning to do AT ALL in the world where Starship is flying?
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| "Starship will be able to land 100 of them per flight. Now
| what?"
|
| Starship cannot deliver 100 tonnes to mars, only to LEO. The
| rover was not just a ton, it came with a heatshield and other
| machinery.
|
| Nasa has plenty of other projects, like the SAFE nuclear
| reactor, and I am sure these teams will be delighted to do
| something other than track every milligram
| panick21_ wrote:
| Starship with refueling is designed for 100 tones to Mars.
| Actually if you do the math it can be even more.
|
| > The rover was not just a ton, it came with a heatshield
| and other machinery.
|
| Great and that was thrown away and didn't add anything to
| the mission. The actual payload is 1 ton.
|
| > Nasa has plenty of other projects, like the SAFE nuclear
| reactor, and I am sure these teams will be delighted to do
| something other than track every milligram
|
| If they allow them to not work that way. That the whole
| point.
|
| I know for a fact the the people who work on Kilopower are
| really exited for their reactors to potentially power
| future Mars base and they really want to be allowed to
| build larger versions.
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| Probably make more custom satellites for scientific projects.
| There's an infinite amount of such work to be done.
| shalmanese wrote:
| In the days of steam powered factories, a central power plant
| was used to drive belts that would power various machines. More
| power intensive machines were sited near the central power
| plant to maximize efficiency and parts were moved to where the
| machines were.
|
| Electrification allowed the replacement of belts with motors
| but machines were expensive so they were upgraded in place and
| electricity was thought of as just steam, but less messy and
| cheaper.
|
| It took several decades into electrification before people
| fully wrapped their heads around: a) many small motors didn't
| cost more than one big motor and you should redesign your
| machines so that the motors were where they made sense and b)
| now that machines could be placed anywhere, you should design
| your factories so that the machines were in the path of the
| parts.
|
| Sometimes, quantitative changes become qualitative changes and
| you need to start from a clean sheet because all of the
| existing received wisdom stemmed from obsolete assumptions. It
| takes a while for this process to happen because we don't fully
| know how all of our assumptions stack on top of each other and
| we resist the change because our power/identities rest on
| elements of the status quo.
|
| Disruption theory is premised on upstarts recognizing
| opportunities that incumbents are structurally unable to
| exploit because they derive too much benefit from the old
| status quo.
| ncallaway wrote:
| I agree with all of this.
|
| I think Starship, if it pans out, will be exactly as
| disruptive as the author of the post thinks it will be. I'm
| very very much hoping that is the case.
|
| And if it delivers on its promises, it _will_ be a
| revolutionary change in how we think about space exploration,
| space tourism, space manufacturing, and other things.
|
| But, I strongly suspect that many very smart people at NASA
| _also_ understand this. And that the reason NASA isn 't
| retooling everything that they do around Starship has more to
| do with the risk of that future not panning out, and less to
| do with the people at NASA not understanding that there's a
| massive economic change at hand if Starship delivers.
|
| > Disruption theory is premised on upstarts recognizing
| opportunities that incumbents are structurally unable to
| exploit because they derive too much benefit from the old
| status quo.
|
| Yes! Exactly! The old space industries (and NASA) derive
| significant benefit from the status quo, and fully
| transitioning to the new system _risks_ many those current
| benefits in the event that the new system fails to
| materialize.
|
| For someone like NASA, they have many resources, so betting
| _everything_ on a 95% chance of success may be a _bad_ bet.
| While a start-up that has very little status quo resources,
| it 's a _really really really_ good bet.
|
| However, I have a problem in characterizing that as "not
| understanding" the opportunity. NASA, and plenty of old space
| companies can _recognize_ and _understand_ the opportunity,
| while it 's still a bad bet for them to make at the current
| development point we're at.
|
| It's more a matter of strategic risk, and current
| positionining. An organization like NASA isn't in a good
| position to bet the farm on Starship yet, even if they fully
| understand the benefits of the bet if they knew the bet would
| pay off.
| shalmanese wrote:
| GP isn't advocating that NASA throw away everything and bet
| the farm on Starship. They're saying that there needs to
| institutional acknowledgement that what's possibly coming
| is a qualitative, not quantitative shift and open up the
| intellectual space to explore what that means.
|
| What happens when launch costs are $10,000/kg, $1000/kg,
| $100/kg? What things that we're doing still make sense,
| what doesn't? Who could be a player that isn't a player
| now. It's going to happen some day, even if it doesn't
| happen tomorrow, but it's looking like it's increasingly
| about to happen tomorrow from a NASA timeline perspective.
|
| NASA is in the business of futuristic speculation, they
| develop plans for hypothetical future propulsion systems or
| life support systems or missions and draw out the vision
| for the future. But like any organization, making plans for
| what's politically palatable is always easier than
| politically unpalatable and Casey is merely pointing out
| that lower launch costs appear based on public actions to
| be very politically unpalatable and thus, an institutional
| blind spot.
| giantrobot wrote:
| Launch costs are not the end-all be-all of space
| exploration/exploitation. There are a large number of
| extremely difficult problems to solve beyond just
| throwing shit into space.
|
| 1. None of the current public Starship designs include
| payload doors. So none of these are in any way useful as
| launch vehicles for orbital payloads. Payload doors a
| huge structural weakness and requires a lot of
| engineering effort. None of the current public Starship
| designs have an obvious "payload doors go here". A
| Starship-based delivery vehicle will likely be a separate
| design from the manned vehicle.
|
| 2. In-orbit refueling is not just an unsolved problem
| it's a largely unexplored problem. Moving fuel between
| two vehicles in free-fall is going to be a monumental
| challenge. You'll basically be running the same pump
| mechanisms you'd use for the rocket motors but feeding
| into a flexible umbilical between vehicles. Starships are
| huge so you're talking about docking two huge vehicles
| (one of which is nearly empty of fuel for maneuvers),
| connecting an umbilical between them, pumping fuel
| through the umbilical (in free-fall), then undocking and
| the two go their merry ways. None of that has been done
| and involves hundreds of individual challenges.
|
| 3. Musk (not necessarily SpaceX engineers) is making
| grand promises about the turn around time for Starships.
| I think they're wildly unrealistic. A large vehicle
| undergoing a lot of extreme dynamic forces in a flight is
| going to need a lot of examination before it can be
| safely relaunched. SpaceX is likely going to need to
| construct hundreds of Starships to maintain anywhere
| close to the promised cadence of launches. The manpower
| to refit vehicles is going to be expensive. There's a big
| difference between reusing a booster core and a vehicle
| that had to survive orbital reentry.
|
| 4. Even if launch costs were hundreds of dollars per
| kilogram it doesn't make any other aspects of spaceflight
| less challenging. If you send people somewhere they need
| their vehicle and life support launched with them. A
| broken toilet can still kill the crew. Just because it
| was cheaper to launch doesn't mean you get to scrimp on
| other expenses. The Space Shuttle was expensive not
| because of the marginal cost of the launch itself but the
| operations/personnel costs of the Shuttle program.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| > SpaceX is likely going to need to construct hundreds of
| Starships to maintain anywhere close to the promised
| cadence of launches.
|
| That's always been the plan. Even in the original 2016
| presentation featuring the considerably larger
| Interplanetary Transport System that got scaled down to
| become what's now known as Starship and Superheavy, the
| plan was to churn them out en masse to make it possible
| to make the most of each Earth-Mars transit window.
|
| Starships and all the parts that comprise them are
| designed to be mass produced and treated as cattle rather
| than pets.
| giantrobot wrote:
| Producing a bunch of units is a small part of the system
| cost. Starships will need to be inspected and refurbished
| between flights (high personnel cost). Launch sites need
| infrastructure to support that launch cadence as well.
| That means clean room storage, fuel production/storage,
| housing, and adequate roads/rail/ports for surface
| transport. Launches also have regulatory requirements
| like clearing of airspace and potential downrange landing
| areas.
|
| Their own deliveries of fuel and client payloads will be
| delayed from the airspace and downrange surface exclusion
| zones.
|
| Once you've got vehicles in space you'll need 24/7
| monitoring and management. Even if mission control teams
| are relatively small the only way you'll be able to
| safely manage a large number of missions will be with a
| large number of teams.
|
| The personnel and infrastructure costs will put a cap on
| the number of Starship launches SpaceX will ever be able
| to manage. The costs of _those_ will push up the costs
| beyond Musk 's low-ball fantasy promises.
| soco wrote:
| In other words, NASA doesn't want to move fast and break
| things.
| thereisnospork wrote:
| Considering the history of rocket development can be pretty
| fairly summarized as '[intelligently] breaking things' that
| seems a counter-productive design philosophy.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| NASA just announced that they want to spend $1B per launch for
| SLS once a year until 2050. For a capability less than what
| SpaceX might provide for $10M.
|
| That's not sensible risk management, that's head in the sand
| denialism.
|
| https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/10/nasa-wants-to-buy-sl...
| ceejayoz wrote:
| It's not like they're paying the 2050 launch costs up front.
|
| If Starship succeeds, expect SLS to get quietly relegated
| after a few token launches.
| panick21_ wrote:
| This is beyond insane and wont happen. Once Starhip flies
| even the last politicans can be cornered to admit to kill
| this ridiculous rocket.
| yokem55 wrote:
| No, there will be one excuse after another. Starship isn't
| human rated and only Orion is rated for human deep space
| flight. So something else will still be needed to launch
| Orion to that lunar trajectory. That something else is SLS.
|
| Now the obvious solution is to rate Dragon for deep space
| and launch humans in that on a falcon and have it meet up
| with a starship in LEO. But getting that will probably take
| more years and billions paid to to the Orion and SLS POR
| before it will actually come to pass.
|
| Never underestimate the power of a self-licking ice cream
| cone.
| onepointsixC wrote:
| While I have much dislike for SLS, there is just no way in
| hell SpaceX will charge $10M for a launch. SpaceX have their
| own goals which they need funds for and they're not going to
| under cut their Falcon 9 that intensely like that. That's not
| to say that Starship won't be the best price per ton of
| payload to orbit. But let's stay reasonable here.
|
| As for NASA remaining with SLS, for now at least, is due to a
| mix of congressional support, and the remaining unproven
| nature of starship. SLS allows members of congress say that
| they're supporting jobs. While SpaceX is pushing the limits
| of space engineering, Boeing and many other contractors have
| pushing the limits of political engineering. Hence the result
| that the same company that took us to the moon can't get into
| orbit, but is still maintaining contracts in spite of
| screwing up everything.
| panick21_ wrote:
| Even with Starship not existing SLS is a mistake.
|
| It doesn't do anything that you can't do in other ways. We
| already have distrusted rocket launch.
|
| SLS is holding the moon architecture hostage. There is
| simply no need for it.
| JulianMorrison wrote:
| > they're not going to under cut their Falcon 9 that
| intensely
|
| Once Starship is tried and tested, I strongly suspect they
| will flat out deprecate Falcon. Fly the missions that have
| been paid and scheduled, and then bin them.
| dangerbird2 wrote:
| The problem is that for Starship to hit that $10M price
| point, SpaceX will have to demonstrate several as of yet
| unproven capabilities: In-space refueling (required for any
| missions outside LEO), safe and reliable re-entry from orbit,
| and fast turnaround for Starship to be launch-ready after
| landing. The last thing NASA needs is a glorified Space
| Shuttle 2.0 that takes months to be rebuilt after each re-
| entry, and has the constant risk of the crew burning up on
| re-entry. Fortunately, it's looking increasingly less likely
| that this will be the case, but NASA is right to not put all
| of its eggs in the Starship basket.
|
| For what its worth, if Starship does succeed in being a cheap
| and re-usable super-heavy launcher, NASA can always just stop
| making SLS (presumably after giving the senators for Alabama
| sufficiently large bribes) and switch to Starship for super-
| heavy launches.
| dr_orpheus wrote:
| Even with SpaceX's accomplishments in dramatically reducing
| launch costs, the $10M price point is still insane. The
| Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy advertised prices are ~$50
| million and $90 million per launch. The actual launches and
| mission management for any more custom launch tend to push
| those prices to almost double. So to assume that a much
| larger as yet unproven rocket with launch for $10M seems
| quite out of range with the others. Even if $10M ends up
| being the material cost, SpaceX will still be recouping
| their development cost which is significant. Development of
| the Falcon 9 was $1.6 billion [0] and I think we can assume
| Starship will be more than that.
|
| [0] https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/586023main_8-3-11_NAFCOM.pdf
| cecilpl2 wrote:
| Falcon9 still throws away the second stage every time.
|
| The idea of Starship being $10M is that it's fully
| reusable, so your marginal cost is only
| fuel/maintenance/launch.
| dr_orpheus wrote:
| Okay, according to Elon [0] the cost (to SpaceX) of a
| refurbished Falcon 9 is $15 million, $10 million of which
| is the upper stage as you say is not re-usable. So $5M
| for everything else for a rocket that gets 18k lbs to
| Low-earth-orbit. If we scale that up to the Starship
| (220k lbs to LEO) then lets estimate a re-use/refurb cost
| of $61M.
|
| So if a Falcon 9 costs $50M to launch, then 70% of that
| cost is SpaceX profit/recouping its design cost. Starship
| is supposed to be even more re-usable so lets assume that
| they only need 30% of the launch cost for recouping
| design costs/profit. This would be $87M/launch
|
| So my really aggressive estimate is still almost an order
| of magnitude higher, which is why I am doubtful. Lets
| also remember that SpaceX got $396M from NASA for the
| development of Falcon 9 and Dragon [1]
|
| [0] https://www.elonx.net/how-much-does-it-cost-to-
| launch-a-reus...
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9#Conception_and
| _fundin...
| cecilpl2 wrote:
| It's a mistake to assume the marginal cost scales
| linearly with payload. Fuel will (ish), but many other
| costs are fixed per launch.
|
| I'd argue your estimate is not aggressive. SpaceX
| continues to claim an eventual marginal cost in the high
| 7 to low 8 figures per launch. I'm inclined to believe
| that deep analysis over a back-of-the-comment Fermi
| estimate.
| panick21_ wrote:
| Even if you assume only basic first stage re-usability
| (that is well proven). That is still a 200-ton to Orbit
| launcher for the cost of a Falcon 9 or cheaper.
|
| And for what it is worth, SLS should be canceled no matter
| if Starship exists or not. Its a program that embodies
| everything bad about the modern space industry and space
| policy.
| tehbeard wrote:
| Several problems with that.
|
| One, it's Congress' baby.. ain't noone taking it out
| behind the barn.
|
| Second, you need redundancy. If something is proven bad
| with falcon or starship design... You don't want another
| situation like we had with the shuttles where your paying
| for Soyuz seats for years on end while the problem is
| debugged and mitigated.
|
| Iirc, NASA is trying to shift SLS production to the
| private sector, to try and "get rid" of this ugly
| duckling.
| panick21_ wrote:
| > Second, you need redundancy.
|
| No you don't. Just as there was no redundancy for Saturn
| V. As there is not for Falcon Heavy. There was no
| redundancy for Delta 4 Heavy. There is always a largest
| rocket.
|
| And if you do need redundancy, SLS is not how you would
| get there.
|
| If Starship doesn't work, then there will simply be no
| moon landing. Period.
|
| > Iirc, NASA is trying to shift SLS production to the
| private sector, to try and "get rid" of this ugly
| duckling.
|
| That is just contract mombo jumbo that changes nothing
| about the actual project.
| dangerbird2 wrote:
| > That is still a 200-ton to Orbit launcher for the cost
| of a Falcon 9 or cheaper.
|
| If they can't prove rapid reusability for both stages,
| it's extremely unlikely the cost will be anywhere close
| to as cheap as current estimates. And if they can't
| refuel in orbit (which as of now, has only been performed
| a handful of times with small satellites), Starship will
| be unable to leave Earth's gravity well.
| panick21_ wrote:
| The current estimate is 2M or maybe 10M.
|
| If the first stage is reusable, having a cargo launcher
| second stage that is none, reusable can be done for 30M.
|
| First stage reuse is wall proven already.
|
| > Starship will be unable to leave Earth's gravity well.
|
| If its not reusable you can use it like any upper stage
| and it could launch anything anywhere you want.
|
| > And if they can't refuel in orbit (which as of now, has
| only been performed a handful of times with small
| satellites)
|
| The physics is well understood. We do it constantly with
| non cryogenics.
|
| I really think this is overrated in how much of a
| technology risk this is. Specially if you have enough
| weight that you can invest in the solution.
| zardo wrote:
| > I really think this is overrated in how much of a
| technology risk this is. Specially if you have enough
| weight that you can invest in the solution.
|
| Refueling is a schedule risk, maybe the first design will
| fail to account for something and it will take a couple
| iterations to get it right. There is zero risk that the
| problem is unsolvable.
| baggachipz wrote:
| > NASA is right to not put all of its eggs in the Starship
| basket.
|
| The problem is that not only are they not putting _any_
| eggs into the Starship basket, they aren 't even aware (or
| admitting) that the basket even exists.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Citation needed; they are aware, and admitting is down to
| the PR department. Can't have a government branch openly
| express support to a corporate party that easily.
| dangerbird2 wrote:
| A big reason why they selected SpaceX's proposal to use a
| variation on Starship as the Artemis lunar lander is for
| NASA to start subsidizing Starship's development.
| stohk wrote:
| The SpaceX HLS bid relies on starship working and they
| won* that award. I think NASA acknowledged the basket and
| threw 2 billion into it.
| simonh wrote:
| >not putting any eggs into the Starship basket
|
| HLS is a $2.89bn egg they have put in the Starship
| basket.
| kiba wrote:
| It doesn't matter if Starship can't do all of these. It
| will still be likely cheaper and more capable than NASA's
| SLS, even if it's capable of only launching one time.
|
| Remember, SpaceX is engineering a production line to make
| Starship, not just prototyping Starshipp.
| dangerbird2 wrote:
| > That is still a 200-ton to Orbit launcher for the cost
| of a Falcon 9 or cheaper.
|
| [citation needed]
| panick21_ wrote:
| Look at how fast they can build an upper stage with basic
| materials and standard welders from the oil industry.
|
| The engine cost is reportedly already under 1M and they
| are building a huge factory t produce more.
|
| Even under the worst assumption, where I take
| conservative assumptions and then double them you still
| end up with cost comparable to Falcon Heavy.
| api wrote:
| It's a jobs program for Alabama.
| handrous wrote:
| The space museum (also home of the famous Space Camp) in
| Huntsville, AL sure is pimping it, still. That's the one
| and only future rocket for USA space flight, one might
| think if one's only knowledge came from a visit to that
| museum, rather than a sad zombie project that everyone
| knows will be badly obsolete by the time it flies. Plus a
| huge amount of square footage dedicated to advertising for
| various MIC contractors for stuff that has little or
| nothing to do with space, and a lot to do with killing
| people. Super lame. Half of the museum feels like a
| government contractor trade show, not a museum, which makes
| sense given where it's located, but doesn't explain why it
| seems to have a good reputation, as far as space & rocketry
| museums go.
| ren_engineer wrote:
| >denialism
|
| more like corruption
| JaimeThompson wrote:
| I am sure that absent interference from the US House and
| Senate NASA would say something different but if NASA says
| too much their stand to have their funding cut.
| panick21_ wrote:
| > I think the risk to NASA of assuming the benefits of Starship
| before it's proven are just too high.
|
| I think the risk of not doing so is to high.
|
| And NASA is already relaying on it. They have had all the data
| and they selected it for Human Landing System. They knew what
| it required and they were comfortable with it.
|
| > If NASA (or other industry players), assume Starship will
| deliver the benefits it promises
|
| It doesn't have to deliver on everything to be worth designing
| for it.
|
| > But that leaves them with no backup plan
|
| Going back what they always did before is the backup plan.
|
| How come wasting 20 billion on SLS is totally reasonable, but
| risking a few billion on starting with designing for a rocket
| that doesn't exist isn't.
|
| > I think once Starship has proven itself capable of deliver on
| its promises, you'll see NASA changing its approach radically
| in the manner the author describes.
|
| But that will leave a years to decade long gap of actually
| profiting from it.
|
| > but a different calibration of "risk"
|
| Yes an incredibly conservative one that would have meant the US
| could never go to the moon.
| Voloskaya wrote:
| I think the author is arguing for NASA to take a cautiously
| optimist stance on Starship, instead of assuming it won't work
| at all until it does.
|
| For example, NASA could start allocating a small-ish budget
| (e.g. 50M$) to design a parallel mission to their Artemis-IV
| mission that is currently scheduled for 2026 (but will slip)
| and that should deliver the Gateway i-HAB module to Moon's
| orbit.
|
| While 50M$ (excluding launch costs) for a mission like this
| would be lunacy today given the constraints on weight imposed
| by current rockets, with Starship that would be a sizeable
| budget to design a much bigger and more useful module.
|
| If by some cut-off date (say 2024) Starship still hasn't proven
| itself, then scrap that mission, proceed with the original one
| and the wasted 50M$ will be a rounding error in Artemis-IV
| budget.
|
| If Starship proves itself before then, scrap the original
| mission and go with the redesigned Artemis-IV based on
| Starship. Billions of dollars will be saved (SLS launch cost +
| at least 2 years worth of development), and we will have a
| Lunar Gateway 10 years ahead of what we would have had
| otherwise in terms of capabilities.
| ncallaway wrote:
| > I think the author is arguing for NASA to take a cautiously
| optimist stance on Starship, instead of assuming it won't
| work at all until it does.
|
| NASA _has_ taken a cautiously optimistic stance on Starship.
| The assignment of the HLS to Starship _and no other provider_
| was an aggressively optimistic stance from NASA that
| surprised many of the space industry observers at the time of
| its announcement. The expectation (and normal NASA behavior)
| would 've been two assign the HLS to multiple vendors, at a
| reduced funding level and stretch the timelines out.
|
| So, I'd argue that NASA is already being quite bullish on
| Starship given the projects and funding that they have
| available.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| The only way I can reconcile this is political constraints
| - perhaps they _can 't_ feasibly do what the GP proposes,
| but they _could_ assign HLS to Starship and have some idea
| on how to capitalize from it "unexpectedly" exceeding
| expectations.
|
| But then, I know nothing about how NASA operates
| internally.
| dflock wrote:
| I don't think it's a very big stretch to think that Blue
| Origin might well sue NASA if they did this.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| -\\_(tsu)_/- Everyone that loses a contract sues the
| government. Blue Origin already sued over losing a moon
| lander contract that didn't even meet the minimum
| requirements. Airbus sued the Air Force after losing the
| KC-X contract. I'm sure there are others, but those are
| just two that immediately popped into mind.
|
| Trying to a void a lawsuit is how you get nonsense like the
| LCS where the Navy first opened the bids for a single class
| of ship, and then when it was time to announce the winner,
| split the contract between Marinette Marine and Austal.
| Voloskaya wrote:
| > Airbus sued the Air Force after losing the KC-X
| contract
|
| You have it backward. Airbus won the contract initially.
| Boeing sued and managed to get the bidding process
| restarted from scratch. Boeing won that second bid and
| Airbus decided to not protest, probably because they knew
| they had 0 chance against Boeing lobbying power in the
| US.
| pintxo wrote:
| Isn't the point of most/all big NASA projects to distribute
| as much money as possible into a specified number of states?
| Kind a hard then to get political backing to move to a
| quicker + cheaper project.
| rbanffy wrote:
| A less cynical person would say that NASA's role is to
| employ as many highly qualified aerospace workers as
| feasible to both keep the workforce updated and advancing
| space applications and to do the things private companies
| don't want to. Now that it seems SpaceX is willing and able
| to fulfil part of NASA's mission, maybe it should refocus a
| bit.
| humanwhosits wrote:
| The very second that Starship gets to orbit it'll be politically
| easy for NASA to make a sudden shift
| cryptonector wrote:
| It's not just a successful (sub-)orbital test. SpaceX needs to
| demonstrate re-use. That is essential.
|
| The Angry Astronaut had a video about this where he argues that
| SpaceX should continue testing Starship to demonstrate
| reusability. But they can't now that they are committed to not
| using landing legs: first they need to test the chopsticks with
| a hopper and a load simulator, then they need to test the
| chopsticks with a booster and a Starship, and only then can
| they attempt a landing and re-use.
| coldtea wrote:
| Damn right, it's not. It's the best shell prompt generator and
| few use it!
| h2odragon wrote:
| I think he's handwaving a bt on how easy "space tractors" are
| going to be. Caterpillar etc are as fully invested int heir
| corporate structures and current practices as Kodak and all the
| other dead companies he mentions were; just because they _could_
| adapt things with "vacuum rated bearings" etc doesn't mean they
| will.
|
| I fear we'll need some legal reforms before we can have "the
| remainder of human industry" keep up with SpaceX here. They've
| got Musk's "laws don't apply" card shielding them, or something,
| to explain how they've managed to innovate this far and this
| fast. The company that produces a cheap vacuum capable drone
| tractor won't have that, and will be rendered a wet stain by big
| competitors before they can get one of their products on a
| rocket. I expect.
| panick21_ wrote:
| > They've got Musk's "laws don't apply" card shielding them, or
| something, to explain how they've managed to innovate this far
| and this fast.
|
| People will quite literally use any excuse to not give them
| Musk credit.
|
| Apparently the reason SpaceX can land rockets and build
| Starship is that they somehow don't follow the law.
|
| It couldn't possible by the the company is well managed, have
| great engineers and is lead by a great engineer.
| h2odragon wrote:
| Beg pardon, no denigration of SpaceX accomplishments intended
| at all. They've put awesome efforts into getting these
| awesome results and Musk's celebrity shadows the work of some
| modern heroes who should be further celebrated.
|
| However, all of that wouldn't have been allowed to succeed,
| without Musk's unaccountable aura of burrocratic avoidance.
| In my opinion.
| kiba wrote:
| I don't see what you mean. The bureaucracy in the last ten
| years had been supportive of SpaceX.
|
| Yes, SpaceX engineers deserve the credit, and Elon Musk on
| one or more occasion credited them.
| panick21_ wrote:
| > without Musk's unaccountable aura of burrocratic
| avoidance. In my opinion.
|
| Can you tell me exactly what you mean and how it
| significantly increased their development speed and overall
| performance?
|
| And can you show that different standards were applied to
| other space companies.
|
| They did one test launch where the FAA inspector wasn't
| there. This causes a review of the company by FAA and
| eventually they were allowed to continue.
|
| The only argument I could see is that somehow other
| companies would been punished more harshly?
|
| But other then that I really don't see what you mean.
| vanattab wrote:
| >They did one test launch where the FAA inspector wasn't
| there.
|
| You are being deliberately misleading with this
| statement. You say that as if SpaceX accidentally
| launched while the inspector was in the bathroom. When in
| reality the FAA explicitly told SpaceX not to launch
| BEFORE the launch. And that doing so would be a violation
| of their launch license. The fact that the FAA reviewed
| the situation and then allowed to continue kind of proves
| the parents point.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > When in reality the FAA explicitly told SpaceX not to
| launch BEFORE the launch. And that doing so would be a
| violation of their launch license.
|
| I'm looking into this, the details I'm finding are not
| clear enough for my liking.
|
| The FAA said there was too much shockwave risk based on
| their weather models, and rejected a request to waive
| that threshold.
|
| SpaceX's own models said the risk was within limits.
|
| > Minutes before liftoff, an FAA safety inspector
| speaking on an open phone line warned SpaceX's staff in
| the launch control room that a launch would violate the
| company's launch license. SpaceX staff ignored the
| warning because they "assumed that the inspector did not
| have the latest information," the SpaceX report said.
|
| So that leaves a very important question in my mind. Was
| that inspector using their authority to directly deny
| authorization to the flight, or were they advising spacex
| that their authorization was _already_ gone because of
| the weather?
|
| The former is a very big issue, but I'd say the latter is
| only a moderate issue. Also depending on whose weather
| models were actually right, but it sounds like it must
| have been pretty borderline.
|
| > The fact that the FAA reviewed the situation and then
| allowed to continue kind of proves the parents point.
|
| > FAA investigators couldn't determine whether the SN8
| license violation was intentional, according to people
| involved in and briefed on the investigation, speaking on
| the condition of anonymity.
|
| That sure doesn't sound like it "proves" spacex got
| special leniency.
| panick21_ wrote:
| > You are being deliberately misleading with this
| statement.
|
| No, I wasn't. I simply stated he wasn't there, and he
| wasn't. I didn't imply anything beyond that he wasn't
| there.
|
| > proves the parents point.
|
| No it doesn't. People violate different things and are
| allowed to continue to operate. Virgin Orbit was just
| stopped from operating and had to go threw review.
|
| Doing a review of company and its safety culture is
| standard procedure.
|
| This is not a human launcher, those have far higher
| requirements.
|
| Can you actually show that if it wasn't SpaceX, the
| company would have somehow been stopped from continuing?
| vanattab wrote:
| >No, I wasn't. I simply stated he wasn't there, and he
| wasn't. I didn't imply anything beyond that he wasn't
| there.
|
| Honest communication is about more then just making sure
| your statements a factually correct, context matters.
| blkhawk wrote:
| I don't know - I think the point is that at Starship costs its
| cheaper and faster to shoot up a tractor to space than to test
| it in a vacuum chamber. Especially for longer term tests.
|
| NASA devices have to work right every time the first time. That
| is because they are not getting replaced in a decade if ever if
| they fail. With a launch cadence measured in days you can just
| shoot up a new one or 10.
| fallingknife wrote:
| If there is a law that prevents Elon Musk from building rockets
| than I am on the side of whoever breaks it.
| twic wrote:
| I loved this bit:
|
| > McMaster-Carr already stocks thousands of parts that will
| work in mines, on oil rigs, and any number of other
| horrendously corrosive, warranty voiding environments compared
| to which the vacuum of space is delightfully benign.
|
| Yeah, working underwater means it'll work in space no problem!
| deelowe wrote:
| It's a bit naive to assume heavy industry doesn't already
| have solutions to most of environmental challenges in space.
| I'm constantly surprised by how dismissive high tech is of
| dinosaur industries.
| ARandumGuy wrote:
| Heavy industry does not specialize in the environmental and
| logistical challenges of space. You can't just slap in some
| oil drilling equipment into your rocket and expect it to
| perform to the degree you need. Every bit of equipment
| needs extensive testing, and likely extensive modification
| as well. That's not cheap, and it's often better to just
| design something purpose built for space, instead of trying
| to modify some piece of Earth-based equipment.
| deelowe wrote:
| Maybe not an entire drilling apparatus but what about the
| bits? What about bolts and nuts that won't cold weld?
| Bearings that work in a vacuum? I'm sure there are plenty
| examples. Going further, what about launch systems?
| Surely those can mostly be built out of off the shelf
| parts.
| blkhawk wrote:
| I don't think it means that you take the underwater parts and
| use them in space - it means that it was possible to make it
| work in adverse environments at cheaper than NASA prices.
| h2odragon wrote:
| I'm trying to conceive a vacuum capable hydraulic cylinder.
| As someone who has used backhoes to dig in water then
| helped refurb the cylinders afterwards. I'm not seeing any
| happy possibilities, myself.
|
| I agree that it should be possible to make things work at
| cheaper prices than NASA, but that's still a long way from
| "easy" or "Commercial off the Shelf"
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I'm curious in what ways a industrial cylinder wouldn't
| be vacuum capable. Pressure shouldn't be a concern. they
| operate at 5-10,000 PSI above the ambient environment, so
| an additional 14 PSI differential shouldn't matter.
|
| I'm guessing operating temperatures would be a big
| concern
|
| What failed in water?
| h2odragon wrote:
| Corrosion is a concern, all over but especially on the
| inner cylinder that has to seal. The seals are _probably_
| OK but they 're important and redo them anyway when its
| open. The fluid _will_ pick up some water and thats a
| whole hydraulic system flush, once you get "too much".
|
| Then you've got bearings and grease ports and channels
| that not only don't necessarily like water; but you're
| not operating in _clean_ water either and that compounds
| all the problems.
|
| Noting almost total ignorance of the realities: I forsee
| vacuum hydraulics problems including keeping seals tight,
| the inevitable oil coating on cylinders boiling off and
| getting polymerized residue buildup. Double enclose all
| the actuators and have _another_ seal system so you can
| have a moving thing poking out of a hull, as is done for
| boats, will probably be necessary... and that 'll have
| its own problems at the actuation points i bet.
| twic wrote:
| I am very much not a rocket scientist. But off the top of
| my head:
|
| Cooling. In space there's no ambient cooling by air. If
| you want to cool something, you have to pump heat out of
| it and into a radiator. And since that is energy-
| intensive, you want to minimise heat production as far as
| you can.
|
| Volatiles. In a vacuum those will boil off and not come
| back. All sorts of polymers, possibly including those
| used in seals and bearings, suffer from this.
|
| Electrostatic build up. Again, there's no route for this
| to escape into the air, so you need to make sure that
| anywhere it can build up is grounded, i suppose.
|
| Maintenance. Depending on where you're going to use it,
| you might not be able to depend on some guy with a socket
| set and ungloved fingers being able to fiddle with it
| whenever necessary.
|
| Gravity. I don't know much about hydraulics, but all
| sorts of machinery is designed around an unstated
| assumption that liquid will drip downwards given a chance
| (sumps etc).
|
| Some of these problems go away on the moon (which has
| gravity, and potentially pressurised garages for
| maintenance) or Mars (which has the above, and also some
| atmosphere).
| ahartmetz wrote:
| Space is probably harder just because there is less
| experience and it's much more difficult to get it.
| Temperature extremes and lubricants seem to be obvious
| difficulies.
| qayxc wrote:
| The author is a physicist, not an engineer and shows in all
| of his articles.
|
| Physicists are trained to check whether a concept passes the
| constraints of the current theoretical models. If it does,
| the rest is just an engineering problem - i.e. take the
| theoretical upper limits of mechanics and material science
| and extrapolate from there.
|
| No concern for the pesky 10% that take up 90% of the
| development time and make or break a product.
|
| In this context: sure, there's equipment that _can_ work in
| space. But all of this equipment needs to be operated and
| maintained by humans and there 's where your problem starts.
|
| Remote operation is impractical beyond the Earth-Moon system.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _No concern for the pesky 10% that take up 90% of the
| development time and make or break a product._
|
| You're missing the author's main point and the whole reason
| Starship is a big deal. With current launch costs, all that
| equipment has to be designed, reviewed and tested up front
| to guarantee, as much as humanly possible, that it'll work
| in space the first time, because there's no money to try
| again. With launch costs Starship offers even under
| pessimistic estimates, even non-space companies will be
| able to afford to just _send stuff to space to see what
| breaks_ , and then iterate until it works. That "10% work"
| becomes orders of magnitude cheaper.
| giantrobot wrote:
| > With launch costs Starship offers even under
| pessimistic estimates, even non-space companies will be
| able to afford to just send stuff to space to see what
| breaks, and then iterate until it works. That "10% work"
| becomes orders of magnitude cheaper.
|
| That is a ridiculous position to take. If you have a
| drill on Earth that burns out you might pop a circuit
| breaker and have to deal with some acrid smoke for a
| second or two. You wave it away and it will dissipate
| into the five and a half quadrillion metric tons of
| atmosphere. If some parts fly off they'll fall to the
| ground pretty quickly. If you drop the drill it will fall
| to the ground.
|
| If you've got a drill on a spacecraft that burns out
| popping a circuit breaker or some acrid smoke is a
| thousand times more dangerous. Just spalling of some
| parts can send debris flying around the craft to cause
| short circuits or damage life support equipment. If you
| let the drill go because it hurt you it doesn't fall to
| the ground but instead float there being dangerous or
| bouncing off equipment that won't like a drill bouncing
| off of it.
|
| Lot's of stuff works fine on Earth, even down in mines or
| other places, because we've got a relatively thick
| atmosphere with favorable temperature and gravity.
| Lubricants don't literally boil off equipment if they're
| left in the sun for a few minutes. We also don't have to
| deal with temperature variations of hundreds of degrees
| between shade and full sunlight.
|
| Sending random crap to space without understanding the
| environment or failure modes would be extremely foolish.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _Sending random crap to space without understanding the
| environment or failure modes would be extremely foolish._
|
| Well, of course I'm exaggerating, but the point is: with
| low enough costs, you can afford to iterate on designs
| you previously had to do perfectly up front. Learning
| from failures becomes cheaper than having to predict
| every possible failure mode up front.
| vanattab wrote:
| >Starship is intended to be able to transport a million tonnes of
| cargo to the surface of Mars in just ten launch windows.
|
| So at 100tons per starship sent to Mars that's 10,000 trips or
| 1000 per launch window. But the current plans call for something
| like 16 starship launches just for refuelling the one starship
| for the lunar mission. Suppose we can do the Mars trip with the
| same number of flights that's 170,000 launches to transport that
| 100million tons? And this guy is mad that nasa is not assuming
| that this is achievable?
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I just can't see it happening. How many launches have there
| been in total since the first launch of anything in space? I
| can't see it being much more than 10K, and it's definitely in
| that order of magnitude.
|
| There's just not enough raw materials and fuel for that amount
| of launches, and environmental objections will catch up with
| them long before that.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| There's not enough aluminum and steel?
|
| There's not enough oxygen? Hydrogen? We can make renewable
| methane just fine.
|
| Even if we used oil a quick calculation says that 1000 tons *
| 10000 launches would barely break a tenth of a percent of our
| current semiannual oil use. I think that's an affordable
| impact for a truly massive mars campaign.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| By the time you're sending a thousand Starships in one go, the
| fuel's probably coming from an orbital refinery processing
| chunks of captured comets, not Earth launches.
|
| Or they've been replaced with some big Aldrin cyclers built
| _using_ Starships.
| vanattab wrote:
| That's exactly my point. This guy is pissed that NASA is not
| planning properly because Starship will unlock the ability to
| send millions of tons all over the solar system but in realty
| starship is only one of hundreds (thousands?) of advancements
| that will need to be made before we can think of sending
| 100's of millions of tons around the system.
| panick21_ wrote:
| The whole point is that Starship actually allows you to
| start thinking of the very problems you speak of.
|
| Before you had it, suggesting mining a asteroid was just
| pointless and insane. Now you can actually think about.
|
| And that is what NASA should do. Now getting stuff to LEO
| is 'solved' what can you actually do.
| chinathrow wrote:
| > The whole point is that Starship actually allows you to
| start thinking of the very problems you speak of.
|
| Thank you for pointing that out - I just realized that
| with Starship, we even could start thinking about putting
| some smaller asteroids out of a potential collision
| course with it.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| I think it's reasonable to think NASA should currently
| being doing exploratory thinking about "how would we build
| something like a space station, lunar base, or Mars mission
| if Starship is available within the decade", though. Which
| is what I think the author is advocating; to get a few
| years out in front, rather than waiting until Starship
| reaches the point where it can't be ignored.
| vanattab wrote:
| But isn't NASA already doing that? I mean SpaceX and
| starship was just awarded the solo lunar lander contract
| no? The first Artimis flights are in 2023 no?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| A little. I take the point as "Think bigger."
| pjc50 wrote:
| Would anyone like to estimate the CO2 emissions produced by
| that?
| sschueller wrote:
| Everyone keeps pointing to the CO2 of the rocket itself but
| forget the enormous infrastructure requirements to launch a
| rocket the CO2 that creates. Even if starship bursn clean,
| it's infrastructure does not.
| zpeti wrote:
| You are passive aggressively attacking the guy who is
| basically doing the only really inspiring thing in the world
| today, while at the same time basically single handedly
| forcing the auto industry into electrifying like 30 years
| early.
|
| So, honestly, please, stop.
| lkey wrote:
| The beliefs that Elon Musk
|
| A) Was _attacked_ by the parent comment B) Needs defending
| _here_ of all places C) Is the _only_ person doing
| something inspiring _in the world_
|
| Indicate that you might want to broaden your worldview.
|
| Electric cars will _not_ save us from climate change, nor
| will rockets send us into climate oblivion.
| NikolaeVarius wrote:
| This hand wringing about CO2 Emissions by rockets is the
| weirdest ongoing trend I've seen. If you want to complain
| about environmental issues, at least complain about something
| interesting like how sound at the launch pad disrupts the
| breeding patterns of an animal or something.
|
| At least that can cause interesting discussion other than ,
| BUT CO2 and WARMING.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| Starship contains a total of 3,400 + 1,200 = 4,600 tons of
| propellant [1]. The propellant being methane and oxygen.
|
| So, someone can do the math to work out how much CO2 is
| generated by burning that much of that mix. In any case, that
| is very small compared to the overall emissions of human
| society.
|
| That being said, methane can be produced a number of ways,
| for instance digestion of food waste. Therefore, they could
| source methane in a way that would allow to claim (quite
| reasonably) that they are carbon-neutral.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship
| Gravityloss wrote:
| 100 tons of payload. Rockets are typically about 2% payload
| so 5000 tons fully fuelled. Fuel and oxidizer combine to H2O,
| OH, CO and CO2. So, not all the exhaust product is CO2. But
| some of the CO released is combined with atmospheric oxygen
| to CO2, so that increases the mass of CO2 besides direct
| propellant mass.
|
| We could as first guess say that it's about 5000 tons of CO2
| per launch. So 1000 launches would be 5 million tons.
|
| US CO2 emissions per capita are about 16 tons per year, so it
| would be equivalent to the yearly emissions of 300,000
| Americans or one thousandth of the country's yearly
| emissions.
|
| 10,000 launches would be 1% of US total emissions.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| A Starship's gonna generate about the same emissions as a
| similarly sized passenger aircraft generates from a full fuel
| load.
|
| We fly ~40M flights a year. It'd be a drop in the bucket.
| vanattab wrote:
| A 737-800 has a max take off weight of 175,000lbs
|
| Super Heavy Dry Mass: 350,000-440,000lbs Super Heavy Fuel
| Weight: 7,500,000lbs Starship Dry Mass: ~200,000lbs
| Starship Fuel Weight: 2,600,000lbs
|
| Starship+Booster total: 10,695,000lbs
|
| 175,000lbs vs 10,965,000lbs!
|
| There is no such thing as a similarly sized aircraft!
| ceejayoz wrote:
| A 747-8's MTOW is about a million pounds. Ten-ish 747s
| for a Starship, as a roughly worst case estimate. Only so
| much carbon you can stuff into a ton of fuel.
|
| A single-digit percentage global increase in aviation
| emissions.
|
| (I'm also very skeptical of that level of Starship
| launches. By the time you're getting anywhere near that,
| you're likely to have captured some comets and are
| processing fuel for interplanetary missions in an orbital
| refinery. Net zero emissions except for getting the
| people and Earth-only parts up to LEO.)
| ben_w wrote:
| > By the time you're getting anywhere near that, you're
| likely to have captured some comets and are processing
| fuel for interplanetary missions in an orbital refinery.
|
| I think you're underestimating both the mass of a comet
| and that the geopolitical implications of a private
| company being one industrial accident away from
| replicating something several orders of magnitude closer
| to Chicxulub than to Tsar Bomba would prevent them being
| allowed to even try it.
|
| I did a napkin estimate a while back, and even
| optimistically 10,000 Starship launches is just where you
| start going "hmm, perhaps we should think about starting
| to seriously plan the basics of an orbital ring or a
| launch loop" -- a 40Mm circumference steel loop with a
| cross section of 1m^2 is still about 30 times less
| massive than 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > I think you're underestimating both the mass of a comet
| and that the geopolitical implications of a private
| company being one industrial accident away from
| replicating something several orders of magnitude closer
| to Chicxulub than to Tsar Bomba would prevent them being
| allowed to even try it.
|
| Meh, you could regulate it fairly effectively. Changing
| the path of a comet is something that's gonna have to be
| done years out. Deviating from the planned course would
| be obvious long before it'd hit anything.
| ben_w wrote:
| Bet your life?
|
| If it was a naive straight-line path with no funky
| orbital mechanics to make things even harder to get
| right, the difference between hitting the Earth at 90deg
| and missing by the orbit of the moon is a sideways
| delta-v of 13 m/s one year in advance. The sideways Dv
| between a 45deg impact and LEO, 7 days in advance, is 3.5
| m/s.
|
| I'm curious: Even ignoring engine errors, given near-
| Earth solar orbital velocities, what's the mass of the
| smallest asteroid which, if it impacted that comet 7 days
| before the comet reached Earth, could cause it to hit
| Earth? For whatever orbit you want to put it in, and
| whatever mass of comet you want to suggest using.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > The sideways Dv between a 45deg impact and LEO, 7 days
| in advance, is 3.5 m/s.
|
| In other words, the larger the comet, the better.
|
| You'd need a fairly obvious number of rockets to impart
| that sort of velocity change on a large one, right? And
| if you're doing it to a pebble, it doesn't matter too
| much?
| ben_w wrote:
| > In other words, the larger the comet, the better.
|
| I don't think so? If you're bringing in a big one you
| need more engines to push it into the right orbit to
| start with, so I think the risk is always things that
| scale up directly with the comet's mass, e.g. "the
| engines are misaligned by $foo degrees".
|
| Also, a pebble in space terms is still a potential city-
| killer, and no nation in their right mind is going to
| want to let a private company -- not one of their own,
| let alone a private company in another nation if they
| have even the slightest say in the matter -- wield that
| kind of potential:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteor_Crater
| ceejayoz wrote:
| In the "whoops" scenario (i.e. non-malicious), an engine
| misalignment would be apparent with enough time to
| correct. You're a year out.
|
| We watch asteroids zing by regularly. The ones we know
| about have their chances of hitting calculated years or
| decades out.
| ben_w wrote:
| Sideways motion is harder to determine than motion
| towards us; the former needs angular resolution, the
| latter doppler radar.
|
| And the sort of rock that could shift 67P from a safe to
| a dangerous path (LEO to 45 degrees one year ahead) would
| be about 13 metres radius. The Wikipedia citation is 5
| years old, so I don't know what we know today, but in
| 2016 the estimate was we only knew somewhere around 1.3%
| of asteroids between 40m and 3.5m diameter (and 0.003% of
| smaller than that, because things get harder to spot as
| you get smaller).
|
| Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-
| Earth_object#Size_distrib...
|
| ArXiv link because the citation in Wikipedia was giving
| me a server error: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1604.06328.pdf
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Musk has promised that eventually they will use synthetic
| methane to launch Starship, so net emissions will be zero.
| micropresident wrote:
| I am more concerned about the Ozone damage.
|
| https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/147776209027688.
| ..
| nsxwolf wrote:
| I wanted to get some sense of how much weight that is in
| Chicago building terms. 1 million metric tons is like sending 5
| Sears Towers (aka Willis Tower) to Mars.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| "Mars trip with the same number of flights that's 170,000
| launches to transport that 100million tons? And this guy is
| mad"
|
| I think the idea that Starship will get us cities on mars is
| pure fantasyland. You could have a decent base on the moon, and
| maybe a visit to Mars, but if you want million tons to Mars,
| you have to go beyong chemical rockets, build a mars transit
| vehicle, etc.
|
| It makes no sence to forgo those technologies if you are moving
| billions of tons.
| altcognito wrote:
| Blue Origin said it would be 16, Musk has claimed it won't be
| more than 8.
|
| https://wccftech.com/musk-rejects-blue-origins-claim-of-16-s...
|
| It ends up being ~100,000 launches over 10 launch windows. Elon
| has talked about building 1000 starships (presumably you would
| need less boosters)
|
| https://www.tesmanian.com/blogs/tesmanian-blog/1000-starship...
|
| Anyway, it's absolutely the case that transferring a million
| tons of cargo will require a new way of thinking about the
| scale of launches.I would also not assume that the refueling
| launches have to all take place within the window, that's a bad
| assumption to start with. You would start your refueling
| launches well ahead of the window.
|
| _added point_ - I do think the article overlooks that while
| Starship will change things, the timing is likely to be slow
| enough that NASA will be able to adapt. They do have ridiculous
| timelines on some of their projects, but just like everything
| else, they will just rewrite those timelines if new solutions
| present themselves.
| qayxc wrote:
| Even 90,000 launches over 10 launch windows is 9,000 launches
| per window. Launch opportunities are about 30 days max per
| window (depending on the flight profile) so that'd be 300
| launches per day or over 12 launches _per hour_ .
|
| I'm not saying this is bonkers, but this is completely
| ridiculous and it doesn't matter whether it's 90,000 or
| 180,000 or even "just" 45,000 launches - it's completely
| impractical.
|
| Not to mention that proponents always act as if it's no
| biggie to just crank out thousands of metric tons of _useful_
| equipment for a permanent Mars settlement in just a couple of
| years.
|
| You, know, including R&D and engineering and paying for all
| that.
| gremloni wrote:
| Based on what, your gut feel? 12 launches per hour does not
| seem insane at all.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Based on the fact that it would be more flying mass than
| the domestic airline industry.
| vanattab wrote:
| In 2020 there was 114 orbital launches supporting all
| space missions around the world. That's 0.013 launches
| per hour. 12 launches per hour to support a single
| mission does not seem at least a little insane? I love
| SpaceX and am hopeful for their Mars plans but we are
| scientists and engineers let's think with our brains and
| not our hearts.
| gremloni wrote:
| Think about what you're saying, does 12 launches per hour
| sound all that crazy? Maybe having 1000s of planes up in
| the air at the same time would have sounded similarly
| crazy to someone on the 50s
| brianwawok wrote:
| if computers taught me anything.. it's if you can do 1
| thing really really well perfectly, it's not a ton of
| work to do it 10x or 100x in parallel.
|
| We don't have enough data to know reliability of say
| Falcon long term. Is it 99% successful? 99.9%?
| 99.999999%? Doing a ton of launches, you really want to
| work on the 9s, so 0-1 of your launches blow up, not
| 100+. But once you do, you just copy paste it baby and go
| to town.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| There is a literally a book called "The Mythical Man
| Month" about the limits of parallelism in computer
| engineering. It's arguably one of the fundamental texts
| of the discipline.
| micropresident wrote:
| And that book has literally nothing to do with what is
| being discussed.
| vanattab wrote:
| I am not convinced the scalability of cyberspace applies
| to actual space.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| I don't think it's a good example either. But the
| scalability of mass production may apply, and that might
| be good enough...
| meepmorp wrote:
| What's a few orders of magnitude among friends?
| qayxc wrote:
| > Based on what, your gut feel?
|
| Based on the fact that every orbital launch requires
| airspace restrictions, local road closures, blocked
| patches of sea and launch permissions.
|
| The regulatory framework alone is incapable of dealing
| with that (keep in mind that every orbital rocket is
| basically an ICBM), let alone the fact that you'd have to
| spread launches over multiple sites therefore rendering
| considerable patches of air- and waterways completely
| closed up for weeks on end.
|
| And that's just the regulatory side of things. There's
| also the logistical side wherein you'd have to consider
| methane production and -storage as well as ground
| operations.
|
| 100t-class orbital rockets aren't aeroplanes and the
| procedures involved in checking, refuelling and launch
| are much more involved. Keep in mind that SpaceX of all
| companies was the first company who managed to lose a
| rocket during fuelling in over 5 decades.
|
| Now scale that risk (of currently 1:129 - make that
| 1:1000 since I'm being generous here) to 9,000 launches
| and you'd be looking at about 9 major explosions (worst
| case) per launch campaign and that's without the added
| stress from an unprecedented launch cadence taken into
| account.
|
| You'd be looking at this:
| https://youtu.be/AOFVuAmcoCA?t=43
|
| two times a week and handwaving that away by quoting
| fantasy goals for the achievable reliability isn't going
| to change the fact that even one such incident would halt
| the entire program for a considerable amount of time.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > Based on the fact that every orbital launch requires
| airspace restrictions, local road closures, blocked
| patches of sea and launch permissions.
|
| So set up a [semi]-permanent airspace restriction
| somewhere inland, remote enough that there are no local
| roads to worry about, and don't block any patches of sea.
| And do the permission in bulk, obviously.
|
| > major explosions (worst case) per launch campaign
|
| Failure rate is something to consider in several ways but
| largely unrelated to the launches-per-hour metric.
| altcognito wrote:
| Don't assume that launches for refueling operations happen
| during the launch window. The window is really as long as
| you want it to be for refueling. Yes, there are engineering
| challenges associated with having fuel in orbit over a
| longer period.
|
| I'll agree there is a shortage of plans and an excess of
| hope in what you're going to ship to Mars in the near term.
| But I can also see where others are saying -- something
| this big requires a slow organization like NASA to start
| planning now.
| SECProto wrote:
| > Don't assume that launches for refueling operations
| happen during the launch window. The window is really as
| long as you want it to be for refueling.
|
| Indeed, the parent comment was making a bad assumption.
| If you look at it that way, refueling can happen anytime
| in the 2-years between windows. So say 10,000 launches
| over 730 days is 13 or 14 launches per day. Given
| multiple launch sites, seems feasible enough (in the same
| sense of feasible as producing 100,000 tonnes of goods
| destined for mars every 2 years).
| skedaddle wrote:
| Launching isn't the whole mission though, even if you can
| achieve that rate. For every launch you also need hours
| of time for rendezvous, docking, and fuel transfer. And
| even if somehow there is a solution to this schedule,
| you're talking about doing it 10,000 times safely and
| without a hitch.
| abledon wrote:
| > It ends up being ~100,000 launches over 10 launch windows.
| Elon has talked about building 1000 starships
|
| managing that many launches...spaceships mid-journey,
| refueling in space ETC... would the 'head count' at spaceX
| have to increase greatly, or would they keep a relatively
| small crew and just 'scale out' having it mostly controlled
| by code/automation
| brianwawok wrote:
| For sure both.
| gene-h wrote:
| A big part of the cost of space missions is not making things as
| light as possible, but developing the scientific instruments.
| More upmass doesn't always make designing sensitive scientific
| instruments easier.
|
| If said scientific instruments need to go on a rover, mass still
| matters. More mass can limit rover mobility and at some point the
| rover requires more power than can be provided with RTGs or solar
| cells.
| qayxc wrote:
| Exactly. Way too many people seem to ignore the cost of
| developing and certifying scientific instruments.
|
| There's nothing gained from sending 50t of metal to the outer
| solar system. Scientific instruments are usually purpose-built
| and while lifting mass restriction can bring down cost, you'd
| still have to account for redundancy and precision because no
| one's going to fly out to Jupiter to properly unfold that darn
| antenna.
| neolefty wrote:
| Nuclear power sources are still mighty expensive too. Solar
| is hard past Mars, and near impossible past Jupiter, AFAIK.
| cookingmyserver wrote:
| > Way too many people seem to ignore the cost of developing
| and certifying scientific instruments.
|
| It gets ignored because it is a symptom of not being able to
| cheaply launch probes. You spend all of this time researching
| and developing a scientific instrument only to make two of
| them. One to launch the other to go on a diagnostic model
| (maybe a third for a launch backup). You spread out the cost
| of development over more units and bring down the per unit
| cost of manufacturing (although probably not that much given
| we are still talking quantities in the tens or at most
| hundreds of units). But without a cheap launch system there
| is a fixed cost per unit of hundreds of millions to get it
| into space, so there is very little point in producing more
| than what you need for just that mission.
|
| Of course certain missions are going to require special
| specs, but I do think that generic, somewhat modular
| spaceprobes are around the corner now that launch costs are
| going down. If you are going to retire a space craft that
| you've made a profit off of shuttling cargo to LEO might as
| well discard of it by sending it on one last mission into
| deep space with a couple of scientific missions onboard.
|
| We will end up spending more money overall, but cost per unit
| of science (however you want to measure that) will go down.
| qayxc wrote:
| > It gets ignored because it is a symptom of not being able
| to cheaply launch probes.
|
| Is it, though? Let's do a quick and very superficial
| analysis of the costs here. Say we want to send a probe the
| outer solar system, like the moons of Jupiter or the Saturn
| system.
|
| There are two unique challenges that such probes are faced
| with:
|
| * on Jupiter, the magnetic field of the planet requires
| hardened electronics and shielding
|
| * in the Saturn system and beyond, nuclear power is the
| only option for powering your instruments
|
| Neither of these points are in any way shape or form
| correlated with launch costs. In fact, in order to get RTGs
| you need to build, maintain and operate an entire
| specialised nuclear facility. Alternatively you could use
| small nuclear reactors, but that may or may not interfere
| with certain instruments.
|
| The cost of hardening electronics and shielding is also not
| going away even if launch costs were non-existent. It also
| doesn't matter much whether you produce 10 or 1000 of such
| specialised processors - the cost will still be orders of
| magnitude higher than comparable commodity options.
|
| It's not getting any better if we turn inwards instead and
| consider Venus or Mercury. Both again pose incredible and
| unique engineering challenges as do most scientifically
| interesting targets in the solar system.
|
| How exactly would a cheaper launch cost solve the problem
| of a Venus sample-return mission? Is it the expensive
| launch that prevents us from sending an orbiter out to
| Pluto? How does more and cheaper payload help with getting
| a probe into the oceans of Europa, Ganymede, or Enceladus?
| I could go on, but I think you get what I mean.
|
| edit: there's also the human factor that I conveniently
| left out - every mission requires a staff of people (both
| scientists and engineers) for the entire mission duration;
| that cost is also unrelated to launch costs
| cookingmyserver wrote:
| > The cost of hardening electronics and shielding is also
| not going away even if launch costs were non-existent.
|
| Of course, but what about hardened electronics exempts it
| from the principles I discussed with scientific
| instruments in general?
|
| > the cost will still be orders of magnitude higher than
| comparable commodity options.
|
| Irrelevant, no one is comparing the cost to commodity
| hardware, we are comparing it to what the cost would be
| if we don't increase the number of scientific missions
| and continue with the current demand.
|
| > in order to get RTGs you need to build, maintain and
| operate an entire specialized nuclear facility.
|
| Yes, needing more material is going to cost more money,
| but does the cost per unit stay the same or go up the
| more you buy? We are going to need to increase production
| Pu used in RTGs anyways, if we are going to build
| facilities to might as well utilize them to the max.
|
| > How exactly would a cheaper launch cost solve the
| problem of a Venus sample-return mission?
|
| There will be unique engineering challenges that require
| unique solutions, but engineers will have a large shelf
| of parts to choose from if they have a specific issue
| they don't have to invent the wheel for.
|
| > that cost is also unrelated to launch costs
|
| That one is true. Missions that involve complex
| maneuvers, landings, driving rovers, etc, will require
| large amounts of staff and engineers. Other missions that
| don't involve those things could utilize a shared staff,
| so something like a general purpose probe network taking
| measurements across the solar system. Fleet management
| tools, policy, and procedures need to be developed so we
| can manage assets like we do with other LEO
| constellations.
| vanattab wrote:
| This. The JWST cost/will cost about 10 billion dollars. The
| launch costs are negligible.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| The JWST costs that much primarily because it's a one-off,
| which is a consequence of high launch costs.
|
| If you drop the launch costs by 100x, this means being able
| to launch 100x JWSTs for the same price, meaning it makes
| sense to optimize for production costs instead of reliability
| - as if one of your telescopes fail, you can always
| launch/use another. So now it makes sense to focus on using
| mass-manufactured parts instead of specialty ones, which
| drops the production costs significantly. It might make sense
| to design a _telescope platform_ instead, opening more
| opportunities to exploit economies of scale.
| giantrobot wrote:
| > If you drop the launch costs by 100x, this means being
| able to launch 100x JWSTs for the same price
|
| As the GP pointed out the launch cost of the JWST is a
| small fraction of the program's overall cost. Launching a
| hundred JWSTs would mean _building_ a hundred JWSTs and
| doing so is not cheap. Even with economies of scale
| _producing_ various components for the hundred JWSTs those
| all need to be tested and verified. That 's an expensive
| process that doesn't really benefit from economies of
| scale.
|
| For an instrument the size of JWST you can't just spam
| launches with the assumption some will fail. It's a giant
| instrument. A catastrophic failure would see it land mostly
| intact in a populated area or fill a huge orbit with
| dangerous debris. Even if it was just non-operational it
| would not occupy an orbital slot that's unusable by other
| instruments.
|
| Launch costs are almost always a small portion of overall
| mission costs. Just because launch costs go down doesn't
| mean space missions can magically scale up. The goal is to
| launch useful scientific/commercial instruments or space
| vehicles. We don't just launch hunks of lead into orbit for
| funsies. Lower launch costs are nice but they're not going
| to magically make all space missions cheap or easy.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _Even with economies of scale producing various
| components for the hundred JWSTs those all need to be
| tested and verified. That 's an expensive process that
| doesn't really benefit from economies of scale._
|
| My point is that all those processes are expensive
| _because_ the final result has to work the first time,
| _because_ launches are expensive and infrequent. Drop
| launch costs enough, you don 't need so much reliability,
| so everything across the board suddenly becomes much
| cheaper. Which then opens many further opportunities to
| reduce costs.
| giantrobot wrote:
| You can't just make space equipment less reliable because
| launching it is cheaper. Equipment failures will kill
| people and ruin missions. Things that might work fine on
| Earth's surface will not work the same way in space. Even
| seemingly mundane failures can damage important
| components.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Most missions aren't manned. If your equipment is cheap
| enough, you can just send more and achieve reliability
| through numbers. If you don't have to optimize for mass
| so hard, you can achieve reliability through cheaper
| means - e.g. simplifying heat management by bolting on a
| larger radiator; simplifying radiation effects mitigation
| by having multiple CPUs running the same calculations and
| voting on results, and/or making thicker rad insulation.
| Etc.
| vanattab wrote:
| Launch costs are not the only (maybe not even the most)
| important factor for reliability. If your probe takes 9
| years to reach it's destination and then fails to deploy
| it's not the launch costs that are the problem. Or if you
| want to land an unmanned cargo ship near your lunar or
| mars base reliability is defiantly a concern. Cheap
| launch costs are definitely in important step to
| colonizing the system we are simply pointing out it's one
| of many things we need before we can usefully launch
| millions of tons around the universe.
| chinathrow wrote:
| Progress at Starbase, SpaceX's base in Boca Chica, TX is done at
| an astonishing pace and very impressive.
|
| Some of the stuff seen in the video series from August by
| Everyday Astronaut has changed already.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t705r8ICkRw
| marktangotango wrote:
| Spacex is building the transcontinental railroads of the solar
| system. There is mind boggling upside for them. I'm kinda
| disappointed Blue Origin seems to have fallen in a rut. I'm sure
| Musk will be happy to provide transportation for Bezos space
| colony construction projects!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railroad_Tycoon
|
| Edit My point isn't to disparage Bezos, but to highlight the fact
| that anyone with grand aspirations in orbit/solar system will
| have to go through Musk and Spacex until a competitor does
| appear. RE space colonies, I believe the natural sequence of
| events for space tourism is: sub orbital, oribital, long term
| orbital (a small space "hotel") culminating in orbital habitat
| ala O'Neil Cylinders. Cheap kg to orbit enables all of that.
| yeetaccount wrote:
| Yeah but watching Bezos turn into a household joke is worth it.
| gremloni wrote:
| He's a household joke the same way Elon is a household joke.
| oxplot wrote:
| Bezos is a household joke even in Elon's household. Elon is
| a nightmare in Bezos'es. That's where the difference is.
| nine_k wrote:
| Transcontinental railroads provided routes between already
| populated areas, with viable trade between them.
|
| Solar system beyond Earth is more like a desert, possibly rich
| with resources, but nearly no resource is precious enough to be
| worth carrying by a starship.
|
| The incentives for space expansion past LEO and GEO will not be
| economical.
| marktangotango wrote:
| That doesn't really hold up though. California has a lot
| desert and was sparsely settled until the gold rush for
| example. Also, in situ resource utilization is an area where
| technology and innovation are certain to provide advantage.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_situ_resource_utilization
| jonathankoren wrote:
| I often think of this observation by Bruce Sterling:
|
| > I'll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time
| I see people setting the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert is
| about a thousand times as hospitable as Mars and five hundred
| times cheaper and easier to reach. Nobody ever writes "Gobi
| Desert Opera" because, well, it's just kind of plonkingly
| obvious that there's no good reason to go there and live.
| It's ugly, it's inhospitable and there's no way to make it
| pay. Mars is just the same, really. We just romanticize it
| because it's so hard to reach.
|
| https://boingboing.net/2004/01/08/sterling-ill-believe.html
| marktangotango wrote:
| Gobi desert doesn't have 1/3 earth gravity.
| wildermuthn wrote:
| What are the economic benefits of low gravity? If so,
| would the moon be more economically valuable than Mars?
|
| I'm genuinely curious about the economics of doing more
| in space than putting up satellites.
| Sammi wrote:
| I mean obviously you need less energy to move things
| around. We spend an enormous amount of energy to move
| things around on earth.
| greedo wrote:
| Though both are probably apocryphal:
|
| "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers,"
|
| and:
|
| "640K ought to be enough for anybody."
|
| We're really bad at predicting how things will change. Who
| would have thought that Tim Berners-Lee would be a link in
| a chain to Donald Trump's election?
| Factorium wrote:
| Can we just build private space, lunar, and martian colonies?
| They could be financed by Tesla shareholders.
|
| The colonisation of the world by Europeans started with
| government investment, but eventually became self-sustaining.
|
| If these offworld colonies are free of political correctness,
| crime, taxes, welfare systems, and disease, and contain only
| beautiful, healthy, and intelligent people (via careful
| selection, including genetic screening and IQ tests, of
| permitted colonists), they could draw the best of humanity to
| them.
| d33 wrote:
| Do we know the Chinese part of the story? I feel like the
| western media hardly report anything on them while e.g.
| Wikipedia suggests that there are new developments happening
| all the time:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Manned_Space_Program
|
| How significant are those in practice?
| mordymoop wrote:
| When I worked at a national laboratory, it was always evident
| that research priorities lagged funding priorities. No scientific
| program director would allocate significant resources into an
| area that wasn't either already funded or practically guaranteed
| to be funded. I don't how NASA and JPL operate organizationally,
| how their budgetary decisions are made, but I would guess that no
| movement toward re-orienting around Starship (or any new
| commercial technology) will happen until funding agencies dictate
| that it happen.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| > We need a team of economists to rederive the relative
| elasticities of various design choices and boil them down to a
| new set of design heuristics for space system production oriented
| towards maximizing volume of production. Or, more generally,
| maximizing some robust utility function assuming saturation of
| Starship launch capacity.
|
| This is not really what economists do. Elasticity is not
| something an economist can "derive" or predict in advance of
| market developments with any reliability. It can only be reliably
| observed.
|
| That is the whole point of a free market. What is possible--
| changes in elasticity between factors--emerges from complex
| behavior. As it emerges, new efforts can compete to take
| advantage of it, thereby themselves creating new possibilities.
|
| This is why people are not re-inventing everything around the
| Starship vision yet; because it hasn't actually happened yet.
|
| There are many projects and companies sitting on the garbage heap
| of history because of, basically, a branch prediction error. They
| guessed wrong on direction or timing. Even if Elon is right about
| Starship costs, but it takes significantly longer than expected
| to get there, that's a huge risk to projects that set it today as
| a dependency.
| politician wrote:
| Ironically Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29026781
| twic wrote:
| > The Artemis program to the Moon requires a Gateway and separate
| Human Landing System (HLS) because even the SLS doesn't have
| enough lift capacity to be execute the mission on its own.
|
| The Artemis programme requires a Gateway because senators decided
| it would be cool to have a gateway. AFAIK, anyone with actual
| technical expertise thinks it's stupid.
|
| There's a bunch of logic in this piece i just can't follow. Like:
|
| > How can the space industry saturate this increased launch
| supply?
|
| It doesn't need to?
|
| > What "lunar exploration objectives" can be "fulfilled" with
| such an architecture?
|
| The only objective which has been pursued since the end of the
| Cold War, that of pumping billions of dollars into politically
| important states.
|
| Who is this guy? Is he new?
| cryptonector wrote:
| Why was this downvoted?!
| ninkendo wrote:
| Is there a name for the rhetorical technique you're using? When
| you act as if you're in an argument with someone who actually
| agrees with you, simply because they're making points that you
| think "everyone knows"? Not everyone is as jaded as you, and
| some people may actually find it to be interesting reading to
| hear why our current SLS plans aren't all that practical.
|
| You see it all the time on HN... "Apple changes course by doing
| something that isn't very privacy-centric", responded to with
| "but this isn't a change of course because they've only ever
| cared about their bottom line!"... "Facebook does thing that
| isn't good for their users" responded to with "no they didn't,
| because these people aren't the users, but the product!", etc
| etc.
|
| It's this weird agreement-masked-as-contrarianism that I can
| only imagine comes from too much time spent debating things
| online, where you feel you must present everything as an
| argument of some sort.
| DennisP wrote:
| > It doesn't need to?
|
| The point there is that if legacy aerospace doesn't do it, new
| players will, and the legacy companies will be left far behind.
| twic wrote:
| Why will they? Where is all this demand coming from?
| dustintrex wrote:
| Even frivolous applications like space tourism are worth
| billions if you can send people into orbit for $100k
| instead of $100M.
| nickhalfasleep wrote:
| I'd love to know if any Universities or Research organizations
| are planning big observatories based around launching on
| Starship. What was once a rare NASA budget item could now be in
| the reach of many more researchers.
| panick21_ wrote:
| SpaceX is already working on that with a professor from some
| Californian university.
| micropresident wrote:
| I would like to know what the Ozone impact these rockets will
| have is. It's my understanding that they burn quite a bit of the
| ozone up as they pass through; but my information could be wrong.
| stcredzero wrote:
| One way to summarize this article and relate it to software
| engineering: Before Starship, orbital launches and their payloads
| were like "snowflake" servers. Meticulously crafted one-offs.
| After Starship, launches and their payloads should become like
| containerized servers. (Starlink is already going this direction.
| No wonder, since Falcon is just a stop-gap and that system was
| designed for Starship)
| yk wrote:
| The entire space reporting has the problem that simultaneously
| there is an established genre of fanboy fawning about space x,
| which is kinda unconnected to space x actually starting to
| disrupt space.
|
| Right now, it looks like one could save a few billions if Artemis
| is not green lit a decade ago. However, private launches were
| still rare at that time, so in absence of a, likely expensive,
| time machine that's just not an option.
|
| So looking at the planned timelines, Artemis I will circle the
| moon next year, and a crewed landing is planned for 2024, while
| star ship does not have a planned launch to orbit yet.
|
| Also on a personal note, I am utterly astonished that there will
| be people on the moon before the subway station down the street
| is operational.
| panick21_ wrote:
| Please for the love of god, its SpaceX and Starship.
|
| > The entire space reporting has the problem that
| simultaneously there is an established genre of fanboy fawning
| about space x, which is kinda unconnected to space x actually
| starting to disrupt space.
|
| Yeah totally unconnected. All these people, journalist and
| engineers are idiots.
|
| > Right now, it looks like one could save a few billions if
| Artemis is not green lit a decade ago
|
| Ah:
|
| > The Artemis Program began in December 2017 as the
| reorganization and continuation of successive efforts to
| revitalize the U.S. space program since 2009.
|
| And just btw, just because a program starts, doesn't mean its
| 'greenlitt'. This is not AT ALL. How NASA is funded.
|
| In fact NASA has to fight for budget every year. So literally
| every year they need budget allocation to continue development
| of the different element they need.
|
| > So looking at the planned timelines, Artemis I will circle
| the moon next year, and a crewed landing is planned for 2024,
| while star ship does not have a planned launch to orbit yet.
|
| Starship is LITERALLY required to land on the moon. NASA has
| only 1 way to land humans on the moon and its LITERALLY
| Starship.
|
| And the first orbital test launch is planned for this year.
|
| > Also on a personal note, I am utterly astonished that there
| will be people on the moon before the subway station down the
| street is operational.
|
| The 2024 timeline is not really realistic, 2026 maybe.
|
| Subway are a political problem, not a technological one.
| Lambdanaut wrote:
| > star ship does not have a planned launch to orbit yet
|
| Starship has a planned launch to orbit in literally a month
| pending regulatory approval.
|
| * source:
| https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/14515814656454942...
| yk wrote:
| They don't plan to circulate the orbit, and instead the plan
| is to splash down in the Pacific after going 3/4th around the
| planet. So, I would call that suborbital.
| cryptonector wrote:
| * A month, yes, in Elon time.
|
| It's almost certainly going to be longer based just on past
| performance (though that performance is nothing short of
| astounding). They need at minimum to: - get
| the chopstick carriage moving and out of the way for
| launch - get the water deluge system in place -
| tank up enough water, LOX, and Methane - build more of
| a blast barrier for the GSE - maybe add a flame
| diverter - test-fire BN4 on the launch stand,
| testing all engines or enough that they can be
| certain of the robustness of the ignition sequence
| - re-assemble the stack and load it with liquid
| nitrogen to test structural integrity under load
|
| etc.
| woah wrote:
| > That is, Starship is a powerful logistical system that puts
| launch below the API.
|
| Lol this sounds like pure BS
| panick21_ wrote:
| Actually a helpful way to think about the problem.
| lquist wrote:
| What am I missing here? Why is spacex valuation 100bn if this is
| true? I would think it would be 1tn easily in this kind of
| capital abundant environment. Is the risk that high? Is the
| market size being overestimated?
| oxplot wrote:
| I'm no financial guru, even enthusiast, but my impression is
| that your average investor is interested in very short term
| profit. If you listened to last Telsa's shareholder meeting,
| one of the top questions was whether Tesla was going to pay
| dividends! People expect a company that's ramping up faster
| than any other in the history, building largest factories left
| and right, to pay dividends to its share holders! I'm in awe
| how they didn't just laugh the question off and didn't take
| back the shares from those shareholders (only if they could).
| GDC7 wrote:
| > People expect a company that's ramping up faster than any
| other in the history
|
| Tesla was founded in 2002, during the same timespan Facebook
| became ubiquitous in our lives, Google became the homepage of
| the world and Amazon became the go-to place to make
| purchases.
|
| Microsoft did even better between 1975-1995. The world was
| much larger and disconnected back then and yet they managed
| to became so ubiquitous to reach the monopoly status, such a
| dominance that the US government had to step in like they did
| with Standard Oil.
|
| I commute to work daily . 25 miles back and forth and I am
| lucky if I see one Tesla .
|
| After 20 years the company most successful and ubiquitous
| product is its stock
| cecilpl2 wrote:
| > I commute 25 miles back and forth to work and I am lucky
| if I see one Tesla .
|
| Where on earth do you live? I can barely walk down the
| street without tripping over one. It's not a stretch to say
| I'd see several dozen on a short morning run.
| godshatter wrote:
| Not the original poster, but I'm guessing they live
| somewhere other than California or New York. The nearest
| Tesla supercharging station to myself is a two-hour drive
| away, for example. While I could use one to drive to and
| from work or to businesses in the area, I won't be using
| it to go almost anywhere else any time soon. At least,
| not without planning my routes around that availability.
| As a contrast, the small town I live in has six gas
| stations.
|
| I'm looking forward to the day that the infrastructure is
| ubiquitous enough that I can buy a fully electric
| vehicle, but that day isn't here yet.
| oxplot wrote:
| That's not apple to apple comparison. Try other vehicle
| manufacturers and see where your numbers end up. Ramping up
| a multi thousand part product with hundreds of suppliers is
| a whole different ball game than scaling an online website.
| panick21_ wrote:
| Are you comparing software companies to a manufacturing
| company?
|
| They were making new technology that people basically
| thought was impossible. By 2012 they had only sold 1000
| vehicles. That how hard it was.
|
| Since Model S however they have grown about as fast as any
| manufacturing based company in history and they have very
| clear potential to continue to do so for a few years more
| at the very least.
|
| Tesla basically invest huge into growing a chemical
| industry to make the batteries. That simply not something
| that just magically happens within a few years.
|
| > Microsoft did even better between 1975-1995.
|
| Because Microsoft was running on ALL computers designed
| from lots and lots of companies. Rather the computers were
| designed for it.
|
| > such a dominance that the US government had to step in
| like they did with Standard Oil.
|
| They didn't 'had to' they wanted to.
| GDC7 wrote:
| When you advertise yourself as a tech company you are
| bound to be compared against other tech companies.
|
| More generally companies from every sector are compared
| against each other to see which one provides the highest
| improvement in citizens' quality of life .
|
| Tesla produces lots of noise but the improvement in
| citizens' quality of life is basically none or
| negligible.
|
| Google, Facebook and Microsoft completely dominate Tesla
| in this fundamental, during the same timespan.
| panick21_ wrote:
| They are a car company that is slowly turning itself into
| a multi-faceted company. They are doing some tech like
| things, but they are also turning into a chemical company
| and an a equipment and manufacturing company. They are
| also an infrastructure provider. They want to turn into a
| robotics company.
|
| > More generally companies from every sector are compared
| against each other to see which one provides the highest
| improvement in citizens' quality of life .
|
| Cars are the single largest expense other then a house
| people make. Of course its gone have less overall impact
| then a free product that everybody is gone spend very
| little time on.
|
| The Supercharger network alone and showing the way for EV
| infrastructure will have a huge impact on everybody.
|
| > Tesla produces lots of noise but the improvement in
| citizens' quality of life is basically none or
| negligible.
|
| People usually love their Tesla and that is reflected in
| the data that is gathered about that. Cars are the second
| most expensive people buy behind a house. They have huge
| impact on the people who buy them and clearly less on
| those that don't.
|
| > Google, Facebook and Microsoft completely dominate
| Tesla in this fundamental, during the same timespan.
|
| Idiotic comparison, no matter how long you talk about it.
| GDC7 wrote:
| > They are a car company that is slowly turning itself
| into a multi-faceted company. They are doing some tech
| like things, but they are also turning into a chemical
| company and an a equipment and manufacturing company.
| They are also an infrastructure provider. They want to
| turn into a robotics company.
|
| And I want to turn into an adonis bedding a different
| Hollywood actress every night
|
| Doesn't really matter what the CEO of a company tells you
| about his projections about the future of the company
|
| It will always be an up& to the right chart.
|
| Especially here people should know better and take those
| promises and straight up throw them into the bin because
| they are just that.
|
| As the old saying goes: "It takes one to see one".
|
| With Microsoft, Google and Facebook you didn't have to be
| on the lookout for anything suspicious because they
| provided very conservatives estimates, begging financial
| analysts to be conservative for their own estimates too.
|
| That's one huge difference between those companies and
| Tesla, an other huge difference is the fact that you can
| tangibly see those companies products in your daily life,
| whereas Tesla is only famous for future projections of
| techno-utopian dreams and the stock price which is
| constantly inflated by the cult leader CEO. The same cult
| leader CEO who managed to get in this privileged position
| by overselling equity to bigger fools for his whole life.
| panick21_ wrote:
| You are the only one comparing those companies. Its
| neither insightful or clever to do so. But I guess you
| feel clever coming up with that.
|
| I'm pretty sure the people who drive Tesla see them quite
| often. People see supercharger all the time and the
| stigma against electric and travel has been broken.
|
| Every large car maker and most countries have admired and
| are now pushing for EVs.
|
| Tesla is famous for making EV popular more then anything
| else and by that had massive impact as every in the car
| industry has addmited.
|
| And the Cult leader said in 2014 they would do 500k in
| 2020 and they did exactly that. Their growth has hit
| pretty much what they have guided for multiple years now.
|
| Anybody that observes the industry knows they will
| continue to grow fast, its not really a question.
| panick21_ wrote:
| > but my impression is that your average investor is
| interested in very short term profit
|
| You can actually figure out how much of a stock is traded and
| if your assumption is true then there would have to be far
| more trading.
|
| > one of the top questions was whether Tesla was going to pay
| dividends!
|
| How do you know what answer the people who voted for the
| question wanted to hear?
| oxplot wrote:
| > How do you know what answer the people who voted for the
| question wanted to hear?
|
| Interesting point. My intuition tells me that most people
| who are looking to get paid are the ones asking the
| question.
| panick21_ wrote:
| I can tell you that the person who got a question in
| literally every year since like 10 years is a long term
| investor. See Tesla Daily Podcast.
|
| Long term investors are very well organized and upvote
| certain questions.
|
| However that question was not from him.
| lquist wrote:
| Sure, but SpaceX trades on the private markets, not public.
| The minimum to get into SpaceX is $1m.
| panick21_ wrote:
| This is flat inaccurate. There people on YT who showed how
| they got involved for much less then 100k.
| cryptonector wrote:
| Isn't SpaceX privately held?
| burlesona wrote:
| The article is really interesting, but the stress the author
| expresses about the potential downfall of NASA seems misplaced.
| This is just creative destruction at work. If NASA can adapt to
| capitalize on the new paradigm, then it will, and there will be
| NASA logos everywhere in future space stuff. If not, then NASA
| will fade away, and some of us will wax nostalgic about how cool
| NASA seemed when we were kids but nobody will really care because
| humanity will have moved far past the limited space exploration
| that was possible to-date.
|
| Like most old US government programs, NASA is fully of wasteful
| political constraints - for instance, facilities scattered around
| the country and to satisfy pork-barrel politics and get random
| senators to support the overall program. I think NASA is still a
| net good, and I'd love to see it adapt, but if it fails to adapt,
| that probably just means the institutional dysfunction between
| Congress and NASA administration was too great, and even though
| it will be a little sad, it will still be a net win for humanity
| to replace that dysfunction with a new wave of highly functional
| new players.
| macintux wrote:
| The problem I have with that analysis is that there's little
| commercial value to purely scientific missions. What will we
| lose if NASA isn't sending (much bigger!) explorers to all
| corners of the solar system?
|
| Maybe mining companies will pick up some of the slack, maybe
| that'll be enough.
| edgyquant wrote:
| There's a lot of research done today that has no commercial
| value. Ideally the commercialization of space will make it
| cheap enough that institutions can fund their own research
| without needing the government.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| NASA, like most government programs, is actually a mission-
| driven purchasing program. They are not threatened by SpaceX at
| all. If SpaceX can deliver what NASA needs, NASA will just buy
| it from SpaceX. See for example: human space flight.
| supperburg wrote:
| I think it was SN11 that stuck the landing. I was there.
| Voloskaya wrote:
| SN10 landed on it's engines as the legs didn't deploy, and
| exploded on the pad a few minutes afterwards.
|
| SN11 exploded in mid-air in the fog [1].
|
| SN15 landed correctly for the first time and didn't explode
| afterwards.
|
| [1]: https://youtu.be/cN7855POvJ8?t=172
| GDC7 wrote:
| Space is becoming a religion for atheists, with SpaceX serving
| the role of the church and Elon Musk in charge of it as the
| techno-utopian Pope.
|
| No wonder really smart people like Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and
| George Soros are staying out of it.
|
| The amount of mass that we have to bring up there to live and
| thrive and be happy is so enormous that Nobel astrophysicist Kip
| Thorne and Christopher Nolan had to essentially cheat their way
| into the epilogue of Interstellar. The hero of the movie finds
| the answer to the problem of how to lift humanity off the Earth
| into the Gargantua Black Hole, which by definition is the place
| where all the rules are off, and there is no knowledge of what
| really happens in there, so that Kip Thorne could, in good
| conscience, allow it in the script.
|
| People who love space should work on mind uploading and laser
| transmission of the aforementioned upload. That's the only way we
| can manage to lift ourselves.
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| You have an SF novel in you, you just need to write it!
| rakejake wrote:
| +1. Greg Egan's novels Permutation City and Diaspora actually
| explore this very well.
|
| I am not opposed to space exploration and generally support
| SpaceX but reading about doing 100,000 launches makes me
| slightly wary, especially with our track record on climate and
| Musk's general penchant for breaking laws. Unless we develop
| anti-gravity or something which would make space travel energy-
| equivalent to flight travel, I don't know how you would ever
| scale this without wrecking the environment. Reading between
| the lines, you get a sense that the average citizen should be
| "willing to take the hit for the greater good". Yeah, right.
| Musk has an immense amount of goodwill today and for good
| reason but I don't imagine this will play well with any crowd.
|
| Even assuming that Musks's Marsshot comes through and a Mars
| colony is established in 50 years (which would be optimistic
| going by the current pace of development), what are the odds
| that I (or the average SWE on HN, let alone average human)
| would ever end up on Mars? I imagine a 70-80 year old is
| probably not very high on the (tentative)waitlist? It is
| looking more and more likely that Earth's climate and politics
| would necessarily have to take a backseat if we were to go all
| in on Mars. I see the wisdom in Kim Stanley Robinson's opinion
| that fixing Earth climate/politics should take priority.
|
| I am in support of AGI research and biotech. Training even GPT-
| scale models is not really comparable to rocket launching. If
| it is possible to clone yourself to a digital form, or even
| train an NN model to think like yourself, there may be a way
| for the average denizen to get to Mars and extend one's life
| while keeping energy consumption low.
| oxplot wrote:
| Even if a religion, sure as heck the best out there, by a large
| margin:
|
| 1. Got the best miracles (two building sized Falcon 9 boosters
| landing side by side after an orbital launch).
|
| 2. Promises exciting future, full of explosions, adventures and
| memes.
|
| 3. Doesn't require you to believe it based on bad evidence
| (already delivers the cheapest and slickest rides to space).
| GDC7 wrote:
| > Doesn't require you to believe it based on bad evidence
|
| What about the promise that you'd be able to have your
| present day quality of life on Mars?
|
| That's basically the equivalent of "if you pray enough and
| donate X money to the church , you'd go to Heaven".
|
| Ironically the same people who stand behind the concept of
| "the big lie" and categorically deny the "lab leak theory" ,
| have no problem believing in the above nonsense, even though
| the probabilities of that happening is many orders of
| magnitude lower than an election being stolen or a viral
| agent being accidentally released in the external
| environment.
|
| Curious.
|
| Nothing in the entire world is more dangerous than a person
| with lots of _book smarts_ but zero _street smarts_
|
| When lots of book smarts people with zero street smarts are
| being recruited by a cult leader the most terrible things
| happen.
| panick21_ wrote:
| I got news for you buddy. Neuralink is being researched and
| lasers that communicate in space that are already on Starlink
| sats.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> A space-adapted tractor needs better paint, a vacuum
| compatible hydraulic power source, vacuum-rated bearings,
| lubricants, wire insulation, and a redundant remote control
| sensor kit. I can see NASA partnering with industry to produce
| and test these parts, but that is no way to service the
| institutional overhead embodied by a team of hundreds of people
| toiling on a single mission for a decade.
|
| If one function of NASA is to redistribute pork spending around
| the country, that seems like an even better way to do it. Rather
| than have contractors that strictly focus on NASA activities, use
| existing companies and fund projects to make space-capable
| versions of existing equipment. That also means the money can be
| shuffled around more as needed.
| theshadowknows wrote:
| I know that going into space is sexy and nerdy and cool and that
| it's a difficult problem. What I don't get is why so many people
| think about going to space and spend so much money on it when
| there are people in the US who drink water that catches on
| fire..and people elsewhere who don't have access to water at all.
| Seems like we should work on the truly hard problems rather than
| the ones that are basically "just go up, really fast"
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| The problem with waiting for all of humanity's problems to be
| solved before doing space things is that humanity's problems
| will never all be solved, and thus space things will never
| happen.
|
| It's also just not a resources problem. There is ample cash and
| manpower to make both space and clean drinking water for
| everybody happen. The real issue is the political will and
| obstructions to those who have such will. The fix for drinking
| water specifically is to vote out all who oppose improving
| public infrastructure.
| _plg_ wrote:
| Why not to do both?
| aero-glide2 wrote:
| So much money on it? NASA budget is $23B, total govt spending
| is $4000B. Show me your math.
| ncallaway wrote:
| If we use the same logic, don't we get a conclusion that we
| should spend nothing on basic research until we've solved world
| hunger, and every other problem?
|
| I agree that we should invest more into safe drinking water
| (though lead seems like much more of a problem than catching
| fire). But I don't think it would be wise to dedicate 100% of
| our nation's resources into the problem.
|
| Some amount of R&D seems like a worthwhile investment, even
| when other pressing problems exist.
| himinlomax wrote:
| > If we use the same logic, don't we get a conclusion that we
| should spend nothing on basic research until we've solved
| world hunger, and every other problem?
|
| If I were to sum it up less charitably, I'd say that OP is
| arguing that if he can't walk and chew gum at the same time,
| humanity can't either.
| theshadowknows wrote:
| lol ok little buddy
| malfist wrote:
| Not only that, but R&D can sometimes solve the other problem.
| Like synthetic nitrogen for fertilizers.
|
| A lot of people say (I have no idea how true this is) that
| the problem isn't growing enough food, it's getting that food
| too people. What if we can grow rice or wheat on the moon, or
| ganymeade, or a spacestation or whatnot and drop it where it
| needs to go a-la Moon Is A Harsh Mistress style.
|
| R&D is looking forward. Pointing at it and saying "people are
| hungry" is willfully ignorant of how science has played a
| roll in feeding more and more people and is a defeatists
| attitude.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _If we use the same logic, don't we get a conclusion that
| we should spend nothing on basic research until we've solved
| world hunger, and every other problem?_
|
| Sounds like a very good principle.
|
| Like, if you can't fix war at the level of horses, bayonets
| and canons, maybe not go for inventing aircrafts and tanks
| and machine guns just yet - you'll just get new wars
| leveraging those improved means, oh wait!
| ncallaway wrote:
| > Sounds like a very good principle.
|
| Does it? Such a world wouldn't have increased crop
| production, and would regularly suffer from otherwise
| preventable famines.
|
| I imagine far _more_ people would be hungry in the world
| where we forego all R &D in an effort to solve hunger.
| coldtea wrote:
| You're still allowed R&D to solve hunger...
| ncallaway wrote:
| But that's not really how fundamental research or
| technological advancement works.
|
| A ton of our advances in improving crop productivity came
| out of research that wasn't directly related to solving
| hunger.
|
| The modern internal combustion engine, for example,
| brought together many technologies and came out of
| advancement of many different kinds of research and
| manufacturing changes. If, in the 1500s you had focused
| _all_ of your R &D efforts on improving food production
| and distribution, there's a good chance you never invent
| the ICE.
|
| That's the thing about R&D, the discoveries in some areas
| often overlap with uses in other areas (sometimes in
| complex ways that we don't discover for a long time). So
| if you say: "we'll only do R&D in food production", you
| might actual end up stifling many technologies that would
| have massively helped you with food production down the
| line.
| panick21_ wrote:
| Great so nobody ever researches anything and we still all
| live in the stone age.
|
| But at least we are pure in our hearts that we didn't mis-
| allocate resources when people were starving.
|
| That this mindset exists blows my mind.
|
| > Like, if you can't fix war at the level of horses,
| bayonets and canons, maybe not go for inventing aircrafts
| and tanks and machine guns just yet
|
| Aside from the practical, problem of "Great way to get
| killed by people with guns that you don't have".
|
| The underlying philosophy is equally flawed. Its like
| picking out of the technology bucket only things you don't
| like.
|
| The same things that made those things possible also made a
| huge number of other things possible that would otherwise
| not have existed at all.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Great so nobody ever researches anything and we still
| all live in the stone age._
|
| Sounds far more climate friendly. Also moving out of
| stone age only once we've stopped with hunger and war?
| Sign me in!
|
| > _The underlying philosophy is equally flawed. Its like
| picking out of the technology bucket only things you don
| 't like._
|
| God forbid we're picky with the tecnologies we adopt!
| panick21_ wrote:
| Why are you an Hacker News, there are literally people dying
| right now that you could be saving.
| vidarh wrote:
| Solving food and clean water is not a technology problem. It's
| a political choice. The money exists to solve those things not
| just for the US but worldwide.
|
| I'm very much in favour of political change to solve them, but
| I long ago resigned myself to accepting that there's very
| little benefit in individual action to try to counter them
| other than to feel good unless a majority is willing to commit
| to the necessary societal change.
|
| Meanwhile the money spent on space is a rounding error compared
| to the many other places you can also choose to cut to lift
| people out of horrible living conditions, yet so many people
| focus their ire on space, which, while some of the flights are
| wasteful, have as a sector done immeasurable amounts of good in
| terms of improving our ability to e.g. feed the planet (weather
| forecasting and crop monitoring for example), and will continue
| to provide advances for a long time.
|
| Focusing the frustrations on space exploration and technology
| improvement rather than on the lack of political will to solve
| the problems you mention solves nothing.
| panick21_ wrote:
| Not to mention that surviving on Mars will require living
| with little water and low water agriculture that might help
| many people.
| themaninthedark wrote:
| To add, solving world hunger is more than just give everyone
| food. The USA had been supplying cheap/food to countries but
| this started causing the farmers in those countries to stop
| growing food because they could not compete with the free
| food. So either the US is a monster because they are
| undercutting the local market or they are a monster because
| they are throwing away food when people are going hungry.
| vidarh wrote:
| You're right, but that's "just" a political problem too in
| the sense that it's a matter of willingness to spend the
| money near those who need aid rather than near the giver.
| Reducing subsidies in developed countries and instead
| paying to upgrade farming in developing countries would be
| one way.
|
| So sure, giving food away is not a perfect solution other
| than for short term crises, but it's still a problem that
| is entirely solvable if there was will to do so.
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| Why not do both?
|
| Run for office on your platform and I'll probably vote for you.
| ajuc wrote:
| > why so many people think about going to space and spend so
| much money on it when there are people in the US who drink
| water that catches on fire
|
| Because people drinking bad water are poor so it's not
| profitable to help them. This problem can be solved with
| current technology (and in fact was solved in many countries
| with slightly stricter environmental legislation).
|
| > Seems like we should work on the truly hard problems rather
| than the ones that are basically "just go up, really fast"
|
| The problem with that is assuming that focusing on solving
| problem X is the way to solve problem X. In history it often
| turned out that problem X was only solved by people who ignored
| X and worked on Y instead.
|
| For example the hard problem of 70% of kids dying before
| adulthood wasn't mostly solved thanks to people who worked on
| it (shamans, healers and priests) but by people who worked on
| "useless" abstract stuff like math, philosophy and writing
| systems. If we put everybody on it we would still devise new
| ways of praying or dancing to stop gods killing infants.
|
| In general it's better not to put EVERYBODY on the same
| problem. Humankind is pretty good at solving many problems in
| parallel. Some people are better at X, others at Y. Also there
| might be interactions that we don't know upfront. Maybe
| designing space colonies gives us a cheap way to filter water
| on Earth as a byproduct? Would be pretty stupid to wait forever
| because we guessed the order wrong.
|
| Cancer is more serious than broken bones or flu, but it doesn't
| mean that we should assign all doctors to only deal with cancer
| until it's solved.
| XorNot wrote:
| Money spent on going to space doesn't vanish in an exhaust
| plume. The money spent building a rocket is paying for the
| ongoing training, expertise and development of precision
| machining, software control systems, welding techniques,
| project management, infrastructure upgrades etc.
|
| Though that's not really the issue anyway: the US's problems
| aren't caused by a lack of funding, they're caused by a lack of
| political will and a populace which is in part completely happy
| with the current state of affairs and votes accordingly.
| People's townwater isn't flammable because we didn't spend
| enough money fixing that problem: it's because the government
| (and voters) are in aggregate, completely happy to let it
| happen. Money - distinctly - will not buy a solution.
| jxidjhdhdhdhfhf wrote:
| Are you truly living your life in the way you are suggesting
| other people should here? Do you, for example, eschew all
| spending that's remotely luxurious and donate it to people that
| have way less than you?
|
| My point is, lead by example if you want others to follow.
| wokwokwok wrote:
| This is a difficult argument to argue with because it doesn't
| have any constraints.
|
| Instead of doing X why don't we do any of the Y other things we
| could do?
|
| Surely, at least some subset of Y is more important than X,
| right?
|
| ...but, is it?
|
| Are we better off, _specifically_ with spending slightly more
| money on proving people with water, than having weather
| forecasts that can help thousands of farmer provide better
| yields and grow more food?
|
| Could we not say, spend a little bit less on building guns and
| use that money to do it instead? There's loads more money in
| guns than space and hell, and wtf are the people crying for us
| to stop doing that?
|
| My observation has been, that people who want space funding
| redirected are not familiar with the benefits it provides, and
| fail to understand that the funding is, actually,
| insignificant.
|
| There's a good write up of this here:
| https://www.planetary.org/space-policy/nasa-budget
|
| What wrong with investing in science?
|
| :(
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Are we better off, specifically with spending slightly
| more money on proving people with water, than having weather
| forecasts that can help thousands of farmer provide better
| yields and grow more food?_
|
| And, with the crumbling infrastructure, declining middle
| class, poverty stricken working class, and so on, how's that
| worked out for us?
| Atreiden wrote:
| We've been _under_ investing in scientific research,
| especially in regards to space, for decades.
|
| What spending we do have is usually focused on militaristic
| applications.
|
| How does this reflect poorly on space travel research? If
| you're using the current status quo to argue that spending
| priorities are broken, you're not arguing against NASA
| funding. You're arguing against the military-industrial
| complex.
|
| If important research is done through public agencies, the
| public reaps the benefits of this research. If private
| industry is allowed to take the reins, corporate interests
| and shareholders are the ones who benefit.
| panick21_ wrote:
| So the middle class is poor because a tiny part of the
| budget is invested in space?
|
| I don't understand what argument you are trying to make.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _So the middle class is poor because a tiny part of the
| budget is invested in space?_
|
| No, it's poor because the same logic that invests that
| "tiny part of the budget" in space (and prints billions
| of money to fund the likes of Musk, Bezos, and so on),
| also runs the other investments and public policy
| decisions.
| panick21_ wrote:
| > and prints billions of money to fund the likes of Musk,
| Bezos, and so on
|
| That's not how monetary policy works but ok ...
|
| > also runs the other investments and public policy
| decisions
|
| So you don't like some things the government does and
| therefore anything the government does is bad and we can
| have no argument about what spending is good and what is
| bad?
| coldtea wrote:
| > _That 's not how monetary policy works but ok ..._
|
| Modern QE, for example, is not traditional monetary
| policy anyway, but ok. Nor is playing with such a huge
| percentage of the GDP, or facilitating lending to the
| already rich, to use to stock their fireplaces, VC bets,
| and in general, getting richer on a cheap supply of
| money...
|
| > _So you don 't like some things the government does and
| therefore anything the government does is bad and we can
| have no argument about what spending is good and what is
| bad?_
|
| On the contrary, I like government. I just with it did
| things as a government of/for the people, as opposed as a
| lackey to oligarchs. You know, reigning on them, instead
| of high fiving them and being in their pockets. Or
| printing money to keep the bubble alive, so they can play
| with their phallic rockets.
| theshadowknows wrote:
| I'm not arguing that no one should focus on space and I'm
| certainly not arguing that no one should focus on
| science..it's the opposite in fact. It just seems to me that
| going to space is sort of a solved problem, and that now
| we're just trying to figure out how to do it a little bit
| better and in a way that generates revenue. But since there
| are problems that remain unsolved, you'd think that people
| who are bright enough to tackle admittedly difficult problems
| like going to space better than we already do would _want_ to
| tackle really hard problems, rather than just sort of
| iterating on an existing design.
|
| Right now we have a new space race, it's just between
| companies instead of countries.
| oxplot wrote:
| > spend so much money on it
|
| If you actually look at $$$ going into space development, it's
| minuscule compared with say, just marketing cost of Windows
| Vista ($500 million whereas development of Falcon 9 rocket was
| in $400 million range).
| cletus wrote:
| NASA is hamstrung by Congress here. Congress mandated the SLS
| program. It's not meant to be competitive with SpaceX. SLS is a
| jobs program for key districts, no more, no less. It's welfare
| for Boeing.
|
| I don't know if NASA personnel cannot plan for or even discuss
| SpaceX. It's probably not that overt. The powers there probably
| just realize it'd be career suicide to do so.
|
| I completely agree that reducing LEO payload costs (in $/kg) by 2
| or even 3 orders of magnitude will be game-changing.
|
| Personally I'd like to see a viable competitor to SpaceX here
| because competition is good and it drives innovation. But it
| isn't Boeing, ULA or even Blue Origin. I actually think Blue
| Origin is so culturally broken that you'd almost be better off
| starting from scratch.
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