[HN Gopher] Impulse Space is betting on a future where launch is...
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Impulse Space is betting on a future where launch is cheap
Author : rbanffy
Score : 54 points
Date : 2022-03-30 10:44 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| Jyaif wrote:
| They are 100% at the mercy of SpaceX accepting their payloads. If
| SpaceX decides to create an in-house competitor, they are purely
| and simply screwed. And SpaceX _will_ create an in-house
| competitor if Impulse Space is profitable.
|
| So they are also betting on either anti-monopoly legislation
| being set-up (SpaceX is a monopoly because no other launcher can
| match their pricing), or that a SpaceX competitor emerges (which
| could easily be a decade out).
| mminer237 wrote:
| I'm 95% sure that SpaceX refusing to accept payloads from
| Impulse Space in order to charge for their own orbital
| maneuvering vehicles would already be illegal as exclusive
| dealing.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Until somebody copies what SpaceX is doing. SpaceX might be
| first to succeed with this but they are inspiring lots of
| others to try as well. That's already happening, there are lots
| of space startups and some are getting some rockets to orbit
| even. Any patents SpaceX might have (and I think Elon Musk is
| actually not big into that) would eventually expire and might
| be licensed in between. I don't think that's a blocker for
| competition.
|
| If e.g. Boeing wants in on the action, they need to start
| moving. The main problem with that has more to do with Boeing's
| inertia than with SpaceX trying to stop them from doing
| anything. SpaceX has actually been pretty vocal and open about
| their plans. And by Boeing/NASA standards they are not even
| spending that much on this. The only thing stopping Boeing from
| competing here is Boeing being Boeing. Other companies are less
| encumbered by their own ineptness and will no doubt start
| figuring things out for themselves.
| simonh wrote:
| It's very similar to the relationship between Apple or
| Microsoft and developers for their platforms. In those cases if
| your product makes sense as a component of the OS, or is a
| table stakes application that the platform vendor can't leave
| to third parties, then you're in trouble. Outside that, they
| actually need you to enrich and expand their ecosystem.
| jpm_sd wrote:
| Or they're just hoping to be acquired by SpaceX, like Swarm
| Technologies?
| Jyaif wrote:
| Without competition SpaceX would be the one setting the price
| of the acquisition, which could be lower than even the 20
| million seed funding!
| qchris wrote:
| It still frustrates me that Swarm was basically given a free
| pass after their illegal satellite deployments[1]. They broke
| both the law and good cultural norms around space tech in a
| meaningful way, barely got a slap on the wrist, and then
| ended up being acquired for quite a good amount of money. The
| FCC commissioner even stated that "The size of the penalty
| imposed is probably not significant enough to deter future
| behavior."
|
| Move fast and break things shouldn't have been acceptable for
| an organization operating in this area, and that Swarm had no
| meaningful repercussions for doing so should be a black mark
| on the org and the executive running it for a long time. I'm
| certainly hoping others don't use their model as a blueprint.
|
| [1] https://spacenews.com/fcc-fines-swarm-900000-for-
| unauthorize...
| bmitc wrote:
| Does anyone have some thoughts on where all the funding and
| market is coming from in this new private space industry? I've
| seen a ton of these companies popping up, and I'm not sure I
| quite understand where all the demand and money is coming from
| outside of government contracts.
|
| While space is always cool and "sexy", I've been wondering if
| there's some analog model that could work for ocean tech,
| particularly tech that allows us to better protect and explore
| the ocean.
|
| On a personal and technical level, I view the ocean as far more
| important to human understanding and survival than space.
| Apofis wrote:
| Presently the biggest challenge confronting the private space
| industry is creating a market and creating demand. This is no
| different than any other industry, however.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _view the ocean as far more important to human understanding
| and survival than space_
|
| Funny enough, I always thought calling groups of coordinating
| satellites "constellations" belies their true complexity.
| They're fleets. When you think of fleets of satellites in
| orbit, the need for ancillary services becomes obvious. (On
| your narrower point, we are seeing major breakthroughs in
| oceanography and maritime surveillance from these
| constellations.)
| gondo wrote:
| Private internet satellites is going to be a big market.
| Russian space program collapsing for quite some time and only
| being escalated recently. SpaceX paving a way for profitable
| private space business.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| Satellite internet seem to me to be a niche thing, at best.
| It's extremely 'cool' but in countries rich enough to buy
| satellite internet high speed wireless infrastructure is
| nearly ubiquitous. Countries without the cash to fund
| wireless infrastructure also don't have the cash to pay for
| satellite internet. On top of that some customers who might
| otherwise have the resources and the need live in autocratic
| countries that may not be entirely happy with internet that
| isn't entirely within their control. It seems like that
| basically limits your possible customers to western style
| democracies in under-served rural areas or a few outliers
| like maybe marine applications, etc.
| 0xffff2 wrote:
| As a current Starlink customer, I can assure you there's
| plenty of market outside of the "nearly ubiquitous". I live
| just 30 miles from a small city where the average home is
| served by 400Mbps cable, yet until Starlink came along I
| was stuck with Hughesnet, which is reminiscent of a
| particularly high-latency 56k dial up connection. There are
| a couple thousand similar households just in my county.
| le-mark wrote:
| So long as humanity is limited to throwing high velocity gas oot
| the back of rockets to get around the solar system, we'll be
| limited by access to volatile material. Spacex is betting on CH4
| and oxygen, nuclear rocket designs (NERVA) used hydrogen,
| although they could use pretty much anything. Earth is in a
| peculiar position such that the delta V of getting to orbit will
| also get you to anywhere else in the solar system fairly quickly.
|
| So if launch to LEO is cheap, fuel will be a large proportion of
| cargo imo. Note solar sails and some other propulsionless designs
| negate this requirement.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > fairly quickly.
|
| The delta-v maps show the minimum needed to get from one place
| to the other. In order to get from one place to another more
| quickly, you'll need larger delta-v's at the ends of the trip.
|
| Even though the rest of the solar system is within reach, we
| don't want to send humans to Pluto and back on 20-year
| missions.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| you mustn't be afraid to dream a little bigger darling. I can
| definitely imagine a mission to pluto and back.
| rbanffy wrote:
| I can too, but we'll need much better engines than what we
| have now to get there and back in an amount of time a crew
| can function.
|
| Sending 20 years worth of consumables and spares is
| complicated, as well as the moral questions about sending
| people on 20 year missions.
| avmich wrote:
| For some time an assumption - a rule of thumb of a sort -
| was that chemical rockets can get people comfortably
| around within Mars orbit, and to get further away we need
| something better. That "something" is likely not solid-
| phase nuclear engines, with Isp about twice as good as
| LOX/LH2, and probably not gas phase nuclear engines...
| but thermonuclear engines, which get closer to
| feasibility with advances in thermonuclear energy field.
| A thermonuclear engine could be more attainable than a
| thermonuclear electrical plant, and cheaper LEO access
| could be a big part of enabling technology.
|
| Having engines like that we may talk about much faster
| trips to Pluto and back.
| Loughla wrote:
| A 20 year mission to Pluto would be unsuccessful without
| cryogenic or otherwise science-magical-sleep system. I
| cannot imagine a single set of humans who could spend 20
| years together, without any way to leave the small space of
| a ship, and not absolutely lose their minds.
|
| That long of a trip means we just end up sending absolute
| lunatics and/or small pieces of chopped up lunatics after
| the inevitable murders.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Not to mention, it's extremely doubtful that a human body
| could survive anywhere close to 20 years in space.
| rbanffy wrote:
| The ship would need to be very large - artificial gravity
| and adequate shielding for radiation and impacts would
| need to be provided, as well as an insane amount of
| redundancy and survivable abort routes. Attempting to do
| it with technologies we have, even with infinite funding,
| would be next to impossible without incurring in
| unacceptable risks.
| api wrote:
| > Earth is in a peculiar position such that the delta V of
| getting to orbit will also get you to anywhere else in the
| solar system fairly quickly.
|
| Tangent:
|
| One of my favorite answers to the Fermi paradox (not mutually
| exclusive with others) is that much of the life in the universe
| is stuck at the bottom of huge gravity wells ("super Earths")
| that make space flight immensely difficult and expensive,
| making the development of a space industry far less likely.
|
| It's a variant of the rare Earth hypothesis. Not only might
| Earth be rare for its stability and long-lived biosphere but
| also for the fact that it's large enough to hold onto a thick
| atmosphere and water but not so large that you can't get off it
| with relatively benign (compared to higher energy alternatives)
| chemical propellants. Increases in the mass of Earth would make
| space launch exponentially not linearly harder.
|
| Getting anything non-trivial off a super-Earth would probably
| _require_ nuclear or hybrid (e.g. LANTR) rockets, which are
| problematic for ground launch in a biosphere. They 'd also be a
| lot more costly.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| There are alternate sources of propellant in the solar system.
| Lifting it out of Earths gravity well is relatively expensive.
| But once you have enough of it, you could start transporting
| propellant from elsewhere in the solar system and start
| stockpiling it in strategic orbits around various objects in
| the solar system. Once you can do that, you'd minimize the
| launch weight from earth to be able to get to a LEO fueling
| point and use the weight savings for more interesting cargo.
|
| One industry that could emerge quickly is that of asteroid
| mining. There are plenty of interesting asteroids with precious
| metals, water, and other resources. Right now the cost of
| getting to these asteroids, mining them, and transporting the
| mined goods back is so expensive in delta-v that it has not
| been done yet despite several companies having been active
| planning for this for quite some time.
|
| So, SpaceX getting their star ship going might be a big
| deal.That enables us getting stuff into space and that enables
| us bootstrapping mining and construction activity in orbit.
| Plenty of science fiction books have been written on this.
| There's no shortage of ideas here.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| My big fear with asteroid mining is that if you can move an
| asteroid to Earth orbit, you can also smash it into any
| capital city or military base on Earth.
|
| Which means that this capability is a weapon more powerful
| than even nuclear missiles!
|
| I don't think the world will let this be run on the honor
| system. So I expect space travel to become extremely tightly
| controlled once we get close to this tech level.
| 0xffff2 wrote:
| A relatively small number of nuclear missiles is enough to
| wipe out human civilization. There's no such thing as "a
| weapon more powerful than even nuclear missiles" in terms
| of Earth-focused weaponry. And we've done very little if
| anything to prevent countries from acquiring and
| maintaining nuclear missiles. If we let North Korea have
| nukes, what makes you think we would try to stop countries
| from developing space capabilities?
| Retric wrote:
| NERVA or other Nuclear thermal rockets are actually fairly low
| ISP compared to ION drives. A solar panel + inert gas gets you
| anywhere in the solar system.
|
| The real issue is what's the point? The economics of asteroid
| mining gets much worse if you consider bringing vast quantities
| of say gold back to earth would tank the value of gold.
| im3w1l wrote:
| I have been thinking about this and what I really hope we do
| is build a fully automated colony in space. Making it livable
| for humans is a huge pain in the ass, but if we restrict the
| scope to just sustaining robots then it becomes easier.
|
| Energy is easy: Solar panels. There is also repairs which
| might be trickier. Need to mine for materials and refine them
| into spare parts.
|
| Once you have a self-sustaining colony you could use it to
| assemble useful stuff. Luxury goods for terrestrial
| consumption. Or you could use it to build a stage-2 colony
| that _is_ suitable for humans. Or maybe rockets and stuff to
| keep expanding into space.
| jcims wrote:
| Pretty interesting Lex Fridman podcast episode in this
| area: https://youtu.be/KW8Vjs84Fxg
|
| It's light on technical details but it's encouraging to
| hear that there is progress being made in this direction.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Gold is a special case, but tanking the price of expensive
| metals is exactly the _point_ of asteroid mining.
|
| If prices for nickel, iron, copper, platinum, etc were cut by
| 99%, it would raise human living standards ENORMOUSLY.
| skykooler wrote:
| It would be nice if people stopped stealing catalytic
| converters because the plantinum, palladium etc were no
| longer worth the effort.
| Retric wrote:
| We can significantly expand mining of common elements like
| copper and iron, the demand simply isn't there.
|
| Over 5% of earths crust is iron, aluminum is over 8%, we
| really aren't running out of them.
|
| Amos stuff is more rare, but for scale roughly 700 million
| metric tons of copper has been mined out of 2800 million
| tons of copper discovered in economically viable
| concentrations. With perhaps another 3500 million metric
| tons in undiscovered but economically viable mines.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Demand isn't there _at current prices_.
|
| Lower prices, and demand will rise!
| Retric wrote:
| Metal prices rise and fall quite a bit. They have fairly
| inelastic demand because raw material prices are a small
| fraction of total costs. A skyscraper may need a lot of
| steel but in total it's still a small fraction of total
| costs. Even just making steel from iron is rather
| expensive.
|
| A great deal of copper is used in new construction, but
| the number of outlets in the average new home isn't going
| up because raw copper is suddenly 1/3 the price.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| I'm sure you're right about current trends.
|
| I'm thinking/dreaming about a world where prices are
| _orders of magnitudes_ lower. Is there some advantage to
| make tin cans out of palladium rather than tin? Then we
| can just do it because the metal cost is the same!
|
| A bit of utopian fantasizing, sure. But even cutting end
| user prices in half should have important effects.
| Retric wrote:
| Unfortunately, I think that's more from sci-fi taking
| place in space rather than some inherent advantages to
| asteroid mining. 100% automated manufacturing process in
| space seem like a minimum requirement, but presumably
| doing the same thing on the ocean floor gets you to the
| same place.
| mavhc wrote:
| Starship aims for $10/kg, and a 1U cubesat is about 1kg
| cletus wrote:
| For another view on how this will change things, consider the
| delta-V map of the Solar System [1]. As an example you need
| 45km/s to reach Saturn, roughly 20% of that is just spent getting
| to Low Earth Orbit.
|
| Now consider the long-term trend in the payload cost (by weight)
| of getting to LEO [2]. This is why people such as myself are so
| bullish on spaceX (despite quite reasonable qualms about Elon
| Musk as a person). The impact this has had and will continue to
| have on reducing this number cannot be overstated.
|
| But all of this are still interim steps and we can potentially
| get the payload to LEO cost under $10/kg. If you want to go down
| the rabbit hole of this, I strongly recommend Isaac Arthur's
| Upward Bound series [3], I consider the ultimate end to this to
| be Orbital Rings [4].
|
| Even if you don't believe there's a reason for humans to go to
| space en masse (which I disagree with), this will greatly impact
| life on earth, for example with space-based solar power
| collectors.
|
| [1]:
| https://deltavmap.github.io/?system=Solar&origin=Earth&desti...
|
| [2]: https://www.futuretimeline.net/data-trends/6.htm
|
| [3]:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JgxkilF5XUM&list=PLIIOUpOge0...
|
| [4]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMbI6sk-62E
| messe wrote:
| > For another view on how this will change things, consider the
| delta-V map of the Solar System [1]. As an example you need
| 45km/s to reach Saturn, roughly 20% of that is just spent
| getting to Low Earth Orbit.
|
| Actually, it's 19km/s less than that. You want your destination
| to be Low Saturn Orbit, not Saturn. You've included the 19km/s
| that it takes to launch from Saturn to low Saturn orbit. It's
| even less again if you can aerobrake at Saturn.
| lquist wrote:
| Mueller talks about " pharmaceuticals, or materials, or
| semiconductors" production shifting to space. Can anyone expand
| on this please? What aspects of these industries is better done
| in space? How large (in revenue) are those portions of those
| industries? Thanks!
| whalee wrote:
| Building organs in microgravity, a potentially crucial
| ingredient to make the process work. From what I've seen this
| is the most realistic near future application.
|
| "When you're 3D-printing a tissue culture on the ground,
| there's a tendency for them to collapse in the presence of
| gravity," he says. "The tissues require some sort of
| [temporary, organic] scaffold to hold everything in place,
| especially with cavities like the chambers of a heart. But you
| don't have those effects in a micro-gravity environment, which
| is why these experiments have been so valuable."[0]
|
| Although I do think, taking human progression in the limit,
| moving to self sustaining manufacturing in space, using local
| raw materials (asteroids or otherwise), and dropping products
| back down to earth will be the natural progression. Space
| offers what earth does not -- infinite resources, infinite
| space(heh), infinite energy. Delete scarcity and what remains
| is purely a logistics problem.
|
| Whether it'll be 50, 100 or 500 years, who knows?
|
| [0] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210601-how-
| transplant-o...
| simonh wrote:
| This is one reason I'm quite bullish about some of the 'old
| space' companies, like Boeing, Northrop and Lokheed. They may be
| losing out in launch systems, but they stand to make a fortune
| building a lot of the cargo Starship is going to launch.
| Someone's going to need to build all these satellites, probes,
| space stations, etc.
|
| The same applies to ESA, do they actually care about building
| rockets, or is the interesting work to be done now all up there
| in orbit and beyond?
|
| Starship isn't the end of innovation in space technology and
| infrastructure. It's not game over, it's the beginning.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Yeah, maybe. But those in the old guard are used to building
| expensive, one-off things. I'll agree they can have better
| margins on what they already do.
|
| SpaceX benefit most from stuff which can be mass-produced.
| Customers who have use-cases which can be massproduced, will
| benefit the most from SpaceX.
|
| Another commenter mentioned on the perils of that too - SpaceX
| owns the ride, so they hold the keys to the Kingdom.
| tempnow987 wrote:
| Yeah, I'm also curious about this approach by folks like ESA.
| Even NASA with their SLS monstrosity.
|
| Imagine what you could do with an extra $4B per year in support
| for missions - it would be amazing. There is no way SpaceX can
| scale for that. You can't build a telescope targeting starship
| (maybe using starship has the frame and keep starship up
| there)? Or tons of other interesting ideas (spacesuits of a
| number of styles etc).
|
| SpaceX is a bit unique, Elon wants to get to space and is crazy
| about Mars. But LOTS of other stuff to do, and he doesn't seem
| to hung up about what he is launching (see OneWeb and all the
| other space com businesses he's launching).
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| I love that the acronym for their company is ISP.
| mrfusion wrote:
| Any idea what technology this might use for propulsion?
| pjscott wrote:
| From what little they've said, it's a pretty safe bet that
| their propellant mix is:
|
| * Safer to handle than traditional hypergolics, which are crazy
| toxic and therefore difficult and expensive to work with. (This
| is what they mean when they say that the propellant is
| "green".)
|
| * Something that doesn't require cryogenic storage. That stuff
| is great for launching from earth, but not great for storing
| longer-term in satellites. (And they will need to store it over
| a longer term in order to provide de-orbit, which they say they
| will.)
|
| If I had to take a guess, I'd guess a hydroxylammonium nitrate
| monopropellant. It was tested in orbit by NASA a few years ago
| and apparently worked great:
|
| https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/tdm/green/gpim-nears-comp...
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