SpaceX Falcon Heavy Muscles Way into $130M Military Contract | Hacker News Reader

SpaceX Falcon Heavy Muscles Way into $130M Military Contract

fortune.com

96 pointsrbanffy43 comments

Great, this will build confidence on FH for non-military hopefully. I've heard that FH will not only make larger research satellite possible but also more complicated ones. (Something about folding the wings limiting satellite capabilities for smaller launch vehicles that I read). I wonder if this also means more and cheaper cubesats making it to space.

Some people might be concerned with the morality of all this . But I still see this as overall progress of humanity in their space venture.

IIRC, the FH's largest fairing is about the same as a Delta IV Heavy's. Maybe you're thinking of the BFR?

Folding is indeed an issue - it's part of why the James Webb telescope has been a) delayed and b) mega-expensive - but the FH doesn't solve it.

Currently, ULA has much bigger fairings available than SpaceX.

https://twitter.com/wingod/status/966728779992150017

I could be mistaken, but my understanding is that fairing width is more important here than fairing length.

The FH is presumably capable of a longer/larger fairing than F9; that graphic also states it's not including F9v5.

I'm hoping it means NASA can launch lots of deep-space probes.

Harder to do. As one commenter on Reddit pointed out, the problem is that you need nuclear power of some kind beyond Jupiter. Falcon heavy isn't nuke-rated and it may be a challenge to get it there.

So that leaves F9's, which are probably more likely to get nuke-rated eventually, or sending up your deep probe on a FH and rendezvous with a separately launched nuke-generator.

But that still leaves plenty of deep space destinations that it can launch to, possibly starting with the Europa Clipper.

What is nuke rated? You need to be specially rated to transport a nuclear battery?

Nobody mentioning the biggest hope for basically having ventures bundling abundant energy in space and sending it to earth?

Carbon free with nearly no infrastructure costs beside some huge foilmirrors and heat collecting powerstations?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-based_solar_power

George Friedman does :)

https://worldview.stratfor.com/article/george-friedman-space...

Is there some kind of sunlight shortage on Earth? Why would this be necessary?

Building structures on earth to collect sunlight is expensive due to need for maintenance, inefficient due to weather and day/night cycles and the transportproblem (no line of sight/ cables) and needs lots of land.

Spacebased power generation can get around that.

Space stations are expensive to maintain, experience a day/night cycle in the sort of orbits you'd have to use, and can't have cables either...

A solar panel in space can be in direct sunlight almost 24/7 without worrying about night or weather, is the big benefit.

Wouldn't it be really easy to convert that technology into a weapon? Giant space lasers and all that jazz?

The cost of doing that would have to exceed the value of providing clean energy? So the political gain would have to be enormous to bother (already have bombs etc).

Granted, anything designed to project terawatts has got to be treated with respect.

Having a weapon no country can shoot down on short notice is a very attractive proposition. Satellite killers already developed are aimed at destroying spy satellites. Putting your space weapon on a higher orbit (and having a couple of them, able to cover all the surface of the Earth at any given time) would make it immune to ground interference.

By the time someone is able to launch a rocket to get you, you already melted down the launch facility into a nice sheet of glass.

Based on what I've read (in particular, this blogpost: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/03/space-based-solar-power/) space-based solar power (SBSP) is not as easy or promising as it might appear.

Getting that energy to the ground is difficult. Maintaining a solar power plant in space is difficult. With the energy required to make and launch solar power installations, the energy returned on energy invested might not be all that much better than terrestrial solar panels.

Additionally, the factor of 10- to factor of 100-reductions in launch costs that seem to be necessary to make SBSP economical might never materialize. SpaceX seems to have had success in reducing launch costs, but it could be credibly argued that that success so far has been a result of their organizational approach. Also, I think they are still running the experiment regarding whether or not reusability can reduce launch costs further (an impression I have gathered from reading the NASASpaceFlight forums, so take it with a grain of salt--I'm just a biologist). Remember that dramatic reductions in launch costs were promised with the shuttle and never materialized. SpaceX has learned from many of those mistakes, but maybe there are other unknown problems yet to discover.

In addition to the physical concern, there's the unfortunate political concern that anyone who builds something that can redirect useful amounts of energy from space to Earth for planet-side consumption has probably also built a death ray.

I find this argument to be pretty useless by now. We all live in a modern society. You can order a crisper-cas do it yourself chemistry kit for your home, your devices are powered by potential electric hand grenades and you can write software in your basement that could cripple the worlds infrastructure for months. Everyone can create a potential doomsday device in his/her basement. And with every physics discover, the likelihood for ease of access to the world-burning zippo is dropping faster and faster. And its a good thing.

Any high energy ray in orbit could be gunned down with railguns or destroyed with reflection. I know its fancy to pretend that security is something real, not just a safety dance, ever after 9/11 - so in order for everyone to feel safe- we are going to do cavity searches on astronauts from now on.

There are good points in that article, but it falls into the common trap: if you're going to do space-based solar, the one thing you probably wouldn't do is make your collecting area out of a load of PV panels. If you want a mahoosive collecting area, the best idea is probably acres of mylar sheets, reflecting onto as small a converter as you can get away with. That fundamentally changes the available sunlight watts per launch kg ratio.

You've just bought yourself a heat dissipation problem, and it does nothing to help with the downlink, but those aren't insurmountable.

It's probably not economical for cases where there's a grid available for the reasons others have given. On the other hand it might be useful for remote outposts. Or it could potentially make electric passenger planes viable.

The idea of flying a plane whose power depends on shooting it with a space-based death-ray is not very attractive. The plane still has to land safely in case power is lost.

While the technology for cost-effective space solar is almost ready, any way to get it from space to the ground has a few problems:

1) Flux. Direct sunlight isn’t good for you. Even just as heat. If the system is 1kw/m^2, it’s simultaneously a weapon and needs a really large and expensive ground station to make use of.

2) Distances. To get power with 24-hour reliably from space, either you need to be in high orbit (significant compared to diameter of planet), or you need to bounce the power around a lot: again, meaning either highly focused and automatically a super-weapon or massive (~ 1 square kilometre per gigawatt) satellites, but the options have fairly similar minimum total distance and you exchange an inverse-square problem for an exponential-in-number-of-repeaters problem.

If you can solve #2, it makes more sense to leave the panels on the ground. For example, you can just build a wide-ish strip of panels from Nouakchott to Muscat, and similar ones in other deserts, noting that some of them are in daylight at all times, and use the same tech to send the power conveniently around the surface of the Earth without needing space launches.

Its not the biggest hope.

We already have unlimited carbon free energy and some people already use it to power their country. Its only ignorance and political shit-show that prevents people from losing it.

Its called uranium.

Elon himself said often that space based solar power is a bad idea.

FH uses the same fairing as the F9, which isn't particularly large.

If demand existed SpaceX said they would make larger fairings.

I would question the double standard-ness of anyone objecting to military space launches.

GPS, for example, is a DoD program, operated by the USAF. Are they going to stop using GPS in protest?

You're wrongly assuming that the military is the only organization that could have implemented GPS, when in fact any organization (e.g. NASA) could have if they had the same ridiculously high funding as the US military.

You're wrongfully assuming that any other organization would've had the foresight to develop such a program back in the late 1950s, if they were given the budget. NASA wasn't established until 1958.

Who cares if it was a few years earlier? With technological progress we are able to innovate at an exponential rate. If imagine where we'd be if NASA was funded an amount as absurd as the military industrial complex.

> SpaceX president Glynne Shotwell

As much as I like to think this is a typo, the W and L keys are on opposite sides of the keyboard... ️

Quite possibly a dictation error, but this just indicates that the copy at Fortune is pretty bad.

Not on Dvorak layouts. There W and L are on the same side... two rows apart.

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