SpaceX successfully launches two humans into orbit
nasa.gov
nasa.gov
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/1266812530833240064
https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/30/spacex-makes-history-with-...
https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/05/todays-the-day-weath...
If there's a particularly good article, we can swap out the URL above. Edit: beefman suggested the nasa.gov page (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23364975), so we'll put that up pending any better suggestion. The submitted URL was the livestream https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIZsnKGV8TE, which was fine while it lasted, but is now of the second freshness. Submitted title was "SpaceX and NASA: Crew Demo-2".
https://www.google.com/search?q=spacex+dock+%22space+station...
Fyi that "Daylight Saving Time" instead of "Standard Time" is in effect in case someone miscalculates it by 1 hour.
You could in principle warn users that they are asking for a strange time, e.g. the one you indicated, but if the user wants to see it, why not.
to follow approach and docking:
All of the NASA missions prior to this have an ambience of "uneconomical but useful". Even the shuttle, which was supposed to be this cost effective space truck, turned out to be not even close.
And the last thing I'm feeling is the amazement at how much technology has evolved to get us to this point. I imagined as a child that the Apollo program would lead to a factory of rockets that launched people to orbit, to the Moon, and even to Mars on demand. And seeing what SpaceX has done to get to this point, it is clear to me that was never even close to possible. The Russian program is great in that way. It shows what that path might have looked like. And yes we could have refined the making of F1 engines, the construction of boosters, and just pushed that, but that leads to a steady state that is below what you need to run a program like this with a net positive economic outcome.
So very impressed guys, congratulations!
"Thank you for flying with Falcon 9 today", as though it's an airplane.
EDIT this is not a criticism, I really like it. Maybe "cheeky" is the wrong term, I'm bad with Anglicisms
https://concord.fandom.com/wiki/Iain_M._Banks_Culture_Univer... (ctrl-f for Windward)
It's a private corporation: it's a mini-dictatorship. Basically everything functional in the world is built by one. Could you imagine the department of transportation making a car?
-- Elon Musk
Ok, he can use Culture names without irony. uwu
NASA gave a $55million estimate on cost per seat on crew dragon, which would be about $440 million to launch 8 people.
Not sure that is factoring in reusability once they are willing to use that for crew missions (or offset price reusing crew boosters on non crewed missions).
Another issue with shuttle was reliability though. It may take hundreds of flights to know how much it is improved with crew dragon, but it seems to have better launch abort capabilities etc.
Stuff like spacelab missions can probably be done using the ISS. Some of the military capabilities are moved to X-37.
Certain of the satellite launching capabilities of the shuttle were hampered by safety concerns post challenger/columbia.
The ability to retrieve and return large cargo is still missing, but it doesn't appear many people are clamoring for it. It'd be nice if we could continue to service Hubble going forward, but that's mostly nostalgia talking.
The Shuttle was supposed to do everything for everyone and it met with predictable results. The promised economies and launch rates were never realized. The safety issues inherent with the design made its continuation nearly impossible.
Having cheaper, mostly reusable launchers that have capabilities that people actually use is way more valuable.
They'll have to stop blowing them up, but at two prototypes per month I think they'll make rapid progress.
The shuttle didn't have any real abort capabilities (other than very late in the flight, when they were already in space, just not in the correct orbit). It had some crazy schemes for earlier stages of flight, but they were never tested, and no one actually thought they would work.
The government paid for Apollo. And once they decided they no longer wanted it, it became impossible to use Apollo parts, technology, or any of the engineers or technicians to put people into orbit. The capability "vanished."
If the government never bought another ticket to space, Crew Dragon could be made available to people who want to go into space and are willing to pay for a ticket. So even if NASA got defunded completely tomorrow, the ability to go into space would still be there. Because the market for space, when served in an economic way, is self sustaining.
This has never been true before, and now it is. That is my definition of sustainable.
There are 4 unnamed tourists set to fly next year. Tom Cruise is also in negotiations to film in space using Crewed Dragon, which would presumably involve at minimum Mr. Cruise plus a cameraman.
SpaceX owns the Crew Dragon IP and tooling, and they can sell flights to private citizens - in fact I believe they said today that they are contracted with Space Ventures to fly 4 people next year. Previously Space Ventures could only buy from the Russians.
All of this combined means that SpaceX is still highly dependent from the goodwill of the US government.
You need manufacturing base and a business model to sustain commercial operation. NASA is a government agency that gets its priority sets by a congress that is not very interested in space flight, and putting the budget wherever they want at any given time. So NASA could have lots of IP about 4 different vehicles that gets into LEO but no amount of money could actually get you there.
They can give the IP to a 3rd company of course, but because they way it was designed it would not really have any commercial use, and likely it only works connected together with other government IP/hardware that you also easily get.
Now you have a private company, who has a very clear business intensive, to get the greatest possible use out of that IP, it only uses other commercially available tools and has synergy with other parts of their business that also has other commercial uses. The industrial base and teams are sustained, and not removed when congress lowers budget for a year.
So the Dragon 2 works with Falcon 9 rocket. SpaceX always operates Falcon 9 launch pads and they have plenty of rockets to fly and a manufacturing base that makes more of them. So now you have a much easier time to get the whole system together for an actual 3rd party flight, as the rocket, launch pad, infrastructure is already there and commercially operated.
NASA had a great deal of knowledge from previous projects which they shared liberally with SpaceX from very early on in their development. Engines such as the Merlin are heavily influenced from NASA IP.
So in essence NASA still is a clearing house of knowledge, and much of the info learned by NASA and SpaceX to date continues to be shared with other providers to the benefit of all.
I do agree however with the sentiment that SpaceX can sell seats or rocket flights in a way that NASA was never set up to do.
Isn't the output of the US government in the public domain? I think the issue was more about the manufacturing and launching of rockets being highly regulated for obvious reasons.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_program#Budget
[1]: This article states the per-astronaut cost paid by NASA on a Crew Dragon mission is $55M, compared to $86M on Soyuz: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/26/spacex-demo-2-nasa-astronaut...
If we are talking pure commercial travel, it is a vehicle without a destination. The ISS is definitely not a commercial project. There are lots of reasons for the ISS to exist, and they have changed over time, but it has never been a money-making venture. While the dragons certainly do come in under budget, they are a more efficient path to orbit, the purpose of the mission is not commercial. Crew Dragon's existence is funded by the need to move people to and from the ISS. Without the ISS, Crew Dragon would exist. I hold off on the "commercial" designation until the customer funding the mission actually intends profit.
What we need is a commercial, money-making, reason to launch people into orbit. Astronauts fly for science. They fly for national pride. They fly to demonstrate engineering excellence. They don't fly to make money. I'm a big spacelaunch fan but I just don't see any commercial reason to launch people into space. (Space hotels for billionaires might be a niche but that doesn't seem sustainable imho.)
Read https://www.amazon.com/Case-Space-Revolution-Spaceflight-Pos...
Also with that short term outlook you wouldn’t have many things. The Internet was not initially commercial. It was designed to provide communications in the event of a nuclear attack. Yet here we are now and we have reaped immense benefits from that investment.
It’s blindingly obvious that spaceflight makes sense to invest in. The issue is that the level of investment is large and the time horizon before a return is long. Sometimes government takes that role.
And the concept of space-mining likely will not involve people. We are already replacing men with machines in mines on earth because of associated costs. I imagine the first space miners won't be guys in spacesuits carrying shovels. They will be machines.
Imo what ever comes after homo sapiens inherits the solar system, not homo sapiens ourselves
Even for regular human asteroid mining it looks like an artificial magnetosphere would be possible: https://physicsworld.com/a/magnetic-shield-could-protect-spa...
It's still surprising to me that the notion isn't prevalent in sci-fi or even hard sci-fi. Though as you mention even a modified MRI could do the job.
Are you invested in spaceflight then? I don't see it being very obvious at all. Yes, some precious metals can be recovered in large quantities but they aren't intrinsically valuable. These materials are used in things like catalysts, batteries and chemical processes where we could also invest to remove the dependence on them.
perhaps not, but materials in space can be assembled to functional components in space. functional components beget more things happening in space.
> remove the dependence on them
cool. you can beam electricity from space, too...
One material Robert Zubrin is interested in is a rare form of hydrogen. He thinks that it would be a good candidate for fusion if we ever figure it out.
Why would you want to send humans to get it? Space is really inhospitable for humans, but machines seem to like it just fine.
Offshore oil and gas mining is rapidly being automated, and if they could, they would eliminate humans from the process altogether. Nobody wants to go out and live on a frozen windblown metal can full of industrial machinery, in the middle of an ocean, that could sink at any time. That's why you have to pay people a lot of money to do it.
After you get over the romantic narrative of space, it really doesn't sound any more appealing than the oil platform. I mean, sure, I'm curious. But I wouldn't want to live there.
I think you are underestimating the challenges they have to overcome to get machines to work in space.
Even if it’s hard, it’s still a lot easier than getting humans to work in space.
The critical point you're missing is that any mining and processing equipment will require their own life support that will already be able to support humans. Machines are significantly more complicated without a gas to convect heat away from all surfaces, they'll need massive fluid handling and filtering systems for lubricants and cooling fluid, the mining operations will need tons of oxygen and scrubbing for their chemistry, and clean water will be required by pretty much every process. The only way we'll pull this off is by using our existing experience on this planet and that requires the same conditions that support life.
That sounds like I'm exaggerating but we've already spent more than a generation in space studying the effects of zero-g and we just barely got a working 3D printer on the ISS a few years ago. No advanced mining, processing, or other manufacturing equipment to speak of beyond lab scale R&D devices. We have one lab capable of continuous zero g research and a few 747s capable of achieving it a a few minutes at a time.
We never explored the surface of Mars, or landed on an asteroid before we had our machines do it, but we managed it anyway with the human operators still on Earth.
Definitely not "back on earth". Lag is an issue with VR as-is with mere milliseconds of it, and you'd be calling for minutes of latency there.
And "in a nearby spaceship" would, definitionally, involve getting humans most of the way there; might as well get them all the way there at that point.
Obviously doing this for robots on Earth is tricky and largely pointless, given it's probably easier to just reduce the latency directly. For remote mining on asteroids or something there's not a whole lot going on in space. You're not going to get a random pedestrian or cyclist suddenly popping out in front of your robot. It's far more practical to model and simulate it entirely in e.g. a game engine, and then record it.
At least, that's my guess where things will go.
The point about the spaceship is not distance related but that building life support structures into everything is quite expensive, whereas building them once in a spaceship and then extending the human presence to all surrounding structures would be a lot cheaper.
True, but that has limitations, right? Meteorite impacts, electromechanical failures, and such still do happen. Plus on Mars there's still dust flurries and such, and then you've got Titan with its "dummy thicc" atmosphere blowing stuff around even harder, though obviously asteroids wouldn't have those issues.
With the Mars rovers we're basically in a position of "well we'll run them as long as we can, but if they get stuck in a rut they're hosed". Spirit and Opportunity would probably still be running and collecting science if we had human crews nearby able to hop over and fix them up.
> The point about the spaceship is not distance related but that building life support structures into everything is quite expensive, whereas building them once in a spaceship and then extending the human presence to all surrounding structures would be a lot cheaper.
Right, but my point there is that "surrounding structures" implies you're basically pretty much there anyway. You don't necessarily need life support structures in the mining equipment itself; you just need some spot for the ship to dock for a sec while the maintenance crews don their spacesuits and do their repairs.
Even if we did build human-habitable areas in those "surrounding structures" (e.g. break rooms, workshops, bunks), as long as there's a supply chain to provide air/water/food (and the first two could likely be extracted from the asteroid itself) I suspect it wouldn't be that much of an additional cost in the grand scheme of things, especially when weighed against the increase in productivity.
Plus, you gotta think on the flip-side, too: would it make sense to haul all those life support structures around on a moving ship? If you're sending crews someplace often enough it seems reasonable to have those on-site and thus not have to haul all that mass with you (then again, depending on the length of the trip such facilities might be necessary anyway).
No, but it’s tremendously easier to fly these robots there than doing the same with humans. We can afford to let robots “die” on Mars; humans not really.
The fact we've yet to automate so much here with such large incentive to do so is evidence we're not there yet.
The estimates I've seen for a human mission to Mars are about 100-500 times the budget for Curiosity. So even if astronauts could accomplish things 52X faster (and I'm skeptical they would), it still wouldn't be as cost efficient. And that's even before you factor in the fact that the Mars Rover is going to be doing work on Mars much, much longer than a human mission would (Curiosity is going on 8 years).
Human space exploration is a solution in search of a problem. People don't seem to be rationally looking for the best way to get certain information from Mars or for the best sources of materials that could be obtained with future technology (there are many overlooked terrestrial ones) and soberly deciding that astronauts are the best answer. They seem to start out with the goal of defending human space exploration, and then searching for problems to try to justify it.
Isn’t there something about “exploration” that seems important to a non-neglible amount of humans? I don’t want everything we do to serve the rat race we’re in. Let’s loose our money on something amazing.
There's a lot more to exploration than space exploration (I think exploring something like the human brain will end up having a greater emotional and practical impact myself). But even if we just look at space exploration, we don't really get a lot from human space flight. As I said, in situations where it's possible to use human astronauts, robots seem like they would be more effective. And for most of the places in our solar system, we simply won't be able to use humans at all anytime soon. The missions to, say, Europa are going to be done by robots.
Still, many people, including myself, enjoyed watching the launch. Maybe something like this is more analagous to a cathedral or memorial.
Not to mention, a probe or rover sent far away all have to go through one of the few DSNs, that can only do so much and so fast[0], and are generally scarce services. Forget about e.g. running 20 simultaneous robotic missions in different areas of Mars.
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[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Deep_Space_Network#Curren...
I have to ask, why the rush? Why not wait 30-50 years until the robots are smart enough? Or we can bioengineer humans that are better adapted to that harsh environment?
This feels a bit like a real time strategy game, where someone at the start of the game wants to spend all their resources on big expensive research projects near the end of the tech tree. You're always better off building up the economy so you have enough surplus to tackle those expensive items later.
(Note that RTS economy is based around acquiring new resources. You can't make minerals by advertising, speculating, or even having your soldiers trade with each other. There are games that try to simulate trade, e.g. Stellaris, but even there it behaves more like a mine than like an economy.)
(Also: the rush is because our lifespans are finite, and I'd like to at least see some of that before I die.)
Also, in terms of bettering our lives... I'd bet advertising beats the ISS. What has the ISS given us? I know hundreds of small businesspeople that would never have gotten off the ground without modern advertising. There are people out there that click on ads and buy things, and that makes them happy.
It certainly is way overpriced in my opinion, but for me, it has served as a reason to wake up excited on many of my days off.
That being said, ads are a great way to bootstrap so many awesome things. I think the cynicism comes from the feeling of privacy invasion.
(Yes, there is a lot of controversy over colonialism that I won't get into here.)
Jokes aside, you are right, of course. We don't have to worry about environmental effects or native populations in the same way when dealing with off-World colonies on sterile worlds. That alone should provide some incentive for commercial exploitation of things like asteroids; at some point Earth will either run out of certain elements, or other factors will result in certain elements being more easily obtainable off-world.
We can see into the space through telescopes, while the seafaring explorers needed to literally go to some place to see what it was like.
Robotics still ain't good enough to make it work alone, we'll need manned missions to establish a manufacturing-based economy in cislunar space, if we want to get anything done this century. Risky, manned missions, that in time will yield good profits.
See [32]-[35]
NASA has a whole page about it now. And here's a rather large paper (I remember reading a shorter version, but with the same pictures inside): https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.11871.
Of course, an industry established at a moon settlement could do it for even less. :-P (1/4)
I think the Polynesians would like a word. And the "vast economic benefits" are dubious given the total human cost of introducing new diseases into unprepared ecosystems and populations - plus the import of abundant New World silver provided coin for the financing of the long, devastating mercenary wars of the early modern period in Europe and disrupted and destabilized the economy of China.
But in any case, humans had pretty much covered the globe outside Antarctica by the time Columbus set sail, in environments that, harsh as they may be, still provided breathable air, drinkable water and food if you knew how to hunt/scavenge/grow it.
I suspect the majority of future exploration will stay robotic though. There are going to be some high-profile missions, but once we start looking more at asteroids and other targets far out in the solar system, then robots will continue to do the bulk of the work.
As far as I am concerned, the major breakthrough here is the reusability that SpaceX is bringing into the table. If we can lower prices of sending stuff to outer space, then we'll be able to do so much more with current space exploration budgets.
This is exactly what SpaceX is doing with the eventual goal of putting people on Mars. They've been finding and solving problems the whole time but the ultimate problem is that we still have all of our eggs in one basket and we're one asteroid, volcano, war, or pandemic away from civilizational collapse. Creating a self-sustaining population off planet is the only way to solve that problem.
I could imagine a lot of volunteers if you promised 5 years worth of dried food, comms back to earth and lots of fame.
But this is something that's not going to be allowed.
Look at all the safety measures they're putting in spacecraft to ensure people live. No way is anyone going to approve a one way trip to Mars.
I sometimes wish people were more comfortable with their own mortality and death in general, but that's how all the humans with "warrior genes" died off.
If you would have the rockets and equipment and a place in a small state to launch the rockets: who do you need to approve it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_situ_resource_utilization
https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/29cxi6/i_made_a_delt...
You are already living in space. :)
But yeah, it's not for everyone. Imo, it would be pretty exciting to continuously enlarge some sort of habitat somewhere.
In case there's no way to return to Earth, would definitely need a steady supply of drugs of all kinds and good doctors, otherwise suicides would become the number one cause of death soon enough.
(Though in all honesty, I want to see both happen because I loved both Star Trek and SeaQuest DSV as a kid.)
Really we're pretty far from semi-autonomous systems for stuff like mining, we're just starting to get problem solving working in AI just look at the DARPA challenge for how far we are from being able to assign relatively small tasks to resolve problems.
https://www.space.com/spacex-crew-dragon-will-fly-space-tour...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_space_travelers_by_nam...
Bigelow Aerospace? Looks like they just laid everyone off.
I'd have hoped nasa is smart enough to charge more than the marginal cost of one more launch.
Look at the Alaskan Railroad for a more recent example.
Look to airships for an example of things that just completely fell out of use or trackless trains.
You can easily look back at things people have built and people have come to (computers, planes, cars, etc)... But there are far more things people built that no one came for, and which we don't even know of because no one wanted them.
Solar roadways is an example of something that was an infrastructure project that was built out in a few places, and by all accounts was a failure.
The concorde seemed like an obvious "build it, people will want it", but in reality people didn't come for it, so it was retired.
And there's countless other examples, from 3d movie theatres, to dotcom ideas to all the things we don't know of.
There is perhaps a bit of confirmation bias in this view, but I see people usually erring in the other direction. E.g. there's no such thing as "too fast Internet" today, people find new ways to suck up all available bandwidth.
And the worst offenders of this narrow-mindset are, wait for it, no less but the trained scientists themselves (not all, but the ones who didn't have exposure to engineering thought).
When we (engineers) say: "If you build it, they will come", what we really mean is this:
- If you build it, and they come, great.
- If you build it, and they don't come, too bad. Let's try something else.
- No one predicts the future like an oracle, but we'll try our best to make our claims come to fruition.
Our audience (the investors) knows that. We (engineers) are not out there for the truth. We're out there to try things out based on an educated guess, give it our best shot, and see what happens.
That's how the real world works.
Once you have companies either vying for real estate in orbit the demand for people to visit the hotel could eventually spur demand for other places to go.
Now that would make a fantastic space hotel.
Although I think given the likely customer profile we're at least as likely to get Vegas-in-Orbit - casinos, hookers and all - as labs and exploration.
The Skylab was 1/3 the size and only needed on launch.
The price of making a station also goes down massively with the going down of general launch prices.
Because they can't adequately do the job, even now, on Earth. Maybe they will, in 20 years. Right now, there are whole classes of missions for which the choice isn't between humans and robots, but between humans and not doing them at all.
In places that can be reached by both, it's the machines that are much more limited. Compare e.g. the distanve covered by astronauts on the Moon in a day with the distance covered by Martian rovers in a year. There's a benefit in local decisionmaking instead of a remote one over a very bad link.
"Let's see what's out there!"
It's human nature.
The entire field of astrobiology is a big giant question mark despite our telescopes and probes. If we'd have sent humans to Mars instead of probes, we'd either have proof of past or present life, or we'd have very convincing evidence that it doesn't or never did exist. And we'd have had that relatively quickly. Here, decades later, we know a lot more, but we don't have this one basic fact.
As for figuring this out quicker: an astronaut would be able to leave their ship/base, go find some interesting rock, bag it, bring it back, slice it and observe under microscope, all in time it would take the rover to just drive towards the nearest rock. All it takes for a human to be a better sample collector than most advanced of robots on Earth is a shovel.
Robotic missions scale better and may still be more cost-effective, if we built and sent a crewed science ship to Mars orbit. It doesn't have to land, the crew could pilot dozens of rovers remotely at the same time - but this way, with much higher bandwidth (could actually drive FPV looking through a HD camera) and much less lag (which, for Earth-Mars link, is 3 to 22 minutes, depending on relative position of the planets, and that's one way, not RTT). I'd say this is the perfect trade-off until we make more progress on AI front, but it requires manned flights. And if we'll be at the point of sending science ships to Mars, we won't be that far from landing humans there anyway.
Well, tourism, if nothing else!
Some people don't see that as a sufficiently serious reason to go. Those people are wrong.
Space should be for noble missions in the service of all mankind.
Barring any severe buckling or collapse of civilization (knock on wood), technological development and economic growth will make this a largely inevitable result, whether it be this decade or a century from now. Humanity will venture far and wide into space.
And I must say, it is rather narrow-minded to think that the entire broader universe should be closed off to the unclean masses.
I was watching the launch live stream and at one point, they said, "if they abort in this zone, the crew will land just off the coast of Ireland". That was like 9 minutes after liftoff!
So if I understand that correctly, if you go to space, you can travel from Florida to Ireland in ~20 minutes?
If anything, DOD is already the first in line for suborbital cargo, not warheads mind you, delivery using Starship.
If you put people in seats, and not spaced out for going to Mars, you should get more then 100 people in on.
https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/29/16383048/elon-musk-spacex...
1. Have a backup of our species in case something happens to Earth.
2. A great experiment in anthropology! It could help us rethink how we organize life on earth. As far as I see, a moonbase would be a "greenfield project" on land that doesn't belong to any nation, where they have to build everything from scratch. How will they organize? Will they need to work or will robots be doing everything for them? Will they be paid & will they have their own money? They will need to reject racism & nationalism to get their goals accomplished, for sure.
That said, I think it's still worth the risk.
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[0] - A slur that roughly translates to "lover of planets and culture that comes from them".
Consider the map in the section Turn of the Tide on Wikipedia's Women's Suffrage in the United States article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_suffrage_in_the_Unit...
It's not a coincidence that as you go from west to east, the level of suffrage for women generally decreases prior to the 19th amendment. Nor is it a coincidence that the 19th passed. This was due, in part, to the federal system of government allowing states great freedom in how they operated, but also due in part to the expanding frontier. Governments were allowed to experiment. Wyoming (followed quickly by Utah) was the first state to recognize women's right to vote. It actually working was great evidence for proponents in other places. It also put competitive pressure on other states to get it right if they wanted women to immigrate to their state (which they did).
Over the short term, we'll probably see something on the moon more like the early British colonies. But over the long term, once the moon becomes more or less self sufficient and people start spreading out across the surface to found new domes or tunnels or whatever form colonies eventually take, I suspect we'll reap social and governmental benefits.
More importantly, there is a bootstrap problem. Where are the funds going to come from? There is no commercial benefit from such an experiment except perhaps tourism. On the other hand, a space colony could develop a self sustainable economy, developing various enterprises from tourism, mining to manufacturing
You need to build structures that can withstand pressure, but that's not a problem. We sent people to the deepest parts of the ocean 80 years ago.
Bottom of the ocean is on average about 3.5 km deep. You can pump air in from the surface, which isn't an option on Mars. You have abundant water, which can be desalinated, or pumped in from elsewhere. You can communicate with the rest of Earth virtually instantly. Resupplying your underwater base is infinitely faster, easier and cheaper than resupplying Mars. In an emergency, getting to or from the underwater base from a major city is only a few hours compared with potentially years for Mars depending on the launch windows.
Colonists of the underwater base don't have to worry about health problems from low gravity, nor do they need to worry about cancers from the deadly radiation on Mars.
Sea base modules can be built on the surface and simply lowered into the sea. We have ample experience with underwater construction from thousands of deepwater oil rigs and other underwater projects. We also have experience from building many underwater habitats for research purposes.
I would guess building a deep underwater base is many orders of magnitude easier than sustaining humans on Mars.
Building structures that can withstand pressure, never fail catastrophically, and can be repaired is really hard. In contrast on Mars you only need a bit of dirt for radiation shielding and any atmosphere leaks can be repaired at a much more relaxed pace. People can walk around on Mars in simple suits, you can't leave your structures at the bottom of the ocean at all outside of a deep sea submarine. Building habitats on Mars is essentially just mining, and we have centuries of experience with that.
Getting energy at the bottom of the ocean is also difficult. Nuclear and geothermal are the only options, whereas on Mars you can use solar panels.
EDIT: And so far this goal has been a dead end.. Voyager 1 has proven it self to be a better explorer then Buzz Aldrin or Yuri Gagarin.
plus or minus 48, depending on the clouds today.
For other destinations or uses, the launch windows might be more flexible or not be an issue at all.
The dynamic simply isn’t there
On the other side of it, what's the point in making a space hotel if you have to pay the Russians an exorbitant amount of money to get 3 people into orbit? Now we can put 7 people up for less money more frequently.
There are thousands, probably tens of thousands, of commercial ventures that only have governments as their customers. This seems no different.
I doubt there's enough of a need for this sort of thing to keep a venture afloat, but manned missions have been flown for commercial purposes in order to service existing spacecraft.
The airlock allowed astronauts to go outside the vehicle to work on stuff without de pressuring and repressurizing the whole vehicle. No capsules have that capability and none are really large enough to add the capability. Remember it's not just the airlock but storage of the EMUs and any tools or equipment the task might need.
This leads into the cargo bay and manipulator arm. The Space Shuttle could get close to a satellite, grab it with the arm and then pull it into the cargo bay. The arm could also be used to maneuver astronauts out to a satellite to large to pull into the cargo bay. No capsules have these capabilities either.
A Dragon capsule has no ability to depressurize and repressurize safely and has no airlock. It's CBM compatible hatch is not large enough to fit either a NASA EMU or the Russian Orlan so there's no way for the crew to even perform EVAs. The launch suits worn on the Dragon and ACES suits worn on the Space Shuttle can handle emergency depressurization of the vehicle but are not EVA capable.
So it certainly won't be the Dragon, Starliner, or Soyuz doing any sort of manned in-orbit servicing of satellites.
The ISS is in a particularly crappy orbit with respect to servicing satellites so a repair ship docked there would require more propellant than one in a better orbit.
The ISS is a nice destination for people because it's got consumables and room to move around. It's not a good pit stop on the way to somewhere else though. There's no spare propellant stored there so the only reasonable place to go after visiting the ISS is back to Earth.
You could launch another station with blackjack and hookers in a better orbit but there's still the propellant issue. Every time you'd want to service something you'd need to send more propellant from Earth. Just sending a dedicated vehicle up that could do servicing (like the X-37) would be far more efficient.
But frankly, there is basically nothing that humans could do in space in a money-making way. Machines are just so much easier. They can fly for years via cheap orbits, don't mind the cold and the vacuum, etc.
The whole idea of colonizing Mars is not about commercial viability, it's about reaching a new land outside of control of Earth's governments. Very much the same as founding Massachusetts or Pennsylvania was not a commercial enterprise, but was an attempt to gain more freedom, even in utterly alien and inhospitable places.
1: https://upward.issnationallab.org/the-race-to-manufacture-zb...
So, there's clearly a lot of value to somebody for fiber optic cable with even lower signal loss.
That really drives home to me that, even though information technology is just my boring day job and it's still space travel that gets me as excited as it did when I was a kid, it's still true that the space age is over and we're definitely living in the information age.
For example, the MAREA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAREA) undersea cable is 6,600 km long. Current optical fiber requires repeaters every ~100km. If it's to be believed, ZBLAN could get rid of these repeaters all together.
The cable's design is _much_ more complicated because of the requirement to have electricity and repeaters.
That sounds like you’re including the weight of the whole final cable, including yarn strengthening members, plastic shroud and sometimes a braided metal shield layer. Only the glass fibre itself actually needs to be manufactured in space and is usually on the order of a kg or so per km.
For scaling up, if one uses the smallest commercial fiber standard (80um diameter cladding--they would put the buffer and whatnot on after it comes back to earth) the mass of the fiber is only 53grams/km so using your $3000/kg the cargo cost is only $0.16/meter which seems pretty palatable to me.
Other concerns include unnecessary waste and unfairness [2]. The point is that this is a zero-sum game that makes us invest in infrastructure that will soon get obsolete once someone else builds a faster infrastructure.
Fast trade isn't "efficient". Long-term stability is.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_flash_crash [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_Boys
Computers mostly.
Ultimately I'd rather place the responsibility for long/short term investing on the investor. The fact that most retail investors should be investing passively and long term is well known at this point, the issue is one of education.
Don't dumb down the system when it's easy to make people stronger.
Months would be pretty good. But I suspect that wouldn't fly in practice. Flipping houses is long-term investment, no? Even if the asset isn't held for a long time, long-term value is added. This is very different to speculative trading where no value is added.
> The fact that most retail investors should be investing passively and long term is well known at this point
Nope! The primary purpose of the stock markets isn't to generate income for the investors. The purpose is to effectively distribute capital to those business that can use if effectively. Passive investment does not help to achieve this. It reduces the "wisdom of the crowd" effect, because anyone investing passively is not contributing their wisdom.
> Don't dumb down the system when it's easy to make people stronger.
I have completely the opposite view on this. If there's an obviously correct way of doing something, then don't leave it to chance. Design the system so that people can't fail.
Buying stock by definition is purchasing the right to participate in a company's future profits. That's the reward for taking a risk on the company, and the primary metric by which "who can use it effectively" is determined. It isn't and has never been some board of financial justices trying to figure out how reallocate capital out of altruism, otherwise hedge funds and active traders would all be non-profits.
There isn't an obviously correct way to do this, it depends on one's objectives. Financially illiterate employees contributing to their 401ks have different needs than hedge funds who have different needs than people trying to build wealth for non-retirement time horizons in taxable accounts who have different needs than people saving in HSAs and 529 accounts who have different needs than Pension funds, among many other users of the market. It's up to the investor to determine their needs, not be coddled by some nameless, faceless system that only permits the lowest common denominator of participation.
On a more philosophical note, systems where people can't fail are systems I've experienced professionally (working for companies with political/economic moats so vast they can fail repeatably and not be punished). All it produces in my experience is complacent dead weight and rules to maintain said dead weight that unite to stifle the progress of those who wish to perform or make progress. The systems become benign tumors at best.
Now granted there should be some safety nets in place, not everyone can be or wants to be a high performer, but that doesn't mean we should make every room with padded walls. People who throw money into the market without the slightest bit of research should be punished for their lack of planning, same way people who jump off a roof without thinking are punished by injury.
This is when I decide I don't really understand the market as well as I think, and I should stop solving the world's problems, and go back to designing circuits.
This is why they have been leveling hills to carve a (mostly, with minimal amount of repeater towers) line of sight path between NYC and Chicago, gaining 3ms (1), or set up a line of sight laser link between NYSE and NASDAQ to eke out a handful of microseconds (2), or set up multiple links across the English channel to reduce latency between London, Amsterdam and Frankfurt (3).
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/14/opinion/krugman-three-exp...
2. https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/176551-new-laser-network...
3. https://sniperinmahwah.wordpress.com/2016/01/26/hft-in-the-b...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Just the fact that the historical events the past couple of days didn't involve space, but something filmed on a mobile phone shared through information technology ...
This is also assuming the price per kg to orbit stays stable but Musk has stated he intends to drive the price down much further. He's even given figures for what he thinks they might be able to achieve with Starship[0] and SpaceX's rapid progress seems to indicate that they will, eventually, get there. The best comparison from history is probably the construction of railroads which had long development timelines and capital costs but eventually began paying back massive amounts even while driving the cost of freight down and providing a backbone for commercial and industrial development.
[0] https://www.inverse.com/article/60712-spacex-starship-elon-m...
Steam engines were originally used for pumping water, but there was an obvious huge demand for locomotives to move freight by land once they could be made cheaper or better than draft animals.
I’m sure there exist some commercial uses for space flight, but it really doesn’t seem all that similar to railroads in terms of obvious market demand or effect on the economy.
I'm not sure why you don't think space is commercially viable right now, companies and governments are paying a lot of money to have things delivered to orbit. SpaceX is making money with every launch otherwise they would have gone bust years ago. If you mean there's no market for human spaceflight, well there wasn't a market for passenger railroad travel for a long time either. You need to build the railways before people can make practical use of them. Back when most railways only extended for 1 or 2 km it was pretty hard to imagine getting paying passengers. You have to build something that connects to places people want to go before they'll pay to ride it.
With spaceflight we're currently in the shorthaul stage, all the profit is in delivering cargo to LEO. The cost is coming down and people are finding more uses for cheap satellites. The rockets already have their use case, they move people and cargo the same as a railroad, it's what we do with that capability that we need to get creative with and as we continue to build out capability and lower cost there will be more and more uses for space. The main reason I compare it to railroads is that it is a type of infrastructure that makes new things possible and there's always a profit to be made in a frontier as long as you're daring enough to take it.
Launching the raw materials to orbit from Earth might cost $3000/kg.
While Earth is great for being able to sustain life, the gravity well rather sucks.
Launching the same materials from most other interesting places in the solar system would cost a lot less, (at least, were there people there to provide some sort of settlement)
For instance, presuming most of what you need is silicon oxide anyway; launching the raw material from the moon and transporting it to earth orbit easily costs MUCH less fuel than launching it from earth.
* Earth->LEO: 9400 m/s * Moon->LEO: 1730+680+3260=5760 m/s on rockets alone * Moon->LEO 1730+680=2400 m/s with aerobraking (smarter) * Mars->LEO 6300 m/s with aerobraking * Asteroid belt->LEO between 1060-3360 m/s
Moral of the story: Don't launch your stuff from Earth if you can at all help it.
Now, once you have a somewhat established moon settlement that can take on projects it gets even more interesting. Unlike on earth, Lunar gravity is so low that things like a space elevator or a linear accelerator are practical with even todays technology and materials science. Combined with aerobraking on the other end, you could ultimately ship materials or goods to earth for cheaper and faster than china post ship from china. ;-)
The only downside: first you do need that settlement on the moon, and that's one heck of an initial investment. On the other hand: once established and marginally autonomous, you can intuit that -despite harsh conditions- such a settlement could be quite a competitive location to establish mining and industry.
Reference (assuming this one is well made): https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/29cxi6/i_made_a_delt...
Perhaps there are scientific uses where loss in fiberoptics makes a project infesible? Or perhaps quantum entangled photons, which one can't amplify?
I also have a feeling I've read the power needed for the repeaters generates magnetic fields that attract sharks. Shark bites are a not entirely trivial source of fiber cuts, which require very expensive fleets of cable repair ships to be maintained on standby and simply driving down the number of fiber cuts could be a fairly significant source of cost savings.
Mining helium-3 from the moon has been suggested. It could potentially be used for fusion power. But we currently can't make a helium-3 fusion plant, and even if we could, it would have to compete with cheaper, more abundant fuels for fusion. So it's far from certain that helium-3 mining the moon will ever happen.
Asteroid mining comes to mind. And sure, we can do that with robots, but it's incredibly convenient to have actual sapient personnel in close proximity to coordinate things, perform repairs, etc. And Ceres is a reasonable choice for such a colony (more so than Mars, IMO, though I know plenty of people might disagree), given the low escape velocity and abundance of water (as ice, but you can always melt ice) making it great for both sustaining human habitation and for refueling return trips.
In general, the more people we can get into space permanently, the greater the chances of humanity's survival long-term, since we would no longer be tied to one planet (and importantly: if we can maintain permanent settlements in space, then we could likely survive all but the most extreme calamities on Earth). I feel like that alone more than justifies any and all efforts to get Earth-to-orbit infrastructure as cheap and robust and predictable as possible; the scientific and commercial objectives are critical but secondary.
1: https://www.marketplace.org/2019/04/24/sci-fi-delta-v-daniel...
The ISS in Earth orbit cost billions of dollars and was only possible because the Space Shuttle was an awesome utility vehicle that could act as an orbital work platform. Putting even trivial ore processing and refining infrastructure in a place where it could process mined ore from asteroids would cost hundreds of billions of dollars. Every gram of refined asteroid ore would amortize that bootstrapping cost. It could never pay for itself.
Even if you want to use asteroid metals for space based manufacturing...that infrastructure is more hundreds of billions of dollars to bootstrap. Then there's the pesky problem of life support, water, and food for everyone working in space to build all that shit. Every kilogram coming from Earth, even in the best priced SpaceX rocket, costs hundreds of dollars. That's all besides the fact the technology to actually mine an asteroid doesn't exist and would need to be developed at great cost.
Even if you assume government space agencies will foot the bill for these expenses, that's still decades of their human spaceflight budget focused on nothing but bootstrapping infrastructure. That would preclude the establishment of off-Earth bases or colonies unless said space agency budgets were significantly increased. It ends up coming down to money because shit isn't free and in space humans need to take all of their air, food, water, and shelter with them everywhere they go.
You wouldn't cross the Sahara desert to go to some oasis to fill up a gallon bucket of water and take it home. Especially when the Nile is right there. If you try to build a new golden civilization around that oasis you'll spend tons of money bootstrapping doing so and then...you're in the middle of the desert. Conducting trade or doing anything eats into your scarce resources making the entire venture extremely expensive and inefficient. You've also got a significantly higher risk of catastrophe wiping out your oasis city since it is isolated, small, and resource starved.
No there ain't. A single asteroid could have billions if not trillions of dollars' worth of precious metals (gold, silver, platinum) and would flood the respective markets of those precious metals (making them less "precious" and more commodities, which would be a massive boon for all sorts of industries). Even more common metals like iron and nickel are abundant enough to represent multiple years of Earth's production per asteroid.
Thus:
> that infrastructure [for space-based manufacturing] is more hundreds of billions of dollars to bootstrap.
That will readily pay for itself.
> Then there's the pesky problem of life support, water, and food for everyone working in space to build all that shit.
Asteroids happen to be rich in water ice and hydrocarbons. Ceres, on that note (like I mentioned previously), is a giant ball of the former and has rich surface deposits of the latter (particularly tholins), making it pretty great as a refueling stop and colony site in support of asteroid belt mining operations (better, IMO, than Mars or the Jovian moons). Melt some water and setup some hydroponic farming and you're set.
> That's all besides the fact the technology to actually mine an asteroid doesn't exist and would need to be developed at great cost.
We've been mining for hundreds of years at this point; the key differences with asteroids v. Earth are the (relative) lack of gravity and the lack of atmosphere, both of which should be relatively straightforward to overcome (if anything they should make things easier). Having humans at the mining sites would allow for faster iteration and development of the specific methods.
> You wouldn't cross the Sahara desert to go to some oasis to fill up a gallon bucket of water and take it home.
No, but you might cross the Sahara to find gold, which is exactly what motivated explorers of centuries past. No different here.
You also don't seem to be aware, Ceres does not currently have a space gas station on the surface. If you intend to refuel and resupply there such a thing would need to be build...for hundreds of billions of dollars because it's super difficult and none of the technology to do it currently exists. So that would need to be invented, developed, built, and put into space.
Also raw ore amounts don't mean anything without refining capacity. There's roughly zero of it currently anywhere off the surface of the Earth. Again, in-space ore refining is something that exists pretty much only as concept drawings and some PhD thesis. So that would need to be invented, developed, built, and put into space.
Even if we could reliably get people out to the asteroid belt and keep them alive, the volume of the belt is absolutely enormous. Worthwhile asteroids are vast distances apart and far away from any larger asteroids you might want to use as bases. It would require enormous expenditure of resources to get some mining equipment to a worthwhile asteroid, mine it, and get that raw ore somewhere it could be processed.
The lack of gravity and atmosphere makes space mining far far more difficult than mining on Earth. If you kick up dust on Earth it blows away in the wind or settles quickly. Kick up dust on an asteroid and it goes into orbit around it and takes potentially centuries to settle. Asteroid dust also has no weathering so it would be extremely harsh on all the equipment. That all just makes the venture more difficult and more expensive.
Then you've got some iron and nickel, something the Earth literally has tons of. Even if you manage to find the Comstock Lode asteroid you'll spend billions to mine precious metals which will cease to be precious thus lose their monetary value.
The differences between crossing the Sahara to find gold and looking for it in an asteroid are when you cross the Sahara there's air at the destination. You don't have to make the crossing in a tin can containing your own personal universe. At any point along the journey you can take a deep breath. If you tear your shirt you don't suffocate and die. If you trip and fall you don't float away unable to be recovered. If you drop something important it lands on the ground rather than float away never to be seen again. A solar flare isn't likely to kill your entire crew or destroy the only space gas station for tens of millions of miles. The Sahara is inhospitable and will kill you if unprepared. Space is downright hostile.
You can't really be taken seriously when you sort of hand wave the challenges doing anything in space. It just sounds like you're pointing to some sci-fi books as if those are the answer to everything. Space is hostile and doing anything in it is dangerous and expensive. Any resources that exist there are orders of magnitude more difficult to access let alone exploit than any on Earth.
It gets more interesting yet when you take into account things like linear accelerators which can launch things for pennies. They're not practical on earth, but somewhat practical on the moon. They might also be usable enough for asteroids.
I agree that the initial investment in the first space or moon settlement would be very, very expensive. On the other hand, once it is established it would be self sustaining, and even potentially competitive with earth.
Early on it could maintain itself by launching satellites to GEO and LEO. This is already a viable industry today.
It would also be much MUCH cheaper to source construction materials for further settlements from asteroids (or the moon, at a pinch)
https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/29cxi6/i_made_a_delt...
I mean, it does depend on how much time you're willing to spend. Yeah, the dV required to move from one asteroid to another is pretty tiny, but typical orbit phasing maneuvers like that typically take a long time to execute, especially in the scale of the asteroid belt (you gotta orbit all the way around the Sun).
That said, I feel like (but haven't validated mathematically or in e.g. KSP, or found real-life examples) it should be possible to do small phase shifts with radial burns (e.g. inward then outward to "catch up", or outward then inward to let the target do so) without requiring much of a time expenditure, though this would probably entail more fuel.
We've got plenty of everything on Earth, but maybe it's more fun to play basketball in moon caverns? I can see billionaires paying to go dirtbiking on the surface, but that's not really so sustainable a market. Moonfruits could grow to enormous sizes and make tourists happy. But that's not an export product.
Tourism and sports. Makes sense in a post scarcity economy.
Rocket factories existed over 50 years ago. But they were making ICBMs.[1]
The big change is that it's now possible to make money launching.
(The Mongols used rockets several hundred years ago, but back then no one even knew what an orbit was).
I understand your sentiment, but I’m also profoundly unsettled by the idea that commerce and capitalism are reaching beyond the clutches of our planet. Today is definitely a threshold, but what that threshold means, in a broader sense, is not clear to me.
As liberals we celebrate the entrepreneurial slam-dunk and as technologists we admire the elegant engineering.
But maybe I’m jaded, but I fear the profit motive is going too far. We live in a truly extraordinary moment socioeconomically. Never before in the history of mankind had so much activity been predicated upon commercial viability — and never before had so much gone undone simply because it is unprofitable.
Spacefaring nations’ governments have not abdicated spaceflight, and indeed they’re likely to militarise their approach ever more. But now we have private enterprise ferrying people up there too.
“Sustainable”... what a funny word. When have commercial ventures ever been “sustainable”? A sustainable commercial venture tends to be one that externalises most of its costs (look at the sustainability of bulwarks of 20th century commercial ventures, such as the automotive industry and its bedfellow oil & gas).
I will say I’m glad that manned spaceflight is no longer the prerogative of a couple of extraordinarily well-heeled superpowers. But...
And I hope it goes further. We've seen what happens when decisions are made on the basis of political expedience rather than cost-effectiveness: you get SLS. Or more accurately, you don't get SLS.
> Never before in the history of mankind had so much activity been predicated upon commercial viability
No idea of how you get to that or how you would actually show that this is correct.
> and never before had so much gone undone simply because it is unprofitable.
Again, based on what? How you measure that? Can you show hard numbers that this is true in any way? And even if it was, is it it not better that there so many things in the first place, as opposed to the waste majority of history?
> Spacefaring nations’ governments have not abdicated spaceflight, and indeed they’re likely to militarise their approach ever more.
By any measure human space flight in particular and space-flight in general is less military driven now then ever before.
> When have commercial ventures ever been “sustainable”?
By any measure most humans care about they are very sustainable. Nothing is sustainable for infinity. In the comment above it was clearly meant that it is sustainable compared to congress driven political budget cycles. Or more likely at least for a decade or two there will very likely be a commercial way to get to space.
> A sustainable commercial venture tends to be one that externalises most of its costs (look at the sustainability of bulwarks of 20th century commercial ventures, such as the automotive industry and its bedfellow oil & gas).
Its utterly and completely wrong to claim that MOST of the cost is externalized, that is just simply bad math even in industries with a lot of external cost.
And then you pick automotive and gas as examples, you do understand that selling of vegan hamburgers is also a commercial venture. Are you saying humanity is not sustainable because we can only have 7 billion people because of commercial ventures. Would going back to 100M human living as hunter gathers in a totally non commercial way be 'sustainable' enough for you?
Any the automotive industry is very sustainable and will not go away for a very, very, very long time, there is no indication that we are gone run out of gas anytime soon either, not for decades and more likely never. Far more likely that we are gone come up with something better and basically not use gas much anymore, but it will still be commercially available at that point.
GPS/map plus ads&directory is already printing money...
It gives me hope.
Congratulations to the entire Space X team, this is a real accomplishment and I'm sure not one that came easily. It's exciting to see relatively small companies fulfilling roles that people thought might require massive military contractors.
Elon is an interesting figure. He is, I think, a paradigmatic example of the imperfect creator. His undeniable success in difficult endeavors can create an aura of authority for acting within domains where signals about the appropriateness of his judgement are less clear. We've had technical experts lead us down paths that were not, in hindsight, in our best interests (I think of Teller and Von Neumann's advocacy for aggressive action against the USSR). I hope we can move away from the "elon sucks" v.s. "elon is a genius" dichotomy and into a culture of acknowledging accomplishment while insisting claims in other areas be fully justified.
In an age where radio was new, where televisions were even newer, where transcontinental news took hours, days or even weeks to travel, the knowledge that the Nazis were engaging in mass murder was not readily available.
When allied troops liberated the concentration camps they filmed everything that they saw because they were concerned that without footage no one would believe them. Why? Because it was a shock, a shock so unbelievable in writing that only video and photographic evidence would suffice.
In hindsight being 20/20 it's hard to comprehend the blurred optics of the past era.
Moreover, the blood libel of WW1 was still a fresh memory, and so many who did hear about Nazi atrocities were skeptical.
The world would be different today if not for the photographic and video evidence.
Either way, that's not really my point. There are probably better "eccentrics" to compare Elon Musk to, that aren't so dramatically worse than Elon Musk. Perhaps Howard Hughes? There are some problems with that one too, but I think the rift between Elon Musk and Howard Hughes is probably narrower than that between Elon Musk and Henry Ford.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isambard_Kingdom_Brunel
Brunels' achievements spanned both civil and naval engineering projects, and much like Musk he didn't so much invent something completely new, but innovated on existing systems. His work on propeller screws is very much in the same vein as Musk and the Raptor engine. Probably fair to say he was a larger than life figure in his day and a driving force during the industrial revolution.
I think with Musk, it's the lesser known achievements like the big battery in South Australia that elevate him to the level of Brunel.
https://reneweconomy.com.au/tesla-big-battery-outsmarts-lumb...
Until then, I'll happily consider Elon's or even John Carmack's opinion over those of Elon's numerous, noisy but otherwise uninteresting critics on the Internet and elsewhere.
It's a serious question. Elon may run some successful companies, but beyond that his credibility has taken a beating on any number of fronts.
How much credit should Elon get for heading companies full of other people who do the actual work? Could another leader do a better job, given Elons unsteady behaviour?
Maybe people should recognize that failure in a domain doesn't mean that same person isn't otherwise highly competent.
People are seriously confused these days. It's like doubting Einstein's famous statement about the importance of bees and his credibility in general because there's a photo of him sticking out his tongue.
> How much credit should Elon get for heading companies full of other people who do the actual work? Could another leader do a better job, given Elons unsteady behaviour?
He should get full credit for what he does, not minus "Internet bad points" because someone somewhere didn't like something he said.
That's an unfortunate example to choose considering that famous statement ("If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left.") wasn't actually said by Einstein and also isn't true.
There's no conclusive evidence either way, for both things.
The actual alleged quote is 'Remove the bee from the earth and at the same stroke you remove at least one hundred thousand plants that will not survive.' by the way.
----------------------------
I forgot to link Quote Investigator before: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/08/27/einstein-bees/
It's as close to conclusive as you can get for any quote misattributed to Einstein (and there are hundreds of quotes misattributed to him). You can't prove someone never said something. At best, you can prove someone else said the same thing earlier.
As for whether it's true,
1) You won't find any scientific study or any evidence supporting it. It was just made up.
2) The evidence against it is that the vast majority of our food doesn't require bees. Grains and staples like corn, wheat, rice, and soybean aren't pollinated by insects. Meat doesn't require bees either, as animals tend to be fed grains or grass. Vegetables generally don't require bees. Many fruits can self-pollinate or aren't pollinated by bees (bananas, citrus fruit, etc.). Finally, even the fruits for which bees are currently essential (kiwis, watermelon) could be manually pollinated if necessary. But even if we lost those few fruits and nuts entirely, humans wouldn't go extinct in 4 years (or at all).
No, there's a written statement by somebody (a contemporary) who "thought" Einstein said it. He may have said it in person. He may have communicated it in an unpreserved publication. We will probably never know. But we can't disprove it. We just have a (weak) testimony from someone with better access to Einstein than we have today.
Honestly, these attempts to "fact-check" and label something as "true" or "false" based on our limited perspective today or even based on studies labeled "scientific" (while studies claiming the exact opposite frequently exist...) are obnoxious and often plain misleading. Reality is uncertain.
> The evidence against it is that the vast majority of our food doesn't require bees. Grains and staples like corn, wheat, rice, and soybean aren't pollinated by insects.
You're trying to disprove your quote, not the one originally attributed to Einstein by Ernest A. Fortin, which isn't about mankind. And how was the situation 100 years ago, without all the carefully bred industrial grain types?
Besides, who wants to try for some empiric evidence?
I think "If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left." is the only famous quote about bees by Einstein. The quote you added isn't well known. I agree with you though that the quote you provided is less dubious than the more famous one.
The Elon of SpaceX introduces himself as "I'm proud to be here representing the SpaceX team." The Elon of Tesla is smoking up on camera, throwing humongous ball bearings at the Cybertruck windows, sleeping in his sleeping bag while trying to bring Model 3 production through the Shadow of the Valley of Death.
You almost never hear about any of Elon's direct contributions to SpaceX whereas he's mister Tesla front and center at Tesla pulling stunt after tweet. SpaceX servers a very conservative industrial market and Tesla makes consumer products. These companies require to very different types of leadership. Who is the real Elon behind this public Jekyll and Hyde dynamic? Most likely it's the driven "man of first principles" just doing what needs to be done.
The media is just much more actively following Tesla in because they are marketing to the general population there is a far more detailed view on Tesla.
However overall Elon is pretty much just Elon al the time. Elon talks about the Starship pretty much like he does about the Cybertruck. These are just products he is working on, he informs people about what is going on, changes that they are doing and so on.
Both during SpaceX and Tesla talks he gives about equal time thanking the team as far as I can tell. We know that Elon for example pushed the team to develop phase shut off for Merlin engine. We know that Elon was pushing for adopting steal on the Starship. With both companies its not totally clear when what decisions are made (as makes sense with private companies), but overall I think its pretty much the same.
Most of his twitter shananigans have nothing to do with Tesla or SpaceX, or have to do with both. The Tesla factory opening was of course about Tesla, but his comments in general about Corona were not. His Thailand diver thing was not about a particular company either.
> The Elon of Tesla is smoking up on camera
In that interview he spent about equal time on both companies
> sleeping in his sleeping bag while trying to bring Model 3 production through the Shadow of the Valley of Death
He has said much the same kind of stuff for SpaceX stuff too. Not specifically sleeping in the factory but overwork after failures, not sleeping for a long time and so on.
This seems quite unlikely in both cases.
I remember being glued to my tv when I watched the first shuttle launch in 81. For me, that inspired a lifelong passion for astronomy, which led to a PhD, and eventually a successful tech career.
Today, I sat with my daughters and watched the launch live and then went outside an hour or so later to watch the dragon (just visible) chase the ISS along the horizon in the twilight. (Needed starwalk and some binoculars to find it).
My 11 year old, was literally jumping up and down with excitement and was still telling me about her plans for Mars when I kissed her goodnight. My 13 year old straight out said, “I want to go to university in the states so I stand a chance of getting a job in that control room.”
This is exactly the sort of think I want my children to witness - what humanity can accomplish when we work together.
[1] Planet Hunter https://vimeo.com/419873718
The defenses are public, and do get taped. But I've never seen an accessible video of one. Perhaps with covid come fall. Anyway, I thought I'd mention it, in case it nudges someone.
Hmm... Kunle Demuren has a thesis defense Monday Jun 1 at 10 on zoom...
Congrats and lots of love from Pakistan. Desperately waiting for Docking moments.
> "I hope for ten minutes just now you looked up and saw something exciting, something to give you hope of a future full of wonder. That's the magic of human spaceflight."
We cannot voyage far into space without our best human qualities: cooperation, reason, and hope. Each small step for all humankind.
(From https://orbitalindex.com)
It's hard to compare costs given that it feels like much of NASA space development was science research into how to actually do it, paving the way for future projects.
There are many examples of successful commercial programs that could only exist because of huge ("unprofitable") government R&D behind it. Google maps, the entire internet, commercial space flight, commercial aviation...
I'm not arguing against their success, it's remarkable. I just wonder if this is more nuanced.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System#Funding_hi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_(spacecraft)#Funding_his...
I would love, for example, for NASA to license the technology from SpaceX with a massive knowledge-transfer initiative to provide NASA the capabilities to do these launches itself.
This can only work if there truly are many competing sellers and buyers of the same service.
A market with a monopoly or monopsony doesn't work well, and the military industrial sector often has both: NASA, NRO and DoD are not competing as buyers while Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman basically take turns as contractors because DoD doesn't let one win or lose too many contracts in a row to prevent one of them needing rescue.
I've never seen anyone claim that NASA is incompetent.
This is the Apple II moment of space travel: when megacorporation giants were squeezed out of the market in a few short years by some dudes working out of their garages.
However watching that it's cool to see cutting edge tech rather than the 1960s style stuff. Also hopefully this is just a step for SpaceX on the way to Mars and beyond.
Boeing got the big bucks at $5B or so for their crewed services because they have the "better" more reliable design.
SpaceX only got $3B or so.
Boeing running roughly 60%+ more per seat as well.
So a real accomplishment so far for SpaceX to pull this off.
Off course, if Boeing messes up again, the carpet will be pulled from under their feet.
Edit: Changed Embraer to Bombardier thanks to emiliobumachar's friendly reminder.
I for one disagree pretty heavily with this ruling.
The WTO leaves you with three options as not the US. 1) Capitulate and lose about any industries as the efficiencies of scales of the US economy steam rolls any industries they don't explicitly prop up in your country (the Israel model if you're lucky, the African model if you're unlucky). 2) Cut yourself off from essentially all global trade (the North Korea model) 3) form a large enough economy that you can flaunt more and more of the WTOs rules because what are they going to do? (The Chinese and EU model).
I'm sure the Chinese will love that angle.
As for China, I think that angle is their acknowledged policy plus some.
Could you or anyone please explain what the DoD or its trade policies have to do with that? Or were you talking about another Embraer thing?
Them getting out of the commercial jet industry had the US's geopolitical fingerprints all over it.
Also, Boeing doesn't make mistakes as the result of some bizarre conspiracy that turns out to benefit them in the end. Most of Boeing's mistakes hurt Boeing.
What I've always heard is the legacy defense contractors are used to cost-plus contracts where you don't make bigger profits by reducing costs. They sometimes don't adapt well to firm-fixed-price contracts because changing the organizational culture takes ages. And also the reality is that they can keep raking in money anyway -- Boeing is in fact collecting more cash than SpaceX, so it's not even clear the incentives have changed that much.
I think the more reasonable explanation for Boeing is that they already have access to ULA's proven launch vehicles, so designing a new one just for Starliner wasn't necessary. I think Boeing just chose a more conservative strategy while SpaceX managed to out-innovate them.
That's the legacy defense contractor strategy -- deliver something that checks off the boxes on the government requirement list at an exorbitant price. It's a very conservative strategy; lots of money, no risk.
The problem is that at some point SpaceX started landing rockets and the formerly safe strategy became extremely risky because Boeing/ULA not only has a competitor, the competitor is cheaper. But getting a fat, lazy organization to innovate and compete is hard even when facing an existential threat, and Boeing/ULA have not (yet?) managed that transformation. They've known it's necessary for years [1] but haven't been able to change course.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/03/ula-executive-admits...
It’s easy to claim that vapor is better. Making it into non-vapor, not so easy.
I do see that you at least put “better” in quotes... good call.
The Commercial Crew contract started with NASA providing guidelines of what they wanted.
Multible companies could give a suggestion of their design and how much it would cost.
The two best of those were suggested. The amount of money was not assigned based on their evaluation what was better, that is absolutely not the case.
Rather they selected 2 proposals that had the best combination based of factors, including cost, design, program reliability and so on.
So Boeing was luck that their (at that point) high status got them selected over the cheaper bid of Sierra Nevada (who tried to fight the choice).
So its not like they first selected the two companies and then assigned them money based on how good their designs were.
https://www.bing.com/maps?osid=b49de63c-29a1-4a5d-9742-0fdf6...
Incredible. For all the silly things Elon Musk does on Twitter, he rightfully takes the credit for building these important machines and building the right team with Gwynne Shotwell.
There’s a saying that once you’re in LEO you’re halfway across the universe.
SpaceX recently released a browser game where you use the real flight UI to dock with the ISS: https://iss-sim.spacex.com/
When what is happening is basically an artificial computer process with human overrides, It could be a little disingenous to have a physical switch.
For instance: imagine there's some pump that the computer won't let you disable because disabling it would cause an explosion. You are in an emergency and flip a switch intending to disable it. You now don't know the internal state of the process... whether the switch flip did what you intended or not.
Years ago I took some time out of a very busy schedule to see STS-130, the last shuttle night launch. I've always been a space nerd but I wasn't prepared for how seeing, hearing and feeling a launch in person was so different than watching it on a rectangle. And I wasn't prepared by how profound the experience would be. It was one of the best on-the-whim-of-the-moment decisions I've made in my life. Do it. I guarantee a lump in your throat.
I wasn't able to see a launch when I was last there but I did get to see a Falcon rocket in one of the hangars.
You hear the countdown over the radio, and a few seconds later you feel the rumble hit you, and you can feel it in your chest as it goes up and away. It’s an unmatched experience.
Saying this as someone who is not a huge NASA or space enthusiast.
I did study physics, and I'm more into science than the average person though.
Oddly enough, I think the first time they landed the rocket booster felt more significant to me.
SpaceX launches have made space flight ordinary in a way that is pretty remarkable.
I guess we just don't have the technology.
I really wish that we didn't have to make EVERY experience ultra casual these days though...it was disorienting to keep hearing the astronauts referred to as "Bob and Doug". These are veteran Air Force and Marine pilots. They deserve their honorifics being honored if anyone does.
From what I've read and watched of the modern-era astronauts they are very keen to be inspirational to their successors and seem to have a more personable demeanour. I think this is a positive change and not so much a disrespect.
What really grinds my gears is science fiction that puts a group of people onboard some long space-faring mission where nobody is at all respectable, professional or suitable. I can believe warp drive, green aliens and Dyson spheres but not psychopaths and 18-year old children being put out to space to work. I have near-yelled at my screen more than once saying "You don't deserve to be there, you are a discredit!" :-)
I guess if you consider funding coming from a source other than the government historic, then the launch was borderline mind boggling.
Agreed about "Bob and Doug". But then again the bravery, training, and talent of the astronauts weren't the focus of this launch. This was all about Elon and SpaceX.
This is what a Martin Baker ejection handle looks like: https://c8.alamy.com/comp/BJTDWG/martin-baker-ejection-seat-...
With all due respect to all the engineers that work at SpaceX, the UI of the cockpit has regressed to the point of pure marketing. Same with the suit design, looks like an awful low budget sci-fi film. Functionalism and the beauty in the way things are without adornment is dying. And, it is painful to watch as a engineer who designs HMI systems. IMO design and aesthetic that emerge out of the way things are is so much more authentic than CEO's inspiration from a sci-fi movie genre that was probably conceived by some guy in 80's in half a dozen hours before before putting up a hollywood set. These movie makers did not study UX/UI and it was all about entertaining the audience.
Just look at how functional and beautiful the aesthetics of space flight was like during the golden era of Apollo 11. There was no design. There was just pure emergence of aesthetics from whatever they were doing to make things functional (ok, with some small exceptions like the logo and US flag on the suits): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpLrp0SW8yg
Checkout the new Mars rover - absolutely zero marketing, pure function - https://mars.nasa.gov/news/8649/nasas-perseverance-mars-rove...
If SpaceX designed a mars rover, it would have gaudy shrouds and plastic covers, probably some LED lights to make it look cool, sleek 30, 45, 60 degree angles everywhere (ohhh space aesthetics), and all kinds of marketing bullshit whereas NASA engineers are focused on what is important. And it is gorgeous without even trying.
They sent voyager up with the Golden record. Those dumb engineers wasted precious mass on something purely for sentimental value.
Also compare with other abort modes Shuttle was a dial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_abort_modes#/med...
If something doesn’t work, SpaceX will fix it. You really don’t give their engineers enough credit.
Or a high budget sci fi film, or a medium budget sci fi film, since literally every film involving a spacesuit ever made had a more reasonable design than the utterly ridiculous, cumbersome, and bulky Hamilton Standard design American astronauts were stuck with for such a long time.
Of all the possible critiques of SpaceX, an attack on the new space suits is a genuinely weird one.
It's mostly just that older suits [0] and scifi suits [1] have painted a picture of there being more stuff involved in a suit to break up the expanse of the torso and the back, so they look weirdly plain. I bet they're perfectly fine functionally, and the single port seems like a good idea, but the do kind of miss the mark for me aesthetically.
Also really hope they figure out how to make flexible necks work because this [2] video of them trying to look to the top of their rocket looks so uncomfortable.
[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/33/AC...
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/19/16104004/science-fiction-...
In an article[1] a month ago, Bob said "I don’t think I’m going too far out on a limb to say that the right answer for all flying is not to switch to a touchscreen, necessarily. But for the task that we have and to keep ourselves safe flying close to the ISS, the touchscreen is gonna provide us that capability just fine."
Doug explained "The difference is you’ve got to be very deliberate when you’re putting in input, relative to what you would do with a stick. Because you know, when you’re flying an airplane for example, if I push the stick forward it’s going to go down. I actually have to make a concerted effort to do that with the touchscreen, if that makes sense."
So it sounds like there's more cognitive overhead to use the touch interface for flying. I did think the touchscreen was perfect for the procedure checklists shown extensively in the middle console during today's flight.
In the on-board media event a few minutes ago, he pointed out "One thing that does get lost is there is an extensive button panel down below."
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/04/this-is-certainly-differen...
A stick while flying is useful for weather, but there's no weather in space. In space, a stick probably provides little feedback.
Yet think it makes for a good HN post to "facepalm" at their decisions.
"It's great, I'm so happy, we are all happy family. We had say on how these things work." Wait until they retire to find out the truth.
BTW - On Soyuz they would need sticks, literal sticks, to interact with controls that are out of reach.
Interested what exactly isn't functional about the suits? Most of this post seems to be entirely about looks and outward appearances alone.
The advent of additive machining means everything doesn't have to be right angles and hard corners.[1] As a result the cabin will be safer because your astronauts are less likely to be hurt if there is an unanticipated thrust. Parts can also be made to fit better and to closer tolerances.
With regard to the suits - they look far better than the orange shuttle flight suits. I think that having the umbilical on the thigh was a good innovation. No idea how comfortable they are, but they're only going to be worn for launch & entry. I expect Doug & Bob have already put their shorts & t-shirts on.
https://airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/spacex-dragon-l...
[0] I'm a tiny bit disappointed that they didn't go for a 2001 design, with Eurostile Bold Extended fonts. https://typesetinthefuture.com/2014/01/31/2001-a-space-odyss...
[1] Which is the same reason why shift levers in cars are being replaced by knobs and switches - so the passengers don't get hurt by them in an accident.
I don't think so, they're using the screens for docking too according to their own site. [0] You can do the same basic task the pilot would be doing during a manual approach from what I think is Waypoint 1 (meaning Dragon is in front of the ISS pointed mostly towards it). You can see the actual text on the buttons here [1] and they're all critical system tasks like power cycling the controllers, aborts/emergency response commands, or manual triggers for things during landing.
[0] https://iss-sim.spacex.com/
[1] https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/2...
https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/9243/what-computer...
I'm shifting uncomfortably in my chair just reading that
Personally I found the lack of analog input control harrying toward the end. A toggle between "large" and "normal" thrust mode is all you get. Normal felt like it wasn't fine-grained enough.
Wouldn’t starting a space mission create thousands of direct and indirect jobs?
These advancements are not taking money away from them. The research we did towards all of the space travel in the past 6 decades have given us dividends on several fronts.
Seeing people talking about going to Mars or building space hotels with the situation around the world seems more ghoulish to me than anything else.
Plus, the continent speaks 20+ different languages.
There is no room or encouragement for individual entrepreneurs like Elon Musk. They are regulated and taxed to death.
Europe faces labor shortages in farms and factories, and their solution has been to import labour, illegally, from the 3rd world - to the detriment of their local population and societies. They are anti-tech, at a fundamental level.
Also Europe does has a nack for immense projects like LHC or ITER.
I used to watch old space mission videos and I think how could it would've been to watch them live back in the day.
Now SpaceX has brought this excitement back.
I wish I could have been there at the time, and today was the next best thing. Truly amazing.
And there is the problem that we have stalled quite a bit in engine development.
Apparently:
Musk plans to send a SpaceX rocket to Mars, with cargo only, by 2022, according to the SpaceX website. A second mission, which would take more cargo and crew, is targeted for 2024
So, realistically, 2030?
However the mission to Mars isn't a direct linear descendant of this so it may slip more or less.
Like, they switch footage to another droneship with a rocket that was always there.
I wonder if these people believe in flat Earth, too?
What am i giving to spacex and nasa by believing this? Its barely a drop in the budget.
I know you're not saying that, just baffles me.
Oh you can see how that will pan out, only get to see the failures live - but logical explanation for it all, so simple that even that won't stop the conspiracy rabbles. Still, just have to laugh as it's almost the perfect troll on conspiracy nuts the way it works.
Huh, that reminds me; a friend and I had a half-serious plan as teenagers, to get Microsoft to invest in our venture to secure the (then) remaining Buran orbiter, build a rocket and a launchpad for it, in exchange for plastering the shuttle and the rocket top-to-bottom with Windows logos.
I found this video in some other comment and I think it highlights how incredibly violent the landings actually are, even from very far away https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBlIvghQTlI
ERROR: -JPLgs3ktyo: YouTube said: This video contains content from National Geographic, who has blocked it on copyright grounds.
Sorry about that.Take off eh?
I still remember when I was very little and my dad took me to a launch once.
Hope manned rocket launches will get more regular again and seeing them will inspire a whole new generation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tikZjwdhtSk "This video contains content from National Geographic, who has blocked it on copyright grounds."
Hopefully Crew Dragon proves itself as a capable platform for Earth-orbit transportation, but this fuel issue is a hard one to counter.
Right, but Soyuz spacecraft is flying since 1960-s, has a half a year orbital storage time, and yet it has no toxic RCS for the capsule. At least that simplifies handling after landing.
And it was long since proven RCS doesn't need to use toxic components. The fact that Crew Dragon still uses them points more to the tradition than to the necessity.
Peroxide has serious limitations in performance (and, like all strong oxidizers and monopropellants, has serious safety concerns by itself and can burn you). SpaceX does nothing out of pure tradition, if that hasn’t been made clear by their approach so far. The future is not hypergols, but there are legitimate reasons for it today.
One can always say "but Klipper is a paper spacecraft". Of course, nothing is perfect. Buran can be brought as an example, and arguments against that could be broght up - "oh, it's too old". The point still stands - it's possible to not use toxic components, it's desirable - and it's not done. In my opinion, performance arguments - for a relatively low delta-V system - aren't convincing. After all, Crew Dragon is much bigger and newer craft that Soyuz.
Soyuz is a counterexample which flies for decades. Lockheed's engineers working on orbital fuel storage (Advanced Cryogenic Evolved Stage) will also point that it's not a law of physics.
This deserves a separate reply.
SpaceX - correctly - speeds up the process by maximally reusing the known solutions for the problems - this not only makes development faster, but saves a whole lot of money on testing the variants which will be found not working.
I disagree that SpaceX does nothing out of pure tradition. In many areas, where invention is hard, unlikely and expensive, SpaceX instead opts to optimize the known solutions rather than invent new ones. Practically everywhere - landing first stages, full-flow combustion Raptor, reusing Dragon, all of that has good precedents in Delta-Cliper, RD-270, Gemini and VA TKS - SpaceX makes a right commercial decision to use proven technologies, which brings us results and doesn't break the bank. Note that truly innovative things, like spinning detonation wave engines, are still in the research labs, and not - at least in a big way - in the SpaceX factories. That's correct way to go considering that we have and know a lot already which we don't use fully.
> if that hasn’t been made clear by their approach so far.
No it hasn't. They just need to be read differently. The fact that they brought - well-tested and beneficial - traditions from computer industry into rocketry doesn't make them doing everything strictly from the first principles.
Fuels are extensively well studied and hundreds of thousands of man-hours are spent validating these choices
Given that we hopefully will soon see Starship flying, that may be rather moot point though.
Its the same as arguing that RP1 engines are inferior to H2 engines because RP1 is based off fossil fuels. It's not relevant to the point.
Good to know thanks.
It's not a question of choices - there are choices. I suspect it's a question which is considered less important so far, so SpaceX didn't pay that much attention to it, considering they had to do a lot of other things already. But I hope we'll get there sooner rather than later.
> so SpaceX didn't pay that much attention to it
That's quite an assumption. They didn't decide as you would have, so they must not have thought about it much?
> I suspect it's a question which is considered less important so far, so SpaceX didn't pay that much attention to it, considering they had to do a lot of other things already.
They had a lot of other things to work on, so they - because of that, I suspect - didn't pay that much attention to it.
I don't think it's the same as what you wrote.
Dreamchaser with its propane/N2O thruster is a better counterexample. They avoided toxic components so it could theoretically land at any airport, making it a strong selling point. There are also new(-ish) hydroxylammonium nitrate based propellants which are storable, better than hydrazine and aren't toxic either.
Mass is often an issue with spaceflight. We're arguing about what's better overall, not what's better by all possible criteria. Crew Dragon I'd say has more mass to spare than earlier spacecrafts - because at least of economy of scale and more mass-efficient subsystems.
They had insulation and active stirring system, that was enough for 15-20 days. To fly up to 30 days they needed a microcryocooler.
> Crew Dragon can be rated for hundreds of days
Isn't Soyuz rated for 200+ days?
> Dreamchaser with its propane/N2O thruster is a better counterexample.
Agree, a good example.
HAN and ADN are also interesting options.
That being said, they should be tested and flown a lot more on cargo launches before they're ready to be put on crafts carrying humans.
Right, but at least Soyuz doesn't have them in the returning capsule. Crew Dragon could be just as good in this aspect, but unfortunately isn't. So when moving the capsule from the sea the team has extra dangers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KTDU-80#Pneumatic_Pressurizati...
It's not saying Soyuz is perfect, or near that. It's about Crew Dragon - the spacecraft could use already existing ways to avoid toxic materials in operations, and it wasn't done. And it's hard to do after the design is complete. So we can reasonably hope for the next spacecraft to be better - fortunately trying to make Starship refuelable on Mars and limiting propellants to LOX and methane works for the goal of reducing toxicity.
Even SpaceX' Gwynne Shotwell (she is SpaceX' long-time COO, in case you do not know her yet) is hoping that SpaceX will fly people on Starship in maybe 3-4 years and she is way more grounded than Mr. Musk. They plan to achieve this unreasonable sounding feat by producing large numbers of Starships and launching them very often to accumulate massive experience with the craft in very short time in parallel basically.
https://www.vox.com/2018/4/11/17227036/flight-spacex-gwynne-...
Not a prototype or demonstration, a real commercial flight service.
I don't think this points to the "ungroundness" of Shotwell. Similar projects were discussed and BOTEd for quite some time. The whole suborbital tourism thing is practically rather similar technology, and we're a couple of decades in the implementation time for that.
Hey don’t even have a settled design and have made radical design changes recently.
SpaceX commercial crew program began in 2010 and is only just coming to fruition.
The very first SpaceX launch was in 2008. Since then they have developed and iterated on reliable, reusable space travel. Its plausible that they can adopt that technology to a commercial platform in 8 years.
The robustness of the system is hard to give up. And fueling and recovery has always been a large production requiring attention to detail.
Has NASA or DARPA put out any requests for a next-gen RCS fuel replacement?
Maybe not, but they'd better do. The experience can be changed - SpaceX, for example, convinced them that loading fuel is better done with crew onboard.
The point is, it's better not to have toxic components close to humans, and it also can be done technically. There could be reasons otherwise, but so far I don't see them particularly convincing, robustness and all notwithstanding.
"I don't think its a good reason to use a thing if we ignore the reasons to use the thing"
I also think general history of technology - including space technology - supports this point of view.
Until you literally give an actual engineering (comparison of performance/reliablity/etc) reason that hypergolics are the wrong choice to make, this is effectively saying that "something should be different because I think so"
As with many discussions, we talk here mostly qualitative differences. Quantitative differences are harder to get by - for example, back of the envelop calculation says that 30 kg of peroxide in Soyuz landing capsule could be, roughly, replaced with 15 kg of hydrazine, so you'd have a 15 kg mass saving here, but in general actual engineering calculations are harder. I wish they wouldn't be such.
Given those very crude estimations and the practice, which shows there are no big unforeseen problems, we have a valid arguments for the alternative. It's an engineering argument, an estimation and not necessarily full calculations, and it's not effectively an arbitrary opinion. You may finally decide the issue using hard numbers, but since we don't have them now, the question stands.
What would be the options? Compressed cold-gas (which don't have much kick, and require compressed gas which carry their own dangers).
You could go with a monoprop Hydrazine which would eliminate half the toxic stuff. There are also some new developments here: hydroxylammonium nitrate (HAN)/water/fuel ? No idea of the trade offs there.
Biprop hydrocarbon/gaseous compressed oxygen? Presumably that'd require an ignition source (and power source). How do you see that trade off?
Do you consider high-test peroxide non-toxic? (It certainly has a different risk profile, but is nasty stuff on contact with about anything that can oxidize). The decomposition would also make storage and rotation a consideration.
Soyuz uses straight hydrogen peroxide, I believe, 82% concentration. For 3 tons capsule it takes 30 kg of peroxide - monopropellant - to land.
Buran is still the example of a high tech option - it used LOX and kerosene for RCS, the biggest trick was to keep LOX liquid for a month-long missions. It was done with mid-1980 technologies.
Kliper planned to use LOX and ethanol. The craft wasn't completed in metal though.
One has to remember that hydrogen peroxide - the rocket concentrations are called HTP, high test peroxide - can be used as an oxidizer, after a catalytic decomposition - and after decomposition HTP is easily hypergolic with fuels. "Hypergolic" doesn't mean "nitrogen-containing, long-storing and toxic", it means "self-igniting" - and it could be non-toxic (or at least HTP toxicity is on the whole different level that hydrazine's one).
To come back from orbit you don't need too much delta-V. So Soyuz uses 30 kg of peroxide, maybe it would use 15 kg of hydrazine for the same effect - you're saving 15 kg in a 3 ton spacecraft but losing on toxicity. Similarly, Crew Dragon is a heavier craft, flying on a bigger F-9 rocket, it can probably allow for some extra mass spent for RCS fuel in order to make it non-toxic.
> You could go with a monoprop Hydrazine which would eliminate half the toxic stuff.
Hydrazine is, I think, a way bigger half. NTO is comparatively benign... not so carcinogenic. But still lethally dangerous :( .
> Biprop hydrocarbon/gaseous compressed oxygen?
Was done at least. Yes, it would require extra systems. You think it can't be done?
> Do you consider high-test peroxide non-toxic?
Comparing to hydrazine - yes.
> The decomposition would also make storage and rotation a consideration.
Yes. Have to chill it, take care while in storage and keep tanks extra clean. But still.
The toxicity of NTO is bad, extremely so, and everyone knows it. But having your oxidizer tank suddenly go boom on its own accord is even worse.
Curious about the spacesuits and performance of the “minimal” touchscreen interfaces compared to the older stuff.
The touchscreen interface is "different" - the astronauts talked a bit about helping SpaceX design it and the pros and cons of it in a recent interview. I wrote it up here but you can also check the original long NASA TV thing.
https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/04/this-is-certainly-differen...
Great graphics and timelines of the mission can be found here.
Moreover, how long until we get a "brought to you live by starlink" banner?
Then we have launches straight to geostationary orbits and similar, for those the second-stages will essentially never come down and they end up positioned in a graveyard orbit.
https://hackaday.com/2018/05/23/spacexs-next-giant-leap-seco...
The Wikipedia page for Crew Dragon says "The spacecraft launches atop a Falcon 9 Block 5 rocket and returns to Earth via an ocean splashdown." [1]
The Wikipedia page for Boeing Starliner says "It is designed to be compatible with four launch vehicles: Atlas V, Delta IV, Falcon 9, and Vulcan." [2]
And here I am fighting webpack to not take minutes to compile a bunch of js files.
Everytime I watch SpaceX rockets fly, I ask myself “Am I wasting my life? Is what I am doing even worth it?”
I hope we start a huge manufacture economy here that rivals the software economy. We’ve gotta move from being mass consumers to sustainable and ultra-efficient consumers.
This is a monumental day for our country.
Private space flight started with this flight.
I hear Dennis Tito and Mike Melvill sighed.
21 June 2004
Is it real paper and pencil? Or some sort of e-ink tablet. iPad? Kinda bukly, though...
Who needs a space-pen? Got a space-watch? :)
That's as much as I was able to gather from today and Wednesday's livestream.
The ISS is not "our national lab". The hint is in the name.
Also, glad we got the very important reminder that this is happening in AMERICA
There's a lot of intense interest in that idea, and yet so far we've barely gotten off the ground. Furthermore, unless some things change, our time window for being able to do that is growing shorter. Without a re-focus, it may not happen for a thousand years. And that'd be a shame. Dreams and stories that don't fuel action are wasted.
Lots of old books talked about 'Conquering Space'. Looks like we need to conquer ourselves first.
The difference in effort and energy required is roughly 1:10. They basically just throw people high up so that they can say they have been space.
> Lifting off from Launch Pad 39A atop a specially instrumented Falcon 9 rocket, Crew Dragon will accelerate its two passengers to approximately 17,000 mph and put it on an intercept course with the International Space Station. Once in orbit, the crew and SpaceX mission control will verify the spacecraft is performing as intended by testing the environmental control system, the displays and control system and the maneuvering thrusters, among other things. In about 24 hours, Crew Dragon will be in position to rendezvous and dock with the space station.
Would you get a reference to M&Ms? I know SpaceShip1 was 16 years ago now. How time flies.
Does anyone have a back story on that?
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/mrap-rolls-through-pad-evacuati...
If you want the closest view of a launch without being in the rocket, get some firefighting experience (preferably on an aircraft carrier or something of similar hazard) and then ask your senator to recommend you as a qualified guest firefighter.
Is it though?
It's a lab, used by our nation, orbiting the Earth.
It erases the ~200 trillion bacteria that were also launched!
I assumed this launch would be uneventful since SpaceX has been flying numerous missions to the ISS, and this one merely has people on it but is basically business-as-usual for them.
Even though that was 8 years ago (!) I can still remember it clearly.