It is hard to convey how "sustainable" this feels to me. For the first time, humans have gone into orbit in a spacecraft that was designed from the ground up to be a commercial venture.
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.
>> into orbit in a spacecraft that was designed from the ground up to be a commercial venture.
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.)
On the ISS you can produce higher quality optical fiber than on earth [1]. A demonstration fabrication unit is already on the ISS, and NASA has recently published prices for using the ISS for commercial tasks such as this. I suspect many other manufacturing methods can also benefit from zero gravity, and as launch costs drop more of these will be explored.
It's interesting to think about that from the other side, too. Just delivering the raw materials to the manufacturing facility would cost ~$3000/kg (assuming rock bottom SpaceX prices). Based on some loose googling, I think that 1kg of raw material would yield only something on the order of 100m of cable. It looks like a typical 100m fiber optic patch cable retails for about $60.
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.
So, no idea the cost of O-O amplification or O-E-O these days, but it's expensive. You have to run power (usually there's power with the optics), and the bigger problem is real estate (At least in urban areas). 100x lower signal loss would do away with most of these.
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.
> I think that 1kg of raw material would yield only something on the order of 100m of cable.
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.
> the raw materials to the manufacturing facility would cost ~$3000/kg
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.
People used railroads to profitably carry freight (originally with carts pulled by horses) right from the get-go. They became a lot cheaper to make once steel could be economically mass produced.
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.
The points you bring up don't seem to support your argument. It took a decade from when people first attempted to haul freight with a steam locomotive until the first commercially successful railway was built. If you start counting from when the steam engine was first invented then it would be more than a century. You're correct that a lot of that success depended on improvements in manufacturing capability but I don't think it's so obvious that there was a huge market for steam locomotives right from the start, early steam engines were notoriously fickle, required constant attention and a trained engineer, needed specialized tooling and materials to repair when they inevitably broke, and they were incredibly inefficient and fuel hungry at first. That's why they started out so linked to coal mines, the mine produced enough cheap fuel for the engine and already had a lot of the metalworking tools and capable engineers needed to maintain it.
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.
Yeah; I would compare railroads/rockets to microcomputers/VR. The latter is definitely impressive, and unique, and evocative for futurists, and has some niche use-cases, but doesn't have a clear "killer app". While the former had people - real businesses - chomping at the bit even before it became economical.
For the time being, they are targeting specialty applications where it is not uncommon to charge in excess of $1000 per meter even for normal earthly fibers.
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.
That's kind a obvious: high-frequency trading. Thousands of banks and companies will happily to pay premium to get some edge over competitors. As soon as single entity on market have it everyone else would want it as well so there will be plenty of demand.
How much of that material needs to come from Earth, though? If we can get that from the Moon, for example, then you wouldn't need nearly as much fuel to get the raw materials into orbit for manufacturing. Then all you need to do is get the finished product to wherever it needs to go (e.g. in an atmospheric entry vehicle, or to some other orbital factory, or to some far out colony, or what have you).
Which is why this fiber optic thing is a big deal. They're demonstrating that you can build useful stuff in space that are a) already have a demand, and b) are infeasible or impossible to manufacture downwell. More attention = more funding, more attempts... until, I'm hoping, we'll reach critical mass and someone will start mining near-Earth asteroids, or perhaps capture one and move it a bit closer to us, at which point the prices of space material will drop. = more funding, more attempts, until someone figures out how to make stuff useful for space missions in space, and this will be the true beginning of a self-sustaining in-orbit economy.
High frequency traders will want the best connectivity humanely possible. It’s a zero sum game. If they can beat a competitor firm’s signals by the smallest fraction of a second, even a nanosecond, they reaps in the profits. So $100m for some better fibre? Go nuts!
High frequency traders do NOT want to be limited by the speed of light in a fiber - due to its refractive index (1.5 for ZBLAN according to Wikipedia) this is only 66% of the speed of a radio signal. Over 10km this amounts to an 11 microseconds difference - already significant for HFT.
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).
Personally I waffle on this myself. My instinct tells me it’s bad but then I try to decide what trading cadence I would limit it to. Assume there is a CEO who wants to do something nefarious to manipulate the stock price. If they make a decision how fast can a company actually act on it? Would or could they make the company act on 1 hour boundaries? Even if we limited trades to once per week is that the long term we want a CEO to consider? At what time frame does a stock stop being a stock and convert to something else? Then I decide even by minute trading is not really something that management can even consider, even if they want to, so there is really no point to artificial limits imposed by law and take a more laissez faire attitude.
I waffle on this one too. Institutions that do HFT have a huge capital cost and pay large fees before they even make their first trade. They also employ programmers, traders, etc. Basically, these taxes are going to need to sum to something really big to dissuade them. Too small, they ignore it. Medium, the market will just consolidate. Large, you'll stop HFT, but at what consequence? The probability of unintended consequences is high.
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.
A tiny tax on each order (bid, ask) entry would cut the total volume of orders by a huge factor, cost them only a small fraction of their takings, and probably fund free college for everyone in the US.
No you wouldn’t. The development of HFT has created massive liquidity for markets and reduced bid ask spreads in a way that benefits retail investors more than past alternatives.
Does it benefit society though? I'd argue that increased liquidity in markets is a net negative. That means it's easier for investors to sell their assets quickly, which is exactly what you don't want if you want to encourage long-term investment.
People buy and flip houses, despite the fact that it takes months. What timeline would you think would discourage short-term investment?
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.
> People buy and flip houses, despite the fact that it takes months. What timeline would you think would discourage short-term investment?
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.
Flipping houses is also speculative, as those who have lost money doing so can attest to. If you spend a lot of time/money flipping a house only to have the market tank or you just chose a bad area, then no one buys and all that "value" is lost in wasted resources.
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.
Volatility is the main concern [1]. Making trading decisions based on microseconds is speculation. How can anyone or anything reach an understanding of something as complex as markets in this short time?
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.
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.
Wait until some HFT investors will step up to buy such fiber cable to be microseconds faster than competition. Those $3000/kg could turn out to be a small change.
> 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.
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 ...
The company that sent that demonstrator does not intend manufacture at the station. The plan is, once the tech is proven, to launch a dedicated robotic craft. It would do the work and return on its own. That moots all sorts of docking/navigation problems, dramatically reducing the complexity of the craft.
How pressing of a problem is the quality of optical fiber? Something tells me tells me that even if you imagine that all the capacity already existed, the mere shipping of raw goods up and finished goods down would probably eat any marginal profits over earth-manufactured fiber.
For regular data transmission, I can't imagine it to be worth it - far bigger gains could be made by just making repeaters smaller and cheaper by iterative design improvement.
Perhaps there are scientific uses where loss in fiberoptics makes a project infesible? Or perhaps quantum entangled photons, which one can't amplify?
I suppose the issue is no matter how small and cheap the repeaters get, they will still need power, backups, replacements and all the complexity that implies.
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.
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.
> You get access to rare materials that can be immensely valuable.
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 don't know much about the intricacies of asteroid mining, but human beings are very capable entities. As great as machines like the Mars rovers are, there's no comparison. A human astronaut could probably accomplish as much in a week as a Mars rover can in a year. When I was reading the daily diaries of one of the rover drivers, it was incredible how much effort and thought went into the most trivial activities. A simple sounding task like "go look at that rock 20 meters away and take a picture of it" would be a multi-day effort, whereas it would only take an astronaut a few minutes
> A human astronaut could probably accomplish as much in a week as a Mars rover can in a year.
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.
We (well, Europeans) explored the earth when it looked quite similar to space exploration today. Year-long journeys with very little chance of survival, and no idea what was waiting on the other side. We ended up making some amazing discoveries (the new worlds) that turned out to be of vast economical benefits. Who says space exploration can't be similar.
(Yes, there is a lot of controversy over colonialism that I won't get into here.)
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.
Let's hope someone with a similar view-point doesn't discover Earth, then! :D
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.
It doesn't matter. The speed of light is too slow for anyone out there to get here in a reasonable amount of time. Even if the universe is densely populated with aliens more knowledgeable than us odds are none are close enough to establish useful communication. That is by the time they realize they know more than us and that knowledge arrives we probably will have discovered it in on our own. (that leaves room to have alien art on the wall but nothing else useful)
We can't see crap now. We need more, bigger, better - and most importantly - space-based telescopes to be able to image interesting objects in anything resembling fidelity. There's e.g. a bunch of exoplanets, or hell, even planets in our own system, that we could image from a distance, if we could put couple hundred tons worth of equipment in space. For the more ambitious future, there are papers showing that you could even use the Sun itself as a lens to shoot pictures of exoplanets comparable with quality to photos of Earth from early days of space exploration! So, if we want to see things and truly learn about them remotely, we still have to get much better at sending things to space.
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.
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.
During much of the Earth exploration phase destinations in Asia had more food and money than Europe (also easier to survive a winter)... I don't see this ever being the case with Mars.
It's cheaper to ship materials to Low Earth Orbit from Mars, than it is to ship those same materials from earth. Can you imagine our current space industry (worth billions of dollars) could be operated from Mars? If there was a settlement on Mars, they could do it for approximately 2/3 of the (fuel) cost of doing it from Earth.
Of course, an industry established at a moon settlement could do it for even less. :-P (1/4)
I appreciate your thoughts, but they are sad thoughts to me.
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.
Sure, as a society we do some things purely for emotional reasons. But we should be honest about that - we shouldn't pretend that the reason we're building the Washington monument is because of it's potential use as a grain silo.
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.
Light lag is one reason for humans to go. Until we crack robotics and AI to the point science can do itself (which I doubt it'll happen in the next 30-50 years), we'll still need humans micromanaging the robots remotely, and it's much easier to do with HD video streams and with millisecond RTT when you're on a science ship orbiting the body in question, vs. using occasional photos that take hours to send, on top of 3-22 minutes of lag, as we have now with Mars.
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.
which I doubt it'll happen in the next 30-50 years
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.
This is building the relevant aspects of the economy. Sitting on our butts, playing zero-sum games to squeeze more money out of each other with ads and products increasingly optimized to be as fragile as possible... that isn't getting us anywhere.
(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.)
The leading self-driving vehicle company was bankrolled by ad money, so I think your cynicism is misplaced.
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.
Our notion of exploration is very much tied to ancient history and in particular exploring places that we could not otherwise learn anything about other than by going there. The problem with space exploration is that we already have explored it to a huge degree just by using telescopes and remote probes. It's not entirely clear what humans could learn by going to somewhere like Mars, that couldn't otherwise be learned using satellites, robots and telescopes.
My problem with this framing of the argument is that it's reasoned from the position of "If we want to do X then how much do we have to spend to make it happen". It's very much a "moonshot" style of thinking where you are only considering doing it once, it's not sustainable and it's not scalable. What we need to be asking is "If we want to do X what systems do we need to put in place so that X is trivial". Then the goal becomes to build sustainable and profitable industries that make everything leading up to X easier, cheaper, safer, and more accessible to everyone. It's not as direct of a route but it has a compounding effect built into it that works for you and eventually does all the work to keep X going.
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.
The estimate I've seen was that fourteen years of work of Opportunity would have been two weeks for a geologist in a Mars buggy. So 52x is probably very pessimistic.
There are some latency involved when it comes to interplanetary exploration, not to mention communication between planets. That alone gives human exploration a certain advantage in some cases.
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.
People who feel passionately about something impractical can get pretty creative trying to justify their passion. The creativity is the output here -- not the stated goal.
Perhaps ironically, advances in technology have generally served to make human space exploration more expensive, not less expensive, when compared to the alternative (unmanned/robotic exploration).
I don't know enough about any of the relevant fields to speak with confidence about what advancements are more likely to happen in the next few decades, but it feels that the number of things we'd need to get better at to send humans further than lunar orbit with a decent chance of survival represent a far greater challenge than the relatively modest progress we would need to make in AI to make more capable and independent exploration craft.
This is actually not so bad. Returning to earth is (relatively) cheap. Returning to earth from the moon is really cheap, so the extra fuel mass is affordable. From Mars you probably want to scavenge it.
Of course they did. It sparked a huge controversy back in ~2010-2013, when some known scientists and popular science authors (I'm pretty sure it was either L. Krauss or M. Kaku, but can't for the life of me find a reference now) started speaking up that sending older people on one-way trips would be a great way to lay foundations for a Mars colony, and there are lots of people who would happily volunteer to work until death on Mars.
Nobody knows their own life expectancy and geriatrics are perhaps not most suitable to survive in a harsh environment, running around an alien planet all day.
I'd volunteer. It would be the adventure of a lifetime (literally).
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.
That's a long way off, if it ever happens. Rocket launches will be tightly regulated, in fact they already are as ICBMs. Any private launches without approval from a big power (or all of them) will likely be stopped by any means.
You don't understand the challenges. Sending humans up with semi-automated machines would actually be a lot easier than fully automated machines. The human race's entire experience so far has been with machines in 1g. We have almost zero experience making self repairing factories in any gravity. We have zero experience mining in low or zero gravity. It might take several generations of engineers and miners in space to figure out all of the problems, slowly automating each step at a time through trial and error like we've been doing for centuries.
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.
Exactly. I can't remember which NASA official I'm paraphrasing here (I think Gene Cernan?), but humans are the cheapest, most abundant, and most "fully automated" machines known today.
The problems you list seem to apply to both fully and semi automatic machines. E.g. wouldn’t human operated mining equipment need just as much lubrication as pre-programmed ones?
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.
Humans plus Earth-like environment. Remember that micro environment has to go with them everywhere, and they die within minutes without it functioning within relatively narrow constraints.
But there'll still be humans. Just not necessarily physically at the mine or factory. All you really need is a robotic chassis that has sufficiently good AI to use hands and follow basic instructions, perhaps helped by a guy in a VR suit back on earth or in a nearby spaceship. Perhaps aided by simulations to ensure low latency - things in space should be easier to simulate without the outside world interfering much.
> perhaps helped by a guy in a VR suit back on earth or in a nearby spaceship.
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.
I think it's interesting to explore whether remote-control VR lag can be combated with simulations. If you can simulate the other side well enough, you should be able to manipulate the simulation until you've got a recording that you're satisfied with and then send it. This is kind of how Mars rovers are steered today.
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.
> If you can simulate the other side well enough, you should be able to manipulate the simulation until you've got a recording that you're satisfied with and then send it. This is kind of how Mars rovers are steered today.
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).
> Is it really that much easier to build space robots to cover as much breadth of function as one astronaut-engineer in a space suit?
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.
I think you've answered your own question, which is an easier place to operate? A (admittedly salty) static platform a couple hours helicopter ride away, or a radioactive vacuum that requires years of planning to reach and which by the way is minutes away even by radio?
The fact we've yet to automate so much here with such large incentive to do so is evidence we're not there yet.
There's still no real substitute for having a person on site to do work when machines breakdown or get stuck and the problems with trying to use machines in their place get worse as the time lag between the machine and it's operators gets worse. Even on modern automated oil rigs there are people driving, repairing and monitoring the systems locally.
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.
>> 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.
If anything the oil platform is much much more appealing. You can go diving and see a bunch of sea life. That's part of why as a human I'm more excited by sea steading than space exploration.
We can do both. We should do both, as both will provide technology for creating and maintaining artificial, closed environments for long-term habitation.
(Though in all honesty, I want to see both happen because I loved both Star Trek and SeaQuest DSV as a kid.)
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.
That's what I meant by "hold off". It isn't commercial until it is. Government-sponsored developmental programs may one day pave the way for commercial operations, but that hasn't happened yet.
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.
Especially given that we'll need to leave the magnetosphere to access a lot of space mining. You either bring a ton of shielding+food+water+life support+crew quarters, or you advance autonomous operation. One of those is already happening and highly applicable to other fields.
Imo what ever comes after homo sapiens inherits the solar system, not homo sapiens ourselves
The magnetosphere bit is intriguing... I've never heard of a proposal to use superconductors to generate a miniature magnetosphere outside of earth's. Even for earth orbit it seems that'd be helpful way to reduce radiation exposure. Superconductors should be able to be cooled to operating temperature readily enough, meaning minimal power once charged. Spaceship hulls are aluminum and non-ferromagnrtic. Odd to never have never heard of discussion on the idea. Anyone have resources for such tech?
This has already been proposed for shielding the entire planet Mars, see https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/moon-mars/a25493/magn... (2017). I'd love to see SpaceX take a crack at this, conceivably it would amount to launching a modified MRI into Mar's L1. It's actually within the launch capability of Falcon Heavy so it's something they could start working on now.
That's amazing! Even a few shipment of neodymium magnets could be sent. Then in a 1,000 years after the collapse of our civilization and emergence of a new technological civilization there'd be a Mars with much thicker atmosphere and potentially even liquid water.
> 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.
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.
You can invest in SpaceX indirectly and directly. You have SpaceX indirectly through some mutual funds and actually through Google since Google’s VC arm invested in SpaceX. I have a tiny bit in those two via a mutual fund and Google. The problem is both have SpaceX as a very small percentage of their portfolio. There is also Virgin Galactic but I don’t have that.
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.
> I just don't see any commercial reason to launch people into space
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.
There’s a story by sci-fi writer Daniel Suarez about that very idea of human mining an asteroid [1]. It’s actually a well thought out thought experiment. I suspect it’d almost require shenanigans like described in the book as modern society is so cautious as to be bordering on paranoid. Space won’t get colonized without significant risk for significant rewards.
Asteroid mining is pointless for Earth-based industry. There's more of everything on Earth and it's orders of magnitude closer to processing and manufacturing infrastructure.
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.
Most asteroids are worthless chunks or carbon, another significant portion are sort of dirty balls of sand and rock. The smallest portion are composed of any metals. Metallic asteroids are mostly iron and nickel and unlikely to be loaded up with precious metals. Any that would be interesting for mining would be in the asteroid belt which requires significant amounts of energy to reach in a reasonable time frame.
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.
Your every response to very real engineering challenges is "just do the thing" or hand wave it away. I don't think you actually understand the difficulties. You have read some pop science books and some "hard sci-fi" and think you've got it all worked out.
Everything seems easy and straight forward when you don't understand the actual problems. Deep space is hostile and unforgiving. Asteroid and cometary landing/sample return probes have had a rough track record because despite a lot of great engineering and effort the task is extraordinarily difficult. You're talking about mining asteroids like it's a solved problem and it's just a question of willpower.
Be interested in spaceflight, manned or otherwise. It's awesome and there's tons to learn. It's great to explore. But if you're serious about the endeavor, don't pretend it's not immensely difficult. Many things in pop science books or science fiction are simply not practical and many more aren't even possible. Also while space is awesome, Earth is right here. It's the only place in the solar system humans can live without being wrapped in massive amounts of technology. There's much better odds of Civilization B being destroyed by a catastrophe than Civilization A here on Earth.
> I don't think you actually understand the difficulties.
I understand the difficulties perfectly well (or at least recognize that there are numerous difficulties far beyond my expertise, let alone that of people far more knowledgeable about space exploration than I am). That doesn't mean they cannot be overcome in the coming decades, nor does it mean that they cannot eventually be overcome in a way that's economically viable, no matter how much you strangely want to pretend otherwise, nor does it mean we can't discuss how we might try to overcome them. Technology marches on, and naysayers like you get left in the dust.
> You have read some pop science books and some "hard sci-fi" and think you've got it all worked out.
"pop science books and some 'hard sci-fi'" indeed. But no, apparently you've got me all figured out. Just some starry-eyed nobody who watched Dune a few too many times instead of someone who, you know, actually pays the slightest bit of attention to what NASA (let alone other space agencies) is actively researching and around which it's planning missions.
(As a disclaimer: I have watched David Lynch's Dune a few too many times, but I assure you that has no bearing on my perception about what's feasible in the coming decades in terms of actual real-life space technology, at least not until we get people so hopped up on drugs that they figure out how to fold space)
> You're talking about mining asteroids like it's a solved problem and it's just a question of willpower.
All things are a "question of willpower". Nobody (least of all myself) is under any illusion that it's easy or that it's a "solved problem". The only claim is that it will someday be possible, and that for that to happen we need to be figuring out how to solve those problems, and in general what we need to do to make it possible.
Meanwhile, you're talking about mining asteroids like it's some impossibility that we'll never achieve. Too hard with today's technology and economies of scale, so let's not even talk about it, right? What a bleak and pathetic outlook on humanity's technological progress.
> Many things in pop science books or science fiction are simply not practical and many more aren't even possible.
And this ain't one of them. There is nothing being discussed here that is entirely outside the realm of physics. We ain't talking fucking warp drives and replicators and Vulcans here. We're talking about very real plans and very real research by very real space agencies and very real companies trying to figure out exactly how they can make use of the vast resources beyond this single planet.
Yeah, obviously it's expensive now, and we don't have all the necessary technologies now. What about 20 years from now? 50? 100? That's the target, and that's where we're fundamentally at odds: you're going off on this tangent about how it's so expensive and impossible in 2020 (and needlessly insulting me in the process - thanks, buddy) while entirely ignoring that we ain't talking about 2020 at all. And in that equation is the fact that Earth's resources are - whether you like it or not - finite. Earth cannot sustain humanity's continued economic and industrial growth even in ideal conditions (and let's face it: we ain't in ideal conditions). As resources become scarcer and scarcer, so too do those asteroids become not only more and more economically viable to mine, but more necessary.
Baby steps. Now is the time to start building out that infrastructure, bit by bit. First LEO, then the Moon, then beyond (including Ceres and the rest of the asteroid belt). We'll get there eventually, assuming we don't drive ourselves to extinction first.
> Also while space is awesome, Earth is right here. It's the only place in the solar system humans can live without being wrapped in massive amounts of technology.
Not forever it ain't.
And that's another key point there: you do realize how destructive Earthside mining is to that very environment that makes Earth friendly to us humans, right? How it poisons our soil and our water and trashes ecosystems? Earthside mining at modern scales is "cheap" only if you ignore the countless externalities thereof. Such concerns are not an issue with asteroids; there is no ecosystem to destroy, no rivers to poison.
The sooner we're mining asteroids instead of Earth, the better the prospects for Earth to continue to be a place where humans can live without being wrapped in massive amounts of technology. And if we're too late for that, well, hopefully we've figured out the technologies with which we need to wrap ourselves, eh? If we can survive in space, we can survive on even the most human-hostile Earth imaginable, and between mining and carbon pollution and deforestation and the myriad of other short-sighted things we as a species have done to our home, that human-hostile Earth is not only an inevitability, but one that's coming sooner than you think.
I would like to take issue with your claim that it's closer to processing and manufacturing infrastructure. If expressed in km that is correct. It gets really interesting once you express it in Delta V.
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)
> It gets really interesting once you express it in Delta V.
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.
They said during the launch live broadcast that SpaceX intends to fly paying tourists by next year. Apparently many tourists have also visited the space station.
Yeah they stopped doing that a while ago and today when watching the launch with friends I was surprised they didn't know it was a thing. When Mark Shuttleworth went there it was all over the tech news.
Space tourism to the ISS is just US taxpayers paying for billionaires' vacations. Yes, NASA charges a fee, but it is tiny relative to the cost of the service. If somebody develops a private space station, great. Until then, this isn't an industry that deserves any support.
I think one of the main priorities is military supremacy. It might not appear as that from a bit away, but that should not be overlooked. NASA's boss really highlighted some of that indirectly today as well with the increased funding to build out Space Force and some of that money goes to SpaceX obviously. So commercial, yes, but not like a car. More like a tank or fighter jet.
With China making plans towards a potential moon landing, there's a chance of a 2nd space race forming, but to Mars. Not speaking to the odds of that, just saying I could see it developing in the next decade.
Good point, despite all the Mars hype I think primary focus is going to be satellites that carry new kind of weapons and surveillance infrastructure, and establishing a basecamp on moon first.
"If you build it, they will come" suffers from confirmation bias.
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.
Weren't solar roadways just bullshit and rather thoroughly debunked from the engineering POV from the very start? Concorde also AFAIR was a victim of oil prices.
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.
Concorde was also a victim of something else getting built that people went to instead— widebody business class. It turns out that a lie-flat business bed for seven hours is more appealing to most people than a cramped, economy-style cabin for three and half hours.
Solar Roadways was also obviously going to be several orders of magnitude more expensive than traditional asphalt, even with very generous estimates in in Solar Roadways's favor, but people still dumped a few million into that scam. And several governments (i.e. France) even wasted money on larger implementations of it despite failing even the most optimistic back of the envelope calculations.
And the ""If you build it, they will come" suffers from confirmation bias" point-of-view comes from the myopic vision that most scientific minded folks have when it comes to engineering projects.
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.
The fact that many scientific breakthroughs were happy accidents is no coincidence. Luck favors the prepared mind, and one of the best ways to prepare yourself is to build a lot of stuff that doesn’t work. The only reason it’s so common for breakthroughs to be “stumbled upon” is because those who discover them were, while not realizing it, preparing themselves to be able to have the “that’s funny...” moment countless others missed.
Not quite, it’s “If you build it, they might come.” You only need to look to the history of railroad in the US to see how infrastructure frequently didn’t pay off.
Yep, but railroads were extremely overbuilt and huge swaths of companies went bankrupt. My point is that despite eventual usage, infrastructure is fraught with wiped out companies.
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.
Falcon/Dragon might not have a high-volume commercial future for human flight, but Starship Crew certainly will. With rapid full reusability the cost drops to the point where single-digit millionaires can afford a trip, and much larger space hotels are affordable to build.
Crew Dragon is commercial in the sense that NASA wants to pay for it, and shopped around for a better vehicle than Soyuz.
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.
Space as a destination in itself seems fine to me.
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.
I can think of one commercial case for people in space: servicing existing systems in orbit. There have been a handful of STS missions that involved EVAs to service everything from the Hubble's famous mirror to correcting launch issues with commercial communication satellites like STS-49: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-49
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 Space Shuttle was unique in terms of orbital servicing in that it had an airlock, a giant cargo bay, and CanadaArm.
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 challenge is one of delta-v. To get from any orbit to any other orbit requires a change in velocity which requires propellant. Space is notably empty so you can't just go harvest yourself some propellant.
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.
Or possibly a dedicated servissing platform, say with ion engines or refueling capacity. It could do slow orbit changes unmanned with crew launched only for the actual servissing, or possibly dragging broken sats for repair to a manned station and back - could be pretty workable in GEO belt if you manage to get and sustain a crew there.
I’m not super well informed on this, but is there any reason for sending humans to space at this moment in time (or for the next 20 years for that matter). The only reason my layperson understanding can think of is mining minerals in space, but I fail to see why robots wouldn’t be able to adequately do the job. In fact wouldn’t sending humans make future space ventures even more costly and put people into unessisary risk?
Building a moon-base or mars-base would be an interesting experiment for humans.
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.
There are plenty of inhospitable places here on earth where you could set up your anthropology experiment— deep under the ocean, for example, heck there was even a series of videogames made about this exact scenario. :)
That's right. I'd like to see that happen too. Although I'd argue that space has much more abundant materials & resources due to its vastness. Minus the geopolitical baggage.
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
Yeah, the bootstrap funding is the main issue - other than that basically all available resources are out there in space, pretty much by definition. From that poikt of view it is a no brainer, once the initial cliff can be overcome.
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.
I'm thinking about colonies that are (eventually) self-sufficient. I agree that it's easier to have a small crew of people living at the bottom of the ocean because it's generally cheaper to get stuff down there. But a self-sufficient colony is pretty much impossible, I think.
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.
Self sufficient on the bottom of the ocean is IMO no more difficult than self sufficient on Mars, _particularly_ when you consider how much infrastructure you could establish there with even a fraction of the cost of bootstrapping a Mars colony.
I think the problem is that we have the ability to wipe out the whole earth many times over, and a lot of the governments and leaders who have that power are extremely unreliable.
Won't they just recreate Earth's social structures on the Moon? Possibly with divergence over time but why would they suddenly abandon racism and nationalism?
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.
I would assume/hope the fact there are only a very small number of you living on an inhospitable rock would bond people together in the effort needed to survive.
I find it interesting that all the major powers in Expanse are in a realistic cold war & pretty nasty. You migh find one of them sympathetic for a while, only to find out it was all a construction hiding the horrendous deeds they did for political power. Only to find out the others did even worse thing. And agains this backdrop you have the heroes, trying to keep some sort of moral integrity & helping to save what they can, often derailing various grand schemes withou even realizing it.
> I fail to see why robots wouldn’t be able to adequately do the job.
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.
Even when robots can do this, the defiance of our physical limitations is beyond something we should be able to do. It’s the best of us as a species risking our lives for progress and similarly to something like free solo, even if I’m not capable of doing something so death defying it makes me feel alive to see people who push the boundaries of what’s possible so far.
That's a fair point. Hell, I'd argue that half the interest in spaceflight (except those of people seeing it all through the lens of an Excel sheet) is because of the idea of sending people up there. That alone makes an occasional manned mission worth it, just to keep the general interest alive.
It is not the 1910s any more. We don’t risk other peoples lives on exploration. Heroic though it might seem, it is ultimately foolish. We are already exploring the solar system with machines. And there is no reason to risk the explorers life for a more limited and more expensive ways to explore.
> And there is no reason to risk the explorers life for a more limited and more expensive ways to explore.
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.
People are risking their lives exploring dangerous places on Earth every single day, not least of which, the ocean. They're also risking their lives for much less.
We already know what's out there, we have telescopes and probes. We're not going to find jungles on Venus or something like that. We're not going to meet the Vulcans.
> We already know what's out there, we have telescopes and probes.
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.
We are still uncovering where and how life is in Antarctica, and we’ve had humans there for decades. What makes you so sure we would be so much quicker to figure out things on Mars?
Studying Antarctica is different; we already know life is there, so we're studying the minutiae of "where and how". On Mars, we're yet to answer the two most critical questions: whether there is - or was - life, and if so, how it is related to the life on Earth, if at all.
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.
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?
The thought of a next-gen trillionaire spending the millions of dollars required to launch a freaking rocket just so he can get to Europe in twenty minutes instead of the couple hours a supersonic airliner would take.. man, talk about ostentatious.
There aren't supersonic airliners. Anyway, let's calculate. Starship having passenger capacity about that of Concord, say 100, would burn 1000 ton, $1M, of fuel and oxygen, per a suborbital transcontinental flight. Capital cost say $100M per Starship. Say amortize over 100 flights. So $20K/ticket. Double for operations. $40K/ticket. I don't see any supersonic in near and mid future coming even close. If I remember correctly my middle school physics, ballistic trajectory is the most efficient one :)
If anything, DOD is already the first in line for suborbital cargo, not warheads mind you, delivery using Starship.
that is a tough one, yet lets try to think like an MBA, an exec from RyanAir - with Starship payload to LEO of 100ton+ (and actually we need less than LEO) and pressurized volume of 1000m3, the Boeing 747 would be a close match, so giving the very short flight time we can do a really tight cattle class of like 500 passengers, which brings us into the vicinity of $10K/ticket :) I wonder whether we're reaching the stage where suborbital will start to put out the very long distance passenger air out of business the same way like long distance passenger air put out of business the long distance passenger ships.
Not sure why you got downvotes. You are correct. Tourists drive a whole lot of the economy in many nations and its where many people work. At the moment it might be tourism for rich people, but that's how it has to start.
People want to go, and is soon as it is possible, they will. Regardless of how "vulgar" some think that is.
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.
Because the tax payer has paid for nearly all of this and the goal was certainly not for some billionaire couple to get into the hundred mile high club.
Yes, the goal was for everybody to get into the club. Billionaires wold just get there faster, for a fee. Similarly like it happened with aviation. Sergey Korolev was pretty comfortable with the idea.
Aviation gets us from a place where people live to another place where people live. Everyday people are still not going on tourist visits to Antarctica. There is no reason to believe everyday people will go on rockets that takes them to space in any foreseeable future.
If it would be cheaper and safer they would; I do not know any billionaires but I know a lot of people who went to Antartica as tourists. They would go into space as well, but currently it is not only dangerous (compared to many or all modes of travel we have on earth?), it is only feasible for billionaires.
For research? If you are thinking for example about microfabbing in space designing an autonomous experiment would be very hard. A lot of cool things could be done with for example adaptive optics if we could manufacture optical elements in space. The technology to align them in orbit is already there. And since it's so expensive to go now a lot of cool ideas like that can't be tried out.
Most people are floating the idea that eventually we would either have commercial companies adding a "space hotel" to the ISS for testing purposes and when the ISS is retired that the hotel would continue to exist.
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.
SpaceX should build space modules next, after they finish Starship. And interconnect them to make a ring. Then spin the ring to generate artificial gravity. And leave a center pod for zero-g activities.
I would be astounded if there were no space hotel projects shopping around for finance already.
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.
Ostensibly due to COVID-19 concerns and Nevada mandating non-essential businesses to shut down. That seems to be relaxing, though (definitely here in Reno, though the Vegas area has a fair bit higher of a caseload), so hopefully Bigelow rehires as things start to normalize a bit more.
Sporting events on the moon have the potential to be profitable, because of the scale of media.
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.
Mining is the big reason to launch mining robots into space. For now though, there isn't anything we can economically mine.
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.
Money is just a technology to facilitate the exchange of goods and services. Are you suggesting capitalism has a problem in that people voluntarily exchange goods and services, and if so: How could that be bad?
So many cheeky touches! It's such a different vibe than the NASA launches of old. It's old news but I still was caught off guard by announcers flatly referring to "Of Course I Still Love You"
EDIT this is not a criticism, I really like it. Maybe "cheeky" is the wrong term, I'm bad with Anglicisms
No, just internally, where king elon makes decrees from high and you follow or are exiled from the nation of spacex.
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?
Not to detract one iota from this amazing achievement, but what definition of sustainable are you thinking of? This was still paid for by the government.
Yes, the government paid to develop crew dragon. And they buy launch services which is another source of revenue.
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.
If Crew Dragon is only making money from the government, how would it still be there tomorrow if the government weren't paying? Do you really imagine that there will be a market for this as it stands today? How much training and medical evaluation have the astronauts gone through to ensure they could survive the trip and know how to operate?
I think your parent poster's point was that previously the IP was owned by NASA. The companies contracted to build Apollo or the Space Shuttle was unable to reuse the IP to sell rides to another company or fly private citizens, nor could they bundle and sell the IP.
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.
You still can't launch a rocket on US soil without a permit from the FAA, and for launches from outside of the US, I'm pretty sure that SpaceX's rocket technology is quite export controlled. But yes, it's now a bit more independent from Congress's financial mood.
My point is that there's still large government involvement. The permits are just one example. Another one would be the military contracts that require contractor employees to maintain clearance levels and create financial dependence, or the government owned launch pads they lease.
All of this combined means that SpaceX is still highly dependent from the goodwill of the US government.
I can't imagine the thought process that feels that the IP being owned by a private company who answers to no one and has no accountability to anyone is 'more sustainable' than it being owned by the public through a non-military organization (NASA)...
Because NASA isn't just free do things with that knowledge even if somebody could pay. You live in a total fantasyland when you believe that NASA just having some IP does any good for anybody.
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.
You make a lot of good points, but it's not quite as grim as the picture you have drawn.
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.
The human spaceflight ability of NASA trended sharply to zero in the last 50 years, with space travel getting more expensive, more dangerous and far less capable than before, going from moon transfer to LEO only to no human spaceflight whatsoever. If you prefer to abolish human spaceflight, then you can be happy with NASA, if not, then you have to present rather strong evidence why the status quo will magically yield better outcomes.
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.
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 is selling Crew Dragon to others. There are already bought flights brokered for space tourists, and Tom Cruise is going to be filming a movie in space too.
The sheer cost of launches is much lower on a Falcon 9 and Crew Dragon versus the Shuttle. Amortized per-launch cost for the Shuttle was about $1.5B [0]. The cost of the Demo-2 mission today with 2 astronauts costs $110M [1].
It get even more exciting when you consider that $110M is the cost to NASA. The cost to SpaceX could quickly reach an order of magnitude lower as it becomes more frequent and reused. As a bonus, the increased profits pay for the next ship, dropping costs even further.
An order of magnitude is a stretch, I think. But a 25% savings is probably pretty doable, which drops the cost to $82.5M. Consider that Richard Garriott allegedly paid $30M for his trip to the ISS, so if you have three passengers and one crew, you're turning a profit of $7.5M
Nope, way less than that. A single expendable rocket may have that margin, although I'd expect even better. Accounting for 5 flight of a si glen booster and capsule, that cost drops precipitously to at least 60-70% percent savings.
They're also only using two of the four seats. And that's on top of taking out seats they originally had planned (maybe they could put them back in at some point?)
From what I have read NASA has opted for the 4 seat version only, and then placed cargo under them where the other 3 seats would be. SpaceX has designed the capsule to carry 7 if you want an all passenger config but it will need to be heading to a destination fairly quickly as it doesn't leave much space left over. That said, even at 7 it looks like it would still be roomier than a Soyuz at 3 people.
Propulsive landing is really hard, see the failure montage from Spacex as they iteratively worked on it. SpaceX also had a very strong incentive to develop the tech, since they are a commercial launch provider and could make more money. All the engineering was certainly not free, and the vehicle has to make some compromises in terms of lift capacity and such to make it work. Propulsive landing only looks easy now, but it is a supreme feat of engineering.
How does something being paid for by the government relate to it being sustainable? Our roads are paid for by the government too - and those are sustainable. So are lots of other things, like basic science research, healthcare in most countries, etc, all of which is sustainable in being paid by government.
Didn’t shuttle have a larger payload? Up to 8 people and larger cargo.
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.
Yeah there's definitely a capability gap. The issue is many of the capabilities weren't necessary or used on every flight.
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.
The cost would not increase linearly for 8 people. Dragon 2 was originally designed for 7, NASA requested it be configured for 4. If they wanted to go to 7, my guess is it would be a pretty marginal increase in cost.
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.
2 people in the shuttle crew were pilots trained to land the shuttle. That was their primary job. Surely they were capable to do other things, but they could not be sent into the space for months and keep their skills intact. So the real number of seats was like 6.
The shuttle had a payload to LEO capacity of 27 tons, but Falcon Heavy can lift over 60 tons. The problem with the Shuttle was the orbiter itself was enormously heavy.
Bear in mind SpaceX is working hard on making Falcon and Dragon obsolete. Starship will have a larger payload than the shuttle and drop costs quite a bit more.
They'll have to stop blowing them up, but at two prototypes per month I think they'll make rapid progress.
This is what it should have been a decade or two ago. The infusion of expertise from gov-sponsored / R&D to commercial should have been accelerated long ago. Happy to see Lars and others matching up with entrepreneurs and a new generation to get things done.
Rockets were being made long before 50 years ago. There were plenty of rockets in WWI. And there were smaller rockets going back to before the US war of independence (ie "the rocket's red glare"). If we are talking big metal things that fly into space being produced on an assembly line, then those operating in Germany during late WWII making the V2s (75years ago) were probably the first rocket factories. But I'm not going to clap for them.
Technically, military rockets were not a thing that existed at the time of the US war for independence. The phrase "the rocket's red glare" refers to Congreve rockets, which were invented in the 19th century following the introduction of rockets into modern military use in India at the end of the 18th century.
The Congreve rockets were inspired by the rockets used by Mysore starting in 1780. So there were military rockets in use at the time of the US war of independence, they just weren't being used by either of the combatants in that war.
Totally. Seeing the rocket successfully land is still stirring. I remember the first time I saw SpaceX land those two rockets together, I felt like I was living through history. With all the insanity plaguing the world right now, it’s amazing to have a parallel track of optimistic discovery and exploration.
You seem to equate being commercially viable with being sustainable but I think you are forgetting that the vast majority of the current economy is unsustainable. The only difference is the government was honest about it.
Bit of a strange criticism. They've got to drive out in something, why not an electric vehicle? And the spacesuits are bulky and difficult to move in, so the falcon doors on that Tesla model make sense for easy egress.
Thanks for the link. I see from that article that Boeing have commissioned a new customised Airstream van to transport crew out to the Starliner. So looks like responsibility for crew transport to launch is up to the commercial provider and so again, completely sensible for SpaceX to use vehicles from its sister company, as appropriate.
There is undeniably a marketing angle, yes. But I don't necessarily see this sort of marketing as harmful. Or 'cringeworthy', harking back to your original comment. What I do see as harmful is push advertising and Tesla, rather uniquely, does not do any of that.
I thought it was awesome. I'm going to create the electric car market no-one thought possible and many companies paid to lobby to create laws to stop.... and put it into space.
> It is hard to convey how “sustainable” this feels to me. For the first time, humans have gone into orbit in a spacecraft that was designed from the ground up to be a commercial venture.
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.
Wow, I hate the philosophy behind this comment so much. The it must be exhausting to look at the world threw such a pessimistic lenses. Its like human commerce is some cancer and if business and capitalist spreads the then the cancer will grow and take over the universe ultimiatly leading to the end of the universe because the inherent un-sustainability. If we only could achieve things with the pure power of love, our achievements would be so glorious without the dirtying influence of the profit motive.
> 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.
I don't understand how SpaceX is "commercial." As I understand it, they exist because the US Government wants to have a space program. Yes, they can launch satellites, but how many for-profit non-state entities can use these things?
It seems like SpaceX is possible because there are governments out there with money to burn.
Lots of people use GPS&map. Even EU/Ru/China developed their own GPS. Military industry wants to have weapons in the space. And for saving the earth we still need satellites monitor our poor earth. Not to mention other goals like deploying internet/phone service to everyone, etc. Lunching Satellites definitely is commercial.
GPS/map plus ads&directory is already printing money...
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!