As exciting as this is, I’ve read that this capsule faces uncertain future after 7 launches: the rocket it was launched on is retired, and while it’s compatible with Falcon it’s not clear what the advantage would be wrt SpaceX’s capsule to warrant additional testing. Imagine working on something for over a decade only to see it fly just 7 times!
It isn't compatible with Falcon, it can be made to be compatible with Falcon in the future. It wouldn't really be worth doing though, since part of the point of having two providers is dissimilar redundancy, so that any issues with one platform don't affect the other. It's more likely that if Boeing wants to keep flying Starliner after using up the stock of Atlas Vs, they'll want to integrate it on Vulcan Centaur rather than Falcon.
One might imagine that an issue could be found on Dragon, which grounded it, but not the Falcon 9. That said, it’s definitely less redundant than one might like.
>Imagine working on something for over a decade only to see it fly just 7 times!
Haha, I'm guessing you don't work in the space industry. Frankly if something you work on gets to space at all you count yourself fortunate. My first job was at a defense contractor working on a big rocket. A senior engineer on our team had a picture of the Indiana Jones warehouse on the wall in his office, rows and rows of boxes. I asked him why, he said it's a reminder to not get too stressed about work - 9 out of 10 projects will never fly.
Things are changing especially in the new space corners of the industry, but for big projects requiring political will I think it's still the same.
"The capsule" here means a decade of R&D and half a decade building production models. If turnaround is about 6-8 months, they're going to need at least two and I'll bet they build three or more because reuse and refurb won't go as well as they hope.
That means about 10 years of R&D since they got the initial contracts and then about half a decade of production for the flight articles and then a wind-down of a couple years and a skeleton crew to make the last few flights.
A 15-20 year project that sends dozens of people to space for the last years of the ISS's lifetime is not going to be a disappointment for 95% of the people who worked on this.
>Imagine working on something for over a decade only to see it fly just 7 times!
Huh? My understanding was that something unique about the falcon is the capability of multiple reuses, in contrast to previous missions that were one and done uses. What past experience in the history of spaceflight might someone be referring to where seven reuses registers as a disappointment?
They won't reuse any Starliners 7 times. Twice is more likely. Three times reuse, perhaps. They can't refub in time to send the same craft up twice in a year as required by the contract so they'll need at least two. If anything goes wrong with either of those, they'll need a backup. Now they've got three for 6 flights. These vehicles will get one, two, or at best 3 launches and then retired to the scrap heap while SpaceX Dragon continues to ferry people to the ISS if it gets an extension and if not then to the first private orbital stations. Boeing should never again get a NASA contract after SLS and Starliner.
> Once the current stock of rockets it did launch on runs out they will have no launch vehicle.
Exactly.
Just to elaborate for your parent, the Atlas V which currently flies Starliner uses an RD-180 engine that's manufactured in Russia. ULA is no longer able to procure any more such engines, and a rocket with those engines are no longer legally allowed to fly DoD payloads. Which prompted ULA to retire Atlas V in favor of Vulcan.
I think someone from ULA or Boeing (I forget which) recently said that they've begun the process of certifying Starliner on Vulcan, although I'll have to go back and make sure I remember exactly what was said.
I think the parent comment is referring to there only being 7 launches total for the entire program before being cancelled, not 7 launches per capsule.
On top of problems with helium leaks there's now another issue[1]:
> Starliner has been given a go to hold at 260 meters from the space station. During the approach two reaction control system jets have failed off. A manual flight test has been put on hold while flight controllers look to restore those jets with a hot fire.
Sounds like there's a problem with the cooling system using more water than expected. If I understood the comms correctly it sounded like they switched to a backup system to try to alleviate the issue.
The helium leak was well understood and characterized before this launch attempt, see the last launch attempt. Helium leaks are not uncommon, and can be worked around.
Not reentering with this capsule would be a catastrophic failure. They are, unless something actually serious happens, certainly reentering on this capsule.
SLS is a jobs program. It's not economically viable at over $1 billion per launch.
As for Blue Origin and New Glenn, this is an object lesson that simply throwing money at the problem doesn't necessarily solve it. Did you know Blue Origin was founded ~18 months before SpaceX?
For the longest time (up until ~9 months ago), Bezos had the former Honeywell CEO in charge of Blue Origin, which to me was such an odd choice. You see, this guy seems to embody everything wrong with corporate America: he was completely focused on not failing rather than succeeding. So there were constant delays with New Glenn and the BE-4 engine, which is years behind schedule. You can't fail if you don't launch.
And the new CEO (David Limp) used to be in charge of Kindles.
It's a total waste of taxpayer money and an extension of the pork of the military/government-aerospace/industrial complex. And they're still using Russian-made rocket engines on Atlas V prior to switching to Vulcan Centaur, another expensive platform. The American taxpayer deserves to have billions in waste cut out and capital used more efficiently at SpaceX and other vendors where there is value/$.
Yet that was historically the most successful approach in XX century for most of research-intensive industries (space, transistors, energy etc) -- when government spends crazy amounts of taxpayers money for some programs that bring little $$ back, but sprawl a lot of commercial startup follow-ups.
Investing in commercial approaches as the step 1 doesn't seem to work in multi-billion R&D endeavors.
So yes, it's not fair, but turns out to be better for the country down the road.
That works for a bit, and then all the others jostle in and start feeding on the pork. SpaceX will get this eventually too if it does well enough and settles into a routine of project bids, project management, technical project success, and more bids.
Cost-plus contracts work during wartime when everybody is motivated by the war to get the job done fast, to end the war and get their friends and family back home safely as soon as possible.
During peace time, the predominant motive is to maximize profit by dragging out the work.
SLS cost way, way more then $1 billion per launch. More like 4 billion $ per launch. They hope to get it to $2 billion $ eventually but that will take a while. 1 billion $ is the end goal that they use in marketing, but that's not happening anytime this or next decade.
> SLS cost way, way more then $1 billion per launch. More like 4 billion $ per launch.
So, the full stack of SLS costs $4.1B. But that includes the cost of Orion which is ~$1.3B when you include the European Service Module, and it includes the cost of 1 year's worth of ground support equipment including upkeep for various buildings like the VAB, etc.
The marginal cost of a cargo SLS (should one ever launch, which is looking increasingly unlikely) is a bit over $2B. Which is still a horrifically high price.
For people who don't know much about SLS, one way to put its cost into context is, every time the full stack with Orion launches, that's about 1/6th of NASA's yearly budget. And that doesn't count any development cost which is several tens of Billions.
I'm not sure that's true. I would bet with Orion its even more. It depends what you consider to be work before launch 1 as launch cost. And we don't really yet know the cost of the EUS.
You can of course get higher if you add development cost as well. But that depends on how many launches there are.
> We project the cost to fly a single SLS/Orion system through at least Artemis IV to be $4.1 billion per
launch at a cadence of approximately one mission per year.47 Building and launching one Orion capsule
costs approximately $1 billion, with an additional $300 million for the Service Module supplied by the
ESA through a barter agreement in exchange for ESA’s responsibility for ISS common system operating
costs, transportation costs to the ISS, and other ISS supporting services. In addition, we estimate the
single-use SLS will cost $2.2 billion to produce, including two rocket stages, two solid rocket boosters,
four RS-25 engines, and two stage adapters. Ground systems located at Kennedy where the launches
will take place—the Vehicle Assembly Building, Crawler-Transporter, Mobile Launcher 1, Launch Pad,
and Launch Control Center—are estimated to cost $568 million per year due to the large support
structure that must be maintained. The $4.1 billion total cost represents production of the rocket and
the operations needed to launch the SLS/Orion system including materials, labor, facilities, and
overhead, but does not include any money spent either on prior development of the system or for next-generation technologies such as the SLS’s Exploration Upper Stage, Orion’s docking system, or Mobile
Launcher 2.
> And we don't really yet know the cost of the EUS.
We have an idea of an initial cost estimate from this[2].
NASA agreed to buy 2 core stages and 2 EUSes for $3.2B. Since RS-25s are around $100M each and the SRBs are around $200M each, this pushes the cost of the rocket up to $2.4B, maybe a bit more.
> We project the cost to fly a single SLS/Orion system through at least Artemis IV to be $4.1 billion per launch at a cadence of approximately one mission per year.
Yeah but you see, they will miss that 'one mission per year' thing by quite a large margin. And it will be more expensive because of that alone.
There are other traps in these numbers. OIG numbers are far better then NASA but I bet in 20-30 years when somebody does the total cost it will be higher.
> prior development of the system or for next-generation technologies such as the SLS’s Exploration Upper Stage, Orion’s docking system, or Mobile Launcher 2.
And I don't think just excluding all 'prior development' as if it was irrelevant makes much sense. Development cost should be considered as part of a program.
> Yeah but you see, they will miss that 'one mission per year' thing by quite a large margin.
So, that's fair. But it's also complicated. Part of that number (for EGS) is for the upkeep of buildings like the VAB. Which is fair - SLS is the only real user, so they get charged for it.
But it's also kind of not fair, since NASA's going to keep it around, even if SLS wasn't a thing. As evidenced by NASA doing just that in the interim period between Constellation and SLS.
> And I don't think just excluding all 'prior development' as if it was irrelevant makes much sense. Development cost should be considered as part of a program.
I completely agree with you in general.
But I think that it's easier to tally the development costs separately.
And it's important to know how much it costs to just build and launch the rocket. A number which NASA (outside of OIG) has been extremely reluctant to release to the public. As far as I know, NASA leadership has never made specific claims about how much SLS costs, just that the OIG numbers are wrong and/or misleading.
Once the program ends, we'll have a better idea of how to amortize the develop costs over the total number of launches.
If you're too risk adverse to even try, then just sit down and get out of the way. I want to put the shut up part of that quote in there too as in quit fighting for contracts/bids that could go to people that aren't afraid.
You can't fail if you don't try, but you can't succeed either.
I think it's just more that Carmack didn't want to go all in with his entire life and net worth the way Elon did (and without which SpaceX would certainly have died exactly the same death). And who can blame him?
What other instances? That was the really obvious one during model 3 “production hell” as they scaled up production mostly on hopium assuming they’d sell.
"The deal ended up closing on Christmas Eve, hours before Tesla would have gone bankrupt. Musk had just a few hundred thousand dollars left and could not have made payroll the next day."
It’s easy to take risks if the failure condition is “still a multimillionaire”.
I refuse to think any sufficiently clever billionaire doesn’t have $1-10M in gold buried in a couple geographically distributed places. I know several people with NW of <$50M who have stashed 2-4% of their assets away in this fashion.
World wars happen, governments collapse, favor shifts, etc. Why wouldn’t you have a backup plan when it’s just pennies?
I refuse to believe that he was ever at risk of having less than 5-10M in pocket money left over after everything implodes.
> I refuse to think any sufficiently clever billionaire doesn’t have $1-10M in gold buried in a couple geographically distributed places.
Maybe you don't remember this, but Elon wasn't a Billionaire with his exit from Paypal. He made his bones with Tesla/SpaceX (honestly, mostly Tesla, but we'll see how SpaceX turns out, it could be bigger in the end).
Why bother when you can just have real estate instead?
I'm likely missing something here, but to me this minimises the problem to just a reduction in the number of properties you can move into (assuming some are lost and some of the others sold).
Title to real estate, as well as its ability to be liquidated, rests wholly in the cooperation of the state, as well as their recognition of your legitimate title to same. I’m reminded of the end of Godfather 2.
10-20kg of gold coins buried at gps coordinates in the deep desert has no such limitations.
I think a lot of ultrawealthy who have experience playing the geopolitical game probably must have some hedges like this. Doesn’t Thiel have NZ citizenship without any explicit intention of residing there?
It’s not like value stored like this loses its utility even if the state doesn’t collapse/confiscate your assets/persecute you.
I can’t imagine circumstances where one would end up being a billionaire then ever being a not-millionaire unless you’re thick as a brick.
I’m not a billionaire (technically neither was Elon at the time but that’s besides the point, but I suspect human psychology leads to a non-linear relationship between net work and acceptance of risk. Most billionaires don’t want to become mere millionaires. And people in poverty would likely say it’s easy for someone in the middle class to take risks.
> In August 2013, Carmack indicated that following the crash of the STIG-B rocket earlier that year, he had wound down the company operations and had put the company in "hibernation mode."
> In 2015, the assets of Armadillo Aerospace were sold to EXOS Aerospace Systems & Technologies, Inc.
the BE-4 is an engine - it was finally used in a rocket january yes - after being in development for almost 15 years. That us still kinda slow compared to spacex.
New Glenn was announced in 2016. An 8 year long development process is hardly slow in aerospace. The development costs are also somewhere between three and four billion dollars. The real problem with Blue Origin is that Jeff didn't really give a damn about Blue Origin and let himself get scammed out of his money.
Given how many people work at Blue, I would suggest its more then four billion $. The Ariane 6 cost 5 billion $ or more. BlueOrigin has been spending almost 2 billion $ a year.
It's also a hedge against SpaceX imploding/compromise/whatever. In that role, cost is less important than having a provably functional product. I'm not saying anything is likely to happen to SpaceX, just saying that having SpaceX as a SPOF in the US space program would not be the best strategy.
You seem to assume a good CEO equals a successful company, and a good CEO also needs to have industry experience.
I don't know if either of those are actually true, there are plenty of good CEOs who came from zero experience in the industry. And plenty of bad CEOs who came from plenty of experience in the industry. Both of these run successful and not successful companies.
For example the currently Boeing CEO does not have experience in airplanes, came from a business background. And is considered a bad CEO by the average person (though considered a good CEO by stockholders, or at least was before the past few months).
A bad CEO can look great on paper and in the stock price. The product however will likely not keep pace, charging more for a product providing less value.
Long term value, employee satisfaction, and customer satisfaction are all intertwined. New management is more likely than not to harm at least one of those 3 .
All things being equal, you'd want a CEO who understands the business, either by coming up through the ranks or a long career at another company in the same business.
I reject the notion that a good manager can manage anything.
I also reject the financialization of modern companies where we put accountants in charge who aren't subject-matter experts whose only playbook is to cut costs and jack up prices.
It's exactly what's wrong with Boeing today.
Obligatory Steve Jobs quotes on "idea people" [1] and Xerox [2].
I don't think it's crazy; it's competition, which is what should be happening. We want multiple private companies to be in this game, because that's the only way access to space will ever become practical at any kind of scale.
This describes almost all human activity outside agriculture. (EDIT: slash that—agriculture doesn’t make the cut either.) Shelter, medicine, education, transportation—none of this is biologically necessary by some measure.
It’s difficult to look at history and not see the obvious—practically unchallenged—connection between technological ambition and quality of life. Paradoxically, if you only focus on feeding and clothing your population, you never do.
> This describes almost all human activity outside agriculture. Shelter, medicine, education, transportation—none of this is biologically necessary by some measure.
Of all things, why would agriculture be the one exception from "leisure"? On the other hand why would shelter be considered anything but a biological imperative?
Shelter is essential for survival. Agriculture is the kind of advanced organized activity developed much later than foraging or hunting.
Protection from the elements is only needed in some places. If humans simply lived in the savannah and abandoned useless technologies like shelter and agriculture, we'd all be better off.
Frankly I don't see the point of shelter. What, so we're going to live in the inhospitable environment of Europe? What would be the point? We should focus on preserving and maintaining our current home.
> If humans simply lived in the savannah and abandoned useless technologies like shelter and agriculture, we'd all be better off.
Depends on your definition of "better off". According to my definition, which I suspect is most people's, we're better off with modern technology, modern medicine, the Internet, etc. than we would be if we were all savannah hunter-gatherers like our ancestors 12,000 and more years ago. The very fact that you are posting here, in a conversation that wouldn't even exist if we were all savannah hunter-gatherers because the medium and the technology would never have been invented, indicates that you want at least some aspects of all that modern technology. But you can't just pick and choose.
Figured they were being sarcastic, given they’re literally commenting on an internet forum, but perhaps we can be thankful, too, for the prevalence of modern psychiatry.
Who is "we"? Evidently a sufficient number of people want to to make private ventures have a reasonable expectation of profit. If you personally don't want to, then just don't get involved. But why should that stop people who do want to from doing it?
> It’s just leisure.
No, it's exploration with the expectation that it will lead to profitable ventures. The same thing that led people to spend months in sailing ships traveling around the world a few centuries ago. Plenty of people back then did not want to participate--but enough people did to eventually lead to the very profitable and wealth-generating system of worldwide trade we have now.
> The same thing that led people to spend months in sailing ships traveling around the world a few centuries ago
The only real equivalent I can think of was the Arctic/Antarctic exploration. However that was massively cheaper and the environment was much more hospitable and not particularly profitable (and they couldn't send drones etc.). Most prior ventures had very practical goals and motivations and were mostly seeking a direct profit even if it didn't always work out.
> have a reasonable expectation of profit
Mainly through government funding though. The only directly profit generating activity that exists is launching satellites which on itself wouldn't really justify all the investment.
> The only directly profit generating activity that exists is launching satellites which on itself wouldn't really justify all the investment.
In the very short-term, yes. In the mid-term, there's a lucrative industry of space tourism yet to be built. In the long-term, there are riches beyond our imagination to be exploited from asteroids and other Solar System objects. All of this should be motivating enough for companies, welwala.
Yes, the last 5 remaining humans after the most recent climate disaster will thoroughly enjoy waving at the billionaires living on the luxury lunar retreat.
The technological advancements were nice the first time around. But diminishing returns are a thing.
I understand it can be difficult to understand that historic data does not reliably predict the future.
Why does anyone think the goal is a place for billionaires to flee to? Where does this come form? All initial efforts in the solar system will be extremely arduous. No one serious thinks otherwise.
"Ensuring the survival of the human race" is such a remote goal that it cannot be a justification for current space activities. Anything that could be done now would only create a tenuous foothold that could not survive the loss of human life on Earth.
The argument I'm making is that self sufficient colonies are so far away that building non-self sufficient colonies isn't on the critical path.
The basic problem is the productivity needed is enormously higher than what we have now. Today, a large number of people can support a small number of people in space -- and that's with the high productivity we have with industry optimized for Earth (where, for example, repairing things and dissipating heat are much easier.)
To make a colony self-sufficient, industry has to be so productive that supporting one person in space takes the work of fewer than one person. And, that productivity has to be in space. Not just building spacecraft and stations, but all the necessary materials and interlocking webs of devices and services that an industrial economy uses.
For me the crazy part is that SpaceX has done 12 crewed flights before Boeing even got their first set of test pilots of the ground. I recall back when NASA was justifying giving nearly twice as much money to Boeing that "because they were much more likely to be ready sooner."
It's not surprising that people in the largest organization on earth (our federal government) think that way. They are so risk averse it creates its own risk, namely, what if you miss out on one great opportunity after another due to risk aversion.
In discussions I've read on planetary climate modelling one idea is that if Venus had an atmosphere like Earth's but 50%+ thicker and an ocean covering 70% of it (like Earth) you'd get an ideal situation. Because of the strong sunlight and slow spin you'd get a tendency for thick storm clouds continuously covering whatever part of the planet was experiencing mid-day, shielding the planet from the strongest and hottest rays of the (60% stronger) sunlight. The warmth would convect to the night side keeping things from getting too cold. Depending on the conditions it's possible that below-freezing temperatures wouldn't even be common in the depth of the night.
The long night seems like a problem for life but forests already thrive in the warmer parts of the near-arctic. And in times past even Antarctica had tropical rainforests despite experiencing a polar night. Another idea I had was building a ring around the planet of dark material, perhaps of left over carbon after we cleaned up the CO2 rich atmosphere. The dark ring would provide shade to certain parts of the planet during the day and would reflect light for the long night.
I've read about many terraforming ideas such as these, and I really think they're kinda pointless, because it would probably be MUCH easier to just build O'Neal cylinders. With those, you can create artificial habitats with the exact parameters you want, instead of trying to change an entire planet so be somewhat habitable by humans.
The idea of living in a can floating in space, while conceptually cool, just does not seem like an appealing lifestyle to me. They also seem very fragile. One explosion, pebble-sized meteorite, failed life-support system or out of control ship could rip a hole in the structure and kill everyone on board. I'd much prefer a planet where there could be some degree of freedom.
Sounds like a sure fire recipe for a (permanent?) super intense electrical storm in right that spot.
Might make that specific latitude uninhabitable due to the planet turning. Though it could be worth the trade off, due to there being a bunch of available land on the planet in other latitudes.
If you have some truly huge arrays of super capacitors such a permanent electrical storm might even be useful. :)
Sounds sorta fun IMO. With the slower rotation of the planet and the rotational winds being slower maybe there would be less lightning. IDK though, I'm talking out of my ass.
Still, even then it will take, what, about a century to get rid of the CO2? (Does it even count as an "atmosphere" at ground level, given that it's past the critical point and the distinction between liquid and gas phases no longer exists?)
Oh, I'm sure it'll take at least several decades and more likely centuries but getting a new planet would be worth it. Seems like a harder project than terraforming Mars but in the end it would be a nicer place in my estimation. With only 7% less gravity, nearly as much surface area and without the dim sun that Mars has I think I'd rather live there.
But that new planet has the exact same fate as Earth in that the Sun will eventually devour it. The only way for the species to survive longer than the sun is to find other planets around other stars at different stages of their life cycles. Yeah, I agree. Expecting the species to survive that long is a bit optimistic.
Yeah seems like with our current physics, almost everything can be cheated out, except mass and gravity. There's no other solid Earth-sized mass now other than Venus so it may be our only real potential second home.
You can cheat gravity with a centrifuge; when the alternative is on the scale of "let's freeze or boil away Venus's atmospheric", building a city-sized rotating cylinder to live in is trivial.
Kurzgesagt has a good youtube video of the idea. It's wacky and unrealistic in some ways but doesn't violate any laws of physics and seems feasible to the sort of advanced civilization we humans hope to have in many decades.
If going that far, use the sunlight for power / in space solar ovens. Just make sure to limit how much power goes to Venus because that will increase the net energy in that envelope.
One of the options is to use the mirrors to boil off the atmosphere, the other is to keep the sunlight away for so long the atmosphere almost entirely condenses and can then be paved over; either way, it was a long wait.
You can't "boil off" the atmosphere. You need to accelerate the gas molecules past the planetary escape velocity, otherwise they'll just cool down and drop back onto the surface.
There's no realistic way to evacuate that much gas (the surface pressure on Venus is almost 100 atmospheres!).
One option is first to cover the surface of Venus with water, by first creating giant orbital mirrors to let the atmosphere to cool. Then you can sequester the carbon dioxide as elemental carbon under the water surface. Oxygen released in the process will be naturally consumed by all the underoxidized minerals present on Venus.
The idea I've heard is to dump many gigatons of hydrogen into the atmosphere to make H2O and elemental Carbon via the Sabatier reaction which will occur immediately with Venus' temperature. This gets rid of some of the CO2. The water will be part of the atmosphere, the carbon will rain down on the surface of the planet.
There will still be a lot of CO2 around though. Now you shade the planet with a giant sunshade and the atmosphere will cool down to the point where CO2 will snow out as dry ice after a couple decades of cooling. What you'll have left is a layer of carbon, followed by a layer of water ice, followed by a layer of dry ice. The atmosphere will be 2 - 3 times as dense as Earth's with almost entirely nitrogen gas. You use autonomous robots and mass drivers to collect and launch the excess dry ice into orbit.
Once you've got most of the CO2 ice out you remove the sunshade and the planet will very quickly thaw out. The planet will be covered mostly in oceans at this point with a thick nitrogen and CO2 atmosphere. At this point use genetically modified algae and microbes which, using the plentiful sunlight, can quickly convert the high CO2 atmosphere into oxygen and organics for the soil. The planet may still need some minor solar shading to keep the temps down until the CO2 approaches earth levels. Introduce Earth life to build a natural biosphere and voila! You've got a whole new Earth whose biosphere should be able to sustain life for millions of years!
Sabatier reaction is an equilibrium reaction, so it can only remove a part of carbon. You need to somehow continuously remove the generated carbon to keep the reaction from transforming it back into CO2.
The second issue is sourcing H2, water ice is common, you "just" need to redirect enough comets. Comets can be also used to build a solar shade, by placing them into a polar orbit around Venus inside the Roche limit. They'll naturally fall apart and form a cloud around the planet.
> You can't "boil off" the atmosphere. You need to accelerate the gas molecules past the planetary escape velocity, otherwise they'll just cool down and drop back onto the surface.
Velocity in a gas is a distribution; raise temperature and increasing fraction exceeds escape velocity.
This is why Earth has ~ no hydrogen or helium in the air.
> There's no realistic way to evacuate that much gas (the surface pressure on Venus is almost 100 atmospheres!).
"Realistic" for values including "let's build a mirror the size of a planet, in space, and keep it together for centuries".
It's currently scifi to send more than a mere few tons total mass that way, and mirrors wouldn't even survive decades, so "realistic" is a bad criticism.
I think there are thrusters on the Russian side of the station. They aren't large but they move the stations orientation for docking sometimes. (And cartwheels for fun and horror)
It does have thrusters used for orbital correction about monthly, (and maybe dodging debris here and there,) but it's fair to say that system is not for taking trips or anything.
Even less than that - most of the station-keeping is supplied by visiting spacecraft; the thrusters on the (ancient, failing) Zvezda module appear to be rarely used.
There’s no money or geopolitical strategic importance in it, and “we” didn’t go to the moon, a saber-rattling warmongering government did using oodles of tax money and repurposed ICBMs (Mercury/Gemini).
I think perhaps Dr Strangelove is more educational about the cultural climate around the Apollo program than almost any other media.
Hopefully with vastly reduced cost to LEO it will be put within the reach of normal people who aren’t engaged in the dance of WW3 nuclear brinksmanship.
> Parents generation really dropped the … ball there
Really probably your grandparents or great grandparents depending on your age. Most Americans born after the moon landings had boomer or gen-x parents. All the men who walked on the moon and the majority of those in high office until roughly the 1990s were silent generation, the GI generation or older. They’re the ones who had the power to keep the space program going but didn’t. Once your parents had significant influence the Apollo program was long gone, the know how to build the hardware was gone, they would have had an even harder time than us rebuilding it because the commercial impetus wasn’t there and we didn’t yet have insane internet billionaires competing for launch contracts.
I want to live long enough to see a viable test of larger spaceships that could send humans to Mars. I really want to live long enough to discover evidence of at least microbial life elsewhere in the solar system - Mars seems like the obvious place we can reach with a good chance for it be possible. I know there's amazingly water vapor around Europa, that's so much more remote.
I think about 30 years should lead to more exploration of Mars, and maybe multiple landers andn robots getting there from here, maybe even a return trip. (human travel to Mars feels so far out, even if Starship works out in the next 10 years).
Yeah we bemoan how short-sighted people are, but that's because we only live for a handful of decades. Think of the kind of progress that we could achieve if people were free to follow their dreams for centuries, alongside the kind of respect for the life and nature that would be necessary to live as a citizen of the world for that long.
True, today time is the greatest equalizer. Even the rich and powerful will eventually kick the bucket and leave the future for others. If life extension takes off, the rich and powerful may live forever, while the less fortunate may still be mortal.
IIRC one of the big ones is that of how the crew is supposed to board the vehicle. Cargo Dreamchaser is launched in a fairing so that its aerodynamics don't matter on the way up. This is fine because the cargo can be loaded prior to payload integration. But that won't work if they're carrying crew.
Dream Chaser flies in a fairing for aerodynamic reasons. In order to fly crew (so that the vehicle could have a working launch abort system), they'd need to figure out how to fly without a fairing.
From some quick reading it seems like the crewed Dream Chaser is intended to fly without a fairing. The cargo version's ability to fold the wings and fly within a fairing seems to be for 1) compliance with NASAs CRS-2 requirements, 2) wide compatibility with existing boosters that weren't designed for the forces that flying without a fairing would create.
Could be spin from Sierra but that's what they were saying to the press as of 2015 when they announced the cargo variant.
The problem with the wings is they generate lift during launch and that will screw up the rocket, thus the fairing. I thought there was no known solution for that.
It seems like you could mitigate that by designing the wing such that when mounted the angle of attack is 0 and thus no lift is generated. Obviously the wing would still have an effect when the booster changes orientation or in cases of high winds. I'm not remotely qualified to calculate the scale of those forces but I don't see why any of that would be a guaranteed showstopper given a booster with enough thrust vectoring capability.
Naive question: Planes and helicopters do not have the ability to safely eject passengers mid-flight. We largely accept these conditions as a risk of those modes of travel. Why is LES/LAS a unique requirement for space shuttles?
> Planes and helicopters do not have the ability to safely eject passengers mid-flight. We largely accept these conditions as a risk of those modes of travel. Why is LES/LAS a unique requirement for space shuttles?
That's a fair point, although my understanding is that parachute systems for small planes are becoming more common.
My view is that flight rate is the fundamental issue at hand. Airplanes and helicoptors fly many orders of magnitude more than these capsules, which means we know they are many orders of magnitude more reliable.
They've also generally been through a long process of refinement - the original airplanes were extremely dangerous compared to modern variants.
Additionally, aircraft can afford to have a lot higher margin of safety baked in to them. Because of how high gravity is on Earth and the nature of the Rocket Equation[1], it's just not possible to have a lot of margin in rockets of capsules. They need to be extremely svelt to launch at all.
And lastly, we have experience with human spacecraft without an LES/LAS - it was the Space Shuttle. And it killed 14 people - easily the most dangerous spacecraft ever created. No one has any desire to build on that particular legacy.
Also worth noting that test pilots of experimental aircraft generally wear parachutes, at least for higher risk tests. This includes tests of commercial aircraft.
2) Both planes and helicopters have an ability to glide (or autogyro) to a relatively safe landing in the event of most failures. A spacecraft can also do that with wings or parachutes, but only if it gets far away from its exploding booster fast enough to survive.
3) Many military planes do have the ability to safely eject passengers.
4) astronauts dying live on stream is a really bad look.
Planes and helicopters do not frequently fail by exploding, but rather things like engines failing. An engine failure, even if it’s the only engine in a given airplane or helicopter, does not automatically involve a deadly crash. Airplanes can glide, frequently for very long distances, and helicopters can use the air moving across the rotors to effectively “glide” down. It’s not always possible, but they do have inherent redundancies that rockets necessarily do not.
Helicopters are actually even safer than fixed-wing airplanes this way: as long as the rotor system is working properly (i.e., it's just an engine failure), the pilot can autorotate and land on any nearby spot of clear land large enough for the helicopter, and can achieve a safe landing with no or minimal damage. In fact, helicopter pilots frequently practice this maneuver while in flight training.
Airplanes need some kind of runway, by contrast, and this isn't usually available within the glide distance. So they can "land", but it frequently won't be a pretty landing.
The main dangers with helicopter engine failures are 1) it happens too close to the ground, so there's no time to react and enter a safe autorotation, and 2) the pilot is too slow to react (low-inertia rotor systems are more dangerous this way, so helicopters like Robinsons are worse).
You could go without an LES if you can convince NASA that you have sufficient contingencies to not need it (and, of course, you can do almost anything you want on a private flight). SpaceX has been entertaining the idea of not using an escape system on Starship and instead proving its safety through sheer number of flights. Although there also is just a general consensus that the flip maneuver would probably make that necessary even if they had an LES.
Airline passengers are in the dime-a-dozen category of expendable. Investments in astronauts are significantly higher. You really want them to be re-usable more so than the rockets
What fuels do you mean in particular? If you’re talking about hypergolic propellants, those aren’t commonly used as a main propellant on manned rockets. Most planes and helicopters use kerosene, which is also the primary fuel used by the launch stages of manned rockets.
Soyuz launches with the crew capsule under fairung and even stacked under the orbital module - it still has a LES[0], that pulls off the whole fairing away & then drops the capsule once clear of the rocket.
A bit complicated but was already used in emergency and worked.
> Can't they blow the fairing as part of launch abort?
I'm not a rocket scientist, so I don't really know the answer. But I have some questions:
* How reliable will the "blow the fairing" system be? If it's only used in emergencies (instead of the regular fairing separation mechanism) than it'll suffer from the same problem as emergency generators - they're rarely tested and fail very often when needed.
* How easy is it to get the fairing out of the way once it's opened? Normally, regular aerodynamic forces slough the fairing halves off, but an LES/LAS doesn't have time for that - it's escaping a potentially exploding rocket. And those fairings will act like sails - huge surface area:volume ratio means they're just not going to move fast.
* What happens if DreamChaser hits one of the fairings on the wing? Would it damage it enough that it'd have trouble landing? Is it enough to cause it to foul the escape trajectory? Or even put it in a spin?
It seems like a lot of work to get it to work with or without a fairing.
That's one more thing to go wrong. In a LES scenario something(s) has gone wrong in an unrecoverable way. Very few systems can be relied upon to exist let alone work correctly. A LES on a crewed capsule is supposed to be able to pull itself from the vehicle all under its own power. It can't assume explosive fasteners on the fairing are functional or actual all function correctly.
You don't want the LES to activate, seem to be working correctly, and then blast the crew into a fairing panel that did not fully separate. The crew doesn't have time to roll down the window and kick it loose.
> Star Liner has all the same problems that the Space Shuttle had. In an emergency, how do you get the crew out safely?
Starliner has a launch abort system; the Shuttle did not.
From what I understand, they use a very powerful rocket (much more powerful than Crew Dragon) to get the capsule far away from the booster. I guess it can get far enough away that NASA is satisfied that falling bits of burning SRB aren't a danger to the parachutes.
During the Starline abort test only 2 of the 3 parachutes opened, and that was a pad abort test - no SRBs!! NASA not only calling that a "success", but a sufficient success to move onto crewed testing was about the moment I lost all faith in Bridenstine being different. Immediately after leaving office he picked up a cushy consulting type gigs for various aerospace/defense companies (aka Boeing et al). Shocker.
For those who might not know SRB = solid rocket booster. Boeing uses them, SpaceX doesn't. An SRB is basically like a giant firecracker. You light it and it starts burning and doesn't stop until its done. It poses substantial safety concerns in the case of an accident where you need to abort the flight. But they're cheap, extremely powerful, and relatively simple contrasted against liquid fuel engines.
While I share your reservations with solid rockets as a main propulsion system on a manned rocket, it turns out they are well suited for launch escape systems themselves for some of the same exact reasons: they’re simple and powerful.
> While I share your reservations with solid rockets as a main propulsion system on a manned rocket, it turns out they are well suited for launch escape systems themselves for some of the same exact reasons: they’re simple and powerful.
Interestingly, both Crew Dragon and Starliner have eschewed SRB based LES/LAS systems for liquid fueled hypergolic ones. You can tell this because neither capsule has a "puller" on the nose like Apollo/Orion does.
Yeah, that is an interesting decision, especially since hypergolics represent a completely different set of risks. But they are extremely reliable for this application.
Well we shall see I suppose. SRB's go back to the Apollo era and NASA safety qualifications often come down to 'are you doing what we've done before'? Hence them refusing to even consider SpaceX retropulsive crew landings, even though that would be a huge step forward.
I would also observe that NASA has a relatively poor safety record contrasted against the Soyuz (which has not lost crew since 1971 in spite of flying more manned missions), and one of the few completely catastrophic crashes we have had, Challenger, was directly related to the SRB. In either case, I expect variance is playing a much larger role than most might appreciate.
Didn't the shuttle have this harebrained thing where the crew were supposed to climb all the way to the exit hatch in their pressure suits, extend a boom along the wing in full flight and then parachute out along it?
I thought I read about that. Of course that's effectively no actual escape system lol. They'd be long dead by the time they managed all that in an out of control shuttle.
Yep. That's supposedly for them to ditch in the event that the main engines fail but the shuttle is controllable - they don't have enough energy for a trans-atlantic abort, so they glide and bail out over the ocean.
How far did this plan go? Just because it was discussed and documented and thought through does not mean it was something that was actually going to happen. Was this actually developed and the parts&pieces put into place with procedures written up in the flight manual?
> Did the astronauts believe that it's likely that the system would save them? Probably not.
Yeah personally I would have taken my chances ditching the craft, tbh. It would probably ditch pretty well considering it doesn't have huge engine pods under the wings.
It's a really exciting time. Also the Chinese have lots of space going on. Chang'e 5 is on its way back from the moon. Tiangong is quite large now. I'm thrilled to see humanity accelerate this.
Don't forget that for the foreseeable future, until other plans are made, there is a hard mission count limit for starliner, which is the number of remaining atlas V cores. The engines are Russian made and subject to sanction, so nasa could just refuse to recertify starliner on a new platform, so sad, so sorry, and have starliner just disappeae into tte night while saving face fir boeing.
. . . so nasa could just refuse to recertify starliner on a new platform . . .
That could happen, but I don't see it as likely. NASA is far more likely to spend ridiculous amounts of money to keep it alive in the name of "competition" or some such.
NASA is keener on having Starliner flying than Boeing is. More likely scenario is Boeing decide they don't want to fly it anymore and they don't bother proceeding with the recertification, at least not without getting a lot more money from NASA.
EU cannibalized its one (1) existing production line for making spacecraft (used to be busy making ATVs for ISS resupply) for Orion's service module production. They're not interested at all in increasing their own capabilities, they just want to not completely lose it.
It's probably more accurate to say "human ratable". They're planning on designing the rocket with human rating in mind, so that if they want to do it in the future, it'll be easier.
But NASA doesn't human rate a rocket - they human rate the entire system as a whole, so it doesn't really make sense to say "human rate Neutron".
I wonder how that's supposed to work with their unique captive fairing design. Feels like they'd have to design crew flight specific boosters which don't have the fairings.
Rocket Lab mentions “human spaceflight” on the Neutron page, that’s the only mention I’ve seen of it. I haven’t seen any plans for a spacecraft for carrying humans or how they might handle re-entry.
For purposes of discussion, ignoring Boeing is something I think is acceptable at this point. They comment was clearly a nod to Bezos/Musk. Sadly, as far behind as Blue Origin is to SpaceX, I still the less poorly of them than Boeing even after today's launch
Is that true? We live in a remarkably gilded age where a handful of people (whose names we all know) cashed in on the Dot-Com Boom. Their pleasure appears to be, for a few of them anyway, rockets and spacecraft.
A vacuum of billionaire self funding? Of course not, but would these ventures have progressed to where they are without the deep pockets of some of these billionaires?
IIRC, Musk wasn't listed as a billionaire until 2012, and that possibly as a result of (rather than cause of) SpaceX having successfully sent cargo to the ISS.
People mock him for being bad at estimating how long projects will take… but even if you agree with the critics, he's still the one-eyed in the land of the blind when it comes to space mission project planning.
That's a factor of ten, which is like calling me a millionaire when I saved just enough to buy a 35 square meter apartment in a small village just outside Cambridge (UK)… in the middle of the house price dip from the global financial crisis.
Fair, I've heard the same from chatting with someone who shall not be named who got on a different list.
I can't remember if it was them or someone else who said that people lie about their wealth all the time for lists like these; the show-offs who want on them and pretend to have more, and the quiet ones who want off them and pretend to have less. (The person previously mentioned was one of the quiet ones).
> It's crazy the US could soon have up to 5 different spacecraft/launch systems that can take humans to orbit with 2 more in development
We had a launch system that could take humans to the moon in 1972.. haven't had one since. Maybe we will get another one in our lifetime, if it is even possible.
> Saturn V was ridiculously expensive [1] and incomparably unsafe.
Von Braun was asked if the Saturn V was safe to launch. He asked six of his engineering reports, each replied nein. Von Braun replied that the Saturn V had six nines of reliability.
It would probably become a lot more possible if we could get this "SLS/Orion with frickin' Starship as a lunar lander Rube Goldberg machine" monkey off our backs.
Is there much practical reason that requires sending people to the moon still? Modern robots are cheaper and can perform science more effectively than any human
I think a long term view is it’s the basis for building heavy industry in space as it has a lot of natural resources that can be exploited industrially and escape orbit velocities are much less from the moon than earth surface. This eventually leads to a general space infrastructure. If you believe the end of humanity is on earth then this probably isn’t convincing. Folks like myself believe we are inexorably driven to spread life as a function of what life is and we have no meaningful choice but to keep going.
But as long as some subset of humanity believes in this humanity will keep investing in it. Not everyone has to be aligned and we can have many priorities at once, not the least of which is robotic science which I only see as mutually exclusive as long as there’s not plentiful private investment, which there is at the moment. I don’t see robotic exploration as suffering in the build out of extremely low cost launch capability and a general space infrastructure including moon infrastructure. I see it benefiting enormously as the costs and risks drop significantly.
In theory it's possible to make a carbon-neutral methane rocket based on atmospheric CO2, though that depends on how completely the methane can be burned.
There are a million viable (and often quite fun) answers here, but one is really kind of funny. What do you get when you mix oxygen and hydrogen? Water? No, of course not! You get rocket fuel! Seriously. Liquid oxygen + liquid hydrogen is a common, and highly effective, fuel that's been used for various engines such as on the Space Shuttle Main Engine.
Rockets can also be carbon negative in another way. A rocket that uses less than 50% of its fuel getting to orbit would be carbon negative, because it's spending less than 'x/2' fuel to go burn at least 'x/2' fuel away from Earth. Factor in some of the fuel coming from carbon neutral sources, and it quickly becomes quite easy for a rocket to be carbon negative.
The flow of mass would be the other way around. Lunar regolith has every element embedded in it and there’s little need to bring anything but bootstrapping -to- the moon. Return to earth from the moon wouldn’t be CO2 producing anywhere but the moon.
Distributing human populations to ensure survival. With current tech the lunar colony couldn't be self-sustaining but the ideal is that humans would be able to propagate and sustain themselves outside of Earth so that a single event couldn't end human civilization. Also creating a jobs program that will produce the technology necessary for a lunar colony will improve materials science, medical understanding, logistics.
I don't think distributing within the solar system is going to do much for us. What takes out the Earth will probably take out everything else - we'll be backstopped on Earth for centuries after we have spaceborne civilization.
I think opening up a new frontier however, is valuable - in fact specifically, the transition which would be good would be to move heavy industry out of the biosphere entirely. You can imagine a nearer future where a place like Earth is treated as the paradise it is, and the idea of polluting it when we have all the rest of the uninhabitable space of the solar system to do that in is thought of as ludicrous.
And this isn't really unreasonable - beyond a certain point, the resource and energy availability of space is far greater then the places we can reach despite the advantages of the biosphere - whether we do it by robots or with manned exploration.
There's a zeitgeist change that I think would accompany having enough people working frequently in space: where its a couple of degrees of separation from someone who's looked at the pale blue dot and gone "you have no idea how valuable this is" (I do think we should have a program which sponsors any world leader who wants to on a trip around the moon: send the people making the big decisions out past the dark side, where the thing bubble of air, steel and alloy is the only thing keeping them alive - might not always work but at least then we can know they've had the opportunity for that perspective).
Self-sustaining human colonies in space or on other celestial bodies are very distant dream, probably it will take several centuries or millennia to happen. The main reason is human body: we haven’t figured out reproduction in low gravity yet. Unless some fascist state will do it, we will never experiment with it until full confidence in safety for the mother and the child.
It's a very distant dream that will always remain distant if we don't work on it. We have a lot of things to test before we get to testing the gravitational requirements of human reproduction. As it stands, we don't even know our basic gravitational needs. All we know is that 0g is too low. It's entirely possible that it turns out we can function relatively fine at something low but non-zero, like 0.1g.
That wouldn't prevent one off extinction type events like asteroids. We can improve our understanding of ecology by trying to design such systems for lunar colony artificial biospheres.
I do agree that we should better manage our impact on the only system that we know works.
> That wouldn't prevent one off extinction type events like asteroids. We can improve our understanding of ecology by trying to design such systems for lunar colony artificial biospheres.
To be kind of blunt, even an extinction-level asteroid hit with near-total biosphere destruction is probably still more conducive to human life than any other planet or satellite in the solar system, as evidenced by the continued existence of at least a few forms of life past the extinction event. And many of the events people worry about are far less destructive than even that (nuclear winter, for example, would probably roll Earth's climate back to pre-industrial temperatures, maybe as far as Little Ice Age, which is, uh, nowhere near extinction-level threat to humanity).
It's also worth pointing out that it's possible to do closed ecological studies without the expense of running it in space (e.g., Biosphere 2). The only thing you need space for studying in that regard is "what is the effect of non-1g environments on biological forms?" (to which existing studies suggest the answer is somewhere between "bad" and "horrible").
It's a very unlikely for one, we haven't had an extinction asteroid in 65 million years. Detection and mapping is very good today, and they're relatively simple to deflect given even with current technology, and a long enough lead time. Obsessing about asteroid impact is just an excuse to engage in fantasy.
But saying "We can improve our understanding of ecology by [designing] artificial biosphere", is just the chef's kiss of bullshittery. It's like saying, that we can understand the ocean by getting a fish bowl. Not exactly, and it certainly won't teach us anything about the actual biosphere. Instead, all you'd learn about is atmosphere scrubbers and water reclamation.
I recommend taking a look at the article I shared. It might help you gain more insight on the topic, rather than continuing to post critical comments without all the information.
>> That wouldn't prevent one off extinction type events like asteroids.
> This is the lamest of all excuses.
> It's a very unlikely for one, we haven't had an extinction asteroid in 65 million years.
He said "like astroids". Quite frankly we don't know how frequent extinction events happen. We've had nuclear weapons for less than 100 years, and have a couple of close calls[1] already.
We could just build giant bomb shelters. It’s cheaper, holds more people, and doesn’t require nearly the investment in a completely closed ecosystem. But that ain’t sexy.
If you want something that uniquely requires leaving the planet for somewhere you have truck in literally everything except rocks, you’re pretty much limited to the sun becoming a red giant. That and gamma ray bursts. That’s pretty much it.
A gravity tractor is the simplest solution with enough lead time. It's theoretical, but doesn't involve any exotic technology or materials.
Essentially you have a spacecraft park itself beside an asteroid. It's gravity will minutely change the asteroids trajectory. With enough lead time that's all you need. Since you're not blowing up, or applying a large focused amount of energy to the asteroid it doesn't matter what the targets composition is. You won't break it up.
> Don't understand this lefty obstinance against preparing for the unexpected when the negative outcome is the death of humanity. Is it because you don't like Elon?
No, it's merely incredibly difficult. Sustainable living off Earth is far beyond that.
Humans definitely can't leave. Humans are even less well suited to interstellar travel than they are to living at the bottom of the ocean, something they also don't do and have no idea how they could ever do.
So, with tremendous effort humans could visit one of their neighbouring planets. All of these planets are terrible. Mars is by far more hostile to life than anywhere humans have even visited, let alone had a permanent settlement. But we could do it. To what end?
Live here, or die here, those are your options and you should get used to it.
It's difficult, but I don't think it is _that_ difficult. Ecologies, like any living systems, can self-heal and regenerate. There are practices that allows us to tap into that regenerative power as societies. They may not happen fast relative to our individual human lifespan, but 50 years is more than enough time to restore wastelands or reverse desertification.
I don't have a good answer to how sustain an economy based upon mining, refining, and manufacturing things out of mineral resources. Many of us have gotten used to modern conveniences (at its own cost related to mental and emotional health, and social cohesiveness). I think what most people balk on are on the perception of having to go back to barely surviving off the land, or having to alter lifestyle. Lifestyle may have to change, but the same regenerative power of ecologies also gives us significantly more resiliency.
To have the species survive if anything ends all life on Earth - apparently not a priority for you but it is for those that enjoy humanity existing.
Also to explore and learn more about the universe we live in. Do you truly not see value in that? Have you never left the city/state/country you were born in?
> To have the species survive if anything ends all life on Earth
Nothing the universe has thrown at Earth in the past 3 billion years has been capable of ending all life. And nothing that could happen in the next million years seems possible of doing that either.
When we say life on earth we mean human life and civilization. Prokaryotes, while alive, are not really what people mean. Yes they would survive asteroids, nukes, possibly nanobot swarms.
Maybe we can find alternatives besides those industries.
As far as cleaning up pollutants themselves, there are some amazing work by Dr John Todd for cleaning up pollution. Two examples of his work — a system capable of breaking down DDT within 40 days. Another where he cleaned up a superfund site that had all ten of EPA’s top toxic pollutant list.
Establishing a permanent presence on the moon would be a stepping stone to further exploration of other planets. (Mars in particular.)
Since its only a 3-4 day trip, with transfer windows every month (and non-optimal ones essentially constantly). resupply missions and rotating astronauts/personnel are going to be much easier. Much less of a gravity well to deal with.
The plan would be for in situ resource extraction and manufacturing. With enough of a human presence, projects like local construction of spacecraft become feasible. And something like a mass driver would be much more feasible on the moon. A big enough one and you're even considering interstellar probes ...
It would require a consistent, sustained effort. But not astronomical in US budget terms. Maybe $20-$30 billion/year (about of 3-4% the defense budget)
Anything beyond Earth orbit requires either multi-stage expendable rockets, which isn't economical for supporting a moon base, or in-orbit refueling that has better economics than expendable rockets, which depends on cheap rapid reusability. If you can't land, refuel, and fly without refurbishing the launch system, rocket engines, etc. you can't ship fuel to orbit cheaply enough to justify in-orbit refueling.
Starship is a vastly better attempt at more of these goals than STS. But if it misses cost, or payload, or reliability goals it won't solve this problem. It is even possible that it will take too many attempts in which a ship and 39 engines are expended to even get close.
Yes, humans living on other celestial bodies is a goal in itself, expanding us beyond Earth and a few people in LEO.
Cities on the moon and Mars are a reasonable and achievable goal. There are resources which can much more easily be exploited with real people on premise, some people will want to live in different environments, there are opportunities for sport, entertainment, tourism, and plenty of industries which will be much more effective with skilled labor on site instead of meticulously planned missions which often fail and if they don't spend a whole bunch of effort overcomming the basics of operating.
> practical reason that requires sending people to the moon still?
The big one that robots can’t do is studying human biology in space.
How do we fare long term on a foreign body? What does trauma medicine look like? How do we accommodate the diseases and disabilities that frequent our non-astronaut grade population? Is gestation, birth and development possible in low gravity? Et cetera.
Then Moon provides the easiest place to do this at scale by virtu of being the closest place to Earth with in situ resources.
This is a common misconception. Modern robots are very limited in their capabilities, out of necessity. Mars is a great example. Perseverance has the most capable drill of any rover, and it can drill up to 2.4 inches deep. [1] And these drills are used extremely sparingly because they tend to break rapidly, like any sort of moving part. Perseverance's top theoretic speed is around 0.07mph, and it's a speed demon compared to prior rovers. [2] Same reasons - the more you move the more things break, and the nearest repair shop is pretty far away. The first humans on Mars will almost certainly learn vastly more in a week than we've learned in 60+ years of probes and rovers!
Beyond this though (and also the survival aspect as others have hit on), I'd simply mention the inspirational aspect. Many who lived through the Moon landings (as well as those who did not) see this as humanity's greatest achievement. And I think this sort of stuff helps to create a better future for a people. When asked what they want to be when they grow up, the most popular choice for American children today is a vlogger/YouTuber, the least popular is astronaut [3]. In China, the answers are completely reversed. Who's going to have the better generational outcome in 30 years?
But of course this isn't just for children. So many people just seem completely devoid of hope and optimism for the future. And that's completely understandable the way things have been going for many decades now. But show literally anybody this video of the Falcon Heavy landing [4] and the first question you will always get is, "Is that real?" People just can't even believe what we're achieving, and I think doing even more of this, on a much larger scale, and making it all the more visible would really improve so many lives, and likely the entire country itself. Just read the comments to that video, to see how it impacts people, and those are friggin YouTube comments!
Humans won't survive long-term without colonizing other planets and/or star systems. There are existential threats already in motion besides climate change; Earth won't have any surface liquid water in about a billion years. While there is several times more water underground than on the surface, that may also not be locked away well enough for when the Sun becomes a red giant 4 billion years later.
All of the science returns of the robotic missions to mars in the past three decades could have been done by a geologist in a space suit with a rock hammer in 15 minutes, and probably done better. Robots really, really suck.
Also many people see the whole point to be expanding people out into the cosmos, not the science.
> can perform science more effectively than any human
I wouldn't go that far, but we already had humans on the moon so we can get away with robots doing the science now. I still think sending astronauts to mars would speed up research, for example.
It makes more sense to have a permanent human presence on the Moon than to aim for Mars.
The Moon is both very near and very easy to communicate with so it is the perfect first place to learn about building a "colony" before moving on to Mars.
Not much point sending robots to go look at Moon rocks if there's no pretext of sending people there. I mean, you could make some PhDs out of it I'm sure, but would that be worth the public expense? I don't think so.
Robots aren’t performing science, they’re doing one half of one step of the scientific method: collecting data in an experiment. It’s humans doing all the rest.
It looks like the RTT is 6 minutes (more or less depending on orbit) for packets send to mars, but despite that it does seem like the easier option yeah.
The lowest the RTT gets is six minutes but that is a brief period every couple of years. The longest RTT is 45 minutes.
Even 6 minutes makes any kind of tele-operation infeasible and require system to function autonomously. This restricts the kinds of science that are currently possible.
Didn't we get to brag about it already? The value of continuing to have the capability seems to be outweighed by the costs of maintaining the facilities and equipment
Here is Putin saying that Americans had landed on the Moon and it's impossible to fake a such thing. [0]
Now please remember where you learned that 'fact' and at the very least stop trusting that source. At best, review all that you learned from them and discover more fakes.
Can you provide a link? I have been unable to find any report of Putin's expressing such a disbelief.
I did find a report that "a former chief of Russian space agency Roscosmos has voiced doubt over the authenticity of the 1969 Apollo 11 Moon landing", but of course that is not the same thing:
For off planet research: because ( https://xkcd.com/695/ aside ) we don't care if the robots "die". Human space exploration has an enormous amount of overhead to keeping the humans alive at all; even the sensors humans bring with them are compromised by having to be operable in a spacesuit.
Not saying that there isn't value to sending humans into space - it's just that that value isn't in gathering data for science, other than on the astronaut-subjects themselves.
This comment is an invitation to an uninformative comparison. Apollo was just barely able to take a crew to the moon and back, with many expendable stages, using 5% of US GDP to do it. Almost all the value in Apollo is indirect value in the form of technologies developed for Apollo.
Why replicate that? Indeed we should ask: Is there a goal to value, other than the obvious "the Chinese would get there first if we don't?"
A lunar "base" would just be a vastly more expensive ISS. We will discover that lunar regolith is a bigger nuisance than floating boogers in the ISS.
I would think barely here means, that there were quite a lot of incidents and with some bad luck, none of the astronauts would have come home.
It was still a great accomplishment, so I would not use barely, but technically it is correct I think. They spend great effort, to just make it to the moon, which was the goal, to beat the sowjets.
And that succeeded. No great safety margins, not much room for error - barely.
What I meant is that the multi-stage Moon rocket, the capsule and command module, and the lander and ascent module, were just barely within the realm of the possible as dictated by the rocket equation. And, as you mention, the risks were just barely acceptable.
That sounds really interesting, but web searching mostly brings up very old research. Do you have a link for any of the up-to-date work on automating the base?
