SpaceX Shows Off Its Interplanetary Transport System in New Video (techcrunch.com) 202
Elon Musk's SpaceX plans to send humans to Mars with a ship called the Interplanetary Transport System, the company announced today in a video, revealing how the ITS will actually work. The ITS will be capable of carrying up to 100 tons of cargo -- people and supplies -- and it will utilize a slew of different power sources en route to Mars. From a report on TechCrunch: SpaceX has released a new video showing a CG concept of its Interplanetary Transport System, the rocket and spacecraft combo it plans to use to colonize Mars. The video depicts a reusable rocket that can get the interplanetary spacecraft beyond Earth's orbit, and a craft that uses solar sails to coast on its way to a Mars entry. The booster returns to Earth after separating from the shuttlecraft to pick up a booster tank full of fuel, which it then returns to orbit to fuel up the waiting spaceship. The booster craft then also returns to Earth under its own power, presumably also for re-use. The solar arrays that the spacecraft employs provide 200 kW of power, according to captions in the video.The Verge is live blogging SpaceX's conference, and has details on specs.
Wow (Score:3, Funny)
That's some incredibly sophisticated vapor. Amazing!
Re:Wow (Score:5, Interesting)
I dunno. They've managed to land boosters on barges in the ocean. They've managed to land boosters on dry land. They're getting pretty good at landing these things.
Re:Wow (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is if you miss landing on a barge, you lose the booster. If you miss landing and hit a giant fuel tank, you lose a lot more.
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Two failures of an brand new rocket system, one of which wasn't their fault (faulty struts from a contractor), gets it labeled a death trap? No doubt they need to iron out the kinks in the system but when you're doing something new, on a budget that wouldn't pay for NASAs office staff, and at rates that are half or less what the rest of the launch industry is charging, you have to expect some issues.
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And that's different from NASA/Energia how? Both burnt hundreds of billions of dollars and killed over a dozen astronauts/cosmonauts, and hundreds of workers/civilians in the process. The only difference with private spaceflight (non-cost plus) will be that it will cost a LOT less and things will improve drastically with every launch instead of the snails pace we've become accustomed to. It should also be noted that neither of SpaceX's failures would have resulted in the loss of a hypothetical crew, the
Failure isn't failure... if you learn from it. (Score:5, Informative)
And that's different from NASA/Energia how?
Space ex has a failure rate 10 times worse. The FAA needs to step in and force them to take safety seriously.
Failing, as it turns out, is an effective way of trying new things and finding out what works. Painful, but very very effective.
The best thing about SpaceX is that they aren't afraid of failure.
The worst thing that could happen would be if the FAA steps in and no longer allows companies to fail. If you aren't allowed to fail, you're not allowed to innovate. The only way to take the chance of doing new things is by taking the risk of failure.
Or, to use a quote: “Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.”
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Yep... not exactly a snail's pace. Remember what they were starting from... trying to put a couple of pounds in orbit.
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Yeah, it's not like we have rovers on Mars, orbiters around Jupiter, functioning interstellar probes, missions to pick up pieces of asteroids... oh, wait...
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No reason to stop them. If they want to cut corners, let them. Buyer beware. It's dangerous going to space, and if your going, you are expected to have accepted that. Ensure your cargo.
You are welcome to spend more money on your own safer "death-trap" ticket. Some of us are willing to accept a little risk to do great things.
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They are cutting corners with safety to make their death trap cheap. They should be stopped before they start killing people.
Because SpaceX is a private effort, you have no way of doing that. You will have to be satisfied with getting your lawyers to kill off government infrastructure projects instead.
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Regulations could keep SpaceX from using any specific launch facility in the US, but nothing prevents it from going to some hungry little place elsewhere in the world. On the other hand NASA, with the best of intentions, is fully subject to domestic politics. That's why it wisely sticks to unmanned probes these days. Let risk be for the private sector.
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Obviously, they didn't. The moon is covered with naturally occurring corner reflectors
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Technically that's Flacon 9 has only had one launch failure... Falcon 1 failed three times before it succeeded. On the other hand, if we're counting back to literally the first rockets an organization tries to launch, NASA doesn't look so hot either.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Interesting)
The video is clearly stylized and not meant to be taken that literally. Unless you think the arrival of the spacecraft is supposed to make Mars spin until it develops oceans ;)
That said, while there's much to like, there's one aspect of it that's really clawing at me... the fact that they plan to make it out of composites. Including the LOX tank. We've never succeeded (and failed multiple times) at making flight-intent LOX tanks for orbital rockets. And they want to make the first time be on what's by far the largest rocket ever built? Without a lining?
Is it worth mentioning that they just had an explosion somehow related to the only major carbon fiber component in the Falcon 9 in a LOX tank?
CF becomes brittle in LOX. It leaks. And most concerningly, it's impact / shock sensitive in LOX. At atmospheric pressure it usually won't do a self-sustained burn on impact, but it chars on impact, and even that alone would be bad. But they plan to have significant pressure as well. He mentions briefly that they expect this to be one of the biggest challenges, getting stable coatings and the like. I think that's an understatement.
I just don't want to see the largest rocket ever built turn into the largest flying fireball on Earth. I don't trust composites with LOX. Composite cryogenics tanks are an active research topic, and they're making progress, but it's not a solved problem.
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It explicitly says that the booster lands back *on the launch pad*. And, realistically, there's no reason to expect they couldn't do that. SpaceX has had some difficulties with the landings in general, but landing *on the right spot* has not been hard. They've been goo with that from the first attempts, and are only getting more precise.
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That's not what people were complaining about in the video. What people were complaining about was that they were landing right next to an exposed, filled propellant stage. You don't land a skyscraper-sized fireball-on-a-stick right next to a half billion dollar tank of fuel. That aspect was clearly stylized.
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This is not an engineering video. Because: The booster isn't shown to be tanked after landing and before launching the second time, the fuel freighter also isn't fueled up (and surely won't be sitting there and picked up and placed on the booster by a crane with fuel onboard, which would be much too heavy). This is basically a nice fluffy PR video for consumers, not for engineers. Obviously.
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nice video, but the launch seems backwards (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:nice video, but the launch seems backwards (Score:5, Informative)
They show the spaceship being launched first, to be refueled by a drone tanker. Shouldn't the tanker be launched first? Unlike the spaceship, it can wait indefinitely in orbit if the second launch is delayed.
I think that whole segment is full of artistic liberty. I'm sure they'll have reuse and fuel boosters and "quick" turnaround, but the Formula One pit stop where the rocket lands right next to a fuel pod, it is hoisted in place and is ready for liftoff again is fantasy. I'd guessing that logistically they'd always do it backwards with a previously landed and refurbished rocket launching first with the fuel, then if successful a new rocket with people that afterwards lands and it refurbished. But I think it's fair to leave practical details like that out to convey the essence to non-nerds.
Re:nice video, but the launch seems backwards (Score:5, Informative)
Consider the fact that this is a promo video, just meant to demonstrate the architecture in layman's terms. In reality, sounds like during the 2-year wait between launch windows, these things will by flying continually, bringing up cargo and fuel to prep the transports. Crews will be sent up last, right before departure. Many ships are meant to make the trip simultaneously.
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The tanker cannot really wait indefinitely, as the fuel it is holding is cryogenic (liquid methane/liquid oxygen), and boil-off is a problem.
But yeah, they are probably going to do as you say. No point in keeping people waiting in orbit.
Re:nice video, but the launch seems backwards (Score:5, Interesting)
No point in keeping people waiting in orbit.
Actually, it's quite possible that the mass of the fuel that would be lost to boil-off is greater than the mass of extra life support required to keep the crew alive a couple of extra weeks.
As for making people wait - normally people's time is considered extremely valuable, but in this case we're talking about people who voluntarily signed up to move permanently to an isolated, barren, frozen, airless wasteland covered in abrasive, (mildly?) poisonous dust. Anyone who does so would probably rather spend the time waiting in "SPAAACCCCCEEEEE!" than on Earth, anyway.
(Or at least they think they would... perhaps sending the people up first is an opportunity to find out who's going to get cold feet before it becomes economically infeasible to bring them home? Sending up a reusable Dragon capsule to collect a few such people from LEO at the last minute is surely cheaper than dealing with the all of the horrible problems that unwilling, depressed, panicky, or constantly space-sick colonists would tend to cause.)
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That depends entirely on the level of disciple present in the colony.
Countrymen, the long experience of our late miseries I hope is sufficient to persuade everyone to a present correction of himself, And think not that either my pains nor the adventurers' purses will ever maintain you in idleness and sloth...
You must obey this now for a law, that he that will not work shall not eat (except by sickness he be disabled). For the labors of thirty or for
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That depends entirely on the level of disciple present in the colony.
While discipline can make a big difference, it's not a panacea. Some people will pull themselves together in response to the encouragement and/or threats of a good leader, but others won't.
Even if they behave somewhat better on the outside out of fear of punishment, a person who is depressed, angry at their situation, or locked in a state of panic will still be less productive, less rational, and harder to get along with. Moreover, space-sickness (micro-gravity induced nausea) is a medical condition which n
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They are not planning to take weeks to fuel the spaceship. The plan is to do it in a matter of hours.
But getting people back to Earth is not really a problem; the spaceship is going to land on Mars, refuel there, and go back to Earth anyway. So the question is only if it is coming back empty or with regretful colonists.
Not that I expect many people to want to come back. These are people who have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for the privilege of doing hard and potentially fatal work. They may lack i
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Boil-off of LOX and methane in space isn't an unsolvable problem and they have to solve it anyway, since they need fuel and LOX to land on Mars and if they can prevent boil-off for 6 months they also can prevent it for a few days or weeks more.
But I agree, this video just shows it the way people expect things to look. All the details will be very different.
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I think you're right. Not only they need enough fuel to survive until the landing in Mars, they also need to fuel it there and launch it back to Earth. There's no way they'll be able to do that without active cooling. I'd be curious to know the details.
But the most incredible aspect of the video for me was that it shows the spaceship aerobraking directly from solar orbit to landing on Mars. Like braking from interplanetary speed to zero. Nobody has ever managed to do this. Maybe what they are actually plann
Re:nice video, but the launch seems backwards (Score:4, Informative)
LOREN GRUSH 3:21:49 PM EDT Tanker will go up 3 to 5 times to fill up the ship.
https://live.theverge.com/elon... [theverge.com]
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I dunno, they're using a reusable booster. I'd prefer to be going up on the 'virgin' launch on the booster instead of the second go around. I'd expect the second launch would be the more risky of the two.
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Since when does division by zero yield precisely zero?
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so far, statistically the 1st re-use (2nd launch) have a 0% probability of surviving into orbit
There is absolutely no data about the probability of a reused SpaceX rocket making it to orbit, because it's never been tried. The one that blew up wasn't a reused rocket, it was new.
Tonnage (Score:2)
They say it can transport about 100 tons. That's not much for a colonization effort. The Mayflower that transported the pilgrims to America was rated at about 180 tons. They could expect to live off the land for the most part whereas whoever takes the trip to Mars will be entirely dependent on what they bring with them. Without help from the natives it's likely that the Mayflower's people would not have done as well if they managed to survive at all. Maybe the Martians will help Musk's colonists.
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The Mayflower's tonnage was around 180 tons. Tonnage is how water a ship displaces. The actual storage capacity is unknown but would have been a small amount of that.
Re:Tonnage (Score:4, Informative)
No, a ships displacement is measured in tons but the 180 tons of storage is just that. The estimate of Mayflower's displacement is somewhere in the neighborhood of 250 tons and total weight about 400 tons including some 130 tons of ballast. Of course all these are approximations based on the given dimensions of the ship and what was typical for the period.
couldn't coexist with their English neighbors (Score:5, Funny)
There's no trees on Mars.
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I know you're joking, but modern day colonists could haul a billion Bibles and not add any weight, thanks to modern storage. They also wouldn't need a printing press, for the same reason. OTOH, the printing press was used to jack the timbers and save the ship, so maybe they should have a lightweight jack on board, just in case. :)
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Hang on. How can a ship displace 250 tons but weigh 400 tons? Or is 250 t the displacement when empty, and 400 t the loaded weight?
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-1, Pedantic.
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They say it can transport about 100 tons. That's not much for a colonization effort. The Mayflower that transported the pilgrims to America was rated at about 180 tons.
Yeah I can't imagine how they're going to be able to be successful, what with the requirement that they can only carry supplies that were available in the early 1600s.
In all seriousness though, I would expect that the first several ships are going to be unmanned supply ships, and that the people would make the journey only when there are sufficient supplies and they've had repeated success landing the things on Mars. If they have 500 tons of supplies from the 21st century waiting on the surface then I'm su
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There will be fewer people going to Mars at first than the first voyage on the Mayflower. 102 on the Mayflower- probably only a dozen going to Mars. That said, there will probably still end up being more than 180 tons sent total due to supply craft going ahead of time- and no doubt supply ships scheduled ahead of time to send more supplies after they get there.
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There will be many ships flying simultaneously, some with more crew, some with more cargo. You don't start a 100-person colony with a single launch, it will be gradual.
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While Mars is not exactly friendly, living off the land there is actually possible. This is why people even think about colonizing it. It has water, it has sun, it has CO2. Grow plants there and so on.
But of course no one is going to colonize it with a single 100 ton ship. The idea is to send a lot of them. 10,000 was the number Musk quoted, to get to a self-sustaining industrial civilization.
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They say it can transport about 100 tons. That's not much for a colonization effort. The Mayflower that transported the pilgrims to America was rated at about 180 tons. They could expect to live off the land for the most part whereas whoever takes the trip to Mars will be entirely dependent on what they bring with them. Without help from the natives it's likely that the Mayflower's people would not have done as well if they managed to survive at all. Maybe the Martians will help Musk's colonists.
Well, just like when Musk launched the Autopilot saying this is going to become our self-driving car he's exaggerating quite a bit what it'll do in the short term. It'll be an outpost, sustained by Earth resupplies and the bigger the outpost, the greater the need for resupplies. It'll be a very long time before you hit critical mass where each expansion would make it more self-reliant. It'll mostly be a proof of concept, can we expand the living quarters with on-site materials or do we need domes from earth
Tanker Last ? (Score:2)
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They probably will do just that. Sounds like it will be two years of launching to get ready for the Mars departure window, with crews being the last to launch - this video was just meant to demonstrate the architecture concisely.
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It takes multiple tanker runs to fully fuel one of the spaceships. They aren't likely to build enough tankers to have them all waiting in orbit for the moment eh spaceship finally launches. If it was a single run (like the video shows), it'd make sense to send the tanker first (unless boil-off is a particularly bad problem), but it's not a single run. More like 4-5 runs per spaceship.
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The people are the propellant!!!
Soylent LOX.
Terraforming teaser at the end? (Score:2)
Probably the most interesting bit, after the 50s-esque ship landing on mars, is the terraforming teaser at the end...
I wanna more about that!!
How do they plan on restarting the magnetic core?
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Batteries my friend! Batteries.
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"How do they plan on restarting the magnetic core?"
I once saw a documentary on how to do this. [imdb.com] I'm not saying that you use nukes. But you use nukes.
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Give mankind a few decades on Mars and we'll have Global Warming there too, we'll find a way even without Oil/Gas/Coal...
Re:Mars Global Warming (Score:2)
Give mankind a few decades on Mars and we'll have Global Warming there too, we'll find a way even without Oil/Gas/Coal...
Yeah, but on Mars, global warming is a good thing!
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Not sure about the core, but to get the atmosphere going they've talked about crashing comets into the planet and nuking the polar icecaps. :)
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That's great and all. Just one issue, without a super-heated, spinning core the atmosphere will just blow away...
Magnets, yo!
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Sure. But it will do so over the course of many thousands to millions of years, allowing plenty of time for "booster shots" of atmosphere. If we can create it in the first place, maintenance is probably a much easier task.
Even among naturally preserved atmospheres, there are other techniques for generating a magnetosphere should we decide to create one. Venus for example has no magnetic core, and is subjected to a *much* stronger solar wind, yet manages to hold on to it's atmosphere thanks to an induced m
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The Refueling Tanker makes no sense (Score:2)
The hardest part of space travel is probably fuel economy which is why it makes little sense to see the booster rocket land on its own power. Sure, you can do it, but if you rely on your rocket engines entirely to decelerate (as the video clearly shows), you would need roughly double the fuel. Instead, what NASA and every other space agency has done, is to rely on parachutes and air resistance (yep, all the fire on the bottom of the shuttle, or a mercury capsule means that air resistance is actually slowi
Re:The Refueling Tanker makes sense (Score:2)
Yes, it does make sense. They're already using the rocket engines to land. The trick is that they're landing empty, so the thrust required is tiny compared to the thrust required for launch.
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if you rely on your rocket engines entirely to decelerate (as the video clearly shows)
You clearly haven't understood how Space-X plans to decelerate both stages of the ICT. The 1st stage will use atmospheric resistance just like the Falcon 9 does and the video clearly shows the ICT 2nd stage using atmospheric drag from 3:40 to 3:45 before moving on to terminal rocket deceleration.
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All you really need for re-use is extra fuel - the legs and fins don't add a lot of mass. In addition, you still get a ton of atmospheric deceleration to help you out on the way down, and the rocket is far lighter on the return trip so you don't need to burn as much fuel for the same acceleration as you do when you are taking off with a full load.
So, all told, it's about 7% of fuel set aside to enable reuse. Pretty small price to pay to save your entire rocket. It also lessens your payload - but all the pro
Re:The Refueling Tanker makes no sense (Score:5, Insightful)
For example, the Saturn V used two different kinds of fuel: LOX with RP-1 and liquid hydrogen. This optimized performance for the 1st stage booster vs the upper stages. This increased the cost and complexity of the ground support. SpaceX uses only one kind of fuel for all stages. This reduces complexity and cost.
If you build a booster stage that is robust enough to return with only aerobreaking, it is going to weigh more and be more complex. You pay for that extra weight for every launch. Note that some of the structure is only used for re-entry and is dead weight on the way up. Breaking with the engines means they are used both on the way up and the way down.
As Musk points out in his presentation, fuel is the cheapest component of the launch system. Therefor it makes economic sense to use more fuel to land the launch stages, which are the expensive components.
The people at SpaceX are not dumb. They came up with a different solution because they framed the problem differently. Rockets are hard, and there is not a single best way to build them. There are a lot of projects that use vertical powered landing: McDonald-Douglas DC-X and Blue Origin New Shepard are examples and NASA funded various prototypes. Aerobreaking is not the only reasonable option.
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you build a booster stage that is robust enough to return with only aerobreaking, it is going to weigh more and be more complex. You pay for that extra weight for every launch.
On the contrary. The heaviest part of the booster IS the fuel so using less of it (essentially zero by aerobraking) drops the cost of the entire system.
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Sure, you can do it, but if you rely on your rocket engines entirely to decelerate (as the video clearly shows), you would need roughly double the fuel.
Agreed, but the real question is what are they replacing the expended fuel with? I mean, so that the landing mass is roughly the same as the launch mass. Because that's the only way you would need roughly double the fuel.
On a more serious note, they've already been landing boosters this way. In Earth gravity. Furthermore, how the fuck are your parachutes going to help land on a planet with little-to-no atmosphere?
You play KSP, so it's totally reasonable to expect that you know better than an entire co
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Parachutes are shit for precision landing. But the reason they can get away with using mostly rocket power to land is that the first stage is mostly empty by that time, and rather light. So a little bit of firing is enough to brake it completely, requiring little fuel. In fact, the first stage is so light that they only use one of the nine engines to propulsively land it.
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if you rely on your rocket engines entirely to decelerate (as the video clearly shows), you would need roughly double the fuel
No, it can be done with much less than double the fuel. The trick is that the boost-back and landing burns take place after the second stage and payload have separated from the booster. Thus, because the booster is much lighter on the way down than it was on the way up, it can decelerate itself with relatively little fuel. (On a two-stage rocket, the empty first stage typically weighs significantly less than the fully-fuelled second stage and payload.)
SpaceX has already demonstrated this experimentally with
That's Heavy (Score:3)
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Seriously - apparently there will be some serious seismic activity created by one of these launches, and if there's a "rapid unplanned disassembly" on the launch pad, the destructiveness will rival that of a smallish nuke.
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I was at the Lunar Lander challenge, for the X-Prize a few years ago.
The problem with being at a "safe distance" is that it is so far away that you can barely see anything, except when the rocket is REALLY high up. We watched the entire thing on gigantic TV monitors, despite being "there." It's still a cool experience - sort of like a music concert, except for science, but don't think being there will give you a good view (at least not if you're a safe distance away!)
Re:That's Heavy (Score:4, Informative)
You would think... but humans haven't gone beyond low-earth orbit since the Apollo program was cancelled. That was arguably the pinnacle of manned space capability and we still haven't matched it with modern systems.
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That was arguably the pinnacle of manned space capability and we still haven't matched it with modern systems.
Space technology has advanced steadily since the Apollo era. The reason we haven't done anything as exciting as landing men on the Moon since then is simply because no one wants to pay for it. And why should they? It's billions of dollars spent travelling to places for no better reason, ultimately, than, "Because it's there."
(Colonization doesn't count until it can be convincingly argued that the colonies could eventually become truly self-sustaining, or export something of comparable value to the cost of s
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But as an integrated system, it's a simple fact that the Apollo program produced the most powerful launch vehicle ever created.
You have a very narrow view of aerospace if you think its most important product is launch vehicles, or that the only design goal worth mentioning is raw power. The most important part of the "integrated system" is the payload, not the launch vehicle.
The payload is the part that actually does something useful in its own right: relaying communications, taking pictures, etc. Launch vehicles exist only to help the payload get where it needs to be; unless its actually needed to get the job done, a big launcher
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You have a very narrow view of aerospace if you think its most important product is launch vehicles, or that the only design goal worth mentioning is raw power.
Not at all, I'm well aware of the advancements in satellite technology because I work directly in that field (and, FWIW, 90's era processors are still considered state-of-the-art in some contexts) - but my original contention was this: "[Apollo] was arguably the pinnacle of manned space capability and we still haven't matched it with modern systems." It's irrefutably true - the only manned system that's even operational as of today (Soyuz) literally predates even the Apollo program.
That's a false premise: costs did come down. Even the Delta IV heavy - widely regarded as badly overpriced compared to its contemporaries - is about 30% cheaper to launch on a per-ton basis than the Saturn V ever was.
Sure, but Delta IV isn'
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my original contention was this: "[Apollo] was arguably the pinnacle of manned space capability and we still haven't matched it with modern systems." It's irrefutably true
I think it could be argued that the International Space Station is both more advanced than Apollo, and more relevant to solving the hardest problems associated with colonization: keeping people alive, long-term. Nevertheless, I concede the point as you have narrowly defined it.
but if we looked to airliners which are more comparable, this would be like having intercontinental flights in the 70's, and today we can only fly cross-country, but still have to pay 70% of the original price. Pretty tepid "advancement".
The difference here is that there is a huge market for travelling between continents, because all of them (except Antarctica) are great places to live and work. There is no comparable market for flights to the Moon, because there's no
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There are plenty of incremental steps that could be pursued to drive R&D and expand the industry, such as near-Earth space tourism (as you suggest), asteroid mining, space-based solar, and small-scale research and exploration colonies that aren't intended to be self-sufficient. All of these things would benefit greatly from a huge reusable rocket like the ITS, without the high probability of catastrophic, deadly, horrendously expensive failure that accompanies a premature large-scale colonization effort.
I tend to agree... if we have to find the "next Earth", then Mars is certainly the best candidate in the solar system, but I don't think there's any real requirement or capability for that kind of thing at the moment. Instead, just opening up a new economic frontier in space will probably be the real key to what Musk is after - moving humanity into the next phase of civilization. It might be that he even recognizes that (and the fact that this has been renamed the Interplanetary Transport System rather than
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Bringing home bacon (Score:2)
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You'll be well-educated enough to get a job building the propellant resupply plant. Indeed, if you work it right, you'll get them to front for your ticket. $200K is not really much of a barrier anyway. Your real ticket will be in the skills you can offer,
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I'm pretty sure that transport costs will be prohibitive for MarsEarth shipping of just about anything that can also be found on Earth. Mars might need an economy, but sending raw materials or manufactured good back to Earth won't be the basis of that economy.
Not a Solar Sail (Score:2)
Why hasn't anyone pointed that out yet? o.O
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NASA figured that out a long time ago.
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Get back to me when they have something in orbit.
So, 28 September 2008?
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I would score you up for being funny if I had any moderating points. (If the Earth wouldn't be curved there wouldn't be a horizon.)
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I'm surprised no one else noticed or commented yet on the final images.
That's because it's just a CGI render, with no indication that SpaceX has any idea how to actually do such a thing from a technical perspective.
Lots of people have speculated (and drawn pretty pictures) about terraforming Mars. However, serious scientific studies of the problem invariably show that it would be astronomically expensive (as in, beyond the combined capabilities of the entire Earth economy), take hundreds to thousands of years, and/or require fantastic technology that does not yet exist.
I saw n
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