SpaceX Engineer Says NASA Should Plan For Starship's 'Significant' Capability (arstechnica.com) 126
technology_dude shares a report from Ars Technica: As part of its Artemis program to return humans to the Moon this decade, NASA has a minimum requirement that its "human landing system" must be able to deliver 865 kg to the lunar surface. This is based on the mass of two crew members and their equipment needed for a short stay. However, in selecting SpaceX's Starship vehicle to serve as its human lander, NASA has chosen a system with a lot more capability. Starship will, in fact, be able to deliver 100 metric tons to the surface of the Moon -- more than 100 times NASA's baseline goal.
"Starship can land 100 tons on the lunar surface," said Aarti Matthews, Starship Human Landing System program manager for SpaceX. "And it's really hard to think about what that means in a tangible way. One hundred tons is four fire trucks. It's 100 Moon rovers. My favorite way to explain this to my kids is that it's the weight of more than 11 elephants." Matthews made her comments last week at the ASCENDxTexas space conference in Houston. She was responding to a question from an audience member, Jeff Michel, an engineer at Johnson Space Center. [...] "NASA specified a high-level need, but we, industry, are taking away one of your biggest constraints that you have in designing your payloads and your systems," she said. "It's significantly higher mass. It's essentially infinite volume for the purposes of this conversation. And the cost is an order of magnitude lower. I think that our NASA community, our payload community, should really think about this new capability that's coming online."
"We all need to be thinking bigger and better and really inspirationally about what we can do," Matthews said. "Anyone who has worked on hardware design for space application knows you're fighting for kilograms, and sometimes you're fighting for grams, and that takes up so much time and energy. It really limits ultimately what your system can do. That's gone away entirely." [...] "If you, as an engineer, are developing an in-situ resource utilization system, what does your system look like when you have no mass constraint?" she asked. "What about when you have no volume constraint? That would be the exciting thing that I would like to hear from NASA engineers, what they can do with this capability." "The engineer says NASA is not thinking big enough," adds Slashdot reader technology_dude. "I think it's pretty obvious what the payload should be, a nuclear powered boring machine. With flamethrower weapons just in case! Leave a comment for my resume. Maybe I'll call."
"Starship can land 100 tons on the lunar surface," said Aarti Matthews, Starship Human Landing System program manager for SpaceX. "And it's really hard to think about what that means in a tangible way. One hundred tons is four fire trucks. It's 100 Moon rovers. My favorite way to explain this to my kids is that it's the weight of more than 11 elephants." Matthews made her comments last week at the ASCENDxTexas space conference in Houston. She was responding to a question from an audience member, Jeff Michel, an engineer at Johnson Space Center. [...] "NASA specified a high-level need, but we, industry, are taking away one of your biggest constraints that you have in designing your payloads and your systems," she said. "It's significantly higher mass. It's essentially infinite volume for the purposes of this conversation. And the cost is an order of magnitude lower. I think that our NASA community, our payload community, should really think about this new capability that's coming online."
"We all need to be thinking bigger and better and really inspirationally about what we can do," Matthews said. "Anyone who has worked on hardware design for space application knows you're fighting for kilograms, and sometimes you're fighting for grams, and that takes up so much time and energy. It really limits ultimately what your system can do. That's gone away entirely." [...] "If you, as an engineer, are developing an in-situ resource utilization system, what does your system look like when you have no mass constraint?" she asked. "What about when you have no volume constraint? That would be the exciting thing that I would like to hear from NASA engineers, what they can do with this capability." "The engineer says NASA is not thinking big enough," adds Slashdot reader technology_dude. "I think it's pretty obvious what the payload should be, a nuclear powered boring machine. With flamethrower weapons just in case! Leave a comment for my resume. Maybe I'll call."
How many artificial female bodies will it hold? (Score:4, Funny)
Heck yeah, NASA should take a play from Edison's book and actually send 11 elephants to the moon in a Starship to prove how unsafe it is.
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The other point I wanted to make was that there was a great episode about the development of the original LM in From the Earth to the Moon. It showed the method they used but also that the biggest issue they had was weight. Almost every decision they made was to find a way to reduce the weight whilst
Re:How many artificial female bodies will it hold? (Score:5, Informative)
The big differences in terms of deliverable/returnable payload to the lunar surface are (A) in-orbit refuelling, so it's like you get a whole extra stage; and (B) higher-performance final stage, both in terms of mass ratios and ISPs.
The big differences in terms of sustainability are of course the fact that no hardware gets thrown away, plus a high flight rate (in part boosted by the multiple launches for in-orbit refueling)
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..I would like to think this shows how far we've advanced in the last 50 years but I suspect at least some of it is down to the right company stepping up to the mark.
"It's significantly higher mass. It's essentially infinite volume for the purposes of this conversation. And the cost is an order of magnitude lower."
Sadly, SpaceX practically makes this sound easy with this statement. And the biggest advancement in the last 20 years, was apparently ripping the Space program from the hands of those hell-bent in making it as expensive as it could be.
Even taxpayers couldn't fund that level of corruption, which says a lot given what we do fund.
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SpaceX did spend twenty years figuring out how to launch a rocket and then land it again, something that's critical to Starship's economy. Raptor is one product of a burst of new engine design after forty years of more or less stagnation.
It's a pretty typical pattern with any high capital industry. A basic design and a few examples are developed and refined and there's very little incentive to build something radically new until technology comes along and changes things.
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One great quote from that was the engineers talking about putting fewer band aids in the first aid kit to reduce weight. Don’t know how true it was but you get the idea.
Re:How many artificial female bodies will it hold? (Score:5, Informative)
For the record, Edison didn't actually kill an elephant [wikipedia.org]. It's a popular myth. Topsy had attacked numerous people and killed one, and was scheduled to be executed. Her owners decided to make a spectacle of her execution and charge admission. Their planned approach for executing her varied over time, but they ultimately settled on a combination of electrocution, poisoning, and a steam winch for strangulation. Of the electrical portion, there were some electricians from the "Edison Company" which helped, but that was entirely unrelated to Thomas Edison - he was no longer in the electrical business, having been driven out of years earlier during a merger and sold his stock in it to finance new ventures. It was 10 years after the War of the Currents. Edison was not at the park, and it's questionable whether he even heard of the event. The only connection is that the Edison Film Company filmed it, but they filmed a ton of things (1200 reels during that period), and it's dubious that he ever even saw that particular reel, much less was involved with it.
MOD PARENT UP (Score:2)
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I was going to be sad for having lost that enchanting story to the dull truth, but I'm delighting in the irony of a "Tesla" fan "defending" Edison.
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The irony is that Musk is actually much more like Edison than Tesla. Both were brilliant engineers in their own right, but Edison also had excellent business sense, while Tesla's business sense was awful. Edison was an obsessive workaholic, and expected his workers to work as hard as he did; he achieved his world-changing products through a brutal slog of repeated failure-is-an-option testing.Tesla was somewhat of a dreamer who came up with out-of-left-field ideas, some of which were sheer bollocks (esp. la
Re: How many artificial female bodies will it hol (Score:2)
Elephants (Score:5, Funny)
African elephants or European elephants?
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,,, and are they unladen?
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As long as one kind is black - oh stupid me: of colour - and the other one is white: who cares?
I knew it! (Score:2, Offtopic)
I knew it that that was what those Nasa geeks were up to. Building artificial women. Great excuse though.
Power Loaders... (Score:2)
Can we get some of these on the moon please incase we need them ....
https://blog.robotiq.com/hs-fs... [robotiq.com]
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And exactly why would you need a power loader on the moon? Clearly you didn't pay attention in your high school physics lessons. Or for that matter watch any of the moon walk videos from NASA.
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To fight queen xenomorphs, obviously.
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Because it's useful to be able to move massive things, especially when doing construction or manufacturing?
The Moon's gravity may be 1/6th Earth's - but that's still too much for you to lift even a single tonne unaided. Not to mention lower gravity only affects weight, not inertia, so even on rollers (or suspended) you still want significant power assist if you want to be able to safely move massive things at faster than a snail's pace.
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Because it's useful to be able to move massive things, especially when doing construction or manufacturing?
The Moon's gravity may be 1/6th Earth's - but that's still too much for you to lift even a single tonne unaided. Not to mention lower gravity only affects weight, not inertia, so even on rollers (or suspended) you still want significant power assist if you want to be able to safely move massive things at faster than a snail's pace.
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Nearly 100% agree with you but, 1/6th of a tonne is about what the automatic transmission of one of my cars weighed with the torque converter in, and I was able to carry that from my driveway to my house and up two flights of stairs to the attic to try to repair (Turned out to be pointless, I didn't realize that, due to one roll pin slipping out, the bell housing was shattered along with additional damage, and the only way I could find to get another housing was to buy a used transmission that had less mile
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You must have been a fricking body builder then. 1/6 tonne = ~366lb, which would be a particularly heavy transmission. You could move that with a hand cart without too much trouble, but very few people could lift it unaided without injuring themselves, much less carry it any distance (even if it didn't have 6x the inertia making it far more cumbersome).
More to the point, one tonne is just a lightweight bauble in the context of significant construction. My intent was to convey "If you can't even lift a si
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You must have been a fricking body builder then. 1/6 tonne = ~366lb, which would be a particularly heavy transmission. You could move that with a hand cart without too much trouble, but very few people could lift it unaided without injuring themselves, much less carry it any distance (even if it didn't have 6x the inertia making it far more cumbersome).
The transmission was from a last millennium (neat to be able to say that) model Nissan Maxima. It was a while ago and I remember checking the weight of it afterwards. That was with the torque converter attached and with transmission fluid and it came to about 360 lbs. It was winter and I don't have a garage and I just wanted to get somewhere warm to work on it before my fingers froze off.
Not a body builder, but I went from being tiny as a child to being able to build muscle mass easily when I hit late adole
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Now do that for a work shift in a horribly awkward vacuum + radiation suit, in an environment where you absolutely do not want to accidentally puncture your suit, and can't wipe the sweat off your brow. Manual labor outside is going to be a last-resort option for the forseeable future. In fact I suspect even most equipment will be remotely operated from VR rigs safely inside the habitat. Some of it maybe even from Earth - though that 2-second lag time is probably going to mean that option's more suitable
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Now do that for a work shift in a horribly awkward vacuum + radiation suit, in an environment where you absolutely do not want to accidentally puncture your suit, and can't wipe the sweat off your brow. Manual labor outside is going to be a last-resort option for the forseeable future.
Oh, absolutely. No matter what humans may be able to do as far as manual labor goes, it seldom makes sense to force them to do it if there's any alternative.
In my fantasy world they'd minimally retrofit one off the lot for vacuum & regolith operation (electric drive and "condoms" around the pistons to keep out regolith?) and send it with the first Lunar Starship. Along with an electric pickup or two, and bunch of other heavy equipment. Why send the thing practically empty just because NASA's original plan only called for a 1tonne capacity? Get a jump start on things, and test out how well minimally modified Earth equipment would actually stand up to the Lunar environment. Worst case scenario they rapidly decay into a bunch of spare parts. And with a little luck they'll get some substantial work out of them, and find that a complete high-dollar redesign isn't actually called for with many/most aspects.
I can think of a few modifications that would be needed. There's regolith to worry about, but I don't think it would be that bad. Like you said, some sort of protective envelope around pistons, etc should be fine. As far as dealing with vacuum, the seals and so forth for the hydraulics should also be fine since the pressure difference between the inside
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Yeah, I suspect the piston seals would definitely need to be protected from the ultra-jagged regolith dust, and it probably wouldn't be that good for bearings either.
Good point on heat - and cold. I think you're right that cold will be the bigger problem. Give the metal a nice shiny polish though, and it will radiate away heat very slowly. Maybe even add some heat tape to the remote bits. That sun-shield might do double duty as well, a reflective underside could reflect back the heat radiated towards spa
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Bloat (Score:5, Insightful)
Starship will be an amazing vehicle, truly powerful and the question is valid but I wonder if it would have a side effect like we see in software development.
Many pieces of software are unnecessarily complex. This simply happened because the payloads we could utilize were significantly greater, so could we not see the same in the future of space travel. When things are too cheap for engineers, it seems they naturally get lazy...
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I would not worry too much. Best case, it will still cost thousands of dollars per kg to the moon, instead of millions before.
That's enough to keep engineers optimising materials and design, more so than in aviation. Even for LEO this would hold.
Lower launch costs will allow the use of more off-the-shelf components, and redundancy to compensate for the lower reliability. This will speed up projects and lower costs enormously.
To get the sort of bloat we see in software today, you'd have to make it cheaper t
Re:Bloat (Score:5, Insightful)
When things are too cheap for engineers, it seems they naturally get lazy...
It isn't lazy, it is appropriately reoptimizing for the changing conditions.
And yes, if launch costs come down significantly you will definitely see that. For example we will probably see more radiation shielding, radiation shielding is expensive you essentially have to surround the thing you shield with mass - the mass provides the interception of incoming radiation. Currently we do a lot of work hardening chips, testing hardware, fault tolerant designs, a lot of this work very very expensive. If launch costs come down significantly it would be cheaper to use standard earth chips and add several kilos of shielding material like water.
While you could argue that shifting from very complex radiation hardened designs to a tub of water was lazy, I would present it as correctly optimizing for the requirements at hand, which is what an engineer is meant to do.
Re:Bloat (Score:4, Insightful)
Exactly. You can only do so much optimization for a given amount of engineering and production cost, and optimizing for low mass is one of those things that is really in direct opposition to strength, durability, cost, and even simplicity.
Not to mention, not caring so much about mass means you could simply send stuff designed for use on Earth, with only whatever relatively minor modifications are needed to operate in the new environment. Which means you could send a LOT more equipment right away with minimal prep time or expense. How much effort would it really take to retrofit a mid-sized bulldozer/backhoe to survive vacuum and lunar regolith? You could probably have it ready with time to spare before the first Artemis mission launched, and it would completely transform what was possible for both research and construction. You pay a few million more in fuel costs, but you easily save that in all the up front costs of designing and building completely custom hardware. And you'd have it on day one, rather than 5-10 years later.
Apply that philosophy to a bunch of other equipment and for only a modest increase in cost you could have that first Lunar Starship packed to the gills with everything needed to start a small outpost with serious growth potential, rather than only carrying 1% of its payload capacity because NASA was fixated on outdated mass and volume considerations.
Maybe it is lazy in some ways - but it's the kind of laziness that goes by a very different name in business circles: cost effectiveness.
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You pay a few million more in fuel costs
Fuel costs for your lunar bulldozer would be zero, since it would be electric. Unless you really want to strap on a LOX tank and ship oxidiser up there as well.
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Sure, but I was referring to the extra rocket fuel required to get it there in the first place. (Including the extra tanker launches required to get it all to orbit)
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It's both. Sometimes laziness and sometimes reoptimizing but your points are valid.
The trade-off would seem to be we could lose expertise and growth in hardening electronics. There are still applications where we should consider this. However, I think reoptimizing as you suggest, especially if later the substance for hardening could be used for other uses, has a lot of value. For instance, if the water shielding is used as part of necessary resources for developing an outpost or colony, once the shielding i
gosh (Score:2)
gee, maybe you could carry one of Bezo's toys in this thing, so he can finally reach orbit . . .
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Starship will be an amazing vehicle, truly powerful and the question is valid but I wonder if it would have a side effect like we see in software development.
Many pieces of software are unnecessarily complex. This simply happened because the payloads we could utilize were significantly greater, so could we not see the same in the future of space travel. When things are too cheap for engineers, it seems they naturally get lazy...
I think they are going to still have plenty of payback from compact and lighter equipment. What they won't do is overdo it. Reducing the amount of material in something without reducing strength is something engineers are pretty good at by now. It's already a desirable goal for mass production, so a lot of off-the-shelf products are already pretty well optimized. It's possible to go further, but you get diminishing returns for the amount of labor and materials you put into it. Reducing the weight 10% can co
I'd like to see that (Score:2)
Like the rest of the planet, I'd be glued to the screen to see 11 elephants if space-suits frolic on the Moon.
100t to moon will take many launches. (Score:4, Informative)
For those unaware, Starship is hoping to take 100 ton to low earth orbit. Similar to SLS but less than the Saturn V. But fully re-usable!
It will need many more launches of the tanker version of Starship, and orbital refuelling, to get to the moon and back. Such propellant transfer has never been done before, and may prove to be challenging. Nobody believes it will be ready for lunar missions in 2024. I'll be over the moon if it can even land intact on Earth by then - only 2 years away.
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From a science perspective you have the option for a Hubble/JamesWeb with a single ~8 metre primary mirror in space. None of that folding malarkey necessary with associated artefacts on the image. Hell you potentially have the option of putting the telescope on the moon.
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Starship *was* hoping to take 100 ton to low earth orbit.
With the new Raptor 2 engines it is hoping (sic) to take much more, maybe 150 tons to LEO.
Which is more than the Saturn V. Which could also get 41 tons to TLI. i.e. the moon ( give or take ).
I think Starship will launch this year and be caught ( no landing ! ) intact by next year.
Re:100t to moon will take many launches. (Score:5, Insightful)
For those unaware, Starship is hoping to take 100 ton to low earth orbit.
That is not what the article says.
"Starship can land 100 tons on the lunar surface," said Aarti Matthews, Starship Human Landing System program manager for SpaceX
Still, this sparks discussion because her wording is not the same. Nasa clearly means 865 kg of payload. Does Aarti mean they can land 100 tons on the lunar surface or that they can bring 100 tons of payload to the lunar surface? Saturn V/Apollo brought 15 tons to the lunar surface for a payload of a few 100 kg. I'm sure the payload to total weight is not a linear correlation, but what does 100 tons of Starship mean in terms of payload? And does it include the return trip or is this just to drop stuff off?
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Quenda is correct, it's two slightly different numbers. Musk has talked about it a lot over the past years.
A single Starship launch is able to get 100t of payload to Low Earth Orbit. I believe that, even unloaded, it *cannot* directly reach the moon.
However, the plan is to have a fuel depot in orbit, where Starship can refuel once it gets there. And fully refueled in orbit it should be able to deliver 100t of payload to the surface of the moon, and then return a modest payload to Earth
And yes, it's 100t
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Yeah, and they're hoping to eventually push 200.
Raptor 2 seems to be having issues though - whether they're a design regression, or tied to pushing it harder than R1 could handle, I don't believe they have mentioned.
100t is a nice conservative estimate. Until we actually have something flying to prove otherwise, it's a nice round baseline number to conceptualize missions around. And far more capacity than any single mission in the near future is likely to require. At least until a major shift in space pr
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The lander contract Starship has with NASA is to go from the lunar gateway to the surface and back. In that configuration I would expect it to have quite a bit more than 100 tonnes capacity, but perhaps the SpaceX guy is being conservative.
Fuel transfer has been demonstrated many times in orbit. It's done routinely for ISS, several times a year, and the Russians did it as far back as Salyut. NASA also ran a successful program in 2007 to demonstrate rendezvous and refuelling between two robotic spacecraft.
Re: 100t to moon will take many launches. (Score:2)
might be able to carry more (Score:2)
Given the much smaller gravity well on the moon, and the lack of a need to carry enough fuel to leave earth, it would seem plausible that a starship could land *more* mass in a single lunar landing than could leave earth in a single launch.
hawk
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The full Saturn V was actually not capable of launching useful payload to LEO, the "payload to LEO" figures include the third stage and propellant load (the SLS figures are similarly misleading). Skylab actually used a cut-down version of the rocket, the third stage being modified into the ~76 t space station.
The Starship figure is the actual useful payload to LEO. It's designed to be most effective at delivering mass to LEO, to make the most of orbital propellant transfer. And while Saturn V could get 43.5
Instant space station (Score:5, Interesting)
What blows my mind is that if SpaceX launches two of these rockets into orbit and connects them up there, the combinatinon will apparently offer more room than the entire international space station.
Imagine if SpaceX launches a simple docking ring that can connect a few starships in a hub-spoke model. They might be able to spin it for some artificial gravity. Climb up to the center of the hub and you can be weightless again, before climbing down into another starship.
Re:Instant space station (Score:5, Interesting)
It's a fun idea, but with nothing to damp vibration from shifting loads (like people moving around) we just don't have the tech or engineering to keep such a system safely together.
There is also the problem that you'd be putting them end-to-end so really your hab space would be the the narrowest cross section of the station - you'd be wasting most of your volume on a big tunnel for access ladders. And that assumes you cleared a path through whatever rocket systems are left and managed to seal them against vacuum and pressurize them.
And you probably really want a 200m radius so you don't have to spin up past 2 RPM. You can fiddle with those numbers a bit, but there's a balance point between radius, rotation rate, g, and the gradient of apparent gravity. Get it wrong and things will break or people will feel sick.
THEN you have the problem of docking for resupply and for crew changes.
Realistically, you want something massive enough you don't worry about minor movement within and large enough that your RPM rate is really low. And SpaceX still isn't there by orders of magnitude.
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all of which are engineering problems, not conceptual ones. and spacex have proven so far to be pretty good at the engineering side of things.
Good points. On the other hand, 0.1G (Score:5, Interesting)
You make some good points.
It occurs to me that many of the problems of zero gravity go away at even 0.1 G, or less. You can set something down on the table and it'll stay there. It isn't necessary to have 1.0 G in order to be able to sit down, without floating out of your chair while you're trying to do something.
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The flip side is that going from 0g to even 0.1g completely eliminates virtually all of the benefits of microgravity.
And without those, why would you be in space at all? Aside from interplanetary voyages, and crew quarters for an otherwise non-rotating facility. (e.g a laboratory or asteroid mining station) And in those cases you probably want to be as close to 1g as you can comfortably get.
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> completely eliminates virtually all of the benefits of microgravity.
> And without those, why would you be in space at all?
That thought did occur to me as well. Of course, there's a LOT of stuff done in space that's there for reasons other than microgravity. In the International Space Station, probably not so much.
Long term, it would probably be helpful to have both zero G areas for science experiments to sit and such, and also some G in the living quarters so you can comfortably eat and go to the ba
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If you make a disc instead of a ring, you'll have something approaching microgravity at the axis of rotation. In fact, you could have multiple floors at different g levels, and probably would just so you're not wasting the useful station volume.
You should probably ask someone with a decent physics degree and experience in microgravity experiment design if that would be good enough before you build anything, though.
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> you could have multiple floors at different g levels
I had to look this up to check if it was true, because intuitively to me it's true - and false. Sure, directly at the axis of rotation, for a one-dimensional object, the G force pulls equally in all directions and is therefore net zero. Much like from south pole, every direction is north. But even one meter from the south pole, that's no longer true. Suddenly you have north, south, east, and west.
So I looked it up. Yep, it's true - G force is proport
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Gyroscopic flywheels should work quite well to damp out transient loads like people moving around. And thrusters could assist if the flywheels saturate.
Here's how I would envision a crewed Starship Mars mission: Send the Starships in pairs, rendezvousing shortly after trans-Mars insertion. Tether them nose-to-nose with a ~300m Xylon tether, using the catch arms as attachment points. (They're already designed for precisely this load.) Spin up to ~1G near Earth, tapering to Mars gravity on arrival. This arran
Re:Instant big M (Score:2)
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Just one of them would give you that volume. The ISS offers 916m3 of pressurized volume, the latest Starship revision with a blunter nose increased the internal pressurizeable payload volume from 1000m3 to 1100. The first passenger Starship to reach orbit will instantly become the largest pressurized habitat we've ever put in space. At least assuming Orbital Reef hasn't gotten their stuff all assembled by then. I'm not sure just how much pressurized volume they're adding to the ISS, and it will only be
Poor kids ... (Score:2)
My favorite way to explain this to my kids is that it's the weight of more than 11 elephants."
One order of magnitude wrong, poor kids. Unless you pick the most heaviest elephants ever found in nature, which reach indeed close to 5tons. Then you are only half a magnitude off.
Re: Poor kids ... (Score:2)
Re: Poor kids ... (Score:2)
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Time and Energy Sinks (Score:3)
"Anyone who has worked on hardware design for space application knows you're fighting for kilograms, and sometimes you're fighting for grams, and that takes up so much time and energy. It really limits ultimately what your system can do."
This statement is so true, and across many industries now. And it doesn't just limit the system. It limits the human designing the system.
EV range is another perfect example. We've watched countless engineers fight for miles, perhaps even fighting for fractions of a mile. That takes up a lot of time and energy. We even grow tired of it being beaten and whipped by marketing. Soon, every EV will have a 1,000-mile battery, and hopefully we can get engineers to not have to focus so much on that aspect, and perhaps more focus on other aspects of EV need (such as solar recharging).
Re:Time and Energy Sinks (Score:4, Insightful)
Then Tesla said, 'nah, let's just throw more batteries at it, and work on making them cheaper.' And then, 'here you go, an EV whose acceleration puts hypercars to shame.'
Personally I think the new Hummer EV takes this too far, it's a mammoth. And the concept does give back a some of the environmental benefits, taking more resources to build and power.
But the "solar challenge" mindset that everybody had before that just wasn't leading anywhere at all.
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'here you go, an EV whose acceleration puts hypercars to shame.'
Here's a question for every adult from the 1960s to today; How comfortable are you handing a Hemi-powered Dodge with a big block motor, to your teenage driver?
The EV acceleration "race", isn't a good thing. We'll realize that when every new car is something that would smoke everything you would never give them before.
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Here's a question for every adult from the 1960s to today; How comfortable are you handing a Hemi-powered Dodge with a big block motor, to your teenage driver?
The EV acceleration "race", isn't a good thing. We'll realize that when every new car is something that would smoke everything you would never give them before.
Not sure about the rest, by my Tesla (Model 3 Performance) can have its acceleration limited to ~50% and requires a PIN to reenable. Seems like that would work for teens.
I think we all know what's gonna happen next... (Score:2)
On our next Lunar mission, expect one of the astronauts to emerge from the landing pod driving a Tesla, as Musk tweets "The Tesla has landed!"
ok.. (Score:2)
Haters gonna hate (Score:2)
easy to predict what happens next (Score:2)
Disneymoon anyone? (Score:2)
Re:Translation (Score:4, Insightful)
That's an interesting set of conjectures you got there.
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Re:Translation (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Translation (Score:5, Insightful)
SpaceX has enough funds to develop the Starship program all by themselves, something no other space company has attempted *ever*. But, for the 1000 missions it's going to take to colonize Mars, they are going to need some help.
Sure, NASA can chose to ignore the offering and just pay for SLS over and over again, as both political parties mandate though Congress. In the mean time, humanity will lose. No real permanent lunar settlement. No cheap missions to the asteroids, Jupiter and Saturn. No orbital factories where to build the next generation of exploration ships.
They all know something like Starship will be needed in the future. SpaceX is just noting that this future is almost there, and ask for NASA (and everybody else) to be ready to take advantage of it. And this is going to benefit NASA big time, like Facon 9 and Heavy are doing right now.
You probably don't know it, but a big part of what makes space missions expensive is the very limited mass that can be launched today. It literally makes developing stuff 10 times slower and more expensive that it need to be. Once Starship removes this mass limit, NASA is going to be able to lauch so many more projects, so much cheapers, so much often. And do a lot more things that right now seem just impossible.
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Sure it will be good to launch things in one go instead of in pieces and assembling in orbit but its an evolutionary change not revolutionary like you are making it out to be. Reuse was revolutionary. Making the spaceship out of steel is revolutionary. Making it bigger is
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There is a value to making things small irrespective of whether you have a mass limit.
Yeah, let's work on miniaturizing all those bricks and lumber that people are building their houses with.
It'd be much better if they were tiny and could fit in an ordinary car.
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https://youtu.be/2js9Z6rtENA?t... [youtu.be]
Re: Translation (Score:2)
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You should probably put a tape measure to a 2x4 piece of lumber.
Making an iPhone small is expensive (Score:4, Insightful)
The size of an iPhone is driven by consumer demand - they want something light because they have to carry it all day, and small because they want to hold and use it in one hand.
Take away those size restraints, and yes, you would make an iPhone the size and weight of a brick, and it would be a lot cheaper. Folded steel instead of cast magnesium alloy, toss in a bank of 18650's for power instead of thin, maximum power density cells, pull in a cheap off-the-shelf off-brand x86 processor and stock hardware, slap a fan in it instead of finely engineered heat pipes and carefully build low power electronics.
Just like how we build bridges and houses out of heavy cheap concrete.
Things are only built small and light when it is a requirement. Otherwise, they are built large, heavy and cheap.
Re: Making an iPhone small is expensive (Score:2)
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As long as we use reaction engines to move things, then Heavy != Cheap. Either we should not move things very far, or we should invent some engine that doesn't need propellants.
I suppose if you have a sufficiently large planetoid (without an atmosphere) to push against, an electromagnetic rail launcher could be useful.
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Yep, and we've got the Moon conveniently nearby. And SpinLaunch is already developing the required mass driver, with no need for fancy maglev systems and ultra-capacitors to reach the desired speeds. (see my co-reply for details).
Of course a maglev system would still be desirable for everything that couldn't survive thousands of g's of centripetal force. About 100km would be enough to reach escape velocity with only 3g of acceleration.
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Conveniently, we already have an near infinite amount of good construction material at the bottom of a relatively shallow gravity well right next door on the Moon.
Using a mass driver (a full-scale SpinLaunch system would need only a slight improvement in launch speed) it only requires about 0.8kWh/kg (plus efficiency losses) to launch something from the Moon's surface to its L4 or L5 points, with no hideously inefficient rockets needed. That's about 1/3rd the energy typically consumed by a cargo ship from
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The moon is already escaping Earth at... ~4cm/year if I recall correctly, as the tides on Earth transfer angular momentum from Earth to the moon, lengthening Earth's day by about 2 milliseconds per century in the process. Nothing we do will even *begin* to compare to the the kind of energy that moves the tides, and thus the moon. And that's going to take billions of years until the Earth finally slows down enough so that the same side always faces the moon, and tidal momentum transfer stops.
If we're conce
So cost is proportional to entropy! (Score:2)
I'd like one of those 18650 powered phones.
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As to your strawman about size. I honestly struggle to imagine that someone really can't get that size reduction is a trade-off with utility and cost, especially at the en
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People have difficulty considering scales that have more than two values. They have even more difficulty considering relationships that are nonlinear, and yet more with relationships that are non-monotonic.
Someone here used to have the sig "the human brain casts to boolean."
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There is a value to making things small irrespective of whether you have a mass limit. Otherwise computers would still be the size of buildings.
There is a value to making some things larger, like rovers. If they're larger they can have more and more durable systems, and longer planned mission times. Or construction equipment, if we're going to make serious bases on other planets we're going to have to send a lot more mass (more habitats and/or more construction equipment.)
its an evolutionary change not revolutionary like you are making it out to be
Some evolutions are revolutions. This might not be equivalent to evolving legs, but it might well be equivalent to the evolution of a knee useful for walking upright — a tru
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Hmm... I see a lot of computers around that weigh significantly more than 5 pounds. New ones too.
It's as if the particular example you chose is subject to some specific factors that make small size particularly desireable. I don't know what that could be in mobile devices, but I'm sure somebody can figure it out.
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There is a value to making things small irrespective of whether you have a mass limit. Otherwise computers would still be the size of buildings.
We still do build computers the size of buildings [top500.org] when the application calls for it. You miniaturize things when the application requires it, or when it's economical to do so. You don't do it for shits and giggles, because then things are more expensive for no reason.
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" is the very limited mass that can be launched today."
Not to mention the limited sizes - the James Webb Space Telescope had to partially "fold" its mirror (on the "wing" mirror subassemblies).
While launching a large, single piece mirror might not be possible due to launch stresses, the largest optical mirrors for telescopes have 8.2 meters diameter.
This is larger than the 4.5 meters of the Space Shuttle cargo bay diameter, 5.2 meters of the Falcon Heavy, 5.4 meters of Ariane 5, 5 meters of Delta IV heavy,
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Would you rather the alternative where NASA spends all of their money on ULA, which is basically a giant money-sucking hole?
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Other than the throwaway comment supposedly by a SpaceX employee I don't see any indication that SpaceX is looking for more money. All that is being pointed out is that there is a lot more capacity in the SpaceX landing vehicle than the minimum that NASA required.
Sure NASA will need to spend more money to fully utilize this capacity but so far (again other than the throwaway comment) there is no indication that SpaceX will get any more of that money and won't be adding any other equipment to the mission. Of
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Well, in that case, let me be the first to say: style gambles with lives, happiness, and even destiny itself! Sixty-four shot the sheriff. An idea lies ahead, what with the future yet to come. Stupidity says hello. The legend of the raven's roar comes asking for bread. Too long a stick revels in authority, and a flailing monkey takes the world for granted. A cranky old lady approaches at hig
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