Earlier quoted context omitted.
Begging for Internet points... shame....
No, partycoder is educating is educating varadg on the correct site etiquette; the 'upvote' button should be used in place of 'I agree!' or 'This!' type comments.
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The New Space Race
31–40 of 40 posts
Re: The New Space Race
#32I had no idea that Blue Origin vertically landed their rocket (New Shepard) on 2015-11-23, before SpaceX did on 2015-12-21. In addition, New Shepard rockets have already been reused. On the other hand, New Shepard is suborbital, even though it's reached the altitude of 100km.
I was gearing up to try to explain how substantial the difference between what Blue Origin and SpaceX have achieved is, but luckily I found that Randall Munroe has already explained it quite well[0].
Long story short -- a vertical takeoff and landing, reaching 100km with zero velocity, is a vastly simpler (and lower energy) problem than what the Falcon 9 is doing.
Re: The New Space Race
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Asteroid mining. New startups like Planetary Resources and Deep Space Ventures will want to send satellites and vehicles into orbit or deep space for exploratory research.
It is super unclear that even if you had extremely cheap access to orbit, you could make asteroid mining pay off. If cost to orbit was cheap enough, people might be interested in orbital solar power.
Asteroid mining will pay off better if launch costs stay high. Anything produced in space has a huge cost advantage over something launched from the ground at a cost of thousands of dollars per kilogram. A kilogram of water or iron is literally worth more that its weight in gold once its in space.
Re: The New Space Race
#34This article has a bunch of problems and is fairly typical of mass-media reporting in this area. Suborbital vehicles such as SpaceShipTwo, New Shepard, and Lynx are lumped together with orbital launch systems. I do not think the distinction is made adequately clear in the text either; it would be very easy for a layperson to be seriously misled. Falcon 9 isn't described separately, just as a note on the Falcon Heavy.…
To be fair to the layperson in the case of SpaceX they're not making it any better. It's called the "Falcon Heavy" now, but it used to officially be "Falcon 9 Heavy". If they didn't want it to be confused with a minor reconfiguration of the "Falcon 9" they couldn't have done worse.
Ditto with "Dragon" and "Crew Dragon".
Re: The New Space Race
#35This article has a bunch of problems and is fairly typical of mass-media reporting in this area. Suborbital vehicles such as SpaceShipTwo, New Shepard, and Lynx are lumped together with orbital launch systems. I do not think the distinction is made adequately clear in the text either; it would be very easy for a layperson to be seriously misled. Falcon 9 isn't described separately, just as a note on the Falcon Heavy.…
Ugh, the article is so full of crap it hurts. As you've said they mix suborbital toys in there Show SLS (but no price breakdown - hint - it's going to be fucking riddiculous) And it has the fucking suicidal SRB's (they dramatically increase the risk of a critical failure) that cost more to refurbish than to build new... Antares is just... And they compare the MAX SpaceX price to MIN (theoretical!) Vulcan price I actu…
Skylon is never going to fly. The system design doesn't close with any reasonable set of engineering assumptions. This the the kind of thing the press is horrible at reporting about because they lack any technical capability to vet wild claims like what Reaction Engines (REL) is making, and they effectively just serve as a mouthpiece for REL. Real decision-makers with budgetary authority are mislead by this kind of crap.
Even the SABRE cycle is overly complex and unlikely to ever be realized as envisioned. The real interesting piece of technology REL has is their precooler. That could potentially see multiple applications.
SpaceX is an interesting case not because of their absolute engineering prowess/awesomeness, but because their competition and preceding Government efforts have failed (or not bothered) so many times to accomplish even what SpaceX is doing. It didn't require new technology that SpaceX invented, for example, to land a first stage after launch. But SpaceX definitely deserves plaudits for their doggedness, willingness to be unconventional, and lack of fear about failing publicly along the way.
Re: The New Space Race
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is super unclear that even if you had extremely cheap access to orbit, you could make asteroid mining pay off. If cost to orbit was cheap enough, people might be interested in orbital solar power.
Asteroid mining will pay off better if launch costs stay high. Anything produced in space has a huge cost advantage over something launched from the ground at a cost of thousands of dollars per kilogram. A kilogram of water or iron is literally worth more that its weight in gold once its in space.
Okay, so there's a couple of dynamics that work differently here.
There's asteroid mining to source materials for other stuff in space and then there's asteroid mining to source materials for the ground. If cost to orbit is low, then it becomes less worthwhile to source stuff in space for space stuff, because you could just source it from the ground for relatively cheaper.
But if cost to orbit is low, it's also lower cost to actually set up an asteroid mining facility and perhaps more plausible that you might economically take stuff from asteroids down to the ground (though huge barriers remain, even for quite low costs to orbit).
Also, if cost to orbit is lower, there is more plausibly other stuff actually happening in orbit that might make sense to consume space materials. Right now, the value of "a kilogram of iron" in space is essentially zero, because what you need is not raw iron but some kind of tool, and there's no way to turn raw iron into a tool in space. Water and other volatiles have some minor use, but as long as the number of people in space is, like, six, it's not that big a deal to get them water from Earth. If you had more stuff going on in space, there'd be more reason to try to get low-cost materials in space.
Re: The New Space Race
#37This article has a bunch of problems and is fairly typical of mass-media reporting in this area. Suborbital vehicles such as SpaceShipTwo, New Shepard, and Lynx are lumped together with orbital launch systems. I do not think the distinction is made adequately clear in the text either; it would be very easy for a layperson to be seriously misled. Falcon 9 isn't described separately, just as a note on the Falcon Heavy.…
I wonder just how unbiased the Washington Post is now that Bezos owns it. The article does come off quite New-Shephard heavy.
I did notice that Blue Origin was the only company that got a paragraph explaining their logo...
Re: The New Space Race
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ugh, the article is so full of crap it hurts. As you've said they mix suborbital toys in there Show SLS (but no price breakdown - hint - it's going to be fucking riddiculous) And it has the fucking suicidal SRB's (they dramatically increase the risk of a critical failure) that cost more to refurbish than to build new... Antares is just... And they compare the MAX SpaceX price to MIN (theoretical!) Vulcan price I actu…
Skylon is never going to fly. The system design doesn't close with any reasonable set of engineering assumptions. This the the kind of thing the press is horrible at reporting about because they lack any technical capability to vet wild claims like what Reaction Engines (REL) is making, and they effectively just serve as a mouthpiece for REL. Real decision-makers with budgetary authority are mislead by this kind of c…
Wonder to see the analysis of REL claims. REL includes people with proven engineering record, and, AFAIK, got money from European organizations familiar with engineering, so it would be interesting to learn what's wrong with their approach.
Re: The New Space Race
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ugh, the article is so full of crap it hurts. As you've said they mix suborbital toys in there Show SLS (but no price breakdown - hint - it's going to be fucking riddiculous) And it has the fucking suicidal SRB's (they dramatically increase the risk of a critical failure) that cost more to refurbish than to build new... Antares is just... And they compare the MAX SpaceX price to MIN (theoretical!) Vulcan price I actu…
Skylon is never going to fly. The system design doesn't close with any reasonable set of engineering assumptions. This the the kind of thing the press is horrible at reporting about because they lack any technical capability to vet wild claims like what Reaction Engines (REL) is making, and they effectively just serve as a mouthpiece for REL. Real decision-makers with budgetary authority are mislead by this kind of c…
Agree, Skylon wont fly. The engineering is real sexy but it wont get funded.
Re: The New Space Race
#40One metric I'd be interested in, if it could be objectively measured, is rate of technical progress in private vs. government efforts, and, total $ spent by both enterprises. Intuitively, I would say it is much faster in private industry, however, it is also more dispersed and not coordinated.
It's a bit more complicated than that. NASA didn't build the moon rocket or the shuttle, they use a huge number of private contractors so much of the technical progress is pretty intertwined between public and private sectors.