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SpaceX Crew Dragon Docks with International Space Station

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Re: SpaceX Crew Dragon Docks with International Space Station

#241
post #45
post #6

Fantastic, very impressive. But somewhere inside (my little star-wars/trek spirit), I wish that it was not so tricky. That we all could just travel and explore the universe. Everybody always talk about how difficult it is in space and how much better earth is. Wish the debate would be more about all the possibilities in space or on other planets. What can we do with zero gravity? For all the bad things with living on…

But all the industrial scale processes we use require gravity, plenty of liquid water or solvents and a LOT of other infrastructure in place. Sure, you could pack up some tools in 10 ships 500 years ago and could start a colony in a hospitable part of Earth. I'm convinced you cannot bootstrap a colony in an unhospitable place in the Solar System without ships 3-4 orders of magnitude above what we have today.

If the BFR/Starship works as well as Musk envisions, it will be near 3 orders of magnitude better than current launch system.

For example, it will carry substantially larger payloads than the SLS, at less than 100th the cost per launch ($15M vs $3B), and launch almost daily, vs twice a year. The Shuttle flew every couple months, at a payload cost of over $30,000/lb, vs under $100/lb for the BFR.

Now I don’t think the first versions of the BFR will achieve those goals, but the crazy part is they are achievable. Reusability drives costs rapidly down towards to the cost of fuel, which is under $1M per launch.

The problem Elon faces is refurbishment costs. It seems premature to think that the BFR and Starship can fly ten flights with only minor refurbishment, and fly one hundred times before replacement. But the benefits of reuse are so huge that even if they fly only ten times each launch costs can be less than a Falcon 9.

Re: SpaceX Crew Dragon Docks with International Space Station

#242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a fan of war, but many technologies and sciences were developed for military use, everything from mathematics for ballistics, food preservation, thermodynamics, antibiotics, nuclear energy, the lunar program, and GPS. So yes, war is a horrendous waste and terrible detriment to humanity, but even war has had some beneficial side effects.

The same effort can be put into inventing these in the absence of conflict. You do need funding and you do need urgency, but that's a question of national will.

Unfortunately, it (often) _isn't_. I'd love to live in that world, but it doesn't seem realistic.

Re: SpaceX Crew Dragon Docks with International Space Station

#243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I watched Free Solo not long ago, yesterday I watched Falcon 9 launch then land flawlessly and today I watched Dragon 2 dock with the ISS. It's mind boggling how apt humans are to what should be impossible.

Oooh, I'm eagerly awaiting that film to screen in Berlin later this month! I loved Alex's TED talk. Just that little taste had my palms very, very sweaty.

National Geographic channel aired it today (March 3rd). But if you have the opportunity to see it on an IMAX size screen, I would wait until that.

Re: SpaceX Crew Dragon Docks with International Space Station

#244
post #149
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also: From a market perspective, this gives agencies such as the ESA a choice about who to work with in order to launch manned flights. That's huge. It's a transition from no competition to competition, and a transition from technological stasis to forward activity. (Soyuz was first launched in the 1960s and we are still using it? It's kind of crazy.)

I assume the Soyuz has developed since the 60s. I mean Ford has had a Mustang since the 60s but the 2018 Mustang is obviously not a '64 Mustang.

From what I know, it's only been minor revisions --- the cost of re-testing/re-certifying anything aerospace is (literally) astronomical.

Re: SpaceX Crew Dragon Docks with International Space Station

#246
On a tangent..

if advances in space travel are to be done by private means, does paying company profits become the new tax to do the things that government previously did?

Is there a presumption that the rich/corporations "know whats best" for humanity?

Re: SpaceX Crew Dragon Docks with International Space Station

#248
post #6

Fantastic, very impressive. But somewhere inside (my little star-wars/trek spirit), I wish that it was not so tricky. That we all could just travel and explore the universe. Everybody always talk about how difficult it is in space and how much better earth is. Wish the debate would be more about all the possibilities in space or on other planets. What can we do with zero gravity? For all the bad things with living on…

An interesting sentiment. Consider what doesn't seem tricky today. Imagine explaining using the internet with a smartphone to someone in 1950, for example. Oh, you just take out this handheld device you keep in your pocket which contains micro-chips that have billions of transistors and an entire city-grid of nanoscopic wires connecting them together to form a processor (actually several of them on the same chip) which then operates at a clock frequency of billions of hertz. This battery powered device then communicates over the airwaves sending and receiving data at up to many megabytes per second, and which communication occurs through a complicated globe-spanning network of millions of nodes and components, each of which are based on various types of miniaturized computers. Every step along the way represents more miracles and more computers: the LTE data connection to a cell tower, the LAN connection from the tower through switches and routers through the service provider through more switches and routers on the internet backbone and then through other switches, routers, load balancers, firewalls, cloud services, etc. to some end-point service. From radio to back and forth beween electrical signals in wires to light pulses in fiber optics and then maybe back to radio at the end. And all of this might facilitate anything as "simple" as sending an instantaneous message almost anywhere in the entire world, or making a video call (also almost anywhere in the world), or mobile banking, or shopping online, or reading an online encyclopedia article, or catching up on the news, or any other sundry tasks that would seem bewildering to someone from a pre-internet age.

In contrast, rocketry seems practically easy, it's just an engineering problem in comparison. You exercise literally trillions of transistors just to send an emoji to a friend, and yet the modern world we've built makes all that seem trivially easy. Not because it is easy, but just because we've invested a ton of effort into building and optimizing every bit and piece of it. We're already on some Nth generation of smartphones (retina displays, quad-cores, GPUs, LTE, etc, etc, etc.) whereas we're really not on that many generations of rockets, certainly less than a dozen, maybe only half a dozen depending on how you count. Once we get rolling with reusable rockets the iterations on development will speed up and we'll progress faster. And we'll get to a place where what seems like an adventure into the barren wilderness today will become merely routine and ubiquitous. Just as today using computers or flying on a jet aircraft thousands of miles seems routine and ubiquitous.

As for the benefits of space exploration and colonization I expect a lot of them will come in ways that people won't expect. A greater appreciation for what we take for granted here on Earth, for example. A tree on Mars is a treasure to be protected and revered, as is clean air and water. On Earth it's not much different, but we don't take care of the gifts we have to the degree they deserve. We dirty our air and pollute our water, we overfish our oceans, etc. Similarly, advanced off-Earth habitats are going to need to seriously invest in things like renewable energy, energy storage, recycling, end-to-end stewardship of the "CHON-cycle", and all that stuff. Here on Earth we can be reckless and treat topsoil, groundwater, and phosphorous as practically unlimited resources we abuse and discard all too readily. We kill our bug populations indiscriminately, etc. On, say, Mars they will need to be very thoughtful and careful about every single one of those things. They'll need to treat their resources as the precious and limited things they actually are. Which is true of here too (we're draining our aquifers like there's no tomorrow, but there is a tomorrow). Those habitats will drive development of technologies and solutions which will be incredibly valuable here on Earth as well, and may help drive us toward a more mature relationship with our environment and our use of resources.

Re: SpaceX Crew Dragon Docks with International Space Station

#249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I watched Free Solo not long ago, yesterday I watched Falcon 9 launch then land flawlessly and today I watched Dragon 2 dock with the ISS. It's mind boggling how apt humans are to what should be impossible.

Oooh, I'm eagerly awaiting that film to screen in Berlin later this month! I loved Alex's TED talk. Just that little taste had my palms very, very sweaty.

Highly recommended! If you can, see it on IMAX for maximum palm sweating :P

Re: SpaceX Crew Dragon Docks with International Space Station

#250
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may be right that there are many ways to make money beyond tickets (I don’t know—curious to hear examples), but I don’t think your ticket math quite adds up. 200k might be an ok ticket price for some, but you’re talking about the overlap of: (a) people who can afford 200k and (b) people willing to risk a possible one-way trip. You’re talking about tickets as if this is space tourism: space tourism is a loop aroun…

"Musk thinks the ticket price could eventually dip below $100,000, cheap enough that "most people in advanced economies could sell their home on Earth and move to Mars if they want."

And have the 24hr equivalent of a coal miner’s job.
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