SpaceX Crew Dragon Docks with International Space Station • Hacker News Board

Re: SpaceX Crew Dragon Docks with International Space Station

#261

Post by saiya-jin » Mon, Mar 04, 2019, 2:10 PM UTC

rictic wrote: post #208

goshx wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we all wait to start anything in Mars when it is too late for our planet, well... humans won’t be around anymore. Think about Mars as redundancy site for the human race.

It only counts as a redundancy site if the colony could survive without Earth. What's the minimum Martian colony size that's self sufficient? Self sufficient doesn't just mean the ability to create sufficient food, water, air, shelter, sewage, etc but the ability to recreate all of the necessary machinery starting only from your initial supplies and undeveloped Martian natural resources. So many of the industrial pro…

I agree with you, but this isn't about creating fully working self-sufficient backup in a single go. There needs to be a first step, and then another, and so on. We will learn great deal from it, be it IT technology, materials, physics but also about us - psychology, physiology etc.

Re: SpaceX Crew Dragon Docks with International Space Station

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Post by bluGill » Mon, Mar 04, 2019, 3:00 PM UTC

iguy wrote: post #257

isostatic wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With an appropriate payload there were proposals for upto 80 people in the shuttle. At $450m to launch that would be $6m a seat.

Indeed, clearly not a head-to-head comparison, I just wanted to find some figure for the shuttle's cost. It's not clear to me what the 450 includes. I had not heard of this 80-person shuttle-bus, that sounds pretty crazy!

It was in the plans back in the late 1970s/early 1980s. You can see it popular science of the past, along with a lot of other parts to the total shuttle system, very little of which was ever built. The basic idea is you can put lots of things in the cargo bay, parts to a space station (not the ISS, though the shuttle was used to build the ISS), a rocket to get from low earth orbit to something else, a bus for lots of people.

I wonder how much was a serious proposal, and how much was an artist allowed to daydream.

Re: SpaceX Crew Dragon Docks with International Space Station

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Post by JohnJamesRambo » Mon, Mar 04, 2019, 3:51 PM UTC

trainingaccount wrote: post #144

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But our "redundancy site" is awful for human life. Imagine if we just worked on fixing up the place we live on already that has air we can breathe, abundant liquid water, and isn't inundated with deadly radiation. We will need to leave Earth in 5 billion years when the sun goes red giant. 5 billion years is an INCREDIBLE amount of time. Things we do in 2019 will have zero influence on those times. It is much more lik…

It's actually in about 100 million years as the sun gradually increases in luminosity.

I see an estimate for 1% every 110 million years, is that enough to make Earth uninhabitable? Surely not.

Re: SpaceX Crew Dragon Docks with International Space Station

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Post by jacobreg » Mon, Mar 04, 2019, 5:58 PM UTC

Klathmon wrote: post #87

jacobreg wrote: post #84

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I thought the going rate for falcon 9 reusable launches was $60 million a flight. With 7 astronauts shouldn't that work out to $8.5 million per astronaut? That's not accounting for the cost of the crew dragon, but I'd be surprised if that increases the cost by an order of magnitude

Well they had to do quite a lot to be able to get to the point where NASA approves of them launching humans, and those costs have to be gained back. Just look at this mission and the upcoming abort test and the years of work that has gone into getting that approval, it's not cheap!

Makes sense. Didn't NASA give them finding to develop the crew dragon though? Is that factored into the launch cost figures we see?

Re: SpaceX Crew Dragon Docks with International Space Station

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Post by stcredzero » Mon, Mar 04, 2019, 6:27 PM UTC

nradov wrote: post #234

stcredzero wrote: post #183

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Imagine if we just worked on fixing up the place we live on already that has air we can breathe, abundant liquid water, and isn't inundated with deadly radiation. Funny, but extremely high altitudes of the atmosphere of Venus could fit the bill in the context of places in the Solar System. Temperatures and pressures are around room temperature and pressure there. The thick atmosphere of Venus provides some radiation…

But without easy access to heavier minerals it would be essentially a dead end, useful as a research base but nothing more.

But without easy access to heavier minerals it would be essentially a dead end

People who have been thinking about this are way ahead of you. There are plenty of minerals on the surface. We should be able to build remotely piloted mining equipment using phase change materials (like water) to shed heat. To cool the equipment off, we just haul it back to the high altitude base before the phase change material tank runs dry.

Re: SpaceX Crew Dragon Docks with International Space Station

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Post by trainingaccount » Mon, Mar 04, 2019, 9:34 PM UTC

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #263

trainingaccount wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's actually in about 100 million years as the sun gradually increases in luminosity.

I see an estimate for 1% every 110 million years, is that enough to make Earth uninhabitable? Surely not.

Apparently the Earth's orbit places us in the hot end of the inhabitable zone, so only a relatively modest increase in received energy makes us go the way of Venus.

Re: SpaceX Crew Dragon Docks with International Space Station

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Post by rapind » Mon, Mar 04, 2019, 11:01 PM UTC

FeepingCreature wrote: post #203

rapind wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure we would bring all of this baggage with us to Mars.

Bioterrorism strongly depends on the incubation period. Probably safe on Mars. Rogue nanotech - not unless it has AI. (Though gray goo is not considered very realistic nowadays, as we've realized just how hard even regular nanotech is, and how hostile the natural environment is to nano-scale mechanisms.) Nuclear war is the big one. Mars colonization would be less about preserving human life, per se, and more about pr…

My opinion is that these are just be symptoms of our social mental state. We're the virus. We need to fix ourselves. Maybe space exploration will help us see a little more long term? Hope so.

Re: SpaceX Crew Dragon Docks with International Space Station

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Post by grkvlt » Tue, Mar 05, 2019, 1:14 AM UTC

adventured wrote: post #153

warp_factor wrote: post #124

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Because spaceX Marketing and PR departments want you to feel this is new. There is also some American pride to be able to send people to space again without the need of the Russians. All of this creates this overblown achievement feeling. This has been done 40 years ago!

> This has been done 40 years ago! What private company was sending people into space on reusable rockets 40 years ago?

Rockwell, I guess, at a stretch? Over 30 years ago they built the Space Shuttle...

Re: SpaceX Crew Dragon Docks with International Space Station

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Post by mcv » Tue, Mar 05, 2019, 1:58 PM UTC

dEnigma wrote: post #22

taneq wrote: post #17

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I've felt that about SpaceX ever since seeing the Grasshopper testing videos. Up until that point, if a rocket slowed down during takeoff something had gone horribly wrong. Then it just... hovered... and landed, and I realised this was the start of a new era of space travel. The Falcon Heavy launch is still the highlight for me but this one is probably more important, simply because it's so normal and routine now and…

I don't know which mission it was exactly, but I think it was the first one where they tried to recover two booster stages (I hope that's what they are called). Watching the live stream of both of them landing simultaneously back on the pad gave me goosebumps and sent shivers down my spine, in a good way.

That shot was epic. Rocket ballet. Seeing those two boosters land together was one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen. They may have lost the third booster, but as a demonstration of what SpaceX does, it was brilliantly done.

Re: SpaceX Crew Dragon Docks with International Space Station

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Post by mcv » Tue, Mar 05, 2019, 2:11 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #36

Klathmon wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It costs about $81 million USD per seat round-trip to go to ISS on Soyuz. SpaceX is doing the same for around $58 million per person (last I read). That alone is a HUGE deal. And that cost is expected to drop as SpaceX gets more comfortable with launching humans, whereas Soyuz has been raising prices. Not to mention that it's increasing the number of countries and rocket designs that can send people to and from the I…

A cost reduction of less than 50% for something that the Russians have been doing routinely with 1960s technology is akin to Magellan setting sail? I like SpaceX but man the spin is blinding.

Magellan was not remotely the first to set sail, nor was he the first to apply that technology.

Of course what SpaceX does is not the same thing as Magellan's trip around the Earth, but it's absolutely an important milestone. It reduces costs on something very expensive, it reuses rockets in a way that wasn't possible before (this is the part that makes it arguably more innovative than Magellan), and it finally gives the US its own capability to go to space again. It was a bit embarrassing how dependent the US had become on Russia since the Space Shuttle's retirement.

But the Soyuz was absolutely also a fantastic feat. It may be small, but it's been the world's primary workhorse for manned space travel to LEO. It's far more reliable than the Space Shuttle (2 lost crews vs none for the Soyus on far more flights, I believe). And the US has nothing remotely comparable. Until now.