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Blue Moon

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Re: Blue Moon

#231

Post by nradov »

grey-area wrote: post #217
nradov wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. Falcon 9 is just another unmanned booster. Unmanned boosters have always been automated. Manned spacecraft so far have always allowed the pilots to take over a significant degree of manual control. This new generation of private manned capsules will be no different.

Manned spacecraft so far have always allowed the pilots to take over a significant degree This is untrue for Soyuz or Dragon 2 - any capsule design is not pilotable. It will also be untrue for the upcoming starship for example. It might have crew but I struggle to think why it would have a pilot. Falcon 9 is just another unmanned booster. Which just so happens to land itself. The point I'm trying to make is that mach…

The latest Soyuz capsules still have an extensive set of manual displays and controls for the cosmonauts to use when necessary. The point is not to hand fly the spacecraft during re-entry, but rather to deal with system failures or unexpected situations which the autopilot can't handle.

Re: Blue Moon

#232

Post by kerkeslager »

8draco8 wrote: post #188
patagonia wrote: post #181

It’s been said that in order to become a space faring species access to space, rocket launches, must become routine, common. Hats off to Bezos. He has certainly made it boring. You can put stuff on top of it! There is a club! The presentation opened with the most uninspired call to inspiration. And then pivoted to a call to fear. We’re gonna have to ration due to energy shortages! In a couple hundred years. Fusion? 1…

Amazon is not saint but market hates vacuum. If Amazon wouldn't exist then other, smaller companies would fill it's space. That would probably mean more people employed but environmental footprint would be much greater. It may look bad if you study Amazon carbon footprint etc. but if not them then someone else would be doing all that pollution and most likely in far less efficient way.

What's your point? That doesn't make it okay. Amazon could and should pollute less.

Re: Blue Moon

#233

Post by HeadsUpHigh »

sandworm101 wrote: post #209
HeadsUpHigh wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't matter if you can reuse something if refurbishing costs as much as building a new one. Space just has a more sensible design with better materials and computers.

And SpaceX is doing a totally different thing. They are not putting anything like the shuttle in orbit (humand+cargo). Shuttle's other big thing was that it returned all of its engines to the ground for reuse. All shuttle threw away was the big orange tank. SpaceX had abandoned that concept, returning only the first stage and dumping the second/third stages into the sea. We will probably never see anything like shutt…

Shuttle returned all of its engines by throwing the srbs to the sea. Maybe using a cheap replacement to those and expending it on each flight would be cheaper. At the same time spacex decided against reusing the second stage, essentially making that decision for it's own stack

Re: Blue Moon

#234

Post by chipsa »

Robotbeat wrote: post #230
simonh wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is reusable if it can be refuelled with hydrolox from a surface ISRU installation, while a kicker stage would lock them into a non-reusable architecture. Also a reusable upper stage is a separate problem. I'm always disappointed when I read comments along the lines of 'lets not bother solving this problem, because I have this other favourite problem instead'. So what? That doesn't make this particular problem go a…

No, a crasher stage can do a flip and burn after separation, allowing the crasher stage to put itself back in orbit. And empty stage with only itself as a payload requires just a tiny amount of fuel to do this. ...and this would all be easier to reuse than the descent stage here.

I think part of the reason why crasher stages aren't in any program of record is that you have to consider abort scenarios where the staging fails.

Re: Blue Moon

#235

Post by 8draco8 »

kerkeslager wrote: post #232
8draco8 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon is not saint but market hates vacuum. If Amazon wouldn't exist then other, smaller companies would fill it's space. That would probably mean more people employed but environmental footprint would be much greater. It may look bad if you study Amazon carbon footprint etc. but if not them then someone else would be doing all that pollution and most likely in far less efficient way.

What's your point? That doesn't make it okay. Amazon could and should pollute less.

My point is that Amazon is polluting less than multiple small companies doing Amazon job. Should they pollute less? Yes. Are they polluting less than others? Also yes. You see grand total numbers of pollution created by Amazon and compare them to other companies and those numbers are terrible, the issue is that Amazon, one company, is pretty much whole industry and should be considered as such. It's like comparing USA pollution to Cameroon. In raw numbers USA will be far worst, on the other hand, per capita numbers are not so nice on Cameroon side of things.

TL;DR Amazon is not ideal but still much better than it could be.

Re: Blue Moon

#236

Post by maccam94 »

rubinelli wrote: post #200
maccam94 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but rocket launch costs are orders of magnitude higher than the cost of fuel to launch payloads. Once we nail down reusability, then we'll see space access become much more affordable. And once we have ships that only operate in space, we'll be able to carry much more fuel along (aerodynamics and structural strength are much less important).

I remember when the Shuttle program was scrapped that the consensus was that reusable vehicles didn't offer the economy they promised, so what has changed since then?

The shuttle had to make tons of major design compromises in order to get funding, and that basically reduced its utility, limited its launch rate and capacity, and blew out the operational costs.

Critically, the shuttle dumped its engines into the ocean, which meant extensive rebuilding and refurbishing was required in order to make them flightworthy again. The fastest reuse time for a Space Shuttle after the Challenger disaster was almost 3 months (and before it was nearly 2).

The most expensive component of a rocket is the first stage (particularly its engines), and SpaceX lands those on a pad, which means no costly saltwater removal. SpaceX is aiming to reuse a rocket within 24 hours this year (So far the fastest they've done is 71 days, but they're being cautious).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_Space_Shuttle...

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