> "This is not just twice as difficult as any typical Mars mission; it's twice squared" So, four times as difficult?
Pretty sure it's just a metaphor, and not literal rocket surgery.
Airbus to build 'first interplanetary cargo ship'
141–150 of 219 posts
Re: Airbus to build 'first interplanetary cargo ship'
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. Returning from orbit is "easy", you just go into a free-return trajectory and don't even do much of a burn at Mars, if any at all. Getting a sample from the surface basically means you need to do a deceleration burn to get into orbit, and then the reverse after grabbing the sample (which itself must be accelerated to orbital speed). No small thing.
SpaceX isn’t planning to enter orbit around Mars but instead do direct entry.
How do you retrieve a surface sample on a direct-entry mission?
Re: Airbus to build 'first interplanetary cargo ship'
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is that something returning from Mars _orbit_, or returning samples from the surface?
A SpaceX vehicle returning from the surface of Mars.
You're saying the vehicle will bring all the fuel needed for a return flight to Earth down to the surface of Mars and then back up again? Do you have a link with a description of how they're going to do this?
Re: Airbus to build 'first interplanetary cargo ship'
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
The moon-starship will not require in-situ resource utilization (ISRU), i.e. no creation of fuel and oxidizer at the target. It is supposed to land with enough propellants to make it back.
I only mentioned the Moon-Starship, because illustrations show nicely how far away from the surface the cargo bay is. I don't suppose the Mars version will be all that different in that regard, but we'll see.
Ah, OK. The cargo bay door being that high up wasn't an issue in my eyes. They can build rockets after all, so they should be fine with engineering a platform and a lift.
Edit: Numbers - for fun: if the cargo bay door is 2/3 up the rocket (at 33m from the ground), and someone fell off the platform of the crane at half this height (16m), they would hit the ground with a speed of 7.2m per second which is the speed they would have after falling a distance of ~2.6m on Earth.
Re: Airbus to build 'first interplanetary cargo ship'
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pretty sure Musk said the crew mission would not return
From Dr. Zubrin's Reddit AMA: > for Mars Ascent and Earth return, SpaceX should develop a mini Starship, sized to be an upper stage of an F9. This would create a fully reusable medium lift booster, and reduce Mars propellant making requirements by a factor of 5. A Starsip could lift one of these to LEO fully fueled, after which it could fly to Mars, and return. any full sized Starships that land on Mars should stay o…
Which seems to make sense, but I don't think SpaceX wants to develop another vehicle. That's extremely expensive. The goal of Starship is to do both, and it can do both.
It also gets debunked by replies. This will never happen.
Re: Airbus to build 'first interplanetary cargo ship'
#146> The joint American-European project is expected to cost billions and take just over a decade to implement. I'm 99% sure that if SpaceX's starship takes off, it will fly to Mars and back within a few years. But still, competition is good.
> is expected to cost billions I'm annoyed by this innumerical journalistic habit where imprecise large numbers are only given as "millions", "billions" or "trillions".
A decade long development for a never before attempted interstellar cargo ship... I'm sure that "billions" is as precise as anyone can be about the cost right now.
Re: Airbus to build 'first interplanetary cargo ship'
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think you can call him Musk "master of the dubious marketing promise" anymore now that Tesla is meeting production goals, SpaceX is landing boosters, re-supplying the ISS, and has brought astronauts to the ISS. His promises are far more reliable than most at this point.
As long as you don't ask him about Neuralink (-:
I don't see any problems with that since he isn't using public funds or selling anything:
"By July 2019, it had received $158 million in funding (of which $100 million was from Musk)"
(from Wikipedia)
Re: Airbus to build 'first interplanetary cargo ship'
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think even Musk, master of the dubious marketing promise, has claimed that; the first ones would be one-way jobs AIUI.
I don't think you can call him Musk "master of the dubious marketing promise" anymore now that Tesla is meeting production goals, SpaceX is landing boosters, re-supplying the ISS, and has brought astronauts to the ISS. His promises are far more reliable than most at this point.
Currently listening to the biography on Musk, he jokingly accepts that his timelines are all off, but he doesn't feel too bad about it because he eventually hits the goals. When asked about comments that a timeline for an electric car took a couple years longer than he had predicted (like a 1 year prediction, and it took 3.5 years, or something like that) he said roughly "Oh yeah, that's crazy. But I didn't know that yet, I'd never done this. We got it done eventually, but that's an unrealistic timeline".
He says he makes timelines based off what he knows, and as he gets more data, he gets more realistic with the timelines. I agree he is getting better with the timelines. And he generally builds everything he talks about eventually.
Re: Airbus to build 'first interplanetary cargo ship'
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think you can call him Musk "master of the dubious marketing promise" anymore now that Tesla is meeting production goals, SpaceX is landing boosters, re-supplying the ISS, and has brought astronauts to the ISS. His promises are far more reliable than most at this point.
Yeah, you definitely can. 1) Tesla driving fully autonomously from LA to NY by the end of 2017 [1][and many others] 2) Tesla producing 10,000 cars per week by the end of 2018 [2][3] 3) "Funding secured" [4] 4) All Teslas produced after Oct 2016 have all the hardware necessary for full self driving [5]. This was apparently before Tesla realized they needed/wanted to design a custom ASIC for full self driving. Many mor…
Like the comments earlier mentioned - he got electric cars to the consumer market, in bulk, in less than 10 years. That alone brings a ton of respect.
Now, if I were an investor, I would be inclined to agree with you.
I do see that I am "moving goalposts" and should have specified what I meant in my initial post.
Re: Airbus to build 'first interplanetary cargo ship'
#150SpaceX Starship is planned for 2024, and with a cargo capacity in the hundreds of tons. Even if it gets delayed by four or five years it will be able to bring back samples before this is is even launched. NASA’s plans seem very slow in comparison.
Marketing materials aren't plans. Musk has made a strategy of "overpromise, maybe deliver", rebranded as "vision" or "ambitious goals". Some of what his companies have delivered is impressive, but you never know what they're going to actually deliver until there are at least working prototypes.
I that this has historically been the case, but I think there has been a lot more delivery in recent years. The estimates from Musk seem to be less off, and I think a massive part of that is that the ramp up to this point was all predicated on original design of parts. They design and build >90% of the parts in the space ships. I think now that they have a catalogue of parts they don't have to build from scratch, their design/development cycles for new products are much faster and predictable.
This same thing goes for Tesla, I don't think Musk & co. get enough credit for building everything from scratch.