Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Airbus to build 'first interplanetary cargo ship'

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 219 posts

Re: Airbus to build 'first interplanetary cargo ship'

#171

Post by jerf »

spacemark wrote: post #167
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> those people would have accumulated enormous radiation dosages over the duration of the flight What is this based on? One of the chief contributors to the mass of a Mars voyage is shielding.

You can't really shield against galactic cosmic rays (too high energy, would require far too much mass), which make up approximately 95% of the dose. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/340/6136/1080.abstrac... *Edit - but the comment higher up isn't right either, that most Mars-bound astronauts will have decreased lives. The paper linked above estimates 3% of astronauts to die from cancer caused by the trip (assu…

And if the worst thing that happens to early Mars astronauts is "a 3% increase in the chance of dying from cancer someday", they will ecstatic. The list of more pressing risks is long.

Re: Airbus to build 'first interplanetary cargo ship'

#172

Post by rsynnott »

Robotbeat wrote: post #168
raldi wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No. It will make the fuel from Martian resources like water ice and the CO2 atmosphere. Using solar power. First to split the water to oxygen and hydrogen using electrolysis, then use the hydrogen with CO2 to make methane (& some water which is cycled back to the electrolysis step) using the Sabatier reaction. This is done on the International space Station today, by the way. The methane on ISS is simply vented (as t…

Call me overly cynical, but I don't see Musk getting this done in time to be back in 2031 and win the race.

Re: Airbus to build 'first interplanetary cargo ship'

#173

Post by vardump »

rrss wrote: post #113
throw1234651234 wrote: post #105

Earlier 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…

1) It's again that time of the year... although this time he merely promised FSD to be feature complete by the end of the year. I think same will happen 2021, 2022, etc.

2) That they did achieve pretty much that, just a bit late.

3) Head scratcher, but some speculation it was to fend off a hostile takeover attempt. A bit fishy indeed.

4) They do replace all HW 2 & 2.5 computers for free, if the owner got FSD package.

Re: Airbus to build 'first interplanetary cargo ship'

#174

Post by jerf »

freeopinion wrote: post #158
mabbo wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simple answer from a space nerd: Rovers are small, light, and have very little energy. So what we can't do is anything that requires a large or heavy device or anything that requires significant energy. They break/fail. They take forever to make happen. Want to burn 20kg of soil to see if there's any trace of specific elements? You'll need a furnace. Those are both heavy and high-energy. You could do a smaller scale…

> Anything that requires significant energy So instead of sending a rover with 4x or 10x energy, the answer is a mission that requires enough energy to launch the samples all the way back to Earth? This makes me smile. I do agree though. We can expend 1000x the energy of the return trip once the samples are back on earth. And we also have the luxury of unlimited time to invent new tests and new tech to apply to whate…

"So instead of sending a rover with 4x or 10x energy"

The rocket equation is a real jerk. You're likely thinking "that sounds linearly harder" when you should be thinking it's exponentially harder.

Re: Airbus to build 'first interplanetary cargo ship'

#175

Post by rsynnott »

51Cards wrote: post #138
rsynnott wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> now that Tesla is meeting production goals Where's the magic cross-country self-driving car that was meant to show up in 2016? And just how 'self driving ready' are those Model 3s? > SpaceX is landing boosters A mere decade or so after promised. I think both of these are examples of dubious marketing promises, though the Tesla one is more egregious (the SpaceX one is merely extremely late). But either way, I wouldn…

I don't think learning a problem is harder than you thought and then still solving it is a detriment. If anything this community should be the ones that understand that the full scope of a problem often becomes apparent once you're 80% into it. How many startups are "guaranteed to revolutionize the world in 2 years", take 4 years to get a minimum viable product, and are gone in 6? You solve the problem, you get my cr…

> Fully self driving cars though I think should have been more obvious that it wasn't going to happen anytime soon.. not just to Musk but to everyone working on it

Well, yes, this is my point. He _must_ have known that his cross-country no-driver car wasn't practical when he was promoting it. If he didn't know himself, any expert in the field would tell him, and presumably did.

Re: Airbus to build 'first interplanetary cargo ship'

#177

Post by growlist »

TomMarius wrote: post #152
growlist wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ESA's leaders have mocked and disparaged SpaceX's approach in recent years; why would they bother unless they considered SpaceX a serious threat? They must be worried. I'll also point out that SpaceX naysayers have a dismally poor record of predicting the future. This isn't an EU/US thing and I totally agree with you on ULA, SLS and I might add Roscosmos etc. I wish ALL launch providers would move towards reusability…

I don't agree nor disagree with you, but I hate the idea that criticism means the critic is afraid.

In this case I'd say the benefit of the doubt should not be with ESA:

'Asked about how the Ariane 5 compares to lower-cost alternatives on the market today, such as SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket, Stefano Bianchi, Head of ESA Launchers Development Department, responded with a question of his own. “Are you buying a Mercedes because it is cheap?”

Ranzo, sitting nearby, chimed in and referenced the India-based maker of the world’s least expensive car. As he put it, “We don’t sell a Tata.”'

And:

'the US military says it pays more for launches because of its mission assurance requirements, which require extra steps to be taken for preparing and attaching the payload alongside myriad other system checks to ensure a safe ride to space for costly national security payloads. What does Charmeau think of this explanation?

“I would be surprised if SpaceX explained to commercial customers that they deliver bullshit to them,” he replied. “I would be extremely surprised by that.”'

https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/05/ariane-chief-seems-f...

Re: Airbus to build 'first interplanetary cargo ship'

#178

Post by whatshisface »

freeopinion wrote: post #164
whatshisface wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Idiot boss/genius lieutenant" pairs don't work in real life. The idiot boss will always get fooled by politickers and before long the genius lieutenant will be replaced by an upwardly charismatic lieutenant. There's no way to conquer the principal agent problem without enough domain knowledge to understand what the agent is doing, even if the domain knowledge is never used to do anything but understand what the agen…

Just because the straight man is a genius doesn't mean the partner is an idiot. Can you say who was more brilliant between Abbott and Costello? They each had different roles. Which Smothers Brother was the brains of the outfit? Why not both?

Well, those are both examples from fiction. "Idiot principal/genius agent" is a very funny fictional trope that has seen use in satiric works from Catch-22 to Yes Minister, and there's no debate that it's not effective. I'm just saying that setups like that tend to be very unstable, usually ending in tears with a manipulative agent under the idiot principal. (In fact, that happened in Catch-22 and Yes Minister - so the instability is even represented in fiction.)

Re: Airbus to build 'first interplanetary cargo ship'

#179

Post by hinkley »

rsynnott wrote: post #128
hinkley wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where are my flying cars? Where is my fusion reactor?

Neither were promised to you by Airbus under a specific contract. I mean, if you're saying that Musk's claims are less extravagant than those of newspaper columnists playing at futurology, then, yes, that's true. But it's the lowest of low bars.

A lot of us knew the self-driving car industry was bullshit. Tesla wasn't piling it any higher or deeper than everyone else. Within this iteration of the discipline, there was something approaching consensus (ie all of the loudest voices agree with each other). Outside of that bubble, some of the rest of us had very strong convictions that they were nucking futs.

Some of us know, as sure as we know the sun will rise tomorrow, that AI and fusion are going to arrive within five years of each other. Which is to say, "don't make any life plans around either".

But you have to be a scholar or of a certain age to have a grasp of 1) how many times and with how little evidence we've been promised both and 2) the painfully vivid ways in which this series of events has resembled Charlie Brown and that football. She's lying to you Charlie. She is always lying to you.

Re: Airbus to build 'first interplanetary cargo ship'

#180

Post by hinkley »

_Microft wrote: post #159
hinkley wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn’t they just recover both fairings on the last launch? I don’t know how you want to work the math, but it is probably best to think of it in a fractional way. Between accidents and wear do they manage better than 4 launches in average? They just managed 6 for one lower stage, with tighter turnaround time. We don’t know how much of that rocket was reused. So we might be talking about expending 20% of a lower stage…

Yes, they did. Great achievement, I was afraid they might abandon the approach sooner or later. This only meant to say that New Glenn isn't that different from Falcon 9. Both are limited (with respect to cost and frequency of launches) in that they need to throw away hardware on every launch. Starship on the other hand will be a true game changer if it works as intended.

I wonder how accurate it is to call the Falcon 9 the Model T of the rocket world.

I wonder how long we have to wait for the moral equivalent of the 65 Mustang, or even the '63 Stingray, complete with malfunctioning headlights.

Almost all scifi is SSTO craft, or craft that never enter atmosphere. Maybe if we start building skyhooks we can split the difference, and have craft you reuse with only minor maintenance between flights.

Post reply on HN