221–230 of 1001 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I can imagine That probably does require some imagination. Starting with any incentive to do so.
Elon just said starship will do the entire moon mission: “Starship will end up doing the whole Moon mission. Mark my words.” To address your question, what is the incentive for going to Mars
Artemis is a joke. You can tell this is politically motivated by their stance on SLS. If they were serious they would give Spacex the SLS contract for being years and years behind schedule.
You don't want to rely on a single supplier for critical infrastructure. Their management can extort you, their failures leave you with no backup plan, if they go bankrupt you're really screwed. Keeping multiple companies capable of building it alive is essential.
I'm pretty sure this is what's been happening with Blue Origin: in 25 years they've delivered close to nothing, but they keep getting contracts because "we need a SpaceX alternative". What is that if not extortion.
(EDIT: the sibling comment correctly points out that Boeing is an even more obvious case. Starliner is a money pit, but we have to keep throwing more money down it so that there's no single supplier)
Artemis is a joke. You can tell this is politically motivated by their stance on SLS. If they were serious they would give Spacex the SLS contract for being years and years behind schedule.
You don't want to rely on a single supplier for critical infrastructure. Their management can extort you, their failures leave you with no backup plan, if they go bankrupt you're really screwed. Keeping multiple companies capable of building it alive is essential.
IIRC they managed to extort additional money out of NASA for Starliner too (despite it being fixed price), for that exact reason.
SpaceX hasn't fallen to such tactics yet, but, agreed, it'll be too late to start on setting up competitors when SpaceX eventually does fall to that level (Boeing wasn't always so bad after all).
Much better for making your friends rich.
I can imagine SpaceX choosing to self-finance a mission to the moon and beat NASA at it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
in space travel there's a saying: once you're out of atmosphere you're halfway to anywhere. it takes tons of energy to get over the friction of air resistance. That's way we want a future where space-related things are built in space as much as possible. Once we can solve the idea of permanent installations on the moon it will have several advantages over an orbital station such as ease of additional construction, po…
I think it's more escaping the gravity well, as the energy consumed by air resistance is fairly negligible compared to gravity and is more of a stability issue. But yeah, once in LEO you're halfway to anywhere as long as you can bring enough mass up for what you need.
For landing hovever it makes things signifficantly easier! You can break full arrival speed from lunar or interplanetary space (successfully done by Apollo missions) with a relatively light passive heatshield & land on parachutes. You can even brek to orbit instead or use the atmosphere to change incliunation of your orbit and other tricks (there are proposals for air breathing ion engines, etc.).
Lack of sufficient atmosphere is what makes landing on Mercury (no atmosphere, need to break to zero using rcoket thrust) and Mars (enough atmosphere to break from arrival speed, not enough to use parashutes or gliders for a soft landing) so difficult .
A scary way to set a schedule on a complex project with lives at stake. They don't care though.
Oh yeah. Replace the stainless steel by carbon fibre, give it to your pals of Boing and instead of being ready in 2030 for 2.3 billion it will be ready in 2050 for 50 billion. Much better for making your friends rich.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I can imagine That probably does require some imagination. Starting with any incentive to do so.
Elon just said starship will do the entire moon mission: “Starship will end up doing the whole Moon mission. Mark my words.” To address your question, what is the incentive for going to Mars
To occupy it. Just look at Musk's t-shirt. Isn't the entire point of SpaceX to go to Mars? Everything else they do is just steps in achieving the occupation of Mars.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
in space travel there's a saying: once you're out of atmosphere you're halfway to anywhere. it takes tons of energy to get over the friction of air resistance. That's way we want a future where space-related things are built in space as much as possible. Once we can solve the idea of permanent installations on the moon it will have several advantages over an orbital station such as ease of additional construction, po…
I think it's more escaping the gravity well, as the energy consumed by air resistance is fairly negligible compared to gravity and is more of a stability issue. But yeah, once in LEO you're halfway to anywhere as long as you can bring enough mass up for what you need.