41–50 of 113 posts
Nice charts ! I was a bit sad not to find https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariane_(rocket_family) in the list ! I'm really not expert enough into space race matters to know if it's relevant, or if the tiny french LEO platform would be worth charting ?
What it has going for however is a near perfect track record.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was going to ask a related question -- with prices as low as $50/kg, what's preventing people from launching a bunch of useless sh*t into LEO? Does someone need to approve? Or does that orbit decay so quickly that it's not much of an issue?
> with prices as low as $50/kg, what's preventing people from launching a bunch of useless sh*t into LEO? Demand. The market price for sending stuff to space will be significantly higher, pricing out _almost_ all of the useless shit.
Honest question, can I hire one of these companies to send a turd to space?
That is exactly what I thought too. As things go cheap, they become encumbered with their local version of « turd ». We are now sending dozens of thousands of microsatellites, which, in 20 years, may well be considered as Earth’s manure floating around. I wonder if the market or human incentives will increase some other variables which will make it just as inaccessible to the lowly (as it should - Even Elon Musk shou…
There is also politics involved, any country putting nuclear 'waste' in high orbits would be a suspect for putting nuclear weapons in space as well.
In Switzerland, in some Cantons, there is a trash tax. You pay roughly 1-2 USD the small taxed trash bag. So at the current trend it will literally become cost efficient to send our trash to space in a few years.
I can't stand stuff like that. There's no way the actual negative externality of a small bag of trash is $2. If I lived in a place with a ridiculous rule like that, I would be more inclined to protest the rule by dumping illegally than going along with it. Trash disposal here is great; free unlimited household trash disposal if you drive it to a dump, with only larger things like tires and mattresses costing money (b…
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Trash is full of valuable materials! Right now it may not be economical to recover those, but I would be surprised if we aren't mining our landfills in the next 100 years. That said, the CO2 emissions from launching anything non-essential into orbit are huge, I'd wait until we have a space elevator to (intentionally) throw trash into space.
I was just watching a video where they made the claim that the slag from steel production 100 years ago has more metal than some ores, so it's becoming worthwhile to re-mill slag.
The advantage of re-using slag isn’t that it’s richer in metal, iron oxides being pretty easy to get, it’s that it would take less energy or Oxygen to finish refining.
Recommended reading: Bret Devereaux’s blog series about iron & steel production. https://acoup.blog/2020/09/18/collections-iron-how-did-they-...
In Switzerland, in some Cantons, there is a trash tax. You pay roughly 1-2 USD the small taxed trash bag. So at the current trend it will literally become cost efficient to send our trash to space in a few years.
I can't stand stuff like that. There's no way the actual negative externality of a small bag of trash is $2. If I lived in a place with a ridiculous rule like that, I would be more inclined to protest the rule by dumping illegally than going along with it. Trash disposal here is great; free unlimited household trash disposal if you drive it to a dump, with only larger things like tires and mattresses costing money (b…
Not diminishing the technology advancement that SpaceX has been pushing but are these prices profitable? Or is it similar to the Tesla strategy which is to keep margin minimal (even negative) at the benefit of breaking into the market?
This is speculation to a degree, but I think Elon has tweeted that the internal SpaceX cost for such a mission is around $15m. So yes, even at $1450/lb to LEO, SpaceX is making a significant margin. See this article for more info: https://www.elonx.net/how-much-does-it-cost-to-launch-a-reus...
Remeber that SpaceX still has to recoup the investment in developing the Falcon9 as well as reusability. In the linked article above, they mention that Elon said developing reusability cost about $1 billion. So lots of this margin goes to paying that invest back.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was going to ask a related question -- with prices as low as $50/kg, what's preventing people from launching a bunch of useless sh*t into LEO? Does someone need to approve? Or does that orbit decay so quickly that it's not much of an issue?
> with prices as low as $50/kg, what's preventing people from launching a bunch of useless sh*t into LEO? Demand. The market price for sending stuff to space will be significantly higher, pricing out _almost_ all of the useless shit.
Edit -- turns out this is a thing, already, I just didn't know. SpaceX apparently does not mind. Flights to the moon are planned.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was going to ask a related question -- with prices as low as $50/kg, what's preventing people from launching a bunch of useless sh*t into LEO? Does someone need to approve? Or does that orbit decay so quickly that it's not much of an issue?
The government of your country will need to approve, since they are covering the damage your turd could make to some other satellite. Also, you can send the turd alone, you need to attach it to a launcher, and have a deployment mechanism. You are looking at a few thousands $ minimum regardless of the weight.
Is that by treaty?
I'd rather fund Starship to get that massive launch cost reduction and then start looking at returning to the moon.
Being able to ship more hardware means you don't have to make it as reliable since you have spares. That further drives down the cost of R&D.