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Impulse Space is betting on a future where launch is cheap

arstechnica.com

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Re: Impulse Space is betting on a future where launch is cheap

#41

Post by rbanffy »

Invictus0 wrote: post #19
rbanffy wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> fairly quickly. The delta-v maps show the minimum needed to get from one place to the other. In order to get from one place to another more quickly, you’ll need larger delta-v’s at the ends of the trip. Even though the rest of the solar system is within reach, we don’t want to send humans to Pluto and back on 20-year missions.

you mustn't be afraid to dream a little bigger darling. I can definitely imagine a mission to pluto and back.

I can too, but we’ll need much better engines than what we have now to get there and back in an amount of time a crew can function.

Sending 20 years worth of consumables and spares is complicated, as well as the moral questions about sending people on 20 year missions.

Re: Impulse Space is betting on a future where launch is cheap

#42

Post by rbanffy »

tsimionescu wrote: post #37
Loughla wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 20 year mission to Pluto would be unsuccessful without cryogenic or otherwise science-magical-sleep system. I cannot imagine a single set of humans who could spend 20 years together, without any way to leave the small space of a ship, and not absolutely lose their minds. That long of a trip means we just end up sending absolute lunatics and/or small pieces of chopped up lunatics after the inevitable murders.

Not to mention, it's extremely doubtful that a human body could survive anywhere close to 20 years in space.

The ship would need to be very large - artificial gravity and adequate shielding for radiation and impacts would need to be provided, as well as an insane amount of redundancy and survivable abort routes. Attempting to do it with technologies we have, even with infinite funding, would be next to impossible without incurring in unacceptable risks.

Re: Impulse Space is betting on a future where launch is cheap

#43

Post by Apofis »

bmitc wrote: post #18

Does anyone have some thoughts on where all the funding and market is coming from in this new private space industry? I've seen a ton of these companies popping up, and I'm not sure I quite understand where all the demand and money is coming from outside of government contracts. While space is always cool and "sexy", I've been wondering if there's some analog model that could work for ocean tech, particularly tech th…

Presently the biggest challenge confronting the private space industry is creating a market and creating demand. This is no different than any other industry, however.

Re: Impulse Space is betting on a future where launch is cheap

#44

Post by 0xffff2 »

BurningFrog wrote: post #33
jillesvangurp wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are alternate sources of propellant in the solar system. Lifting it out of Earths gravity well is relatively expensive. But once you have enough of it, you could start transporting propellant from elsewhere in the solar system and start stockpiling it in strategic orbits around various objects in the solar system. Once you can do that, you'd minimize the launch weight from earth to be able to get to a LEO fueli…

My big fear with asteroid mining is that if you can move an asteroid to Earth orbit, you can also smash it into any capital city or military base on Earth. Which means that this capability is a weapon more powerful than even nuclear missiles! I don't think the world will let this be run on the honor system. So I expect space travel to become extremely tightly controlled once we get close to this tech level.

A relatively small number of nuclear missiles is enough to wipe out human civilization. There's no such thing as "a weapon more powerful than even nuclear missiles" in terms of Earth-focused weaponry. And we've done very little if anything to prevent countries from acquiring and maintaining nuclear missiles. If we let North Korea have nukes, what makes you think we would try to stop countries from developing space capabilities?

Re: Impulse Space is betting on a future where launch is cheap

#45

Post by 0xffff2 »

idiotsecant wrote: post #40
gondo wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Private internet satellites is going to be a big market. Russian space program collapsing for quite some time and only being escalated recently. SpaceX paving a way for profitable private space business.

Satellite internet seem to me to be a niche thing, at best. It's extremely 'cool' but in countries rich enough to buy satellite internet high speed wireless infrastructure is nearly ubiquitous. Countries without the cash to fund wireless infrastructure also don't have the cash to pay for satellite internet. On top of that some customers who might otherwise have the resources and the need live in autocratic countries…

As a current Starlink customer, I can assure you there's plenty of market outside of the "nearly ubiquitous". I live just 30 miles from a small city where the average home is served by 400Mbps cable, yet until Starlink came along I was stuck with Hughesnet, which is reminiscent of a particularly high-latency 56k dial up connection. There are a couple thousand similar households just in my county.

Re: Impulse Space is betting on a future where launch is cheap

#46

Post by Retric »

BurningFrog wrote: post #39
Retric wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Metal prices rise and fall quite a bit. They have fairly inelastic demand because raw material prices are a small fraction of total costs. A skyscraper may need a lot of steel but in total it’s still a small fraction of total costs. Even just making steel from iron is rather expensive. A great deal of copper is used in new construction, but the number of outlets in the average new home isn’t going up because raw copp…

I'm sure you're right about current trends. I'm thinking/dreaming about a world where prices are orders of magnitudes lower. Is there some advantage to make tin cans out of palladium rather than tin? Then we can just do it because the metal cost is the same! A bit of utopian fantasizing, sure. But even cutting end user prices in half should have important effects.

Unfortunately, I think that’s more from sci-fi taking place in space rather than some inherent advantages to asteroid mining. 100% automated manufacturing process in space seem like a minimum requirement, but presumably doing the same thing on the ocean floor gets you to the same place.

Re: Impulse Space is betting on a future where launch is cheap

#47

Post by avmich »

rbanffy wrote: post #41
Invictus0 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you mustn't be afraid to dream a little bigger darling. I can definitely imagine a mission to pluto and back.

I can too, but we’ll need much better engines than what we have now to get there and back in an amount of time a crew can function. Sending 20 years worth of consumables and spares is complicated, as well as the moral questions about sending people on 20 year missions.

For some time an assumption - a rule of thumb of a sort - was that chemical rockets can get people comfortably around within Mars orbit, and to get further away we need something better. That "something" is likely not solid-phase nuclear engines, with Isp about twice as good as LOX/LH2, and probably not gas phase nuclear engines... but thermonuclear engines, which get closer to feasibility with advances in thermonuclear energy field. A thermonuclear engine could be more attainable than a thermonuclear electrical plant, and cheaper LEO access could be a big part of enabling technology.

Having engines like that we may talk about much faster trips to Pluto and back.

Re: Impulse Space is betting on a future where launch is cheap

#48

Post by gary_0 »

0xffff2 wrote: post #44
BurningFrog wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My big fear with asteroid mining is that if you can move an asteroid to Earth orbit, you can also smash it into any capital city or military base on Earth. Which means that this capability is a weapon more powerful than even nuclear missiles! I don't think the world will let this be run on the honor system. So I expect space travel to become extremely tightly controlled once we get close to this tech level.

A relatively small number of nuclear missiles is enough to wipe out human civilization. There's no such thing as "a weapon more powerful than even nuclear missiles" in terms of Earth-focused weaponry. And we've done very little if anything to prevent countries from acquiring and maintaining nuclear missiles. If we let North Korea have nukes, what makes you think we would try to stop countries from developing space ca…

Also, if you have rocketry that's efficient and high-tech enough to push distant space rocks into deadly orbits, building a good ICBM arsenal is almost the same thing. Although dropping rocks at 50km/sec does save you having to build nuclear warheads, and you'd worry less about them getting shot down by missile defense.

But global-scale strategic deterrents do get kind of academic past a certain point. There are plenty of ways for a nation-state actor to end the world if they really want to.

Re: Impulse Space is betting on a future where launch is cheap

#49

Post by simonh »

actionfromafar wrote: post #8
simonh wrote: post #5

This is one reason I'm quite bullish about some of the 'old space' companies, like Boeing, Northrop and Lokheed. They may be losing out in launch systems, but they stand to make a fortune building a lot of the cargo Starship is going to launch. Someone's going to need to build all these satellites, probes, space stations, etc. The same applies to ESA, do they actually care about building rockets, or is the interestin…

Yeah, maybe. But those in the old guard are used to building expensive, one-off things. I'll agree they can have better margins on what they already do. SpaceX benefit most from stuff which can be mass-produced. Customers who have use-cases which can be massproduced, will benefit the most from SpaceX. Another commenter mentioned on the perils of that too - SpaceX owns the ride, so they hold the keys to the Kingdom.

I think they have the opportunity, whether they take it or not is up to them.

I don't worry about SpaceX dominating all aspects of space development, because their launch capacity will far, far exceed the volume of products they can reasonably develop to fill it. We're talking about the ability to deliver thousands of tons of payload to orbit per month. It's going to take many companies, many product ideas, many business models and industrial sectors to fill that capacity.

It's a bit like how in the early days of the iPhone Steve Jobs imagined that Apple would develop all the apps for the phone, sometimes along with business partners, as they did with the early versions of Google Maps. His colleagues realised that the platform had the capacity to run a vast ecosystem of apps across many use cases and business models they couldn't even think of yet. The only way to realise it's potential was to carry other people's stuff, in that case apps, in SpaceX case cargo.

Re: Impulse Space is betting on a future where launch is cheap

#50

Post by rbanffy »

avmich wrote: post #47
rbanffy wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can too, but we’ll need much better engines than what we have now to get there and back in an amount of time a crew can function. Sending 20 years worth of consumables and spares is complicated, as well as the moral questions about sending people on 20 year missions.

For some time an assumption - a rule of thumb of a sort - was that chemical rockets can get people comfortably around within Mars orbit, and to get further away we need something better. That "something" is likely not solid-phase nuclear engines, with Isp about twice as good as LOX/LH2, and probably not gas phase nuclear engines... but thermonuclear engines, which get closer to feasibility with advances in thermonucl…

> A thermonuclear engine could be more attainable than a thermonuclear electrical plant

Very true. Nobody cares about breakeven for that use case.

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