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SpaceX to Send Privately Crewed Dragon Spacecraft Beyond the Moon Next Year

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Re: SpaceX to Send Privately Crewed Dragon Spacecraft Beyond the Moon Next Year

#481

Post by gozur88 »

nojvek wrote: post #376
Retric wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, butchered that. I was trying to say the figures are less exact depending on how hard you want to hit the earths upper atmosphere. ~8.2km/s if you want to end up in earth LEO ~8km/s if you want to get back to the earth. You can also save a little if your sending an unmanned craft and don't care how long it takes or skip low moon orbit.

I wonder if spaceX is going to send a permanent colony of bots on moon to make a base there. The latency is a lot lower than Mars and would make a good start. Sending a couple of humans around moon for tourism is a waste of resources.

They have paying customers. When you're in business to make money, you do what you can bill for.

Though I don't know why anyone would want to spend a week locked in a tiny can like that, let alone pay big bucks for it. There's a limit to the discomfort I'd be willing to endure for bragging rights.

Re: SpaceX to Send Privately Crewed Dragon Spacecraft Beyond the Moon Next Year

#482

Post by gozur88 »

kworker wrote: post #414
mrb wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except today it will be done at less than 1/10th the cost. So yeah, progress.

If it will be done. Musk isn't great at the "deliver" part, not to mention how dangerous this mission is.

Space is dangerous. That comes with the territory. I would be very surprised if this ended up being more dangerous than Apollo 8 just given the advances in materials and electronics.

Re: SpaceX to Send Privately Crewed Dragon Spacecraft Beyond the Moon Next Year

#483

Post by gozur88 »

astrodust wrote: post #351
dwg wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a fraction of the cost.

Being the first to land on the moon was never intended to be cheap. So many things had to be invented simply to get there. Just imagine how economical space flight would be if all of that 1960s technology had been incrementally improved on for efficiency, manufacturing ease, and scale instead of a lot of it being almost literallly mothballed.

There was never any reason to spend that kind of money. It was worth going to the moon once to see what was there, but I have yet to see anybody articulate a reason to go back that doesn't rely on soaring rhetoric and implausible money-making schemes.

Re: SpaceX to Send Privately Crewed Dragon Spacecraft Beyond the Moon Next Year

#484

Post by gozur88 »

whyenot wrote: post #308
ChuckMcM wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a taxpayer (who was just reminded this past weekend of how much that is :-) I'm really glad that NASA had enough budget to spend on the Commercial Crew program. Given that the NASA budget of $18.5B[1] is a rounding error on the overall budget $3,540B[2], seriously it's a half a percent. And commercial crew was only $1.2B [ibid] of that NASA budget. So less than .05%. Again rounding error. And with that money they…

Why is it so important to send people on these missions outside of some 21st century version of manifest destiny? NASA could do so much more with its limited funding if it just cut out all the humans.

Carl Sagan used to make that point. From a science perspective, you get a much, much better bang for your buck sending robots. But as Larry Niven pointed out to Sagan, every time you convince someone that manned space doesn't make sense you convince them there's no reason to go into space at all. Yes, NASA could do a lot more with its budget if it didn't do manned space, but if it didn't do manned space NASA might not exist at all.

Re: SpaceX to Send Privately Crewed Dragon Spacecraft Beyond the Moon Next Year

#485

Post by gozur88 »

lettergram wrote: post #187
hackuser wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The next person to take a picture of the Earth from moon may not be on a government funded mission. Note that the press release says: Most importantly, we would like to thank NASA, without whom this would not be possible. NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, which provided most of the funding for Dragon 2 development, is a key enabler for this mission. Your tax dollars, if you are American, helped pay for this. Thank yo…

Rockets (or any research) > bombs any day of the week. Yes, my tax dollars going towards research (even indirectly) is better than the way most of my money is spent

The military is something like 20% of the budget. That's not where most of your money is going.

Re: SpaceX to Send Privately Crewed Dragon Spacecraft Beyond the Moon Next Year

#486

Post by gozur88 »

ascorbic wrote: post #388
pinewurst wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also Polaris, a little bit earlier (deployed 1960) had a very small transistorized guidance computer which was the design root of the Apollo Guidance Computer. Polaris was much more of a DDA (digital differential analyzer) than real computer though.

ICBM development is basically a space program with a different budget code though, right?

Yes, though there was a divergence later. For various strategic reasons you want your ICBMs to use solid rockets, so while the early manned rockets were liquid fueled ICBMs mated to capsules, money spent on ICBMs today probably doesn't do much for a civilian space program.

On the other hand, I doubt we spend much money upgrading our ICBMs. The technology is mature, and that's an area where "good enough" is, well, good enough.

Re: SpaceX to Send Privately Crewed Dragon Spacecraft Beyond the Moon Next Year

#487

Post by gozur88 »

sidlls wrote: post #288
ChuckMcM wrote: post #161

Wow. This sends so many thoughts cascading through my head that I'm dizzy. Some things to consider, China has been working up to getting a space capability to send people to the Moon with the full backing of the government funding, by 2035[1]. They started in 2003. SpaceX was founded in 2002 and they are saying they will fly someone around the moon next year? Dragon has the deltaV to land on the moon (not sure if it…

This is great, but let's have some perspective, please. SpaceX is the beneficiary of decades of research in engineering and basic science by the US government. They aren't making this achievement as a result of their own original effort or even funding (NASA provided a significant portion of the funding). I don't think it is fair to compare the SpaceX plan with China's (who have almost certainly had to acquire the ex…

But let's have some perspective, please. NASA was the beneficiary of years of research in engineering and basic science by the German government. They didn't make anything as a result of their own original effort.

So what? Nobody reinvents the wheel if they don't have to.

And I don't know why you think China started behind SpaceX. China benefited from US technical assistance in a way that SpaceX didn't.

Re: SpaceX to Send Privately Crewed Dragon Spacecraft Beyond the Moon Next Year

#488

Post by gydfi »

rkuykendall-com wrote: post #227
dalbasal wrote: post #181

I love that a moon mission is a milestone en route to SpaceX' moonshot, not the moonshot itself. We need new idioms for these people.

It may seem less weird as trips to the moon become more common. We still use "flew too close to the sun" even though human powered flight at high altitudes is now common. It's more about the story of the original moonshot.

But flying close to the sun is still really bad. It's just we've never got close enough to the sun for it to be a problem.

Re: SpaceX to Send Privately Crewed Dragon Spacecraft Beyond the Moon Next Year

#489

Post by CydeWeys »

robszumski wrote: post #381
CydeWeys wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Right. SpaceX doesn't have a craft capable of lunar orbit rendezvous Why not? Their Dragon capsules can dock with the ISS; why wouldn't they be able to dock with each, possibly with some kind of adapter? You can imagine one Dragon and a trunk docking with another upper stage that's all fuel tank, heading to the Moon, undocking in orbit, landing, ascending, and rendezvousing in orbit to return home. The total dv req…

A lot of the devil here is in the details. You need long term life support that Dragon hasn't proven yet. Deep space communications on the transmit and receive side. Abort scenarios for most or all phases of flight. All of this is untested and requires a huge amount of engineering and manufacturing work. Since this will likely share the same design as the NASA-contracted capsules, these systems will need to pass must…

Minor quibble: you don't need deep space communications. The Moon is laughably close. I am quite confident that we can easily make contact with the existing unmodified Dragon capsules by using something like one of these bad boys: https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/goldstone.jpg

Of course it's laughably overkill for the purpose -- amateur radio operators using much smaller equipment can already send and receive signals to each other by bouncing them off the Moon, which has four times the signal attenuation owing to the doubled distance plus a good deal more in losses from the poor reflectivity of the Moon to radio waves.

Re: SpaceX to Send Privately Crewed Dragon Spacecraft Beyond the Moon Next Year

#490

Post by jessaustin »

BHSPitMonkey wrote: post #316
whyenot wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it so important to send people on these missions outside of some 21st century version of manifest destiny? NASA could do so much more with its limited funding if it just cut out all the humans.

This mission's passengers appear to be funding it, at least in part.

In that case we're using the wrong word. Tourists go on "tours", not "missions".
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