Elon Musk, Wernher Von Braun and Gigantism: What is Old is New Again
Interplanetary Transport System at Enceladus. (Credit: SpaceX)
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about Elon Musk’s obsession with making giant leaps forward in technology and how the approach has likely contributed to some of the company’s problems. I posited that SpaceX needs fewer leaps and more plateaus so its employees can consolidate what they have learned and get really good at it before moving on to the next level. [SpaceX: Giant Leaps, Deep Troughs But No Plateaus].
Elon Musk threw any chance of that happening right out the window when he unveiled his plan to colonize Mars in Guadalajara, Mexico, on Tuesday. The plan is light years beyond anything he and SpaceX have ever attempted, and it makes NASA’s much more modest effort look positively puny and uninspiring by comparison.
Project Mars by Wernher von Braun
As John Logsdon pointed out to me, the Elon Musk of 2016 resembles no one so much as the Wernher von Braun of the 1950’s. Von Braun wrote a book, “The Mars Project,” that featured a fleet of 10 ships that would carry 70 men on an expedition to the Red Planet. The fleet would be assembled in low Earth orbit using fully reusable rockets with dozens of first-stage engines that would launch components and fueling depots before returning to their launch site.
The illustrations of rockets on the surface of Mars that adorned the cover of the English translation of von Braun’s book look strikingly similar to the images of the Interplanetary Transport System released by Musk on Tuesday.
Von Braun’s work formed the basis for a famous 1952-1953 series of articles in Collier’s magazine titled, “Man Will Conquer Space Soon!” The articles, in turn, were used for three episodes of a television series produced by Walt Disney about humanity’s conquest of space.
Von Braun didn’t live to see humans walk on the face of Mars. He did get the opportunity to send men to walk on the moon. They flew in ships that, while representing state-of-the-art technology of the time, were small compared with what von Braun envisioned sending to the Red Planet.
Instead of leading to the establishment of a permanent base on the moon and a precursor to manned missions to the Red Planet, Project Apollo proved to be a dead end. NASA landed 12 men on the lunar surface during six missions and then abruptly ended the program, much to von Braun’s dismay. Nobody has ventured beyond Earth orbit since 1972.
Musk has taken von Braun’s ideas and supersized them. No 10 men each on seven ships for Elon. Try 100 people on one ship, then 200, with dozens and then hundreds and thousands of voyages to Mars. Eventually, a million people or more would inhabit the planet’s frozen deserts, forming humanity’s first off-Earth colony.
I have no idea whether Musk’s plan has any chance of working. There are so many aspects to it (financial, political, technical, sociological) and unanswered questions (funding, life support, Mars habs) that even two days after watching him present this plan, I’m still having a hard time getting my head around it.
The one thought I do have is that Musk’s Mars plan smacks of a syndrome I call gigantism that has caused problems for space exploration over the years. Essentially, initial successes lead people to attempt giant leaps that have a high chance of falling short.
After his initial success with the V-2 rocket, von Braun imagined scaling up the technology for manned voyages to Mars. It proved to be a pleasant and ultimately frustrating illusion.
After landing men on the moon, building a fleet of airliner-sized space shuttles that could fly to 50 times per year and make space travel routine, safe and affordable should have been a comparatively easy task. The shuttle was a technological marvel, but it really didn’t accomplish any of these goals.
After flying SpaceShipOne into space three times, Burt Rutan and Scaled Composites proceeded to develop the much larger SpaceShipTwo to make suborbital space travel routine, safe and (relatively) affordable. Twelve years, hundreds of millions of dollars, and four deaths later, we’re still waiting for the vehicle’s first flight to space. NASA completed the Apollo program in less time.
And then there’s Rutan’s other brainchild, Stratolaunch. The twin fuselage carrier aircraft with the 385-foot wingspan is a giant leap beyond the next largest plane Scaled has built, WhiteKnightTwo. What rocket(s) it will air launch is still not clear. Some critics don’t believe the aircraft will ever fly.
With visions of spreading humanity out into the solar system dancing in his head, Musk seems to have succumbed to gigantism. The question is whether he can make it work. That remains to be seen.
179 responses to “Elon Musk, Wernher Von Braun and Gigantism: What is Old is New Again”
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Well, I’m going to enjoy watching him try.
I find Elon very trying.
Its not gigantism. It is attempting to scale up space from its current governmental monopoly where payloads are measured by the precious pound and only an elite handful, to what is normal for every other form of human transportation where its measured in tons and where anyone can go anywhere. MSF (and pretty much every other spaceflight) stalled out at the wood and canvas era of aviation and even shipping. Going big is nessissary if we are ever going to get past this point.
I get that. But why this plan? Being done in this manner? It’s not the effort, it’s the way he’s going about it.
Other forms of transportation don’t blow up every tenth time you use them (average rocket reliability today). Or just blow apart when you are fueling them.
New Glen will be in the sweet spot
Depends on either there truly are efficiencies of scale that make it worth while and counter the negatives (lots of eggs in fewer baskets) of going big. In that case the BFR has the ace card (until BO comes out with “New Grissom” anyway).
Next one will be New Armstrong. Bezos has his eyes on the moon. Which is fine by me; let Bezos get us the moon, and let Musk shoot for Mars, and let NASA. . . . I guess maybe a probe to Europa? Anyway, the more the merrier.
The moon is where the ice is. It’s where serious space exploration will go while billionaire playboys waste the governments money.
I donno, but he’s got lots of smart folks working for him. In the other threads I’ve snarkily postulated why, but it really boils down to, his perspective, his (well… some of his) money, his plan/dream.
That really is the problem with New Space isn’t it? Lots of ways to make a pie, but too many chiefs and not enough dough.
I think it normally comes after recognizing everyone’s time on earth is limited, and realizing how much of a slow slog real progress actually is.
So these giant leaps are put forth to see things happen before one gets too old to be excited about it or really, part of it anymore.
Bezos was talking about suborbitals and all of a sudden a jump to Apollo sized rockets for the same reason.
If you don’t have the eyes on the horizon, you wont ever get to see whats behind it, but at the same time just looking up and not paying attention to the road in front of you gives you a good chance of ending up in a ditch, too.
It might be easier to understand if you realize he’s not in production, he’s in development. You yourself have pointed out that almost every thing that goes up is a slight change from the one immediately previous. Blowing up every 10th attempt is a very reasonable amount of “pushing” the design cycle. It’s aggressive enough to get a long way quickly, if he can balance the customer/funding issue.
As soon as it’s dead reliable, it’s not serving the purpose of moving forward, and should be spun off into a division with a mission statement no more interesting than United Parcel Service. A man like Musk would be bored with that type of company within a month of operating it.
He does need to find a partner with the skills of “The Man Who Sold The Moon” to help get the economic engine running, though. Musk himself prefers to stay right on or slightly ahead of the bleeding edge.
It might be easier to understand if you realize he’s not in production, he’s in development.
Uh huh. I realize that. It’s one of the disconnects between SpaceX and everyone else. If I’m NASA, a satellite fleet operator, or the US Air Force (which Musk sued), I want my satellites launched reliably and something close to the schedule. I want SpaceX focused on the Crew Dragon program I’m paying billions for the company to build.
Instead, Musk has used the Falcon 9 as an extended development effort for booster landing tech he will need for Mars and frequent upgrades to the booster. Those things that nobody was paying him to do took precedent over launches. When it came time to boost the launch cadence, the technology wasn’t mature enough to handle it.
Meanwhile, commercial crew is slipping badly and Musk seems utterly bored with the idea of sending astronauts to ISS even though SpaceX hasn’t even done it yet.
One of the threats Mr. Musk is somewhat ignoring is the obsolence of spaceflight, or at least a possible decrease of need to send anything beyond Earth.
It is mostly thanks to Arianespace and EU donating the space sector + former Soviet Union selling cheap that we have a whole non-govt space sector. Without that the number of geo sats would be highly limited and many other endavours would be completely non-existant. Even with this assistance the geosat market is losing to other tech.
I can easily imagine civilization going in a different direction: terrestial communication, stratospheric baloons, oceanic habitats, bioengineering and a merge of human and computer/Internet as new frontiers…
If one does not care for the space markets, the spaceflight will go a route of Zeppelins or railway, at best. And then space buffs will need to wait decades for a renaissance.
Thankfully Mr. Musk is not alone on this planet and even if he goes a “full Mars” route others (like Bezos, Arianespace or whoever hires his engineers) will pickup. But I am just pointing out possibilities, and the plans of Musk will actually require a lot of market creation.
We go meekly staring into our smartphones until the machines replace us all?
Not necessarily :D, but we may find new great things to play (and fund): explore our oceans, train complex AIs or break some taboos and start evolving mankind manually. Of course, we can also spend more and more time on MMORPGs. Or actual wars. Or increasing a disparity between rich and poor.
Certainly one should not underestimate a threat of a lack of interest (TM). Take a look at the Apollo curse. Mankind could have got there back and do something actually useful but noone funds it because “we’ve been there, nothing to look at”. It is perceived as “not interesting enough” even if It was almost 44 years ago! Any bets how many years one needs to wait for return?
I wonder what happens if U.S. general public and govt will think that space stations and Mars rovers aren’t cool anymore, tv sats can be replaced with Internet, and spysats with Internet espionage…
I find it sad that having to choose even occurred to you. What is even worse is that what you describe has pretty much already come to pass, minus any of the cool stuff beyond electronic fantasies.
I realize you like NASA, and are very much a sharpened pencil type of guy, but Musk’s approach to the development of space travel is precisely what has been missing since NASA gave up on human space flight after they went to the Moon and concentrated on accounting, a wasteful and poorly-designed taxi, and building instruments for deep space. And there is room for that. But without outfits like SpaceX we would still be uselessly flying around in circles for a hundred years. I applaud his effort. His spirit is something I was afraid had been bred out of the human race. I cheered when I watched the first launch from Kwajalein atoll, after NASA screwed him out of Vandenburg.
The people who are his customers are well aware of the risk versus cost, and are still happy to help push out the envelope. It’s not as though they are ignorant farm boys (nothing against farming). Since you are not privy to the exact verbiage of the contracts, you have no right to say that “nobody was paying him” to do anything other than what he is doing. If you want “your” satellites launched reliably and on schedule, then pay more and go with another launch provider. There are a couple to choose from.
You are not “paying billions” for Crew Dragon. Last I looked, NASA is paying money that you authorized them to pay through the auspices of your president and their mission statement. If you feel you must have a larger say in how they do that, then perhaps you should see if you can get a job at NASA and work your way up the management chain. Good luck with that, though. You would have a far better chance of having an effect if you went to work for SpaceX, where there is some dynamism and some dreaming going on.
You clearly misread the response. I was saying if i were NASA I’d want them focused on what I was paying them to do.
“If I’m NASA, a satellite fleet operator, or the US Air Force (which Musk sued), I want my satellites launched reliably and something close to the schedule. I want SpaceX focused on the Crew Dragon program I’m paying billions for the company to build.”
It’s not that easy for companies to move their satellites to a different booster. Not a lot of excess capacity out there. You often end up at the back of another line.
As for the rest of your rant….what are you, like 10 years old or something? Playground insults and putdowns. Grow up.
If you think that was a rant, you don’t spend much time on the internet 😉
You are, historically, extremely critical of SpaceX, and you seem to believe you have a better idea. Please, feel free to start your own space company. I repeat, you aren’t paying those “billions”, and you aren’t an insider in any of these contract negotiations. I have been inside some major negotiations, and the language I’m using here is pretty common. You might be surprised how often they resemble playtime at kindergarten – I think you are making arguments based on an idealized vision of how these things go down. Ask any lawyer: Marquis of Queensberry does not win the day where billions are at stake.
I find nothing Elon Musk is doing to be less than totally effective given what he’s trying to achieve. I find your continuous disagreement with his methods, your snide headlines and constant sniping from your armchair, quite annoying. I visit this blog in hopes of finding objective news about space activities, not to run into your personal disagreements with people’s methods. You do not pay NASA to do any particular thing. Your money does not buy any particular behavior from them. The same goes for SpaceX, Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, ULA, or any other activity of this magnitude. If you seek influence in these organizations, get a job there instead of carping with your blog. There is too much negativity here.
I played critical roles in getting the 787 off the ground, and I made an impact on the manufacturability of carbon fiber cryogenic tanks. I’m not exactly ten years old (though there are many times I wish I were, again). Maybe I’m more of a cheerleader for space efforts than you are comfortable with, but we are in desperate need of positivity and cheerleading. That the United States fell flat on its face after Apollo is a deep personal disappointment for me. I have seen countless astonishing, far-reaching projects die because bean counters and lawyers couldn’t see past the ends of their noses and worked behind the scenes to kill off things they didn’t agree with. Oh, where we might have been by now if we had had the vision I see springing up all over as bored billionaires dip their feet into things their accountants undoubtedly advised against. These are happy, exciting times!
And we’re going to Mars, whether or not you think there is a business case for it. Look back fifty years from now and count the wealth that is about to be generated. Let’s see, what’s the way you expect me to put this…ah! “I double-dog dare you!”
You are, historically, extremely critical of SpaceX, and you seem to believe you have a better idea.
Doug is a space industry journalist. He’s not supposed to be a SpaceX cheerleader – or a cheerleader for anyone else.
I haven’t sensed that he’s been unduly biased against SpaceX in his Parabolic Arc coverage.
You are entitled, of course, to your opinion. Mine is otherwise. In any event, it may be due to a letdown in expectations. SpaceX has accomplished far more than any other non-government entity, and we have grown to expect great things from them. Setbacks hurt. I had great hopes for Mr. Rutan’s work, but engineering realities and some questionable management throttled those hopes ‘way back as well. Jeff Bezos seems to believe he can go from sub-orbital straight into LEO and beyond by simply making his engines bigger, a snap of the fingers sort of thing. And NASA continues to believe that all that is needed is enough money to pave several countries in gold two feet deep and all will be as per their powerpoint slides predict.
It’s easy to criticize. As Musk said, rather ineloquently, “Space is hard.” If we put our shoulders to the wheel and push together, one of these days we will wonder why it was ever difficult. I would like to be having this conversation looking out from one of Mr. Bigelow’s silly inflatable tents, orbiting the Moon after being delivered by Bezos’s shuttle system while waiting for a seat on Elon Musk’s interplanetary service to Europa, drinking wine produced on Mars from an experimental NASA farming system under a dome designed by an engineer who thought he would make a fortune building underwater hotels in the Adriatic for rich Russian capitalists.
Let’s not call Musk’s gigantic ideas ridiculous. Let’s help fill in the gaps to make it happen. Or build something even better. All it takes is human will. Been there, done that: something from nothing. It works, it really does.
I find nothing Elon Musk is doing to be less than totally effective given what he’s trying to achieve.
Musk fan boys never do.
I worked as an engineer in aerospace for 40 years, Doug, in defense work and commercial work. I have a couple decades’ experience in the center of design and development programs, test programs, and manufacturing programs, working my way up over time from the low end of the ladder to the very top. I know the process inside and out. I have seen what works, and what doesn’t, compiling along the way my own list of DO’s and DON’Ts. SpaceX is hitting all the right buttons, and making none of the mistakes (publically, at least). This doesn’t make me a “fanboy”. My opinion is based on personal experience with almost every major company in the field.
Lose the juvenile name-calling.
Not publicly, at least?
OK. I guess this is where the disconnect is here. There’s a gap between what you’re seeing publicly and what’s actually happening behind the scenes. I have a better understanding of what’s actually going on behind the scenes than you do.
Do you have the same insights to all the other major players in this game?
I have a reasonable clue as to the difference between what happens “inside” vs. “publicly”. I’m applying a little Kentucky windage here. I do know that “big things” are high-risk – “attempt big, win big, or lose everything”. Boeing publicly stated on the development of the 747 that it was a break-the-company risk. What they did not state publicly is that about half the new airplanes have the same risk. In point of fact, the 787 may still sink the company.
I am in the “attempt big” class because I won’t live long enough to see big things that are done in small, safe steps.
Those things that nobody was paying him to do took precedent over launches.
Do we have specific evidence of that, in terms of how company resources and priority were parceled out?
What a short sighted, and nearly rude argument!
Musk is doing what the paying customers are asking him to do, launch their satellites. Last time I checked a company is allowed to make a profit, and it’s none of NASA’s business what he does with that profit. Or any other customer. If he wants to spend it on strippers, mariachi bands, Ferraris, or R&D for Mars rockets, it’s his business. We should be grateful it’s not strippers and here we have at least one billionaire, who actually plans on doing something for humanity with his wealth.
Where are you getting that NASA is paying for his research? Aside from government provisions for the commercial sector, the company’s hard earned profit is paying for it….which they have a right to earn and do whatever they want with it!
And with all that, it still comes at a fraction of the cost NASA’s contractors ask them. And those guys, like Boeing, who ONLY spend our tax payers money, their companies’ profit simply goes to investors and shareholders or fat checks to their CEOs. I don’t hear you criticizing that.
What the hell man?
There is an easy answer to the blowing up problem.
Hire ULA to build and launch it.
“After his initial success with the V-2 rocket, von Braun imagined scaling up the technology for manned voyages to Mars. It proved to be a pleasant and ultimately frustrating illusion.” That is not the fault of technical constraints on building the required hardware, it is the fault of a war eating up valuable resources and a lack of vision of our government.
The plans were there, the technology was there and the vision was there but the will was lacking. I blame the Nixon administration for both hobbling space exploration and for its lack of support for continuing Moon missions, expanding to Mars missions, and for the Space Shuttle never fulfilling the original promise of its name: “Space Transportation System”.
I also blame the entire concept of government-funded space exploration that is subject to political whims. For many politicians, NASA is, more than anything, a source of “pork” for their districts. There are few, if any, incentives to improve technology or cut costs. Even SLS will likely turn out to be a boondoggle.
As I said, there are many elements (financial, political, technical, sociological, etc.) that have to come together to make ambitious space projects like Apollo and Musk’s Mars plan work. The complexity of all those aspects is what is making it so difficult to evaluate what Elon has proposed. That and all the unanswered questions about funding, surface habs, etc.
Musk is building a big ship/station once it’s built he has an asset than can do most anything.
https://uploads.disquscdn.c… The design is incorrect, but that’s the idea. https://uploads.disquscdn.c…
Most of these things cannot be answered before you gird up your loins and go out there and do them.
Agree! Lolol
Picture Nasa running to get on board as this thing is about to fly.
It really is a shame half the questions asked after the IAC talk turned out to be worthless. I hope he’ll do a Reddit AMA soon.
I only heard 2 or 3 questions. Had to turn the PC off. It made me feel ill.
But now this is being discussed…
As long as he want to accomplish that in his lifetime, he’ll not try to make a “simple” SLS to sell a capability NASA would have soon or later for a bigger cost, but with political suport. So developing a ship to put half dozen people on Mars would be a dead end for SpaceX. If he shows in the next 5 yeras that the big rocket could work, there’ll be a lot of interest and investment to achive that capability in more a decade or so. Some companies, agencies and governments will work with him, others will recreate their projects to a new reality of scales. Nothing of can happen but we will all think on another scale from now on. The New Armstrong taunt prove that.
ITS is not like Apollo. Apollo was a successful reply to Kruschev’s Space Propaganda campaign between 1958 and 1968. Then it was ended, because its true objectives were accomplished. Its impact on opinion during WW3 around the world nearly balanced out our acceptance of defeat in Indochina.
ITS is, by contrast, a market opener. Without *something* doing the things ITS will be trying to do, the markets for settling the Solar System will not develop. Without those markets developing, there will be no settlements. There is no political profit in settling the Solar System. Therefore it will be done through markets, or it will not be done at all. Others will develop Mars Habs, not SpaceX. Others will develop power systems for the settlements. Others will do all the other things needed, just as they do here in a market-based society.
They will *not* spring, denovo, from the head of Elon Musk! If he tried to present that sort of complex plan, we would know he was a megalomaniac. Yes, he has spoken of a private/public partnership, but then the Red Dragon of 2018 is that. That “partnership” should go no further than what happens in Red Dragon.
Elon’s problem is that he’s running out of time, so he’s desperately trying to push things forward as fast as he can. He wants a permanent Mars colony in his lifetime AND he wants to retire there. He’s 45 now, so he only really has about 20 to 25 years at most to see his dream come true. (By the time he’s in his 70’s he’d probably be too old for the rigors of interplanetary travel and adjusting to Mars’ gravity)
If I were Elon I’d give up on the retiring on Mars dream. It ain’t gonna happen. Just focus on getting the F9 and F9 heavy series perfected. He can make mountains of money from them in the next several decades doing reusable launches. If F9 Heavy works as well as they hope, and reusability leads to prices as low as they are projecting, that would be enough to support a small-scale manned mission to Mars. He would go down in history, becoming just as famous as Von Braun if not more so.
And that’s why you’re not a billionaire named Elon.
Elon’s fortune is not exactly liquid. A few years ago he had to borrow money from friends to pay personal expenses even though at the time he was rich by most people’s definition. His assets are extremely fragile too. The way ™, SC and SX are intertwined financially, if one fails it could drag the other two down.
Surely you have read, “The Man Who Sold The Moon”, right? Very sad story. By the time he was able to go, he was too old to go.
Well, DD was blackmailed into not going but at least he made one trip and died on the moon. Mars via chemical rockets will be even tougher on the human body. All of the time spent in zero G ending with high G orbital insertion maneuvers will take being in good condition to survive. Once on the surface there wouldn’t be any recovery time. Colonists will need to go straight to work.
I want to replace ISS with a space station that spins at a rate to simulate MARS gravity.
Call Elon and have him park two of his ships in LEO spinning on a tether.
I want to send mining equipment to the moon.
Call Elon his craft can get to the moon and back on one tank of Methane.
I want to take a 100 people to the moon village for a 2 month once in a life time vacation.
Call Elon
Nasas wants to scout out the asteroid belt and land on Ceres, a science mission.
Call Elon
I want to put a giant telescope in Space.
Call Elon
Up want to build a 2001 type gravity wheel in Space.
Call Elon
I want to launch 1000 micro sats with their tugs and fuel depot all at once.
Call Elon
We need a fuel depot in Space
Call elon
SpaceX will make a ton of money with this thing even if they never fly it to Mars.
Yup. If this succeeds in getting built and flown, there will be lots of opportunity and repercussions in the “space industry”. You already have it with BO deciding to go big. That is the really interesting factor of this development.
I cannot agree more. Build it and they will come!
This is what I thought all along: that this was sort of a loss-leader to get people excited enough that they’d find lots of uses for heavy lift. And it still may be, but this thing is so big that nobody would ever use this for garden-variety payloads; the risk would be too great.
Of course, scaling this down ought to be a piece of cake. Provide 50 tonnes of a grab-bag of payloads and a 10 tonne long-dwell bus to put them in any set of orbits they need and you’ve got something that might sell like hotcakes. And ITS gives you all the technology you’d ever need to do it.
Now if they can just find somebody to pay for the R&D…
Space X not only had their development cycle paid for, they were paid to conduct tests that at the time had nothing to do with what the customer was paying for. When developing their landing systems and operations Space X convinced paying customers to tollerate and pay full rate on flights that were used as test jigs after 1st stage separation. He got a double whammy, he got paid, and he got to fly. Imagine if he had to take profits from one flight, in order to conduct another flight? That’s the model that’s going to happen here, and have to work out. The step from Falcon to the BFR is too large. Nobody needs it except someone wanting to build solar power satellites in the gigawatt range. There’s no market of people ready to pay for a service AND a test at this scale.
I can totally believe that the GEO and government LEO and MEO market will develop to use fully a F9 H. And then after that maybe even a New Glenn, or Saturn V class vehicle another decade after saturating F9 H. I think Space X’s transition from evolution to revolution will turn out to be a mistake. Think about it, who needs payloads as large as 600,000 lbs to LEO delivered on a schedule even more frequent and less tolerant of failure than the old DOD Responsive Space specifications? Each flight of that beast is the equiv in mass of the payload of 4 and a half fully loaded FedEx MD-10’s! What is going to cause a needs for the daily up-mass to LEO to start to approach a fraction of the daily up-mass of Fed-Ex?
My thoughts precisely. F9H will be difficult to market and the customers will need to evolve in this direction but it does not need to go up that often and virtual quits of Zenit, and arguably Proton, Delta, Atlas and Ariane 5 should make the necessary space. What is more, China and India are not ready to market there and HIII & heavy Angara have a long, uncertain way to go.
However, this is pretty much it. As I mentioned before, more kg to space means more $$ to build and operate. In the same time, space tech learns how to be more weight-efficient. Ion propulsion and Bigelow habitats require far less uplift.
What is even more important, some traditional markets got pretty saturated. Geostationary sats for instance – they are losing the bandwith for LTE and business cases for Internet. People are not that willing to pay for high quality 4k / FullHD and operators are cutting bandwith on the majority of the markets. Earth Observation – now it is served with smaller sats and at the moment everyone and their dog wants to have at least one. But this mkt will saturate too. LEO/MEO telco sats – they are smaller and these business cases are not so sure (Iridium was one and went bankrupt even while cutting the number of sats; now 3 companies want to compete here…)
Navisats – how many navi systems do we actually need? Now we are getting 5 of them! Envisats? Only Europe really cares.
Astronomy/science? There the mission is the vast majority of costs and cheaper flight does not help a lot here.
Finally, human spaceflight. Unfortunately, nowadays it serves little more than national prides. Scientific outcomes are limited at best and now – not only it sucks a lot of funds to operate but it is really uncertain how far the sponsors want to go. Russia was paying for their pride a lot and they are calling deescalation. U.S. wants to fight back and pay more but the other players, be it Japan, ESA, Canada, China, India – are far more relaxed with it.
So I repeat: if someone wants to see a growth of rocket flights, new markets need to be created. Now.
AT&T/Direct TV plans to scale back DBS satellite services in 3-5 years in favor of streaming from terrestrial sources.
There’s no market of people ready to pay for a service AND a test at this scale.
The Air Force has already started paying. As far as they are concerned, SpaceX is a strategic asset and Elon Musk is why.
“100+ tons to anywhere on the planet in less than 45 minutes? And you are willing to start on spec? Have all our Christmases come at once? Yes, please!
They did not even have the authorization to start paying for raptor, but they did anyway. Congress said, “Fund an RD-180 replacement for the Atlas 5. And by that, we mean don’t fund anything else but an RD-180 replacement for the Atlas 5.” The Air Force replied, “Nope. But thanks for the money. Hey, Elon, you need to get in on this.”
We are not very good at saying no to our military. Our military spends more money each year the the next 6 militaries combined, with one hand tied behind its back, hopping up and down on one leg, and every 4 years a Republican presidential candidate promises to rescue the military from its currently sorry state and restore it to its former glory. And even if the weak/venal/ungodly Democrat wins, the outcome is pretty much preordained. Aside from the 178 American military bases on foreign soil, all our military assets and all our defense contractors are located in congressional districts. And we are the biggest exporter of military hardware on the planet.
Space Marines! Let’s see the Chinese claim and hold the south pole of the moon now!
Who is going to pay for this? Who is not going to pay for this?
Rocket package services have been proposed all the way back to, probably, Goddard. It’s only 45 minutes after getting the package to a remote location suitable for launching rockets (coastal locations, mainly). Then there is the time to pre-flight and fuel the rocket provided there is one already sitting on the launch pad. NOTAMS are issued when rockets go up so aircraft don’t intrude into the area (24 hours in advance). Boat patrols attempt to keep boats and ships out from under the flight path. Fuels and especially oxidizers are not easily stored for long lengths of time. And, the biggest dilly is the cost. Very few customers can afford to spend millions of dollars to send a package via rocket when FedEx can do it overnight for a fraction of a percent of the price and do it from just about anywhere in the US.
Everybody is NOT going to pay for this.
Trump won’t pay because he doesn’t pay taxes. The rest of us will pay. We’ve already placed our deposit.
Space Marines!
A monster rocket like the BFR enables a lot of other large in-space building projects. A large, rotating space station, that has been a dream for 70 years, may soon be possible. Depending on how the final design turns out, it’s right on the edge of being able to put into orbit a carbon nanotube ribbon for a space elevator. And so on.
None of these building projects have ever been really blocked by lack of rockets. There are plenty of rockets, and plenty of lift capacity.
A single 60,000 km long carbon nanotube ribbon could weigh up to 750 metric tons.
You don’t honestly think that this is the barrier for building a space elevator ? Because if you do, i have a bridge or a few to sell ..
It isn’t now, of course. Once carbon nanotubes can be produced to any desired length, it will be.
Is the Ribbon Challenge still active? Nobody to date has even come close the last time I heard.
A Space Elevator is a bad idea on Earth. The risk isn’t worth the rewards.
I think the Strong Tether Centennial Challenge is technically still open, as there has yet to be a winner. There hasn’t been a formal competition since 2011, however, there have been many tether-climbing robot competitions.
I do not understand why you say the risk isn’t worth the rewards, what risk?
A tether could weigh in at a billion tons or more. An accident during construction or sabotage/damage once in place would kill millions of people and cause massive devastation as it falls and wraps around the equator.
A billion tons, citation needed 🙂
I’ve seen quotes of 750 tons for a carbon fiber nanotube ribbon, which would be a literal ribbon, a couple of nanometers thick and 3-5 centimeters wide. Such a ribbon would weigh something like 7-10 kg per kilometer (depending on width), and if it broke in space and fell on your head you might not even notice it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…
You must have left your engineering degree in your other jacket if you think that a ribbon a couple of nanometers thick and 3-5 centimeters wide is going to do the job. Try imagining a cable meters in diameters times the length required. The idea is to haul tonnage into orbit not grams with side loads and allowance for acceleration. 10kg at terminal velocity is not going to be a good thing to have dropped on your head even if it could survive frictional heating from the fall through the atmosphere.
Look up the tensile strength of carbon nanotubes.
I’ll wait.
Imagine 10 kg of unspooled christmas wrapping ribbon, drifting through the wind. Yeah, that would hurt if it fell on your head…
Not at an acceptable price per pound to orbit.
You have noticed that the space elevator would essentially kill this particular solution?
For “depending on how the final design turns out” – I am not sure why we are discussing some, not only not made but even not presented, solutions. I will just notice that you actually pointed out how still intangible this plan is. Maybe it is OK as some people wrote me on Tuesday – that it is just a sort of horizon and direction – but I expected something more.
One thing I concur, as savuporo I fail to see why only this particular solution enables things like a rotating space station – and actually, if this BFR is to have a slight chance to succeed – you need to start building new markets like this station ASAP.
A space elevator trip to GEO would take many days up to weeks, and goes through the radiation belts. Items (like people) that can’t do that easily will still have to be launched to their destinations on rockets 🙂
Plus the parts of the space elevator would still need to be launched into GEO in the first place.
Large, complex space stations could be launched up in just a few trips. To clarify, I’m not talking about putting two capsules on a string and rotating them. I mean a massive rotating space station, a 450+ meter in diameter 1 g space station that can be lived on normally.
Agreed.
The fundamental truth is that this mad plan is not a threat to SpaceX. It is SpaceX’s reason for being. And Musk does not think it is likely that he will succeed. He only posits that success is one of the possible outcomes. That’s the deal. That’s what he says. That’s what he has been saying all along the way. If he succumbed to gigantism, he did it 14 years ago. Apparently, Doug, you just got the memo this week.
Doug seems to treat space development the way an accountant treats a safe, but very boring, investment portfolio. He doesn’t seem to understand that in the art of development and deploying new technology there is no such thing as a wasted dollar. Thank God for dreamers!
Yeah. Musk proposes a fantastical Mars plan he has no money to fund without even mentioned the cost of ground infrastructure to support all these people, meaning he’ll want taxpayers to foot a lot of the bill…..and the actual problem here is….Doug the accountant?
Good lord. Elon’s Musketeers are impossible to have rational conversations with.
You need to work on your vision thing, Doug. Friendly advice.
There are a lot of ways of moving people out into space. Elon’s vision is but one. It might well be a deeply flawed one.
It probably is, in one way or another. That is why we should have decisions for purchase of services made by markets rather than by visionaries, …and we will.
Markets are almost as bad as central planning committees at fostering innovation. Disruption means uncertainty, change, and extra effort.
The markets that are bad at innovation are those already tightly controlled by government regulators, and thus dominated by those who’ve already got it made. Most innovation is done by startups, in industries where government was looking elsewhere, such as the 40 years of computer technology just passed. Those markets innovate quite well. The question is one of freedom of action. The primary lack of freedom of action comes from high costs for action. The imposition of costs for new startups inhibits the innovations that come from startups.
If you want to see innovation in spaceflight, then focus on what happens after 3d printing factories at places like Earth/Moon Libration Point #1 (EML-1) get started. Watch what happens to their input prices as materials sources like 2016 HO3 come online. Then the costs for new spacecraft will plummet. As that happens, innovation in spaceflight should skyrocket! The only thing that could keep that from happening is government regulations that keep boosting the percentage of an entrepreneur’s time devoted to filling out government forms. When the entrepreneurs are beyond the reach of the regulators, ….
A market is just whatever is sold, bought, or traded. Innovation is an external input in to markets (change!). Highly competitive markets (like PC computing), are highly innovative. Non-compeditive or those dominated by a monopoly or oligopoly markets (like mainframe computing, or…. government spaceflight) are not. But “the market” by itself plays no real role in it, it just reacts to new events.
Sorry to get pedantic. The rest is spot on and hopefully!
The fact that he is going to Mars first is a flaw. But useful tech is useful tech. Blue Origin is in the sweet spot is my guess. I think New Glen will be very successful with its big volume against Falcon Heavy. Bet New Armstrong is more practical than this Mars Monster as well.
Who wants to go suffer on Mars for the rest of their life when you can visit the moon in the near future anyway.
How fast can the Dark horse ride? Abort test October 4th 🙂
I keep seeing Howard Hughes at the control of his monster plywood cargo plane.
And Bill Gates finally releasing Windows 95 to take over the PC market.
I bought the first Fat Mac and printer for 3500 dollars too. What a ripe off!
SpaceX Apple Fanboy
You can’t sustain an outer space presence based on tourism to the moon. Rich folks will go for a joy ride once, maybe twice. That’s about it. It’s not sustainable and the moon cannot sustain a colony without far more expense than Mars ever will be because of the lack of local resources. That’s why Musk has the right idea of going to Mars.
People who want to go to live on Mars will not view it as suffering any more than the Amish view their community as a community of suffering. They will view it as a hardship, an initial price to pay, to get a chance to start a new society, away from the predatorial and corrupt governments that have infected our planet whose grasp can never really be escaped from the inside. You know…the same type of pilgrims and pioneers that made this country happen, for the same reasons. The chance at freedom! Real freedom! To start over. As an immigrant, I think Musk also understands this, as I do. Mars will give people once again the chance to live in what America was when it was first founded. It’s worth it!
Its not Doug’s vision, he reports and comments about space news.
You are the one who needs to learn about keeping it real, you obviously have no grasp of what the realities of aerospace or spaceflight are.
And you should be careful about what you assume.
Why is that James?
I read his post about his aerospace background which by the way equals my own so why is there such a stark difference in what the views of the realities of aerospace and spaceflight are? My 21yrs with NASA and my current 10+ with an aerospace defense contractor allow me to make those assumptions.
So… by your logic I could assume you’ve been a janitor at KSC for 31 years?
Ya got me! At least I had a high tech spin mop!
Actually I do. I won’t repeat my resume here. Doug and I differ on the big picture and how to get there.
I do not mind, and in fact celebrate objective journalism. In certain areas, however, Doug appears to have lost his objectivity. I’m simply pointing out that he should leave the sarcasm to the main stream media talking heads.
You make that sound like a bad thing.
idealists though have a bad habit of sabotaging the realists especially when thier ideals are very ambitious.
Not if the team is managed correctly. You must have a visionary on your team, as well as realists who make it happen. It is the job of the visionary to light fires in the eyes of the rest of the team. One person with excitement will achieve a hundred times what somebody only worried about how much his paycheck is will accomplish. I’ve seen it over and over again. In a large organization, there are perhaps only one or two individuals that will drive success. A company of 25 really can do as much as one of 1000, if it is the right group.
“A company of 25 really can do as much as one of 1000, if it is the right group.”
I used to work at XCOR. This statement is true.
Hey, the rule is when I’m picking on Doug, no one else is allowed to pick on Doug. Now I have to come to his defense, talk out of both sides of my mouth. Grrrr!
Doug is a journalist. As a journalist, he is supposed to be skeptical. He is supposed to speak truth to power.
You and I are space cadets (if I may be so bold). As space cadets, we are well within our rights to be fanbois. We also can be skeptical. We have more degrees of freedom.
It is natural for the sentiments of the readers of this blog to occasionally run up against cold-eyed analysis of the author, our host. It is easy to interpret someone else’s healthy skepticism as cynicism or a lack of perspective. Easy for me, anyway.
But I know that I should not indulge such passions with any frequency, nor with much hyperbole, and in any case, I ain’t interested in piling on. Not in this place. Doug Messier is the warrior poet of space news. He is our holy man, shouting into the wind, dwelling in the desert, keeping it real.
Hey, I still come here to read what he has to say! But there’s a place between keeping it real and Tom Corbett cheering, and we have to move out into that place a bit more or we will never go anywhere. I’ve spent too many years being forced to listen to people who claim there’s no market for that, or why would anyone want to bother going to the Moon, or that’s impossible or that’s crazy to enjoy listening to it on a blog that supposedly supports space industry.
That is just how they rationalize wasting (investor) dollars.
It’s up to the investor to trust the company to spend wisely. If he doesn’t agree with how they do things, then he should cease investing. Caveat emptor. Unfortunately, activities funded through taxes are a couple of levels removed from that level of control. All we can do is try to elect politicians who will direct the budgets wisely.
I cannot even remember a time when I thought somebody I voted for spent our money wisely.
Sadly…. upvoted.
As long as they bring the pork home, who cares!!! Lolol
http://d38zt8ehae1tnt.cloud…
If you were to ask SpaceX’s major investors what the company’s “reason for being” is, they will likely respond “to make money”. If you ask their clients, it will be along the lines of “to get our satellites into orbit”. So far, SpaceX’s money isn’t where their mouth is. If ULA were to kick up production and get prices down a little, the backlog of SpaceX clients waiting for availability will shrink due to those clients jumping ship.
Mars is interesting. Sending humans to Mars is fascinating. But, there is no commercial reason to go. NASA can’t fund them. SLS is already eating into NASA’s budget to the point where they are slimming down to an agency that doesn’t have very much besides that one project going on. If Elon shifts a major portion of SpaceX’s efforts into a project with no foreseeable revenue, his investors are going to start demanding their money back. A little bit is ok. There is plenty of technology needing development for a Mars mission that has or could have a market in the near term.
The 2nd loss of mission in 14 months is definitely going to hurt SpaceX. It will be interesting to see how NASA handles it. They are planning to put their people on that rocket.
As for the $10 billion he says he needs to make his Interplanetary Transport System happen, I’m dead certain that he will get it.
If you were to ask SpaceX’s major investors what the company’s “reason for being” is, they will likely respond “to make money”.
They would be wrong. Musk has been upfront since day 0. Every investor has been warned in advance. SpaceX has to be profitable in order to survive, but all profits are plowed into development. Profitability is a necessity, but not the goal. And failure is likely. That’s the sales pitch and the promise he makes to prospective investors. That is why there has been no effort to take SpaceX public to date. But who knows? Maybe that’s where he’ll get his 10 billion, or some of it. I don’t think so, but it may come to that.
ULA’s performance is admirable. I am glad that they are proceeding with Vulcan. I really like their space tug concept. And Tory Bruno is a class act. They are going to have to continue to reduce their costs.
The question of whether they are profitable is a tricky one since it’s a private company, but I have heard from employees that SX is living a lot on customer deposits. That makes sense as Elon’s other 2 major businesses also have very high burn rates.
I would think that ULA could get their pricing down if they really wanted to. They’ve lived so long on fat government purchases (and still do) that they haven’t had to compete to any great extent. They don’t have to match SX’s prices and shouldn’t. Their success record is too valuable to risk it by cutting corners on quality. The cost of insurance for payloads on F9 must have gone up over the last year and could be less for one of ULA birds. It’s not just the loss of the payload, but the loss of the income that the payload would have generated. Insurance for that is very pricey if anybody will write that policy.
Reliability better be a goal now or the whole thing collapses no matter how little they charge.
If he turns the company to be solely focused on Mars (90% of engineering staff dedicated to Mars) why would satellite operators even want to use SpaceX for launches? If I have invested 100 – 300 million in my satellites I sure as hell want a company to focus on my launches and not some dream.
I don’t know why you presume they would and not grow the company to support both.
Did he not say in his presentation that in 1.5-2 years most SpaceX engineers will be focused on IST?
Did you know there is a whole web site devoted to “Stuff Elon Says”?
Cool, so should we just ignore everything he says then? Works for me.
No one ever said you had to.
Unless you want to buy an expensive electric car or on the exceedingly unlikely chance you could afford to buy a trip to the ISS, LEO, or Mars; none of Elon’s antics will probably have any impact on you.
I’m a spacecraft controls engineer. The satellite I’ve been working on for the past few years is slated to be launching on a Falcon 9, but may very well end up being cancelled because of the constant Falcon 9 delays. This is a project my team and I have poured many nights and weekends into. Forgive us for not being inspired by Elon’s beautiful vision of Mars while we wait to possibly become the next AMOS-6.
I’d argue Elon’s antics directly have an impact on me.
You’ve probably gotten paid regardless if it ever goes to space or not. And if it gets “AMOS-6ed”, then guess what? You get paid to build another one!
huh.
So, what launch system only focuses on launching just your satellite?
The one that is getting paid to.
well, that is exactly how SpaceX works. The same as others.
ULA has lots of side projects being worked on as well.
Jon says no big Swiss army knife
Cut that thing into 3 parts
http://selenianboondocks.co…
Paradigm shifts are hard to make up, but going big is a simple way to do it. One can solve a lot of space problems by simply throwing mass at it. Reusability makes huge rockets economically possible. It is not “gigantism”, it’s the logical conclusion, hence why von Braun had a similar concept 70 years ago.
Yeah. Actually reuseability makes rockets, or…. anything, more economically possible. Not just big ones.
That is one of the reasons why I felt let down by Musk’s presentation, it really wasn’t anything new, it was just a really big version of their current architecture.
Bigness is what makes it conceivable.
Not some fancy new EM engine launching small sats from a double jumbo jet or from a submarine at sea or something like that. Simply more, much more, of what has been proven to work.
Elon Musk has already done it with the battery Megafactory. He didn’t bet on inventing new kinds of batteries, just making more of the existing ones cheaper and ever more of them again. Falcon 1 to 9 to BFR is kind of aligned with that basic concept. This guy does not waste a penny on anything but going to Mars. Solar electric, electric vehicles, vacuum engineering, SPX. All serve the purpose to put him on Mars. That’s evidently the only thing he cares about. There are reasons to care about what capable men care about.
The gigafactory isn’t up and running yet. Tesla is making a token number of assemblies there but Panasonic is not manufacturing cells there yet.
The big press rollout was in a tiny section of the building that was pushed ahead on the schedule so they could make some sort of PR announcement. The rest of the building is/was an empty shell with lots more to do.
Waste? TMotors and SCity are dragged down by their burn rate all up and down the org chart with no slowing down. I do agree that money spent on a Mars mission is a waste if it can’t be used elsewhere in the short term.
Maybe big is enough? It is at least something which can be done. More of the same. Much more of the same. Even more of the same. Until it works. Not waiting for a tooth fairy. This is more classic business think than it is rocket science.
Yes, but much needs to be learned first. We were building and navigating Mayflowers long before we attempted Titanics.
If they can get the Raptor engine to work reliably, a upper stage based on it would be a great upgrade to the Falcon. At 380 sec Isp, and the improved power density of L CH4 over LH2, the performance increase should be worth it.
“Essentially, initial successes lead people to attempt giant leaps that have a high chance of falling short.”
In the software biz, we used to call that “second system syndrome”. Some examples of second systems are… oh, wait–there aren’t any.
Still, if it worked, it would be awesome.
What beats me is the Direct Ascent approach as opposed to Mars Orbit Rendezvous. It’s so… von Braun.
Each environment – Earth, space, Mars – has its own characteristics which are best served by specialised vehicles. (Remember the original Apollo plan, Direct Ascent and taking the CM all the way to the surface? Not optimal)
Several BFR launches would provide a truly colossal space-only Mars liner (with a decent storm shelter among other things); then you need fairly modest sized Earth and Mars shuttles plus a Mars-based tanker to refuel the liner. And if you want to go to Europa why would you want to drag an atmospheric vehicle out there?
A space liner, moreover, would provide a decent revenue stream (honeymoons to the Moon? Venus and Mars flybys?) long before the Mars landing and return issues were resolved. I’m not sure that Musk has his business head on wrt Mars.
I’m not so sure that Elon is thinking about any revenue from going to Mars. So far, he hasn’t made any statements regarding all of the wonderful commercial opportunities.
I would think that if a colony is established on the Moon, it would be an easier sell to advertise a honeymoon on(in) the Moon. A five year honeymoon going to Mars and back is a bit much.
Engineering is about tradeoffs. What Musk showed us is the end result of his team’s tradeoffs. We can guess they were optimizing for fast and cheap and doable by SpaceX. There may be more tradeoffs that cause the puzzling aspects of the ITS design that we don’t know about, but we can start with these and see where it takes us.
Fast and cheap means don’t develop a lot of vehicles. Specialized deep-space liners and Mars cyclers and boost stages and Mars-orbit refueling tankers might all come later, since it looks like they might save some money. But do it as quick and cheap as possible first.
One of the things that surprised me was getting to Mars faster than a Hohmann transfer. That costs a lot of delta-v – at both ends. On the Mars end, maybe they need to aerobrake or they won’t even make Mars orbit? I should run the numbers and see. If so, they come in hot and head straight for the surface, no loitering in orbit first. That’s what the video shows.
Approximately 50% of all Mars missions have failed. They actually missed their target (i.e. Mars) or crashed on the surface (either came in too steep and burned up or the landing system didn’t deploy). One did land where the parachute deployed but the parachute then fell on top of the lander; blocking it from any sunlight.
…and remember; that’s only getting to the surface. Once on the surface, those odds will decrease, substantially – and I’m not sure if the fanboys actually realise this.
It’s worth keeping in mind that most of those failures were from the attempts back in the 1960s.
I have to say that back in my 30s, I was single and having a great time in life. However, I would have gone to Mars in a HEARTBEAT as long as I stood better than a 50% chance of getting to the surface alive.
Because once you get to Mars, your chance is actually fairly decent. It will have to be underground, and I would NEVER go without a nuclear energy being available (solar only would be the kiss of death).
So good to get away from the days of Dan Golden and Delta II sounding rockets
It doesn’t seem to use as much composites.
I’ll take a metal rocket over a composite one. Remember, the presentation calls for densified propellants and composites.
We’ve just done that one.
“Remember, the presentation calls for densified propellants and composites.
We’ve just done that one.”
No.
We’ve seen the results of high pressure gaseous Helium inside composite tanks. Those are eliminated in ITS. Their place will be taken by the Raptor’s ability to gassify some of each propellant and reinject it into each tank to keep tank pressure positive as propellant is consumed. The composite tanks of ITS will contain low pressure densified liquid Methane and Oxygen. These are completely different things than tanks of high pressure gasses.
I hope so–I really do.
I want to see this fly. Unlike New Spacers, Old Space fans like me don’t want to kill everyone else’s projects
New Space backers would love to see NASA have many more projects, just not the ones that Congress finds it profitable to fund, so committee members can control the places where funding goes at small cost in political favors.
That is the basic problem NASA has had for 45 +years. It has great engineers, whose money is controlled by people who no longer get enough political profit from spaceflight. Thus, committee members profit politically by directing the funding stream into the districts they need votes from.
New Space backers would love to see 20 projects replacing SLS, for developing and demonstrating new technologies, not for using shuttle technology to slosh money where it will get the committee members elected, again. Until there is a basic change in the way that Congress views the reasons for funding NASA, there will be opposition to the projects Congress mandates.
Supporters of shuttle derived heavy lift have been on the outside looking in for too long. SLS has lots of great folks doing great work–and they should be supported. SLS is not Venture Star.
I remember anti shuttle-derived HLLV folks like Greason–who wanted to rob SLS (then Ares V) for what? Roton. No thank you.
It’s sad just how many folks hate SLS.
Some reasons behind it I think:
1.) Planetary Scientists
Lots of folks just got used to chain smoking Delta IIs to the point that they didn’t want to share any funding with any type of LV development–especially if humans are involved–since most of these guys are robots only
2.) EELV hucksters.
With depots, they saw a way to sell endless supplies of medium lift rockets on endless Rube Goldberg assembly missions where boil-off means you sell more EELVs. Obviate that with a big LV–and their goes their market. So the fangs came out. This is where a lot of hate for shuttle-derived heavy lift came from–and folks have foolishly bought into it. Of course, when Elon Musk’s Space X came along, ULA has a more pressing target.
3.) Libertarians
These folks want to cancel SLS just because they hate on gov’t. While driving on the Interstate, using the ARPANET, etc I have little patience with this viewpoint myself.
“Kill SLS”
Why
NASA doesn’t do anything right–when’s the last time they finished anything?
So you want to kill something–to keep it from finishing–since…
This just makes my head hurt.
Now in the past, the different parties were more all over the place.
Rather how like young earth creationists and UFO believers will join forces to silence a James Randi type.
Larger LVs, simpler assembly–This is what Shuttle-derived systems offer–and I choose to support SLS as much because of the naysayers as in spite of them.
“Supporters of shuttle derived heavy lift have been on the outside looking in for too long.”
Between 1975 and 1995, I was a supporter of shuttle derived heavy lift, because no one else was bringing newer tech to the field successfully. Then, people started doing just that. Supporting SDHL after that would mean ignoring the possibilities of the new tech, and accepting the continuing agency costs of being funded at the direction of people who have no interest in spaceflight other than as a nozzle to direct money to their districts.
“folks like Greason–who wanted to rob SLS (then Ares V) for what? Roton.”
No. Roton was dead 5 years before Ares V was ever put into NASA’s budget. Jeff Greason knew that better than anyone, and in my presence *never* brought up reviving Roton after Ares V was proposed. He is, however, a brilliant man who focused on making spaceflight work, not on getting Congressmen re-elected. *That* was the reasoning behind his Augustine Panel recommendations.
“It’s sad just how many folks hate SLS.”
People who are intent on making spaceflight for all into a reality have no use for money being spent just to spend money to buy votes, and at the moment SLS is the personification of Congressional desire to do just that.
“1.) Planetary Scientists”
Yes, the robots only explorers want government money, like everyone else, and are often more interested in money spent to keep their grad students grinding away at data doing science than in spending it on new launch vehicles. No surprise there. Academics have been doing this since the 1880s in the US, and elsewhere have been selling out to government at least since Henry VIII bought the opinions of the Universities of Europe about how right he was to divorce Catherine of Aragon. This is also what the SLS program office was reduced to by the legislation that demanded it be done using Shuttle tech dating back to 1969.
“3.) Libertarians
These folks want to cancel SLS just because they hate on gov’t. While driving on the Interstate, using the ARPANET, etc I have little patience with this viewpoint myself.”
We libertarians acknowledge the accomplishments of government quite gladly. We simply point out that *every* government hierarchy has agency costs they are forbidden from acknowledging. Worse, the higher up the funding hierarchy you go, the higher the exponent on the agency costs.
Thus, we see Congress cutting technology development to fund an SLS that is no less expensive than the Space Shuttle, because being less expensive would mean it sent less money to their districts. We want a shift to markets that acknowledge agency costs (they call it profit) and allow us to account for it. In that we anticipate costs to drop, and freedom of action to advance because costs drop.
“NASA doesn’t do anything right–when’s the last time they finished anything?”
When’s the last time Congress *allowed* them to finish anything? There is a long list of new tech developed a few TRL levels through NIAC that, in total, could revolutionize spaceflight, that the committees don’t want touched by NASA, specifically because it would cut costs. It isn’t NASA that is the problem. It is the agency costs imposed by congressional committees on anything NASA does that is the problem.
“and I choose to support SLS as much because of the naysayers as in spite of them.”
And there is the end-zone dug-in bitterness that refuses to look at the costs involved. Not once have you mentioned the costs involved.
I know some scientists/engineers at JPL that have worked 30 years on one program after another that got axed and have never had anything fly. That’s pretty depressing. Most of the time, it’s been due to budget cuts and political whims and not a tech impasse.
The people at NASA tend to be perfectionists and there is still the “Failure is not an option” flag flying. The problem is that when they have a failure, the congress critters form a committee and demand sacrifices on the alter of perfection. Manned missions take an extra level of perfection since all astronauts are “heroes” and shouldn’t be subjected to risk. They are correct that “Failure is not an option”. The next line is “It comes standard”. Sometimes the best path is to fail quickly and cheaply. Slap it together and see how it goes. This is not recommended as a process for a complete piece of flight hardware, but prototype subsystems, certainly.
Throwing SLS away is what is costly. SLS is a conservative design. I don’t see Orion having a huge front windshield that is just asking for trouble as on Musk’s design. I want my tax money to go to more conservative designs.
Now if Musk can fund BFR and other projects–then prove you can do it on your own in a private manner, without putting existing jobs out of work for something “new.”
“Throwing SLS away is what is costly.”
Sunk costs fallacy right there.
“SLS is a conservative design.”
SLS is a conservative design that *cannot* do what we want during its lifetime.
” I want my tax money to go to more conservative designs.”
And I want mine to go toward designs that will open the Solar system to settlement, which SLS will not do.
“without putting existing jobs out of work for something “new.”
Here is the core of it. You are as one with your congressional overlords.
Overlords?–they work for me. Infrastructure is something libertarians just don’t get. Even if we had anti-gravity tomorrow, keeping rockets around (like how sailing ships are used by some navies for training) would be a good thing.
NIF/ITER–they keep pools of professionals around–a base. Libertarians are all about offshoring and destroying bases–downsizing. This will result in a ” a lack of cultivation of skillsets in younger generations that we need to maintain what we have into the future.”
Like so many libertarian/conservative types–you see large numbers of employees as a problem. I see them as a resource.
Some reasons you did not mention:
$40 billion is too much money to develop one rocket and one capsule.
$1 billion+ is a lot to spend on a single launch.
10+ years is too long to spend developing “block 1” of a launch stack using “proven” technology. Cost plus, baby!
Congress specified the tech for SLS to steer the work to specific contractors in specific districts. They specified solid rocket boosters, a choice no engineer not employed by a solid rocket booster company would make, for reasons unrelated to the soundness and safety of the vehicle.
SLS/Orion costs so much money that we can’t even contemplate building the lander, ascent vehicle and habitat that would be required to employ SLS/Orion in any useful way.
Reusability is the only financially viable path forward. I’m stretching on this one because landing boosters on their tails was not a thing in 2009 and it has yet to demonstrated that it is financially viable. Nevertheless, this is a widely held belief and one to which I subscribe.
NASA doesn’t do anything right–when’s the last time they finished anything?
I don’t hear that said anywhere, where “anywhere” means here, Space News and NSF. I’m sure some people say that somewhere, but I strongly suspect that their numbers are few. Maybe a few snarky Russians taking the piss. Do Internet trolls count? If anyone is writing that where I might see it, then I must be filtering it out. That’s quite possible. A mind is a terrible thing.
It isn’t going to be 3 billion per launch. I’ve seen two or less. A lot of the early cost was development/set-up and a lot of that is done. We spent how much on Iraq now. I think SLS costs are justified. At least SLS doesn’t have one big showy front windshield to pop out and lose atmosphere.
NASA not finishing things? I’ve heard that for years with other phrases/words..like Roton, Gary Hudson, standing armies, etc.
It isn’t going to be 3 billion per launch. I’ve seen two or less.
I said 1+ billion, which amounts to 2 or less, and that is too much. It amounts to waste by design, because they thought they would get away with it, which remains to be seen.
$40 billion for half an Apollo stack. Musk says he can build his monster for 10, and it will be fully reusable. That ratio complies with the evidence of history. $40 billion and no place to go.
The Iraq war is a non-sequitur.
What will be interesting is how the office holders who back SLS/Orion are going to react to the ITS. It represents a direct threat to their gravy train, and we are talking about a lot of gravy, a big fat chunk of NASA’s budget. There is no getting around that. I’m sure Musk would rather not have to deal with it, but whaddayagonnado? I expect witch trials to commence posthaste. Angry villagers with pitchforks.
There are quite a few mullions on that windshield. It’ll be fine.
40 billion for half an Apollo stack. Musk says he can build his monster for 10,
Musk has said a lot of things. How about this? How about the new spacers use their own money and not pull themselves up by trying to put other folks out of work. Musk got bailed out by COTS. Libertairan alt.spacers didn’t mind NASA money when it went to their pet projects.
No, I’ll stick with a more conservative design. Now, Bezos can spend his own money. He and Musk need to pool efforts. Hell, if BFR actually flies, I can see SLS tankage used as an upper stage for that thing.
Now if I could KNOW that BFR/ITS would be real–that’s one thing. I’d want funding for that–in the same way that both old Space EELVs and Falcon fly. Maybe we will have three HLLVs. The trend does seem to be going in the right direction. Just because SLS can be killed doesn’t mean that ITS will get its money. More likely, it would go elsewhere.
Musk has said a lot of things.
He does a lot of things, too. He notoriously bad with schedules, but drops jaws with the way he can stretch a buck. Nobody believed that SpaceX developed the Falcon 9 for 400 million. NASA did an audit. Then they believed. When Musk said 10 billion for ITS development out loud, he was thinking 6 to 8.
How about the new spacers use their own money and not pull themselves up by trying to put other folks out of work.
That is the real argument. That is the crux. Old Space is entitled to that annual distribution of federal money by virtue of long established practice, because they have earned it with past performance, because Old Space has grown dependent upon it. New Space is not entitled. Go away. Don’t screw this up for everybody. I have a mortgage. My kids have to go to college.
That’s not a good argument. NASA does space exploration. It’s not a jobs program for Alabama, Louisiana, Colorado and Texas. Well, it is a jobs program for Alabama, Louisiana, Colorado and Texas, but that’s not the goal. That’s not NASA’s purpose. The jobs program was instituted to support NASA’s purpose and to lock in long term Congressional support. But that arrangement has not been working for quite a while. The cost plus jobs program has become a burden. It’s bleeding the human space flight program dry. And all of a sudden, we have viable alternatives.
All that stuff Old Space did for NASA, Old Space got paid for. Cost plus. That’s 58 years of no skin in the game.
Here’s the answer: compete.
Just because SLS can be killed doesn’t mean that ITS will get its money. More likely, it would go elsewhere.
Yup.
Well, it is a jobs program for Alabama, Louisiana, Colorado and Texas, but that’s not the goal.
Like ITER–it is keeping folks in the game–folks that can go to other projects. Musk had to have folks to draw upon. Old and New Space need to work together.
Oh, absolutely. The Old/New Space terminology gets pointless quickly when you are talking about companies doing business. I don’t expect ULA and SpaceX to unveil a joint undertaking in the next 6 months, but Lockheed, Boeing and SpaceX do business with one another all the time. Small New Space companies get work from Old Space companies all the time.
Elon will set up shop in Mischoud, perhaps 2 years from now. But that half-promise of intent will hang in the air over every discussion going forward. One does not get the impression that he wants a war with NASA’s Congressional base. That does not get him where he wants to go.
Musk has never been interested in playing the upstart/outsider role. He is not disaffected, disenfranchised or in any other way marginalized by entrenched interests. That’s not his posture. That’s not his thing. He does not spend much time talking about what other people should do. He mostly talks about what he is going to do.
BFR needs to be New Armstrong. Also, ITS actually looks a bit like a football–so, that might be a way to attract interest perhaps. He does need to make toys of his mega-vehicles–get into the youth zeitgeist like Trek did.
We don’t want to kill SLS because we don’t want a heavy-lift vehicle. We want to kill SLS because of its enormous opportunity cost.
That’s all it is.
We think that money could be better spent elsewhere.
And if you actually read the Augustine report, you’ll see why they didn’t like the program of record (Ares). It was doomed to failure, because there was not enough budget to actually fly it.
Ares I was one thing. Things cost what theycost. I see BFR getting out of hand in terms of cost as well. I heard comments about the passenger compartment being one vulnerable to breach what with that huge window.
I lile SLS because it is metal, and very conservative.
“Things cost what theycost.”
The question you keep ignoring is what is being bought for the cost.
If launch capability were anything more than a side-effect of sloshing money into the committee members districts, you might have an argument. Launch capability with SLS, however, is *nothing* more than a side-effect of moving money to the pockets Congress wants to put it in. *Nothing*More*!
You keep focusing on “jobs”, like a good little congressional serf.
The rest of us don’t!
Then do it on your own. You want to pull yourselves up[ by pulling better men down.
“Things cost what they cost.”
Well, yeah. Things also have benefits. You pay the cost to get the benefits.
Tom, myself, and every other NewSpace person I know all think that the benefits provided by SLS are not worth the cost.
Am I being clear enough here? It’s not an ideological dislike of SLS, it’s an engineer’s dislike of wasting money. We’d rather launch more payloads for less money, end of story.
But it isn’t a waste of money. It is capability we didn’t have before. Starting and stopping projects is the waste. And the sunk cost fallacy only works if you agree that the initial cost was wrong–which it isn’t. Sigh.
Look, ITS/BFR is well in the future. SLS will fly soon. If Musk plays his cards right–he should be asking Congress to kill SLS. Like it or not–that isn’t going to fly with Congress.
You know what might work? Go after F-35. Musk might do some powerpoints on orbital military platforms. Talk about how our immense ColdWar/WWII infrastructure and architecture is essentially socialist. With space bombardment, we don’t have to mobilize slow carrier groups, airplanes that take off from an airfield with a CNN reporter watching–like an ISIS fighter can’t look at a stopwatch and guesstimate a strike.
No–with more isolationism–Musk might get more traction by diverting aerospace funding to his projects. Musk, Bezos and NASA need to work together. IHis ITS/MCT is about the size/mass of SLS itself. I can see SLS becoming a hydrogen upper stage for the BFR in case the more busy ITS has problems. It is a potential out worth looking at.
Also, SLS tooling may play a part. I want BFR to be a giant Saturn IB myself. Having clister tanks with the top and bottom of the tanks “floating” between top and bottom plates may make more sense for BFR than one big resonating tank. There were gaps between the Redstones around the Jupiter. I can see longer landing legs fitting into those gaps offered by cluster tanks.
If BFR should hit two hard with the tankage as it stands…it migght be more easily damaged. Besides, someone shoots a hole in a cluster tank–swap it out on a carousel.
Lastly, I think Musk and Bezos need to go into the toy manufacturing business.
Face it, there are not many folks like us who hang out on space sites.
But popularize ITS/BFR with big playsets–and you put the bug into the minds of kids who grow up to be space voters.
That’s your path.
I think we must be talking past each other, even though I’m using the simplest language I can. It must be some fundamental difference in our worldviews.
Perhaps it’s that you want new capabilities sooner, and I/we want cheaper space launch sooner? Given the same dollar, you will want to spend it on a new capability and I want to spend it on lowering the cost of launching existing payloads. Does this sound reasonable to you?
I want capability across the board. SLS wil fly sooner than BFR–maybe even sooner than Falcon Heavy. I just want folks who work on shuttle-derived heavy lift the same respect that JPL and other space workers get.
They are all doing a good job.
I am sure they are doing a good job. I have huge respect for every NASA employee and contractor I’ve ever met. I spent two summers at WSTF, and they’re heroes, every one.
I just wish the people working on SLS were working on something else that might actually make progress on the goals that I think are important. Opportunity cost, again.
Thanks for responding in such a calm and civilized manner. It’s nice to have an actual conversation in an Internet forum.
There often is a lot more heat than light on some boards–but people fight because they **care** and that’s a good thing.
Tom and publiusr, you are talking about two different types of tanks. The helium tanks in the F9 are indeed high pressure, but they’re not entirely made of composites. They are COPVs, which are composite tanks with an aluminum liner to prevent leaks. They’re located inside the LOX tank, in order to densify the gaseous helium with the cold LOX.
We don’t know yet the root cause of the latest F9 mishap. Perhaps it was a COPV, or something else involved with the helium system. Either way, there are no naked composite structures in the F9 propellant system, high pressure or otherwise, that I am aware of.
OK. That said, it appears to be true that there won’t be any high-pressure gases bottled up as part of the ITS’s propellant system, and if so, the possibility of a similar mishap on ITS is eliminated.
FYI, the Shuttle used autogenous pressurization on the external tank, at least on the H2 side. I was present when a Shuttle H2 repressurization valve was being tested at White Sands Missile Range. It was a pretty crude valve, I was told – only a few pressure settings. Presumably it was carefully modulated so the tank didn’t explode or implode. In any case, we know (or used to know) how to do this.
That leaves unlined cryogenic composite tanks to discuss. AFAIK nobody’s flown one yet, but at least two companies have demonstrated them. Elon admits that the big composite propellant tanks are hard to do. And that huge tank he showed us means exactly nothing until we see some test data that suggests that it’ll meet its design specs.
So, both of you have good points. IMO 🙂
It’s more real than Musk’s rocket. And it will fly.
The rocket is metal now–not powerpoint–that was the old rag on it.
Venture Star–now that was a load.
We will see. Software can be re-written.
What space advocates call gigantism the business world calls economies of scale. The small rockets being built never made sense economically. You need to be able to lift large pieces of machinery if you want to mine the Moon, asteroids or build realistic factories in space. If Elon Musk pulls it off then the age of space settlement and development will really start.
Yes, economies of scale are excellent. So, why didn’t they built a 747 in 1947 as opposed to a couple of decades later? Because post-war passenger jets were a step by step progression.
It’s the leap forward that is the question here. Is it too big of a leap too fast? They get the rocket engines to work, but ECLSS isn’t ready to go.
I wouldn’t care that much if it was a booster like the Delta IV to haul cargo up there. But, you’re talking about keeping 100 people alive through space through interplanetary space and then healthy and productive on the surface. I didn’t hear anything about the latter.
Boeing bet the company that the 747 would be a commercial success. It paid off, but it wasn’t a slam dunk.
Economies of scale are not universal nor are they linear and infinite. The SLS is criticized for not being able to service enough missions at a brisk enough rate to justify keeping a support crew trained and available. It is supposed to be able to launch a very large payload, but the EoS doesn’t work when factoring in all of the requirements. The Airbus A380 is efficient at moving around 500 passengers from point A to point B, but only when moving that number of passengers and only when A and B are sufficiently far apart that the turnaround time is only a small part of the total flight. Traveling from Los Angeles to Seattle is more efficient with more flights of smaller aircraft. A full booking from LA to Tokyo is more cost effective for the airlines with a Jumbo aircraft. (I will not fly on an A380 personally)
Going large for some missions also implies that one is putting a whole bunch of eggs in one basket. To support a colony on Mars or even the Moon is going to take multiple unmanned missions to stage tools and equipment in advance. A load of 3D printers isn’t going to work on Mars. There is no way to support the technology without it taking years to get replacement electronics. It could be feasible on the Moon to 3D print things since replacement parts can be packed in the next care package without too many problems. If all of the tools and equipment fails to arrive safely via a very large lifter, it’s a huge loss. It won’t be until the next launch window that replacements can be sent. Multiple smaller rockets can have a better chance especially if there are redundancies.
According the Musk’s way and scale of thinking his BFR/ITS IS a smaller rocket.
You are thinking airliners. He is thinking PANAMAX freighters.
Which is what you need for both space settlement and industrialization. If he meets his performance goals he will find markets beyond just Mars.
Doug,
Sorry for the delay, I was on the road as part of my moving here to Texas.
Yes, it often is but the B-52 was a pretty big jump from the B-47. And look at the SR-71 compared to other jets of the era. Big jumps are possible, it is just a matter of focusing on the details.
Just found General Dynamics Mars reference mission video from 1962 on youtube (interesting to compare): https://www.youtube.com/wat…
“Orion” (the Dyson version) is mentioned without qualification at about 25 minutes in…
Pad 39 is expected to be ready in November. I don’t think that Kennedy or the Cape (or VAFB) are going to allow a SX flight until the last failure is analyzed to their satisfaction and fixes are made.
“why would fixes even need to be made?”
Ummm, it caught fire and then exploded on the launch pad. The facility management are probably a little concerned that it might happen again. Unless you are suggesting that Elvis shot at the rocket from his UFO and caused the fire.
And the software for BFR is where now?
Another trash article by Doug Messier…. Wouldn’t waste a minute reading it
glad that I read it FIRST prior to read your posting.
And if you do not like his work, why are you here?
Because freedom of information allows you to read any article… Misinformation and negative writing will not help private commercial space initiatives. At least, if he were a good reporter, he would have reported exclusively on the title of the article. What do the SpaceShipOne and Two programs have to do with this article? He’s comparing apples with peanuts, as if Scaled or VG ever spent a penny of his or anybody’s pocket…
Moreover, if he had studied history, he would have learned that Von Braun ideas for Mars were not a “frustrating illusion”, and they were simply killed by political indecision and loss of interest in the outer space program, without considering that nobody really wanted to accept the risk of losing a crew on the way to Mars
and what exactly is your background?
2 postings and nothing but hatred for doug.
I have to wonder if you are just a troll, or are you really working for VG and just hate him for speaking up about VG?
Im guessing the former.
ironically, reusing an SLHV like SLS is quite possible while the hobby rocket space airliner is not.
If the advanced boosters for the SLS are pressure fed and structurally strong enough to be parachuted into the ocean they can be recovered like the space shuttle boosters.
Since they can be cleaned and given a light refurbishment without needing to be sent to Utah, cleaned and have new fuel cast they will be the least expensive reuse possible.
The core engines of a lunar mission SLS would boost a wet workshop stage out of orbit, separate from the workshop and then take a lunar free-return trajectory back to a reentry and ocean recovery with it’s own heat shield, parachutes and water-safe covers.
This would make sense if Elon’s original plan was to launch satellites, and then got greedy and wanted Mars. It’s not the case. It was always Mars for him. He didn’t just set out to start a satellite launching company. I mean he originally wanted to buy rockets from the Russians just to put some plants on Mars to get people interested in Mars again. His plan only came about because when he looked into NASA’s plans for putting humans on Mars he was as disappointed and shocked as the rest of us to find out they didn’t have any plans. It’s far from what you are describing in this article with von Braun and Branson.
Also, the big difference here is von Braun depended on government money to sponsor him, as well as approval. The government stopped having a need for him and after he built the Saturn V and after using him to get us to the moon to win their political race with the Russians, they couldn’t wait to get rid of him because he was an ex-Nazi whom they really just wanted out of the way and wanted to break up his all star team of ex-Nazi engineers that was the backbone of our Apollo space program and had too much influence within NASA. After all, they wanted to show the world that democracy could do better than communist Russia….so how ironic was it the fact the maestro behind it all was a former Nazi German and his team that earned his wings working for Adolf Hitler? He had to go….and we got the Space Shuttle instead, a massive money pit, and nothing since.
The U.S. government was really never interested in human exploration to begin with, they never cared about any of von Braun’s visions any more than Hitler did, just his talent for missile/rocket building and to win the space race against Russia. Hitler used him to make weapons of destruction and to make war, we used him to fight a propaganda war. It certainly wasn’t to support his personal vision of space exploration. Eisenhower just really wanted to make sure the Russians wouldn’t have satellites that could hover over us, launch nukes on us, wanted to be able to have OUR own satellites to spy on everyone else, at will, pushing to pass legislature that gave us that freedom to monitor and spy on the globe. As for Kennedy, he wanted to appease the public and win a political race to the moon after von Braun’s engine test and confidence in his letter response to Kennedy reassured him we could do this, to show off American democratic engineering, even though it was ridiculously hypocritical at best considering who was the driving force behind it all.
Human exploration in space or science was always secondary to our government and likewise to the protocol they mandated to NASA, and after they achieved that purpose, they sure as heck made sure NASA would plateau after the 1970’s once von Braun was ran out of town and showed just how much they valued human exploration in space and science. Actually there’s a better word for that: stagnation. And handing out fat contracts to old friends. That’s when they transformed NASA more into the public scientific and educational agency it is today, when they no longer wanted to spend serious money on NASA programs. Or better said, money on serious NASA projects, because some serious taxpayers money is still being spent.
Considering all of these things I really can’t possibly see how anyone can draw any correlations to Elon Musk’s plan, vision, authority over his own programs and not least, his personal financial stake and situation.
The only correlation I can draw between these men is that they were all foreign born immigrants who came here with a vision about space and found the US as the place to help them make it happen. Which is ironic considering our government won’t allow SpaceX and other companies in the private sector to hire foreigners, yet they had no issue hiring former Nazis. And I can’t stress enough how stupid this policy is, because while before the brightest foreign engineers wanted to work at NASA, NASA is no longer that cutting edge space agency it once was. Right now it’s private companies like SpaceX that hold that torch so if our government insists on keeping the brightest foreign minds out, all that’s going to do is hurt us, and make them go work for another country and advance their programs instead of ours. The next von Braun won’t give a crap about working for old, slow, dinosaur NASA, but he may have been interested in up and coming companies like SpaceX except now our government is shutting that guy out and sending him to our competitors. Not good.
The allusion Musk is mimicking von Braun’s plan from the 1950’s isn’t a correlation of gigantism and failure, because I think as I have shown, they have little in common in their situations. If anything it’s more of a correlation that they may have an equal impact on humanity and reshaping global superpower leaders in space. But really, it just merely goes to show you just how behind we truly are that it required a South African to come in, and start a rocket company from scratch in 2002 and implement a vision originally dreamed up by a surrendered German in the 50’s! And it may be Elon Musk that actually helps us maintain that status in the face of Chinese advancement taking place under our nose just like von Braun helped us stay ahead of the Russians in the 60’s. I sure as heck have no faith in NASA and our congress to do that job with their SLS and their “Mars plan” of handing out fat checks to Boeing and friends to work on terrible rockets that will just be scrapped by the next president. All NASA has advanced is the price of their programs and their timelines, which now range from decades to indefinite to “it’s never actually going to happen, but we’ll still collect all the money and stay employed in the mean time for building things we’ll never use”. They seem content with this plan. And so do their subcontractors.
The one correlation I hope never happens with Musk is that the government will step in and make him do something that will impede his plans and vision. This is our third shot at Mars. NASA and our government didn’t support von Braun in the 60’s and 70’s for his Mars plan. NASA ran off Mark Zubrin and his Mars Direct plan in the 90’s out of petty jealousy that his plan was too simple, too inexpensive and left too many other departments without a play in the game and kept their hands out of the money jar, so the man went off to create the Mars Society on his own and kept the dream alive when nothing was happening. And now we have Elon Musk. He was probably inspired by the likes of Mark Zubrin and von Braun’s plans but he had so little faith in NASA getting us anywhere, he bet his fortune on himself to do something he had no experience doing, the private sector, and continues putting up his own cash to make this happen. Maybe third time’s the charm America! If the government is stupid enough to screw it up once more, then we deserve the Chinese or whoever else is more ambitious to take the lead. Progress, the Chinese, the Indians won’t wait on us just because we are the USA and we are supposed to be the leaders in space. Let’s not screw it up this time and support this man, if we really want to remain on top. If not, the next time a brilliant space engineer or entrepreneur is born in the world, he may decide America is not the place to go anymore, and will run off to start his company in China or Dubai.
As for the magical plateau….well, whether we are talking about the airplane, car, computer, cell phone, the boat, the train, you name it….none of them needed to plateau in order to advance or succeed and it’s been innovation and pushing technology forward that’s actually kept those companies in business and selling iteration after iteration of their products. We never stopped improving the car, the plane, the tv, the radio, or anything else. Nor should we. And we should have never stopped improving rockets either. No matter of what politically unpopular nationality the engineers were that we needed to help us do it. Heck I wish we could have stolen Korolev too. And thank God von Braun chose America and not the Russians, because those 2 together would have left us so far in the dust in space engineering, the Russians would already be drinking Vodka on Mars today. And thank God Musks’s family also chose the USA.
The reality is Elon Musk has a sound business plan based on common sense which is a lot more I can say about our government space program and the SLS. He doesn’t plan on scrapping the Falcon 9 any time soon, although I have plenty of doubts the SLS will ever fly. In fact that Falcon 9 satellite launch business part WILL plateau as you want, in order to fund the remaining portion of his ORIGINAL vision. It’s not a leap, It’s not gigantism. It’s merely the next step in his plan. His original plan. His original vision.
And I’m sure eventually SpaceX and Elon Musk will in fact plateau, but not in the launching satellites business. But rather in offering a permanent, cheap transportation system to Mars and other bodies in our solar system. That’s where he hopes SpaceX’s plateauing will happen. At that point he’ll probably make the company public.
He set out to try and offer cheaper space travel via reusable rockets to make it viable to do business in space for private companies, and to then use that to make sure we get to Mars. He’s still working on the same plan. He’s not taking any leaps, if anything he’s proven he stays the course, perseveres and is relentless and persistent despite setbacks and naysayers. Delays and all, he’s followed through so far. Hopefully he succeeds carrying his plan all the way to the end. But this isn’t gigantism, though his Mars rocket is indeed gigantic. He just unveiled some of the technical details of the Mars rocket NASA would have never built and now has a rough draft for the engineering and a tested engine to power it. That’s all.
Strangely enough, SpaceX is claiming that it was a failure of a COPV by way of how it was being filled. Nothing of a metallic nature mentioned.
At 4-5°K, using liquid He seems a bit silly. With its high thermal conductivity, unique (strange) characteristics and cost, there are better and safer ways to get the job done.
I’ve had many situations where an exotic material would eek out a slight improvement and found the cost significantly higher ie: solder at $1,800/lb, and/or special handling required due to health and safety concerns.
Making the F9 a reliable vehicle instead of constantly trying to get more performance out of it and using the engineering time to get the F9H to the pad makes more sense to me than what they have been doing.
Landing the first stage for reuse is interesting, but they haven’t taken it to the next step of reusing one. That’s millions of dollars spent without the follow on. I could even call it a stunt since the same type of thing has been done before (I was part of one of those teams) and the competition, Blue Origin, lofted their vehicle to space 5 times before retiring it with a 100% recovery rate.
People have to realize that Musk is not some genius inventor. What he IS is someone with lots of money who is willing to spend it on trying to make long-dreamed-of ideas come to life. He hires the people with the know-how to design and build what he wants. Assembling a large ship in orbit because it’s too big to launch in one piece in a practical manner is old news.
And landing a rocket on it’s tail? Hell, Abbott and Constello were landing rockets on their tails on Mars in 1953. Nothing new there either: http://www.flickattack.com/…
But just because one can afford to build it doesn’t mean a project idea is a good one. There are reasons these concepts were rejected long ago and other paths taken.