Comment by grondilu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by grondilu | Hacker News Reader

I've been a long time skeptic of SpaceX's goal, and I have to admit that I'm reconsidering my assessment with that successful landing. Frankly I'm amazed they eventually managed to do that.

But let's not get too carried away, ok? Because with sentences like:

> Mars, asteroids, the Oort cloud and beyond, all with technology and physics we thoroughly know today.

and:

> The SpaceX future is completely open, currently only limited by the amount of atoms in the universe.

it really seems like this is way too optimistic. I mean it's not like SpaceX has cracked interstellar travel or anything. Mentioning the Oort cloud for instance is quite weird : we barely can send un-manned spacecrafts there. And even if we could, it's such a big place that bodies there are separated by astronomical units of emptiness. What exactly would men do there?

Also, even if we can bring the cost of space-flight to something comparable to the cost of an intercontinental airplane trip, I would remain skeptical about mars colonization. The fact remains that mars is a gigantic barren waste land, with a tenuous, oxygen-less atmosphere, barely any water, frigid temperatures and continuous radiations from the sky.

Imagine the worst place on Earth where to spend your holidays. If a travel agency tells me that prices for a plane ticket to this place have dropped by 99%, I'd still would not want to go there. I wouldn't even go for free.

What's really encouraging is that Google is investing $1B in them. Musk has the tech, the team, and the track record, and now the backing. It's entirely possible he can get a Mars colony bootstrapped, if that's really the plan here.

http://www.wired.com/2015/01/google-spacex-investment

According to the article this money was more intended for the deployment of communication satellites.

$1B seems short for a mars colony anyway.

The communication satellites are meant to become a revenue source to find the Mars mission

The problem with your logic is that the current highest hurdle to any of those goals, even the Oort cloud is how much it costs to get anything into orbit. We already know how to construct things in orbit. Getting the massive equipment cheaply into orbit busts the door open to serious space travel, not launching over-sized washing machines into orbit around comets.

> current highest hurdle to any of those goals, ... is how much it costs to get anything into orbit.

This is true for micro-sats, but an awful lot of high end communications sats as well as (I'm assuming) the deep space exploration vehicles cost on the order or 10x their launch cost. Dropping the launch price isn't going to drop the total price tag by much.

Isn't that partially because these vehicles are designed under strict weight and volume constraints, so that they can be launched in one piece?

I imagine being able to cheaply put tons and tons of equipment in orbit and do the build up there would remove all those constraints and maybe allow the use of cheaper construction and technology.

I think the poster is saying if we can launch cheaply, potentially assemble in space, we might find new techniques for doing everything in the space pipeline more cheaply now that the first stage in the pipeline is less prohibitively expensive.

Not sure I agree or disagree but it's a POV.

Manufacturing those items in orbit and/or on the moon might reduce their cost. Cheap to-orbit rates lessen barriers to that sort of technology. Transporting raw materials to orbit would increase the efficiency of the to-orbit trip by increasing cargo density.

Wouldn't higher cargo density be more of a benefit if launch costs are high?

Indeed. Raw materials in space won't be of great use without in-orbit manufacturing infrastructure. Cheap to-orbit begets economically realistic in-orbit manufacturing begets need for raw materials at high densities in orbit.

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