The New Space Race | Hacker News Reader

The New Space Race

washingtonpost.com

93 pointsapo38 comments

This article has a bunch of problems and is fairly typical of mass-media reporting in this area.

Suborbital vehicles such as SpaceShipTwo, New Shepard, and Lynx are lumped together with orbital launch systems. I do not think the distinction is made adequately clear in the text either; it would be very easy for a layperson to be seriously misled.

Falcon 9 isn't described separately, just as a note on the Falcon Heavy. Though the Falcon Heavy has a great deal of commonality with the Falcon 9 there are substantial differences in capabilities and economics that go far beyond mere diffrent configurations of a single vehicle. This is very odd considering the outsize influence the Falcon 9 is having on the launch industry right now. Even with the Falcon Heavy flying in the near future, the Falcon 9 is capable of lifting most payloads and will continue to be the core offering from SpaceX in the near future. It's kind of important.

Dragon and Crew Dragon are lumped together. One has been delivering cargo to the ISS since 2012, the other is slated for its first launch next year. They are different vehicles with different capabilities, designed for different purposes; albeit not without considerable commonalites.

Antares has been flying since 2013, so evidently this article isn't just about designs which are in development, experimental, or have yet to reach operation. In which case, it is strange not to compare the listed rockets to Atlas V, Delta IV, Ariane 5 and Proton.

Ariane 6 certainly deserves a mention in its own right. In most respects it is comparable to Vulcan, including plans for partial reusability (in response to SpaceX) and is of enormous political importance to the EU, ESA, and France in particular.

Ugh, the article is so full of crap it hurts.

As you've said they mix suborbital toys in there Show SLS (but no price breakdown - hint - it's going to be fucking riddiculous) And it has the fucking suicidal SRB's (they dramatically increase the risk of a critical failure) that cost more to refurbish than to build new... Antares is just...

And they compare the MAX SpaceX price to MIN (theoretical!) Vulcan price

I actually don't fanboy SpaceX that much (I love what they are doing (because, HEY SPACE!) but I am somewhat ambivalent about them as an actor. Plus, I'd really want to see Skylon fly...), but one has to admit, right now SpaceX seems unstoppable.

Skylon is never going to fly. The system design doesn't close with any reasonable set of engineering assumptions. This the the kind of thing the press is horrible at reporting about because they lack any technical capability to vet wild claims like what Reaction Engines (REL) is making, and they effectively just serve as a mouthpiece for REL. Real decision-makers with budgetary authority are mislead by this kind of crap.

Even the SABRE cycle is overly complex and unlikely to ever be realized as envisioned. The real interesting piece of technology REL has is their precooler. That could potentially see multiple applications.

SpaceX is an interesting case not because of their absolute engineering prowess/awesomeness, but because their competition and preceding Government efforts have failed (or not bothered) so many times to accomplish even what SpaceX is doing. It didn't require new technology that SpaceX invented, for example, to land a first stage after launch. But SpaceX definitely deserves plaudits for their doggedness, willingness to be unconventional, and lack of fear about failing publicly along the way.

Wonder to see the analysis of REL claims. REL includes people with proven engineering record, and, AFAIK, got money from European organizations familiar with engineering, so it would be interesting to learn what's wrong with their approach.

Agree, Skylon wont fly. The engineering is real sexy but it wont get funded.

I wonder just how unbiased the Washington Post is now that Bezos owns it. The article does come off quite New-Shephard heavy.

Any bias in the article is probably about 4 levels of reporting away from Bezos. More likely that the author found various defense contractors being extremely available to chat, living in the DC area and all, and trying to get an article out on a deadline while not being an expert on the subject matter.

Bias can exert itself in subtle ways. Merely the knowledge that the big boss has a stake in this area is enough to bias reporting on it, the big boss doesn't have to get involved personally or even have the slightest potential of doing so.

I did notice that Blue Origin was the only company that got a paragraph explaining their logo...

To be fair to the layperson in the case of SpaceX they're not making it any better. It's called the "Falcon Heavy" now, but it used to officially be "Falcon 9 Heavy". If they didn't want it to be confused with a minor reconfiguration of the "Falcon 9" they couldn't have done worse.

Ditto with "Dragon" and "Crew Dragon".

NASA is listed as one of the competitors, but really, NASA is also driving a great deal of this innovation through contracting rocket use (for ISS refueling, etc.) to private companies. They are creating the market.

A real question is: what is a viable business model that will necessitate these rockets? Aside from space tourism and placing satellites, what successful business ventures might exist at lower $/orbit capabilities? Even free access to orbit might not result in ancillary profitable businesses.

It's more useful to look at the current work being done as R&D for longer term missions to Mars, settlement of space, and asteroid capture/mining.

There's significant value to be gained in putting things in space, but these are fundamentally long term plays.

Someone is always talking about high-speed transport. Either rich people who really need to do london-new york in under an hour, or packages that for whatever reasons cannot wait for the Fedex truck.

If SpaceX really can cut costs by 99+% (imho they cannot) then rapid delivery of people/packages might be viable.

Asteroid mining. New startups like Planetary Resources and Deep Space Ventures will want to send satellites and vehicles into orbit or deep space for exploratory research.

It is super unclear that even if you had extremely cheap access to orbit, you could make asteroid mining pay off.

If cost to orbit was cheap enough, people might be interested in orbital solar power.

Asteroid mining will pay off better if launch costs stay high. Anything produced in space has a huge cost advantage over something launched from the ground at a cost of thousands of dollars per kilogram. A kilogram of water or iron is literally worth more that its weight in gold once its in space.

Okay, so there's a couple of dynamics that work differently here.

There's asteroid mining to source materials for other stuff in space and then there's asteroid mining to source materials for the ground. If cost to orbit is low, then it becomes less worthwhile to source stuff in space for space stuff, because you could just source it from the ground for relatively cheaper.

But if cost to orbit is low, it's also lower cost to actually set up an asteroid mining facility and perhaps more plausible that you might economically take stuff from asteroids down to the ground (though huge barriers remain, even for quite low costs to orbit).

Also, if cost to orbit is lower, there is more plausibly other stuff actually happening in orbit that might make sense to consume space materials. Right now, the value of "a kilogram of iron" in space is essentially zero, because what you need is not raw iron but some kind of tool, and there's no way to turn raw iron into a tool in space. Water and other volatiles have some minor use, but as long as the number of people in space is, like, six, it's not that big a deal to get them water from Earth. If you had more stuff going on in space, there'd be more reason to try to get low-cost materials in space.

NASA also owns the SLS rocket. Granted they are not building it themselves, but it's 100% theirs.

So in other words they would be competing with Falcon Heavy or the future MCT from SpaceX among others.

Nobody here is mentioning ISRO. ISRO might not have the most advanced technology, true, but their cost effectiveness compensates for that.

They're also catching up very quickly.

This. Thank you for pointing this out.

Then upvote

Begging for Internet points... shame....

No, partycoder is educating is educating varadg on the correct site etiquette; the 'upvote' button should be used in place of 'I agree!' or 'This!' type comments.

Doubtful

This article focuses on US companies or agencies that are involved with the Space Race.

But I do get your point and agree out of the non-US, India is in excellent position to be a competitor.

I had no idea that Blue Origin vertically landed their rocket (New Shepard) on 2015-11-23, before SpaceX did on 2015-12-21. In addition, New Shepard rockets have already been reused.

On the other hand, New Shepard is suborbital, even though it's reached the altitude of 100km.

I mean, technically spacex vertically landed a rocket in 2014 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwwS4YOTbbw

If you're willing to count a 40 meter hop, then 2012: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4PEXLODw9c

C'mon, this has been done before by both private and government funded projects

DC-X 1991: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzXcTFfV3Ls

Compared to an orbital launch, Blue Origin's flight so far are more like a tech demo. But they're one heck of a tech demo!

It's a smart strategy. Take the shortest, cheapest possible route to profitability by selling flights to space tourists, all the while building experience with operating and maintaining a reusable rocket. Then build on that expertise to develop a reusable orbital launch system. I think they're by far the most interesting of SpaceX's competitors.

Yeah... For some reason everyone who is interested in this stuff is SpaceX fanboy and when Blue Origin released their success after SpaceX's failure(s) everyone just seemed to be little them. Then SpaceX did theirs and everyone went nuts over it.

They're not comparable. Blue Origin's work is commendable, but landing a sub-orbital rocket, even re-using one, is not on the same scale as what SpaceX has done, the engineering is just on a different level. The X-15 program was landing sub-orbital vehicles, and re-using them, that had gone above 100km decades ago. The difference between Blue Origin's efforts and the X-15 is primarily the landing.

In addition to the enormous difference in difficulty, there's a correspondingly enormous difference in utility. Suborbital is good for some light tourism and brief science experiments, but not a whole lot. Orbital is extremely useful for things like communications satellites, to the point that a lot of people will willingly pay hundreds of millions of dollars just to put something up.

Blue Origin's vehicle is basically a fancy toy, while SpaceX is opening up space.

Of course, Blue Origin is working on opening up space too, they just haven't got there yet. Once they start putting things into orbit, I'll be tremendously excited for them too.

I was gearing up to try to explain how substantial the difference between what Blue Origin and SpaceX have achieved is, but luckily I found that Randall Munroe has already explained it quite well[0].

Long story short -- a vertical takeoff and landing, reaching 100km with zero velocity, is a vastly simpler (and lower energy) problem than what the Falcon 9 is doing.

[0]: https://what-if.xkcd.com/58/

Aren't the Ariane rockets produced commercially since the 80s?

Also what about Russian commercial launches?

One metric I'd be interested in, if it could be objectively measured, is rate of technical progress in private vs. government efforts, and, total $ spent by both enterprises.

Intuitively, I would say it is much faster in private industry, however, it is also more dispersed and not coordinated.

It's a bit more complicated than that. NASA didn't build the moon rocket or the shuttle, they use a huge number of private contractors so much of the technical progress is pretty intertwined between public and private sectors.

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