Comment by ocdtrekkie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ocdtrekkie | Hacker News Reader

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It's also incredibly valuable that we're developing multiple competing solutions to the problem. This means the problem will get solved, one way or the other. I recall multiple prototypes and development projects to replace the shuttle with newer spaceplanes during it's run. NASA would invest a lot of money and research into one design, and then they hit a fundamental roadblock that killed the project. And they were back to square one... the shuttle. Until they had a new idea, and started again.

Additionally, two successful strategies will be far more helpful than one. Consider that when a space shuttle exploded, it shut down the entire US space program for a lengthy span (sometimes years) while everything was reevaluated, refit, and recertified. When we shut down the shuttle program, we no longer had a viable route to space except through Russia.

If we have two viable craft from two viable contractors to get to space, we're able to rely on a persistent strategy that can weather unexpected events or problems.

Yes, but regardless of competing designs you simply can't lose the ability to control your space launched as a superpower or any space faring nation.

SpaceX can implode tomorrow, it can be sold to China, it can decide that it doesn't like Emperor Trump (shivers...) and it won't launch anything anymore for the Americans.

NASA is good at doing very big and actually pretty efficient projects when you take reliability into account.

Yes they are job projects, yes they feed contractors, but this is OK, the space program needs to be a job program this is how you reap one of the main benefits of it which is the distribution of knowledge and ideas across the industry there would be no SpaceX without NASA. If we learned anything from the Apollo days is that you can't stop making big rockets because once you do it would take you ages to regain that capability, the cost of the SLS and any follow up project after that would be worth it if nothing than to preserve knowledge, skill, and manufacturing capabilities for future generations.

And on a side note I am very skeptical of SpaceX's "interstellar rocket" yes I'm just another ahole with an opinion but they are effectively trying out the same thing that the Russians did and very unsuccessfully as the new SpaceX design is effectively the Soviet moonshot rocket.

The N1 had 30 engines, the design was deemed "ingenious" (even by the americans) the Russians could not build big engines, but they had an extremely safe, effective, and very very powerful small engine design that is still used today the NK-15/NK-33. So they put 30 of those on the first stage of the N-1 rocket and it failed badly, all 4 attempts failed for "different" reasons but all of them tied to a single thing - too many "moving parts" any problem with a single engine even a slight thrust imbalance would lead to disastrous results, and having 30 engines on a rocket that have to operate with near impossible tolerances was simply not something that was achievable then (and perhaps even today).

There wasn't anything wrong with the engines, each engine on it's own was working pretty flawlessly, and on smaller scales the issues that the N-1 encountered during launch would most likely been controllable, or at least possible to compensate for long enough for the damn thing not to explode on launch or very shortly after it (the idea of an N-1 type rocket launching anywhere near a populated area is a freaking scary one).

Now it's true that many things have changed, the Russians had to control the engines electro-mechanically, there was likely no software involved but still when you add parts to a system you increase the chances of failures.

Both Blue Origin and ULA/NASA are basing their big rockets on a small number of big engines, SpaceX wants to use 42 Raptor engines which were initially designed for an upper stage single engine usage, I'm honestly very skeptical that this system can be reliable enough to get off the ground with that many engines.

>> NASA is good at doing very big and actually pretty efficient projects when you take reliability into account.

Didn't the shuttle have around two orders of magnitude larger cost/lbs to orbit than originally promised? (Is that some form of world record, btw?) And set back space research for decades?

NASA's job programs just aren't working. No one can afford to do anything worthwhile with those launch costs.

If we delay real space colonies for a few more decades, it can mean the extinction of humanity. That is important -- job programs are not.

>Didn't the shuttle have around two orders of magnitude larger cost/lbs to orbit than promised? (Is that some form of world record, btw?) And set back space research for decades?

No, mostly because the 600 $ per lbs. figure touted quite often as the target was never actual the target, it was the based on differential payload costs when launching a crew only mission vs a crew + payload.

The shuttle had its problems but it was an important project.

>NASA's job programs just aren't working. No one can afford to do anything worthwhile with those launch costs.

Eh, show me another country/entity/organization that does as much space exploration as NASA.

>If we delay real space colonies for a few more decades, it can mean the extinction of humanity.

Nonsense, our species is 250K+ years old, all of a sudden 50 delay years would mean extinction?

All space exploration stopped, the Shuttle just cost too much to launch. Here is this criticism in a nutshell.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_Space_Shuttle...

NASA administrator Michael D. Griffin argued in a 2007 paper that the Saturn program, if continued, could have provided six manned launches per year — two of them to the moon — at the same cost as the Shuttle program, with an additional ability to loft infrastructure for further missions:

If we had done all this, we would be on Mars today, not writing about it as a subject for “the next 50 years.” We would have decades of experience operating long-duration space systems in Earth orbit, and similar decades of experience in exploring and learning to utilize the Moon.

>> No, mostly because the 600 $ per lbs. figure touted quite often as the target was never actual the target, it was the based on differential payload costs when launching a crew only mission vs a crew + payload.

Your comments re cost/lbs to orbit seems weird. Can you post a link discussing this, from the early days?

It doesn't seem supported by wikipedia. There was nothing on e.g. the introduction on the page I link above about the promised cost without crew and with crew, regarding the original sell of the program from NASA.

(Also -- there are big threats to human existence today. One example: Just a bit of lag for development of counter measures to better technology for developing biological weapons. If relatively primitive groups/countries can develop doomsday weapons, we have a real problem. It is a risk the coming 1-2 decades you can't just dismiss seriously.)

So Mars Rover's, New Horizons, Juno.... Space exploration did not stop.

>NASA administrator Michael D. Griffin argued in a 2007 paper that the Saturn program, if continued, could have provided six manned launches per year — two of them to the moon — at the same cost as the Shuttle program, with an additional ability to loft infrastructure for further missions:

No this isn't what he said, this is why I hate wikipedia they quote mined a sentence from the very last paragraph and made it look like it was saying "if we didn't had the shuttle we would've been on mars", he did not say any such thing, not even remotely.

Here is the full paper: http://aviationweek.typepad.com/space/2007/03/human_space_ex...

The Shuttle had many issues, technical, conceptual and also political/budgetary overall it was a chicken and the egg problem with which resulted in that the Shuttle did not fly enough to be economical and was not economical enough to fly ;), and after the challenger disaster the shuttle program also lost most if not all of it's DoD contracts which made things quite worse.

The challenger disaster being on the 25th launch and the "risk aversion" of the US space programme didn't work that well for the Space Shuttle, but nonetheless the Space Shuttle did flew 135 mission which is technically more than the Soyuz (it's on 131 or 132 now), it had 2 loss of crew incidents which is the same as the Soyuz. That's not to say that the Soyuz is not a great programme on it's own, yes the shuttle was expensive but at the end it wasn't nearly as bad as some people make it out to be for some reason.

And again this isn't an argument for the Shuttle, NASA did what it could with the shuttle, the Air Force wanted it, it was supposed to be the cornerstone of space Station Freedom and many other projects including Star Wars and NASA got stuck with it and yes in the later years it fought to keep it alive not because NASA was stupid but because it had no other option since there were no alternatives on the table.

So you have nothing to say about this weird claim you made about launch costs (or my other points you dismissed), which seems to be contradicted by Wikipedia:

>> No, mostly because the 600 $ per lbs. figure touted quite often as the target was never actual the target, it was the based on differential payload costs when launching a crew only mission vs a crew + payload.

[Edit: 600$/lbs is in "modern" dollars. In early 70s dollars it was ~ 110$. The real costs were somewhere between one or two orders of magnitude larger, depending on what year you select the dollar. The differential costs can only be a fraction of that.]

>> the Air Force wanted it

As far as I've read, NASA sold the Shuttle to the air force with unrealistic promises. That is why they wanted it. It isn't so?

>> No this isn't what he said

That full paper contained e.g.: the expense of owning and operating [the shuttle], or any similar system, is simply too great. Any new system, to be successful, must offer a much, much lower fixed cost of ownership.

And this was from someone that was as tied to not making NASA look bad as anyone can be!

[Edit: I really can't see that Wikipedia misrepresent Griffin's position, as you claim? Please be more specific about that claim. You really need to show quotes to dismiss wikipedia today.]

>> NASA got stuck with [the shuttle] and yes in the later years it fought to keep it alive not because NASA was stupid but because it had no other option since there were no alternatives on the table.

The Shuttle ate a large part of the NASA budget (30% at least some years), which contained lots of aviation and other programs. The shuttle was a gigantic job program -- that gave NASA, with a big weight to throw around, an incentive to kill off all competing launch systems! There was probably a reason not much happened in launch systems until the Shuttle died...

[edit: The point was, there were no other launch systems not just because the Shuttle took such a gigantic amount of the total budget but also because NASA had motivation to keep the job program going.]

[edit 2 on this: If you put your foot in a trap and can't afford the tools to get the foot out of the trap, because the trap was so expensive -- you're not "stupid"? :-) ]

And, to go back to the original subject, the Orion seems to be another cuckoo, eating up most of the food in the nest. :-(

Addendum:

When someone (at least) seems to know a lot about a subject area and have to dismiss Wikipedia without sources, it is just funny. Or sad.

The original claim was -- "NASA is good at doing very big and actually pretty efficient projects when you take reliability into account."

To support that weird statement, dogma1138 had to make multiple unsupported claims about the Space Shuttle. Like "unique" statements about the horrendous costs and that a NASA administrator is misrepresented about the Shuttle eating the budget (despite other quotes in the same document support that was his position).

Enough for me, I feel a bit dirty.

> the Space Shuttle did flew 135 mission which is technically more than the Soyuz (it's on 131 or 132 now), it had 2 loss of crew incidents which is the same as the Soyuz.

Two loss-of-crew incidents very early in the programme (the last in 1971 if I'm reading right) paints a quite different picture from the Shuttle's history.

So, whatever planet-killing doomsday weapon will wipe out every shred of humanity from Earth, but its operators will just happen to forget to point it at a completely independent, self-sufficient Mars?

I feel that building a 100% successful planet-killing doomsday weapon is far harder then establishing an independent, self-sufficient Mars colony... That will not be affected by it.

The coming decade the answer is obvious -- something biological. It can be moved with e.g. sales of consumer products into a country.

Consider a contagious plague with an incubation time of a few days put into fresh food imported into a set of countries -- it will not be stored in dusty warehouses for weeks before reaching the population.

Large states should be able to do something similar now (this might need a start up time, since the biological weapons research was closed after the cold war) and soon major terror organizations or rogue states might be able to.

Will counter measures (creating vaccines quickly, etc) be ready before alQ have similar capabilities? I have no clue. The first targets would probably include geographic areas with the universities/agencies that could do something about this type of attack anyway.

(Frankly, I'm surprised that I needed to write that. With increasing technological possibilities the power to do harm increase too. If the power to stop harm increase slower...)

Ebola is one of the deadliest viruses. Its kill rate is only about 90%. Most biological agents would be less lethal. Delivery of biological agents on the sort of scale that could threaten the human race requires at the very least missile delivery (countering missiles once they've launched is hard), and then it's dicey: there's so many pockets of low-density population, and if you decide not to target a country, that country can very easily close its borders to protect itself (cf. the Ebola epidemic).

It is much, much easier to kill off the human race using nuclear weapons. And I'm not sure that's possible.

I'd note a simple possible solution to the Fermi paradox: A physics experiment that is logical to do, will discover new physics -- with really big and unexpected results. Or something like that. It seems something kills (or hides) civilizations.

The weaponized diseases were worse than anything natural (e.g. optimized to get a really toxic immune system reaction and so on). And multiple ones could be used at the same time, with different spread mechanisms and incubation times.

But about Ebola -- I have no clue if the kill ratios can be engineered to not go down for a fast spreading disease. (And if I did, I would not be able to talk about it, of course.)

Those militarized diseases are easily enough for an economical (/civilization) collapse, that would take the world at least generations to recover from. Which is bad enough, but is no extinction of course.

I don't know if nuclear weapons are on the table again, despite that they are spoken about in Russia -- it is probably just psychological warfare (maskarovka), everything new from there seems to be a smoke screen.

But how hard would it be for Iran or North Korea to build a Cobalt bomb, the doomsday machine out of Dr Strangelove?

SpaceX has data about their engines; they've flown 243 1st stage engines on fully-successful flights. By the time ITS might fly, they'll have a lot lot more experience.

Isn't it nice to have a development program that can study a large number of flights?

The ITS will use a different Engine (Raptor) that SpaceX developed for the USAF to be used as a upper-stage engine.

WRT the national security fears - because rockets are such a security-sensitive technology, the market is highly regulated. Multiple government departments have veto power over any foreign acquisition of companies involved in activities covered by ITAR, and if SpaceX decides not to cooperate with the US government it will likely find itself without launchpads, telemetry, surface-to-orbit communication, and a whole range of other services that NASA, the FAA, and the DoD provide.

> "SpaceX wants to use 42 Raptor engines which were initially designed for an upper stage single engine usage"

That's not what really happened, and anyway, Raptor is a 35% larger engine than BO's/ULA's BE-4. So by your definition, if ULA's/BO's engines are "big", then SpaceX's engine is "even bigger".

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