SpaceX’s Dragon capsule successfully returns from ISS resupply mission
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
SpaceX can launch its own rockets into space, so they could conceivably launch their own crews. Certainly the 'space tourist' business from Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic have employees as 'operators' for the equipment, they just have less capable equipment.
The fact that SpaceX exists and is competing in the crew option means that "Dragon Pilot for SpaceX" can be a thing. Before now, that was just science fiction.
Although all astronauts have stellar (ha) resumes, most are not test pilots. Mission specialists come from all areas of science: the current cohort include a marine biologist, geologist, oceanographer and a ton of aero/astro engineers
Then you remember that you're also competing with Jonny Kim:
> The California native trained and operated as a Navy SEAL, completing more than 100 combat operations and earning a Silver Star and Bronze Star with Combat “V”. Afterward, he went on to complete a degree in Mathematics at the University of San Diego and a Doctorate of Medicine at Harvard Medical School.
The sky's the limit!
It's not really a cost saving measure, it's just that machines are much more capable of performing the precision maneuvers it takes to fly spacecraft under normal conditions.
Write code that autonomously pilots our vehicles in space, simulates countless flight scenarios, translates petabytes of data, performs computational fluid dynamics, and more. Hardware Engineering
Nearly every board and box that controls, communicates, actuates, or powers our avionics is built in-house employing the same iterative approach used in the commercial industries. Structures Engineering
Our goal is to have the most mass-efficient primary and secondary structures possible while exceeding all factors of safety. Propulsion Engineering
With Merlin, Draco, and Kestrel as flight-proven examples along with Super Draco and Raptor in development, you will not find a more robust engine development program in the world. Launch & Test
We have built some of the most efficient launch facilities and a test facility in Texas that exceeds one engine test per day.
just get these from spacex careers
changing career is out of the question for me.this is sad i am in my thirty plus and my life is over?
I'm doing the career I love (Enterprise software) but if I wasn't it would be hard to switch given I have bills and responsibilities.
Right now we have to haul 100% of our mass into orbit. But what if we derived that mass from sources that weren't at the bottom of a huge gravity well? If we can shift most of that mass to those sources, convert the raw materials to finished goods and start to construct habitats in space, we can move that 100% up/down to just us and a few things we can't space-derive.
Building out that manufacturing and supply line is where the future really is and it will allow us to handle component assembly on scales far outside of the reach of any space-launch system no matter how cheap. Moving a million tons of steel and composite from one point in space to another is just a matter of delta-V to get it going and to get it to stop moving. Getting it up from the ground may be an impossible endeavor.
The entire ISS weighs only 450 tons. But an Aircraft Carrier weighs 100,000+ tons. Even with a 90% launch cost reduction, it's impossible to build Carrier-sized habitats without breaking national economies.
How does this get funded? Also not sure, but I have a sense that there's enough rich people who wouldn't mind living in orbit and dropping down to any point on the planet in about an hour if their physical presence is required and getting back "home" a couple hours later. But with enough industry, a contract signing ceremony to build a factory in France could simply be shifted to an intra-orbital flight to an orbital factory for a tiny fraction of that cost and time.
There's potential efficiencies in space. And a lot of very valuable R&D waiting to happen to make it work. And I think that R&D hill is where the medium-term money is.
The 100k ton carrier is possibly not needed up there, why would we need that? Let's build 10 ISS, that's 4500 tons, putting materials up there would cost $495.000.000, a minor project budget in military speak :) With 10 ISS material you could build a nice doughnut shape station we pictured in the 70's.
Thinking for long-term space habitation requires projects that make human space presence self sustaining, at least in some sense or other. That's the point of space-based manufacturing and huge habitats; the more industrial power we have in space, the cheaper all future space missions become. At some point, they might become as cheap as terrestrial projects- then we'll have colonized space in a meaningful sense.
To put it into perspective, a 100,000 ton carrier houses around 5,000 people in tight quarters (the flight deck is just under 5 acres). and needs constant tending and provisioning for supplies. As an analogy to a space habitat they also make a kind of sense since they also have to house flying craft. There are only about a dozen carriers in the world at this size...or about a million tons.
Hollowed out asteroids with internal habitation spaces on the order of hundreds of internal cubic km would probably provide enough diversity to keep generations reasonably happy. The hollowing out process could supply raw material to space-based factories that would then build more habitat things and inter-habitat ships. Capture a couple comets and you have water, oxygen and other things. A small asteroid, something like 243 Ida has a total volume of over 25,000 km^3. Even if a couple km of shell were left, we're talking millions of tons of raw material.
Asteroids probably resemble piles of gravel -- maybe with ice mixed in -- more than chunks of stone or metal.
Update: Yes, this bugs me about The Expanse books. Spinning up Ceres to provide internal gravity ...
Spinning a rock can be done over long periods of time. In The Expanse, it was a decades-long project, that earned the Tycho Corporation some serious engineering cred.
You'd probably need expertise in boring to pull it off ;-)
What makes space expensive is the one-off nature of the launches. If you really wanted to build an aircraft carrier in space you could take advantage of economies of scale not previously available. It wouldn't break a national economy. Not the US economy, anyway.
1 - http://www.iafastro.org/elon-musk-at-iac-2017-in-adelaide/
Maybe, it acquired too many leeches feeding from it to move fast and lean since the Moon landings times?
Perhaps somebody more informed in the organizational differences between then and now care to share his opinion.
I think its biggest problem is that it's such a political animal. They can't just do things in the obvious and straightforward way. The work has to be spread around so that each congressman's district can get a piece of the pie.
Yes, that's one part - but the "real" reason is risk aversity. Basically, as long as there was the UdSSR to beat in a space race, the American public was 100% behind NASA - no matter how much (money and lives) it'd cost. When the Soviets were beat square, there was nothing worth the "risk" so everything had to be done by the books, with certifications and all that other bureaucratic nonsense.
In the future? Sure, they could, but it's kinda silly to use NASA's resources on shuttling cargo to/from low Earth orbit. That can and should be a routine thing that we offload to commercial entities, so NASA can focus on the risky, not-profitable, big-picture stuff.