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Airbus to build 'first interplanetary cargo ship'

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199 pointspseudolus213 comments

> "This is not just twice as difficult as any typical Mars mission; it's twice squared"

So, four times as difficult?

it was a test .. you're hired

Or maybe (2n)2 as difficult?

Fun fact I realised only recently: 2 ∘ 2 = 4 for any operator ∘ in the Ackermann sequence other than the zeroth (successor) operator.

2+2 = 2×2 = 2² = … = 4

At least, unless I messed up my proof. My highest qualification is two A-levels in maths and half of brilliant.org…

https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2020/07/27/hᵤ2-2-4-for...

Tangential to the topic of this post, but how have you found brilliant? I’ve been considering it but don’t know if it’s worth adding another subscription to my monthly spend when I could presumably get a lot of the same knowledge from YouTube (albeit in a less structured way). Any thoughts?

Plus:

Brilliant’s computer science courses cover slightly more than my actual software engineering degree from Aberystwyth university, and their maths courses cover more than I did at A-level.

The various introductions to matrices (in different contexts each time), are better than the introduction I had in my A-levels (with a good teacher!), and I would say they are of comparable goodness to 3blue1brown. Only, all of it is that good.

If you get stuck because a topic assumes knowledge you don’t yet have, they have a course to teach you what you need to learn.

I can’t comment on the levels of Brilliant’s physics, chemistry, or biology as I have only GCSEs in those subjects — but I can say they’re well-described and engaging.

Negatives:

Limited practice materials, e.g. I still suck at probability because I’m not groking the broader implications of their simpler lessons.

Thanks for replying! Sounds like I should try it out. My maths could use a refresher and I could use an engaging way to learn it. Much appreciated.

This is neat. I was taking a Trigonometry course online. Was great at first but I kept running it references to “as we learned in Algebra or Geometry” Well dang it, I aced trigonometry in college, but apparently I have completely forgotten some basic building blocks. So I need to start back at basic algebra and work my way up to find the missing gaps.

I figured this out when I discovered hyperoperators and spent a good day or so telling everyone "two and two are always four!"

>> So, four times as difficult?

Or, by "twice squared" they mean to say "It has been squared ... twice". That would be 16x, which is probably more in line with the total deltaV requirements.

Did you just linearize squaring?

"not just twice ...; it's twice squared"

So "twice"(2) and "twice squared" (x^2^2) = 2^2^2 = 16

Where are you getting the third two to put in for x? Your number would be phrased as "twice squared twice."

English is a strange language. "Twice squared" could be interpreted both as "Twice as hard, squared" or "Twice as hard, squared two times."

Think of the sentence, "A man, twice fooled, shall not be fooled again."

If x is the difficulty, the phrase either means “twice the difficulty, squared”: (2x)^2 or 4x^2.

Or “the difficulty squared and squared again”: (x^2)^2 or x^4.

The GP is asking why x == 2 in the second example rather than just “the difficulty”. English interpretation doesn’t explain that.

Read "not just twice" as "not only twice".

Then you can read "it's twice squared" as (the first use of twice) + ("twice squared")

The 'it' reference can change. The first 'it' is referencing the difficulty. The second 'it' is referencing the first 'twice', creating the option that 'it' is further "twice squared". Not the most elegant interpretation but a possible interpretation.

Learning to avoiding this vague language is why math majors should still take the occasional poetry class.

Or (twice as difficult)^2 which is 4x for difficulty 1, but in general 4(prior difficulty squared)x as difficult.

Well, if the original difficulty is 1, and we square it twice, that is 1^2^2, which ... is still 1.

Even in the most obnoxiously nerdy interpretation, it would be (2*n)^2, not 2^2.

I see the urge to avid the tired cliche of "exponential", but being creative has risks.

twice = (* 2) squared = (^ 2)

twice . squared = (* 2) . (^ 2)

(difficult * 2)^2

Mmm, easier than I thought so.

Pretty sure it's just a metaphor, and not literal rocket surgery.

Squared twice?

  x -> x^2^2 = x^4

Doubled and squared?

  x -> (2x)^2 = 4x^2

Difficulty factor of 2 is squared?

  x -> (2^2)x = 4x

Or was that squared twice?

  x -> (2^2^2)x = 16x

All of these functions agree at x = 0, so can we conclude that it's gonna be way easy??

Lesson: don't handwave your math when you're talking to lay journalists, because nerds are gonna read it and be horrified.

> compile error: figure of speech is not a number

Question for the experts: what are the tests and analysis that we cannot do via a rover-based lab and hence need to send the samples to Earth? Asking out of curiosity (pun not intended!).

Not an expert, but the test chambers on a rover can't be cleaned easily or without a massive amount of complexity. They are also fairly limited and very limited use. While a sample collected and sent back can be split and used in many ways.

I am no expert, but I can imagine there are many kinds of laboratory equipment that is way too heavy to pit on a rover, perhaps mass spectrometers, etc.

Biological wxperiments is a big one. There is kind of outstanding question of perclorates in martian soil and its toxicity to earth organisms, plants, etc.

The mars rover does have a spectrometer. It's called ChemCam [1], it uses a laser to vaporize a small amount of matter and them captures the spectrographs of the resulting plasma with a camera. That doesn't take away from your point, but it is a cool piece of equipment.

[1] https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/spacecraft/instruments/chemcam/

Simple answer from a space nerd: Rovers are small, light, and have very little energy. So what we can't do is anything that requires a large or heavy device or anything that requires significant energy. They break/fail. They take forever to make happen.

Want to burn 20kg of soil to see if there's any trace of specific elements? You'll need a furnace. Those are both heavy and high-energy. You could do a smaller scale test on a rover of 2g perhaps, but what if the traces are very, very small? Plus, whatever analysis tools you would use now have to also be extremely small and light, which means less capabilities.

Also, rovers have limited size: we can only do a small number of tests per rover because the rover's utility belt of tools is only so large. If your experiment is really easy to do but it's not a high enough priority, it won't happen.

Lastly, rovers die. You might spend 5 years building a tool, 2 years sending it on the next rover to Mars, only to have it crash or die before it's time to run your experiment.

But if we sent 300kg of soil back from Mars, we could do every test we can think of, carefully, with the best tools humanity can make and as much energy as we need.

Edit: +1 to what Something1234 said too! You can't clean out apparatuses easily after an experiment!

I think the GP wanted to know what the actual tests an analyses are.

> Anything that requires significant energy

So instead of sending a rover with 4x or 10x energy, the answer is a mission that requires enough energy to launch the samples all the way back to Earth? This makes me smile.

I do agree though. We can expend 1000x the energy of the return trip once the samples are back on earth. And we also have the luxury of unlimited time to invent new tests and new tech to apply to whatever is left of the samples.

"So instead of sending a rover with 4x or 10x energy"

The rocket equation is a real jerk. You're likely thinking "that sounds linearly harder" when you should be thinking it's exponentially harder.

At that point, adding weight to the rover or to the return system is an equivalent cost.

No, rover is easier; return system has to fly all of its mass back to Earth, rover never leaves Mars.

In which case you might be asking what the advantage of a return system is in the first place, the answer being for much the same reason that we have "stages" of rockets. The return system gets a fresh exponential curve to work with. If you tried to ship both at once it would be a nightmare. Plus there are all the advantages of shipping things back, regardless of what the rocket equation says. Science via a rover is great but it just can't match numerous full laboratories with humans in them.

The part that disappoints me a bit is that I still don't see us launching fuel into space for space refueling very often. Rocket equation bites no matter what you do, but launching a Falcon fuel of nothing but fuel (to the extent possible) shrinks the solar system a lot. It's still pretty big after that, but it's a different place, even with conventional chemical rockets. I hope we'll see it soon. I'm not sure it'll be quite as simple as "SpaceX will have a Mars Starship there before the mission can get there", but there is a real prospect of making it so space missions takes weeks instead of years if we can get space refueling figured out. A lot of other things come into reach as well, like satellite reclamation.

These are all reasons why sending humans is so important. They will explore more of Mars in a week than rivers have in 50 years. They will arrive with a testing lab and do all sorts of tests immediately.

If Starship meets its performance targets, it’s first missions will bring hundreds of scientists to a Mars, with thousands of tons of equipment and supplies. In-orbit and in-situ refueling are game changing technologies that will literally reduce the cost of deep space manned missions by a thousandfold.

Space technology actually does drive technology miniaturisation!

Better question: What will we learn that we cannot learn from all the Martian rocks we already have on earth.

There have been plenty or Martian meteors found in Antarctica, and no doubt many more if we redoubled our efforts to find them. Many once claimed to have found evidence of life in these rocks already. Some of us are even old enough to remember President Clinton's speech on the subject. (That isn't a deepfake video. The US president really did talk about the discovery of life on mars.)

> Better question: What will we learn that we cannot learn from all the Martian rocks we already have on earth.

These particular samples will be from the present-day surface, with known geographic (aerographic?) origin, not affected by potentially millions of years of interplanetary travel, and not contaminated by sitting around on Earth for who knows how long.

That would be true if we were looking for life currently alive on mars, but this is a search for fossil life, life that once existed but died off perhaps a billion years ago. Fossils would survive a million-year trip just fine.

There has only been one serious attempt to detect current life, the labeled release experiment on the Viking lander. It came back positive. If we are seriously interested in detecting current life we don't need a sample return. Any rover can dump some rock into a nutrient bath and put the results under a microscope. If anything is growing/moving, life is detected. Viking didn't have the bandwidth for such things. Lets do that a couple times first.

> That would be true if we were looking for life currently alive on mars

I mean, why not?

> Fossils would survive a million-year trip just fine.

Sure, but getting to pick where we take the rocks from helps us maximize the possibility of fossils in the sample. The rovers have found rocks with evidence of water - being able to pick those instead of a random chunk (which might've been blasted from deep bedrock) found in Antarctica has its appeal.

> There has only been one serious attempt to detect current life, the labeled release experiment on the Viking lander. It came back positive.

This seems like a good argument for sample return.

I love how they borrowed and repurposed that speech in Contact.

There is a big, big difference between, "we found a rock on earth that is probably from Mars that was blasted here some time in the past," and, "we went to a specific area of Mars and got a rock and brought it back." Not least of which is the intrinsic value and aspirational nature of us actually fetching things from other planets ourselves, with intent and purpose, rather than luckily stumbling upon some.

Great, get me some samples from the bottom of Valles Marineris, preferably from the dry river beds.

Looking at a rock with our own eyes, and feeling it with our own senses can provide context and meaning that a robot might have trouble conveying.

Having humans on Mars means we can find the best sample rocks in a tiny fraction of the time, and test them right there.

Can't we just shoot a orbital space laser at mars then from mars orbit? If we're already sending a very heavy craft that way... should be able to do spectral analysis from space.

Excellent question. Obviously there are lots of things they couldn't afford to get into a lander. Question is what could they have put into a lander, for much less than $billions, that they still haven't?

Like, a microscope?

> The joint American-European project is expected to cost billions and take just over a decade to implement.

I'm 99% sure that if SpaceX's starship takes off, it will fly to Mars and back within a few years.

But still, competition is good.

I don't think even Musk, master of the dubious marketing promise, has claimed that; the first ones would be one-way jobs AIUI.

Correct, only the crew mission would return, the rest would be several one-way cargo missions

Pretty sure Musk said the crew mission would not return

Nope. The whole point of developing the Raptor Engine was (A) to be able to reuse it and (B) to refuel on mars (using the Sabatier reaction with atmospheric CO2) for a return mission.

I believe those people would have accumulated enormous radiation dosages over the duration of the flight, they might not have a long life left and a return voyage would shorten that even more. Might as well stay put for the remaining time on Earth, err, Mars, stay in deep lava tubes and help build that colony.

> those people would have accumulated enormous radiation dosages over the duration of the flight

What is this based on? One of the chief contributors to the mass of a Mars voyage is shielding.

You can't really shield against galactic cosmic rays (too high energy, would require far too much mass), which make up approximately 95% of the dose.

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/340/6136/1080.abstrac...

*Edit - but the comment higher up isn't right either, that most Mars-bound astronauts will have decreased lives. The paper linked above estimates 3% of astronauts to die from cancer caused by the trip (assuming no exposure on the surface of Mars, meaning they're in the ground).

And if the worst thing that happens to early Mars astronauts is "a 3% increase in the chance of dying from cancer someday", they will ecstatic. The list of more pressing risks is long.

NASA studies indicate a two year round trip to Mars (with roughly a year of surface time) would increase cancer rates by only 4%.

He did not. This is a common myth with Mars missions that was started by a company called Mars One. This company was the first to announce a mission to Mars, but they never had a single piece of flight hardware, and only had fancy 3d animations. They did however have a lot of 'applications' for becoming an astronaut while the applicants had to pay money to apply. While I'm sure the founders of Mars One had good intentions, it resulted in eventually being a scam.

This unfortunately resulted in people thinking Mars is a 'one way' mission. Elon Musk has repeated that to make live on Mars sustainable, you need roundtrips. You can't keep making new rockets, eventually you need them back. Otherwise it would become too expensive.

Info here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_One

From Dr. Zubrin's Reddit AMA:

> for Mars Ascent and Earth return, SpaceX should develop a mini Starship, sized to be an upper stage of an F9. This would create a fully reusable medium lift booster, and reduce Mars propellant making requirements by a factor of 5. A Starsip could lift one of these to LEO fully fueled, after which it could fly to Mars, and return. any full sized Starships that land on Mars should stay on Mars. SpaceX will make plenty of Starships, it won't need any back that go to Mars. A Starship on Mars is much more valuable than one on Earth.

https://old.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/hgy64k/ask_me_anyth...

Which seems to make sense, but I don't think SpaceX wants to develop another vehicle. That's extremely expensive. The goal of Starship is to do both, and it can do both.

It also gets debunked by replies. This will never happen.

I don't think you can call him Musk "master of the dubious marketing promise" anymore now that Tesla is meeting production goals, SpaceX is landing boosters, re-supplying the ISS, and has brought astronauts to the ISS.

His promises are far more reliable than most at this point.

As long as you don't ask him about Neuralink (-:

I don't see any problems with that since he isn't using public funds or selling anything:

"By July 2019, it had received $158 million in funding (of which $100 million was from Musk)"

(from Wikipedia)

I was responding to the enormity of his claims, not the question of ethics.

Yeah, you definitely can.

1) Tesla driving fully autonomously from LA to NY by the end of 2017 [1][and many others]

2) Tesla producing 10,000 cars per week by the end of 2018 [2][3]

3) "Funding secured" [4]

4) All Teslas produced after Oct 2016 have all the hardware necessary for full self driving [5]. This was apparently before Tesla realized they needed/wanted to design a custom ASIC for full self driving.

Many more.

[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-two-years-car-20285...

[2] https://www.thestreet.com/investing/stocks/tesla-ceo-musk-th...

[3] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1117526382563643392

[4] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1026872652290379776

[5] https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-tesla-cars-being-produced-now...

Like the comments earlier mentioned - he got electric cars to the consumer market, in bulk, in less than 10 years. That alone brings a ton of respect.

Now, if I were an investor, I would be inclined to agree with you.

I do see that I am "moving goalposts" and should have specified what I meant in my initial post.

1) It's again that time of the year... although this time he merely promised FSD to be feature complete by the end of the year. I think same will happen 2021, 2022, etc.

2) That they did achieve pretty much that, just a bit late.

3) Head scratcher, but some speculation it was to fend off a hostile takeover attempt. A bit fishy indeed.

4) They do replace all HW 2 & 2.5 computers for free, if the owner got FSD package.

2) Pretty sure Tesla is still not producing 10k cars per week. Their Q2 2020 update shows max quarterly production was ~105k in Q42019, which is ~8k per week. I can't find anything suggesting they have ever peaked over 10k per week.

4) Replacing old hardware is obviously not the same as shipping all the necessary hardware in 2016.

All were done on time, in Mars years, the calendar of his home planet.

> now that Tesla is meeting production goals

Where's the magic cross-country self-driving car that was meant to show up in 2016? And just how 'self driving ready' are those Model 3s?

> SpaceX is landing boosters

A mere decade or so after promised.

I think both of these are examples of dubious marketing promises, though the Tesla one is more egregious (the SpaceX one is merely extremely late). But either way, I wouldn't depend on any of their timelines going forward.

Where are my flying cars? Where is my fusion reactor?

Neither were promised to you by Airbus under a specific contract.

I mean, if you're saying that Musk's claims are less extravagant than those of newspaper columnists playing at futurology, then, yes, that's true. But it's the lowest of low bars.

A lot of us knew the self-driving car industry was bullshit. Tesla wasn't piling it any higher or deeper than everyone else. Within this iteration of the discipline, there was something approaching consensus (ie all of the loudest voices agree with each other). Outside of that bubble, some of the rest of us had very strong convictions that they were nucking futs.

Some of us know, as sure as we know the sun will rise tomorrow, that AI and fusion are going to arrive within five years of each other. Which is to say, "don't make any life plans around either".

But you have to be a scholar or of a certain age to have a grasp of 1) how many times and with how little evidence we've been promised both and 2) the painfully vivid ways in which this series of events has resembled Charlie Brown and that football. She's lying to you Charlie. She is always lying to you.

I don't think learning a problem is harder than you thought and then still solving it is a detriment. If anything this community should be the ones that understand that the full scope of a problem often becomes apparent once you're 80% into it.

How many startups are "guaranteed to revolutionize the world in 2 years", take 4 years to get a minimum viable product, and are gone in 6?

You solve the problem, you get my credit. Fully self driving cars though I think should have been more obvious that it wasn't going to happen anytime soon.. not just to Musk but to everyone working on it. It'll get there eventually too, but it's still early days.

> Fully self driving cars though I think should have been more obvious that it wasn't going to happen anytime soon.. not just to Musk but to everyone working on it

Well, yes, this is my point. He _must_ have known that his cross-country no-driver car wasn't practical when he was promoting it. If he didn't know himself, any expert in the field would tell him, and presumably did.

He never promised to land boosters in 2007, the Falcon 9 hadnt even flown yet. In fact their original reusability plans were based around parachute recovery.

https://elonmusk.today

That's some deliberate misreading.

"people who get brain surgery from him" - the tweet doesn't say from him.

"since Elon Musk told Jay Clayton of the SEC to" - he didn't say it to Jay Clayton.

"since Elon Musk promised to get rid of most possessions" - he didn't promise anything.

"since Elon Musk promised to produce ventilators at the SpaceX factory" - saying SpaceX is 'working on venitilators' is not any such promise.

"Elon Musk assured parents that" - there is no context about "assuring parents", he was justifying a previous prediction.

"since Elon Musk advised consumers that Teslas can safely function as a boat for short periods of time" - the Tweet doesn't say "safely" it came with a video on escaping a sinking car by rolling down the window, and he's saying the electronics are water-sealed and it won't lose power to a blocked air intake (like an ICE vehicle).

"since Elon Musk offered a chance to fly to Mars and work off the price of the ticket with a Mars job" - nope, since Elon Musk said "the goal needs to be such that anyone can go, with loans available" in the context of "how will people be chosen to go to Mars".

What an awful website. As if there isn't enough real strange stuff he's said without making shit up and then linking directly to the Tweets which don't say what it claims they say.

I'm pretty sure you can do that more now than ever, after courts in more and more countries are shutting down their "Autopilot" marketing.

Currently listening to the biography on Musk, he jokingly accepts that his timelines are all off, but he doesn't feel too bad about it because he eventually hits the goals. When asked about comments that a timeline for an electric car took a couple years longer than he had predicted (like a 1 year prediction, and it took 3.5 years, or something like that) he said roughly "Oh yeah, that's crazy. But I didn't know that yet, I'd never done this. We got it done eventually, but that's an unrealistic timeline".

He says he makes timelines based off what he knows, and as he gets more data, he gets more realistic with the timelines. I agree he is getting better with the timelines. And he generally builds everything he talks about eventually.

You can try doing the same thing in your job and see how that will end. The mere fact that he doesn't just get away with it, but also gets funding every singel time, and has a huge cult following, makes all of my BS whistle ring.

Maybe the trick is to be your own boss, risk your own personal wealth, and not try “getting away” with stuff at your job.

Which I am now. In which case you have to get away with missed deadlines with your customers, banks and, if there are any investors. Good luck with that.

>I'm 99% sure that if SpaceX's starship takes off, it will fly to Mars and back within a few years.

Define "a few years" and I'll bet you it won't, with whatever odds you want.

2031 is when the Sample Return Mission is supposed to return the samples back to Earth. Keep in mind slips happen in ALL sorts of space projects, not just SpaceX. I’ll take your bet.

I want 2:1 odds:

SpaceX returns a vehicle from Mars by the end of 2035 (UTC), and before the NASA-ESA sample return mission has returned its samples. I’ll buy you a beer/beverage (value not to exceed $10) if you win, and you’ll buy me 2 beers/beverages (value not to exceed $20 total) if I win.

Is that something returning from Mars _orbit_, or returning samples from the surface?

A SpaceX vehicle returning from the surface of Mars.

You're saying the vehicle will bring all the fuel needed for a return flight to Earth down to the surface of Mars and then back up again? Do you have a link with a description of how they're going to do this?

No. It will make the fuel from Martian resources like water ice and the CO2 atmosphere. Using solar power. First to split the water to oxygen and hydrogen using electrolysis, then use the hydrogen with CO2 to make methane (& some water which is cycled back to the electrolysis step) using the Sabatier reaction. This is done on the International space Station today, by the way. The methane on ISS is simply vented (as the point on ISS is to recover the oxygen from the CO2, which is most of CO2’s mass). It takes a lot of energy, so there will need to be very large solar arrays on Mars, but it’s possible.

This page describes the process: https://medium.com/spaceinmylifetime/how-spacex-will-refuel-...

Call me overly cynical, but I don't see Musk getting this done in time to be back in 2031 and win the race.

Well, he’s competing against a gov entity, so his schedule slips are going to be much less than theirs.

Exactly. Returning from orbit is "easy", you just go into a free-return trajectory and don't even do much of a burn at Mars, if any at all.

Getting a sample from the surface basically means you need to do a deceleration burn to get into orbit, and then the reverse after grabbing the sample (which itself must be accelerated to orbital speed). No small thing.

SpaceX isn’t planning to enter orbit around Mars but instead do direct entry.

How do you retrieve a surface sample on a direct-entry mission?

You land on Mars. Refuel. And launch again direct to Earth.

A free-return trajectory doesn't enter orbit around a body, indeed its appeal is that if your propulsion fails while on such a course, you'll coast home "for free" rather than enter orbit around your target or drift into deep space.

Entering orbit almost always requires an orbital insertion burn, and in the case of an Earth-Mars Hohmann transfer definitely does.

Your point stands though: returning from a fly-by (including a free-return) requires much less fuel than returning from orbit, and even that's much easier than returning from the surface.

For fun, take a look at rotovators (AKA "momentum exchange tethers") that could make orbital capture/departure—and even landing/launch—"free" on bodies with minimal atmosphere.

Correct, I misspoke: My first use of "orbit", I should have said "the area up around the planet, not down on the surface.

The difference in difficulty (mainly, fuel requirements) between a flyby and an orbit is a crucial distinction often overlooked.

Maybe put it on http://longbets.org

Why not https://www.reddit.com/r/HighStakesSpaceX/

Don't know about the person you replied to, but none of the dates you mention qualify as what I would call "a few years."

Well, I'm not sure 15 years qualifies as "a few years", but the price is right, so you're on I guess!

Okay! Let’s put it in here, with a bunch of other SpaceX-related beer bets. If you make an account there, I’ll be able to message you. The site is pretty old and more active than ever, so it’ll probably still be around by the time this has been decided: https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=35196.0

I think 10 (+/- 2) years is a fair estimate but I would start counting from when Starship reaches orbit. It would be close enough to their historical development timeline of the Falcon which went from Falcon 1 reaching orbit in 2008 to a crewed Falcon 9 mission to the ISS in 2020, with a propulsive landing of the first stage to boot. I would expect a number of missions within that timeframe that could possibly satisfy the condition of "fly to Mars and back" but I think they will be able to do a full surface of Earth to surface of Mars and back to surface of Earth crewed mission at the end of that period. Call me an optimist but I'm pretty sure that's what they're aiming for.

> is expected to cost billions

I'm annoyed by this innumerical journalistic habit where imprecise large numbers are only given as "millions", "billions" or "trillions".

A decade long development for a never before attempted interstellar cargo ship... I'm sure that "billions" is as precise as anyone can be about the cost right now.

I agree about general journalistic innumeracy, but in this case it may well be the best estimate available. It's no different from the order of magnitude estimates highly numerate people make for good reason all the time.

> I'm 99% sure that if SpaceX's starship takes off, it will fly to Mars and back within a few years.

I'm 99% sure that's wrong.

SpaceX Starship is planned for 2024, and with a cargo capacity in the hundreds of tons. Even if it gets delayed by four or five years it will be able to bring back samples before this is is even launched. NASA’s plans seem very slow in comparison.

NASA funds SpaceX though.

For big projects, a sound tactic is to spend a small portion on a cheap alternative implementation. Sometimes the smaller team will be far more successful. Better focus, a competitive drive to prove worth, etc.

Unlimited budget is sometimes a hindrance.

Not as much as you think: ~32% Source: https://www.spacexstats.xyz/#payloads-customers

Marketing materials aren't plans.

Musk has made a strategy of "overpromise, maybe deliver", rebranded as "vision" or "ambitious goals". Some of what his companies have delivered is impressive, but you never know what they're going to actually deliver until there are at least working prototypes.

Yeah, but that’s true for all space companies. The surprising thing about SpaceX is that SpaceX delivers more than other corporations which promise less than SpaceX promises.

You agree with what I said, but the sentiment with which I said it wasn't positive enough, so now you've gotta jump in to defend SpaceX?

That marketing scheme sure does work.

It's no surprise that the best-funded company produces the best results, but it would be interesting to find out if a more honest company could produce better results with equal funding.

No, I’m saying everyone else is more guilty of the same sins.

Generally with more money behind them, too.

> No, I’m saying everyone else is more guilty of the same sins.

Given the sin in question is "lying", I'm pretty sure that's just not true. Can you give another example of a space corporation with such a consistent strategy of very publicly overpromising to win contracts and investment?

> Generally with more money behind them, too.

I'm not sure who you're referring to. NASA might have more funding, but if you subtract what they turn over to SpaceX I'm not sure that counts. Other aerospace companies have other obligations in the aero part of aerospace, so funds devoted to those obligations are not particularly relevant either.

> Can you give another example of a space corporation with such a consistent strategy of very publicly overpromising to win contracts and investment?

All of them? We call them cost-plus contracts, and they're very common in space/military projects. Bid crazily low, because the bid doesn't matter!

For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope

They only got large funding from NASA after building fully production-ready rockets and demonstrating they could deliver. It took around $100m of private investment to get the first Falcon generation flying.

Yes, that's the "and investment" part of what I said.

ESA and NASA are the only entities which have much recent operational experience of advanced use of ion drives; they've both launched and operated multiple ion drive propelled probes. And Airbus is the only manufacturer to have made _multiple_ ion drive propelled vehicles.

Some commercial satellite companies, including SpaceX, use ion drives for station keeping, but this has been around for about 50 years.

Currently, Airbus is probably in about as good a position to build something like this as anyone. They certainly have far more experience than SpaceX.

Can you go into more depth with this? Because I don’t understand why you consider the experience with satellite station keeping to be unimportant.

What’s importantly different about the more recent ion drives?

Since the 1970s, some satellites (particularly Soviet satellites) have had some form of electric thruster for stationkeeping; these fire as needed, but spend most of their time off. This has become more common since the 90s.

A small number of probes have used ion thrusters for propulsion. These fire continuously for long periods (months). This is fairly new (late 90s on), and no-one has much experience with it, but NASA and ESA have had a few each.

Thanks; I would never have guessed that distinction was important. :)

You don't need to wonder. Boeing has received much more funding for Starliner than SpaceX has for crewed Dragon.

Boeing has liabilities which a new company doesn't.

Even if we consider the two funding amounts equal for the sake of comparison (which is a real stretch), crewed Dragon has already delivered while the recent Starliner test flight was riddled with defects.

Being as optimistic as I can without being an idiot: it’s abundantly clear that they are still farting around with welding techniques, but in a complex project of this scale, somebody is always running behind schedule, and if it’s something new, then lots of people are (I worked on support software for the 787, and even among our cohort, my division was the only one that was only slightly behind schedule) and sometimes it’s enough for those people to be sort of scaffolding for everyone else.

If Conway’s Law has any flex in it, you bend the mandate of each group to shift some of their responsibilities to teams that are getting better results and eventually something ships. I suspect this is how they get anything done. It might even be their organizing principle, a sort of self organizing system.

The same might be true for SpaceX, I couldn’t say. What we do know is that they just accepted delivery of welding robots, and I don’t know if that was Plan A all along or they’ve given up on training people to consistently make a clean bead that’s 53 ft long.

I don't get that logic. So what if they have liabilities?

They also had experiance, proprietary knowledge, tested supply chains, tooling etc. etc.

I think the problem is that everyone is buying into the Musk==SpaceX story, which I think is wrong. He is a marketing gimmick that secures funding and cheap labor (through hype) and maybe some clients.

If you ask me, from what I've seen the actual person responsible for SpaceX is it's president/COO: Gwynne Shotwell.

"Idiot boss/genius lieutenant" pairs don't work in real life. The idiot boss will always get fooled by politickers and before long the genius lieutenant will be replaced by an upwardly charismatic lieutenant. There's no way to conquer the principal agent problem without enough domain knowledge to understand what the agent is doing, even if the domain knowledge is never used to do anything but understand what the agent is doing.

Just because the straight man is a genius doesn't mean the partner is an idiot. Can you say who was more brilliant between Abbott and Costello? They each had different roles. Which Smothers Brother was the brains of the outfit? Why not both?

Well, those are both examples from fiction. "Idiot principal/genius agent" is a very funny fictional trope that has seen use in satiric works from Catch-22 to Yes Minister, and there's no debate that it's not effective. I'm just saying that setups like that tend to be very unstable, usually ending in tears with a manipulative agent under the idiot principal. (In fact, that happened in Catch-22 and Yes Minister - so the instability is even represented in fiction.)

This makes no sense? You can compare SpaceX and Boeing performance on the commercial crew contracts which have very similar deliverables and nothing to do with other businesses.

Boeing received considerably more money for commercial crew and delivered worse results, they'll refly the demo mission at their own cost putting them ~1 year behind SpaceX.

Is this a joke post? Boeing has the greatest pool of experienced space engineers on the planet, all funded by 70 years of government projects.

> It's no surprise that the best-funded company produces the best results, but it would be interesting to find out if a more honest company could produce better results with equal funding.

This is not true, SpaceX was consistenly cheaper than the competition for launches and ISS resupply.

> Marketing materials aren't plans.

That's right, they aren't. Which is why it's mighty brave of the BBC to call it "first interplanetary cargo ship". We'll see who gets there first.

I that this has historically been the case, but I think there has been a lot more delivery in recent years. The estimates from Musk seem to be less off, and I think a massive part of that is that the ramp up to this point was all predicated on original design of parts. They design and build >90% of the parts in the space ships. I think now that they have a catalogue of parts they don't have to build from scratch, their design/development cycles for new products are much faster and predictable.

This same thing goes for Tesla, I don't think Musk & co. get enough credit for building everything from scratch.

Keep in mind that the first Starship cannot return anything to Earth, due to the lack of fuel.

The first Starship that might be able to return anything wouldn't be able to launch before 2026 either, so...

Are they not even planning to at least try and send a fuel factory on the first Mars launch?

I don't know. But in any case, it's not just the fuel.

Have you seen the proposed Moon-Starship? They'd require some quite impressive crane to even get cargo into the ship.

Additionally, there's the problem of the landing site. It's considerably more difficult to land a rocket on unprepared, rocky terrain than on a carefully prepared landing pad. Plus a suitable area has to be found first, too.

There's simply no guarantee the first Starship(s) even make it to the surface in one piece, let alone ready for refuelling and launch.

The moon-starship will not require in-situ resource utilization (ISRU), i.e. no creation of fuel and oxidizer at the target. It is supposed to land with enough propellants to make it back.

I only mentioned the Moon-Starship, because illustrations show nicely how far away from the surface the cargo bay is.

I don't suppose the Mars version will be all that different in that regard, but we'll see.

Ah, OK. The cargo bay door being that high up wasn't an issue in my eyes. They can build rockets after all, so they should be fine with engineering a platform and a lift.

Edit: Numbers - for fun: if the cargo bay door is 2/3 up the rocket (at 33m from the ground), and someone fell off the platform of the crane at half this height (16m), they would hit the ground with a speed of 7.2m per second which is the speed they would have after falling a distance of ~2.6m on Earth.

Have you heard how weak gravity is on Mars? The crane can be made out of LEGO’s.

Two things to consider:

1) They plan on working out orbital refuelling before sending a Starship to Mars, this might not be enough to return it to orbit from Mars surface depending on how much fuel needs to be used for Earth orbit departure but I wonder if it would be enough to decelerate into Mars orbit and have enough left over to return to Earth, this could open up some other possibilities which leads to #2

2) If they wanted to do a sample return mission, they might not need to land the whole Starship on Mars. If they put the Starship in orbit they could use it as a command module and send a Mars Lander down that was kitted out with enough fuel to return a sample to orbit. They should have about 330,000 lbs of payload to play with.

Interesting idea. The only issue I see with that is that you now have two orthogonal problems: a Starship to get into Mars orbit and back to Earth orbit and a lander capable of landing on Mars and returning to Mars orbit.

Had SpaceX not cancelled their Red Dragon project, they wouldn't even have needed Starship for Mars sample return. NASA should have funded that back in 2014 - there would have been a sample return vehicle today and ready for launch two years from now...

>SpaceX Starship is planned for 2024, and with a cargo capacity in the hundreds of tons.

And Full-Self-Driving will be available in the summer of 2015, and a cross country autonomous drive will happen in 2017, and this year we'll have 1,000,000 autonomous Robotaxis on the streets. Let's go!

And Falcon 9 is nearing its 100th flight, and has made first stage recovery normal, and a Starship prototype has already flown with the new engine. Based on SpaceX typical cadence, full Starship prototypes will fly this year and achieve orbit next year. That’s three years to work out the kinks for the first Mars attempts.

Though I would very much like to see Starship succeed, it must be understood just how risky a project it is. Just having the rocket be able to work in Earth orbit is a risky proposition, given its novel design and materials challenges. Add to that the many novel challenges returning Starship would entail, refueling in space, landing and taking off from Mars, setting up multi megawatts of solar, mining, methane production, etc.

Consider that Falcon Heavy was something like 5 years late. That was doing something that had been done before, strapping rockets together to make a Heavy version. Starship is many times more ambitious, with any of the challenges I raised above likely to hit multi-year delays.

FH was done on a shoestring budget for a small market and nearly canceled when it became clear Starship was the better path.

But I agree with you that Starship has some challenges, specifically proving it can handle re-entry, be easily refurbed between launches, and be easily refueled in low earth orbit.

But Super Heavy is just a bigger Falcon 9, using the same landing technology. Even if a Starship Reusability falls short, it’s very clear that the combo is going to put bigger payloads than the the SLS into orbit at 1/20th the cost.

I agree they should look at putting Super Heavy into service before Starship. They could use a conventionally designed expendable upper stage, imagine how immense its payload capacity would be without having to lug the enormous Starship. It would allow them to fill out Starlink quickly and would open up the market for larger satellites sooner rather than later.

> That was doing something that had been done before, strapping rockets together to make a Heavy version.

That’s a common misconception - in fact, even SpaceX itself made this mistake! Musk said that making Heavy was almost as complex as designing a whole new rocket; which is also why they went with new next time (Starship) instead of incremental (Super Extra Heavy).

> in fact, even SpaceX itself made this mistake

That was part of my point. They could be (re)making the mistake of making a promise of timelines before they understand the real difficulty of what they are trying to accomplish.

I've been on this website long enough to remember when everyone was saying 'of course manually-driven cars will be the exception by 2020', and believing Elon Musk's timescales has taken over as the new naive credulity of the HNer.

Who actually believes Musk's timescales? Musk's overly optimistic yet technically plausible timescales seem to be part of the reason why his ventures are so successful. With the right culture and team members, it drives people toward the finish line. The challenge and constant pace of progress is motivating. With the wrong culture and team members (most companies, most people) it leads to crash & burn. Musk's exhausting personality is precisely what makes it all work.

I am very haply to see the idea of electric propultion tug finally commited to implementation. This has a lot more utility than delivering samples from Mars - in principle there is a lot of equipment that could use rugging between , and Mars.

I hope this becomes a configurable platform for future missions, nur just a one-off experiment.

It will be interesting to see what the situation will be like when this spaceship is ready. By that time we should have Starship and New Glenn flying regularly. Even New Armstrong could be close to ready by then.

New Glenn is not that different from Falcon 9 regarding reusability as they will have to expend the upper stage and fairings every single launch.

Didn’t they just recover both fairings on the last launch?

I don’t know how you want to work the math, but it is probably best to think of it in a fractional way. Between accidents and wear do they manage better than 4 launches in average? They just managed 6 for one lower stage, with tighter turnaround time. We don’t know how much of that rocket was reused. So we might be talking about expending 20% of a lower stage per launch, and some higher ratio of upper stages.

Yes, they did. Great achievement, I was afraid they might abandon the approach sooner or later.

This only meant to say that New Glenn isn't that different from Falcon 9. Both are limited (with respect to cost and frequency of launches) in that they need to throw away hardware on every launch. Starship on the other hand will be a true game changer if it works as intended.

I wonder how accurate it is to call the Falcon 9 the Model T of the rocket world.

I wonder how long we have to wait for the moral equivalent of the 65 Mustang, or even the '63 Stingray, complete with malfunctioning headlights.

Almost all scifi is SSTO craft, or craft that never enter atmosphere. Maybe if we start building skyhooks we can split the difference, and have craft you reuse with only minor maintenance between flights.

The article mentions a "football sized package". Hope there is no confusion between American and European football.

Or perhaps they mean table football?

Good gawd, that would be more [sad|funny] than the mm/inch confusion. Can the rover use it's hands or not? Better hope they use American version of Instant Replay than the pathetic VAR implementation as well.

Reading https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Human_and_Robotic_Ex..., they mean “basketball size”. It seems the BBC thinks their readers do not know how large those are.

Or maybe BBC thinks it's readers are more familiar with the size of a football (as in soccer, of course) than the size of a basketball (although they are the same, but someone who doesn't know the size of a basketball wouldn't, of course)

I learned something checking that. A basketball (29½ inch circumference) indeed is only slightly larger (27 to 28 inch circumference) than a football.

I thought the difference was larger, possibly because of the volume (about 20% more) and weight difference (22-23 oz vs 14-16 oz)

Are they going to have to change their name to Vacuumbus?

Although, it is a cargo ship, so maybe Vacuumtruck would be more accurate.

It doesn't exactly roll trippingly off the tongue, does it?

Spacebus is better. Better hop on the Spacebus!

10 years to implement? Aren’t we supposed to have a starship in orbit of Mars by that time?

Thats in Elon time, I would not bet my house on starship being in orbit by 2030.

Secondly, there is need to independant access to space free of US technology export rules and foreign policy and sanctions.

US administration has forbidden NASA collaboration with China, and as a result they built a separate space station, and are having a separate moon-capable rocket. And i would bet my house that they will get to the moon, CCP seems to plan in 20 years+ horizons, not elevtuom cycles. Perks of being a dictatorship and all that.

Orbit isn't hard. The hard part is landing something that can later return to space.

That said, you can't trust anything Elon says.

Orbit is incredibly hard. It's only just possible. A few percent more gravity and we would be permanently earth-bound. Getting to orbit requires hundreds of thousands of components to function together perfectly. Failure requires one to go wrong.

While his track record is bad at getting there on time, it’s pretty good at getting there in general.

So many people who wonder about the exact cost and do not read the article to the end... And this is the ESA bet against SpaceX btw. http://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Space_Transportation/ESA...

I want to see it named "Nostromo". Or the "Ripley".

Interesting, but the SpaceX Starship/Falcon Heavy, which will start flying in a few years, will be able to do this a thousand times better.

Remember when Uber’s business got a little shaky so they started making a bunch of noise about a flying taxi project that would launch soon and be cheaper than a car?

Well this smells like that. Airbus knows that orders for commercial airplanes may be low for years as we work through the fallout of this virus. So time to go to space to give the investors something to think about.

Did you read the article? They are creating a satellite, ERO, set to launch 2026 for an actual mission.

Eh? Airbus has always been a large contractor for ESA; they make a lot of ESA probes and are a stakeholder in Arianespace, which makes the launchers. This is pretty normal for them.

If NASA really wanted to answer the 'life on Mars' question, Perseverance would have included a microscope. AFAICT, the reason it doesn't is because nobody wants to stake their reputation on the hypothesis.

Really? What's wrong with admitting you were wrong, and that was a discovery in its own?

I recently made an error regarding essential amino acids, and it only improved the quality of suggested foods. Everyone wins.

(Although you still get a few internet haters)

Yes, that's the way science should be done. But look at the number of negative result papers that get published, et cetera. How much push does a negative result give your career vs a positive one? Who's interested in spending ten years of their career pushing a test for a hypothesis that most people (and likely themselves) think is negative? And of course the microscope cannot prove the negative hypothesis, nor does it really help the negative hypothesis much.

What hypothesis?

If you found life on Mars you're going to be rendered immortal as long as knowledge survived. No one is refusing out of pride.

Gilbert Levin might disagree.

Why don’t they just give the money to spacex? This is such typical French/eu behaviour. Let’s build something that already exists, for 10x the price, 10 years late, so that we can create jobs and have our own... Except the market viability is close to 0.

how about using that money for something that’s actually innovative? Or perhaps charge less tax so people can decide on their own what’s worthwhile.

competition is good, it's better than piling all the money in one place.

Is it really competition when nobody is trying?

Surely there's evidence they're both trying?

Europe is trying to build a glorified cargo box. SpaceX is trying to build a starship.

I’d be more enthusiastic if we had 2 attempts at a spaceship.

I am tired of spacex fanboys that cant tell the difference between a scientific mission for research and a commercial operation

> "And this satellite that Airbus will build - I like to call it 'the first interplanetary cargo ship', because that's what it will be doing. It's designed to carry cargo between Mars and Earth,"

It has nothing to do with fanboy or not. I’m sure there are tons of challenges involved in making this happen, but I just don’t think a cargo satellite is fundamentally very exciting.

Having a human in orbit of mars would make the whole process of retrieving rock samples orders of magnitude easier.

> SpaceX is trying to build a starship

No.

No? I agree that so far it has been mostly exploding cylinders, but that doesn’t really change what they’re attempting no?

"The joint American-European project is expected to cost billions and take just over a decade to implement."

This doesn't exist. It's never been done before. If SpaceX does it before Airbus and brings back literal tons of mars rock then great, but it's not certain when that will be possible.

Market viability isn't an appropriate metric for scientific research.

> Let’s build something that already exists

What already exists that can do what this is built to do?

On the contrary, it would be foolish of the EU to be so dependent on a foreign company, dependent on a foreign law on a subject as strategic as space. It is a crucial choice that, as a EU citizen, I applaud.

It's not beyond the realms of possibility that around the same time as the sample returns to Earth, the US could have geologists' boots on the ground on Mars doing actual geology in situ, courtesy of SpaceX/Starship. Kind of puts this effort in perspective.

They should be going all out for reusability, but instead they chose the oldspace pork approach. I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

> It's not beyond the realms of possibility that around the same time as the sample returns to Earth, the US could have geologists' boots on the ground on Mars doing actual geology in situ, courtesy of SpaceX/Starship.

I mean... maybe? What's your suggestion here? NASA and ESA should put all interplanetary work on hold, in case Musk delivers on time and on budget for once?

> I mean... maybe? What's your suggestion here? NASA and ESA should put all interplanetary work on hold, in case Musk delivers on time and on budget for once?

No. I'd prefer ESA to be building reusable rockets of their own, which offer the prospect of orders of magnitudes greater potential for exploration.

I just find it amusing to imagine the Earth-based geologists poring over their few crumbs whilst actual geologists stomp about on Mars with hammers chipping away to their hearts' content, likely also deploying fleets of rovers etc. and thereby gathering terabytes of data, and it could be the case that these two things are happening very close together in time. Surely you'd agree that's a poignant juxtaposition.

> No. I'd prefer ESA to be building reusable rockets of their own

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adeline_(rocket_stage)

The numbers didn't work particularly well on this one, but it's not like they're ignoring it.

And, frankly, commercial space is doing fine on launchers right now. It's doing very little on future interplanetary concepts, so if anything it would make MORE sense for ESA to focus on them now than previously.

> I just find it amusing to imagine the Earth-based geologists poring over their few crumbs whilst actual geologists stomp about on Mars with hammers chipping away to their hearts' content

I mean, it's _possible_, maybe. But it's not likely. And you can't suspend all work due to dubious claims by someone else. In the 1950s, British fusion researchers claimed that cheap fusion energy would be a thing within a decade. If we had believed them absolutely, the world would still be powered by low efficiency coal and oil power plants; why bother spending all that money developing high efficiency steam and gas turbines, wind and solar power, and fission power, when cheap fusion was about to sweep it away?

And of course, even in the Musk dream scenario where this actually happens, solar electric drive cargo tugs would still be very useful, and this is a decent first step towards those. No-one envisages a long-term purely chemical exploration of space.

While I absolutely agree that SpaceX is way ahead of anyone else, and I am very enthusiastic about SpaceX in general, SpaceX is a US corporation, and it is a really bad idea for any other economy or military to allow the USA to have a monopoly on space tech.

Space has enough strategic advantages that the economic reasoning of comparative advantage, while still true in itself, simply isn’t the most important concern.

I don't want my tax money to go fund SpaceX. SpaceX is American and all their capabilities are practically owned by American entities. Europeans like me cannot even work for SpaceX, so unless we have our own parallel programs we would just have no capability at all in this space.

If ESA were building reusable rockets and not instead persisting with a pork-driven employment programme that happens to have a side effect of producing rockets, I'd agree with you. Until then ESA deserve to be hammered with criticism - and especially by those whose tax money etc. is being spent on an approach that is hurtling towards obsolescence.

What are you talking about ? So far Ariane program seems to be a commercial success. ESA on a scientific point of view too. It is true that Ariane 6 will not be reusable, although cheaper than Ariane 5, just like ALL reliable commercial launchers today (even tomorrow for ULA) outside of space X. It is clear that this is the future. However, these are only the first steps. I am not sure that today space X will be able to be profitable with it. Talking about tax money, note that SLS will not be reusable too...

ESA's leaders have mocked and disparaged SpaceX's approach in recent years; why would they bother unless they considered SpaceX a serious threat? They must be worried. I'll also point out that SpaceX naysayers have a dismally poor record of predicting the future.

This isn't an EU/US thing and I totally agree with you on ULA, SLS and I might add Roscosmos etc. I wish ALL launch providers would move towards reusability because in the end that increases the opportunities for getting humanity exploring space properly again, which is what I'd really like to see. Clearly Europe has fantastic engineers: why aren't they leading this transition? Why is it only SpaceX, Blue Origin and Rocket Lab that are actively pursuing reusability today (notwithstanding paper studies etc. from other groups)?

I don't agree nor disagree with you, but I hate the idea that criticism means the critic is afraid.

In this case I'd say the benefit of the doubt should not be with ESA:

'Asked about how the Ariane 5 compares to lower-cost alternatives on the market today, such as SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket, Stefano Bianchi, Head of ESA Launchers Development Department, responded with a question of his own. “Are you buying a Mercedes because it is cheap?”

Ranzo, sitting nearby, chimed in and referenced the India-based maker of the world’s least expensive car. As he put it, “We don’t sell a Tata.”'

And:

'the US military says it pays more for launches because of its mission assurance requirements, which require extra steps to be taken for preparing and attaching the payload alongside myriad other system checks to ensure a safe ride to space for costly national security payloads. What does Charmeau think of this explanation?

“I would be surprised if SpaceX explained to commercial customers that they deliver bullshit to them,” he replied. “I would be extremely surprised by that.”'

https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/05/ariane-chief-seems-f...

Ariane 6 will still be significantly more costly that expendable Falcon 9s. It’s a terrible design that learned nothing from SpaceX breakthroughs before reuse was even possible.

Nothing like this currently exists. The closest would probably be Phobos-Grunt, but that, er, didn’t work.

You can look at the UK as an example of what happens when a country abandons its own space program and decides to buy launches in the US instead.

US and EU have already a "trade war/tariffs", so it is really stupid to give money to US to build their space industry so in future some weird dispute can cause $EU to lose access to space or over pay. There are also good engineers in EU that would need jobs, maybe they can create better stuff if they compete with SpaceX or create something different that can dominate a niche.

i bet US would have loved Airbus do not exists so Boeing made more money.

For strategic industry you don't want to minimize your dependency on external factors, some natural disaster happens and you no longer have food to feed your citizens or no longer have medicine or your software will refuse to run etc.

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