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.
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.
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.
Generally with more money behind them, too.
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.
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
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.
What’s importantly different about the more recent ion drives?
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is not true, SpaceX was consistenly cheaper than the competition for launches and ISS resupply.
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.
This same thing goes for Tesla, I don't think Musk & co. get enough credit for building everything from scratch.
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!
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.
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.
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).
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.
The first Starship that might be able to return anything wouldn't be able to launch before 2026 either, so...
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.
I don't suppose the Mars version will be all that different in that regard, but we'll see.
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.
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.
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...
Unlimited budget is sometimes a hindrance.