The New ‘Gold Rush in Space’ | Hacker News Reader

The New ‘Gold Rush in Space’

wsj.com

58 pointsfurtively84 comments

This article is mostly fluff. It doesn't get into any interesting technical details. The core bits are:

> Mr. Kokorich, 44, is one such entrepreneur. In 2017 he founded Momentus, a California-based company that seeks to revolutionize transport in space by developing in-space transfer vehicles that use water as a propellant. These would “complement low-cost gigantic rockets, like Starship from SpaceX and New Glenn from Blue Origin,” he says. Craft built by Momentus would enable the outer-space equivalent of the connecting flight. A satellite would reach orbit by “ride-sharing on a big rocket,” then transfer to a Momentus vehicle for the next leg farther out.

> The choice of water as a propellant, Mr. Kokorich says, would “not only enable extremely low-cost in-space vehicles—built in a ‘Mad Max’ steampunk style—but eventually allow the use of water mined from the moon and from asteroids.”

It would be nice if journalists did some actual investigating and reporting instead of just regurgitating non-technical PR.

I think there's some info at https://momentus.space/ but no interesting technical details.

From https://momentus.space/development/ it looks like they are using a microwave generator with water to generate a plasma thruster. The technical name seem to be microwave electro-thermal thruster (MET). There is more info on the thurster in the abstract here: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/1420619

So in a sense it’s a steam engine powering a space ship.

Wonder what an effective steam rocket in lower atmosphere would look like.

SSME’s? Or does it count if the water started off in separate pieces?

Steam is a gas, meaning the thrust is a function of the pressure. Plasma is made of ions, which can be significantly accelerated by electromagnets, meaning the thrust depends on the acceleration caused by those magnets, and can be a lot higher than steam.

(Technically, the thrust generated is more complicated than just pressure, heavily affected by temperature too, but I digress)

How does the specific impulse compare to the current state of the art hall effect / ion thrusters that use xenon as a fuel?

Probably worse. Raw steam has an ISP of around 100s. There was an experimental ion thruster from U Michigan a few years ago that got that up to nearly 700s. Some of the more efficient ion thrusters are like 20,000s (although they're operating at a different scale so idk if that's an apples to apples comparison)

Edit- I looked at the Momentus paper linked above and apparently their ISP is 800s

It's my understanding that current state of the art very low kN, but high ISP efficiency hall effect/ion grid thrusters can achieve 6000-8000 specific impulse without an absolutely ridiculous amount of electricity. There are designs that have been ground tested but not flown which could achieve 15000-20000 ISP but would also require immense photovoltaic arrays, or a small nuclear reactor.

Once in orbit unless you need to achieve a lot of delta-v in a relatively short period of time, I'm not sure why an engine/fuel combo with only 800 ISP would be a logical choice. It's certainly a whole lot more efficient than a bipropellant chemical rocket engine, which maxes out around 385-400 ISP. Although it's never flown I believe the theoretical efficiency of a NERVA would be around 800.

I am really surprised that this story got the weekend interview slot of the WSJ, no less.

There's a Romanian space company trying to make first stage boosters out of super heating water..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKHI5VXisEc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O50kL6am6U8

Once in space, does it not make more sense to split water into hydrogen and oxygen using solar energy and use that as fuel?

Perhaps, but the intended purpose of these is to actually help get the payload to space.

At that point it would be far more efficient to just skip the electrolysis, fill your spacecraft with xenon, and use the solar power for ion propulsion. No need for an oxidant when you have sufficient electrical power, so a large portion of the water's mass would be dead weight.

Water is certainly cheaper and easier to handle than xenon.

But the company's site claims a "3x increase in efficiency" (WTF that is), so I guess they didn't manage to get any high isp.

You would generate the fuel extremely slowly so would have to wait ages between brief burns for thrust. But why settle for the Isp of a hydrolox engine, when you can have the efficiency of an ion it hall thruster?

Scott Manley has a video with a more realistic view on this company [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qT9HBkWGg7s

I have the privilege of being the space startup founder.

If you have any specific questions - I am happy to answer them.

P.S. Going offline now, but send questions anyway - I'll to reply them later.

What is your business model, your website does not make it clear.

Do you plan on selling time on orbital computers?

It's all fine and good until the orbital computer rehabilitates a disgraced ex-console jockey currently selling drugs in chiba city to retrieve the hardware crypto key required for a wintermute/neuromancer merger.

Just what was the colour of the sky above Chiba, anyway? I used to think a stormy grey turmoil, and now people seem to think it was a uniform brilliant blue.

I think Gibson was trying to describe an overcast gray with a lot of reflected city light on its underside. Sort of like VHF/UHF analog TV snow. He literally wrote Neuromancer on a typewriter, despite the subject matter, in the late 70s and early 80s Gibson lived a quite low tech lifestyle.

https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/163304/what-color-...

Yes, that's correct. We'll revamp the website to make business model more clear.

Can I have the MicroNOVA placed into orbit for me? I can't seem to do that from your site.

It is not likely to survive orbit deployment, unfortunately.

Long term or short term? I don't need a century-level deployment, but I would like to see how long it would survive.

It would probably be cheaper and easier to test at a terrestrial cyclotron

For some reason I can't reply to your comment below, so Iam answering here.

- From purely hardware perspective, microNOVA has a nonzero chance of being operational for at least few minutes in space environment.

- From rules & regulations point, launching it as a standalone cubesat is not possible. It is not compliant enough with cubesat specs (plastic frame, non-approved components, no radio licenses)

If you load a comment and it's been less than 2 minutes sometimes you can't reply.

I dig the actual reply, I actually considered whether it was radiation or just cooling of the components, but I didn't consider the regulations point.

Edit: I was planning on making something accessible over AWS Ground Station so I was wondering if it was possible to get the payload into orbit in the first place. Thanks for being reachable and replying.

But why in orbit where cooling is MUCH harder?

As someone without much knowledge of use cases for orbital computing, what's the ELI5 use cases for this?

Cheers!

The strongest use case is in-space data analytics on Earth Observation data (camera images, simply said).

Orbital compute presents a pretty good physical security model as well (X-37B notwithstanding). I've often thought it would be fun to build a smallsat providing crypto functions (signatures, certificates, message passing).

There's a lot of investment and development going on in asat tech...

I could imagine. An unhardened satellite is going to be a pretty soft target for EMP/laser attacks.

Is there something drastically new besides the change in the economics? From layperson's perspective, SpaceX so far has done nothing new that hasn't been done 50 years ago. Yes, robotic rockets landing on robotic ships is cool but that's not core space tech that changes everything IMHO. It's nice that there's a new way to go to ISS but Soyuz was doing it since ever and very reliably. There was a buzz about how the new ship docks automatically but Soyuz was doing it too for decades AFAIK?

What I am missing here? Is there a new frontier or is this simply a business opportunity to fill a gap?

> From layperson's perspective, SpaceX so far has done nothing new that hasn't been done 50 years ago.

https://bucket2.glanacion.com/anexos/fotos/85/2912485.gif

In the last 50 years we did not have anything like this. Rocket re-utilization, now only for first stage but also second stage in the future is a game changer in the economics of launching a rocket.

Yes it’s cool and being cheaper is a nice thing but what does it enable that wasn’t possible before?

Cost is the usually the main factor determining whether something is possible.

What is this thing that wasn’t possible before but possible now thanks to the discount?

I know the talking points but what about the specifics?

Specifically a manned flight to mars, which before depended on the cyclic political will and state of the cold war to be funded. There are also other uses for starship like 30 minute suborbital flights between new york and london. Maybe it's easier to see if you look at the limits: given an infinite amount of money and labour, we wouldve seen a manned mars landing in the 1980's perhaps. If on the other hand funding was finite and reaching mars cost 100% of world gdp, it would never happen.

SpaceX launch cost is roughtly half of competitions for same payload: 40mil USD vs 90mil (Ariane Space).

40mil is far more affordable than 90mil, and they are promising lower prices in future.

Starlink becomes economically viable.

Building a satellite constellation with 42,000 satellites comes to mind.

Is this possible due to the rocket re-use? Do you have the numbers? I want to understand the economics of this.

I know the talking points but I’m septic because nobody seems to know the specifics.

Since the satellites are mass produced each one is comparatively cheap. That means losing them is an option and SpaceX can launch them using parts that no other customer would want (first stage boosters that have been flown 4 or more times already). Their main costs are the second stage ($20 million), payload adapter and fairings (which are simpler than the normal $10 million version), fuel ($300k) and ground support etc ($1M?). That puts you in the range of $30 million. A regular launch would cost twice that, and any competitor easily twice of that again. So it's a 4x launch cost reduction, and a lot of the remaining cost can be written off as R&D as it's exploring the failure points of reused boosters, eventually allowing them to put regular customers on more heavily used boosters with confidence.

Imagine you go to a furniture factory and visit the owner. You tell him the factory is cool but what does it do that wasn't possible before? All the machines are just cutting wood. A carpenter with a hand saw could have done the same things during the iron age.

If you don’t think robotic tech changes anything about the core of space flight, I just don’t know what to tell you.

Okay, what it changes? I know the talking points(yes, it is cheaper but not in order of magnitude) but where's the substance here? If it's the cool videos, that could have been done in CGI too. What is the new things, the thing that is a leap forward? Sure, it is nice to end the reliance on Russia but that's a political advancement. If it's the wild stock market, you can do it with cryptocurrencies too(maybe rockets are more environmentally friendly?).

If it is Mars, this is some CGI so far and kids in Eastern Europe can do it too.

Re-do everything with the electronics and software of the 2020's is interesting of course but my understanding is that the reason the space age ended is because we need multiple orders of magnitude more energy to reach far distances in reasonable times and what we have in the distance that we can realistically reach isn't particularly important. The new space companies don't bring the orders of magnitude cost savings or energy into the play, they bring re-do of what was done in the Space age and I fail to see how this is changing the fundamentals.

Please somebody stop repeating the talking point and explain this thing that everybody understand but nobody talks about.

"Everybody knows what robotics will do to the space"

Well, tell me please what robotics(which is not actually new in space) will do to revive the Space Age? I am not one of the everybody who knows, please explain.

The space age ended because there are few economical reasons to go to space. You can deploy satellites profitably and that's about it. Anything that goes beyond this has to be funded by a national space program and unless there is a nationalistic reason like a space race against the soviet union the national space program is going to be at the bottom of government priorities. The only way one could possibly change that is by reducing launch costs.

IMO what all these commenters and mainstream narratives miss is: cheap launch cost enabling space based industry and development. Once you move resource extraction of space based resources and industrial production INTO space it’s game over. The solar systems vast riches are available. Mars and the moon value in the long term is their relative shallow gravity wells.

I don’t know how robotics plays in here, that’s the innovation to come.

How much would it cost to put something like microNOVA into orbit around Mars?

Several millions US dollars, at least. Interplanetary missions are expensive, even the small ones.

Sorry if this is remotely tangentially related, but wasn't there a startup many years ago backed by silicon valley bigwigs with the mission to mine asteroids for gold and diamonds? Or did I see that in a movie?

Yes, Planetary Resources. I remember the announcement.

They folded - asteroid mining is too much of challenge even now.

Yes, that's the one - thank you! I could not remember anything until seeing that name.

Their website used to show what kind of skills they were looking for when you applied for a job there [0], I thought it was pretty interesting at the time because of how broad the skill set they were looking for was. So I saved it.

[0] https://pastebin.com/5fGaPZ4H

Maybe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_Resources ? Several similar companies were founded but really the business model is very far from being realistic. Asteroid are very difficult to reach and automated mining is even harder, plus mineral resources on earth are not even actually that scarce.

This is a very silly article, the interesting investment in space right now is in LEO communication satellites and to a lesser extent in launch services.

Probably Planetary Resources, this has been talked about for years. Several companies were looking at doing it but the time lines are always like 30 years out or something. Here's and article from 2015 talking about it

https://www.space.com/30213-asteroid-mining-planetary-resour...

The Colorado School of Mines even has a graduate program in it.

https://space.mines.edu/

Using nuclear options to transform ordinary metals to gold should be less pricier than running a gold mining operation on an asteroid flying by, I think.

Do we have anyone as an expert on any of those options?

Not an expert but here is an article on turning lead into gold. Spoiler it's radioactive.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-l...

For the energy cost, you might as well mine bitcoin instead of trying to make gold via nuclear reactions.

Cost is more of a spoiler than radioactivity. At "one quadrillion dollars per ounce" you might as well do isotope separation and only collect stable gold 197. The additional cost of the separation would probably be just a rounding error in the whole thing.

The real value proposition of asteroid mining is the ability to source heavy things (metals, ice) from outside the gravity well, so that you don't have to lift them up. Manufacturing things is space is a pretty important thing in the tech skill-tree.

Yeah this space tourism needs infrastructure and shipping stuff from earth is expensive. So mining water and fertilizers(phosphorous) might be profitable surprising fast.

Your intuition is wrong. Valuable resources are abundant in asteroids for one simple reason: gold and other industrially useful metals heavier than iron sink in magma. When the earth formed, they sank to the core.

Indeed what gold and other rare(-ish) metals we mine today are largely the remains of asteroid impacts which deposited metals into the crust of this planet after formation, then got mixed around by plate tectonics and water cycles. Go to the source and you’ll fine pure, reduced metals at the original concentrations.

Like for example, there are near earth asteroids classified as “non-metal” types that are 1-4% gold and platinum group metals by weight, which would totally make them valuable ores on Earth. Let me emphasize these are the non-metal asteroids.

if gold becomes common, it's value drops, as it has no inherent uses (other than as decoration, and minor electrical/industrial uses, for which there is plenty here on earth already). Ditto with platinum - 'cept may be more valuable than gold for use as catalysts in industry.

I would imagine that asteroids would hold value with rare-earths instead of currency metals.

I think you severely underestimate the usefulness of gold in electronics.

You're ignoring the problem. The electronics industry would love it if they could gold plate every single PCB but for that to happen the price of gold would have to drop. Gold mining is probably only profitable at current gold prices so the electronics industry won't benefit from expensive space gold.

> Gold mining is probably only profitable at current gold prices

There is no reason to make this assumption.

> as it has no inherent uses (other than as decoration, and minor electrical/industrial uses, for which there is plenty here on earth already)

This is extremely wrong. Gold is the preferred material for a huge variety of industrial applications, it's just not used because it's too expensive.

Silver and platinum are probably even bigger industrial wins though. Platinum is used a lot in industrial chemical reactors, and silver would entirely replace copper in electronics and heat-sinks if it were cheaper.

Gold and diamonds are common enough on earth, we have as much as we need for industry. Articles often talk about rare-earth minerals but don't specify exactly what is desperately needed that can't be found or made on earth cheaper.

It's partly a geopolitical thing. Chinese businesses control over 80% of the rare-earths market.

Then there's pollution and the constant talk about exploitation of child workers in mines. You won't get pollution on Earth if a robot mines the stuff in deep space, a rocket brings it to lunar orbit where a commodity is manufactured, and then brought back to Earth for consumption.

Technological leaps happen when something new or uncommon becomes widely available. How many cost prohibitive applications become possible when the cost of any available raw mineral drops by at least one order of magnitude?

This is a non-sequitur - there's absolutely no expectation that space mining would result in the cost of any available raw mineral dropping by at least one order of magnitude; it's not a solution for "cheap mass mining" solution, it's a solution for very expensive targeted mining of something that we need very much.

The parent post argument is that we can get as much gold as we need on earth with techniques that aren't used because they're too expensive, but even those would still be far cheaper than space mining.

Space mining can be solution to prevent the price of some rare earth material skyrocketing in the future because we're running out of it, or to get something that's very rare and expensive (it's just that nobody has a clear proposal on what it's going to be) but at the moment gold is too common and cheap to justify the expense of mining it in space.

At current costs it would be a waste of money to pick up gold bars orbiting Earth; after (if!) SpaceX Starship cuts down cost of bulk transfers to orbit ten times, then it may become economic to bring down certain exceptional cases of highly concentrated rare materials - but it certainly will not be cheaper than the price of any raw minerals that exist on Earth in reasonable quantities, such as gold ore (alluvium ores, which aren't that valuable by weight due to low concentration in gold)

AFAIK the rare earth metals aren't actually particularly rare, just uneconomical to mine. It will probably eventually be cheaper to mine heavy metals like gold in space to feed manufacturing in space than to send them up from the surface of the Earth.

Yes, mining materials in space to avoid the fuel cost of bringing them up to orbit is a perfectly feasible use of space industry. But it's not going to make any industrial resources cheaper for us down there.

There are a ton of industrial applications for which gold or silver would be extremely suitable but are too expensive. Gold has better electrical conductivity than copper at surfaces due to corrosion resistance, and silver has better thermal and electrical conductivity in bulk, so in almost every industrial use of bulk copper it's being used as a cost-compromise over gold-plated silver.

Yeah why focus on boring luxury stuff that has almost no industrial value? Manufacturing fuel in space by finding water on the moon is a much bigger priority.

Planetary Resources. They’ve now pivoted into an ethereum-based blockchain startup. No joke. (They were Washington State based, not Silicon Valley, however.)

https://archive.is/sn3ZN

> water-fueled space transport

After watching an Elon Musk interview in front of his starship he was saying - If anyone can show us that aerospikes are the way to go then please, do it. It'll be a gift.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIQ36Kt7UVg

This other company Arca has a 25-video series starting 2 years ago about their journey to build a hydrogen/oxygen (water) areospike engine. Really worth the watch. Skip to the last videos if you want to see live engine tests.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1hnImvI2gw

That's definitely a good thing to have.

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