NASA Has Decided to Start Building the Lunar Gateway Using the Falcon Heavy
universetoday.com
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I predict that the program will end after Artemis flies and they have a plan in place for the jobs it creates
SLS stopped making sense years ago. They need to cut their losses now.
If you assume it’s to benefit NASA, but I think this statement is meant to speak to benefits to politicians
It's been a huge political boondoggle.
SpaceX has upended the cost analysis on stuff like this.
The only way forward is reducing launch costs. SpaceX did that, but if that had not happened SLS still would have been pointless.
It just doesn't feel like....an advancement. It's not something that can get the general public excited about space.
Edit: it turns out today is the 40th anniversary of the first firing of those rockets while attached to the orbiter (the 'SSME' - space shuttle main engines). https://www.nasa.gov/feature/40-years-ago-two-months-away-fr...
Space is like a sports team: the public gets excited when there are wins. The public is excited about SpaceX because of the company's many wins. All ULA needs to do is post some wins to generate excitement.
Its original purpose seems to have been a place SLS would be able to get to, and then SLS would have the purpose of getting to it, in the same weird way that the ISS was a place the Shuttle could get to, and the Shuttle was needed to resupply ISS. Until it wasn't; and now the ISS has no purpose or value. Don't need SLS to get to ISS, so make a "Gateway" that does.
Make no mistake, a "Lunar Gateway" is much worse than completely useless. If you want to go to the moon, go to the moon. If you want to go to Mars or an asteroid, go there. Stopping at lunar orbit, effectively halfway, just costs a huge amount of extra fuel to stop and then start again.
So Having a launch vehicle that does a rendevous with a LEO space station, then transfer the astronauts to a vehicle that is optimized just for the function of shuttling back and forth between an Earth space station and a Lunar space station, then have them board another craft that is optimized for landing on the Moon and taking off again, using minimal fuel because it doesn't need to carry the weight of the other components..
It makes designing a mission a lot more complex but at the savings of a lot of components and fuel, makes a lot more reusable components as well. Then when you add the ability to refuel in orbit by capturing asteroids, it really pays off.
Suppose I want to send a mission to land on the moon at a site not on the orbital plane of the gateway station. For an all in one mission this is no problem, I can match my Earth launch plane and transfer plane to line up with the destination. With a gateway station the lander has to do two plane change burns, on on landing and again on ascent back to the gateway. If you play KSP you know just how expensive plane change manoeuvres can be.
ISU is a great opportunity for sure, but we don’t have it yet. That would be a great reason for building a way station and a great reason for going to it on other missions. But without that reason what’s the point?
Once the Gateway is up and running, the PPE element will provide power (in the 60-kilowatt), high-speed communications, attitude control, and Solar-Electric Propulsion (SEP) capabilities. This will allow it to alter its lunar orbit as needed, giving crews greater access to the lunar surface than was ever possible with conventional missions.
Many months is ok, because it can happen in parallel with the spacecraft being prepared on Earth.
The xenon gas is the propellant. This still comes from the earth so it's far from free. It's just more efficient.
A plane change can be expensive, but if there's a space station that can supply all the required fuel, who cares?
Wait, what? The standard "go straight to the moon" mission plan (e.g. Apollo 11) has a required point where you are at a lunar orbit. There's no extra fuel cost to "stop" there; as you're spending fuel to slow down between lunar insertion and lunar landing, at some speed you inevitably are in a lunar orbit and can spend some time there at no fuel cost.
What's the actual benefit?
The only useful place for a "gateway" would be in low Earth orbit, with minimal cost to deliver fuel to, and useful for any destination except highly-inclined Earth orbit. Its value there is a result of the radically different character of Earth-launch vs. deep-space transport vehicles, being the natural point to transition between the two. Getting between Earth orbit and lunar orbit is, relatively, trivial, even for a crewed mission in an all-fired hurry.
Finally, the moon is a very specialized destination. There is no value in going or being there, beyond curiosity. Everything of practical interest or value is elsewhere, and a "Lunar Gateway" is useless for those.
A side trip from low Earth orbit to the gateway takes nearly the same delta-V as to Mars. But unless you are willing to take weeks getting to the gateway, you use up most of a Mars transfer delta-V to stop there, and as much delta-V again to get to your transfer orbit to Mars. In other words, LEO-to-gateway-to-Mars takes almost 3x the delta-V of going directly from LEO to Mars.
https://www.fool.com/investing/2020/10/22/boeing-has-a-delta...
https://spacenews.com/starliner-test-flight-slips-to-early-a...
So if Blue Origin wants to buy ULA, it has to negotiate with both Boeing and Lockheed Martin to be able to do it.
I have no idea if Boeing and Lockheed Martin would be interested in selling. Both Boeing and Lockheed Martin have their own space businesses separate from ULA, and likely view part-owning ULA as having some synergies with their own space businesses, and selling ULA to Bezos could threaten those synergies. OTOH, as they say, everyone has their price, and Bezos has enough money to pay just about anybody's.
Infusing the existing org with a state of the art rocket/rocket development process has many failure modes (the new becoming "infected" with the stagnant mindset), but it could also work quite well, pairing the "cowboys" who know how to land a rocket stage with skilled "regulation jockeys".
But BO has a much better chance of succeeding without ULA than ULA has without BO and in this situation entering in an alliance of equals would just be silly. The icing on the cake is that the failure mode (stagnancy infection) would also be far more likely in arm alliance of equals.
It is funny saying that ULA might infect BO with a "stagnant mindset", given how little BO has actually delivered so far. BO had a two year head start over SpaceX, but in the same time that SpX has had over 100 successful orbital missions, BO hasn't made it to orbit once. In fact, thus far BO's only paying customer appears to be ULA – BO is supplying rocket engines to ULA's new Vulcan Centaur rocket. Vulcan Centaur is supposed to have its maiden launch by the end of this year; I wouldn't be surprised if it slips to next – but still, for all we know, Vulcan Centaur might make it to orbit before New Glenn does.
If they bought ULA it would be for the established cont(r)acts , but it would feel like an odd lateral move after investing so much money and effort into to their own vehicle, and a non reusable one at that.
ULA s next rocket also uses the engine developed by BO for New Glenn, but is also not reusable apart from an optional future possibility of catching the engines with a helicopter.
Massive win for BO if this comes to pass.
Blue Origin business model now and for years to come is selling Amazon stock.
New Shepard's first passenger flight may be this year -- but they've been saying that for a while. As for New Glenn, they've built an enormous factory to manufacture it, but aside from the first-stage engines, they're keeping further progress to themselves, for the moment.
However, because Blue doesn't release a lot to the press about things they have that are not flying yet, and because they've had a lot of delays with their engines, pushing the whole project back, there is very little in visible results. It's sort of a running joke among rocket watchers that tomorrow Blue is going to open the doors, roll out a massive rocket and launch it into orbit. It's just that it's always tomorrow, not today.
Given how Bezos is willing to keep investing into Blue, someday that tomorrow will come.
I hope Blue Origin succeeds, but Jeff’s investment and attention by no means guarantees success. The Fire Phone was a similarly enormous, exorbitantly-expensive, and secretive project that ultimately failed utterly. In that case, from my perspective as someone who was there, it was Bezos’s fixation on a particular solution (3D display, hand tracking) and refusal to consider or solicit contrary feedback that doomed the product. I worry about a similar outcome for Blue Origin. I hope I’m wrong.
The Fire Phone seems to have lived a pretty short life from launch to death (it was announced in 2014 and canceled in 2015). Even accounting for a few years of development, it seems a different scale from BO, which has been running for 20 years.
Of course, disposable launch providers will be even worse off.
Boeing market cap: 126.7 billion
Lockheed market cap: 93.95 billion
Bezos net worth: 197 billion
So he doesn't have quite enough to buy both outright. On the other hand, both are diversified aerospace companies. If he just wanted their space parts, who knows...
They have their own control rooms and the own launch pads.
The literally just spend the last 3 year rebuilding everything ULA already has from the ground up.
All of that would be incredibly stupid if they would want to buy ULA.
Of course if China will manage to put a kind of a permanent base on the Moon, even some years after USA, that will be quite noteworthy.
Boomers were the ones who stopped the space program and turned it into a jobs program.
Gen X graduated at the end of the 80s and brought new energy into the 90s to build the first dot com and the internet economy, and people like Musk and Beck are the ones shaking up the space industry.
Boomers were involved in Viking and Voyager, but their main contribution to space was the Shuttle and the ISS.
There, saved you some time ;-)
As my Chinese coworkers would say, it's an even bigger waste of money. Given the delta-v costs of landing on the moon, putting a base there, landing personnel and resupply would be enormously expensive. If China wants to spend percentages of their GDP building a moon base, sure, why not?
Even with a heavy payload re-useable rocket like Starship, it'll still be really difficult. Alternatively, the US will build out serious orbital infrastructure and a mars base within the decade.
The U.S. spending percentages of their GDP on Apollo got us microchips which lead to the personal computer, etc.
Talk about dividends.
I believe we have to maintain this by law. Which, of course, means throwing money at whoever stands in the #2 spot, even if their product costs ten times more than #1. This means they have to keep throwing money at the likes of Boeing (which is likely one of the things that's helping keep them alive).
Until they can violate this mandate and stop burning cash like it is rocket fuel these inefficient programs and companies are going to keep doing what they do. No incentive to improve when the fitness function always outputs 100% regardless of what you do.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceLaunchSystem/comments/kt1vlf/r...
But while people love to talk about the Shelby thing, its overrated. Congress in general love SLS, its not about Shelby. House Democrats actually pushed for even more SLS budget then the Republican Senate.
Its just a terrible design for a rocket, terrible executed at an absurd price. Everybody involved should be fired and the contractors shouldn't get a new large contract until they prove successful at smaller contracts.
It consumes a perverse amount of NASA budget every year that could be invested in amazing programs that NASA has.
In terms of resources the moon itself only has water. But it's down in a difficult to access gravity well. There's no nitrogen. Far, far, better would be fully funding ARM and starting to despin and drag asteroids to the lunar gateway for study, resources, and eventually living space in space protected from radiation and, if you build sub-surface tracks, enough acceleration to live normally.
So yes, we've put 11 space stations in orbit: only if you count a one-room flying can as a space station. I think we have a few more practice steps to go before we start hollowing out asteroids as GP was suggesting we do next.
with the number of billionaires walking around, it probably can make a decent money as a tourist destination. Especially if there is an option to get down for a walk on the surface. Though it can become quickly at least partially outdated once one can just charter a Starship to make a quick long weekend trip around the Moon.
What a dark evil Neuromancer 'the rich floating above the problems of earth (that they have created)' prospective.
To be explicit, the ARM mission propulsion bus, canceled in 2017, is now to be the main component of the lunar gateway program. But it's like putting the cart before the horse with no intention of getting a horse ever. All this talk about lunar gravity well exploration is just sour grapes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_and_Propulsion_Element#A...
However, the limitation is mass not volume so while an asteroid 1/3 that density might be chosen it’s still going to be fairly compact.
ARM was a mission literally designed so Obama so NASA would have something to do with SLS and Orion. It was a pretty terrible mission that basically nobody wanted except the president.
The actual ARM that they settled on would only pick up a small bolder from an asteroid and bring it to earth orbit. Not large enough to live in, not even close. And not even useful for resources.
Water is by far the most useful thing you can find, and its what makes everything else possible. The moon has a huge amount close to each other. Almost every expert I have heard talk about is, think getting water from the moon is the best way to use space resources early on.
>In terms of resources the moon itself only has water
This is completely false. Just FYI.
There is lots of different useful materials on Mars.
Check out this video by former NASA engineer who has work on in Space manufacturing for many decades:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-RTBGnzNks
You can literally build solar panels, batteries, and many other things with martian resources.
* Asteroid redirect tech in case of, you know, a dinosaur killer coming your way.
* Asteroid harvesting.
It would have picked up a single small bolder and brought it to LEO.
Non are relevant for resource mining.
It has vast amounts of Helium 3. This could potentially be very valuable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium-3#Lunar_surface_2
I'd read something else about the challenges of reactor design, but not sure what it was. I haven't been enthused about He3 since. I feel like the one interesting use would be a Project Orion / Nuclear Pulse Propulsion system, but wow, boy does that seem like an expensive way to do propulsion: what's the use case?
[1] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/08/moonshin...
Every time a Moon mission comes up, Helium 3 gets trotted out, but it's just absurd.
For one, billions of tons of rock would have to be mined to extract any reasonable amount of Helium 3. Even with heavy machinery and robotic miners operating 24/7, this is a stretch.
But much more importantly, Helium 3 is utterly useless. It was proposed as one possible fusion fuel but then a much cheaper alternative was developed almost immediately: breeding the required fuel from a blanket of Lithium.
Last, but not least: There are exactly zero fusion power plant operational on Earth right now. There will be exactly zero commercial fusion power plants operational on Earth for at least a decade, no matter what new technologies are developed. At the current pace, according to current plans (e.g.: ITER/DEMO), there will be one (1) power plant generating a trivial amount of power staring in 2048. Likely well into the 2050s there won't be many more.
So to summarise mining lunar He3: We should spend trillions of dollars digging up the Moon for power plants that won't exist for three decades and don't need need the helium anyway.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Old_Lady_(from_Pasa...
The payoff would be worth it a hundred times over. Not just because of cheap, clean energy, but also because the earlier we start weaning ourselves off of fossil fuels, the better.
But did you notice my choice of words? I said nations, not governments. Governments do not represent their nations. They represent themselves. And they are made up of a small number of greedy, self-interested, mostly corrupt individuals looking out for their own personal benefit. They benefit from bribes (coughconsulting jobscough) from their "partners" in industry. The oil industry. The coal industry. The gas industry. Not just mining! Even power generation industries have a vested interest in delaying fusion as long as possible.
There is no fusion industry yet, and non-existent industrialists cannot pay bribes.
This is the essence of why governments are disinterested in the future. They're only interested in the bribes they get in the here and now. Oh, I'm sorry. "Alleged" bribes, I mean... perfectly legal donations.
Worse, the scientific bodies involved in the nascent fusion industry, like ITER, have become cancerous. They exist now only to justify their own enormous scale. A growing bureaucracy that benefits only from its own size, not in achieving its goals. Hence the plans out to 2050. The longer the better. Got to think about all the project managers that want to reach retirement age and start collecting that pension without ever having to actually deliver.
There is exactly one reason we spend $billions every year on Tokamak: it is a jobs program for high-neutron-flux physicists, to maintain a population to draw on for weapons work.
That is not to say fusion is itself a dead end; just that Tokamak is stealing the funding that could otherwise develop practical fusion power. E.g., the FRC DFD project shows every sign of near-term viability, but is starved for the small amount of money that would take them to fully practical power generation and also spacecraft propulsion.
The project is in "Phase II" development under NASA, and needs just $50m to get to a viable prototype -- pocket change for the Tokamak club.
I read a paper recently that basically said that the best bang for buck is to just work on better superconducting magnetic tape. Stronger fields make everything better, and the scaling law is cubic!
Even if such a tape is developed but doesn't lead to fusion, we'd have better MRIs and DC power lines as a side effect, so it's not even wasted effort!
We can still say that no amount of HTS tape, or of anything else, will ever make Tokamak hot-neutron fusion competitive. But that is not a reason to abandon HTS tape development.
Go check out the money being spent building ITER. I won’t spoil the surprise here, just to say if it doesn’t make your eyes water there something wrong with your tear ducts.
Good sci-fi always has an eye towards the future - we have transparent aluminium now. The whole point of science is to push the boundries of our knowledge.
If you want helium3, seawater is probably a better source than the moon. The difference between 150 tons of lunar rock and something like five times that of seawater is probably a wash, even ignoring the expense of gravity wells.
Long term all of those make it a very valuable place for exploring the rest of the solar system.
The Moon gravity well is weak but still significant.
On the other hand you could catch an asteroid and bring it back to Earth orbit and exploit it here or even completely remotely, by automated means.
The amounts of energy can be as little as you want if you go far from the sun where orbits are very slow and very little energy needs to be used to move an asteroid in any direction you want.
The only thing you need to do is to be patient. A lot depends on how greedy you are, if you want a smaller one it gets exponentially easier.
Just read this 10 year old report: https://space.nss.org/technologies-for-asteroid-capture-into...
"Reasonable" is subjective to define, but there are many multi-decade projects running right now so I don't think of multi-decade projects as unreasonable.
Things like sending man to the Moon or building Space Station would have been deemed "pure sci-fi" with the approach of the parent commenter.
All the things above are fully realizable in the coming decades, they are not in the realm of science fiction what so ever they are merely engineering problems.
2. Define “technology”
The meta-technology of R&D and socio-economic programs that will make these things happen exists and gets better every day. If a method to perform the needful does not exist, it will given the right conditions.
On earth, the nuclear reactors are radioactive rods that heats up water, to create steam, to spin a turbine, to create electricity. This is like a 5 stage process to indirectly generate electricity. But all the intermediary products are now radioactive.
So in space, I assume you can use the same steps to generate electricity, and then use the electricity to run a furnace, to heat up the minerals to melt it into pure metals.
Or is there some other process of using the nuclear radiation directly in space?
But really, reactors are extremely simple. For example, on Voyager missions the it is just a hunk of metal that is constantly hot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MHW-RTG
You then do with that energy whatever you want.
You can use part of it to power electronics and actuators, part to melt a piece of asteroid and part of it to convert it to ions and send whichever way you want.
Also, RTGs have been used on earth, contrary to your implication they are only in space for safety reasons. Russian equipment in the arctic, for instance, has been powered by RTGs.
The point is you don't need huge complicated nuclear reactor to produce practically endless supply of energy in space, which is what the parent said he thought is a problem.
You probably need more energy than RTG but probably not as much as most people think. If you can apply a steady force for years, you would be able to give the required 10-100cm/s velocity delta to even large asteroid.
There are and have been fission reactors in space already. RTGs seem to typically be in the hundreds of watts, while the reactors are more in the kilowatt range.
The reactors are not RTGs, and they are definitely a lot more complex.
That's simply false.
First of all, asteroid is already on an orbit...
You can move stuff around solar system with relative ease and little energy if you are patient enough.
For this, you go very far from the Sun (ie. Kuiper Belt) where things fly very, very slowly and then you can use very little energy to nudge it in direction of Earth orbit. You can match velocities and use gravity assists so that the object is captured by Earth.
Technically you can use as little energy as you want depending on how far you are willing to go, how long you want to wait and how precise you can steer the object.
You take a nuclear reactor and you can use asteroid as reaction mass.
If you are still not convinced, these guys also don't agree with you: https://space.nss.org/technologies-for-asteroid-capture-into...
Can you clarify what you mean by that please?
What protects from radiation?
What are "sub-surface tracks" and the "acceleration" they provide?
And then, how much energy would it even take to spin such a huge rock? I think you’d need a new exotic propulsion system just to rotate it. Maybe nuclear or a sustained ion propulsion.
Being beneath the surface provides radiation protection.
Specifically by digging out tunnels beneath the surface of moderates size asteroids, putting down butyl ruber tubes, and laying tracks within. By having the cars on the track go around the curved track an artificial gravity is induced.
But you can stop the space train cars, step outside, and there's no deep gravity well to make getting things to and from there so expensive.
----
I'd also like to make it clear that the Asteroid Retrieval Bus, the mission that was canceled, is the reason the lunar gateway concept exists. Having the lunar gateway but not asteroid de-spin and retrieval is putting the cart before the horse without intentions of getting a horse.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_and_Propulsion_Element#A...
>The Asteroid Redirect Vehicle... ...mission was cancelled in early 2017 and the spacecraft's propulsion segment became the Power and Propulsion Element (PPE) for the Deep Space Gateway, now known as the Gateway.
There are tons of serious problems to solve here on earth, no need for another huge waste of money.
If we didn't have interest in space, there would be no SpaceX, Starlink, Mars rover, planetary missions, etc.
I personally think we're about to reach the terminal generation in 100-200 years with advancements in ML, and we won't be worried about sending human bodies anywhere. Just engines, sensors, and computers.
That money could be much better spent, like on tanks we will never use.
I can state flatly that heavier than air flying machines are impossible. — Lord Kelvin, 1895
Let's ship first.
Why is funding into technological advancement a "jobs program." We don't call research a jobs program. Rome wasn't built in a day.
Mining for He3 would require all kinds of new technology to be invented. And necessity is the mother of all inventions.
Basically, launch a probe that goes to the asteroid, spins up to match, collects it in a net/blanket, and maneuvers to meet up with a Starship in an highly elliptical or maybe lunar flyby orbit. The Starship would rendezvous, match spin, load the cargo in it's payload bay, and proceed to de-orbit.
As long as you engulf the asteroid, the spin shouldn't be more than a minor nuisance (e.g. pulsed thruster firing control systems, reinforcement to endure centrifugal loads). You might even be able to de-spin on your way back to earth.
My understanding is that Starship is capable of landing with full 100+ t payload, thanks to the aerodynamic reentry. Also, with no passengers, it could easily spend a few orbits getting the apoapsis from "almost Earth-Sun L5" down to a LEO before re-entry.
Yes, all of them. The last politician that matter who believed in government was Nixon.
Everyone since then has done their best to weaken it, with the result being a country that is unable to build any engineering project larger than a football stadium without cost and time overruns larger than the original projections.
The US right now is in the position of the barbarian tribes squatting in the former Roman Empire. Using the infrastructure build before them, wearing togas and pretending to be Romans, constantly sniping each other over who is more virtuous, while everything rots and falls apart, only it's happening slowly enough that no one notices. We didn't need those baths anyway: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ruin
Can't say I haven't thought the same about where we are as a civilization, and how eerily similar it really is in some regards to the "End Game Roman Empire". I guess we had a good run while it lasted?
The Romans managed to avert disaster for two centuries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisis_of_the_Third_Century
There is no reason why we can't do the same. It doesn't help that we expected Obama to be Augustine, but we got a Julian the Apostate wannabe instead.
If your definition of “politician” is “US President from the GOP”, that's maybe true (George H. W. Bush might make even that wrong, though.)
If it's any broader, then, just, no, not even close.
Apart from Sanders name one Democratic president or major presidential candidate that wanted to re-nationalize anything since the 70s. That isn't some sort of radical socialism, it was policy under the New Deal.
In fact it was Nixon who totally fucked up the manned space program, so your analysis makes no sense in that aspect.
It seems you are not addressing NASA or know much about it, you are just trotting out your hobby horse.
> The US right now is in the position of the barbarian tribes squatting in the former Roman Empire.
Another terrible argument.
> Using the infrastructure build before them, wearing togas and pretending to be Romans, constantly sniping each other over who is more virtuous, while everything rots and falls apart,
As somebody who a deep interest in roman history, it is incredibly clear that you have not studied, and just repeat boring old cliches that every single modern scholar of the roman empire would laugh at.
Counterexamples include huge inspirational value - to the tune of a generation of scientists and engineers. Also there was a period when automatic satellites couldn't be used for even rather simple, by today's standards, tasks, like space telescope on e.g. Skylab. Also at some scale involving human presence into a space project (Apollo) turns out to be more beneficial, science-per-dollar-wise, than doing everything with robots only. And there are other reasons.
[0] https://news.crunchbase.com/news/segment-raises-175m-for-big...
Maybe space service and taxi cabs are not directly comparible.
I think it's still too early to be able have an interesting discussion comparing the two companies.
BO's development pace is glacial.
Peak inside the building where they are building things: https://twitter.com/julia_bergeron/status/136030816885784576...
Rocket Lab is aiming for reusability on their Electron.
Probably others I haven’t heard of.
Blue Origin (New Glenn), Rocketlab (Electron), China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (Long March 8), Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology (Long March 6), Landscape (Zhuque-2), iSpace (Hyperbola-2), Roscosmos (Amur), ArianeGroup (Themis), United Launch Alliance (Vulcan Centaur, reusable engines only), Indian Space Research Organisation (RLV, aiming for two stages and a winged shuttle)
I might still be missing a few. SpaceX has a head start but absolutely everyone else is looking at them and thinking "If we don't catch up to that, SpaceX is going to eat this market."
There are about a dozen companies with rockets. The big dogs are:
United Launch Alliance (lockheed/Boeing) -USA
Northrop Grumman -USA
ArianeGroup (airbus) -EU
Mistsubishi -Japan
Khrunichev -Russia
I was thinking that SpaceX seems more private because they have a seemingly valid consumer market with StarLink, but how different is that from Hughes, HughesNet, EchoStar and Dish Network? Ok, Hughes didn't build their own rockets but they still had to pay for them.
Not only are they the largest sat operator, they are also growing faster then anybody.
Amount of launches is a terrible metric because is counts a 200kg RocketLab launch the same as a 20 ton SpaceX launch.
By the time other launch providers get to reusability SpaceX will probably be already flying Starship, decreasing price even further along with other advancements.
https://twitter.com/RocketLab/status/1362116590863409152?s=2...
0. https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/24570/what-was-eje...
1. https://www.thedrive.com/news/34152/how-mercedes-amg-will-us...
The closest private competitor to SpaceX right now IMO is Rocket Lab. They are the only company that has an orbital rocket that has a path forward for reusing the first stage right now. Rocket Lab's rockets are already pretty cheap for launching small sats and when they start reusing their first stages they might be able to get their cost per Kg to orbit close to what SpaceX can offer right now. But Rocket Lab's rocket is tiny compared to the Falcon 9, even SpaceX's first rocket, the Falcon 1 could put more payload into orbit than Rocket Lab's Electron rocket. It's not clear if Rocket Lab has any plans for making a bigger rocket.
Blue Origin is the only other company (besides the Chinese) that is currently building reusable first stages. Blue Origin's BE-4 engine also looks really promising and was designed from the beginning to be reusable. I think a lot of people are giving up on Blue Origin because they have yet to launch anything into orbit and they've been around longer than SpaceX. If Blue Origin does get it's New Glenn rocket off the ground and can recover and reuse the first stage they have a good chance of being cost competitive with the Falcon 9/Falcon Heavy.
The reality though is if SpaceX is successful with their Starship/Superheavy project they will be so far ahead in the cost/reusability department it will take a competitor a decade or more to catch up. Keep in mind part of what makes Starship even possible is the Raptor engine which SpaceX started developing in 2009. It's likely SpaceX has spent hundreds of millions of dollars just developing the Raptor, the Air Force chipped in over $40 million to the Raptor program at one point and SpaceX has built over 30 Raptors already at a cost of about $1 million a piece.
(This is not intended to be an exhaustive list.)
Designing and flying a Falcon 9 competitor is a very risky proposition. They would start heavily behind SpaceX and with Falcon 9 proven record, it's doubtful they could ever win that fight.
Every decade there's a plan to return to the moon by the next decade and it always gets cancelled half way through.
I doubt the US can do this any longer as it has lost all the institutional knowledge of how to run such a program since the 70s. I'd go so far as to say that it is impossible to run a successful manned mission past low earth orbit with the current incentives in government and the risk aversion in terms of both cash and lives.
Not sure I agree. I think the end of the Cold War and loss of our "competition" may be a bigger factor.
China no doubt could light a fire under the U.S. again.
Or, how I stopped worrying and learned to love Cold Wars.
1968, the 2020 of the 1960s. Martin Luther King Jr and Robert F Kennedy were assassinated, race riots in many cities (much worse than our current riots), general mass protests, a criminal president, and a war going poorly.
All China has to say, is that they’re going to put the first Chinese woman on the moon by 2029. Then the American politicians will go apeshit and say that they must beat the commies. “How dare these bat-eating orientals try to outdo us? We’re going to show them what capitalism and white privilege means to the world!”
Btw, what the fck is an oriental? Who uses that anymore? Apparently, a lot of racist white people still uses that term. And Senator John McCain kept calling Asian people “gooks” until they day he croaked. What a scumbag.
Then the USA goes and spends another $500 billion on this Artemis and Lunar Gateway missions. Money that they don’t have, so the Fed will just have to print more money to sustain the national credit card.
Whether the project succeeds or not, is irrelevant, as the moon missions really adds no further strategic advantage to the United States. And all the allied partners are just leeching off America’s money printing, to say that they’re also lunar partners with NASA.
Meanwhile, America keeps spending big on their military. They keep sailing warships and aircraft carriers up and down China’s coastline as a big fck you to the Chinese.
Meanwhile, Texas freezes to death. Oregon is starving to death. The national minimum wage is still $8.50, because Joe can’t give the poor people a raise. Infrastructure is crumbling. Young adults have crippling student loan debt. Millennials can’t afford a house, and can’t afford to start a family.
Then 2029 rolls around, and China say: “Naw America, we were just fcking with you. We were just trolling you when we said we were going to put a Chinese woman on the moon. We didn’t think you’d actually believe us. Thanks for the LOLz btw.”
America goes: “Dude, wtf?”
George W Bush said we would return by 2020: https://www.nasa.gov/missions/solarsystem/bush_vision.html
There's nothing indicating that this initiative is any more serious. There isn't a space race, people don't care. If this were canceled in favor of any other program (say, relief for climate-related crises), there would be very little opposition.
I think Artemis 1 and 2 are very likely to happen. The hardware for Artemis 1 is fully constructed, they are just in the final testing/bugfixing phases; hardware for Artemis 2 is currently under construction. Probably going to take longer than they plan, but they'll get there. They are politically very difficult to kill because of how much money has been invested in it, the lobbying power of the contractors on them, the international cooperation with the Europeans (who contribute Orion's service module). That is just sending people in orbit around the moon (as in Apollo 8), not landing on it.
I think it is also very likely that something like SpaceX DearMoon is going to happen (probably even that specific mission, but if not that one, some other). The market exists – billionaires – it isn't a huge market, but it is enough to make a successful business out of it. But that is still in the Apollo 8 rather than Apollo 11 category.
Moving ahead, I think some kind of human landing on the moon is very likely eventually – whether or not the current NASA Human Landing System procurement leads to it. If a government space agency doesn't eventually do it, probably sooner or later private space tourism will.
NASA's current goal of 2024 is unrealistic, but I think it is very likely people will return to the Moon's surface within the next 20 years.
The reality is a lot of knowledge was GAINED since then as well. This program will be very different then Apollo, not a copy. So the institutional knowledge of Appollo would not really apply and would not be a help. Going back to the moon the way Appollo did is totally impossible now, you could never pay for it and it would be to unsafe.
We now actually have situation that is very different then Constellation and other programs. The program Artemis actually has buy in from Republicans and Democrats, both in congress and in the white house.
The New Space movement has happened. Lead by SpaceX there have been massive amounts of improvements in the industry as whole and in launch in particular. NASA can now get access to a super-heavy class rocket whenever they want at a low price.
NASA has also learned and evolve quite a bit, NASA actually does learn from its failures. The way NASA does contracting now for the most part is quite different compared to the past. NASA now prefers to use fixed size contract with contractor submitted milestones and designs. This is far more successful compared to cost-plus contracts of the past.
Sadly, SLS and Orion are still on the old model. However all the Gateway System, CLIPS (cargo to the moon) and the human lander are contracted that way.
Importantly, SpaceX is Starship is one of those commercial landers and if NASA finances that, going to the moon becomes not just possible, but the capabilities will be way beyond what Apollo could do.
Even if NASA cancels the Artemis program again, if they finance Starship, its very likely that somebody would develop the capability and go anyway.
Being pessimistic is fine, but the situation now is incredibly different then 20 years ago.
There may be some advantages, like re-use ascent modules and risk reduction for lunar missions.
Admittedly, there are alternatives to manned colonialization (e.g. seeding), but it seems rather worth exploring multiple options, considering the stakes.
> NASA's budget for fiscal year (FY) 2020 is $22.6 billion. It represents 0.48% of the $4.7 trillion the United States plans to spend in the fiscal year.
NASA uses less than half of 1 percent of the federal budget. If you care so much about budget waste, there are a myriad of other places you could complain about (how about defense or healthcare spending?)
The practical benefits of NASA's science and engineering efforts have been laid out many times in many different places. There are also less practical benefits; for example, how can you quantify the impact that the Blue Marble photo had on the environmental movement? That was only possible because we put someone on the Moon.
Curmudgeons like you will always be around, and those of us who enjoy seeing humanity push itself and accomplish incredible things are happy to ignore you :)
Solve that first, and then we can easily quantum teleport ourselves to anywhere in the solar system. Then reconstitute ourselves at the destination point. And hopefully your device didn’t make a quantum error during the rematerialization process.
You’d have to send the complement quantum teleportation receiver device to Mars, and set it up there first.
Then the device would have to rematerialize you back into fleshy form from pure quantum information residing in your quantum storage buffer.
Oh and make sure that a fly doesn’t enter the quantum teleportation device with you, as you initially get quantum scanned and dematerialized from Earth.
And you must enter the quantum teleportation device without any extra external clothing on. Since version 1 of the device has difficulty differentiating between organic and inorganic materials.
Once we colonize the solar system, the next frontier to explore will be interstellar travel. I think research on faster than light travel will be what brings teleportation to us rather than the other way around.
Even if FTL were indeed impossible, I think pursuing it would bring interesting discoveries and technologies.
I doubt the sort of teleportation you are talking about there could be made to work, but if we assume that it could, it would make Mars more like Antarctica than colonial North America. It would be a place to visit, but would just be a research appendage without its own self-sustaining population or manufacturing infrastructure.
We have the technology to do it now, but it would be a suicide mission.
Starship is trying to be launch vehicle, cruise stage, landing/ascent vehicle and reentry vehicle all in one and has to make huge sacrifices in terms of payload capacity and delta-v to achieve that.
Starship can land on the Moon and return, but it needs a fleet of tankers to refuel it for each trip. A specialised crew transfer vessel (no heat shield, no aero surfaces, no landing legs) would be able to head directly from LEO to LLO and transfer crew without having to be refuelled in a highly elliptical orbit around Earth first. Using Starship to get from Earth to the Moon is like using a Ram 3500 to pick up groceries from the corner store.
SpaceX is already talking about a few different variants of Starship (Crew, Cargo, Tanker, Lunar Landing). There's no reason why they couldn't come up with a special "Lunar Transfer Starship" variant to meet the use case you describe
Super Heavy is only a first stage booster. Combined with the Starship upper stage this system is also called Starship. This system is still in development and has not yet made orbit.
NASA does not just pick some rocket for a huge expensive payload like that. A rocket needs to go threw a complex certification program, have a proven flight record and be well understood by NASA.
While SpaceX hopes to be flying with Starship by the point this would launch, NASA simply doesn't work in those time lines.
All for gender equality, but uhm wtf are they trying to say here?
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