Hilton's 1967 plan for a space hotel
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Maybe I have overly romanticized notions of what could have been, but I feel like humanity lost out big time when the space shuttle was chosen over a manned mission to Mars.
The shuttle might have been fine if it weren't twisted into the boxcar-like thing the Air Force insisted upon. And if the other parts came along with it: space tug, lunar-orbiting station, etc. Instead we got a starter salad and then were shown the door.
Perhaps it was a lack of money. The U.S. worrying so much about (South)East Asia meant money went to war and things like the DynaSoar X-20 and MOL were nixed.
No less than Michael Griffith, *the NASA Administrator*, said in 2007 that the shuttle was a mistake (<https://aviationweek.typepad.com/space/2007/03/human_space_e...>), and that NASA should have instead continuing launching Saturn rockets:
>If we had done all this, we would be on Mars today, not writing about it as a subject for "the next 50 years." We would have decades of experience operating long-duration space systems in Earth orbit, and similar decades of experience in exploring and learning to utilize the Moon.
However, even is Saturn V was an extraordinary engineering feat, to explore space we needed something much less expensive, much less polluting, much more secure.
Perhaps SpaceX fills better this niche, but I hope that we simply become a space species with most jobs and people at least in orbit around Earth or Moon.
It would be better if we have several good reasons to stay permanently in orbit.
Isn't the SpaceX Merlin a fuel-rich RP-1 engine too, just like the Rocketdyne F-1? Or is it another source of pollution that you have in mind?
I hope for a breakthrough in rocket engines, but I am quite sure it will not happen. We need something new.
Also, how energy efficient is the production of hydrazine? Non-fossil processes for making fuels tend to be pretty wasteful, take hydrogen from methane compared to hydrogen from electrolysis for instance.
I suppose the benefit of removing and adding and removing carbon again would be that at each removal step you end up with a pile of solid carbon that you can put in a landfill. But I'm always wary of schemes to spend energy to sequester carbon, even if it is renewable energy. That's energy you probably could have used to greater effect elsewhere, like charging an electric car or supplanting a coal power plant.
This is not a "Oh, we'll just deal with that when we need to" problem. It's absolutely critical for long-term missions. And there's been shockingly little research done on it.
The ISS is trivial in comparison because you can send up stuff and take stuff down almost instantly with relative ease. Mars is seven months away. So your mission has to be self-sustaining for at least that long. And it's going to need a steady stream of resupply runs - with a seventh month lead time if have an accident or start running out of stuff.
And all of that - for what? Mars is not a pleasant or easy environment. Aside from unpleasant, difficult, and hostile living space it has no obvious resources.
"Because we can" is a good enough reason for an initial exploration, but it's not a sustainable project without a long-term goal.
I think you mean 'crewed Mars mission'.
Engineering is innovation and maintenance. Bureaucrats slow good change while pushing to cut corners.
Hotels on earth aren't exactly money spinners and apart from the zero gravity and looking at the earth the novelty of being in space would probably wear off after a day or two. Projects like Virgin Galactic - for a 'near space' fun ride will probably be more lucrative in the short term. Getting (government funded) astronauts and satellites into orbit is where the money is right now.
Falcon 9 flight to LEO costs $200K in fuel but can lift 22,800Kg. If a person and their seat could be squeezed into 200Kg that's only $2K per person. I think the biggest cost is that the forces and extremes of temperature mean the 'rocket' needs to be engineered and maintained very well as any small failure is likely to be catastrophic - its very hard to abandon ship or divert to the the nearest airport.
If SpaceX's Starship plans come to fruition, the $/kg to orbit cost will fall dramatically.
Ultimately, even if we massively increased the rate of rockets being launched, the greenhouse gas impact would be pretty minimal compared to cars, electricity, and cement production.
The economic issues are more about how space flight has been funded than the underlying physics. The space shuttle for example had some terrible tradeoffs relating to which orbits it could achieve and needing to return cargo etc. SpaceX has dramatically lowered the cost to orbit, but they don’t have the funds to explore dramatically different designs.
"I could get used to a view like this" - Flynn Ryder
It is more about the resources, do we have enough of it to make it possible for regular people to travel to space ? Probably not on earth, so let's build mega factories on the Moon. You might argue it's not possible or feasible for some physic reasons, so let's find a solution. But not money, money does not exist, it's made up.
The purpose of humanity as I see it is not to go smoothly and safely, to be able to go without troubles to a final destination (that does not exist). I say buckle up and let's do it! As Billy said you need to be solution oriented.
And the demand side of that business is still there. Who wouldn't book a hotel in space for a few days if the price came down to an annual salary, then a monthly?
Gordon Moore only stated his thesis almost two decades after the start of the semiconductor era.
It was an empirical observation based on the history of integrated circuits.
Why would you assume a Moore's law in fields that have never shown anything resembling Moore's law?
I'd say if you're watching star trek or some other sci-fi show from earlier than the 90s, we may not have achieved FTL or teleportation, but the whole "magic device that contains all knowledge and can communicate with anyone at any time" thing we actually did pretty well on.
As long as you can find a sci-hub mirror that hasn’t been taken down.
https://twitter.com/ZachWeiner/status/1402314414515273728?s=...
Moon wasn't terribly popular among Soviet space engineers because orbital construction was seen as necessary tech, and a single launch mission would have accomplished nothing towards it. But the party decided to participate in the moon race so the largest rocket in the family, N-1, which was never optimized for TLI missions, has been selected and repurposed for this task (and never flew since the concept itself turned out to be flawed in several regards unlike R-7).
Hard to say whether this vision was right - too many unknowns, and they would probably have finished in early 80s at best - but the outcome of that idea was the modular space station tech.
It's only now that we have some commercial companies making serious attempts to make space travel more cost effective that we are contemplating going there again. A commercial hotel starts making a lot of sense as soon as you have wealthy tourists going up there or highly skilled people traveling there for "work" that have Ph. Ds, rich employers, etc. Classic target audience for hotels. They'll want comfy accommodation, nice food & beverages, etc. Still a great business plan as soon as somebody figures out how to get stuff up there cost effectively. Millionaires are lining up to visit ISS. E.g. Tom Cruise is going there apparently. But ISS is not a hotel of course. It also lacks a lot of things that people might want to pay for. Like toilets you don't have to share with others, privacy, air that isn't foul smelling (a big thing apparently), etc.
Natural progression? :)
Contemporaneous with the dream of "we will settle space", was one of "we will settle the continental shelves". The progression? Skylab-like habitats, abandoned, nothing ISS-like, and now only temporary work camps. A tourism of many brief shallow visits, and a few shallow subs and hotels. Military subs. No large commercial subs, a few semi-submersibles. Limited shallow seabed mining. Very limited floating towns. Drift nets and bottom trawling. No bases and cities under the sea. No commercial divers looking around at the seafloor and thinking, "I want to raise my family here someday". Lessons? Find some space resource extraction, for which robots are inadequate, and with better economics than seabed mining. Militarize space. Encourage recreational high-altitude ballooning, parachuting, and suborbital.
"We will settle the Antarctic"? Science bases grew a bit, got prettier. Little commerce, no industry, no extraction, no settlement. Some tourism, visiting ships, and tear-down-each-season hotels. Emphasis on preservation. So a planetary protection "Mars international-park planet: take only photographs, leave only footprints"?
"We will colonize the air"? Societal emphasis on safety cripples innovation? Clear-eyed investors deny funding? (Early railroads and canals often operated profitably... after a bankruptcy or three disposed of the cost of making them.) No floating cities. Few aerostats. Enormous ratio of paper dreams to metal. Lessons... ?
"We will settle the deserts"? Cairo's cities in the sand? Diversely poor, industrial, and gated. China's ghost cities? So focus on incentivizing developers, and then move something there to attract people?
So many natural progressions to choose from. :)
Plenty of desert cities in the US: Las Vegas, Palm Springs, Scottsdale, etc. For more extreme deserts, lots of middle eastern cities.
Someone must have built a centrifuge barracks or something during the cold war. Have never heard of such a thing, though.
"In the late 1950s, two scientists, Carl Clark and James Hardy, had a more daring idea. Physics dictated that if a spacecraft could be steadily accelerated at 2 Gs, it could reach the moon or Mars in days or even hours. But could a human being survive the constant acceleration? Clark used the centrifuge to find out.
“He essentially moved into the cab, brought his La-Z-Boy from home, and stayed in there at 2 G for 24 hours,” says Shender. Clark slept, ate, worked, and lived at two Gs for a full day under constant medical surveillance. He suffered nothing more than fatigue. Further marathon rides were planned, but more immediate space missions loomed and the idea was set aside. "
https://www.airspacemag.com/history-of-flight/the-g-machine-...
Then, there will be the dirt biking on the moon dunes, which will also be gnarly.
They licensed and further developed NASA's inflatable habitat technology. They actual have a module on the International Space Station right now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bigelow_Expandable_Activity_Mo...
“When I say I want the moon, I expect the moon.”