“The Martian” + Starship
caseyhandmer.wordpress.com
caseyhandmer.wordpress.com
Starship, if it pans out as planned, is a huge game changer.
I'm pretty sure the plans are for ~4 month Starship trips to Mars. The real limitation may be in launch windows. But with SpaceX's "shotgun approach" the real solution would probably be to use an already landed cargo Starship.
Like seriously, how much that must have cost so far ?? Not just money, but all the time thousands of people would have invested into producing maybe hundreds of booster stages that would then be just dumped to the sea. Such a colloidal waste it must have been!
No wonder every margin is so thin in the book and even just launching a module with food is a major hurdle...
Also there is really no apparent orbital infrastructure mentioned anywhere in the book, likely again due to the stupidly high ELV launch costs.
In a proper RLV/Starship world Watney would either most likely not get stranded due to the whole operation being done by a fleet of ships, with some likely kept in reserve as spares.
And even if he managed to get stranded and was lacking supplies to last to the next synod (say the crate with emergency supplies turned out to by logistic mistake contain chainsaws instead) you could very likely get a sacrificial starship with a couple tons of payload, fueled from one of your propelant depots in Earth orbit, to Mars very quickly.
But maybe the society in The Martian universe is just so unimaginably rich they can pull that all off even using those super inefficient expendable rockets. :)
And that is if the only upper stage developed for Superheavy is the reusable Starship. An expendable upper stage could carry a lot more fuel and cargo. On a mission you don't expect the vehicle to return, it'd be fine to use a lighter one. I'm thinking a truncated Starship with a Red Dragon lander, doing a burn to slow down enough the lander can get safely to the surface with the supplies needed.
Finally, with that much launch capacity, I'd be pretty sure there would be more than one crew on Mars at any time. Watney's rescuers could probably just drive to his door with food from over the hills.
I don't think that's all that strange, but it is at least fairly convenient for when people start going to Mars.
What I find a whole lot stranger is that Earth, Venus, Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus all have a surface gravity of around 10 m/s^2 plus or minus about 14%. That's either a heck of a coincidence, or there's something about planet formation that favors that particular outcome.
Feel free to write this if you like, any of you. Ideas are cheap and I have more than I'm likely to use in what remains of my life.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passengers_(2016_film)
And here's an alternative take that might work better:
Warning Spoilers: It would have been much better had Pratt died in the fusion exhaust pipe, and the movie ends one year later showing JLaw standing over another cryopod, internally conflicted if she should wake up another passenger, and only then finally forgiving Pratt.
Also, the plot twists in Hail Mary are very well delivered. The book ends up being completely different then you're expecting when you go into it.
Hail Mary I started reading last night at my first comment. 7 hours later I'm about 50% of the way through and absolutely loving it. So far we seem to be doing the problem->fix cycle in the small and large scales with an interesting overarching plot. Looking forward to continuing.
Hail Mary I haven't read twice yet, but my take is that it fits somewhere in the middle.
NerdWriter on youtube has a good video on how the change would look, does a better job of selling it than I ever could: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gksxu-yeWcU
Spoiler...
The second woman he unfreezes offs him.
It was both representative of the male dominated era of science fiction, and a big progressive.
I was disappointed when this wasn't the ending to Passengers.
Though it's not just a single person, colonists in cryosleep (or more precisely their mass at braking time) are definitely involved. ;-)
Apparently I was mistaken. There are people working at the JPL who seriously believe we'll be able to send payloads to the Martian surface using a human-rated vehicle and bring it back to Earth for $1,000/kg. There are people working for NASA who actually believe we will be able to launch to LEO for $55/kg.
What the Hell?
I guess it's no wonder NASA is doing so badly if these are the sorts of people they're hiring.
Is the claim that Falcon 9 and Heavy prices, total and per kilo, are comparable to any platform from before 2010?
The tradeoffs SpaceX has made have some real cost savings. Problem is that it's not anywhere even remotely close to what they want you to believe it is.
NASA begs to disagree, showing Falcon 9 at $2,720 per kg and Falcon Heavy at $1,400 per kg [1]. This is the cheapest launch platform on the planet, apart from, perhaps, the PSLV [2].
And those are their prices, not costs. The runners up are Proton, Long March 3B and Ariane 5G at $4,320; $4,412; and $9,167 per kg respectively [3]. There simply isn't competitive pressure to push SpaceX's prices down. Particularly in heavy.
Ignoring the tremendous leaps we've made in launch economics over the past two decades, largely as a result of SpaceX, is naïvely dismissive. Yes, they talk a bigger game than they bring. But they're still bringing some big fucking game.
[1] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20200001093
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_Satellite_Launch_Vehicle
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_launch_market_competitio...
What's the reasoning behind your scepticism? More information would be good, it's an interesting subject.
That's not true. They've achieved parts of what they set out for, yes. The important parts, too. But far from everything.
Just one example, because that irks me every time someone brings up nonsense like Starship point-to-point as a realistic option: SpaceX planned to achieve a turnaround time for F9 of 24 hours. So far, the best they could do is 27 days.
I won't get into why faster turnaround times are actually irrelevant for F9, but it goes to show that reality and plans don't always align even with SpaceX.
Now with regards to the turnaround time, people with be quick to point out that this beat the Shuttle record of 54 days, but then again the F9 in question wasn't a crewed mission and doesn't reuse its upper stage, so...
Another reason for healthy scepticism is the lack of cold hard numbers regarding the system. We cannot know the total system cost yet or the launch cost, because neither the final spec system nor its launch infrastructure exists. The number can also be very deceiving: the STS had an estimated $2000/kg to LEO goal and that was realistic back in he 1970s. Why? Because the calculation assumed ~50 launches per year and lots of cargo missions.
Instead, the shuttle launched only 4.5 times a year and the launch cost increased dramatically after the 1986 Challenger disaster and again after the 2003 Columbia accident due to safety procedures and maintenance.
In addition all launch facilities, infrastructure costs and R&D are priced into the Shuttle launch cost (e.g. total program cost divided by number of missions), which is impossible to do for Starship since we don't know the R&D or infrastructure costs.
Just throwing a number like $1000/kg into the ring is pretty meaningless as you need to provide context as well (number of launches per year, unit- and infrastructure costs, R&D costs, etc.). It's also important to keep in mind that this is the number SpaceX wants to achieve eventually, e.g. not with the first launch.
F9 launch costs haven't decreased either and NASA and the DoD in particular still pay a hefty premium compared to business customers. We'll see.
SpaceX's original plan was to further evolve F9. Then they decided to build Starship instead, at which point they decided to stop making any more than minor improvements to F9. If they hadn't decided to work on Starship, they probably would have made further improvements in F9 turnaround time, and other metrics. Citing they fact that they are now never going to deliver on their original objectives for F9 doesn't tell us anything about whether they can deliver on their objectives for Starship.
Look, they've flown block 5 boosters 10 times with minimal refurbishment. Given the cost of Merlin engines, it's obvious they're saving money over expendable designs.
They didn't plan to achieve this. It was an Elon's tweet when they only started recovering F9 booster, even before B5 (please correct me if I remember incorrectly).
SpaceX can be anything, but they're still a business. There is no reason whatsoever for 24 hour turnaround for F9. First of all they have a fleet of eight F9 boosters. Boosters are waiting for payloads, not the other way around like in the past. Even with Starlink, 2021 cadence has only been a launch every 10 days so far, and with that SpaceX already put more payloads into space than everyone else combined in 2021, governments or commercials. Why invest in something with no return, just for bragging right?
Second of all, and this is more important, F9 is the past, Starship is the future. Why invest in a dead end product when the future is such a game changer? They are on the cusp of launching SH/SS in the near term, according to Gwynne Shotwell just a few days ago.
They built competitive rockets. That's a big deal and I don't wish to diminish that. They promised magic 99% cost savings and are nowhere close.
Is that correct? If so, then that's not "nowhere close", it's another order of magnitude away, for sure, but the high-volume approach of Spaceship could do that? Or not?
[0] https://www.fool.com/investing/2020/10/05/how-much-cheaper-a...
They could invent a rocket that does $500/kg to LEO and it wouldn't matter one iota to their actual costs if 1) demand doesn't go up and 2) competition doesn't exist.
I mean, that works fine if you have something like a space elevator:
$ units # assuming 10cent/kWh[0]
You have: 300 km gravity * (.1$/kWh)
Definition: 0.081722083 US$ / kg
You have: sqrt(G earthmass/earthradius)
Definition: 7911.1468 m / s
You have: (9km/s)^2 * (.1$/kWh)
Definition: 2.25 US$ / kg
You have: ((9km/s)^2+300 km gravity) * (.1$/kWh)
Definition: 2.3317221 US$ / kg
0: https://www.statista.com/statistics/183700/us-average-retail...
They also don't have to pass all those costs savings to their customers: they can charge exorbitant prices and people will still happily pay if it's the best deal around. I'm sure many people at NASA and JPL are aware that SpaceX has some pretty good fallback positions if their marketing materials turn out to be inaccurate predictions of the future and that their bargaining position against SpaceX is weak up until they have multiple vendors and competitive bidding.