Starship is still not understood | Hacker News Reader

Starship is still not understood

caseyhandmer.wordpress.com

309 pointswwilson362 comments

I’m kinda confused by the criticism of the industry and NASA not designing for Starship.

The author argues that NASA doesn’t understand Tempe game changer that Starship is, but I don’t think that’s accurate. I think the risk to NASA of assuming the benefits of Starship before it’s proven are just too high.

If NASA (or other industry players), assume Starship will deliver the benefits it promises, they to fundamentally alter their approach to space. But that leaves them with no backup plan in the event that Starship fails to materialize or deliver on its promises.

Whereas this other approach, of treating Starship like a much better vehicle but integrating it into its old processes, gives them an out if Starship fails in some way. Because they’re still using the “old” assumptions, they can fall back to other “old space” style providers.

I think once Starship has proven itself capable of deliver on its promises, you’ll see NASA changing its approach radically in the manner the author describes.

So, fundamentally, I think it’s not a lack of “understanding”, but a different calibration of “risk”. This also applies to many existing space companies, and I also think this gives opportunities for new companies that have a higher risk tolerance to take advantage.

I'm not sure that NASA designs much. JPL designs and builds most of the probes launched by NASA. JPL is an anomaly in the Federal Government where it gets good results. It would be interesting to look into how JPL does so well relative to other agencies and contractors such as Boeing (which is a national embarrassment).

People with passion. JPL people were/are (and I hope will continue to be) believer in the purpose of what they are doing.

Interestingly, the author himself works for JPL.

JPL is the only NASA center that is staffed by non civil servants and managed (under contract) by a private organization (Caltech). By law this gives them certain flexibility that other NASA centers aren’t afforded (e.g. Caltech has lobbyists in Washington DC). It may make more sense to categorize JPL with other Federally Funded Research and Development Centers such as Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.

JPL employees are actually private employees of CalTech not federal employees.

Yeah if starship gets to orbit and lands both stages, NASA will start talking about it more. At the moment brief static fire tests still knock off multiple heat tiles. Still a long way from knowing it will be viable for humans to fly on.

In other words, NASA doesn't want to move fast and break things.

Considering the history of rocket development can be pretty fairly summarized as '[intelligently] breaking things' that seems a counter-productive design philosophy.

NASA just announced that they want to spend $1B per launch for SLS once a year until 2050. For a capability less than what SpaceX might provide for $10M.

That's not sensible risk management, that's head in the sand denialism.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/10/nasa-wants-to-buy-sl...

It's not like they're paying the 2050 launch costs up front.

If Starship succeeds, expect SLS to get quietly relegated after a few token launches.

This is beyond insane and wont happen. Once Starhip flies even the last politicans can be cornered to admit to kill this ridiculous rocket.

No, there will be one excuse after another. Starship isn't human rated and only Orion is rated for human deep space flight. So something else will still be needed to launch Orion to that lunar trajectory. That something else is SLS.

Now the obvious solution is to rate Dragon for deep space and launch humans in that on a falcon and have it meet up with a starship in LEO. But getting that will probably take more years and billions paid to to the Orion and SLS POR before it will actually come to pass.

Never underestimate the power of a self-licking ice cream cone.

The problem is that for Starship to hit that $10M price point, SpaceX will have to demonstrate several as of yet unproven capabilities: In-space refueling (required for any missions outside LEO), safe and reliable re-entry from orbit, and fast turnaround for Starship to be launch-ready after landing. The last thing NASA needs is a glorified Space Shuttle 2.0 that takes months to be rebuilt after each re-entry, and has the constant risk of the crew burning up on re-entry. Fortunately, it's looking increasingly less likely that this will be the case, but NASA is right to not put all of its eggs in the Starship basket.

For what its worth, if Starship does succeed in being a cheap and re-usable super-heavy launcher, NASA can always just stop making SLS (presumably after giving the senators for Alabama sufficiently large bribes) and switch to Starship for super-heavy launches.

It doesn't matter if Starship can't do all of these. It will still be likely cheaper and more capable than NASA's SLS, even if it's capable of only launching one time.

Remember, SpaceX is engineering a production line to make Starship, not just prototyping Starshipp.

> That is still a 200-ton to Orbit launcher for the cost of a Falcon 9 or cheaper.

[citation needed]

Look at how fast they can build an upper stage with basic materials and standard welders from the oil industry.

The engine cost is reportedly already under 1M and they are building a huge factory t produce more.

Even under the worst assumption, where I take conservative assumptions and then double them you still end up with cost comparable to Falcon Heavy.

Even if you assume only basic first stage re-usability (that is well proven). That is still a 200-ton to Orbit launcher for the cost of a Falcon 9 or cheaper.

And for what it is worth, SLS should be canceled no matter if Starship exists or not. Its a program that embodies everything bad about the modern space industry and space policy.

Several problems with that.

One, it's Congress' baby.. ain't noone taking it out behind the barn.

Second, you need redundancy. If something is proven bad with falcon or starship design... You don't want another situation like we had with the shuttles where your paying for Soyuz seats for years on end while the problem is debugged and mitigated.

Iirc, NASA is trying to shift SLS production to the private sector, to try and "get rid" of this ugly duckling.

> Second, you need redundancy.

No you don't. Just as there was no redundancy for Saturn V. As there is not for Falcon Heavy. There was no redundancy for Delta 4 Heavy. There is always a largest rocket.

And if you do need redundancy, SLS is not how you would get there.

If Starship doesn't work, then there will simply be no moon landing. Period.

> Iirc, NASA is trying to shift SLS production to the private sector, to try and "get rid" of this ugly duckling.

That is just contract mombo jumbo that changes nothing about the actual project.

Once it becomes Somebody Else's Problem, and not NASA's, then NASA can quietly abandon it. Since nobody else will want to pay for even a single launch, it may then die a final death.

> Once it becomes Somebody Else's Problem, and not NASA's, then NASA can quietly abandon it

No, what happens is that you create a seriously powerful group of private institutions that will go full force into lobbying congress to not kill the project. Even more so then now.

What you describe is the present condition.

No, now you have many private groups with slightly different interest temporarly unified. Once you create one gigantic mega contractor, that group has a much more specific and target interested in lobbying for that one specific program.

In other words, no worse than the present condition.

But it would be increasingly awkward for Congress to be seen to force NASA to choose the $2B launcher from vendor A over the $10M or $50M (or whatever) launcher from vendor B.

> That is still a 200-ton to Orbit launcher for the cost of a Falcon 9 or cheaper.

If they can't prove rapid reusability for both stages, it's extremely unlikely the cost will be anywhere close to as cheap as current estimates. And if they can't refuel in orbit (which as of now, has only been performed a handful of times with small satellites), Starship will be unable to leave Earth's gravity well.

The current estimate is 2M or maybe 10M.

If the first stage is reusable, having a cargo launcher second stage that is none, reusable can be done for 30M.

First stage reuse is wall proven already.

> Starship will be unable to leave Earth's gravity well.

If its not reusable you can use it like any upper stage and it could launch anything anywhere you want.

> And if they can't refuel in orbit (which as of now, has only been performed a handful of times with small satellites)

The physics is well understood. We do it constantly with non cryogenics.

I really think this is overrated in how much of a technology risk this is. Specially if you have enough weight that you can invest in the solution.

> I really think this is overrated in how much of a technology risk this is. Specially if you have enough weight that you can invest in the solution.

Refueling is a schedule risk, maybe the first design will fail to account for something and it will take a couple iterations to get it right. There is zero risk that the problem is unsolvable.

I would agree mostly. If you need to many iterations you might run out of money however.

In general I think refueling is a far smaller problem then the heat shield.

The heat shield is such a massive component that it's conceivable that the first design is flawed, and resolving the flaw requires a dry mass increase that cuts into the payload and makes a Mars return unachievable.

> NASA is right to not put all of its eggs in the Starship basket.

The problem is that not only are they not putting any eggs into the Starship basket, they aren't even aware (or admitting) that the basket even exists.

Citation needed; they are aware, and admitting is down to the PR department. Can't have a government branch openly express support to a corporate party that easily.

A big reason why they selected SpaceX's proposal to use a variation on Starship as the Artemis lunar lander is for NASA to start subsidizing Starship's development.

>not putting any eggs into the Starship basket

HLS is a $2.89bn egg they have put in the Starship basket.

The SpaceX HLS bid relies on starship working and they won* that award. I think NASA acknowledged the basket and threw 2 billion into it.

Even with SpaceX's accomplishments in dramatically reducing launch costs, the $10M price point is still insane. The Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy advertised prices are ~$50 million and $90 million per launch. The actual launches and mission management for any more custom launch tend to push those prices to almost double. So to assume that a much larger as yet unproven rocket with launch for $10M seems quite out of range with the others. Even if $10M ends up being the material cost, SpaceX will still be recouping their development cost which is significant. Development of the Falcon 9 was $1.6 billion [0] and I think we can assume Starship will be more than that.

[0] https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/586023main_8-3-11_NAFCOM.pdf

Falcon9 still throws away the second stage every time.

The idea of Starship being $10M is that it's fully reusable, so your marginal cost is only fuel/maintenance/launch.

Okay, according to Elon [0] the cost (to SpaceX) of a refurbished Falcon 9 is $15 million, $10 million of which is the upper stage as you say is not re-usable. So $5M for everything else for a rocket that gets 18k lbs to Low-earth-orbit. If we scale that up to the Starship (220k lbs to LEO) then lets estimate a re-use/refurb cost of $61M.

So if a Falcon 9 costs $50M to launch, then 70% of that cost is SpaceX profit/recouping its design cost. Starship is supposed to be even more re-usable so lets assume that they only need 30% of the launch cost for recouping design costs/profit. This would be $87M/launch

So my really aggressive estimate is still almost an order of magnitude higher, which is why I am doubtful. Lets also remember that SpaceX got $396M from NASA for the development of Falcon 9 and Dragon [1]

[0] https://www.elonx.net/how-much-does-it-cost-to-launch-a-reus...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9#Conception_and_fundin...

It's a mistake to assume the marginal cost scales linearly with payload. Fuel will (ish), but many other costs are fixed per launch.

I'd argue your estimate is not aggressive. SpaceX continues to claim an eventual marginal cost in the high 7 to low 8 figures per launch. I'm inclined to believe that deep analysis over a back-of-the-comment Fermi estimate.

>denialism

more like corruption

While I have much dislike for SLS, there is just no way in hell SpaceX will charge $10M for a launch. SpaceX have their own goals which they need funds for and they're not going to under cut their Falcon 9 that intensely like that. That's not to say that Starship won't be the best price per ton of payload to orbit. But let's stay reasonable here.

As for NASA remaining with SLS, for now at least, is due to a mix of congressional support, and the remaining unproven nature of starship. SLS allows members of congress say that they're supporting jobs. While SpaceX is pushing the limits of space engineering, Boeing and many other contractors have pushing the limits of political engineering. Hence the result that the same company that took us to the moon can't get into orbit, but is still maintaining contracts in spite of screwing up everything.

Even with Starship not existing SLS is a mistake.

It doesn't do anything that you can't do in other ways. We already have distrusted rocket launch.

SLS is holding the moon architecture hostage. There is simply no need for it.

> they're not going to under cut their Falcon 9 that intensely

Once Starship is tried and tested, I strongly suspect they will flat out deprecate Falcon. Fly the missions that have been paid and scheduled, and then bin them.

It's a jobs program for Alabama.

The space museum (also home of the famous Space Camp) in Huntsville, AL sure is pimping it, still. That's the one and only future rocket for USA space flight, one might think if one's only knowledge came from a visit to that museum, rather than a sad zombie project that everyone knows will be badly obsolete by the time it flies. Plus a huge amount of square footage dedicated to advertising for various MIC contractors for stuff that has little or nothing to do with space, and a lot to do with killing people. Super lame. Half of the museum feels like a government contractor trade show, not a museum, which makes sense given where it's located, but doesn't explain why it seems to have a good reputation, as far as space & rocketry museums go.

I am sure that absent interference from the US House and Senate NASA would say something different but if NASA says too much their stand to have their funding cut.

> I think the risk to NASA of assuming the benefits of Starship before it’s proven are just too high.

I think the risk of not doing so is to high.

And NASA is already relaying on it. They have had all the data and they selected it for Human Landing System. They knew what it required and they were comfortable with it.

> If NASA (or other industry players), assume Starship will deliver the benefits it promises

It doesn't have to deliver on everything to be worth designing for it.

> But that leaves them with no backup plan

Going back what they always did before is the backup plan.

How come wasting 20 billion on SLS is totally reasonable, but risking a few billion on starting with designing for a rocket that doesn't exist isn't.

> I think once Starship has proven itself capable of deliver on its promises, you’ll see NASA changing its approach radically in the manner the author describes.

But that will leave a years to decade long gap of actually profiting from it.

> but a different calibration of “risk”

Yes an incredibly conservative one that would have meant the US could never go to the moon.

I think the author is arguing for NASA to take a cautiously optimist stance on Starship, instead of assuming it won't work at all until it does.

For example, NASA could start allocating a small-ish budget (e.g. 50M$) to design a parallel mission to their Artemis-IV mission that is currently scheduled for 2026 (but will slip) and that should deliver the Gateway i-HAB module to Moon's orbit.

While 50M$ (excluding launch costs) for a mission like this would be lunacy today given the constraints on weight imposed by current rockets, with Starship that would be a sizeable budget to design a much bigger and more useful module.

If by some cut-off date (say 2024) Starship still hasn't proven itself, then scrap that mission, proceed with the original one and the wasted 50M$ will be a rounding error in Artemis-IV budget.

If Starship proves itself before then, scrap the original mission and go with the redesigned Artemis-IV based on Starship. Billions of dollars will be saved (SLS launch cost + at least 2 years worth of development), and we will have a Lunar Gateway 10 years ahead of what we would have had otherwise in terms of capabilities.

Isn't the point of most/all big NASA projects to distribute as much money as possible into a specified number of states? Kind a hard then to get political backing to move to a quicker + cheaper project.

A less cynical person would say that NASA’s role is to employ as many highly qualified aerospace workers as feasible to both keep the workforce updated and advancing space applications and to do the things private companies don’t want to. Now that it seems SpaceX is willing and able to fulfil part of NASA’s mission, maybe it should refocus a bit.

> I think the author is arguing for NASA to take a cautiously optimist stance on Starship, instead of assuming it won't work at all until it does.

NASA has taken a cautiously optimistic stance on Starship. The assignment of the HLS to Starship and no other provider was an aggressively optimistic stance from NASA that surprised many of the space industry observers at the time of its announcement. The expectation (and normal NASA behavior) would've been two assign the HLS to multiple vendors, at a reduced funding level and stretch the timelines out.

So, I'd argue that NASA is already being quite bullish on Starship given the projects and funding that they have available.

The only way I can reconcile this is political constraints - perhaps they can't feasibly do what the GP proposes, but they could assign HLS to Starship and have some idea on how to capitalize from it "unexpectedly" exceeding expectations.

But then, I know nothing about how NASA operates internally.

It seems much of the politics are external and come from congress pushing their various pork barrel projects.

I don't think it's a very big stretch to think that Blue Origin might well sue NASA if they did this.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Everyone that loses a contract sues the government. Blue Origin already sued over losing a moon lander contract that didn't even meet the minimum requirements. Airbus sued the Air Force after losing the KC-X contract. I'm sure there are others, but those are just two that immediately popped into mind.

Trying to a void a lawsuit is how you get nonsense like the LCS where the Navy first opened the bids for a single class of ship, and then when it was time to announce the winner, split the contract between Marinette Marine and Austal.

> Airbus sued the Air Force after losing the KC-X contract

You have it backward. Airbus won the contract initially. Boeing sued and managed to get the bidding process restarted from scratch. Boeing won that second bid and Airbus decided to not protest, probably because they knew they had 0 chance against Boeing lobbying power in the US.

As someone who has worked on NASA contracts pretty much my whole career, you're quite right. Starship is still extremely unproven. If you look at the history of rockets, mayyyybe 1 in 5 that make it to an orbital launch debut (which is like 1 in 50 paper rockets) in turn make it to commercial rollout.

The author's claim that the potential benefits of Starship are not understood by NASA is cringeworthy naive. Everyone at NASA is rooting for SpaceX but they have been burned many times by the promises of the next shiny rocket: DC-X, VentureStar, NASP, Ares, SLS, hell even the shuttle despite its "success" only fulfilled a small fraction of the desired results.

Makes me wonder how old the author is.

This would be true perhaps if this wasn’t SpaceX. They already moved the goalpost with Falcon

And I don’t think the author wrote what you said. His main point was that not one of NASA’s powerpoints even as much acknowledges that something like Starship might come round. The new constraints by Starship are a game changer.

Past success does not guarantee future success. And when you're dealing with space travel, which is inherently expensive and extremely dangerous, then you can't afford to buy into any hype.

If it was just 'hype' why did NASA select them for HLS?

They had all the data and they officially declared it was very doable and that SpaceX had a path to get there.

So its ok to plan for it but pretend it only exists for that one thing they contracted if for, and ignore if for everything else.

> So its ok to plan for it but pretend it only exists for that one thing they contracted if for, and ignore if for everything else.

No one here is saying "NASA should ignore Starship for everything else".

I'm saying that NASA isn't "failing to understand" Starship when they don't push all their chips to the middle of the table on Starship. You can't use the fact that NASA was willing to make a $2.9B bet on Starship as evidence that they should have been willing to go all-in on Starship.

It'd be like saying if you wager me $1,000 on an outcome, then you should also be willing to bet your house on it. That's not how risk works!

Would I personally like to see NASA continue to evaluate and select Starship for future programs? Yes!

Would I personally like to see NASA start kick off early concept-phase work for payloads that would be enabled by Starship? Yes!

Do I think that NASA decided not to completely re-orient everything that they do around Starship right now means they don't understand Starship? No! Of course not! It means there's too much risk right now around doing that.

The point is that you have to start to think differently.

Not just have the same circle of programs, selecting a launcher and on.

You need to fundamentally rethink how you approach space.

And there is little evidence of that happening, specially from a leadership standpoint.

Sure. And my point is that, for an organization like NASA (which is basically our government's "approach to space") "fundamentally rethinking how you approach space" is basically saying: "fundamentally transform everything about how the organization operates".

Which, if Starship delivers on its promises (and I'm quite optimistic and hopeful that it will!), then NASA will have to fundamentally transform everything about how the organization operates.

But that's a huge transition to make on the back of a program that hasn't proven its key value proposition yet. I'm happy for NASA to wait the extra 2-3 years for Starship to prove that it can deliver on its promises, before NASA commits to a reorganization and restructuring at such a fundamental level.

If NASA commits to such a restructuring now, and in 2 years we learn that Starship's economic dream fails to materialize and the program ends up as an improvement (but an ordinary one) over Falcon 9. NASA how has to unwind all of that organization restructuring and program development. It seems...wise to me for NASA to wait a handful of years to see Starship prove itself before committing to such a transition.

> But that's a huge transition to make on the back of a program that hasn't proven its key value proposition yet.

The article agrees! Author's point, as I read it, is that if NASA does not plan for the transition now, then by the time Starship "has proven its key value proposition", both NASA and its usual contractors will be out of the game, as a new breed of private companies takes over most of space activity. The author doesn't expect NASA to bet on Starship, but rather to at least make some internal noises and initial movements towards that transition - but he failed to find any indication of that for the past 2 years.

Exactly, the could keep a small budget aside already to do feasibility studies, along the lines of “instead of 50T a year, what and how do we approach the ability to shift 100,200T etc, to the moon?”

> "fundamentally transform everything about how the organization operates".

Its more about starting to thinking on how to do that. And initiate some trail projects that take a different approach.

At the moment, in most parts of NASA its simply ignored. That Starship launch system got funded is more of an accidental byproduct of the HLS.

If they were trying something genuinely new - like falling out of orbit and making a propulsive upright landing of a wingless booster - then some skepticism would be justified.

But what's new in Starship?

Propulsive landing of an orbital stage is pretty new.

(You can make an argument for Soyuz's just-before-landing rockets, but it wouldn't be a fair one.)

Okay, I'll grant you that. Not a huge step from what they already do, but it is a step.

Given the uncertainty around heat tiles (and the impact on rapid turnaround) plus the sheer size of the rocket, it seems like a huge step to this ignorant observer.

Orbital flight vs suborbital flight is a bigger step then you might think. For orbital flights the vehicle is traveling at least 28,000 km/h where as to reach 125 miles above Earth, a suborbital vehicle only needs 6,000 km/h. This can dramatically effect the survivability on reentry. Orbital and sub orbital flights are very different.

> Propulsive landing of an orbital stage is pretty new.

It is, but those are largely separate features. Each half of that combo has been done, and combining them doesn't cause any massive engineering conflicts.

No one has, to my knowledge, de-orbited a spacecraft ready to launch again immediately, which is where Musk thinks Starship is headed. That’s a big jump.

That is, yes, but jumping that hurdle doesn't really matter if the landing is propulsive or not.

> But what's new in Starship?

The planned recovery mechanism (the aerodynamic fall, with a very late righting maneuver and landing) is still quite new. They've successfully tested it once (which is great!), but the Starship concept really hinges on that being an extremely high reliability maneuver.

I would argue that, until SpaceX can demonstrate that landing maneuver is high reliability, that the Starship concept isn't proven.

I say this as a massive fan of Starship, and someone who is extremely excited by the promises of Starship of they come to fruition.

They can take the mass penalty of performing a large re-entry burn to reduce heat-load and land falcon9-style. It would mean _much_ less mass to orbit, but the cost savings of reusing the vehicles would still be there.

Except that one of the Starship's big new things is refuelling in orbit.

Nitpick: the booster does not achieve orbit. If it did it would need a heat shield like the upper stage.

What's new in Starship? Rapid turnaround. Catching the returning rocket with the launch tower. A durable heat shield that needs zero refurbishment for back-to-back flights. The sheer number of engines on the first stage and the volume of engine production needed for that. Orbital refueling. The landing flip maneuver.

There is a lot of new stuff in Starship, and not all of it is proven yet. Personally I think the biggest remaining risk is the heat shield. I'm no expert, but my speculation is that there will be several reentry failures, and refurbishment will limit turnaround speed for a long time. I've also heard a lot of people saying that orbital refueling will be very difficult. I'm also worried that landing failures will wreck the ground support equipment. And I think it's very unlikely that the reliability of the whole system can ever be good enough for the airliner-like earth-to-earth passenger service that SpaceX has proposed.

All that said, I'm very much in agreement with the article that NASA needs to radically change their future plans, because while Starship is not completely proven, it is clearly derisked to the point where it's going to be revolutionary, even if some of the above risks prevent the total potential from being realized. HLS was the first time NASA showed that they realize this, but they are still doing tons of stuff outside HLS that makes little sense in a Starship world.

Even for some reason Starship can not return in its early development, it still triumphs SLS by a wide, wide margin.

Rapid turnaround is not demonstrated. Nor is it even, in fact, planned, in any real sense. I.e., to be clear, there is no evidence that they have any idea how to achieve rapid turnaround of a Starship orbiter.

(Superheavy is a different story.)

All this turns on the design of the heat-shield tiles. Those we have seen are basically the same as on the shuttle. Each individual tile needs a great deal of personal attention before and after each use, including squirting in some goo that will boil off on the next flight. Many will need to be replaced, each flight.

So, turn-around time is weeks, minimum. More probably a month or two, or three.

It is conceivable that a future version of Starship will have a heat shield that needs less attention. Maybe a fabric shroud in place of tiles, over most of the hull, will turn out to be practical. If that happens, it might get possible to turn around a re-entered Starship faster. But that will require entirely new development not obviously begun.

I will be happy to be proved wrong.

Despite all of the above, even without quick turnaround or even re-usability, Starship is obviously overwhelmingly superior in every conceivable way to Artemis/Ares. NASA has the unenviable chore of trying to unload that turkey on some commercial contractor to get out from under the obligation to pour ever more treasure down its gaping maw, endlessly. If NASA succeeds in selling it at a penny on the dollar to Marietta, and leaving Marietta to try to find someone, anyone willing to pay for even a single hull, we can all breathe a sigh of relief.

I don't think that the heat shield is the same as the shuttle's. The tiles are tougher and attached in a different way, and the underlying steel structure can stand more heat than the shuttle's aluminum could.

Orbital refueling is required for HLS and depends on rapid turnaround so SpaceX and NASA must have some confidence that it can be achieved without a radical redesign.

There are differences from the shuttle's tiles, but they are much more similar than different.

Rapid turnaround seems at this stage more an aspiration than a designed feature. It was the same with the shuttle. In that case it was never achieved at all, even with decades of experience.

Turnaround and reuse are desirable, particularly to minimize cost, but not strictly necessary for a successful mission.

The tiles on Starship are much more uniform than on the Space Shuttle, so they are cheaper to produce and less complex to replace.

That mainly affects cost, not turnaround time. And there are anyway many unique tiles, particularly around fins and on the nose cone.

> His main point was that not one of NASA’s powerpoints even as much acknowledges that something like Starship might come round

That's just not true, though. NASA awarded the HLS program solely to SpaceX as a Starship lander. The Source Selection Statement of that program (https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/option-...) discusses the benefits and drawbacks of Starship in good detail.

It seems wild to claim that NASA doesn't acknowledge that Starship might come around, when they're paying SpaceX specifically for the Starship program, for moon landings with Starship in 2024 (I think we all know that date will slip, but that's the official plan).

Author mentions HLS contract, but their argument is that it's not taking any advantage of economies offered by Starship. It's like a 10th century trader took an offer to use modern long-haul trucks at a fraction of what they pay for horse and cart transport, but failed to update the business to take advantage of the improved range, speed, reliability and cargo capacity.

The argument is potent particularly because space mission architectures are designed primarily around constraints of the space launch systems, so choosing Starship as the launch vehicle seems to merit a large expansion in scope, if not total redesign of the program.

It seems a little unfair to compare a program with flying test vehicles and production already in progress, with flying Powerpoints that got cancelled because you can't make a cryogenic hydrogen tank out of scrith.

> The author's claim that the potential benefits of Starship are not understood by NASA is cringeworthy naive.

> Makes me wonder how old the author is.

The author works for JPL.

> Starship is still extremely unproven. If you look at the history of rockets, mayyyybe 1 in 5 that make it to an orbital launch debut (which is like 1 in 50 paper rockets) in turn make it to commercial rollout.

How many of these had 10+ prototypes fly and had a dedicate launch site near to complete?

How many had a working next generation engine for there first and second stage?

How many were designed by companies that had already developed the largest rocket in the world?

> burned many times by the promises of the next shiny rocket: DC-X, VentureStar, NASP, Ares, SLS,

Non of those were even remotely close. DC-X was a sub-orbital technology demonstrator. Even had it been successful it would have been nothing more. NASP is another technology demonstrator.

VentureStar was far, far away. Comparing it to Starship is just not accurate. It was basically almost delusional to think it would ever happen. And many people even back then were very skeptical of a SSTO Spaceplane. And beyond that politically it getting the needed funding was also not gone happen.

Ares, SLS are basically just warmed up shuttle concepts. These are designed to keep contractors employed, not to solve the problem. They no potential to solve anything.

>The author works for JPL.

As a software person. JPL employs over 5000 people. The vast majority of them don't have knowledge of the sort of systems and business dynamics relevant to the matter of NASA using Starship.

> The vast majority of them don't have knowledge of the sort of systems and business dynamics relevant to ...

If experience from private sector is any indication, that's usually question of caring. It's not hard to gain such insight from the inside - but you need to walk around a bit, talk to people outside of your team, and most importantly, pay attention.

Jeez dude, these were just random programs off the top of my head to illustrate industry distrust of launch vehicle promises. My comment wasn't meant to initiate a debate but offer the perspective of someone who is quite literally writing proposals about launch vehicle selection for NASA missions. But hey, you can read Wikipedia, so...

In any case to those reasonable out there, don't worry. If SpaceX can prove reliable launch to orbit and deliver on their promises, change will come. It's kind of silly to write articles about how everyone should change the way they operate NOW because change is coming. Of course it's coming, everyone accepts it's likely, and things will move quickly once it does and is proven. What more do the fanboys want!?

> Jeez dude, these were just random programs off the top of my head to illustrate industry distrust of launch vehicle promises.

What you are insinuating is that people are unable to difference between a suborbital technology demonstrator and powerpoint vehicles and multi-billion $ projects that are deep in development.

And non of the projects you mentioned would have a comparable impact to Starship. Maybe VentureStar but that was at best decades away.

You can just throw out some random projects and use them to justify non-action.

If VentureStar had actually seriously gone forward the same kind of almost the rethinking would have been necessary. And even if it in the end didn't happen, it would have been valuable to do.

> perspective of someone who is quite literally writing proposals about launch vehicle selection for NASA missions. But hey, you can read Wikipedia, so...

So making bad arguments can be justified from authority. Good to know.

> It's kind of silly to write articles about how everyone should change the way they operate NOW because change is coming.

There are many years of lead time, choices are only gone go into actual products and missions year from now.

Now is exactly the right time to start planning and rethinking approaches.

When Commercial Cargo was made, much of the need private industry didn't exist. And yet they did it, because they were locking forward and adjusted their operations.

Back then there was massive critic of NASA even from win NASA itself that this was a bad idea and it was never gone work. And that is what kick started the New Space movement.

That kind of thinking is what is needed. Plan projects now and get them rolling that could take advantage of the capabilities in a few years.

> What more do the fanboys want!?

Putting yourself as the reasonable authority and then ranting about 'fanboys' makes you look silly.

The auther of the article works for JPL, but I guess he is a 'fanboy'.

Man, there you go again, trying to turn this into a debate where we pick apart everything the opponent says line by line. What a waste of time. Take care, good luck with your mental health.

There you go again, responding with insults rather then arguments. A debating in a forum that is about debating articles about technology shocking.

Apologies, my last sentence was unprofessional and unhelpful. I was not at my best in that comment.

My other points stand, though. Everyone in the industry that's paying attention knows that Starship, IF it delivers on its promises, will change the game. It's a strawman to say those in industry are ignorant of this. Yet we've heard Starship-esque promises many times before, spoken with just as much fervor and certainty as displayed by your friend the JPL blogger.

I don't perceive this as a forum for ruthless debate but rather sharing ideas in an atmosphere of cooperation. Debate closes off context and undermines trust, which in turn limits communication bandwidth severely and often destroys it entirely.

The act of debate can most certainly be productive, but in an open and unbounded forum where the ruleset of "debate" - and thus its goals - are undefined, competitive framing has a consistent tendency to devolve into semantics and entrenchment of positions rather than productive insight.

Of course, you're free to pick my statements apart further, if you find that productive. But I will spend my time elsewhere.

> Ares, SLS are basically just warmed up shuttle concepts

Not really. They were started before SpaceX proved the idea of reusable boosters. They are a safe Plan-B, using engines and concepts that were already available. It’s a shame they decided to improve upon the existing hardware and took much longer than initially expected, but that’s what life with rockets used to be before SpaceX showed rapid iteration is a better path.

Also, Congress would be very upset with a bunch of failed launches, but that’s also how iterative development works.

> They are a safe Plan-B

I was the Plan-A back then during Constellation. And SLS was also Plan-A.

> Not really.

I would argue the forced existing hardware into those project to continue to employ the same contractors.

Using a single stick solid rocket booster for your human launcher might be one of the worst ideas in the last 2 decades of rocket history.

Not surprisingly the congress person from that state was heavily involved funding Constellation.

> It’s a shame they decided to improve upon the existing hardware and took much longer than initially expected, but that’s what life with rockets used to be before SpaceX showed rapid iteration is a better path.

There were other viable paths even back then. Not to the level of SpaceX but there were others.

NASA did a whole bunch of studies and these studies pretty much universally showed that the current SLS designs was flawed and a booster that looked like a modern Saturn V was the far better solution.

There were even considerations of having it be privately developed.

Turns out NASA can make as many studies as they want, congress basically over-ruled them and forced them to use all the existing contractors and facilities and thus they were forced into current SLS.

https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceLaunchSystem/comments/kt1vlf/r...

> I was the Plan-A back then during Constellation. And SLS was also Plan-A.

It makes sense for it to use the well known approach as Plan-A when the options don’t exist.

> NASA did a whole bunch of studies and these studies pretty much universally showed that the current SLS designs was flawed and a booster that looked like a modern Saturn V was the far better solution.

New developments based on new components, however Saturn V-like, are a risk. I have read a couple studies back then and, while I am not overly enthusiastic about the approach adopted, it offered minimal development risk.

The only novel idea of Ares was putting people on top of an SRB, which was cheap, but abandoned when they realised the vibrations would kill the crew.

Back then, SpaceX was science fiction.

> It makes sense for it to use the well known approach as Plan-A when the options don’t exist.

Not when Plan A has well known well document problems.

> New developments based on new components, however Saturn V-like, are a risk.

Restarting production for RS-25 has risk. Using solids boosters for human space flight has risk.

The idea that magically the picked design has no are significantly less risk is questionable.

In terms of risk to human on the rockets the other designs out-performed the current design and they were cheaper.

> The only novel idea of Ares was putting people on top of an SRB, which was cheap,

I recommend you go back and check out how much Ares 1 cost. It was literally the opposite of cheap. It was a gigantic money pit for a non-commercially competitive rocket that was incredibly risky for human.

> but abandoned when they realised the vibrations would kill the crew.

Maybe the single worst rocket design ever. Despite the issues there were others metnioned.

However the whole Constellation program got canceled because it was horrifyingly badly executed and a bad plan in the first place.

> Back then, SpaceX was science fiction.

By the time SLS was designed they were not. And just because SpaceX doesn't exist, doesn't mean you couldn't do much better then Ares or SLS.

Uhm, I think you're simultaneously doing a discredit to past rocket development and giving an easy pass to the mess that is SLS with this statement.

It's just shoddy project management and prioritizing collaboration with as many big donar aerospace companies as possible as opposed to what works. There is playing it safe and then there is just being complacent. The SLS is complacency personified.

> Uhm, I think you're simultaneously doing a discredit to past rocket development and giving an easy pass to the mess that is SLS with this statement.

Not at all what I intended. Congress is to blame for some of the mess, NASA for the rest. They had shuttle parts and tools and the SLS is certainly not the best that could be done with those.

But, remember, NASA can’t really do much unless Congress gives them the money.

Maybe not everyone. JSC community strongly opposed much of the ISS rework (they were designing something that required 40 hours of spacewalks a week), opposed Shuttle C (which seemed completely illogical given the work base), and as far as projects like DC-XA... I was in Bldg. 30 watching its amazing flight and when it caught fire and fell over, the combined contractor and MCC staff cheered and broke out in applause.

Perhaps it's changed, but not sure how relevant many of them would be in a Starship world.

They're happy enough to put all their eggs in the even more untried SLS basket.

I've read that the fundamental problem for NASA is that they are a political football. They have at most 8 years of one administration before the next comes in, and Congress can change hands several times even in that span. As such, the only way to create a program that won't be announced to great fanfare one year and cancelled the next, is to make it out of solid, Congressional grade pork. Which would be SLS. Since nobody benefits by cancelling it, it won't be cancelled. Even if it becomes an obsolete and ridiculous white elephant.

> to make it out of solid, Congressional grade pork. Which would be SLS. Since nobody benefits by cancelling it,

There are always other people who think 'maybe those Alabama $ could go to Texas instead'.

SLS pork is spread to all 50 states. Texas gets a good chunk of it. A small fraction of $2B is more than all of $10M.

The waste is not even a downside.

NASA budget will not change that much so the money will still be spent. You can compare launch cost like that.

And while it might use all 50 states, in reality the waste majority of money is spend in a very few locations as paying labor is huge part of the cost.

Latest post is more of a continuation of this one: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/03/04/sls-what-now/

I'm going to presume what author thought and quote him:

------

What does NASA do with teams that cost a few billion dollars a year to feed and whose main expertise is building rockets and space probes whose entire architectural philosophy is threatened by current launch costs, let alone the order of magnitude improvement that’s in the pipeline?

The Perseverance Mars rover cost $2.4 billion, which works out to a few thousand salaries for just under a decade. Thousands of people are needed to build this rover because landing stuff on Mars is so hard that subsystem masses must be tracked to a tenth of a gram, on a system that weighs a tonne. The whole thing is meticulously handcrafted from custom silicon, PCBs, titanium tubes, motors, cameras, and other awe-inspiring instruments. Starship will be able to land 100 of them per flight. Now what? How can NASA feed a team that makes one feather light rover per decade for a billion dollars if the demand just jumped by a factor of a thousand and the unit cost fell by the same amount? Set up a production line? Work out how to make them with a team of ten? Build one every two weeks?

In short, in a world where SLS’s ongoing failure is justified and/or ignored while Starship races towards transformational capabilities, NASA needs to think very deeply about its place in a human spaceflight program that appears poised to proceed without NASA at its center.

-----

So the point is it seems to be a question - what is NASA planning to do AT ALL in the world where Starship is flying?

"Starship will be able to land 100 of them per flight. Now what?"

Starship cannot deliver 100 tonnes to mars, only to LEO. The rover was not just a ton, it came with a heatshield and other machinery.

Nasa has plenty of other projects, like the SAFE nuclear reactor, and I am sure these teams will be delighted to do something other than track every milligram

Starship with refueling is designed for 100 tones to Mars. Actually if you do the math it can be even more.

> The rover was not just a ton, it came with a heatshield and other machinery.

Great and that was thrown away and didn't add anything to the mission. The actual payload is 1 ton.

> Nasa has plenty of other projects, like the SAFE nuclear reactor, and I am sure these teams will be delighted to do something other than track every milligram

If they allow them to not work that way. That the whole point.

I know for a fact the the people who work on Kilopower are really exited for their reactors to potentially power future Mars base and they really want to be allowed to build larger versions.

Probably make more custom satellites for scientific projects. There’s an infinite amount of such work to be done.

I would buy your argument if they weren’t assuming the benefits of SLS before it’s proven. Why give SLS, but not Starship, the benefit of the doubt?

Because Nasa is calling the shots on SLS, but Elon could cancell starship with a tweet, or OD on crack and kick the bucket, or go bancrupt, or end up in jail for calling someone a pedo.

There is a real non-zero risk of something bad gappebing to him and then future of SpaceX is in question, its not a robust institution like NASA

Elon going to prison would not stop Starship. Neither would it stop if he died.

And in some absurd crazy scenario NASA could basically 'take' it because its relevant for future mission. NASA has done so before if a company they needed went bankrupt.

SLS depends on a incredibly long list of suppliers. Far longer then Starship.

I don't think NASA really wants to give the benefit of the doubt to SLS. It's a congressionally mandated program, that NASA regularly proposes reducing the budget and responsibility for (e.g. https://spacenews.com/nasa-budget-proposal-targets-sls/), and Congress regularly rebuffs them and demands SLS.

If Congress passes a budget with $7B in funding specifically for SLS, you can't really blame NASA for spending that money on SLS.

>I think once Starship has proven itself capable of deliver on its promises, you’ll see NASA changing its approach radically in the manner the author describes.

Like how SLS has proven itself?

I have to agree with you here. Given NASA's position it has to wait and see how successful Starship will be. NASA cannot afford to lose ground financially, politically, or publicly if they bet on Starship only for there to be issues with it down the line. They're not the owners of this tech which gives them time and flexibility to wait for the right moment to capitalize on it.

I can only assume they are internally very excited at the prospect of what Starship can be to them in the future but that can't be fully expressed if something out of their control has not been fully proven. They will jump on this as soon as the risk is outweighed by the benefit which, as the author argues, is in the process of happening.

I think part of the point that the author misses is that while designing a spacecraft for a Starship launch does remove a lot of the constraints there is not the infrastructure to take advantage of that (yet).

There have been some preliminary studies on spacecraft that could take advantage of a Starship launch capability, but we currently can't transport a spacecraft that large over the road. It would most likely have to be transported by ship from the manufacturing facility to the launch site. Additionally, new test facilities like thermal vacuum chambers, acoustic cells and anechoic chambers would likely have to be created to handle the large spacecraft that a Starship could enable. And NASA is not going to make that investment until there is a higher probability of the Starship succeeding.

Those in the industry are pretty cautious about Elon's promises. Back in 2011, SpaceX advertised that the first Falcon heavy flight was going to be in 2013 [0], but the demo flight didn't occur until 2018, with the first launch of an actual payload in 2019.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/space-business-rocket-idUSN0...

When your primary customer says that they will never man-rate your rocket, as NASA's administrator Bolden did, it's more surprising that they actually went on to finish Falcon Heavy than that it was late.

Yeah, that's fair. But the original first operational launch of the Falcon Heavy (USAF STP-2) was to help certify it for the National Security Space Launch. So one of their main targets was to get classified business that was going to the Delta Heavy rockets. So I don't know how much/little NASAs planned use of the Falcon Heavy affected their decision.

> Those in the industry are pretty cautious about Elon's promises. Back in 2011, SpaceX advertised that the first Falcon heavy flight was going to be in 2013 [0], but the demo flight didn't occur until 2018, with the first launch of an actual payload in 2019.

This is misleading. SpaceX pushed Falcon 9 so much that it actually reached the targeted Falcon Heavy payload years before that. Many early Falcon Heavy costumers launched on Falcon 9.

There was very little market for Falcon Heavy and the main costumer was DoD and their launch was scheduled for pretty late.

The simply didn't work on Falcon Heavy until Falcon 9 was at the end of its evolution and they had figured out re-usability. However the end result was more then double as powerful then the version announced in 2013.

But what was supposed to be the first launch of the Falcon Heavy (USAF STP-2) was initially scheduled for March 2017. So maybe 2013 to 2019 isn't fair to compare, but 2017 to 2019 is still launching 2 years late.

This is not to say that what SpaceX is doing isn't incredible. But I get frustrated when articles like this take the promises of things like "<$10m per launch, and up to thousands of launches per year" as an absolute truth.

Edit: Had the original contracted launch date for the STP-2 mission wrong

Conversely, I get kind of frustrated when people take "Elon time" as an argument that SpaceX can't deliver on what it promised. It does deliver. Just a year or three late. Given the amount of transformation they're causing, compared to previous 30 years of developments in space industry, these kinds of delays are irrelevant. It's like considering a million dollar software project a failure just because a couple sprints run a week late.

That is fair, but in the space world that is not so much. I mean even if it is 10x more expensive and 3 years later, changing the approach is still needed sooner rather then later.

In the days of steam powered factories, a central power plant was used to drive belts that would power various machines. More power intensive machines were sited near the central power plant to maximize efficiency and parts were moved to where the machines were.

Electrification allowed the replacement of belts with motors but machines were expensive so they were upgraded in place and electricity was thought of as just steam, but less messy and cheaper.

It took several decades into electrification before people fully wrapped their heads around: a) many small motors didn't cost more than one big motor and you should redesign your machines so that the motors were where they made sense and b) now that machines could be placed anywhere, you should design your factories so that the machines were in the path of the parts.

Sometimes, quantitative changes become qualitative changes and you need to start from a clean sheet because all of the existing received wisdom stemmed from obsolete assumptions. It takes a while for this process to happen because we don't fully know how all of our assumptions stack on top of each other and we resist the change because our power/identities rest on elements of the status quo.

Disruption theory is premised on upstarts recognizing opportunities that incumbents are structurally unable to exploit because they derive too much benefit from the old status quo.

I agree with all of this.

I think Starship, if it pans out, will be exactly as disruptive as the author of the post thinks it will be. I'm very very much hoping that is the case.

And if it delivers on its promises, it will be a revolutionary change in how we think about space exploration, space tourism, space manufacturing, and other things.

But, I strongly suspect that many very smart people at NASA also understand this. And that the reason NASA isn't retooling everything that they do around Starship has more to do with the risk of that future not panning out, and less to do with the people at NASA not understanding that there's a massive economic change at hand if Starship delivers.

> Disruption theory is premised on upstarts recognizing opportunities that incumbents are structurally unable to exploit because they derive too much benefit from the old status quo.

Yes! Exactly! The old space industries (and NASA) derive significant benefit from the status quo, and fully transitioning to the new system risks many those current benefits in the event that the new system fails to materialize.

For someone like NASA, they have many resources, so betting everything on a 95% chance of success may be a bad bet. While a start-up that has very little status quo resources, it's a really really really good bet.

However, I have a problem in characterizing that as "not understanding" the opportunity. NASA, and plenty of old space companies can recognize and understand the opportunity, while it's still a bad bet for them to make at the current development point we're at.

It's more a matter of strategic risk, and current positionining. An organization like NASA isn't in a good position to bet the farm on Starship yet, even if they fully understand the benefits of the bet if they knew the bet would pay off.

GP isn't advocating that NASA throw away everything and bet the farm on Starship. They're saying that there needs to institutional acknowledgement that what's possibly coming is a qualitative, not quantitative shift and open up the intellectual space to explore what that means.

What happens when launch costs are $10,000/kg, $1000/kg, $100/kg? What things that we're doing still make sense, what doesn't? Who could be a player that isn't a player now. It's going to happen some day, even if it doesn't happen tomorrow, but it's looking like it's increasingly about to happen tomorrow from a NASA timeline perspective.

NASA is in the business of futuristic speculation, they develop plans for hypothetical future propulsion systems or life support systems or missions and draw out the vision for the future. But like any organization, making plans for what's politically palatable is always easier than politically unpalatable and Casey is merely pointing out that lower launch costs appear based on public actions to be very politically unpalatable and thus, an institutional blind spot.

Launch costs are not the end-all be-all of space exploration/exploitation. There are a large number of extremely difficult problems to solve beyond just throwing shit into space.

1. None of the current public Starship designs include payload doors. So none of these are in any way useful as launch vehicles for orbital payloads. Payload doors a huge structural weakness and requires a lot of engineering effort. None of the current public Starship designs have an obvious "payload doors go here". A Starship-based delivery vehicle will likely be a separate design from the manned vehicle.

2. In-orbit refueling is not just an unsolved problem it's a largely unexplored problem. Moving fuel between two vehicles in free-fall is going to be a monumental challenge. You'll basically be running the same pump mechanisms you'd use for the rocket motors but feeding into a flexible umbilical between vehicles. Starships are huge so you're talking about docking two huge vehicles (one of which is nearly empty of fuel for maneuvers), connecting an umbilical between them, pumping fuel through the umbilical (in free-fall), then undocking and the two go their merry ways. None of that has been done and involves hundreds of individual challenges.

3. Musk (not necessarily SpaceX engineers) is making grand promises about the turn around time for Starships. I think they're wildly unrealistic. A large vehicle undergoing a lot of extreme dynamic forces in a flight is going to need a lot of examination before it can be safely relaunched. SpaceX is likely going to need to construct hundreds of Starships to maintain anywhere close to the promised cadence of launches. The manpower to refit vehicles is going to be expensive. There's a big difference between reusing a booster core and a vehicle that had to survive orbital reentry.

4. Even if launch costs were hundreds of dollars per kilogram it doesn't make any other aspects of spaceflight less challenging. If you send people somewhere they need their vehicle and life support launched with them. A broken toilet can still kill the crew. Just because it was cheaper to launch doesn't mean you get to scrimp on other expenses. The Space Shuttle was expensive not because of the marginal cost of the launch itself but the operations/personnel costs of the Shuttle program.

> SpaceX is likely going to need to construct hundreds of Starships to maintain anywhere close to the promised cadence of launches.

That's always been the plan. Even in the original 2016 presentation featuring the considerably larger Interplanetary Transport System that got scaled down to become what's now known as Starship and Superheavy, the plan was to churn them out en masse to make it possible to make the most of each Earth-Mars transit window.

Starships and all the parts that comprise them are designed to be mass produced and treated as cattle rather than pets.

Producing a bunch of units is a small part of the system cost. Starships will need to be inspected and refurbished between flights (high personnel cost). Launch sites need infrastructure to support that launch cadence as well. That means clean room storage, fuel production/storage, housing, and adequate roads/rail/ports for surface transport. Launches also have regulatory requirements like clearing of airspace and potential downrange landing areas.

Their own deliveries of fuel and client payloads will be delayed from the airspace and downrange surface exclusion zones.

Once you've got vehicles in space you'll need 24/7 monitoring and management. Even if mission control teams are relatively small the only way you'll be able to safely manage a large number of missions will be with a large number of teams.

The personnel and infrastructure costs will put a cap on the number of Starship launches SpaceX will ever be able to manage. The costs of those will push up the costs beyond Musk's low-ball fantasy promises.

Most likely the first few dozen Starships will not be re-launched in any short time. Although, the engines from any that land could be bolted to a new hull and re-used, after a week or two of re-work. There is simply zero plausibility of the current tile system offering any sort of quick turn-around.

But that doesn't matter. Even without any Starship re-usability (aside from Superheavy), you still come out far, far ahead of any conceivable evolution of SLS.

>I think the risk to NASA of assuming the benefits of Starship before it’s proven are just too high.

This seems to be a theme of many of Elon Musk's ideas: assume they will work and talk about what a difference it will make. Just look at the media coverage surrounding the Tesla Robot.

So, this stuff is cool and I'm glad it's happening, but there's a ton of capability to prove before any sort of external organizational budget should be allocated to the Starship project. It's still a rough prototype.

I think Shotwell keeps Elon away from SpaceX, and that's secret to SpaceX's success compared to Elon's other ventures.

Or maybe SpaceX is more successful because improvements in that industry are easier to achieve and the technology of the competition is relatively primitive. I mean, it's not exactly brain surgery.

> I mean, it’s not exactly brain surgery.

No. It’s rocket science. :)

The author trots out the "$10,000 a pound" launch cost which is really indicative of the overall quality of the article.

For non-Space Wonks, the "$10,000/lb" to orbit number was the rough cost of launching some payload on the Space Shuttle to orbit. Costs for the Space Shuttle were basically NASA's entire manned spaceflight budget divided by the number of Shuttle launches performed in a year. It's not just a naive number it's wholly misleading.

No/few commercial space launch approach $10k/lb. It's a meaningless number for any discussion of launch costs since the Space Shuttle is retired and was not a commercial launch vehicle anyways. Even the most expensive ULA rockets aren't even close to that price.

If you're going to talk about space launch capabilities and bring up stupid numbers it impacts your credibility.

The author mentions $10000/kg, not per pound. This number is reasonably accurate for recent launch within one order of magnitude.

Starlink launches were claimed to cost $35 million for 16 tons, this means SpaceX is still around $2000/kg even internally. This is the lowest cost of "real" missions with payload adapters and deployment mechanisms.

Atlas 551 is ~150M for max 18.8tons to orbit so best theoretical price is > $8000/kg.

Dividing the space shuttle program cost of $196B by 133 successful launches and a max payload of 23tons you get around $64000/kg.

Spacex is building the transcontinental railroads of the solar system. There is mind boggling upside for them. I'm kinda disappointed Blue Origin seems to have fallen in a rut. I'm sure Musk will be happy to provide transportation for Bezos space colony construction projects!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railroad_Tycoon

Edit My point isn't to disparage Bezos, but to highlight the fact that anyone with grand aspirations in orbit/solar system will have to go through Musk and Spacex until a competitor does appear. RE space colonies, I believe the natural sequence of events for space tourism is: sub orbital, oribital, long term orbital (a small space "hotel") culminating in orbital habitat ala O'Neil Cylinders. Cheap kg to orbit enables all of that.

Yeah but watching Bezos turn into a household joke is worth it.

He’s a household joke the same way Elon is a household joke.

Bezos is a household joke even in Elon's household. Elon is a nightmare in Bezos'es. That's where the difference is.

Can someone explain the joke to me?

Transcontinental railroads provided routes between already populated areas, with viable trade between them.

Solar system beyond Earth is more like a desert, possibly rich with resources, but nearly no resource is precious enough to be worth carrying by a starship.

The incentives for space expansion past LEO and GEO will not be economical.

That doesn't really hold up though. California has a lot desert and was sparsely settled until the gold rush for example. Also, in situ resource utilization is an area where technology and innovation are certain to provide advantage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_situ_resource_utilization

California has a nice climate, lots of free air, some freshwater, several easily navigable havens for bulk transport. The barrier of settling there near the shore is pretty low, even if you don't trade much and just self-sustain.

A more proper comparison would be Klondike. Inhospitable, barren Arctic land, rather hard to self-sustain, really easy to die. It was only interesting because of the rich gold deposits.

Compared to that, Moon is like 100x the hardships of Klondike, but without the gold, and a ship back to Earth is so expensive that any cargo costs more than gold by weight. Or, at least, so it is now.

There are no immediate economic incentives to settle on the Moon or Mars or even further away. But there are non-economic incentives, much like those which produced the Mayflower.

I often think of this observation by Bruce Sterling:

> I'll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I see people setting the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach. Nobody ever writes "Gobi Desert Opera" because, well, it's just kind of plonkingly obvious that there's no good reason to go there and live. It's ugly, it's inhospitable and there's no way to make it pay. Mars is just the same, really. We just romanticize it because it's so hard to reach.

https://boingboing.net/2004/01/08/sterling-ill-believe.html

Gobi desert doesn't have 1/3 earth gravity.

What are the economic benefits of low gravity? If so, would the moon be more economically valuable than Mars?

I’m genuinely curious about the economics of doing more in space than putting up satellites.

I mean obviously you need less energy to move things around. We spend an enormous amount of energy to move things around on earth.

1/6th of Earth gravity is even better.

Short term: a wonderful tourist attraction. You can nearly fly.

Long term: people with muscular / bone disabilities who cannot withstand Earth gravity. An interesting retiring home (for a narrow wealthy set, of course).

Who is going to pay to fly these sickly retirees to the moon, and then continuous supply them with resources that are literally free on Earth (ie air)? Medicare?

Moreover, if they struggle with earth gravity, how will they survive launch and landing?

By using the space elevator, of course!

For a spacefaring civilization reliant upon chemical rockets, less gravity is better. Point being Mars is a better place for such a civilization, not earth.

Though both are probably apocryphal:

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers,"

and:

"640K ought to be enough for anybody."

We're really bad at predicting how things will change. Who would have thought that Tim Berners-Lee would be a link in a chain to Donald Trump's election?

Do we know the Chinese part of the story? I feel like the western media hardly report anything on them while e.g. Wikipedia suggests that there are new developments happening all the time:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Manned_Space_Program

How significant are those in practice?

Can we just build private space, lunar, and martian colonies? They could be financed by Tesla shareholders.

The colonisation of the world by Europeans started with government investment, but eventually became self-sustaining.

If these offworld colonies are free of political correctness, crime, taxes, welfare systems, and disease, and contain only beautiful, healthy, and intelligent people (via careful selection, including genetic screening and IQ tests, of permitted colonists), they could draw the best of humanity to them.

Are you familiar with the term "Company Town"? We have, collectively, quite a lot of history with the concept. The Soviet Union did quite a lot more with the idea than western countries did.

The GULag system was just one collection of data points. The nuclear weapons reservations, space launch complexes, and bio-weapons towns were others.

The experience was not, on average, considered inspirational.

Oligarchs live well because they exploit their subjects.

>Starship is intended to be able to transport a million tonnes of cargo to the surface of Mars in just ten launch windows.

So at 100tons per starship sent to Mars that's 10,000 trips or 1000 per launch window. But the current plans call for something like 16 starship launches just for refuelling the one starship for the lunar mission. Suppose we can do the Mars trip with the same number of flights that's 170,000 launches to transport that 100million tons? And this guy is mad that nasa is not assuming that this is achievable?

By the time you're sending a thousand Starships in one go, the fuel's probably coming from an orbital refinery processing chunks of captured comets, not Earth launches.

Or they've been replaced with some big Aldrin cyclers built using Starships.

That's exactly my point. This guy is pissed that NASA is not planning properly because Starship will unlock the ability to send millions of tons all over the solar system but in realty starship is only one of hundreds (thousands?) of advancements that will need to be made before we can think of sending 100's of millions of tons around the system.

I think it's reasonable to think NASA should currently being doing exploratory thinking about "how would we build something like a space station, lunar base, or Mars mission if Starship is available within the decade", though. Which is what I think the author is advocating; to get a few years out in front, rather than waiting until Starship reaches the point where it can't be ignored.

But isn't NASA already doing that? I mean SpaceX and starship was just awarded the solo lunar lander contract no? The first Artimis flights are in 2023 no?

A little. I take the point as "Think bigger."

The whole point is that Starship actually allows you to start thinking of the very problems you speak of.

Before you had it, suggesting mining a asteroid was just pointless and insane. Now you can actually think about.

And that is what NASA should do. Now getting stuff to LEO is 'solved' what can you actually do.

> The whole point is that Starship actually allows you to start thinking of the very problems you speak of.

Thank you for pointing that out - I just realized that with Starship, we even could start thinking about putting some smaller asteroids out of a potential collision course with it.

Would anyone like to estimate the CO2 emissions produced by that?

A Starship's gonna generate about the same emissions as a similarly sized passenger aircraft generates from a full fuel load.

We fly ~40M flights a year. It'd be a drop in the bucket.

A 737-800 has a max take off weight of 175,000lbs

Super Heavy Dry Mass: 350,000-440,000lbs Super Heavy Fuel Weight: 7,500,000lbs Starship Dry Mass: ~200,000lbs Starship Fuel Weight: 2,600,000lbs

Starship+Booster total: 10,695,000lbs

175,000lbs vs 10,965,000lbs!

There is no such thing as a similarly sized aircraft!

A 747-8's MTOW is about a million pounds. Ten-ish 747s for a Starship, as a roughly worst case estimate. Only so much carbon you can stuff into a ton of fuel.

A single-digit percentage global increase in aviation emissions.

(I'm also very skeptical of that level of Starship launches. By the time you're getting anywhere near that, you're likely to have captured some comets and are processing fuel for interplanetary missions in an orbital refinery. Net zero emissions except for getting the people and Earth-only parts up to LEO.)

> By the time you're getting anywhere near that, you're likely to have captured some comets and are processing fuel for interplanetary missions in an orbital refinery.

I think you’re underestimating both the mass of a comet and that the geopolitical implications of a private company being one industrial accident away from replicating something several orders of magnitude closer to Chicxulub than to Tsar Bomba would prevent them being allowed to even try it.

I did a napkin estimate a while back, and even optimistically 10,000 Starship launches is just where you start going “hmm, perhaps we should think about starting to seriously plan the basics of an orbital ring or a launch loop” — a 40Mm circumference steel loop with a cross section of 1m^2 is still about 30 times less massive than 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko.

> I think you’re underestimating both the mass of a comet and that the geopolitical implications of a private company being one industrial accident away from replicating something several orders of magnitude closer to Chicxulub than to Tsar Bomba would prevent them being allowed to even try it.

Meh, you could regulate it fairly effectively. Changing the path of a comet is something that's gonna have to be done years out. Deviating from the planned course would be obvious long before it'd hit anything.

Bet your life?

If it was a naïve straight-line path with no funky orbital mechanics to make things even harder to get right, the difference between hitting the Earth at 90° and missing by the orbit of the moon is a sideways delta-v of 13 m/s one year in advance. The sideways Δv between a 45° impact and LEO, 7 days in advance, is 3.5 m/s.

I’m curious: Even ignoring engine errors, given near-Earth solar orbital velocities, what’s the mass of the smallest asteroid which, if it impacted that comet 7 days before the comet reached Earth, could cause it to hit Earth? For whatever orbit you want to put it in, and whatever mass of comet you want to suggest using.

> The sideways Δv between a 45° impact and LEO, 7 days in advance, is 3.5 m/s.

In other words, the larger the comet, the better.

You'd need a fairly obvious number of rockets to impart that sort of velocity change on a large one, right? And if you're doing it to a pebble, it doesn't matter too much?

> In other words, the larger the comet, the better.

I don’t think so? If you’re bringing in a big one you need more engines to push it into the right orbit to start with, so I think the risk is always things that scale up directly with the comet’s mass, e.g. “the engines are misaligned by $foo degrees”.

Also, a pebble in space terms is still a potential city-killer, and no nation in their right mind is going to want to let a private company — not one of their own, let alone a private company in another nation if they have even the slightest say in the matter — wield that kind of potential: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteor_Crater

In the "whoops" scenario (i.e. non-malicious), an engine misalignment would be apparent with enough time to correct. You're a year out.

We watch asteroids zing by regularly. The ones we know about have their chances of hitting calculated years or decades out.

Sideways motion is harder to determine than motion towards us; the former needs angular resolution, the latter doppler radar.

And the sort of rock that could shift 67P from a safe to a dangerous path (LEO to 45 degrees one year ahead) would be about 13 metres radius. The Wikipedia citation is 5 years old, so I don’t know what we know today, but in 2016 the estimate was we only knew somewhere around 1.3% of asteroids between 40m and 3.5m diameter (and 0.003% of smaller than that, because things get harder to spot as you get smaller).

Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-Earth_object#Size_distrib...

ArXiv link because the citation in Wikipedia was giving me a server error: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1604.06328.pdf

This hand wringing about CO2 Emissions by rockets is the weirdest ongoing trend I've seen. If you want to complain about environmental issues, at least complain about something interesting like how sound at the launch pad disrupts the breeding patterns of an animal or something.

At least that can cause interesting discussion other than , BUT CO2 and WARMING.

It doesn't matter whether it's interesting or not, it only matters whether it's happening and who and what it's affecting.

Starship contains a total of 3,400 + 1,200 = 4,600 tons of propellant [1]. The propellant being methane and oxygen.

So, someone can do the math to work out how much CO2 is generated by burning that much of that mix. In any case, that is very small compared to the overall emissions of human society.

That being said, methane can be produced a number of ways, for instance digestion of food waste. Therefore, they could source methane in a way that would allow to claim (quite reasonably) that they are carbon-neutral.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship

100 tons of payload. Rockets are typically about 2% payload so 5000 tons fully fuelled. Fuel and oxidizer combine to H2O, OH, CO and CO2. So, not all the exhaust product is CO2. But some of the CO released is combined with atmospheric oxygen to CO2, so that increases the mass of CO2 besides direct propellant mass.

We could as first guess say that it's about 5000 tons of CO2 per launch. So 1000 launches would be 5 million tons.

US CO2 emissions per capita are about 16 tons per year, so it would be equivalent to the yearly emissions of 300,000 Americans or one thousandth of the country's yearly emissions.

10,000 launches would be 1% of US total emissions.

Except it's not 10,000 launches, it's 170,000 (see other comments here).

So that's 850M tons, about a 10% increase (on top of the 2nd most polluting country in the world), so yeah, not happening.

I would personally rally against the govt. (and everything that allowed that to happen) if Elon gets a free pass on that.

Ok, I'm not that familiar with the plans with starship.

I think the premise of the article is wrong anyway.

I think no matter what the system is like, it still makes sense to optimize for mass in a reasonable way. That means, not sending dead weight to high delta vee. Leave big tanks or engines behind.

It's a bit like you don't transport your car with the airplane. It would be madness.

Exponentials are unintuitive. The total mass of all fuel in all stages is directly proportional to the mass that needs to be sent to the highest delta vee. So for example (to take a few shortcuts) if your moon ascent stage is 1% heavier, everything has to be 1% heavier, including the first stage of the launcher. So 1 kg in the ascent stage might not look like much but it grows the first stage at something like 1000 kg.

That's why I'm really skeptical of the architecture of landing atmospheric stages to the surface. They are just unnecessarily heavy. You have maybe quadrupled your total launch amount from the surface (haven't done an analysis).

Early Apollo planning had direct landing because docking in orbit had not been demonstrated. Gemini validated that. Orbital docking works fine and Apollo could continue with muchh more efficient architectures. Actually, docking has gotten a lot better, we did have Apollo, yes, and we have robotic tugs routinely flying to ISS.

Engines haven't made significant progress since the sixties, not enough to warrant really big architectural changes towards less mass efficiency.

If anything, the improved docking and automation that has already been demonstrated would swing the architectural plans for moon or Mars to have even more docking, berthing, refueling and staging!

Direct landing might only make sense with something like nuclear propulsion...

> That's why I'm really skeptical of the architecture of landing atmospheric stages to the surface. They are just unnecessarily heavy. You have maybe quadrupled your total launch amount from the surface (haven't done an analysis).

Lunar starship is not an atmospheric stage.

In the fine article, in Casey Handmer's plan, Starship is landed to the surface and returns directly to LEO or even to Earth surface.

So yes the heat shield goes all the way down to the lunar surface and back.

https://caseyhandmer.files.wordpress.com/2021/03/artemisspac...

The Starship actually being built by SpaceX under the HLS contract for NASA has no heat shield or atmospheric engines. It is meant to be expendable, or for reuse only in space without servicing.

Yes, which the fine article was criticizing.

The plan is to use atmospheric processing to produce methane and LOX on-site using renewable power. So it’d be net-zero carbon emissions.

Musk has promised that eventually they will use synthetic methane to launch Starship, so net emissions will be zero.

He also promised fully self driving cars were six months away. And sweared Vernon Unsworth was a pedophile.

Not sure why PR statements matter.

You are passive aggressively attacking the guy who is basically doing the only really inspiring thing in the world today, while at the same time basically single handedly forcing the auto industry into electrifying like 30 years early.

So, honestly, please, stop.

The beliefs that Elon Musk

A) Was attacked by the parent comment B) Needs defending here of all places C) Is the only person doing something inspiring in the world

Indicate that you might want to broaden your worldview.

Electric cars will not save us from climate change, nor will rockets send us into climate oblivion.

Everyone keeps pointing to the CO2 of the rocket itself but forget the enormous infrastructure requirements to launch a rocket the CO2 that creates. Even if starship bursn clean, it's infrastructure does not.

I am more concerned about the Ozone damage.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/147776209027688...

Blue Origin said it would be 16, Musk has claimed it won't be more than 8.

https://wccftech.com/musk-rejects-blue-origins-claim-of-16-s...

It ends up being ~100,000 launches over 10 launch windows. Elon has talked about building 1000 starships (presumably you would need less boosters)

https://www.tesmanian.com/blogs/tesmanian-blog/1000-starship...

Anyway, it's absolutely the case that transferring a million tons of cargo will require a new way of thinking about the scale of launches.I would also not assume that the refueling launches have to all take place within the window, that's a bad assumption to start with. You would start your refueling launches well ahead of the window.

added point - I do think the article overlooks that while Starship will change things, the timing is likely to be slow enough that NASA will be able to adapt. They do have ridiculous timelines on some of their projects, but just like everything else, they will just rewrite those timelines if new solutions present themselves.

Even 90,000 launches over 10 launch windows is 9,000 launches per window. Launch opportunities are about 30 days max per window (depending on the flight profile) so that'd be 300 launches per day or over 12 launches per hour .

I'm not saying this is bonkers, but this is completely ridiculous and it doesn't matter whether it's 90,000 or 180,000 or even "just" 45,000 launches - it's completely impractical.

Not to mention that proponents always act as if it's no biggie to just crank out thousands of metric tons of useful equipment for a permanent Mars settlement in just a couple of years.

You, know, including R&D and engineering and paying for all that.

Don't assume that launches for refueling operations happen during the launch window. The window is really as long as you want it to be for refueling. Yes, there are engineering challenges associated with having fuel in orbit over a longer period.

I'll agree there is a shortage of plans and an excess of hope in what you're going to ship to Mars in the near term. But I can also see where others are saying -- something this big requires a slow organization like NASA to start planning now.

> Don't assume that launches for refueling operations happen during the launch window. The window is really as long as you want it to be for refueling.

Indeed, the parent comment was making a bad assumption. If you look at it that way, refueling can happen anytime in the 2-years between windows. So say 10,000 launches over 730 days is 13 or 14 launches per day. Given multiple launch sites, seems feasible enough (in the same sense of feasible as producing 100,000 tonnes of goods destined for mars every 2 years).

Launching isn't the whole mission though, even if you can achieve that rate. For every launch you also need hours of time for rendezvous, docking, and fuel transfer. And even if somehow there is a solution to this schedule, you're talking about doing it 10,000 times safely and without a hitch.

Based on what, your gut feel? 12 launches per hour does not seem insane at all.

Based on the fact that it would be more flying mass than the domestic airline industry.

In 2020 there was 114 orbital launches supporting all space missions around the world. That's 0.013 launches per hour. 12 launches per hour to support a single mission does not seem at least a little insane? I love SpaceX and am hopeful for their Mars plans but we are scientists and engineers let's think with our brains and not our hearts.

if computers taught me anything.. it's if you can do 1 thing really really well perfectly, it's not a ton of work to do it 10x or 100x in parallel.

We don't have enough data to know reliability of say Falcon long term. Is it 99% successful? 99.9%? 99.999999%? Doing a ton of launches, you really want to work on the 9s, so 0-1 of your launches blow up, not 100+. But once you do, you just copy paste it baby and go to town.

I am not convinced the scalability of cyberspace applies to actual space.

I don't think it's a good example either. But the scalability of mass production may apply, and that might be good enough...

There is a literally a book called “The Mythical Man Month” about the limits of parallelism in computer engineering. It’s arguably one of the fundamental texts of the discipline.

And that book has literally nothing to do with what is being discussed.

Right. I didn't say we hire 100 developers to code the project 100x faster.

I said let's build 100 parallel rocket pads with 100 parallel rockets.

It will indeed launch rockets 100x faster.

The term you are looking for is embarrassingly parallel.

Only parts of the system are embarrassingly parallel. But you need the whole system to be available for every launch.

Poorly parallel parts of the system include regulatory clearance and accident investigations. There is only so much clear air space available each day. And if a rocket blows up (which they often do), they’ll all sit on the ground until there is understanding as to why. And then potentially sit even longer if they each require work to correct or mitigate flaws that are found.

Starships are still hand-built prototypes. And Musk has a history of underestimating the difficulty in scaling and automating physical manufacturing.

It’s way too early to be confident this can embarrassingly parallel. Parallelism is hard in general. It’s hard because often constraints aren’t obvious until you’re actually doing it.

What's a few orders of magnitude among friends?

Think about what you’re saying, does 12 launches per hour sound all that crazy? Maybe having 1000s of planes up in the air at the same time would have sounded similarly crazy to someone on the 50s

> Based on what, your gut feel?

Based on the fact that every orbital launch requires airspace restrictions, local road closures, blocked patches of sea and launch permissions.

The regulatory framework alone is incapable of dealing with that (keep in mind that every orbital rocket is basically an ICBM), let alone the fact that you'd have to spread launches over multiple sites therefore rendering considerable patches of air- and waterways completely closed up for weeks on end.

And that's just the regulatory side of things. There's also the logistical side wherein you'd have to consider methane production and -storage as well as ground operations.

100t-class orbital rockets aren't aeroplanes and the procedures involved in checking, refuelling and launch are much more involved. Keep in mind that SpaceX of all companies was the first company who managed to lose a rocket during fuelling in over 5 decades.

Now scale that risk (of currently 1:129 - make that 1:1000 since I'm being generous here) to 9,000 launches and you'd be looking at about 9 major explosions (worst case) per launch campaign and that's without the added stress from an unprecedented launch cadence taken into account.

You'd be looking at this: https://youtu.be/AOFVuAmcoCA?t=43

two times a week and handwaving that away by quoting fantasy goals for the achievable reliability isn't going to change the fact that even one such incident would halt the entire program for a considerable amount of time.

> Based on the fact that every orbital launch requires airspace restrictions, local road closures, blocked patches of sea and launch permissions.

So set up a [semi]-permanent airspace restriction somewhere inland, remote enough that there are no local roads to worry about, and don't block any patches of sea. And do the permission in bulk, obviously.

> major explosions (worst case) per launch campaign

Failure rate is something to consider in several ways but largely unrelated to the launches-per-hour metric.

It can’t be inland, because there’d be a huge stretch of flyover restrictions. It’d be at sea on top of mobile floating platforms. Like the two oil rigs SpaceX bought last year…

Genuine question: how important is the launch window when you start thinking about bulk transport to Mars? If you build thousands of starships, how much does it matter if some of them are slower to arrive?

It's not like flying to Mars is impossible outside the launch window. It takes longer and probably needs more fuel, but by how much?

> how important is the launch window when you start thinking about bulk transport to Mars?

Launch windows aren't just about time of travel. They are primarily about the energy required to get to your target.

You can in principle launch to anywhere at any given moment, but the required energy will be much higher. So high in fact, that a Starship-type spacecraft would be unable to make the trip due to lack of fuel.

Hyperbolic trajectories require higher energies and the exact amount involves solving partial differential equations that depend on the exact orbital configuration (i.e. date and location of launch), so I cannot provide a general answer as to how much more fuel would be required.

Suffices to say it would take more fuel than a Starship is able to carry and a hyperbolic trajectory would require en-route refuelling, which is basically impossible since the tankers/fuel depot would have to move at the same speed.

> It ends up being ~100,000 launches over 10 launch windows. Elon has talked about building 1000 starships

managing that many launches...spaceships mid-journey, refueling in space ETC... would the 'head count' at spaceX have to increase greatly, or would they keep a relatively small crew and just 'scale out' having it mostly controlled by code/automation

For sure both.

I just can't see it happening. How many launches have there been in total since the first launch of anything in space? I can't see it being much more than 10K, and it's definitely in that order of magnitude.

There's just not enough raw materials and fuel for that amount of launches, and environmental objections will catch up with them long before that.

There's not enough aluminum and steel?

There's not enough oxygen? Hydrogen? We can make renewable methane just fine.

Even if we used oil a quick calculation says that 1000 tons * 10000 launches would barely break a tenth of a percent of our current semiannual oil use. I think that's an affordable impact for a truly massive mars campaign.

I wanted to get some sense of how much weight that is in Chicago building terms. 1 million metric tons is like sending 5 Sears Towers (aka Willis Tower) to Mars.

"Mars trip with the same number of flights that's 170,000 launches to transport that 100million tons? And this guy is mad"

I think the idea that Starship will get us cities on mars is pure fantasyland. You could have a decent base on the moon, and maybe a visit to Mars, but if you want million tons to Mars, you have to go beyong chemical rockets, build a mars transit vehicle, etc.

It makes no sence to forgo those technologies if you are moving billions of tons.

I think he's handwaving a bt on how easy "space tractors" are going to be. Caterpillar etc are as fully invested int heir corporate structures and current practices as Kodak and all the other dead companies he mentions were; just because they could adapt things with "vacuum rated bearings" etc doesn't mean they will.

I fear we'll need some legal reforms before we can have "the remainder of human industry" keep up with SpaceX here. They've got Musk's "laws don't apply" card shielding them, or something, to explain how they've managed to innovate this far and this fast. The company that produces a cheap vacuum capable drone tractor won't have that, and will be rendered a wet stain by big competitors before they can get one of their products on a rocket. I expect.

I loved this bit:

> McMaster-Carr already stocks thousands of parts that will work in mines, on oil rigs, and any number of other horrendously corrosive, warranty voiding environments compared to which the vacuum of space is delightfully benign.

Yeah, working underwater means it'll work in space no problem!

I don't think it means that you take the underwater parts and use them in space - it means that it was possible to make it work in adverse environments at cheaper than NASA prices.

Space is probably harder just because there is less experience and it's much more difficult to get it. Temperature extremes and lubricants seem to be obvious difficulies.

I'm trying to conceive a vacuum capable hydraulic cylinder. As someone who has used backhoes to dig in water then helped refurb the cylinders afterwards. I'm not seeing any happy possibilities, myself.

I agree that it should be possible to make things work at cheaper prices than NASA, but that's still a long way from "easy" or "Commercial off the Shelf"

I'm curious in what ways a industrial cylinder wouldn't be vacuum capable. Pressure shouldn't be a concern. they operate at 5-10,000 PSI above the ambient environment, so an additional 14 PSI differential shouldn't matter.

I'm guessing operating temperatures would be a big concern

What failed in water?

Corrosion is a concern, all over but especially on the inner cylinder that has to seal. The seals are probably OK but they're important and redo them anyway when its open. The fluid will pick up some water and thats a whole hydraulic system flush, once you get "too much".

Then you've got bearings and grease ports and channels that not only don't necessarily like water; but you're not operating in clean water either and that compounds all the problems.

Noting almost total ignorance of the realities: I forsee vacuum hydraulics problems including keeping seals tight, the inevitable oil coating on cylinders boiling off and getting polymerized residue buildup. Double enclose all the actuators and have another seal system so you can have a moving thing poking out of a hull, as is done for boats, will probably be necessary... and that'll have its own problems at the actuation points i bet.

I am very much not a rocket scientist. But off the top of my head:

Cooling. In space there's no ambient cooling by air. If you want to cool something, you have to pump heat out of it and into a radiator. And since that is energy-intensive, you want to minimise heat production as far as you can.

Volatiles. In a vacuum those will boil off and not come back. All sorts of polymers, possibly including those used in seals and bearings, suffer from this.

Electrostatic build up. Again, there's no route for this to escape into the air, so you need to make sure that anywhere it can build up is grounded, i suppose.

Maintenance. Depending on where you're going to use it, you might not be able to depend on some guy with a socket set and ungloved fingers being able to fiddle with it whenever necessary.

Gravity. I don't know much about hydraulics, but all sorts of machinery is designed around an unstated assumption that liquid will drip downwards given a chance (sumps etc).

Some of these problems go away on the moon (which has gravity, and potentially pressurised garages for maintenance) or Mars (which has the above, and also some atmosphere).

To add to list vacuum welding. Which happens in hard vacuum. Making it somewhat complicated to test and solve for on Earth. Specially if we talk about large scale machinery. Then I suppose large scale hard vacuum will be solved by hyperloop...

It's a bit naive to assume heavy industry doesn't already have solutions to most of environmental challenges in space. I'm constantly surprised by how dismissive high tech is of dinosaur industries.

Heavy industry does not specialize in the environmental and logistical challenges of space. You can't just slap in some oil drilling equipment into your rocket and expect it to perform to the degree you need. Every bit of equipment needs extensive testing, and likely extensive modification as well. That's not cheap, and it's often better to just design something purpose built for space, instead of trying to modify some piece of Earth-based equipment.

Maybe not an entire drilling apparatus but what about the bits? What about bolts and nuts that won't cold weld? Bearings that work in a vacuum? I'm sure there are plenty examples. Going further, what about launch systems? Surely those can mostly be built out of off the shelf parts.

The author is a physicist, not an engineer and shows in all of his articles.

Physicists are trained to check whether a concept passes the constraints of the current theoretical models. If it does, the rest is just an engineering problem - i.e. take the theoretical upper limits of mechanics and material science and extrapolate from there.

No concern for the pesky 10% that take up 90% of the development time and make or break a product.

In this context: sure, there's equipment that can work in space. But all of this equipment needs to be operated and maintained by humans and there's where your problem starts.

Remote operation is impractical beyond the Earth-Moon system.

> No concern for the pesky 10% that take up 90% of the development time and make or break a product.

You're missing the author's main point and the whole reason Starship is a big deal. With current launch costs, all that equipment has to be designed, reviewed and tested up front to guarantee, as much as humanly possible, that it'll work in space the first time, because there's no money to try again. With launch costs Starship offers even under pessimistic estimates, even non-space companies will be able to afford to just send stuff to space to see what breaks, and then iterate until it works. That "10% work" becomes orders of magnitude cheaper.

> With launch costs Starship offers even under pessimistic estimates, even non-space companies will be able to afford to just send stuff to space to see what breaks, and then iterate until it works. That "10% work" becomes orders of magnitude cheaper.

That is a ridiculous position to take. If you have a drill on Earth that burns out you might pop a circuit breaker and have to deal with some acrid smoke for a second or two. You wave it away and it will dissipate into the five and a half quadrillion metric tons of atmosphere. If some parts fly off they'll fall to the ground pretty quickly. If you drop the drill it will fall to the ground.

If you've got a drill on a spacecraft that burns out popping a circuit breaker or some acrid smoke is a thousand times more dangerous. Just spalling of some parts can send debris flying around the craft to cause short circuits or damage life support equipment. If you let the drill go because it hurt you it doesn't fall to the ground but instead float there being dangerous or bouncing off equipment that won't like a drill bouncing off of it.

Lot's of stuff works fine on Earth, even down in mines or other places, because we've got a relatively thick atmosphere with favorable temperature and gravity. Lubricants don't literally boil off equipment if they're left in the sun for a few minutes. We also don't have to deal with temperature variations of hundreds of degrees between shade and full sunlight.

Sending random crap to space without understanding the environment or failure modes would be extremely foolish.

> Sending random crap to space without understanding the environment or failure modes would be extremely foolish.

Well, of course I'm exaggerating, but the point is: with low enough costs, you can afford to iterate on designs you previously had to do perfectly up front. Learning from failures becomes cheaper than having to predict every possible failure mode up front.

> Learning from failures becomes cheaper than having to predict every possible failure mode up front.

But this assertion is wrong. There's a minimum price of failure in space. To have just a bare minimum of safety you must understand at least some failure modes of things you're sending into space. That requires testing and qualification. It doesn't matter if our hypothetical drill costs $10 or $100, to even think of launching it in the first place requires thousands of dollars in qualification for the environment. At that point the difference in launch cost is negligible to the point of unimportant.

Safety regulations are written in blood. The Apollo I disaster occurred in part because the behavior of nylon (Velcro and cargo netting)[0] in the crew cabin in a pure oxygen environment was not understood. A material that was perfectly safe in an Earth-like environment had a catastrophic failure mode in a pure oxygen at high pressure like during the "plugs out" test being conducted.

You can't just throw random crap into enclosed environments to tear them out in situ. That's how to write uncomfortable letters to next of kin. Real life isn't Kerbal Space Program. You don't respawn or reload a save game if your ship explodes.

[0] https://www.space.com/14379-apollo1-fire-space-capsule-safet...

I don't know - I think the point is that at Starship costs its cheaper and faster to shoot up a tractor to space than to test it in a vacuum chamber. Especially for longer term tests.

NASA devices have to work right every time the first time. That is because they are not getting replaced in a decade if ever if they fail. With a launch cadence measured in days you can just shoot up a new one or 10.

> They've got Musk's "laws don't apply" card shielding them, or something, to explain how they've managed to innovate this far and this fast.

People will quite literally use any excuse to not give them Musk credit.

Apparently the reason SpaceX can land rockets and build Starship is that they somehow don't follow the law.

It couldn't possible by the the company is well managed, have great engineers and is lead by a great engineer.

Beg pardon, no denigration of SpaceX accomplishments intended at all. They've put awesome efforts into getting these awesome results and Musk's celebrity shadows the work of some modern heroes who should be further celebrated.

However, all of that wouldn't have been allowed to succeed, without Musk's unaccountable aura of burrocratic avoidance. In my opinion.

> without Musk's unaccountable aura of burrocratic avoidance. In my opinion.

Can you tell me exactly what you mean and how it significantly increased their development speed and overall performance?

And can you show that different standards were applied to other space companies.

They did one test launch where the FAA inspector wasn't there. This causes a review of the company by FAA and eventually they were allowed to continue.

The only argument I could see is that somehow other companies would been punished more harshly?

But other then that I really don't see what you mean.

>They did one test launch where the FAA inspector wasn't there.

You are being deliberately misleading with this statement. You say that as if SpaceX accidentally launched while the inspector was in the bathroom. When in reality the FAA explicitly told SpaceX not to launch BEFORE the launch. And that doing so would be a violation of their launch license. The fact that the FAA reviewed the situation and then allowed to continue kind of proves the parents point.

> You are being deliberately misleading with this statement.

No, I wasn't. I simply stated he wasn't there, and he wasn't. I didn't imply anything beyond that he wasn't there.

> proves the parents point.

No it doesn't. People violate different things and are allowed to continue to operate. Virgin Orbit was just stopped from operating and had to go threw review.

Doing a review of company and its safety culture is standard procedure.

This is not a human launcher, those have far higher requirements.

Can you actually show that if it wasn't SpaceX, the company would have somehow been stopped from continuing?

>No, I wasn't. I simply stated he wasn't there, and he wasn't. I didn't imply anything beyond that he wasn't there.

Honest communication is about more then just making sure your statements a factually correct, context matters.

I don't know what is not clear about what I said. The person wasn't there, for a rocket launch that clearly implies the facilities where the rocket is launch from.

Not sure how one could interpret that any other way.

And you continue to not provide that evidence for that SpaceX treatment was particularly unusually and gives them a massive advantage (not to mention that by that point SpaceX existed for almost 20 year).

> When in reality the FAA explicitly told SpaceX not to launch BEFORE the launch. And that doing so would be a violation of their launch license.

I'm looking into this, the details I'm finding are not clear enough for my liking.

The FAA said there was too much shockwave risk based on their weather models, and rejected a request to waive that threshold.

SpaceX's own models said the risk was within limits.

> Minutes before liftoff, an FAA safety inspector speaking on an open phone line warned SpaceX’s staff in the launch control room that a launch would violate the company’s launch license. SpaceX staff ignored the warning because they “assumed that the inspector did not have the latest information,” the SpaceX report said.

So that leaves a very important question in my mind. Was that inspector using their authority to directly deny authorization to the flight, or were they advising spacex that their authorization was already gone because of the weather?

The former is a very big issue, but I'd say the latter is only a moderate issue. Also depending on whose weather models were actually right, but it sounds like it must have been pretty borderline.

> The fact that the FAA reviewed the situation and then allowed to continue kind of proves the parents point.

> FAA investigators couldn’t determine whether the SN8 license violation was intentional, according to people involved in and briefed on the investigation, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

That sure doesn't sound like it "proves" spacex got special leniency.

I don't see what you mean. The bureaucracy in the last ten years had been supportive of SpaceX.

Yes, SpaceX engineers deserve the credit, and Elon Musk on one or more occasion credited them.

If there is a law that prevents Elon Musk from building rockets than I am on the side of whoever breaks it.

NASA is hamstrung by Congress here. Congress mandated the SLS program. It's not meant to be competitive with SpaceX. SLS is a jobs program for key districts, no more, no less. It's welfare for Boeing.

I don't know if NASA personnel cannot plan for or even discuss SpaceX. It's probably not that overt. The powers there probably just realize it'd be career suicide to do so.

I completely agree that reducing LEO payload costs (in $/kg) by 2 or even 3 orders of magnitude will be game-changing.

Personally I'd like to see a viable competitor to SpaceX here because competition is good and it drives innovation. But it isn't Boeing, ULA or even Blue Origin. I actually think Blue Origin is so culturally broken that you'd almost be better off starting from scratch.

>> A space-adapted tractor needs better paint, a vacuum compatible hydraulic power source, vacuum-rated bearings, lubricants, wire insulation, and a redundant remote control sensor kit. I can see NASA partnering with industry to produce and test these parts, but that is no way to service the institutional overhead embodied by a team of hundreds of people toiling on a single mission for a decade.

If one function of NASA is to redistribute pork spending around the country, that seems like an even better way to do it. Rather than have contractors that strictly focus on NASA activities, use existing companies and fund projects to make space-capable versions of existing equipment. That also means the money can be shuffled around more as needed.

> We need a team of economists to rederive the relative elasticities of various design choices and boil them down to a new set of design heuristics for space system production oriented towards maximizing volume of production. Or, more generally, maximizing some robust utility function assuming saturation of Starship launch capacity.

This is not really what economists do. Elasticity is not something an economist can “derive” or predict in advance of market developments with any reliability. It can only be reliably observed.

That is the whole point of a free market. What is possible—changes in elasticity between factors—emerges from complex behavior. As it emerges, new efforts can compete to take advantage of it, thereby themselves creating new possibilities.

This is why people are not re-inventing everything around the Starship vision yet; because it hasn’t actually happened yet.

There are many projects and companies sitting on the garbage heap of history because of, basically, a branch prediction error. They guessed wrong on direction or timing. Even if Elon is right about Starship costs, but it takes significantly longer than expected to get there, that’s a huge risk to projects that set it today as a dependency.

A big part of the cost of space missions is not making things as light as possible, but developing the scientific instruments. More upmass doesn't always make designing sensitive scientific instruments easier.

If said scientific instruments need to go on a rover, mass still matters. More mass can limit rover mobility and at some point the rover requires more power than can be provided with RTGs or solar cells.

Exactly. Way too many people seem to ignore the cost of developing and certifying scientific instruments.

There's nothing gained from sending 50t of metal to the outer solar system. Scientific instruments are usually purpose-built and while lifting mass restriction can bring down cost, you'd still have to account for redundancy and precision because no one's going to fly out to Jupiter to properly unfold that darn antenna.

Nuclear power sources are still mighty expensive too. Solar is hard past Mars, and near impossible past Jupiter, AFAIK.

> Way too many people seem to ignore the cost of developing and certifying scientific instruments.

It gets ignored because it is a symptom of not being able to cheaply launch probes. You spend all of this time researching and developing a scientific instrument only to make two of them. One to launch the other to go on a diagnostic model (maybe a third for a launch backup). You spread out the cost of development over more units and bring down the per unit cost of manufacturing (although probably not that much given we are still talking quantities in the tens or at most hundreds of units). But without a cheap launch system there is a fixed cost per unit of hundreds of millions to get it into space, so there is very little point in producing more than what you need for just that mission.

Of course certain missions are going to require special specs, but I do think that generic, somewhat modular spaceprobes are around the corner now that launch costs are going down. If you are going to retire a space craft that you've made a profit off of shuttling cargo to LEO might as well discard of it by sending it on one last mission into deep space with a couple of scientific missions onboard.

We will end up spending more money overall, but cost per unit of science (however you want to measure that) will go down.

> It gets ignored because it is a symptom of not being able to cheaply launch probes.

Is it, though? Let's do a quick and very superficial analysis of the costs here. Say we want to send a probe the outer solar system, like the moons of Jupiter or the Saturn system.

There are two unique challenges that such probes are faced with:

• on Jupiter, the magnetic field of the planet requires hardened electronics and shielding

• in the Saturn system and beyond, nuclear power is the only option for powering your instruments

Neither of these points are in any way shape or form correlated with launch costs. In fact, in order to get RTGs you need to build, maintain and operate an entire specialised nuclear facility. Alternatively you could use small nuclear reactors, but that may or may not interfere with certain instruments.

The cost of hardening electronics and shielding is also not going away even if launch costs were non-existent. It also doesn't matter much whether you produce 10 or 1000 of such specialised processors - the cost will still be orders of magnitude higher than comparable commodity options.

It's not getting any better if we turn inwards instead and consider Venus or Mercury. Both again pose incredible and unique engineering challenges as do most scientifically interesting targets in the solar system.

How exactly would a cheaper launch cost solve the problem of a Venus sample-return mission? Is it the expensive launch that prevents us from sending an orbiter out to Pluto? How does more and cheaper payload help with getting a probe into the oceans of Europa, Ganymede, or Enceladus? I could go on, but I think you get what I mean.

edit: there's also the human factor that I conveniently left out - every mission requires a staff of people (both scientists and engineers) for the entire mission duration; that cost is also unrelated to launch costs

> The cost of hardening electronics and shielding is also not going away even if launch costs were non-existent.

Of course, but what about hardened electronics exempts it from the principles I discussed with scientific instruments in general?

> the cost will still be orders of magnitude higher than comparable commodity options.

Irrelevant, no one is comparing the cost to commodity hardware, we are comparing it to what the cost would be if we don't increase the number of scientific missions and continue with the current demand.

> in order to get RTGs you need to build, maintain and operate an entire specialized nuclear facility.

Yes, needing more material is going to cost more money, but does the cost per unit stay the same or go up the more you buy? We are going to need to increase production Pu used in RTGs anyways, if we are going to build facilities to might as well utilize them to the max.

> How exactly would a cheaper launch cost solve the problem of a Venus sample-return mission?

There will be unique engineering challenges that require unique solutions, but engineers will have a large shelf of parts to choose from if they have a specific issue they don't have to invent the wheel for.

> that cost is also unrelated to launch costs

That one is true. Missions that involve complex maneuvers, landings, driving rovers, etc, will require large amounts of staff and engineers. Other missions that don't involve those things could utilize a shared staff, so something like a general purpose probe network taking measurements across the solar system. Fleet management tools, policy, and procedures need to be developed so we can manage assets like we do with other LEO constellations.

Just incidentally, a RTG powered by strontium-90 works as well as or better than a plutonium-powered one. Strontium-90 builds up as a waste product in ordinary uranium fuel rods, and can be (pretty) cheaply extracted from what we call nuclear waste. I suspect the use of plutonium for RTGs in spacecraft is mainly because people already had a pipeline for extracting and concentrating plutonium for the weapons industry. I don't know of any other use for strontium-90, outside RTGs.

An industry delivering strontium-90 on demand could be very valuable for space operations, despite or even because of its uselessness as weapon material.

> I suspect the use of plutonium for RTGs in spacecraft is mainly because people already had a pipeline for extracting and concentrating plutonium for the weapons industry.

You suspect wrong.

In order to be a decent RTG power source, an isotope needs to have:

1. Good power density, since the current energy conversion efficiencies are quite low

2. Good half-life, since it is aimed to operate the spacecraft as long as possible

3. Require little to no shielding, in order not to interfere with sensitive instruments aboard and also to protect humans (i.e. scientists and engineers working on the spacecraft)

4. High power/mass ratio, to minimize the propulsion requirements to launch it into space (which would be less of a factor in this context)

Pu-238 is an ideal fuel due its very good performance in all of these characteristics. Nothing to do with nuclear weapons.

The next best fuel would be Am-241, which is more readily available but is a more aggressive alpha-emitter and therefore performs poorer in (3).

Strontium-90 has a lower power density and a significantly lower half-life. This makes it OK for terrestrial applications, where operation times of a decade are perfectly acceptable, but not ideal for interplanetary missions.

Keep in mind that a lot of power capacity is lost during transit if we're talking about missions to Saturn and beyond. Cheap cost to LEO doesn't pull the outer planets any closer so probes will still take the better part of a decade to get to their destination.

Overprovisioning is also not really an option, because excess heat needs to be radiated away, which is very difficult and costly to do in space.

Strontium-90 has better power-density per unit mass than Pu, albeit with larger volume. Half-life is comparable. Safety is better: less gamma, no neutrons, no shielding needed.

Overprovisioning is needed in every case, and excess power has to be dealt with the same way.

Low cost to orbit means more fuel / more ∆V is practical to provide, thus much shorter transit times, translating to less up-front decay.

> Strontium-90 has better power-density per unit mass than Pu

The power density of Sr-90 fuel is 15% lower by mass than Pu-238 - 0.46kW/kg thermal compared to 0.54kW/kg thermal. You must have been looking at the wrong figures. Since the Sr-90 fuel rod doesn't get as hot as a Pu-238 fuel rod of the same size, energy conversion efficiency drops significantly and you need up to 100% more Sr-90 fuel (and consequently more shielding as well) to get the same power.

> Half-life is comparable.

A factor of 3x is not really comparable (87.7 vs 28.7 years).

> Safety is better: less gamma, no neutrons, no shielding needed.

Where did you get that from? Strontium-90 and its daughter product Yttrium-90 emit high-energy beta particles and thus give off high energy bremsstrahlung which requires heavy shielding. The BUP-500 battery (the largest RTG ever built, designed to provide 500W electric after 5 years; 1.8m³ in size and 3.6 metric tons in weight) used a tungsten alloy for shielding; its predecessors used depleted uranium...

Pu-238 on the other hand is pretty much exclusively an alpha emitter and has no short-lived daughter products (U-234 has a half-life of >200ka).

> Overprovisioning is needed in every case, and excess power has to be dealt with the same way.

Again, where did you get that from? A space mission is designed to a certain power spec and if you need your primary instruments for a 15 year mission, you plan your power such that after 15 years all primary instruments can still be powered. With Pu-238 that'd be about 75%-80% of the initial RTG capacity (some losses due to development time and efficiency losses from thermocouples are included).

Due to its properties, Sr-90 would require about 3x as much fuel just to make up for its shorter half-life in addition to the up to 100% increase in required fuel mass from its lower temperature.

Since it's a beta emitter, the additional radiation requires heavy shielding as well. So no, there's a pretty substantial difference there.

> Low cost to orbit means more fuel / more ∆V is practical to provide, thus much shorter transit times, translating to less up-front decay.

That's not how interplanetary missions work. Chemical rockets are incapable of providing enough delta-V to substantially shorten transit times to the outer solar system. If you want to do anything other than fly-by missions, more chemical fuel isn't going to help with that - you'd need nuclear or electric propulsion [1].

[1] https://www.esa.int/gsp/ACT/doc/PRO/ACT-RPR-PRO-ISTS2004-Plu...

Wikipedia claims strontium-90 emits 0.95W/g. But it also says SrTiO3 emits only 0.256W/g, which is consistent with your figure.

So, I am obliged to conclude Wikipedia's figure is off by 2x, undermining my argument.

That said, if there were no Pu, Sr-90 would have to do. It has the advantage of being very cheap, as radiothermal isotopes go, and not requiring G7-military-grade security. Its bremsstralung radiation is only in X-ray range, so easily shielded, yielding heat.

When it gets cheap to loft 150 tons to orbit, in a couple of years, the economic and timing verities of outer solar system transport will be up-ended. Cassini was lofted at 6 tons, and took 7 years to get to Saturn. Much of its cost was driven by limits on mass. Given 150 tons to work with, it is hard to imagine any detail of the mission remaining similar, except its rousing success. It certainly would not have needed 7 years to get to Saturn. It might not even have needed RTG power.

A four-year transit to Pluto using FRC direct fusion propulsion is more appealing than RTG-powered ion drive, with the additional advantage of much less likelihood of wholesale civilizational collapse in the interim. But FRC fusion needs development work; its research budget is currently diverted to dead-end Tokamak projects.

This. The JWST cost/will cost about 10 billion dollars. The launch costs are negligible.

The JWST costs that much primarily because it's a one-off, which is a consequence of high launch costs.

If you drop the launch costs by 100x, this means being able to launch 100x JWSTs for the same price, meaning it makes sense to optimize for production costs instead of reliability - as if one of your telescopes fail, you can always launch/use another. So now it makes sense to focus on using mass-manufactured parts instead of specialty ones, which drops the production costs significantly. It might make sense to design a telescope platform instead, opening more opportunities to exploit economies of scale.

> If you drop the launch costs by 100x, this means being able to launch 100x JWSTs for the same price

As the GP pointed out the launch cost of the JWST is a small fraction of the program's overall cost. Launching a hundred JWSTs would mean building a hundred JWSTs and doing so is not cheap. Even with economies of scale producing various components for the hundred JWSTs those all need to be tested and verified. That's an expensive process that doesn't really benefit from economies of scale.

For an instrument the size of JWST you can't just spam launches with the assumption some will fail. It's a giant instrument. A catastrophic failure would see it land mostly intact in a populated area or fill a huge orbit with dangerous debris. Even if it was just non-operational it would not occupy an orbital slot that's unusable by other instruments.

Launch costs are almost always a small portion of overall mission costs. Just because launch costs go down doesn't mean space missions can magically scale up. The goal is to launch useful scientific/commercial instruments or space vehicles. We don't just launch hunks of lead into orbit for funsies. Lower launch costs are nice but they're not going to magically make all space missions cheap or easy.

> Even with economies of scale producing various components for the hundred JWSTs those all need to be tested and verified. That's an expensive process that doesn't really benefit from economies of scale.

My point is that all those processes are expensive because the final result has to work the first time, because launches are expensive and infrequent. Drop launch costs enough, you don't need so much reliability, so everything across the board suddenly becomes much cheaper. Which then opens many further opportunities to reduce costs.

You can't just make space equipment less reliable because launching it is cheaper. Equipment failures will kill people and ruin missions. Things that might work fine on Earth's surface will not work the same way in space. Even seemingly mundane failures can damage important components.

Most missions aren't manned. If your equipment is cheap enough, you can just send more and achieve reliability through numbers. If you don't have to optimize for mass so hard, you can achieve reliability through cheaper means - e.g. simplifying heat management by bolting on a larger radiator; simplifying radiation effects mitigation by having multiple CPUs running the same calculations and voting on results, and/or making thicker rad insulation. Etc.

Launch costs are not the only (maybe not even the most) important factor for reliability. If your probe takes 9 years to reach it's destination and then fails to deploy it's not the launch costs that are the problem. Or if you want to land an unmanned cargo ship near your lunar or mars base reliability is defiantly a concern. Cheap launch costs are definitely in important step to colonizing the system we are simply pointing out it's one of many things we need before we can usefully launch millions of tons around the universe.

Much of the cost of JWST was making it so it could unfold from a tiny cylinder that fit on a little rocket. Probably the overwhelming majority of the cost was just because it took so long before they could launch it. They kept losing the scheduling reason to reject unnecessary proposed changes. Probably it is a better telescope for many of the changes, but almost certainly not a 10x better telescope.

Progress at Starbase, SpaceX's base in Boca Chica, TX is done at an astonishing pace and very impressive.

Some of the stuff seen in the video series from August by Everyday Astronaut has changed already.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t705r8ICkRw

When I worked at a national laboratory, it was always evident that research priorities lagged funding priorities. No scientific program director would allocate significant resources into an area that wasn't either already funded or practically guaranteed to be funded. I don't how NASA and JPL operate organizationally, how their budgetary decisions are made, but I would guess that no movement toward re-orienting around Starship (or any new commercial technology) will happen until funding agencies dictate that it happen.

Ironically Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29026781

The article is really interesting, but the stress the author expresses about the potential downfall of NASA seems misplaced. This is just creative destruction at work. If NASA can adapt to capitalize on the new paradigm, then it will, and there will be NASA logos everywhere in future space stuff. If not, then NASA will fade away, and some of us will wax nostalgic about how cool NASA seemed when we were kids but nobody will really care because humanity will have moved far past the limited space exploration that was possible to-date.

Like most old US government programs, NASA is fully of wasteful political constraints - for instance, facilities scattered around the country and to satisfy pork-barrel politics and get random senators to support the overall program. I think NASA is still a net good, and I'd love to see it adapt, but if it fails to adapt, that probably just means the institutional dysfunction between Congress and NASA administration was too great, and even though it will be a little sad, it will still be a net win for humanity to replace that dysfunction with a new wave of highly functional new players.

NASA, like most government programs, is actually a mission-driven purchasing program. They are not threatened by SpaceX at all. If SpaceX can deliver what NASA needs, NASA will just buy it from SpaceX. See for example: human space flight.

The problem I have with that analysis is that there’s little commercial value to purely scientific missions. What will we lose if NASA isn’t sending (much bigger!) explorers to all corners of the solar system?

Maybe mining companies will pick up some of the slack, maybe that’ll be enough.

There’s a lot of research done today that has no commercial value. Ideally the commercialization of space will make it cheap enough that institutions can fund their own research without needing the government.

One way to summarize this article and relate it to software engineering: Before Starship, orbital launches and their payloads were like "snowflake" servers. Meticulously crafted one-offs. After Starship, launches and their payloads should become like containerized servers. (Starlink is already going this direction. No wonder, since Falcon is just a stop-gap and that system was designed for Starship)

I'm more worried about NASA's goals than I am their costing strategy.

SLS and Orion are taking up much of NASA's budget, and I don't see the payoff. What science are we going to add with another manned moon mission? Going to the moon and returning with stuff like the Genesis Rock was important, but that's been done. Likewise I'm really not sure what science we've gotten from the Space Shuttle and the ISS, outside of biology on long-term human space flight.

Whereas stuff like Voyager, Galileo, Cassini, Juno, Hubble have had _clear_ science gains, and cost much less than manned missions. Now we the Webb Telescope and Lucy, we should be doing much more stuff like that.

We tend to overestimate science and technology progress in short term, while underestimating it in long term. Of course, starship will fail on it's promises and artemis program will lag it's schedule and cost of kg to orbit will be 2000$ and not 100$ For next two decades that is.

But in 2045 it would be unimaginable to design new rocket not taking in account starship. Starship itself will be on it's 10-th iteration. Everyone: EU, China, Japan will have starship-inspired space launch vehicles. In-orbit refuelling will be finally figured out.

That is when slow progress will change thing forever. Not Artemis program, not today.

What am I missing here? Why is spacex valuation 100bn if this is true? I would think it would be 1tn easily in this kind of capital abundant environment. Is the risk that high? Is the market size being overestimated?

I'm no financial guru, even enthusiast, but my impression is that your average investor is interested in very short term profit. If you listened to last Telsa's shareholder meeting, one of the top questions was whether Tesla was going to pay dividends! People expect a company that's ramping up faster than any other in the history, building largest factories left and right, to pay dividends to its share holders! I'm in awe how they didn't just laugh the question off and didn't take back the shares from those shareholders (only if they could).

> People expect a company that's ramping up faster than any other in the history

Tesla was founded in 2002, during the same timespan Facebook became ubiquitous in our lives, Google became the homepage of the world and Amazon became the go-to place to make purchases.

Microsoft did even better between 1975-1995. The world was much larger and disconnected back then and yet they managed to became so ubiquitous to reach the monopoly status, such a dominance that the US government had to step in like they did with Standard Oil.

I commute to work daily . 25 miles back and forth and I am lucky if I see one Tesla .

After 20 years the company most successful and ubiquitous product is its stock

> I commute 25 miles back and forth to work and I am lucky if I see one Tesla .

Where on earth do you live? I can barely walk down the street without tripping over one. It's not a stretch to say I'd see several dozen on a short morning run.

Not the original poster, but I'm guessing they live somewhere other than California or New York. The nearest Tesla supercharging station to myself is a two-hour drive away, for example. While I could use one to drive to and from work or to businesses in the area, I won't be using it to go almost anywhere else any time soon. At least, not without planning my routes around that availability. As a contrast, the small town I live in has six gas stations.

I'm looking forward to the day that the infrastructure is ubiquitous enough that I can buy a fully electric vehicle, but that day isn't here yet.

That’s not apple to apple comparison. Try other vehicle manufacturers and see where your numbers end up. Ramping up a multi thousand part product with hundreds of suppliers is a whole different ball game than scaling an online website.

Are you comparing software companies to a manufacturing company?

They were making new technology that people basically thought was impossible. By 2012 they had only sold 1000 vehicles. That how hard it was.

Since Model S however they have grown about as fast as any manufacturing based company in history and they have very clear potential to continue to do so for a few years more at the very least.

Tesla basically invest huge into growing a chemical industry to make the batteries. That simply not something that just magically happens within a few years.

> Microsoft did even better between 1975-1995.

Because Microsoft was running on ALL computers designed from lots and lots of companies. Rather the computers were designed for it.

> such a dominance that the US government had to step in like they did with Standard Oil.

They didn't 'had to' they wanted to.

When you advertise yourself as a tech company you are bound to be compared against other tech companies.

More generally companies from every sector are compared against each other to see which one provides the highest improvement in citizens' quality of life .

Tesla produces lots of noise but the improvement in citizens' quality of life is basically none or negligible.

Google, Facebook and Microsoft completely dominate Tesla in this fundamental, during the same timespan.

They are a car company that is slowly turning itself into a multi-faceted company. They are doing some tech like things, but they are also turning into a chemical company and an a equipment and manufacturing company. They are also an infrastructure provider. They want to turn into a robotics company.

> More generally companies from every sector are compared against each other to see which one provides the highest improvement in citizens' quality of life .

Cars are the single largest expense other then a house people make. Of course its gone have less overall impact then a free product that everybody is gone spend very little time on.

The Supercharger network alone and showing the way for EV infrastructure will have a huge impact on everybody.

> Tesla produces lots of noise but the improvement in citizens' quality of life is basically none or negligible.

People usually love their Tesla and that is reflected in the data that is gathered about that. Cars are the second most expensive people buy behind a house. They have huge impact on the people who buy them and clearly less on those that don't.

> Google, Facebook and Microsoft completely dominate Tesla in this fundamental, during the same timespan.

Idiotic comparison, no matter how long you talk about it.

> They are a car company that is slowly turning itself into a multi-faceted company. They are doing some tech like things, but they are also turning into a chemical company and an a equipment and manufacturing company. They are also an infrastructure provider. They want to turn into a robotics company.

And I want to turn into an adonis bedding a different Hollywood actress every night

Doesn't really matter what the CEO of a company tells you about his projections about the future of the company

It will always be an up& to the right chart.

Especially here people should know better and take those promises and straight up throw them into the bin because they are just that.

As the old saying goes: "It takes one to see one".

With Microsoft, Google and Facebook you didn't have to be on the lookout for anything suspicious because they provided very conservatives estimates, begging financial analysts to be conservative for their own estimates too.

That's one huge difference between those companies and Tesla, an other huge difference is the fact that you can tangibly see those companies products in your daily life, whereas Tesla is only famous for future projections of techno-utopian dreams and the stock price which is constantly inflated by the cult leader CEO. The same cult leader CEO who managed to get in this privileged position by overselling equity to bigger fools for his whole life.

You are the only one comparing those companies. Its neither insightful or clever to do so. But I guess you feel clever coming up with that.

I'm pretty sure the people who drive Tesla see them quite often. People see supercharger all the time and the stigma against electric and travel has been broken.

Every large car maker and most countries have admired and are now pushing for EVs.

Tesla is famous for making EV popular more then anything else and by that had massive impact as every in the car industry has addmited.

And the Cult leader said in 2014 they would do 500k in 2020 and they did exactly that. Their growth has hit pretty much what they have guided for multiple years now.

Anybody that observes the industry knows they will continue to grow fast, its not really a question.

Sure, but SpaceX trades on the private markets, not public. The minimum to get into SpaceX is $1m.

This is flat inaccurate. There people on YT who showed how they got involved for much less then 100k.

> but my impression is that your average investor is interested in very short term profit

You can actually figure out how much of a stock is traded and if your assumption is true then there would have to be far more trading.

> one of the top questions was whether Tesla was going to pay dividends!

How do you know what answer the people who voted for the question wanted to hear?

> How do you know what answer the people who voted for the question wanted to hear?

Interesting point. My intuition tells me that most people who are looking to get paid are the ones asking the question.

I can tell you that the person who got a question in literally every year since like 10 years is a long term investor. See Tesla Daily Podcast.

Long term investors are very well organized and upvote certain questions.

However that question was not from him.

Isn't SpaceX privately held?

The very second that Starship gets to orbit it'll be politically easy for NASA to make a sudden shift

It's not just a successful (sub-)orbital test. SpaceX needs to demonstrate re-use. That is essential.

The Angry Astronaut had a video about this where he argues that SpaceX should continue testing Starship to demonstrate reusability. But they can't now that they are committed to not using landing legs: first they need to test the chopsticks with a hopper and a load simulator, then they need to test the chopsticks with a booster and a Starship, and only then can they attempt a landing and re-use.

I’d love to know if any Universities or Research organizations are planning big observatories based around launching on Starship. What was once a rare NASA budget item could now be in the reach of many more researchers.

SpaceX is already working on that with a professor from some Californian university.

I would like to know what the Ozone impact these rockets will have is. It's my understanding that they burn quite a bit of the ozone up as they pass through; but my information could be wrong.

Damn right, it's not. It's the best shell prompt generator and few use it!

I think it was SN11 that stuck the landing. I was there.

SN10 landed on it's engines as the legs didn't deploy, and exploded on the pad a few minutes afterwards.

SN11 exploded in mid-air in the fog [1].

SN15 landed correctly for the first time and didn't explode afterwards.

[1]: https://youtu.be/cN7855POvJ8?t=172

Whoops I meant 10

Space is becoming a religion for atheists, with SpaceX serving the role of the church and Elon Musk in charge of it as the techno-utopian Pope.

No wonder really smart people like Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and George Soros are staying out of it.

The amount of mass that we have to bring up there to live and thrive and be happy is so enormous that Nobel astrophysicist Kip Thorne and Christopher Nolan had to essentially cheat their way into the epilogue of Interstellar. The hero of the movie finds the answer to the problem of how to lift humanity off the Earth into the Gargantua Black Hole, which by definition is the place where all the rules are off, and there is no knowledge of what really happens in there, so that Kip Thorne could, in good conscience, allow it in the script.

People who love space should work on mind uploading and laser transmission of the aforementioned upload. That's the only way we can manage to lift ourselves.

I got news for you buddy. Neuralink is being researched and lasers that communicate in space that are already on Starlink sats.

You have an SF novel in you, you just need to write it!

Even if a religion, sure as heck the best out there, by a large margin:

1. Got the best miracles (two building sized Falcon 9 boosters landing side by side after an orbital launch).

2. Promises exciting future, full of explosions, adventures and memes.

3. Doesn't require you to believe it based on bad evidence (already delivers the cheapest and slickest rides to space).

> Doesn't require you to believe it based on bad evidence

What about the promise that you'd be able to have your present day quality of life on Mars?

That's basically the equivalent of "if you pray enough and donate X money to the church , you'd go to Heaven".

Ironically the same people who stand behind the concept of "the big lie" and categorically deny the "lab leak theory" , have no problem believing in the above nonsense, even though the probabilities of that happening is many orders of magnitude lower than an election being stolen or a viral agent being accidentally released in the external environment.

Curious.

Nothing in the entire world is more dangerous than a person with lots of book smarts but zero street smarts

When lots of book smarts people with zero street smarts are being recruited by a cult leader the most terrible things happen.

+1. Greg Egan's novels Permutation City and Diaspora actually explore this very well.

I am not opposed to space exploration and generally support SpaceX but reading about doing 100,000 launches makes me slightly wary, especially with our track record on climate and Musk's general penchant for breaking laws. Unless we develop anti-gravity or something which would make space travel energy-equivalent to flight travel, I don't know how you would ever scale this without wrecking the environment. Reading between the lines, you get a sense that the average citizen should be "willing to take the hit for the greater good". Yeah, right. Musk has an immense amount of goodwill today and for good reason but I don't imagine this will play well with any crowd.

Even assuming that Musks's Marsshot comes through and a Mars colony is established in 50 years (which would be optimistic going by the current pace of development), what are the odds that I (or the average SWE on HN, let alone average human) would ever end up on Mars? I imagine a 70-80 year old is probably not very high on the (tentative)waitlist? It is looking more and more likely that Earth's climate and politics would necessarily have to take a backseat if we were to go all in on Mars. I see the wisdom in Kim Stanley Robinson's opinion that fixing Earth climate/politics should take priority.

I am in support of AGI research and biotech. Training even GPT-scale models is not really comparable to rocket launching. If it is possible to clone yourself to a digital form, or even train an NN model to think like yourself, there may be a way for the average denizen to get to Mars and extend one's life while keeping energy consumption low.

The entire space reporting has the problem that simultaneously there is an established genre of fanboy fawning about space x, which is kinda unconnected to space x actually starting to disrupt space.

Right now, it looks like one could save a few billions if Artemis is not green lit a decade ago. However, private launches were still rare at that time, so in absence of a, likely expensive, time machine that's just not an option.

So looking at the planned timelines, Artemis I will circle the moon next year, and a crewed landing is planned for 2024, while star ship does not have a planned launch to orbit yet.

Also on a personal note, I am utterly astonished that there will be people on the moon before the subway station down the street is operational.

> star ship does not have a planned launch to orbit yet

Starship has a planned launch to orbit in literally a month pending regulatory approval.

* source: https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/14515814656454942...

They don't plan to circulate the orbit, and instead the plan is to splash down in the Pacific after going 3/4th around the planet. So, I would call that suborbital.

* A month, yes, in Elon time.

It's almost certainly going to be longer based just on past performance (though that performance is nothing short of astounding). They need at minimum to:

  - get the chopstick carriage moving
    and out of the way for launch
  - get the water deluge system in place
  - tank up enough water, LOX, and Methane
  - build more of a blast barrier for the GSE
  - maybe add a flame diverter
  - test-fire BN4 on the launch stand,
    testing all engines or enough that they
    can be certain of the robustness of the
    ignition sequence
  - re-assemble the stack and load it with
    liquid nitrogen to test structural
    integrity under load

etc.

Please for the love of god, its SpaceX and Starship.

> The entire space reporting has the problem that simultaneously there is an established genre of fanboy fawning about space x, which is kinda unconnected to space x actually starting to disrupt space.

Yeah totally unconnected. All these people, journalist and engineers are idiots.

> Right now, it looks like one could save a few billions if Artemis is not green lit a decade ago

Äh:

> The Artemis Program began in December 2017 as the reorganization and continuation of successive efforts to revitalize the U.S. space program since 2009.

And just btw, just because a program starts, doesn't mean its 'greenlitt'. This is not AT ALL. How NASA is funded.

In fact NASA has to fight for budget every year. So literally every year they need budget allocation to continue development of the different element they need.

> So looking at the planned timelines, Artemis I will circle the moon next year, and a crewed landing is planned for 2024, while star ship does not have a planned launch to orbit yet.

Starship is LITERALLY required to land on the moon. NASA has only 1 way to land humans on the moon and its LITERALLY Starship.

And the first orbital test launch is planned for this year.

> Also on a personal note, I am utterly astonished that there will be people on the moon before the subway station down the street is operational.

The 2024 timeline is not really realistic, 2026 maybe.

Subway are a political problem, not a technological one.

> That is, Starship is a powerful logistical system that puts launch below the API.

Lol this sounds like pure BS

Actually a helpful way to think about the problem.

> The Artemis program to the Moon requires a Gateway and separate Human Landing System (HLS) because even the SLS doesn’t have enough lift capacity to be execute the mission on its own.

The Artemis programme requires a Gateway because senators decided it would be cool to have a gateway. AFAIK, anyone with actual technical expertise thinks it's stupid.

There's a bunch of logic in this piece i just can't follow. Like:

> How can the space industry saturate this increased launch supply?

It doesn't need to?

> What “lunar exploration objectives” can be “fulfilled” with such an architecture?

The only objective which has been pursued since the end of the Cold War, that of pumping billions of dollars into politically important states.

Who is this guy? Is he new?

> It doesn't need to?

The point there is that if legacy aerospace doesn't do it, new players will, and the legacy companies will be left far behind.

Why will they? Where is all this demand coming from?

Even frivolous applications like space tourism are worth billions if you can send people into orbit for $100k instead of $100M.

Is there a name for the rhetorical technique you’re using? When you act as if you’re in an argument with someone who actually agrees with you, simply because they’re making points that you think “everyone knows”? Not everyone is as jaded as you, and some people may actually find it to be interesting reading to hear why our current SLS plans aren’t all that practical.

You see it all the time on HN… “Apple changes course by doing something that isn’t very privacy-centric”, responded to with “but this isn’t a change of course because they’ve only ever cared about their bottom line!”… “Facebook does thing that isn’t good for their users” responded to with “no they didn’t, because these people aren’t the users, but the product!”, etc etc.

It’s this weird agreement-masked-as-contrarianism that I can only imagine comes from too much time spent debating things online, where you feel you must present everything as an argument of some sort.

Why was this downvoted?!

I know that going into space is sexy and nerdy and cool and that it’s a difficult problem. What I don’t get is why so many people think about going to space and spend so much money on it when there are people in the US who drink water that catches on fire..and people elsewhere who don’t have access to water at all. Seems like we should work on the truly hard problems rather than the ones that are basically “just go up, really fast”

Why not to do both?

So much money on it? NASA budget is $23B, total govt spending is $4000B. Show me your math.

If we use the same logic, don’t we get a conclusion that we should spend nothing on basic research until we’ve solved world hunger, and every other problem?

I agree that we should invest more into safe drinking water (though lead seems like much more of a problem than catching fire). But I don’t think it would be wise to dedicate 100% of our nation’s resources into the problem.

Some amount of R&D seems like a worthwhile investment, even when other pressing problems exist.

Not only that, but R&D can sometimes solve the other problem. Like synthetic nitrogen for fertilizers.

A lot of people say (I have no idea how true this is) that the problem isn't growing enough food, it's getting that food too people. What if we can grow rice or wheat on the moon, or ganymeade, or a spacestation or whatnot and drop it where it needs to go a-la Moon Is A Harsh Mistress style.

R&D is looking forward. Pointing at it and saying "people are hungry" is willfully ignorant of how science has played a roll in feeding more and more people and is a defeatists attitude.

>If we use the same logic, don’t we get a conclusion that we should spend nothing on basic research until we’ve solved world hunger, and every other problem?

Sounds like a very good principle.

Like, if you can't fix war at the level of horses, bayonets and canons, maybe not go for inventing aircrafts and tanks and machine guns just yet - you'll just get new wars leveraging those improved means, oh wait!

Great so nobody ever researches anything and we still all live in the stone age.

But at least we are pure in our hearts that we didn't mis-allocate resources when people were starving.

That this mindset exists blows my mind.

> Like, if you can't fix war at the level of horses, bayonets and canons, maybe not go for inventing aircrafts and tanks and machine guns just yet

Aside from the practical, problem of "Great way to get killed by people with guns that you don't have".

The underlying philosophy is equally flawed. Its like picking out of the technology bucket only things you don't like.

The same things that made those things possible also made a huge number of other things possible that would otherwise not have existed at all.

>Great so nobody ever researches anything and we still all live in the stone age.

Sounds far more climate friendly. Also moving out of stone age only once we've stopped with hunger and war? Sign me in!

>The underlying philosophy is equally flawed. Its like picking out of the technology bucket only things you don't like.

God forbid we're picky with the tecnologies we adopt!

Wow, didn't not expect so technology negative open in on HN.

> Sign me in!

Then we would still be in the stone age.

> God forbid we're picky with the tecnologies we adopt!

Be picky all you want. As we progressed certain things simple became viable and just ignoring the problem doesn't make them vanish.

> Sounds like a very good principle.

Does it? Such a world wouldn't have increased crop production, and would regularly suffer from otherwise preventable famines.

I imagine far more people would be hungry in the world where we forego all R&D in an effort to solve hunger.

You're still allowed R&D to solve hunger...

But that's not really how fundamental research or technological advancement works.

A ton of our advances in improving crop productivity came out of research that wasn't directly related to solving hunger.

The modern internal combustion engine, for example, brought together many technologies and came out of advancement of many different kinds of research and manufacturing changes. If, in the 1500s you had focused all of your R&D efforts on improving food production and distribution, there's a good chance you never invent the ICE.

That's the thing about R&D, the discoveries in some areas often overlap with uses in other areas (sometimes in complex ways that we don't discover for a long time). So if you say: "we'll only do R&D in food production", you might actual end up stifling many technologies that would have massively helped you with food production down the line.

> If we use the same logic, don’t we get a conclusion that we should spend nothing on basic research until we’ve solved world hunger, and every other problem?

If I were to sum it up less charitably, I'd say that OP is arguing that if he can't walk and chew gum at the same time, humanity can't either.

lol ok little buddy

Money spent on going to space doesn't vanish in an exhaust plume. The money spent building a rocket is paying for the ongoing training, expertise and development of precision machining, software control systems, welding techniques, project management, infrastructure upgrades etc.

Though that's not really the issue anyway: the US's problems aren't caused by a lack of funding, they're caused by a lack of political will and a populace which is in part completely happy with the current state of affairs and votes accordingly. People's townwater isn't flammable because we didn't spend enough money fixing that problem: it's because the government (and voters) are in aggregate, completely happy to let it happen. Money - distinctly - will not buy a solution.

Are you truly living your life in the way you are suggesting other people should here? Do you, for example, eschew all spending that's remotely luxurious and donate it to people that have way less than you?

My point is, lead by example if you want others to follow.

This is a difficult argument to argue with because it doesn’t have any constraints.

Instead of doing X why don’t we do any of the Y other things we could do?

Surely, at least some subset of Y is more important than X, right?

…but, is it?

Are we better off, specifically with spending slightly more money on proving people with water, than having weather forecasts that can help thousands of farmer provide better yields and grow more food?

Could we not say, spend a little bit less on building guns and use that money to do it instead? There’s loads more money in guns than space and hell, and wtf are the people crying for us to stop doing that?

My observation has been, that people who want space funding redirected are not familiar with the benefits it provides, and fail to understand that the funding is, actually, insignificant.

There’s a good write up of this here: https://www.planetary.org/space-policy/nasa-budget

What wrong with investing in science?

>Are we better off, specifically with spending slightly more money on proving people with water, than having weather forecasts that can help thousands of farmer provide better yields and grow more food?

And, with the crumbling infrastructure, declining middle class, poverty stricken working class, and so on, how's that worked out for us?

So the middle class is poor because a tiny part of the budget is invested in space?

I don't understand what argument you are trying to make.

>So the middle class is poor because a tiny part of the budget is invested in space?

No, it's poor because the same logic that invests that "tiny part of the budget" in space (and prints billions of money to fund the likes of Musk, Bezos, and so on), also runs the other investments and public policy decisions.

> and prints billions of money to fund the likes of Musk, Bezos, and so on

That's not how monetary policy works but ok ...

> also runs the other investments and public policy decisions

So you don't like some things the government does and therefore anything the government does is bad and we can have no argument about what spending is good and what is bad?

>That's not how monetary policy works but ok ...

Modern QE, for example, is not traditional monetary policy anyway, but ok. Nor is playing with such a huge percentage of the GDP, or facilitating lending to the already rich, to use to stock their fireplaces, VC bets, and in general, getting richer on a cheap supply of money...

>So you don't like some things the government does and therefore anything the government does is bad and we can have no argument about what spending is good and what is bad?

On the contrary, I like government. I just with it did things as a government of/for the people, as opposed as a lackey to oligarchs. You know, reigning on them, instead of high fiving them and being in their pockets. Or printing money to keep the bubble alive, so they can play with their phallic rockets.

> Modern QE, for example, is not traditional monetary policy anyway, but ok.

Nonsense, QE was done already 100 years ago and more.

> Nor is playing with such a huge percentage of the GDP

Not that new in history of money and bad measure anyway.

Your understanding of monetary policy is fundamentally flawed. Your idea that if the central bank just collapsed nominal spenidng to 'destroy' the 'bubble' is about the worst possible thing you could do. That is literally how we totally unnecessary had the Great Depression. Congratulation 'Bubble Burst'.

But I guess you have bought into some of the leftists conspiracy and nonsense propaganda about central banks so there is like not much to talk you out of it.

> phallic rockets.

Ask yourself who is actually obsessed with thinking about phallics.

We've been _under_ investing in scientific research, especially in regards to space, for decades.

What spending we do have is usually focused on militaristic applications.

How does this reflect poorly on space travel research? If you're using the current status quo to argue that spending priorities are broken, you're not arguing against NASA funding. You're arguing against the military-industrial complex.

If important research is done through public agencies, the public reaps the benefits of this research. If private industry is allowed to take the reins, corporate interests and shareholders are the ones who benefit.

I'm not arguing that no one should focus on space and I'm certainly not arguing that no one should focus on science..it's the opposite in fact. It just seems to me that going to space is sort of a solved problem, and that now we're just trying to figure out how to do it a little bit better and in a way that generates revenue. But since there are problems that remain unsolved, you'd think that people who are bright enough to tackle admittedly difficult problems like going to space better than we already do would want to tackle really hard problems, rather than just sort of iterating on an existing design.

Right now we have a new space race, it's just between companies instead of countries.

The problem with waiting for all of humanity’s problems to be solved before doing space things is that humanity’s problems will never all be solved, and thus space things will never happen.

It’s also just not a resources problem. There is ample cash and manpower to make both space and clean drinking water for everybody happen. The real issue is the political will and obstructions to those who have such will. The fix for drinking water specifically is to vote out all who oppose improving public infrastructure.

Why are you an Hacker News, there are literally people dying right now that you could be saving.

Solving food and clean water is not a technology problem. It's a political choice. The money exists to solve those things not just for the US but worldwide.

I'm very much in favour of political change to solve them, but I long ago resigned myself to accepting that there's very little benefit in individual action to try to counter them other than to feel good unless a majority is willing to commit to the necessary societal change.

Meanwhile the money spent on space is a rounding error compared to the many other places you can also choose to cut to lift people out of horrible living conditions, yet so many people focus their ire on space, which, while some of the flights are wasteful, have as a sector done immeasurable amounts of good in terms of improving our ability to e.g. feed the planet (weather forecasting and crop monitoring for example), and will continue to provide advances for a long time.

Focusing the frustrations on space exploration and technology improvement rather than on the lack of political will to solve the problems you mention solves nothing.

Not to mention that surviving on Mars will require living with little water and low water agriculture that might help many people.

To add, solving world hunger is more than just give everyone food. The USA had been supplying cheap/food to countries but this started causing the farmers in those countries to stop growing food because they could not compete with the free food. So either the US is a monster because they are undercutting the local market or they are a monster because they are throwing away food when people are going hungry.

You're right, but that's "just" a political problem too in the sense that it's a matter of willingness to spend the money near those who need aid rather than near the giver. Reducing subsidies in developed countries and instead paying to upgrade farming in developing countries would be one way.

So sure, giving food away is not a perfect solution other than for short term crises, but it's still a problem that is entirely solvable if there was will to do so.

> why so many people think about going to space and spend so much money on it when there are people in the US who drink water that catches on fire

Because people drinking bad water are poor so it's not profitable to help them. This problem can be solved with current technology (and in fact was solved in many countries with slightly stricter environmental legislation).

> Seems like we should work on the truly hard problems rather than the ones that are basically “just go up, really fast”

The problem with that is assuming that focusing on solving problem X is the way to solve problem X. In history it often turned out that problem X was only solved by people who ignored X and worked on Y instead.

For example the hard problem of 70% of kids dying before adulthood wasn't mostly solved thanks to people who worked on it (shamans, healers and priests) but by people who worked on "useless" abstract stuff like math, philosophy and writing systems. If we put everybody on it we would still devise new ways of praying or dancing to stop gods killing infants.

In general it's better not to put EVERYBODY on the same problem. Humankind is pretty good at solving many problems in parallel. Some people are better at X, others at Y. Also there might be interactions that we don't know upfront. Maybe designing space colonies gives us a cheap way to filter water on Earth as a byproduct? Would be pretty stupid to wait forever because we guessed the order wrong.

Cancer is more serious than broken bones or flu, but it doesn't mean that we should assign all doctors to only deal with cancer until it's solved.

Why not do both?

Run for office on your platform and I’ll probably vote for you.

> spend so much money on it

If you actually look at $$$ going into space development, it's minuscule compared with say, just marketing cost of Windows Vista ($500 million whereas development of Falcon 9 rocket was in $400 million range).

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