SpaceX is beginning to get the hang of human spaceflight
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Its great to see the "routine-ness" - but SpaceX needs to stay humble and stay focused. A accident now could cost everything they have done to this point.
-- edited to clarify potential failure mode.
How did you get to that conclusion regarding Crew Dragon?
With time and more flights, more things will have a chance to go wrong, and in spaceflight, resting on your laurels is the best way to make sure that when it does go wrong it will be catastrophic.
This stuff is called rocket science for a reason.
For example, the O-Rings were designed as a backup, the force generated by the solid rocket motors was supposed to seal the SRM sections together. But they knew after the first launch that the O-Rings were what was actually sealing the SRM's. But the O-Rings worked, so they didn't stop the program to fix the design. Later they found evidence of blow through the O-Rings, and again decided that since that didn't cause a crash, they were OK. Until they didn't. Tile strike damage was a similar normalization that killed 7 people.
Does SpaceX normalize deviance? They fixed the toilet, so they didn't normalize that, but what about the delayed opening of the 4th parachute in the Crew 2 landing? It seems suspicious that they launched Crew 3 so quickly after an apparent anomaly. They do claim that the delayed opening is nominal behaviour seen and accepted in testing -- that this behaviour only happens when the other 3 parachutes are working fine. If one of the others had failed the 4th would have opened quicker due to increased air pressure.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/11/double-dragon-nasa-p...
I'd love to see the causal relationship between both that makes it safe to land with 3 parachutes (I remember they added the 4th as an added precaution that reminds me of the O-ring issue)
That NASA did not see the parachute as an issue speaks volumes. It looked bad visually, but having watched enough space launches and how mission control reacts to off-nominal data - clearly they were comfortable with the performance, because they didn't flinch at all. NASA just doesn't sign off on these commercial launches with NASA astronauts on board if they have any inkling that something won't go right - they aren't under the political pressure to "save the Shuttle program" or whatever.
I have more concern about NASA getting politically-imposed "go fever" with SLS.
More likely is a failure of the other extreme where if changes are normalized and something that seems sufficiently simple actually has an outsized impact on the craft. I think such a thing is still relatively unlikely given how much testing and modelling goes into all their changes but it's much more likely than catastrophic failure occurring due to known design deficiencies that are left because they haven't yet caused failures.
There's actually a video of the plane trying to recover with the COM so far back, it is horrific.
EDIT: The video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fpxm0D46iQ
Because the loadmaster is a member of the aircrew they incentivized to be good at their job and veto unsafe loads because it's their life at stake if the aircraft becomes tail heavy in flight.
Also wondering what the timeline comparison is here too. Wasn't one of the problems with Columbia the advanced age of the shuttle? I'm assuming this isn't comparable to the situation with spacex?
> Wasn't one of the problems with Columbia the advanced age of the shuttle?
On visits to the ISS it's 37 vs 25.
If you look at the ratio of non-human flights to human flights SpaceX is far more conservative of human life.
See Soyuz T-10a
> If it had been a crewed flight, the crew would not
> have boarded at that point.
The advantages are that if there is a problem before the astronauts are strapped in, firing the LES on a loaded rocket will seriously hurt the astronauts and ground crew. Also, with less time between propellant loading and launch, denser, super chilled propellants can be used. This provides significant margins for boostback and recovery of the first stage boosters.
I'll never get over the fact that NASA never made an assessment of tile damage after liftoff in over 100 flights before Columbia. All these machines are experimental in the sense we still don't understand completely what happens with them and treating them like 737's is a huge mistake.
Even in the case of the 737, the MAX proved we didn't understand a 737 thoroughly enough to ensure safe operation.
> Even in the case of the 737, the MAX proved we didn't
> understand a 737 thoroughly enough to ensure safe operation.
Economical being a conservative word. Designing a new airframe for the newer, larger, more efficient engines would have been very expensive.
Columbia had a foam strike on the leading edge and wasn't so lucky.
> they will investigate the issue and build a safer one the next time
At least, not the landing part. If they could launch and perform all exatmospheric activities in a Starship yet land in a Dragon (or Soyuz) I'd be fine with that.
That said, SpaceX will probably be able to relaunch early Starships with a few months of their initial launches, and might be able to refurbish a Starship for launch within a few weeks in short order. I would not be surprised to see a single Starship perform three launches and landings by the end of 2022. We could see a dozen total Starship launches and landings in that same timeframe.
We might see people fly on it by 2023. That's not a long time.
Estimates for SpaceX seem to be around $2,700/kg but I'm not sure this factors in first stage reuse so it's probably closer to $1,000/kg.
Starship will get this into the $hundreds/kg while also being able to launch individually much larger payloads. It's hard to overstate just how important that is.
I personally believe this will have a profound effect on commercial space operations including a likely commercial station that is much larger than the ISS. Personally I think we should invest in a station with spin gravity on at least part of the station. All of this being a necessary step towards industry.
And all of this from a private investment of ~$20 billion, which I believe was roughly the development cost of either SLS or Orion.
But either way, this is insane. Taking something from $50,000 to < $1,000 per KG in a handful of years. Curious all the applications that come form this. I don't fully understand what all we can do in space even with it cheaper. A base to asteroid mine could be a cute start.
Also, the price is not low margin, lower cost is just more profit for SpaceX.
Estimations are that internal cost is only ~20 million $ or maybe 25. The price has not gone down much with re-usability.
Boeing high price was partly justified by 'higher schedule certainty'. They were selected over Sierra Nevada who had a 3.6 billion $ proposal using the Dreamchaser aircraft.
Some news emerged that Boeing believed that SpaceX could not deliver anyway and if they both didn't deliver the could renegotiate with NASA and demand more money. Unfortunately for them, SpaceX delivered without asking for more money.
Since then Boeing has failed its first test flight and has run into major issues with the second one, and it will not launch for many more months. All of these costs are carried by Boeing, only when they complete further milestones will the get paid.
This is very unlike the contracts that Lockheed Martin and Boeing work under for the Orion capsule and the SLS contract. Just in comparison, those system already at up almost 20 billion each, they have sometimes over 2 billion a year in funding. The extra cost for failing to deliver these systems is paid by NASA.
So the complete Dragon capsule development is basically 1 yearly budget for one of those programs. Dragon could do almost everything Orion does with a few enhancements (certainty not costing billions every year).
SLS and Orion are left over from the dark days and they need to be canceled, all future human spaceflight need to be done at fixed cost. If you want to play, you need to be willing to risk your company on it.
What can Dragon not do that Orion will be able to do? Can Orion go further from Earth?
Dragon was originally designed for moon missions. We know that the heat shield can do moon reentry.
What we don't know is if the avionics can navigate in deep space. However upgrading this shouldn't require much redesign of the core structures.
Additionally Orion has a Service Module. This is made by ESA. Dragon would need something along those lines at well. Mostly this is about DeltaV.
Dragon has a trunk and with some work likely they could carry additional fuels in the trunk. Dragon has the engines of the required power.
SpaceX would have to be asked to provide a design. My estimation is that they could do significantly less then 1 billion $.
Orion also has more propellant, more delta-v, so it has more post-separation maneuvering capability. Dragon would need either expanded tanks on board or maybe some extra propulsion capability in the trunk or perhaps docking with a small propulsion module (think like how the Apollo command module docked with the LM in Apollo 13 and used that for maneuvering delta-v).
Neither of those things are huge. There are a few other things that are relatively minor, like shielding (literally just mass of plastic, very little engineering involved) and extra consumables for longer free flight mission and getting Falcon Heavy fully up to Falcon 9 human rating standards (pretty straightforward as it’s almost identical to Falcon 9 but with 2 side boosters).
You could test those things on an uncrewed test flight fairly cheaply. In some ways, it’d be safer than Orion/SLS as the vehicle and spacecraft have a lot more flight history already.
If they actually had to change the heat shield it would be quite a bit more work.
But in the opinion of experts Falcon Heavy is considerably safer than the human rated SLS[1] and massively safer than the Shuttle ever was, so human rating Falcon Heavy is just a matter of NASA swallowing their pride and acknowledging that.
1: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/02/24/sls-is-cancell...
That's the plan for Starship. It doesn't follow the NASA man rating design guidelines either, AFAIK. But SpaceX doesn't need NASA human rating to fly non-NASA personnel and have no immediate plans to fly NASA astronauts on Starship. By the time they do compete for a NASA human contract with Starship they expect to have enough flight data to meet NASA's standard of less than 1/500th of a chance of loss of mission using hard test data rather than computer modelling.
Even Bolden has changed his tune now that he's retired and doesn't have to answer to Congress. He says that SLS should be cancelled. I wonder if Senator Shelby will change his tune after he retires? Somehow I doubt it.
Nothing in Starship should be outside of human rating specifications. They have never done those for powered landings but its not outside of scope.
There are very few cases in the history of space flight where these escape systems have saved anybody.
Depending on where in the flight profile the main engines of the second stage could be uses as an escape system.
Just repeating a false statement doesn’t make it true.
Seems SpaceX didn't want to play that collusion (or prisoner's dilemma) game many government contractors play.
If government would stop handing out contracts, SpaceX would try to go on as best they can anyway.
But of course as long as government is sharing in the goals SpaceX will use those.
It occurs to me how much the film "2001" suggested a cold-war future still dominated by nations (US/USSR). Even the corporations depicted in the film, Bell Telephone, Hilton, somehow exuded a feeling of nationalism: our capitalist Pan-Am is better than your state-owned Aeroflot.
We are slowly getting there.
The growing elephant in the room is SpaceX's Starship. What happens if Boeing says "Yeah, sorry, we need to delay the moon landings 3 more years- at $2B/year out of your pockets" and SpaceX steps up and says "Cancel the SLS/Orion program, give us $2B one time and we'll put your astronauts on the surface on schedule with Starship".
All that would need to happen to reach that is SpaceX succeeding and Boeing falling behind. A formerly-unlikely scenario that now is the norm.
If you actually did a clean sheet architecture, there is literally zero reason to do SLS/Orion.
Starship is one on the critical path anyway. The only difference is you go from the capsule to Starship in LEO instead.
The problem is that the current design for the lunar Starship doesn't have enough propellant left over to leave lunar orbit, let alone enter Earth orbit (and it has been stripped of its heatshield, so no aerocapture). Going back on a Starship requires first delivering fuel for that Starship to lunar orbit, which adds another ~8 launches to each mission.
They could even send the same kind of vehicle ahead of schedule to the moon as a backup for when the astronauts are going home.
And just saying 'its complex' therefore lets spend 40 billion on development and then limit our options by paying 3 billion per launch is an insane plan.
Overall complexity is reduced by not having those two legacy systems.
Basically you use Falcon9 to get in and out of LEO using Dragon.
A Falcon Heavy can push a larger space craft into LEO and it saves weight by the fact that a LEO-to-moon vehicle doesn't need heath shield and other stuff which makes a Dragon capsule heavier.
And with Falcons being cheap you could even send a whole bunch of LEO-to-moon vehicles straight to the moon surface, as well as just dump fuel tanks there.
SpaceX has a lot of these and can build them quite cheaply, so the mission will have a lot more built in safety. E.g. if you got an extra lunar ascent vehicle sitting on the landing site already before astronauts arrive, you have extra redundancy.
[1] take Falcon 9 as a reference - it first launched in 2010 and their first manned mission was only last year in 2020. yes, SpaceX has grown significantly since then, but so have their ambitions with Starship. Fuel transfer and 2nd stage reentry/landing are significant further milestones to reach besides just getting it to orbit. And then they'll have to prove safety margins, life support systems, abort scenarios...
If they can relaunch the same entire stack more than say 2 times per day, they're going to absolutely hit the reliability margins[1] that NASA / the FAA want to see in a very short time period.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human-rating_certification
The NASA CCP human-rating standards require that the probability of a loss on ascent does not exceed 1 in 500, and that the probability of a loss on descent did not exceed 1 in 500. The overall mission loss risk, which includes vehicle risk from micrometeorites and orbital debris while in orbit for up to 210 days, is required to be no more than 1 in 270.[3] Maximum sustained acceleration is limited to 3 g.There is a lot of background in the biographies of both Chuck Yaeger AND John Glenn about some of this if you like that sort of thing.
And they achieved the exact opposite.
SpaceX didn't do significant work on Dragon until 2015 since Congress didn't properly fund Commercial Crew until then.
Not sure what you are seeing.
That's already going to happen assuming things go to plan (and Bezos doesn't play any further shenanigans). They could offer seats to lunar orbit and back either with Starship or Falcon Heavy in expendable mode.
Never underestimate the size of his ego or his sheer force of will.
I sure hope they do and give that money to either SpaceX or pretty much any other promising startup around (can't think of any with the payload requirements needed for a moon/mars mission).
Don't worry, guys, I got this!
They do, but remember they were the low-risk bet, on tech and engines NASA already had, with contractors they already had. It most likely (Starship isn't in service just yet) will not pay, but, still, it was the right decision at the time. Betting that SpaceX would be able to a reusable booster would be risky and betting they'd be able to deliver a fully-reusable super-heavy-lift rocket would be insane.
NASA's role is not to offer the best flights for the money, but to keep the aerospace industry busy and up-to-date with their own latest technology (and to prevent them from working for foreign powers). The science is mostly a side-effect.
But you're right, it wasn't completely insane in 2010. Nobody could have predicted how successful SpaceX would be and how untrustworthy Boeing would be.
The insanity of SLS was obvious to all but the deliberately blind by 2018 when Falcon Heavy flew.
You mean the political pork game sold as 'low' risk?
In fact, NASA own analysis showed this was not the case.
> Betting that SpaceX would be able to a reusable booster would be risky and betting they'd be able to deliver a fully-reusable super-heavy-lift rocket would be insane
That was not required for a much, much better solution.
> NASA's role is not to offer the best flights for the money, but to keep the aerospace industry busy and up-to-date with their own latest technology
So they spend 40 billion on legacy technology that is mostly pointless?
Of course not. Rockets and spacecraft were never the final product of NASA. The end-product of NASA is a large, trained aerospace workforce. While I agree SLS sucks, that earlier, less modified options still based on shuttle technology (such as the Shuttle-C) were better ideas in general, with SLS they had the opportunity to research and develop new materials and techniques that may be employed elsewhere, much like previous programs had vast spin-off industries.
All this investment should be able to make American aerospace companies more competitive in the global market.
Is SLS a better rocket than Starship/Superheavy? Probably not, but, again, that's not their goal.
You would get a larger better workforce if you actually developed new things, not put together 50 year old parts.
> less modified options still based on shuttle technology
Everything based about anything Shuttle is basically a horrible idea. Shuttle is what has dragged down NASA for 50 years now.
Literally non of those solutions would ever be even close to be cost efficient.
> with SLS they had the opportunity to research and develop new materials and techniques that may be employed elsewhere, much like previous programs had vast spin-off industries.
What are you talking about? SLS is maybe the list innovative large rocket ever made. The engines are literally Shuttle engines. The Upper stage is literally a Delta IV Upper Stage with an adapter on it.
The boosters are mostly the same as Shuttle booster with one more element (that mostly seems to have been added so they can give that contractor a couple 100 million in development money.
The core stage is based on the Shuttle external tank and outside of a some welding technology its not innovative at all.
The whole SLS program was LITERALLY designed to be the least innovative possible program. That's what is his whole justification was that it would be minimal development.
NASA own evaluation pointed out that they would end up much more cost effective by doing some development but congress killed that:
https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceLaunchSystem/comments/kt1vlf/r...
> All this investment should be able to make American aerospace companies more competitive in the global market.
Funny then that US had literally 0% of the global commercial launch market. Seems like they achieved the exact opposite, make companies that are depended on government contract that were mostly good at maintaining legacy systems.
A lot of the best sat companies were from places like Canada and Britain. The companies that made the most money from NASA are exactly those that are not that competitive.
> Is SLS a better rocket than Starship/Superheavy? Probably not, but, again, that's not their goal.
The goal was to pay the same old contractors, in pure pork program.
You don't have to be close to Starship to make a rocket far better then SLS. SLS spend 20 billion and they didn't even reach the 130t to LEO rocket that congress demanded.
The SLS that will finally launch in 2022 is like 70-90t to LEO rocket and to get to the actual design goal it will require another 10 billion or so.
Not being critical of it with the defense 'it was designed to be pork' makes no sense.
Tons and tons and tons of mass margin covers a multitude of sins. A lot of the difficulties of “must haves” for Mars are really just a side effect of substantial mass constraints. Relax those, and it’s much simpler with tech close to what they’ve already demonstrated.
This is also why building spacecraft is so expensive - they need to be engineered to the absolute minimum mass that does the job and that takes the majority of the time.
Relax that and you cut design time to 10% of it used to be.
We'll see if SpaceX can actually achieve their cost-to-orbit goals. Progress so far is promising, but they have a long way to go still.
So “limited water, storage, crew time, and food preparation capability (e.g., add water, heat)” all sound like things that can be addressed either directly or indirectly by “giant rocket.” And using a freezer for food (which a big rocket would allow) isn’t in the list of options they mainly considered. Deep frozen food is a very straightforward way of preserving food and high levels of nutrients for a very long time.
And as far as SpaceX meeting their goals, I agree they haven’t done it YET, but in order for Artemis to work, they now have to achieve those goals. It takes on the order of 10 Starship launches per HLS mission, more than a Mars launch would require! And they’re only charging like $2.5 billion for that, which includes two HLS missions and HLS development. Starship working and meeting its goals (at least enough for initial Mars mission) is now something NASA is reliant on for the critical path for Artemis. NASA is effectively all-in on Starship now.
Some examples: there's no good way to analyze air/water for trace volatiles on a spacecraft (ISS flies samples down to earth), there's no food that stays edible for five years, water recapture (which has to be closed loop) has been a headache for the entire life of ISS, so has managing trash and human waste.
You're also wrong that ISS has had anything like closed-loop life support. They are entirely dependent on regular resupply, a full-time ground crew, and lab analysis done on earth. The closest they come to closed-loop anything is 93% re-use of water; a Mars mission (by NASA estimates) would need 99%+.
There's a large class of space flight problems you can't giant rocket your way out of.
> Everything's easy in space until it has to run for three years or more without breaking.
Only 90% reliability ? So let's bring 5 of each, since we're not limited by weight, we get to 99,999%
> there's no good way to analyze air/water for trace volatiles on a spacecraft
How much weights a specialized lab for that ?
> there's no food that stays edible for five years
Its been solved a long time ago: dried and salted food, basically
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/ship-food-research-rec...
> Mars mission (by NASA estimates) would need 99%+
There are glaciers on Mars. Its about the only thing they wont have to bring.
2. There is no specialized lab for it that works in space. It has to be invented.
3. Astronauts can't survive on ship's biscuit and space MREs. Malnutrition is already a problem on ISS.
4. There are no glaciers between Earth and Mars, and by the way you're not allowed to touch the Martian glaciers because of contamination risk.
You’re now moving the goalposts from “no food is edible for 5 years” to “MREs don’t count”.
And the trip from Earth to Mars is only like 4 months if you use a BIG ROCKET. :) 4 months without resupply is no huge challenge.
You can't subsist on MREs for five years. Here's a cite for you about the space food problem: https://academic.oup.com/jn/article/150/9/2242/5870322
However fast your imaginary rocket goes, you have to wait 26 months for the planets to align so you can use it.
If it breaks in storage, without been used - yes. If it breaks in use, for reasons related to usage - no.
Multiple versions and designed to be repairable. Common parts, 3D printers and so on.
We 100% will need to use martian water. Otherwise its impossible to go.
I have never heard of 2) can you provide a link with some information what is actually required?
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20110012747/downloads/20...
For example: > The closest they come to closed-loop anything is 93% re-use of water; a Mars mission (by NASA estimates) would need 99%+. Oh, really? Why precisely do you think NASA estimated 99%+ water recycling would be required? Because MASS.
>trace volatiles In fact, ISS has had trace volatiles measured in real-time for years: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20070030106 ISS sends samples back to validate the instrument because ISS is a testbed. It isn’t absolutely required.
> there's no food that stays edible for five years
Wrong. Anything will stay edible for 5 years if put in a deep freezer. And canned food lasts a LOT longer than that. “Oh, it’s not as yummy and the nutrient profile changes”, well sure. It’s nice to have fresh food. But the claim no food stays edible for 5 years is trivially false. All of us have eaten food that old, and the radiation environment isn’t enough to change that equation massively.
ISS can withstand long periods without resupply, and has done so when there has been launch failures. If you can prepare for it ahead of time, it’s just a matter of having a sufficient spare pool on-orbit instead of just having the spare pool on Earth. In other words, MASS.
Waste management is annoying if you don’t have canisters to place the waste in, but again, that’s also just MASS. You can put the waste in double sealed containers and then just place it outside the airlock. Can do that on orbit, so that’s actually one advantage Mars has over ISS.
And I don’t see why Mars can’t have a full time ground crew, too. Time delay annoying but not in any way a showstopper.
In fact, a large rocket solves these problems so completely, people who should know better still haven’t wrapped their heads around just how completely it changes the situation. The water recycling thing you repeated is illustrative of this. It literally is just mass.
With all of these problems large rockets do help.
With cosmic rays, having a large mass of metal around you will actually increase your dose (because of secondary radiation). So you need to figure out shielding that helps more than it hurts.
Space is hard.
Seriously, for long time already it's not a rocket science.
Existing technologies - with engineering efforts - are capable to bring humans to any point between Mercury and asteroids. We'll likely develop something better, and Solar system would be all reachable without major breakthroughs. Certainly not of the kind "rocket fins on Earth, tip on Mars".
“Space is hard” is kind of a low-effort mantra. Space radiation shielding really is one of those things that is extremely straightforward to address with mass. Polyethylene, or actually any hydrocarbon solid, works fantastic.
Here's the Journal of Nutrition saying that five-year stable food adequate for space flight doesn't exist: https://academic.oup.com/jn/article/150/9/2242/5870322. You should write them with the good news that this is trivially solved.
These arguments about "everything is trivial with big enough rockets" remind me a lot of trying to have a discussion with blockchain people. Yes, if you have a warp drive, you can resupply Martian astronauts daily with fresh foods. But maybe let's see it in action before we call it a solved problem.
Fun fact, but SpaceX has launched ice cream in a freezer to ISS before. This isn’t hypothetical.
See how many hidden assumptions there are which can be relaxed if mass constraints are relaxed? It’s just assumed freezers aren’t viable because they’re too heavy. There’s stuff like this all over the place. The entire field is built under the assumption that mass is extremely rare.
Thanks for highlighting the point that big rocket solves these problems in almost a trivial way.
(And what does blockchain have to do with it? Blockchain is simply a worse solution to a database problem.)
Going to Mars is sort of mundane business - we want new markets, but on this scale it's bigger than that - we, humans, operate like that, we expand, we strive to better our lives, to know more or our surroundings, to conquer potential resources. So, if you don't see a point in going to Mars, perhaps you also don't see a point in, say, a company expanding operations in new cities or new countries.
I think there is a middle ground between the two. But Im just not excited to land on Mars, just as Im not excited about people on the space station. I dont disagree it can have (and does have) some value, but the value seems disproportionate to the media, money, and return on it is all. I can't fully explain why either, which doesnt help for internet discussions, but I just see closer issues that could use billions and focus on.
> Spaceflight can very well have a large role in saving the planet from climate crisis.
I would like to see this explained, or the forethought on it. Not to dismiss it but it seems like much of what we are doing now is for the sake of doing it. Maybe a mini-cold war with China. But just to say it very well may doesn't convince me this time around is all.
Once we had this discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21397285
like locusts
It's impossible to predict what tech can come out of such efforts that will be of use here on Earth in the future. The amount of money going to space exploration is peanuts so I think it's well justified if it has even a trace of potential to improve future of humanity and that has been true historically - e.g. satellites (GPS, weather, etc), medicine (MRI), and whole bunch of NASA spinoffs and more.
People spent nearly half a trillion dollars (not billion) on cosmetic products in a single year! You want to point fingers, point at something you can actually locate. Money spent on space is negligible to the point that it doesn't even warrant justifying spending it.
Visiting the Moon, and establishing a base there will help in establishing colonies on Mars and in the Belt. And don't despair. The Earth is much more resilient than many give it credit for.
But I also think that moving a lot of harmful activities into space would be an all-around benefit.
For example, I think space mining will help reduce the need to mine a lot of resources on earth.
Potentially the same may be true for certain manufacturing operations that are better suited to zero-gravity, and whose harmful bi-products might just be jettisoned off towards the sun instead of having to be buried in the desert or dumped off the coast of Africa.
Apart from getting everything into orbit to begin with, any transportation thereafter is merely left up to gravity and dropping the final/semi-final products back to earth. Today, the amount of emissions resulting from striping, digging, transporting, refining, transporting, manufacturing, transporting, etc... is alarming.