A bevy of rovers heading for the Moon | Hacker News Reader

A bevy of rovers heading for the Moon

blog.jatan.space

89 pointstectonic124 comments

Love the Orbital Index. A weekly Space treat in my email inbox for sure!

Subscribe link: https://orbitalindex.com/subscribe/

Thank you!

Google's $20 million Lunar XPRIZE [1, 2] ended a few years too early in 2018. Would have been exciting had they kept until 2023 or 2025.

> In the case of the Google Lunar XPRIZE, the audacious competition ended without a $20 million grand prize winner. [3]

Seems like they got tired of waiting and redistributed the funds to other causes. They didn't realize how close we were.

Sure would have been incredible publicity for Google had they not canned it. We'd be talking about the prize every year and with every launch, and we'd hold Google in esteem for being pioneers in science and space exploration.

Pity.

[1] https://www.xprize.org/prizes/google-lunar

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Lunar_X_Prize

[3] https://www.xprize.org/prizes/google-lunar/articles/a-new-er...

However, you must admit that canceling the program too soon is very on brand.

Best comment of this thread!

I was on one of the teams since 2010, and still at the surviving company now. The original deadline was “before a space agency went back” or 2013, whichever came first. There was about 30 teams, of which only about 4 were serious, and as far as I know, only 2 surviving as companies that are actually still working.

Near the end they finally figured out how to pare down to a few teams instead of manage 25+ teams of a few people each, making press releases and experiments but there was a lot of years of nothing much happening aside from the Milestone prizes in 2014. Each year after that it was a real struggle from the people At xprize to convince google to extend by one more year (which needs an annual budget, not only the prize money), teams so and so are going to launch soon. Eventually it wasn’t credible, and after 11 years there was none of the original people involved at either xprize or google so there was no one left to convince higher-ups. News about GLXP was more and more negative each year as well.

I was fortunate in that we were (at the time) only making a rover so we were partnered with or in discussion with all of the top teams at some point and got to travel around to meet them. It was a great time!

Fascinating history!

How big is your company/team now, and what are you building? Is it commercial?

What did the field feel like back then as opposed to now? Has the new commercial space race breathed new life into the field? Has it made it more competitive? Given new opportunities for funding?

It's a shame Google shuttered, but it makes sense given the overhead. Still wish they could have performed minimal maintenance and left it untouched, but I suppose there was a period when it looked like none of this would pan out at all.

I'd totally read a blog post if you have this written up somewhere. It's so interesting.

I work at ispace, we are mentioned in the article. We have 150+ people, 3 offices (Japan, USA and Luxembourg) and a handful of projects. It's commercial but the larger contracts in the industry are still from space agencies. And it was always like that. NASA doesn't make a lot in house but always contracts companies. There's just a willingness to let new companies try now. That's the "commercial" part and aside from telecom, it may be a while until we see fully commercial missions.

Because of this the field is better now, because NASA and to some extent other space agencies are actually offering contracts to several low-cost missions, with the expectation that some fail and some succeed, with lower cost overall to a typical project with a ton of paperwork. The extent to which they actually reduce paperwork in practice varies.

The overhead of GLXP was probably pretty huge even when they reduced the number of teams, plus reputation risk of google being associated with people running around telling investors they were "selected by google to fly to the moon."

I haven't written this up anywhere, maybe someday.

Will this ever be safe enough to use as a hazardous waste disposal system? Can we just send the worst of the worst into the sun without too much risk of just spreading it out through the atmosphere in case of an explosion.

Fun counter-intuitive space fact, it actually takes much less energy to send a space probe out of the solar system than it does to send one into the Sun. To fling something into the Sun you basically have to get rid of all the kinetic energy that was given to us from the Earth's orbit.

Even stranger still is the fact that you have more efficiency if you send the probe into the outer solar system first and then try to slow down. The Ulysses probe did this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_(spacecraft)

Edit:

> "To fall into the sun a spacecraft would first have to escape the earth's gravity, and then after that slow down almost completely from the earth's orbital speed of about 30 km/s (~70,000 mph) around the sun. A four-stage, 3,000 ton rocket (about Saturn-V size) could only launch about 150 lbs into the sun on a direct trajectory, and it would probably cost a little more than $1 billion."

> "To escape the solar system and fly off into interstellar space, a spacecraft only needs to speed up from earth's orbital velocity by about 40% (instead of reducing it by almost 100% to fall into the sun). The required delta-v would be about 17-18 km/s."

From a simple HTML page with content written by a college professor, my favorite kind of webpage! https://van.physics.illinois.edu/qa/listing.php?id=43694&t=l...

No no no - I think we are all missing the point here - if I learned anything from the Superman documentary series then we should be flinging the toxic waste at a trajectory that makes it go around the sun in REVERSE which will also mean it of course will travel backwards in time. And then for sure we can say that is going to end up as someone else's problem.

If we send it back in time we can reverse the half-life too, think of the possibilities!

Half-Life 3 confirmed

How about crashing it into Jupiter?

That's certainly do-able and given that any spacecraft meant to leave the solar system would almost certainly use a Jupiter gravity assist it wouldn't be any more difficult to steer it into the planet itself.

However, if we were truly determined to get radioactive waste off of Earth and into space we could put it into an Earth escape trajectory and leave it in an orbit high enough so that it doesn't encounter the Earth again. That would save a ton of fuel.

We also have the option of impacting it into the Lunar surface. Radioactive waste is primarily a problem for us here on Earth because we have an atmosphere and a water cycle that causes particles to spread all around the ecosystem. But any waste left on the moon will stay put for billions of years because there's nothing to disturb it.

I did some back of the napkin math, USA generates about 2000 tons of nuclear waste a year[1] and it costs DOE half a billion dollars to store it[2].

Instead as you said we could yeet it all into space with like 20 starship launches, taking the $100/kg price tag it would cost us 2 million dollars to send it to space. Starship electronics should be radiation hardened so the unique payload shouldn't affect it much. The only risk is starship blowing up during launch. That would be a bummer.

There's already a paper discussing this[3].

I love the last line in the paper

'Both the technology and the need exist. What does not yet exist is the will and support of the engineering and political communities'

Mind you this came out in 1992, we have far better technology now.

[1]https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nuclear-waste-let.... [2]https://earth.stanford.edu/news/steep-costs-nuclear-waste-us... [3]https://space.nss.org/wp-content/uploads/Space-Manufacturing...

I imagine the risk of the rocket blowing up right after launch and scattering radioactive waste all over Texas would make this a non-starter.

If Starship flies as much and is as safe as SpaceX predicts, they will have enough data to show empirically that Starships launches have an expected risk below 0.1% (i.e., it won't rely on theoretical models). That 0.1% isn't nothing, but it could easily be acceptable if the nuclear waste disposal Starship flight is launched from a sea platform (which is currently a planned Starship capability) in the middle of the Pacific. For instance, it's already been well argued that dilution of radioactive waste in the oceans could also provide a good disposal option, leading to a worldwide increase in background radiation that is much smaller than the baseline levels.

(There are a lot of important details here, including (1) the disputed argument that some isotopes might be preferentially concentrated by some organisms to high levels in any dilution scenario and (2) that an explosion of Starship in the Pacific would not dilute the radioactive waste as uniformly as a dedicated waste dilution program. My comment is just trying to point out that this could plausibly be acceptably safe and more careful analysis would be needed to check.)

Could we not put it in a thick lead box which is designed to survive explosions?

Why don't they just make the whole plane out of the same material as the black box?

Thicker box = more weight = $$$. Plus is anything really resistant to thousands of tons of rocket fuel?

Sure, more weight but at the bargain price of $100/kg

Could it be resilient enough? I have no idea. I'm a programmer.

We already make containers that can tolerate being pummeled head on by freight trains without leaking, so I imagine that we could definitely engineer something similar for space travel.

Isn't Uranium as sturdy as any material you'd pick to encase it in?

Your math seems off, 1 ton is 1000kg, but your point still stands at $200 million plus the overhead of containment and transport to starship. This is far more economical that I expected.

But also this is the price to orbit. As the escape velocity is 1.5x higher we can probably assume the same or a greater increase in cost. Maybe you could just justify a really high orbit? It would take a long time for it to build up.

The main risk is taking off, you'd want something well protected and capable of surviving starship blowing up at any point during ascent, including returning safely to earth and impacting. You'd probably want to (unusually) launch over land - perhaps Alaska/Canada, to make retrieval easier should it fail before reaching orbit.

Once it's in a low orbit, the extra shielding isn't needed as much as it's not going to fall back to earth quickly, so boosting from there to a high orbit would reduce the mass needed to be transported.

In theory you could maybe do it for say $4b/yr all in.

How many orbital solar collectors could you use to concentrate energy and beam the equivalent energy currently produced by nuclear plants to a desert based collector?

Yeah, I didn't even consider this. But at what point does orbital solar energy start to make sense?

I wonder what the $/kg before we can just send up solar panels that last 100+ years and provide continuous microwave beams of clean energy to ground stations.

But once it's launched it's a lot of potential energy lost for ever, no?

Isn't there part of this spent fuel that could be used as fuel again? I'm thinking MOX on steroids.

Weren't surgenerators supposed to 'recycle' and reduce drastically the amount if 'final waste'? Weren't next-gen fission plants supposed to take in even higher rates of spent fuel?

I believe France has the types of reactors you are talking about in use - from what I remember they still do end up producing some waste though.

I feel like we should probably save the stuff just in case we end up needing it eventually in the future. Could be some aliens out there that love the stuff!

Oh yeah, there'll always be waste but reducing it by orders of magnitude is the best waste management bet I can think of. Less mining in sketchy places too. 'my waste is my energy independence strategy' :-)

Perhaps life on Earth was a long-con destined for us to throw our nuclear fuel out into the stars for easy harvesting

I wonder if lining a spaceship in nuclear waste might actually end up blocking interstellar radiation (assuming the nuclear waste is not also irradiating you). That stuff is pretty dense right?

I imagine that building a breeder reactor could be cheaper per kilogram of nuclear waste it burns, while also generating energy instead of spending it.

> Will this ever be safe enough to use as a hazardous waste disposal system? Can we just send the worst of the worst into the sun without too much risk of just spreading it out through the atmosphere in case of an explosion.

I don't think it is impossible that launch capabilities become safe enough to lower the risk to something some people might consider acceptable. However the physics of it won't change. To even get into earths orbit we have to accelerate anything going up to an average of 7.8 Km/s, where to escape orbit to anywhere else it's 11.8 Km/s.

I think the amount of energy to do that will always be the primary reason why this just isn't practical. Assuming you are advanced enough to be considering this, I would hope that your society is stable enough for long term containment and processing.

A space elevator could fling it out to escape velocity if you can build the containment vessel to survive a fall at terminal velocity (way lower than orbital velocity). Energy wouldn't be a problem for a civilization with the capability of building such an elevator, as there's plenty of solar, and raising 1 ton to GEO uses a trivial amount of energy.

Launching into the sun is a VERY difficult achievement. So far we've launched one solar probe, and dozens of other probes. It launched back in 2018, and still has 3.5 years before it will actually reach the sun.

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

Yes, for reference the capability of the Delta IV Heavy [0] (which launched the Parker Solar probe) is ~28,000 kg in to LEO. And the Parker solar probe [1] was only 685 kg. I don't know how close to the limit of the mass this is to get in to this orbit, but it still gives you an idea of the capability to get something to the Sun versus in to LEO.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_IV_Heavy

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

Going to the sun is easy, going there fast is hard. You could put a tiny ion thruster on it and get it there in a million years

It is, indeed, way cheaper to fling it into space beyond the solar system with the right planetary alignment.

We don't actually much care about when trash would hit the sun. But yes, it's a huge delta v compared to just getting to orbit.

Adding a long duration deep space maneuvering system to allow the trash to precisely navigate the necessary gravity assists would also be far from feasibly economical.

Throwing all our radioactive waste into space seems like a shortsighted waste of a non-renewable resource. Once humans pull it out of the ground there isn't a natural process on Earth to create more.

If it was put in a very high Earth orbit or solar orbit, it could be retrieved in the future, if desired.

Spacecraft that use RTGs have to do quite a bit to ensure that the risk of the radioactive contamination is low. It is pretty expensive both technologically and to go through all the regulatory hurdles. So I think getting to a place where this is feasible is still a very long way off.

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

Waste is just a resource we don't know how to use yet. Someday we'd regret throwing all that fuel into the sun.

I know this is beside your point, but launching directly into the sun requires more energy than throwing outside our solar system altogether, as Scott Manley nicely explains here:

https://youtu.be/i5XPFjqPLik

The launch of this material is probably safer than the transportation of that material to the loading/launch facility.

It's not, the probability of a SpaceX rocket spectacularly exploding is somewhere around ~1%. They'd need 860 more problem-free launches to hit ~0.1%.

The probability of a truck spectacularly exploding on its way to the launch facility is way less than 0.1%. In fact, it's astronomically lower than 0.1%.

> They'd need 860 more problem-free launches to hit ~0.1%

For what it's worth, SpaceX claims that they intend to reach this level of safety by literally performing thousands of launches. Time will tell if they can do that.

You can't calculate probabilites that way when the process itself is improving.

One more to the list: GITAI is hoping to send a centaur-like rover with a robot torso in mid-2020[0]. Given that the current version is using some off the shelf sensor I have no idea how realistic is this timeline though.

[0] https://gitai.tech/en/2022/02/10/gitai-develops-lunar-roboti...

Very excited about this mission for several reasons.

The variety of rovers (different companies, different processes, different energy and propulsion) are quite exciting. It'll be useful to compare their efficacy.

But also significant is the overall mission design. A rover swarm where every individual member is expendable has been bandied about at NASA for at least 18 years. It lets the mission take more risks: if you see an interesting rock over rough terrain or a cave or outcropping that might harbor water ice, you're not going to risk a whole Perseverance on checking it out. But it might be worth risking one Iris or a couple COLMENA.

If we are lucky we might get a new season of Battle Bots: Lunar Edition

My first reaction to this wondering how long before the face of the moon is deformed to an extent visible from earth. Did anyone else feel that way too?

As civilization spreads to space, it will be visible.

Let's hope we don't treat the Moon like San Francisco, where you (sometimes) can only construct buildings that don't cast a shadow.

Even with the largest optical telescope being planned, the man made object on the moon would have to be pretty big to see. It would probably have to be a few hundred feet in size.

Probably not for a long time. We can't even see human made structure on the earth from orbit let alone the moon. Except lights at night.

You can't see single buildings from low Earth orbit with the naked eye, but human influence can cover huge areas. There are artficially constructed lakes. For example:

> On completion, the reservoir flooded a total area of 632 km2

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Gorges_Dam#Floods,_agric...

Oh yeah that's true. Probably hard to do that on the moon though :)

We totally can. But the moon is a lot further away.

What structures?

https://www.nasa.gov/vision/space/workinginspace/great_wall....

That's about seeing things in photographs taken from space, not things seen with the naked eye. Like, we've all seen satellite reconnaissance photos, so we know those can see lots of important stuff.

Astronauts can reportedly see highways, airports, dams with a naked eye from orbit.

Do you have a link to those reports? Highways strike me as improbable. Visibility requires thickness in 2 directions, so if they could see highways I'd expect them to see tons of stuff, like wharehouses.

Covered in The Tick

Is “a bevy” the venereal term for a group of rovers? Because that would be pretty cool.

https://infogalactic.com/info/List_of_English_terms_of_vener...

"To illustrate this monumental change in capacity, Musk pointed out that in a single year, a Starship launching three times per week could put as much mass into orbit as has been launched by the entire world to date (~15,500 tons). "

While that sounds impressive, the whole 3 starships per week for a year part just makes this seem ridiculous. Is Musk personally going to pay the <$10million per launch? <$10m x 3 x 52 = $1.56billion. That's just the launch. Never mind the expense of the payload being lofted into orbit. Nor the amount of time required to produce all of that payload. 3x per week is just an insane amount of launches.

So for ~ the cost of one SLS launch spacex could put more into space that all of history.

At this price points this low for mass to orbit it starts being reasonable to forgo technologies like super light materials, and reclaiming every molecule of water you bring up. You can build payloads for super cheap in a conventional terrestrial fashion and ignore the weight.

> So for ~ the cost of one SLS launch spacex could put more into space that all of history.

Could they? I think they still have to prove they are able to deliver that kind of cadence at that price point. They aim to get there and I hope they do, but spaceflight being as fiendishly hard as it is, I wouldn't take their marketing claims as fact just yet.

You're right, all this assumes the marketing material is an accurate description of the furure. Sprinkling in a dose of reality we must conclude that with maybe only two launches ever, SLS will turn out to cost much much more per launch.

You could use waste water as propellant

This is similar to the coversation of only having 128k memory forcing extremely tight programming vs multiple GBs of memory where you can do whatever you want and put recommendations on your users to have a minimum amount of memory.

Just because you can be lazy doesn't mean it's the best way.

Depends on your definition of "best". Programming for 128K takes massive skill. Having multiple gigabytes allows more people to participate, and to prioritize other attributes than "low memory", typically faster and cheaper. So you get say a better UX, with better error handling, for less money.

Which one is "best"? Well depends if you are skills & money rich, or skills and money poor. Clearly both are best, depending on what you are optimizing for.

Up to now launches have been highly optimized for weight. Optimizing for other priorities (like cost) will change the rules of the game.

">Programming for 128K takes massive skill."

It does not. What it does not tolerate is mediocre level which seems to be taking over the world lately.

To program simple things, maybe not. But if you are trying to do something complex then having a severe memory limit adds one more area of complexity to the process.

If you can remove areas of complexity then you are doing three things: 1. allowing mediocre people to accomplish the same goals as used to take skilled programmers, largely by throwing hardware at the problem (this seems to be the source of your complaint) 2. letting skilled programmers accomplish the same task in less time (again by throwing hardware at the problem) 3. making even more complicated things possible for skilled programmers

I certainly see the value in your complaint about things like the Slack app using Electron to make the UI easy to build (at the cost of my hardware performance), but that is a business optimizing for costs, rather than trying to optimize more for quality. Please assign the blame where it belongs.

Concur. I've done some programming for a platform that gave me way less than 128k to work with, and it's not rocket science. In some ways it's a hell of a lot easier than, say, web development.

It just forces you to be aware of certain things that are tremendously wasteful of memory and cycles, but which don't matter on "modern" hardware.

And by "don't matter" I mean "do matter a whole bunch, but your particular contribution to the problem is likely to be small enough that it won't help much if you spend the time to do it right, so why bother"

Under that assumption, modern software would have a better UX and be more reliable than the software written "back then". And from my experience it's the exact opposite - modern software, like Slack, is not only slower and less functional than old counterparts, like IRC; it's also much less reliable.

> it's also much less reliable.

The software, or the service? Because IRC is not typically associated with tremendous reliab...*

* User has quit due to excess flood

Both. "User has quit" doesn't seem to happen in Slack, because Slack doesn't report stuff like that. But the problem goes deeper - Slack often fails at very basic functionality, like failing deliver messages until much later or duplicating them. It's helloworldware with a lot of marketing money to pretend to be a technically sound solution.

Why isn't IRC much more popular?

Because it turns out to be a colossally chatty and stateful protocol in an era of stateless mobile devices. Plus it's not HTTP... the rule at the network layer these days is basically "80 and 443 are open; every other port is good-luck-to-you."

OP's assertions it was more reliable are assuming a very static network. Modern protocols (Slack included) are far, far more reliable on a highly-unreliable transport layer.

Not true. Or rather: in theory what you are saying would be true, however in case of Slack it simply doesn't work: Slack handles unreliable transport worse than IRC - IRC never dropped or duplicated messages; you could reconnect to IRC client under a tmux session from anywhere and it would do the right thing.

> you could reconnect to IRC client under a tmux session from anywhere

That would actually be a pretty decent solution if it could be automated on a mobile device: run the IRC client in the cloud and then have tmux auto-reestablish every time it gets its connection dropped while the mobile device moves around.

I'd have to see it in action to be confident that a continuously-dropping-and-reestablishing tmux won't drop incoming messages or double-send though.

People (like me) have been doing this for over two decades now. It's quite well tested :-)

Excellent! Do you have a link to a write-up on how to set it up?

No business model, I think - and thus no money for infrastructure, further r&d, and marketing.

For sure, but the best way to program say, a game, now definitely is not to go to the same lengths as people went to on the original Nintendo.

There is a happy medium between using Unity and hand tuning every line of assembly.

I don't think the software analogy works super well. In the case of software there's been a real performance loss over time as code became generally less optimized. In the case of space hardware or space stations, not having to use ultra-specialized materials means a potentially huge reduction in cost, which will enable plenty of new use cases. Space will become hugely more accessible as launch costs and space hardware costs both go down tremendously. Nobody is really losing here, except maybe the slow, bloated, old school space industry.

The lazy way broadened society's access to computing which has had all sorts of positive knock on effects.

Elon is banking on low launch costs creating lots of demand. Whether that pays off has to be seen: for conventional satellites the launch cost hasn't been the biggest factor by far, but we are now seeing more satellites that profit from low launch costs (mainly earth observation and internet services), and there are at least some projects in the pipeline for things that make sense to manufacture in space (like optical fiber). But demand takes time to materialize, and SpaceX has to somehow stay solvent until then.

I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that the demand will be there.

At $2,800/kg, I'm curious enough to start looking at options for a _personal_ satellite. It's unlikely that would be viable, because the cost of the communications and stationkeeping hardware would be prohibitive. I'd be interested in sharing space on a "F/OSS" orbiter of some type, but I've not seen any projects that would make such an idea viable.

At $100/kg... I'd figure it out, if only to say that I'd done so. At that price I'd be trying to figure out a way to stream video from a microsatellite of orbit, de-orbit, and re-entry just to show the couple of "flat earthers" I know what's obvious to the rest of us. Let them pick the camera and lens so they can't fall back to "It's a fisheye lens!".

In all seriousness, though - at $100/kg, you'll see all kinds of entities trying things that have never been practical before just to see if they'd work.

NASA used a commodity CPU for their Martian drone, so just start there. See what an RPi4 or something could do. If it works for any amount of time at all, then it's a success. If it lasts the entire duration before re-entry, then it's a resounding success.

If launches are that cheap, just keep throwing junk up until you find out where the line for good enough is.

With launch costs 100x lower than historical norms, there is plenty of space cargo that becomes economically viable. I don’t think SpaceX will have any trouble filling those launches. I am surprised there isn’t already a venture fund dedicated to funding space startups so that they can exploit Starship economics.

While I don't know of any dedicated space funds off-hand, there are hundreds of venture funds that dabble in space endeavors: https://signal.nfx.com/

SpaceX ought to start their own venture fund to fill their vehicles with things.

How much of that space cargo is payload ready for a vehicle that hasn't been finalized in design yet? How long does it take to fit that cargo into that ship once it is finalized? Able to meet the 3x/week launch schedule?

It's obviously just a stat to make it sound impressive, but it is just totally impractical. I could easily say that with a launch every day, that capacity could be met in just 6 months! Fuck, with a measly 2 launches a day, we could do it this quarter!! Stats are sometimes meaningless, and when they are coming from this particular individual, they have to be taken with rather large grains of salt.

They're averaging 1x a week with Falcon 9 which requires throwing away an upper stage and Merlin engine each time. So yeah you "could easily say" whatever you want, but this hot take that SpaceX is just talking bullshit like any rando internet commentator is getting a bit old.

Averaging 1x a week is not the same thing as 1 a week.

The bullshit quotes coming from Musk are what's getting old. People calling him out on that bullshit is not the stale part. His rhetoric is getting quite boring.

It is ridiculous, and I think people latch onto the per kg cost as we can all visualize what a kilogram is. But you can't just say "mass is cheaper now" and then put 100 customers on one launch. If any one of them fails, it affects everyone, just as it does now. It takes 2 years minimum to develop anything new for space now, and in joint missions everyone delays everyone else constantly. It takes at least a year to get a license to communicate to a spacecraft. SpaceX has hundreds of requirements for its customers and has a 2 year schedule from discussing those requirements to launch, just like every other provider. Longer of course, for multiple customers on one launch.

Making something lightweight but stiff is one of the easier problems to overcome. And yes, you can use a raspberry pi in space, but even SpaceX won't let you connect a raspberry pi to an antenna actuator (for the radio you don't have a license to operate) and a simple battery, in a mission with a hundred other customers and let you say "well the launch cost is cheap so I don't care if it fails".

Sure, things can be made better through standardized carriers, AWS ground stations, etc, but Starship will not be a gamechanger overnight, at least not for any small player.

I have a feeling eventually we are going to drastically reduce that cost - either through just making something similar to Starship cheaper or with some new weird hybrid launch system. For non human capable launches (no worries about high g-forces for example) some type of system that just never stopped moving but went to space and back and orbited the earth continuously could be interesting. Imagine like a space plane thing that temporarily "lands" on a runway like thing that is also a giant magnetic accelerator but never actually slows down all that much. Of course we would need to find a way to reliably LOAD the damn thing while it is going that fast but I can't see that being impossible. Most of the systems we are designing now are general do it all systems - they have to be suitable for both people and other payloads.

SpaceX will certainly have a ship called the ESS Jimmy Carter --> Which, just like the submarine, will have the ability to capture a satellite pull it into bay and fiddle with it...)

But it will be launched as a service to "recover space garbage" but really it will be a satellite capture program..

The guy has hundreds of billions of dollars in assets so he could pay the bill himself. There are some easy things to fill launch capacity at that scale: fuel (especially methane), water, scaffolding, and inflatable modules for pressurized work (habitat, service, storage, hangars, etc). The play is to be the biggest landlord in space.

Wow! Cheap! Each Space Shuttle launch was at least $500mm. And we still don't have anything that can go to orbit with the same versatility -- without the Space Shuttle Hubble would have been disabled ages ago. So much for the rocket people...

How much CO2 does each launch emit into the atmosphere?

A lot, but it doesn't come near a primary pollution source (and would have to get far past Musk's wildest dreams for frequency before it got near becoming one).

I mean, he made $120 billion in 2021, so sure why not.

Isn't the Earth going to run out of mass and shrink away to nothing at this rate?

I can't tell if this is sacarstic or not but I decided to do the math.

Mass of earth: 5.972 × 10^24 kg

Launch capacity per year: 15,500 tons

Years to get rid of earth: 385,290,322,580,645,161 years.

I think if we every have to worry about this it becomes more a question of where are we going? And do we have enough carbon to cycle for fuel to do this.

I didn't account for the decreased gravity over time as you chip away at the planet. Woops!

Over that time span you should probably account for the 48.5 tons of material that falls to Earth annually as well.

Gravitational binding energy of Earth is about 10^32 joules, so you'd need to pump that much in to dismantle Earth. The entire solar output reaching Earth is about 10^17 Watts, so it would take 10^8 years to dismantle Earth without leaving it if you could capture every Joules as it entered the atmosphere

On the other hand if you could capture the Sun's entire output - not just that arriving at Earth - you'd have enough energy to do it in a week or two.

Wouldn't the reduced mass of the Earth's sphere of influence be reduced over time, thereby reducing the energy required to launch subsequent payloads?

Yes, there's all sorts of odd things that would happen with rotational energy too, hence you don't need as much as if you calculated it based on lifting 1kg at a time from the earth's surface. You'd need about 10^32 joules. If you didn't account for that you'd need about twice as much energy, which is about 10^32 joules.

In theory you could simply vaporize the earth with antimatter, converting it to energy, rather than trying to disasemble it. That would produce far more energy than the gravitational binding energy, so unless you happen to have a planet sized lump of antimatter around you'd have to generate it with more than 10^32 joules.

Yes

Also worth noting that the Earth receives about 43 tons of new mass every day, mostly from meteorites. Coincidentally, this works out to 15,695 tons of new mass every year.

Are we going to run out of some chemical elements?

You might be interested in https://what-if.xkcd.com/7/

> Is there enough energy to move the entire current human population off-planet?

That’s like saying having hundreds of airplanes in the sky at all times is an an insane amount in 1930.

Well, if price of BTC 2x’s he can pay that tab pretty easily. No reason for him not to.

And that much starship launch volume is invaluably more than the rovers or whatever they’d be bringing up. Quick & dirty reliability test for the world to see, launch turnover times, etc

> a Starship launching three times per week could put as much mass into orbit as has been launched by the entire world to date (~15,500 tons).

Finding a free spot to place all those objects without too much risk of collisions might become quite a challenge. http://www.stuffin.space/

It amazes me how empty space is. There's about a dozen objects on that map over California at the moment, at various heights.

Now sure things are moving fast

For some reason, HN's link isn't going directly to the lunar rovers item, which is here: https://orbitalindex.com/archive/2022-02-16-Issue-156/#the-u...

Thank you Jatan for his excellent contribution to today's issue of Orbital Index. Here's his longer form version as well: https://blog.jatan.space/p/lunar-rovers-launching-in-2020s

That's because HN's software replaces URLs with canonical URLs when it finds one, and the submitted page includes https://orbitalindex.com/archive/2022-02-16-Issue-156/ as a canonical URL.

In this case, though, the author's own source is more in keeping with the HN guidelines ("Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter.") so I've replaced the URL above with that one. Thanks!

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Reply on news.ycombinator.com