Impulse Space is betting on a future where launch is cheap
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
So if launch to LEO is cheap, fuel will be a large proportion of cargo imo. Note solar sails and some other propulsionless designs negate this requirement.
The delta-v maps show the minimum needed to get from one place to the other. In order to get from one place to another more quickly, you’ll need larger delta-v’s at the ends of the trip.
Even though the rest of the solar system is within reach, we don’t want to send humans to Pluto and back on 20-year missions.
That long of a trip means we just end up sending absolute lunatics and/or small pieces of chopped up lunatics after the inevitable murders.
Sending 20 years worth of consumables and spares is complicated, as well as the moral questions about sending people on 20 year missions.
Having engines like that we may talk about much faster trips to Pluto and back.
Very true. Nobody cares about breakeven for that use case.
One industry that could emerge quickly is that of asteroid mining. There are plenty of interesting asteroids with precious metals, water, and other resources. Right now the cost of getting to these asteroids, mining them, and transporting the mined goods back is so expensive in delta-v that it has not been done yet despite several companies having been active planning for this for quite some time.
So, SpaceX getting their star ship going might be a big deal.That enables us getting stuff into space and that enables us bootstrapping mining and construction activity in orbit. Plenty of science fiction books have been written on this. There's no shortage of ideas here.
Which means that this capability is a weapon more powerful than even nuclear missiles!
I don't think the world will let this be run on the honor system. So I expect space travel to become extremely tightly controlled once we get close to this tech level.
But global-scale strategic deterrents do get kind of academic past a certain point. There are plenty of ways for a nation-state actor to end the world if they really want to.
I'm thinking a few decades in the future, when there is probably settlements on the Moon and Mars, and an asteroid mining industry that finds valuable metal asteroids and sends them to Earth orbit, maybe by attaching solar powered rockets to them.
In that world, any asteroid mining operation can destroy a lot on Earth, even by accident.
Tangent:
One of my favorite answers to the Fermi paradox (not mutually exclusive with others) is that much of the life in the universe is stuck at the bottom of huge gravity wells ("super Earths") that make space flight immensely difficult and expensive, making the development of a space industry far less likely.
It's a variant of the rare Earth hypothesis. Not only might Earth be rare for its stability and long-lived biosphere but also for the fact that it's large enough to hold onto a thick atmosphere and water but not so large that you can't get off it with relatively benign (compared to higher energy alternatives) chemical propellants. Increases in the mass of Earth would make space launch exponentially not linearly harder.
Getting anything non-trivial off a super-Earth would probably require nuclear or hybrid (e.g. LANTR) rockets, which are problematic for ground launch in a biosphere. They'd also be a lot more costly.
The real issue is what’s the point? The economics of asteroid mining gets much worse if you consider bringing vast quantities of say gold back to earth would tank the value of gold.
Energy is easy: Solar panels. There is also repairs which might be trickier. Need to mine for materials and refine them into spare parts.
Once you have a self-sustaining colony you could use it to assemble useful stuff. Luxury goods for terrestrial consumption. Or you could use it to build a stage-2 colony that is suitable for humans. Or maybe rockets and stuff to keep expanding into space.
It’s light on technical details but it’s encouraging to hear that there is progress being made in this direction.
If prices for nickel, iron, copper, platinum, etc were cut by 99%, it would raise human living standards ENORMOUSLY.
Over 5% of earths crust is iron, aluminum is over 8%, we really aren’t running out of them.
Amos stuff is more rare, but for scale roughly 700 million metric tons of copper has been mined out of 2800 million tons of copper discovered in economically viable concentrations. With perhaps another 3500 million metric tons in undiscovered but economically viable mines.
Lower prices, and demand will rise!
A great deal of copper is used in new construction, but the number of outlets in the average new home isn’t going up because raw copper is suddenly 1/3 the price.
I'm thinking/dreaming about a world where prices are orders of magnitudes lower. Is there some advantage to make tin cans out of palladium rather than tin? Then we can just do it because the metal cost is the same!
A bit of utopian fantasizing, sure. But even cutting end user prices in half should have important effects.
While space is always cool and "sexy", I've been wondering if there's some analog model that could work for ocean tech, particularly tech that allows us to better protect and explore the ocean.
On a personal and technical level, I view the ocean as far more important to human understanding and survival than space.
Trust me, I empathize as I am in a similar boat. But we are a small, small market comparitively. We are expensive to service, low density, and low profit. Pretty much the definition of a niche
Funny enough, I always thought calling groups of coördinating satellites “constellations” belies their true complexity. They’re fleets. When you think of fleets of satellites in orbit, the need for ancillary services becomes obvious. (On your narrower point, we are seeing major breakthroughs in oceanography and maritime surveillance from these constellations.)
So they are also betting on either anti-monopoly legislation being set-up (SpaceX is a monopoly because no other launcher can match their pricing), or that a SpaceX competitor emerges (which could easily be a decade out).
Move fast and break things shouldn't have been acceptable for an organization operating in this area, and that Swarm had no meaningful repercussions for doing so should be a black mark on the org and the executive running it for a long time. I'm certainly hoping others don't use their model as a blueprint.
[1] https://spacenews.com/fcc-fines-swarm-900000-for-unauthorize...
If e.g. Boeing wants in on the action, they need to start moving. The main problem with that has more to do with Boeing's inertia than with SpaceX trying to stop them from doing anything. SpaceX has actually been pretty vocal and open about their plans. And by Boeing/NASA standards they are not even spending that much on this. The only thing stopping Boeing from competing here is Boeing being Boeing. Other companies are less encumbered by their own ineptness and will no doubt start figuring things out for themselves.
Now consider the long-term trend in the payload cost (by weight) of getting to LEO [2]. This is why people such as myself are so bullish on spaceX (despite quite reasonable qualms about Elon Musk as a person). The impact this has had and will continue to have on reducing this number cannot be overstated.
But all of this are still interim steps and we can potentially get the payload to LEO cost under $10/kg. If you want to go down the rabbit hole of this, I strongly recommend Isaac Arthur's Upward Bound series [3], I consider the ultimate end to this to be Orbital Rings [4].
Even if you don't believe there's a reason for humans to go to space en masse (which I disagree with), this will greatly impact life on earth, for example with space-based solar power collectors.
[1]: https://deltavmap.github.io/?system=Solar&origin=Earth&desti...
[2]: https://www.futuretimeline.net/data-trends/6.htm
[3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JgxkilF5XUM&list=PLIIOUpOge0...
Actually, it's 19km/s less than that. You want your destination to be Low Saturn Orbit, not Saturn. You've included the 19km/s that it takes to launch from Saturn to low Saturn orbit. It's even less again if you can aerobrake at Saturn.
The same applies to ESA, do they actually care about building rockets, or is the interesting work to be done now all up there in orbit and beyond?
Starship isn't the end of innovation in space technology and infrastructure. It's not game over, it's the beginning.
SpaceX benefit most from stuff which can be mass-produced. Customers who have use-cases which can be massproduced, will benefit the most from SpaceX.
Another commenter mentioned on the perils of that too - SpaceX owns the ride, so they hold the keys to the Kingdom.
I don't worry about SpaceX dominating all aspects of space development, because their launch capacity will far, far exceed the volume of products they can reasonably develop to fill it. We're talking about the ability to deliver thousands of tons of payload to orbit per month. It's going to take many companies, many product ideas, many business models and industrial sectors to fill that capacity.
It's a bit like how in the early days of the iPhone Steve Jobs imagined that Apple would develop all the apps for the phone, sometimes along with business partners, as they did with the early versions of Google Maps. His colleagues realised that the platform had the capacity to run a vast ecosystem of apps across many use cases and business models they couldn't even think of yet. The only way to realise it's potential was to carry other people's stuff, in that case apps, in SpaceX case cargo.
Imagine what you could do with an extra $4B per year in support for missions - it would be amazing. There is no way SpaceX can scale for that. You can't build a telescope targeting starship (maybe using starship has the frame and keep starship up there)? Or tons of other interesting ideas (spacesuits of a number of styles etc).
SpaceX is a bit unique, Elon wants to get to space and is crazy about Mars. But LOTS of other stuff to do, and he doesn't seem to hung up about what he is launching (see OneWeb and all the other space com businesses he's launching).
"When you're 3D-printing a tissue culture on the ground, there's a tendency for them to collapse in the presence of gravity," he says. "The tissues require some sort of [temporary, organic] scaffold to hold everything in place, especially with cavities like the chambers of a heart. But you don't have those effects in a micro-gravity environment, which is why these experiments have been so valuable."[0]
Although I do think, taking human progression in the limit, moving to self sustaining manufacturing in space, using local raw materials (asteroids or otherwise), and dropping products back down to earth will be the natural progression. Space offers what earth does not -- infinite resources, infinite space(heh), infinite energy. Delete scarcity and what remains is purely a logistics problem.
Whether it'll be 50, 100 or 500 years, who knows?
[0] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210601-how-transplant-o...
* Safer to handle than traditional hypergolics, which are crazy toxic and therefore difficult and expensive to work with. (This is what they mean when they say that the propellant is "green".)
* Something that doesn't require cryogenic storage. That stuff is great for launching from earth, but not great for storing longer-term in satellites. (And they will need to store it over a longer term in order to provide de-orbit, which they say they will.)
If I had to take a guess, I'd guess a hydroxylammonium nitrate monopropellant. It was tested in orbit by NASA a few years ago and apparently worked great:
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/tdm/green/gpim-nears-comp...