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melling

Yes, manned space flight is slow and costly. Every few years I try to explain it but get downvoted on everything.

8 years ago we had a long discussion after the Virgin Galactic crash.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8540279

Virgin Galactic still isn’t live but at the time people thought they would be by now.

Anyway, since then I’ve seen Steven Weinberg’s explain my point much better than I ever could.

Can’t find the entire article but here’s the first part. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2004/04/08/the-wrong-stuff/

Unmanned is much cheaper, and we can iterate much faster.

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Uch that argument again. I can't read the whole article but I know the basic idea.

First of all Virgin Galactic is a trash company that mostly been use to scam investors, they have shown nothing but incompetence using them as a reference point is just a terrible idea.

But there are many other issues with the concept of just not doing human space flight at all.

If you want to do real systematic science and exploration have humans is actually cheaper. Human on mars supported by serious equipment and local labs is simply more powerful. The best results you get when you have real human scientists directly on location.

And the cheap price for science missions is also partially a myth, despite being a second flight of the same architecture Perseverance cost over 2+ billion. We can't spend 2 billion every time we want to get a few rocket samples and then spend many more billions to pick them up. The complete cost of designing a lunar lander for NASA (that is capable of delivering 100x that weight of Perseverance) cost 2.9 billion.

If you want to do really serious science on a large scale on mars, you will have a human station with lab facilities resupply by reusable rockets and space craft, going on expeditions themselves or sending out robots that can bring back samples and be repaired.

In addition, the human component is quite simply politically incredibly relevant. Human rocket launches draw far larger audience, astronauts are the best ambassadors for space. In addition, the technology developed for human in space of has application for humans on earth as well so much of the technology to provide, air, radiation protection and so on is relevant.

> Virgin Galactic is a trash company that mostly been use to scam investors, they have shown nothing but incompetence using them as a reference point is just a terrible idea.

Thats a reasonable description of how a lot of space launch companies turn out.

Mhh most space company don't go public that aggressively. Some did with Spec, but VG was worth for more and was marketed more aggressively.

So I think while your statement is partly true, partly that inherent in space, and partly VG is worst of breed.

What is your point? Suborbital tourist launchers are essentially irrelevant to efforts like Commercial Crew, SLS/Orion, and so on. They differ enormously in complexity, cost, and addressable market. By a similar token, an article from 2004 may well have interesting things to say, but talking about the economics of human-rated launch systems in 2022 without the context of Commercial Crew is like trying to drive a car without knowing about the gas pedal.

It's not controversial to say that manned space exploration is more expensive and complex than unmanned, but it also offers capabilities that unmanned currently can't match. Where I expect you will run into trouble is in trying to argue that those capabilities aren't worth the cost based on a view of the industry 20 years ago, and/or by extrapolating on deeply flawed analogues like Virgin Galactic while ignoring obvious, far more relevant counterexamples like Crew Dragon.

Yes, manned space flight the way we have been doing it is slow and costly. But is that the cost of manned space flight, or the cost of the way we've been doing it?

Official estimates are that if SLS flies 10x, its cost per flight will be $4.1 billion. These things have a way of ballooning, but let's say that is reasonable.

SpaceX does not say how much Starship is costing them to develop, but external estimates seem to be under $8 billion. So for the cost of 2 SLS flights, SpaceX is developing a rocket with a cost to LEO orbit of under $10 million, and that they are aiming to get down to $2 million. SpaceX is planning to build in quantity, and launch at an insane cadence. Once enough have been launched, they will have ironed out the bugs and have a safety record good enough to take people.

After that, human spaceflight will be cheap.

In fact SLS is entirely unnecessary for going to the Moon. The current plan is for SpaceX to launch Starship, fuel it in orbit from other Starships, send it to the Moon, and then have it be a ferry for astronauts who got to the Moon on Starship. Why not just send people on Starship the whole way?

Yeah, yeah. I know the answer. Politics. SLS is largely funded by porkbarrel politics. Its purpose is to get congresscritters re-elected and only incidentally get to the Moon. But in a sane world, we wouldn't build it.

But we are. We are even laying plans to send humans to Mars on SLS in 20 years or so.

Anyone want an even money bet that Elon lands people on Mars before NASA does?

> SpaceX does not say how much Starship is costing them to develop, but external estimates seem to be under $8 billion. So for the cost of 2 SLS flights, SpaceX is developing a rocket with a cost to LEO orbit of under $10 million, and that they are aiming to get down to $2 million.

Some of that sounds like unreasonable optimism.

Given the track record of SpaceX, it's safe to assume that Starship will eventually fly and that the lower stage will eventually be reusable. Getting the Starship itself to survive reentry and landing in good enough condition to fly again without major refurbishment is another story. Something like that has never been achieved before. It's plausible that SpaceX will make it happen, but it's also plausible that it won't work. Then Starship will be simply an expendable upper stage that's too big and too expensive for the purpose.

While I agree with your point, I would only suggest ... compared to what? Let's say SpaceX cannot make Starship reusable. Will it really cost $4 Billion Dollars to create a Starship + Booster? Still cheaper than the SLS...

> Getting the Starship itself to survive reentry and landing in good enough condition to fly again without major refurbishment is another story. Something like that has never been achieved before

Didn't the space shuttle used to do that?

No. Shuttle needed major refurbishment.

Even assuming its gone cost 100M or even 1 billion it would still be better.

A non reusable Starship still beats SLS. So the discussion is kind of mute.

You're suggesting that they won't be able to do it simply because it hasn't been done?

Do you have any idea how many firsts they've put up? The craziest was reusable boosters.

For this one the problems to solve are fairly well-known. There is no particular reason to believe that it will be harder than what they already do.

I find it pretty amazing the utter lack of interest or outright cynicism about this by the HN crowd because potential future rockets may be (even very possibly will be) better. Sure, let's put all the eggs in the SpaceX basket. What could possibly go wrong? There's a lot of money being thrown around these days. It's not clear having a couple of alternate paths is the worst idea.

Literally nobody is suggesting to put all eggs in the SpaceX basket. But nice straw-men.

In fact, in the current situation we have exactly this issue. SLS/Orion is so absurdly expensive that there literally is no money for dual sourcing of moon landers. NASA was forced to select on Starship as the moon lander BECAUSE there isn't enough money.

If you actually read what smart pro-SpaceX analysts and journalist write, you will see that you can dual source literally every part of the architecture.

We already have (or soon will) have 2 ways to go from earth to LEO. If you build on top of that, and you are not forced to spend money on SLS/Orion you have easily enough money for 2 way to get form LEO to the moon.

Starhip is one of those ways, but other ways of doing the same thing could be designed if there was money for it in the budget, but that money isn't there because NASA was forced by uninformed politicians to use this architecture. Why so many people defend an architecture that is the direct result of clueless politicians I will never understand.

There is a reason every other modern NASA program is dual sourced, COTS, CommercialCrew, CLIPS, Lunar resupply, suits, but somehow Artemis isn't. Why might that be ...

With respect to the lunar lander, yes, it was at least odd single-sourcing to SpaceX. At one point there was talk of revisiting that but I'm not sure where that stands.

Still, my point was primarily that there is a general heavy slant towards SpaceX on this site which, whatever successes, should be tempered.

I disagree, there is a heavy slant towards SpaceX because SpaceX earned it. And taking maximum advantage of that makes a huge amount of sense. And it makes sense to talk about them more then anybody else.

But even fans of SpaceX agree that dual sourcing is important, it just so happens that the secondary bids are mostly not as good or inspiring. So they are talked about less.

Of the two rockets that resulted from the original COTS program, Falcon 9 and Antares, I think its pretty clear why when talking about those there is a heavy slant towards Falcon 9.

Had NASA not given SpaceX a chance for HR (as Bolten and others in the Obama administration wanted) the US would be reliant on Russia for ISS and that would be a literal disaster right now.

Success in the space industry is slanted towards SpaceX, and that why its the same on this sight.

It's because space ventures were complete ripoffs until spacex came along. SpaceX reinvigorated excitement for space in a lot of ways.

SpaceX is shaming all other effort (not an Elon fan but he is a game changer).

Not all, Rocket Lab are also doing great things. I’m just as excited about Neutron as I am about Starship. It will fill an important niche.

Rocket Lab has a tiny rocket and a nice space craft. That's all pretty neat but lets not go over board.

Neutron is less capable then Falcon 9 and likely lower launch rate as well. Its really not comparable to Starship at al.

I love RocketLab but they are not really playing in the same league as of yet and will not for a many years to come.

> Yes, manned space flight is slow and costly. Every few years I try to explain it but get downvoted on everything.

It is, yes. But why does that mean it isn't worth doing?

Didn’t SpaceX go from satellites to manned in like 3 years?

First successful orbital flight was 2008, first crewed flight was 2020.

To be fair, the first launch of Falcon 9 that was actually used to resupply the ISS was 2012, but I’ll admit that it’s not nearly 3 years :)

Except space X has shown the opposite can be true.

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