Once they get this working, the quantity of cargo they can put in space will be ridiculous. We could actually plausibly begin planning for an offworld base.
Even with a high volume and relatively low cost launch vehicle, the actual offworld base will be hugely expensive, and no commercial enterprise can realistically expect to make a return for their investors.
A government needs to step up with the rationale that it will eventually form a tax-producing colony - but a huge investment will need to be put in till it gets there.
I expect it will be profitable in the future as it scales up. But there is probably only about 2x more scaling at the current price point (launching new countries, selling to people who aren't yet aware of it).
Money is just a medium for the exchange of goods or services. What would the colony export in order to generate the revenue required to produce said taxes?
EDIT: this is also made worse by the fact that the first few colonists should be farmers, mechanics and doctors (aka human mechanics), since all the intellectual work can be done on earth.
A human being able to lift 3x as much without machines already opens up possibilities for greater productivity.
Stuff that must happen in the cold is cheaper to do too...
Think of Vegas - no economic output at all, tourist destination alone. Mars could do the same.
It only takes one thing - there is no need for a mixed economy.
If it takes 10,000 people to make $thing, then even at Musk's target price of $100k/person, the cost to develop and ship the automation[0] only has to come in less than a billion dollars to win.
[0] I guess the TCO would be more complex to determine, as the human side includes not just paying the humans (and presumably shipping good from Earth), but also figuring out how to do low-gravity and zero-gravity healthcare and surgery (on this scale there will be emergencies requiring surgery during transit), and planning for the colonists' desire to start families and retire.
The amount of money that a sizable and well funded group of people spend to get away from literally every other human on the planet and away from the government would easily fill a few rockets.
2. Martian Water.
Imagine all the disenfranchised homeopathics now have another woo-woo cure to turn to and will pay out the wazoo for. Make up a claim like "the purest water, untouched by human industry or nuclear tests, powered by billions of years of energy from sun, unfiltered by ozone and untouched by magnetism."
3. Tourism.
Vegas is basically a Martian tourist destination with an entire city built to support it. There's no other reason for Vegas to exist. If the accommodations were nicer, people would go to Antarctica as well. Rich people want to take their selfies with Olympus Mons in the background.
4. Low-G sports
Earth sports probably won't work the same, so entire new sports and leagues will form and provide entirely new season pass resell opportunities for streaming video providers. There's no way to simulate the low-gravity on Earth.
Also rich people sports like golf might take on an entire new ultra elite form when your par-4 hole 8 is 4500m long and you need a satellite to spot your ball.
5. Low-G food products
For similar reasons as the Martian water. Insert any combination of differences in nutrition/taste/look and it'll find it's way onto the plates of a three star Michelin restaurant or as supplements sold at a health store or something.
That's off the top of my head and could easily be a multiple billions of dollars per year of sustained economic output from Mars, mostly built on simple vices, novelty, entertainment, and pure human gullibility.
All we need is the political will and we can fund a Mars base as a purely government funded research program.
1. The indomitable human spirit and drive to explore and expand
2. It's cool
3. More room for humans
There are also reasons that don't apply to Antarctica:
1. Hedging our bets against planet-ending catastrophes (global warming, giant asteroid/comet strike, ultra-pandemic)
2. Another stepping stone to exploring further interesting/important space goals, like gathering resources from the asteroid belt/moons of jupiter/etc, discovering life on Europa, and so on
Also it has space accountancy pirates.
According to this
https://klangable.com/blog/quantity-has-a-quality-all-its-ow...
It was not Stalin who said that
"The law of the passage of quantitative changes into qualitative changes"
According to Wikipedia it has its roots from ancient Greece https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectical_materialism
I’m not impressed by a cheap observation like this, even when phrased in a clever sounding way. I am impressed when people make new observations when this applies, such as when they are able to model a specific macro system that behaves very differently when the number of inputs is increased by a lot, and show how that is useful for our understanding of nature (including human nature).
https://klangable.com/blog/quantity-has-a-quality-all-its-ow...
This goes in fact for most of his grand quotes. Whatever deep sounding passage are attributed to him and can't be traced back to Marxism tenets, are typically adaptations from the Bible, reflecting his education as a priest.
"First there was the dream, now there is reality. Here in the untainted cradle of the heavens will be created a new super race, a race of perfect physical specimens. You have been selected as its progenitors. Like gods, your offspring will return to Earth and shape it in their image. You have all served in public capacties in my terrestrial empire. Your seed, like yourselves, will pay deference to the ultimate dynasty which I alone have created. From their first day on Earth they will be able to look up and know that there is law and order in the heavens."
:)
Moonraker :)
I'm guessing Starlink will get less expensive to operate - but will it be to the point it'll displace cell towers?
Earth observations satellites would be cheaper to put up... so maybe we'll get a few more than before. But are there any real game changers?
With Starship, most of this goes away. It becomes possible to launch bigger, heavier (that is, cheaper) stuff to space. Still high-tech stuff, for sure, but engineers will be able to make more tradeoffs, because there won't be a need to optimize everything to be small and light.
I just really wonder how much money can they make off of all of this even in the best case scenario. There isn't an infinite demand for putting things up into space.
There are demand inflection points. If it's so cheap you can go up for your birthday, or can do transatlantic flights, then it's a bit different - but nobody is talking about it ever getting THAT cheap. If Starlinks starts making all telecom providers obsolete then that'd also present something radically different and a huge amount of revenue. But I don't think they're able to do that either
I feel the primary reason people stopped caring about space after Apollo is because there are simply insufficient economic incentives.
The list of things you can do is short.. Telecom, Telescopes looking down, tourism, space mining
Everything else is on taxpayer dollar
Actually, Shotwell has. She has speculated that they could eventually do a trans-Pacific hop for the price of a first class plane ticket.
When Shotwell and Musk talk about stuff like that or Mars colonies, they're hyping the company to attract more talent. If you loom at what they're actually building, it's all satellite launchers.
The first three have provided quite a bit of launch demand. Nation funded human space flight has been in decline since Apollo but commercial launch demand has been grown significantly.
The last two have yet to be tapped but their combined potential have the ability to create unprecedentedly high levels of demand.
I don't see how space can be profitable but societies must grow.
As Italian, we're still profiting from what the Romans built and from their general hegemony.
Another way to look at it is that the empire ran into a labor shortage and contracted back to a sustainable size.
Figuring out how to get large nearly pure metallic asteroids in earth orbit would go a long way in figuring out that profitability.
I love the challenge of space technically. My concern is confusing technical challenges with profitable/worthy pursuits.
I say this as a collector of inertial guidance systems.
That’s because your constraint is delta-V which is expressed in terms of the mass you are moving around. More mass requires more propellant and energy… which means more mass requires more mass.
Another good example is JWST, which required an elaborate (and therefore risky) "unfolding" process. The costs of such approaches seem somewhat self-reinforcing: a failure would be very costly, so it's worth spending more on validation and testing; that extra expense would make a failure even more costly, justifying even more spending on testing! (In that sense it's similar to the tyranny of the rocket equation: having to carry more propellant in order to propel that extra propellant!)
Beyond that it would be a significant boon for science.
Seems like the primary benefit comes to silicon wafer manufacturing. Growing pure silicon crystal is much easier to do in a microgravity, vacuum environment:
> The study reported that for semiconductor crystals processed in LEO compared to terrestrial samples, more than 80 percent improved in either one or a combination of structure, uniformity, reduction of defects, and/or electrical and optical properties–and some by orders of magnitude
For actual device manufacturing, there are potential benefits as well, but this is less well researched area (possibly as a result of the difficulty of getting advanced IC manufacturing equipment into earth orbit).
https://www.issnationallab.org/redwire-space-3d-prints-menis...
It really depends on what we mean by "offworld base". There is extensive literature on how this might be done "on a shoestring budget". Start here: https://www.marssociety.org/concepts/mars-direct/
He's also more recently said the revenues from Starlink, aiming to be at least $5+ billion monthly recurring revenue, will fund his Mars colony.
The reality is though he's now tapped into accessing the full abundance of the universe, and he's at least 1-2 decades ahead of everyone else, in part due to the synergy of his various projects: Starlink, Boring Company, Tesla, etc - all are technology that he'll need for Mars - so he can funnel revenues/sales back into those companies]; and Musk understands exponentials of scaled paths, and so him being 1-2 decades ahead, with the synergy of the multiple companies he owns/controls, every year he has the chance to leapfrog ahead another decade of any other competition.
There’s no private business in Russia, almost all economy is state owned in practice. That particular conference is organized by Sberbank.
By speaking at the conference, Musk is directly collaborating with Russian government.
Tell me which of Elon's companies would exist today without heavy government subsidies or largesse?
He is a modern day Ross Perot. No more, no less. Maybe he wants to make the world a better place - but only if he can get extravagantly wealthy on US taxpayer dollars doing it.
He's obsessed with Mars because it represents the fattest international government contract that ever existed.
Can we get to a point where every kg doesn't need to be maliciously thought about and optimised, maybe we could just yeet any potentially useful thing in to orbit and sort it out later.
Also, space is pretty big. Even with a million destroyed satellites out there, the total density of debris would be very low. Imagine spreading debris of a million destroyed cars all over the planet - including the oceans - then walking around and trying to spot a piece. How often would you even see one, much less happen to walk directly over it (=equivalent of a collision)?
They are quite concerned about that particular outcome, Kessler wasn’t just warning us, but predicting an outcome.
NASA sent China a nasty letter the last time China shot down one of its own satellites.
The why is simple. There are launch windows. The more debris in orbit the smaller the windows and shorter their availability.
I believe you overestimate how much orbital debris it would take to ground earthlings for centuries.
You probably mean meticulously...
I mean you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.
Yeah, it’s cool, but there’s bazillion things needed for a space station. Just a metal tube in the orbit isn’t sufficient.
That doesn’t make it comparable to a space station any more than arguing here makes people rocket scientist.
https://www.humanmars.net/2016/10/spacex-its-spaceship-docki...
In fact Starship may make space stations obsolete, for the same reason we don't have anchored floating research stations out on the sea that we go back and forth to using little boats. We use research ships instead.
That process could be repeated N times to quickly build a station that’d dwarf the ISS.
You’re talking about metal tube that never reached the orbit. You thing you just need “slight” customization to make it a space station?
That thing doesn’t fly yet, is not human rated, has no life support capabilities, has unknown lifetime in space, has no propulsion system that would keep it in orbit for long period of time and bazillions of other things.
It’s just a metal tube at this point. I know it’s cool to fantasize what it could be, but so far its metal tube that doesn’t even fly and is hugely behind schedule.
And it’s built by guy, who’s known for overhyping.
I mean when you have a company that's shipped nothing and they are saying big things, that's one thing. But when you have a company that's actively launching and reusing more rockets than everyone else combined, that's another.
All the things you've listed are previously solved problems that have existing solutions. SpaceX isn't even inventing anything new here.
>That thing doesn’t fly yet
Starship has flown and landed in low altitude flights. It's the booster+starship that's in testing now.
None of that matters when you try to make an argument that it's basically a replacement for space station, with few simple tweaks.
You can argue if it will get to Mars of you want. But silly to argue that anything that can get to Mars with human occupants won't be able to also orbit the earth with human occupants
Sure, it may, maybe. But those are 2 very different use-cases, and it's not given or easy by any way.
For example Ford makes cars and trucks.
But that doesn't mean it's a viable replacement for space stations.
Those are 2 totally different topics and it boggles my mind how people can write whole science fiction story around and argue that it's basically a fact.
We would do well to ignore the cynical and misanthropic who contribute nothing but complaints about how the capable people should serve their personal interests first.
We should try to improve and solve some of our cultural, philosophy, and systemic problems -before- we replicate them in isolated pockets of humanity. Otherwise we might suffer a replication crisis, where cultural and societal advancements are not shared by all.
For example, many dystopian media in the past few decades has focused on images of what a hyper capitalistic society could look like in space. Where you may have to pay for every breath, pay for literally existing in a space. A society where every day of your life must be profitable and servicing the corporations you have sworn fealty, a world where the only purpose for the foreseeable future is growth and commerce.
Perhaps having a society that is a bit more communally focused, and less self centered. One where the purpose of society is to nurture and spread life to where complex life does not exist. A society where the primary driver isn't growth for growth's sake.
The argument is that if we ignore our cultural and philosophical short comings, we could replicate them. Why is replicating them bad? Because the stakes are so much higher when you have a space fairing race. Do you know what a small crew of technically literate people could do with the tech a society building a mar colony would require? Capture and redirect an asteroid, and if they were half intelligent they would know that the best way for it to go undetected would be to play the long game and give it a long trajectory out of the solar plane where most of the solar systems mass is. Or they could just as easily purposefully seed a planet's orbit with debris to create an intentional Kessler's syndrome. And you might say that these are outlandish, but any society that lives in space or on an non-terraformed would be a society where the base competency would be vastly higher due to survival pressures.
So, yes we should keep advancing tech but I think it's an obvious deficiency with our silicon valley minded leaders. We don't put any time/money/energy into the fundamental problems of our society because these newage business men have been indoctrinated into the ideology that technology is the one and only savior. It's important, but you can't build a society or a building with only one pillar.
We spend untold billions and trillions on these things. You will never solve every problem for every person. Utopia does not exist. You see, a lot of different people have a lot of different ideas on what the fundamental problems of our society are. Some people think it's because people have abandoned traditional values and religion. Other people think it's because of that. You can't solve all the problem for all the people. You can't care for everyone because you just end up caring for no one.
> Perhaps having a society that is a bit more communally focused, and less self centered.
Your vision, to my judgement, sounds self centered though. It's saying "take care of me first instead of fulfilling your ambitions". There can't be a single "community". It's just not possible or realistic. It will always be plural because to be quite frank, many groups of people do not like each other, will not change for each other, and don't want to waste their lives trying to be accepted by other groups. And that's OK.
> We should try to improve and solve some of our cultural, philosophy, and systemic problems -before- we replicate them in isolated pockets of humanity.
This is saying we should paralyze ourselves until an arbitrary group of people say everything is good now. Again, why would we do that?
It’s better to use the capability while we know we have it and have the chance to etch that knowledge into our very existence by way of living all throughout the solar system.
I reject that interpretation of the the song completely—theoretically, a nation represents a single community. The issue is that the nation in question (the United States) doesn't seem to give a shit about its own needs outside those of its dominant (i.e. rich and ruling) class. Keep in mind that—although the song in question does present it as a racial matter, because race and class are so deeply intertwined in this country—that the focus on economic dominance over all other concerns leaves the poor in this country behind regardless of race.
And the implication that the poor (especially poor black folks) in this country are poor because they "can't seem to figure it out" is so asinine I'm not going to bother addressing it.
Kessler.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/ekyibk/commen...
It's not a good look to criticize an org for being careless when you haven't even put bare minimum effort into seeing if they were careful.
I thought NASA already had those rockets. What's preventing them from sending astronauts and cargo now?
And they haven't made a new one.
So no, NASA hasn't had a human rated lunar lander for a very long time.
You don't see 50 years old weapon systems stop working.
You mean simple firearms, that were carefully cleaned, prep'ed, and packed for long-term storage? Or something at least vaguely comparable to a moon rocket in size and complexity, like a B-52?
Talk to an old Air Force guy, who knows the maintenance routines for the older warbirds, and how many issues they have with "manufacturer went out of business" spare parts, etc.
If people can maintain underwater nuclear-powered coffins armed with nukes for 50 years, why can't they maintain a (then) functional space rocket?
It's not like NASA is missing fuel, or that hull is damaged, or that engine is not working. At least, these things shouldn't happen if they put half effort into maintaining it.
Part of the reason why the SLS took so long and cost so much is because they DID try to re-use all the old resources and technology rather than building from scratch.
Vs. those old rockets were designed to be one-shot expendable stuff. Plenty of them are on public display at museums - you could ask the museum staff about how many $$$/year they have available in their budgets, to keep the rockets in operational condition. (Hint: $0.)
Or, you might want to check out the YouTube channel for the USS New Jersey (historic WWII battleship, now a museum) -
https://www.youtube.com/battleshipnewjersey
- where their curator often talks in gritty detail about vast differences between "operational warship" and "keep afloat and open as a museum". Note that the something-million dollars which they are currently trying to fundraise - for some bare-minimum drydock maintenance - is small potatoes compared to the cost of a single new F-35 fighter.
I'm sure if the political will had been there to maintain the Saturn V/Apollo capability, they could have.
Can? Sure you can. Absolutely.
Did they? No. There was no mandate, no requirement, no project, no budget.
Put that Ohio submarine into a dry dock, send everyone home. Tell them to find something new to do because the project has ended. Do you think you will be able to re-launch submarine in a year later if you changed your mind? How about ten years later? How about 51 years later? I wouldn't hold my breath.
The best way to maintain a capability is by regularly exercising it. The Ohio did that every year constantly, the Apollo program did not.
Even if it was possible, there would be no point: the blueprints weren't the hard part, and the world has changed since they were drawn up.
Records were not kept, knowledge died with the engineers who built it. Materials are no longer available, some of the technology has not been built in 50 years. In the end, redeveloping the stack is much cheaper than using the old rockets. Which is exactly what they are doing - and with every new development comes the risk you are chasing the wrong rabbit and won't, in the end, end up at your target.
More plausable explanation, however, is that it simply did not exist at all and they faked everything.
NASA a radically changed it's focus an functions since the space race. Suppliers have changed too.
They could do it again with enough funds and time, but it will take many years.
Orchestrating a plan to keep millions in the dark and ensuring thousands, upon thousands of people keep a secret to their deathbeds is a lot less plausible.
You miss the point. They used those rockets multiple times to go to the Moon, it's not like it was "do once and forget" situation.
How could they simply forget things after doing it for so many times? You need extreme reliability and know-how to do those things consistantly over the span of a decade.
There must have been a knowledge transfer for such an important feet of engineering. If not, then the whole thing is not really believable. Sorry.
Interestingly enough, the leftover Saturn V hardware was put to good use by launching Skylab missions and the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, both of which turned out to be valuable steps in the US space program. So as much as it pains me to say, it may have been a good thing that the last three moon missions were canceled.
You've never heard of the situation where no one knows how a business critical piece of software works? "Bob wrote it 20 years ago but he died last year". This kind of stuff happens all the time in the real world. If no one is paying for that knowledge and supply chain to be maintained it will atrophy and dissapear. That's why the US army is still buying tanks even though they have thousands in storage, they need a company to maintain the supply chain and institutional knowledge to build tanks. Are you imagining generations of engineers being tasked with knowing how to build a rocket with 1960's technology with parts from suppliers that no longer exist despite no one having any intention to ever buy such a rocket again and no one paying for the maintenance of that ability?
NASA didn't have the budget to continue to operate Saturn V and also build Shuttle.
The president and NASA leadership wanted Shuttle. So the last Saturn V were put into storage.
To claim they don't exist is stupid, you can go see them:
https://ids.si.edu/ids/deliveryService?max_w=800&id=NASM-A19...
Yes, lots of those design top documents still exist. But not every supplier and sub-sub-sub supplier did the same thing. Most of those companies don't exist anymore or were bought and bought again.
NASA never wanted to build a Saturn V again. So they archived all the plans.
You seem to believe that they put some kind of plan in place to keep the Saturn V so they could bust them out again. This is simply not the case. As far as they were concern Saturn V was over and Shuttle was the future. Archiving everything was the only thing they did.
Of course we could do a huge effort and recreate the Saturn V program. And the lots of documentation that exist would help. But anybody who has recreated old things, knows that plans are not perfect. Doing something like that would simply not be worth.
I can't really say how we now have a better rocket that can send people to the Moon.
We do have rocketry that is a lot more advanced than the Saturn V ever was - but it simply cannot, and does not do what the Saturn V did.
I could argue details - but notice that, after battleships were no longer so important, it remained a critical priority for the U.S. Navy to be the "Reigning Superpower" on the world's oceans:
https://www.history.navy.mil/research/library/online-reading...
Vs. how interested was the U.S. Gov't in retaining "can go to the moon" capabilities after Apollo 17 (in Dec'72)? Can you name any post-Apollo, pre-2000 manned-moon-mission NASA programs which received serious funding?
The issues are pretty straightforward, when the SaturnV and lunar lander were being built, almost all of the design was done by hand, all of the parts were made by hand and the engineers made all sorts of little undocumented adjustments to the designs in the process.
On top of that, the flight computers of the era were extremely primitive, large and heavy, and the design was done with this in mind.
Finally, NASA's safety standards were much more lax at the time. Saturn V would be considered way too dangerous to fly crew on nowadays.
Modern engineering methods are just too different to just recreate a Saturn V without effectively redesigning it from scratch, at which point it might as well be a much more capable vehicle like Starship.
I'm all for it, and root for SpaceX and Musk to make it happen.
What I'm saying all this time on this thread is following:
"Man never went to the Moon before. Artemis will hopefully be the first. If man has been to the Moon multiple times using the same aging technology over 50 years ago, then it shouldn't be an issue to go there now. In fact, it should be much easier and cheaper, as the computers are 1000x more powerful nowadays, and we still have fuel/energy sources that were used then."
Thank you for the discussion.
Now, guess why the beam actually comes back instead of getting absorbed by the lunar surface? Because Apollo 11 left a mirror there half a century ago, it still works
There are people alive, today, that can prove to you that we went to the moon just by shooting a laser beam in the sky, so yes, we did go to the moon.
The reason why this isn't a problem is that the device wasn't 'just' a mirror, but rather a retroreflector. This reflects any light back at its source, regardless of which direction the light came from.
If you were really lost in deep space, perhaps you could flash a very bright light (not a laser) momentarily, then look for the return flash from the retroreflector moments later - or at least, hopefully that soon, otherwise you are very far away indeed! A few strategically-placed retroreflectors around the solar system could make an effective triangulation-based location tracker. I wonder if this already exists in some form.
It works this way with any conspiracy. It is you mental model, it is your decision, but it is little sad to watch people choosing ignorance over knowledge.
As for cost and 'easier', the Artemis lander programs are cheaper than what Apollo cost, and they have far higher requirements than just being the bare minimum to keep 3 carefully selected specimens of humanity alive for a few days. Hell, Starship is supposed to have an entire infirmary. That is to say that it would indeed be a lot easier if we were just aiming to land a few people in a can for a few days and were completely willing to risk their potential inability to return. We've made the requirements much harder, so the project is appropriately harder.
Do you think we could built an exact replica of the Model T and its manufacturing line? We could build something kind of like it, but it would require a lot of engineering.
The type of plastic and cloth used is likely not manufactured anymore. The processes used and tools used don't exist anymore in the exact same way they did then. And the people trained to build those tools and operate them don't exist anymore.
The idea that all technology once built can just be recreated without any issue is just complete nonsense.
Do you not know anything about how technology works?
Mission accomplished boys, let's pretend that Moon doesn't exist for 50+ years. /s
For the record, I do want Artemis to succeed.
NASA is now building the SLS, a modern(ish) heavy lift rocket meant for moon missions, among other things. But for a couple decades in between there was this obsession with the Space Shuttle as the primary launch platform, and the Space Shuttle wasn't of much use beyond low earth orbit. And with the Soviets focusing on space stations after the Apollo landings there wasn't any competitive aspect to going further either.
There were obviously lots of unmanned missions to the moon and other places in the solar system, but manned activity was limited to low-earth orbit for the last 50 years, so the capability to go further withered.
> What's more, delays to Starship have knock-on effects because the spacesuit contractor needs to know how the suits will interface with the spacecraft, and simulators need to be built for astronauts to learn its systems.
From https://web.archive.org/web/20230809230628/https://www.chann...
- Dragon can do an emergency abort, by (a) accelerating away from the booster and (b) parachuting down to a soft-landing. Starship's upper stage is so massive that such acceleration and soft-landing seem out of reach (ideally an emergency-fallback-everything-has-gone-wrong mode shouldn't rely on tricky maneuvers like their landing flip!). There may be ways around that, e.g. using an ejectable module, but it would all need designing, building, testing, validating, etc.
- Falcon 9 needed to prove its reliability by performing many successful uncrewed missions. Starship will need to take the same approach, but hasn't managed any yet ;)
- SpaceX had to stop making changes/improvements to Falcon 9, since NASA would reset the successful-mission-count back to zero after major changes. SpaceX was willing to do that, since they had another rocket to focus on (Starship). Also, it helped that Falcon 9 had already exceeded their expectations by the "Block 5" design (which is why Falcon Heavy hasn't seen much use; Falcon 9 is very capable on its own!). Even when Starship is reliably launching, it will likely undergo design changes for a while.
- Getting Starship to the Moon will need in-orbit refuelling. That's untested, and more dangerous than docking and crew transfer (which is now routine), so it makes sense to launch the crew separately and transfer them to an already-refuelled Starship. This doesn't add much complexity, since refuelling requires multiple launches, orbital rendezvous and docking anyway. The choice of crew launcher is then arbitrary: SLS, Falcon 9, Soyuz, Starship, etc.
(Earth) launch and landing will be the hardest parts to get crew-rated, if they ever are. Perhaps the only human-rated approaches will be smaller, safer systems like Soyuz (or some modern replacement on that scale), with immediate transfer to a Starship or space station once orbital. Given its cargo lifting capacity, and station-sized living space, that would still be a great improvement over today (although maybe not enough to pay back SpaceX's costs)
The solution to get Starship and Shuttle beyond LEO is the same: either use up the fuel required for landing and expending the vehicle or orbital refueling.
The difference is that Starship is so cheap it makes both of those options feasible. Shuttle's reusability was supposed to make it cheap, but it ended up costing $1.5 billion per flight.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/08/rocket-scientist-say...
There is another thing sets apart Starship from other launch systems: relatively wide availability/manufacturability of its fuel outside of Earth. You won't find kerosene or hypergols on Mars or Ganymedes, but methane can be produced fairly straightforwardly there.
Hydrogen is notoriously tricky to even keep in one place, much less pipe across some distance.
But that's exactly what people believed about the space shuttle before it launched as well. Let's wait to see Starship actually work before predicting it will be enormously cheap. As it stands, that cheapness is entirely predicated on a completely unrealistic level of reusability (multiple launches per day with the same rocket, when even Falcon 9 requires weeks or months between launches of the same rocket).
You have full powered engines in orbit on Starship, "just" need to fuel them :)
We can build medieval castles all day long with concrete and steel, but if you want an actual stone medieval castle, we don't know how to do it.
Oh yes we do.
I ran an industrial facility that had been in operation since the 40’s, safety used to not even be a concern. If it operated in 2000 the way it did in 1950’s, or even in the early 80’s, they’d be out of business.
let me introduce you to the US military and the lack of mental health care we provide them after their service.
let me introduce you to prisons. farms. a dozen others.
let me introduce you to daily mass shootings.
Americans do not care about the lives of other Americans until and unless it is required by law.
no group of people today, outside of a few enthusiast amateurs (very few), know much about how the Apollo program worked in enough detail to resurrect that technology and infrastructure.
We can't return to the moon today. That's why we're building up a new moon program. We can't just pick up where we left off.
China in general want to go to the moon.
And the Chinese would get to beat the Americans at the American's own stated goal. America's programme is called the Artemis Program - Artemis being Apollo's sister - and the programme's first goal is to put a female and a person of colour on the Moon ASAP.
It would be a clear-cut victory for China over the USA, all the while being perfectly in keeping with China's socialist beliefs and past activities.
And China has several competent female astronauts (Wang Yaping and Liu Yang are experienced).
So, am I missing something?
Sending a woman (or a person of color for that matter) to the moon has no scientific benefits unless the mission is framed as building a long-term colony there (where both men and women could participate) for example.
You enumerated several political reasons but no scientific ones as I understand. Hence my question.
Therefore, the logic goes, each side needed to frequently show off their advanced technology whilst avoiding showing any secrets: ostensibly civilian space exploration serves that purpose rather well.
I've read a similar argument for spying - that countries begrudgingly want a certain amount of espionage to take place in peacetime. This is because it's better for everyone to know the extent of each other's military capabilities than to accidentally start an arms race out of a misplaced belief that their rivals are suddenly increasing development of weapons.
I was born in the post-USSR world, and am also British rather than American, so perhaps take my perception of the Cold War with a pinch of salt. :)
China putting a woman on the moon would be a little embarrassing to the US, but people would forget about it in a week or two. It wouldn't prove China's technological superiority, just some vague sense of moral superiority. And there are a lot cheaper ways to send that message.
What significant difference does it make if we put a woman (or woman of color) on the moon first vs putting another white man on the moon. [with modern technology].
I could think of a few positive reasons to do this, but it shouldn't be the main driving force of competition.
If the goal is “but X can do Y too” then there are already women astronauts so goal achieved I guess.
70% of the US is either female, POC, or both. Enticing that mind bogglingly huge demographic into STEM has massive utility for this country. Evidence shows that people aspire more easily to be like people they resemble, and the moonshot that inspired "Whitey On The Moon" didn't do that job well.
What would you pay to add 10 million more engineers and scientists to the trajectory of this nation over the next couple decades?
The US is I guess 51% women, maybe 20–30% Hispanic, maybe 15% African-American, and so on. Then you just need to put one of every identity on the Moon in the next decade.
Because surely you didn’t think that the average person of a sociological minority identify themselves as “not a white [straight] male”.
Missiles have to be launched and require much more acceleration to reach the moon and leave earths gravity.
To put it into perspective, imagine the moon can catapult 5000 massive rocks at earth every day. Earth can’t make that many missiles fast enough
Hypothetically a battery of missiles on the moon could be launched without being noticed by anyone on earth. With modern radar absorbing/scattering designs their transit could also be unnoticed. By the time they arrived at Earth they would be moving far faster then any ICBM could ever hope to achieve. Which puts them well outside the envelope of any existing/soon to exist missile defense system. You would also not have nearly enough time to launch a meaningful counterattack, and any that you did launch would be much easier for our moon based overlords to spot and counter.
Basically putting nukes on the moon breaks MAD pretty thoroughly for the foreseeable future.
My hope would of course be that opening space up would provide humans with sufficient rocks that we would stop trying to blow ourselves up over this rock. I don't expect that will be the case, would be nice though.
Small edit: Double checked the published reentry speeds of some modern ICBMs, ~8 km/s, it's a lot closer to the moon to earth reentry speed of ~10 km/s then I thought. Should point out though that the first is a ceiling and the latter is the floor. So my point still stands, it just means that the moon nazis will have to push a little harder to kill us all.
If your opponent puts missiles on the moon, put observation satellites in lunar orbit.
Surely stealth nuke satellites in earth orbit would be better than fixed positions on the moon? But even nuke satellites are way worse than land based missiles.
A co-ordinated satelite strike from ow orbit means all you satellites need to go over your target at the same time. In an emergency unless you happen to have a bunch of sates by chance over your target, on average it actually takes longer to wait until a given satelite is over a target before you can launch, compared to using ground based missiles. You can compensate by having about 20x as many missile sats as you actually need, so there's always enough over your targets. In theory that gives a small advantage over land based missiles, but that's hugely wasteful.
Putting any of that on the moon just means your enemy has 3 days to figure out what you're doing, or means if you need an emergency response it will arrive in 3 days time.
The only saving grace here is that if the US government contracted Elon Musk to secretly haul nukes to the moon, there'd be a smarmy tweet about it that same day.
Submarines.
* Precision landing of large amount of troops, anywhere
* Ability to lift 250 tons -> precision landing of tanks and artillery, anywhere
* Deployment of kinetic impactors from space
Countering the ability for competitors to launch the capability's both you and I mentioned.
> Ability to lift 250 tons -> precision landing of tanks and artillery, anywhere
How does a foe distinguish one of these launches from an ICBM carrying nuclear warheads, so that they know not to launch their own in retaliation?
That is a lot of launches for a rocket that doesn't work.
I would prefer some contingency plan so that were not stuck here because Elon decided to go fast and break things...
Kessler Syndrome is a real risk at higher orbits like 1000km and above. But not at the lower altitudes. Kessler Syndrome is an exponential effect, so if the losses (due to atmospheric drag) are higher than the gain (debris generation due to collisions), then you do not get the exponentially growing debris problem. It’s not even possible.
Although it should be pointed that even at higher orbits and even if you’re technically in the exponentially growing regime, this growth would occur very slowly, not minutes or hours. Think months or years. And it’d take something like an active war with mass deployment of anti-satellite weaponry to trigger that kind of thing.
In fact, most debris problems nowadays ARE caused by debris from anti satellite tests (as well as collisions with old Russian derelict satellites or explosions of upper stages not properly deorbited).
But we also have demonstration missions for deorbiting derelict satellites to prevent the production of additional debris even at these higher orbits.
But sorry to say, none of these problems are due to Elon Musk.