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Comment by GMoromisato | Hacker News Reader

There are literally only three organizations on earth capable of putting humans in orbit:

   1. SpaceX
   2. China
   3. Russia

I say "SpaceX" instead of America or NASA because the Axiom missions show that SpaceX can launch people independent of NASA.

India may develop their own capability to put humans in orbit before Europe does, which is amazing to me. [Though admittedly that's only because Europe has different priorities--not necessarily a lack of ability.]

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Isn't having a private entity be able to do what previously required a nation a good sign for that nation? The idea that the USA cannot re-obtain that capability again seems silly to me and there are a lot of pros for having private companies pushing the state of art forward.

it puts the concentration of power into fewer individuals hands, which makes me nervous.

The gov is slow b/c it requires sign off from hundreds of people. (For example, congress approving NASA's budget).

As a private entity, maybe 20 or 50 people are required to approve or reject missions. This lets them move faster, but if a certain CEO doesn't want to provide services for a war, they can mess with the contract.

The government is still in control. They could nationalize the project tomorrow or stop issuing launch licencees.

Why taking rides to orbits should require some massive jumping threw hops doesn't really make sense to me. If the launch and landing are secured what the problem or danger with people going to LEO?

"move fast and break things" coming soon to a low earth orbit near you

I believe SpaceX has been moving fast and breaking things over many places, already.

https://www.npr.org/2023/04/26/1172290009/spacex-is-grounded...

https://www.space.com/spacex-debris-fall-australia-crew-1-dr...

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/spacex-rocket-debris-fo...

https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/2/22364582/spacex-rocket-deb...

Indian human space flight mission program is already underway with launch date sometime in 2025 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Human_Spaceflight_Progr...

NASA deliberately funded private space flight capability. Your slight seems misdirected.

NASA cannot independent of SpaceX?

NASA hasn't been able since the Shuttle got retired in 2011. They've been relying first on Russian rockets and then on SpaceX ever since. There are several alternatives in development but nothing human-rated yet.

In all fairness, NASA provides oversight for the Commercial Crew Program. This is better than the previous arrangements because there is incentive for companies to perform the contracted work on behalf of NASA rather than NASA taking on all the risk.

Edit: Guess down voters don’t like this idea

Good point. I was responding to the question above but at this point, NASA can legitimately consider SpaceX as part of their manned flight program. It makes way more sense to do it this way.

Yes, exactly. I think they consider Boeing and SpaceX as “one of us”. It’s pitched this way on their website

If this was reddit I would downvote you for that edit ;)

Lol bad habits die hard

Boeing's Starliner is now expected to have a crewed flight test in April (after two shaky uncrewed test flights, the first nearly disastrous). Of course, by the standards being applied to SpaceX here, that could be described as "relying on Boeing"...

I definitely wouldn't volunteer to be on that first crewed flight of Starliner. Boeing has had some questionable engineering decisions in the last decade and it has shaken my confidence in the ability of their engineers to press back against management when there is an inconvenient truth.

Boeing space flight is on delicious cost plus contracts as opposed to trying to shave it down to the bone in 737 max

Starliner is not cost-plus. It's under the same program as SpaceX.

> After several rounds of competitive development contracts within the Commercial Crew Program starting in 2010, NASA selected the Boeing Starliner, along with SpaceX Crew Dragon, for the Commercial Crew Transportation Capability (CCtCap) contract round.

> ...While the company had received $18 million under the NASA Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) contract by 2010 for early design work, substantial Boeing private funds would be required to complete development, even with Boeing competing for additional NASA contracts. This exposed Boeing to ordinary business financial risk that had not been a large part of traditional cost-plus contracting that Boeing had previously done for work on space capsules.

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

Thanks for the correction

NASA can do so without SpaceX, they have 2 human-rated vehicles that have flown.

There is the SLS/Orion and Atlas/Starliner - they just havent actually put people in them yet

No, but NASA's on the cusp of regaining the ability with SLS rocket/Orion capsule/Artemis program. First crewed launch targeted for Sept 2025.

They can go to Russia like they did for 10 years after the Shuttle retired.

The sanctions make this harder surely.

Probably not as much as you'd expect. Launches are out of Kazakhstan. Russia still sends cosmonauts to fly on dragon. This remains probably the most robust point of diplomatic contact between the two countries, especially since rogozin allegedly lost his penis (not a joke -- the anti USA rhetoric of roscosmos has decreased since he departed? from his post). I wouldn't be surprised if musk is instructed to at least publically not be too pro-ukraine to preserve this line of communication (I also wouldn't be surprised if musk is just being dumb).

Edit: ok this is slightly incorrect, rogozin was dismissed from roscosmos and then he got injured on the front, not the other order around

They can, on SLS and Orion.

They could and perhaps soon will, but at time of writing, they haven't.

The parent comment is about capability.

I guess it depends on how you define "capable".

I defined it (implicitly) as "have they actually put humans in orbit". That's a pretty simple and objective definition.

If you want to include SLS/Orion and Starliner, you have to define the point at which a system becomes "capable". Is it when they designed it? When they approved the budget? When they tested it uncrewed? When it's less than 1 year from launching with humans?

Depending on your definition, India might already be "capable" of launching astronauts now.

Note also that both Orion and Starliner are working through technical problems. Are they very likely to resolve them in <1 year? Sure. But there's still a non-zero chance that they will delay for 1 year, 2 years, or even more.

You're being a little obfuscatory here. In 2022 SLS flew a capsule around the moon that was human-rated, except that it had mannequins in the seats instead of people. Adding oxygen and some granola bars to this setup is not a big technical leap; the hard part is done. I'm not a fan of either SLS or Orion, but it's pretty clear that they will have no difficulty putting a human crew into space whenever their schedule and budgetary drama allows it.

Well, idk about literally, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic both did it in 2021 right? Could they not do it again? NASA has plans to do it next year.

In any case, were there ever more than now? I’m curious if we were regressing, or just not progressing for a couple decades.

BO and VG didn't go orbital, which is the real test of capability.

Being able to shoot straight up and fall back down isn't anywhere near as useful or hard as orbit.

This is why everybody who talks about space should spend a few hours with Kerbal Space Program just to get a sense of the difference in scale between a suborbital hop and actually putting something into orbit.

> Being able to shoot straight up and fall back down isn't anywhere near as useful or hard as orbit.

Being able to reach space at all is the hard part: so many pieces have to be developed and work well together. Achieving orbit is more evolutionary than from going from 0 to 1. Orbit seems like a such an arbitrary line, amd I suspect once BO achieves it, the bar is going to be arbitrarily raised to "Heavy-lift rockets are the hard part, and only 2 organizations on Earth can achieve it"

> Being able to reach space at all is the hard part No its not. Teenagers can get to space with model rockets and simple fuels. You can reach space simply by throwing something really really hard, but it will come right back down.

https://www.wired.com/story/a-rocket-built-by-students-reach...

> Orbit seems like a such an arbitrary line

It's not. If your super expensive rocket can't reach orbit, why would anyone bother? Can't deploy sats, can't go to the ISS, nothing.

> You can reach space simply by throwing something really really hard, but it will come right back down.

Is there anything special about boosters, second or third stages or vacuum motors that's tough to crack for an organization that has already managed to reach space under its own steam?

Bigger tanks, more engines and/or higher specific-impulse-fuels are tractable problems to organizations that have already reached space - they know how to do R&D, integration and operations. Getting to space ab initio is harder, and is where most - if not all - failed launch companies have failed.

You ask whether there is something special about orbit vs reaching space. This is a good question.

To be in orbit, a rocket must move extremely fast. The source below says that the energy needed to go to space is only 3% of the energy needed to go to orbit. That means orbit is about 30 times harder than space.

And it gets worse than that because of the rocket equation: to get twice as much kinetic energy requires more than twice the amount of fuel, because you are not just accelerating your capsule, but also the fuel it will need along the way.

So yes, there is a huge difference between being able to reach space and being able to reach orbital velocity.

Source: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/life-unbounded/basic-ro....

It took about a decade of work to go from the first suborbital rockets to orbit, and even that was in the context of a competitive arms race. It actually took more than a decade but it’s not completely fair to count all of that time since there wasn’t a continuous effort between the V-2 and the US and Soviet rocket programs.

I'd love to fly on Virgin Galactic's space plane, but I think its maximum speed is around Mach 3. To get into orbit you need to reach a speed of at least 27,000 km/h (Mach 22). Huge difference!

My argument wasn't on the orbital potential of suborbital vehicles - rather, I think the odds of Virgin successfully developing an orbital vehicle are better than even. Or more succinctly

  P(achieve orbit|reach space) > P(reach space)

They literally had a Virgin company go bankrupt trying to do that as a business:

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

I’ll take the under

Sorry but no, reaching space is not particularly hard. “Space” is an arbitrary line where the atmosphere is really really thin, and it’s defined pretty arbitrarily by what seems like a round number in an arbitrary system of units (100 kilometers). Orbit is qualitatively different and much less arbitrary to define: it’s when your flight path that no longer intersects the earth’s surface. It’s also the first milestone to actually doing anything useful. And it’s significantly harder than just reaching 100.0000001 km of altitude.

Parent post said putting people into orbit. Those companies do short suborbital flights.

You’re right I missed that.

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