Elon Musk and the future of spaceflight
newscientist.com
newscientist.com
To summarize, it goes something like that:
The aim is spacefaring.
1. We need reusable rockets 2. We should lower cost for space 3. Reliability follows automatically from above
4. We must iterate reasonable size projects to progress 5. We must tolerate failures 6. We must build many parallel and consecutive prototypes 7. Competition is good
Until now it's either been hobbyists or then NASA building something with billions of dollars and taking decades.
It is unlikely that a reliable, cheap and well working operational reusable rocket system will be built right on the first try, even with billions spent. Rather, you have to try different things at a reasonable scale, and then go back to design things differently. You can't know or analyze everything beforehand, what works and what doesn't. You must also be able to take risks in design. That has the potential of radical cost reductions.
All this is possible if you keep the projects small enough so that the failures don't destroy everything. With small enough steps, you enable progress.
I don't know if I write understandably. This is a perfectly sound concept but I find it very hard to make people understand that spacefaring progress is not reached by giving NASA more money and building the next big moon rocket. In fact, that would stagnate it.
But I did not realise the reusability cost structure quite so well as Elon's explanation - 200k on fuel, 60m on a one shot rocket.
Before that I truly thought we had no hope before a space elevator.
Call me a reluctant convert.
Insufferable nitwit interviewers at New Scientist, not so much.
I am really sick of interviewers using language as a weapon and having hostile confrontational interviews with scientists and entrepreneurs, when the same interviewers and periodicals don't have the balls to even ask questions of the various criminals in society who are actually worthy of such contempt in an interview.
In particular, the interview starts with the phrase "You claim to be...". This phrasing establishes that the subject is suspected of lying. A respectful neutral question is "You have said that..." Such language use is not unintentional. It is designed to impeach the credibility of the subject in the reader's view by painting him as someone who is dishonest and can not be trusted.
Textbook response, if you know that you can put the other person out of their depth.
(i do quite a few interviews myself).
Think that's a bit strong. I didn't take "you claim to be" as anything close to framing Musk as potentially lying.
"It is designed to impeach the credibility of the subject in the reader's view"
If that is the case there would have been more wording like this in the interview. I'm not seeing that in any of the other questions, at least nothing that is worthy of calling the writers at "Insufferable nitwit interviewers". Which in itself has made me think there is some general disrespect for New Scientist which I wasn't aware of. New Scientist seems to have fairly good demographics we're not talking about People Magazine here.
"The escape system's motors will allow the capsule to land anywhere in the solar system, whether it has an atmosphere or not - and that's pretty cool. These motors can even fire supersonically which is important for Mars: in the higher altitudes of Mars the atmosphere is so thin that parachutes are completely pointless. So retro thrusters have to be able to fire when you are supersonic so they have to be very high thrust."
I've always understood SpaceX's main goal is lowered cost, followed closely by safety. It's pretty awesome that they're also cutting edge in terms of performance.
I'm genuinely excited by space flight now. I have the new space race (fought between SpaceX, Virgin Galactic, Armadillo Aerospace and all these other companies) to thank for it :)
Build the robots, ask SpaceX to put them in space, construct a station, permit SpaceX to use it to push further to Mars. It makes a lot of sense to me.
Comparing the two is a bit premature.
The stated, immediate goal of SpaceX is to "Make the human race a multi-planetary species." They want to put a self-sufficient colony of people on Mars. Everything else they do before that is a stepping stone to make it happen.
On a side note, I'm quite glad that this is getting a lot of press. Hopefully this buzz will create a demand for jobs related to space technology. I'm 27 but I wouldn't mind working for something related to that field once there is of high demand.
Must. Not. Become. a Fanboi.
Merlin 1C is 96:1, while NK-33 is 133:1
Obviously Musk knows what he's talking about, so where's the discrepancy?
[Edit]
"About 150 engines survived, and in the mid-1990s, Russia sold 36 engines to Aerojet General for $1.1 million each. This company also acquired a license for the production of new engines. Aerojet has modified and renamed the updated NK-33 and NK-43 the AJ26-58 and AJ26-59, respectively."
But that doesn't mean they are in production. I'd check but the Aerojet website doesn't seem to be working.
"The oxygen-rich technology lives on in the RD-170/-171 engines, and their RD-180 and recently developed RD-191 derivatives."
The engines produced after the NK-33/43, using a similar design, all have a power to weight ratio of under 90.
If NASA doesn't kill that program.
SpaceX has gotten so much publicity that killing commercial ISS supply is getting harder though.
But they can still downselect. You should fight against this politically.
SpaceX isn't doing very high performance rocketry if you look at their engines. It's a liquid oxygen - kerosene gas generator engine, similar to first big rocket engines everywhere in the fifties.
The NK-33 for example is a much higher pressure staged combustion engine meaning it gets a much better exhaust velocity and you get more payload. So are the RD-170 and RD-180 used on Zenit and Atlas respectively.
In gas generator engines, a small amount of fuel and oxidizer is burnt in the gas generator to drive a turbine which drives the pump for all propellants. After the turbine the gas generator gas is exhausted. In staged combustion, you put the gas generator gas into the chamber so it is not wasted and its volume can be much higher.
There doesn't exist US technology for oxygen rich kerosene staged combustion engines, so that's why either you use gas generators like SpaceX, or use Russian engines like Lockheed Martin (Nowadays United Launch Alliance) or Orbital Sciences. Boeing (Now ULA too) used an odd hydrogen gas generator for the Delta IV first stage engine.
The Space shuttle main engine (SSME) was a hydrogen staged combustion engine, a technological marvel with extreme performance but also complex and very expensive. It is a wonder of the world that they got it to work reliably.
EDIT: Which makes me think - Some Russian companies like NPO Energomash http://www.npoenergomash.ru/eng/ can perhaps be considered the Foxconns of rocketry. You can also buy propellant tanks and structures from Russian and Ukrainian companies.
It's on Google video here: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5787437371570928
"In 2010 stockpiled NK-33 engines were successfully tested for use by the Orbital Sciences Antares light-to-medium-lift launcher."
If I'm not mistaken, isn't the Antares lifter the other lifter by Orbital that's currently in parallel production to SpaceX's (but not almost never talked about in the media)?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberian_pipeline_sabotage
>>>"There's no Foxconn in the rocket business. And rocket technology is also considered an advanced weapons technology so you can't really have such a situation - so in our case manufacturing is necessary"<<<
To me his use of the word "considered" is meant to divorce his opinion from the stated fact. It does not reveal whether he agrees with it or not. To me it looks like he is giving one reason why a Foxconn of Rockets is very unlikely. Not espousing any opinions on what is or is not dangerous.
From this perspective, technology that reduces the cost to lob a warhead reliably is still advanced weapons technology.
But I also don't think fear should hold back progress.