House bill seeks to gut NASA’s Artemis plan, resurrect Journey to Mars
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What does to the moon mean here? In orbit? It will take more dV to get a payload onto the moon from the earth than it will to Mars since Mars has an atmosphere that you can dump all of that transfer dV into while in the case of the moon you need to have that dV onboard.
The following solar system subway map (not the most correct) but still helpful. Note the arrows denoting aerobraking, that means most of the dV needed for that segment could be avoided using the atmosphere.
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https://science.house.gov/imo/media/doc ... 01_xml.pdf
Ms. KENDRA S. HORN of Oklahoma (for herself, Mr. BABIN, Ms. JOHNSON of Texas, and Mr. LUCAS) introduced the following bill
Two Dems and two Rs = bipartisan sponsorship.
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Even if you want to get in orbit, it’s possible (although not yet attempted) to aerocapture with a very modest burn to circularize.What does to the moon mean here? In orbit? It will take more dV to get a payload onto the moon from the earth than it will to Mars since Mars has an atmosphere that you can dump all of that transfer dV into while in the case of the moon you need to have that dV onboard.
The following solar system subway map (not the most correct) but still helpful. Note the arrows denoting aerobraking, that means most of the dV needed for that segment could be avoided using the atmosphere.
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https://science.house.gov/imo/media/doc ... 01_xml.pdf
Ms. KENDRA S. HORN of Oklahoma (for herself, Mr. BABIN, Ms. JOHNSON of Texas, and Mr. LUCAS) introduced the following bill
Two Dems and two Rs. Bipartisan sponsorship.
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For all there is to admire in the US government (and there is a lot), the influence (and legalisation) of corporate money has corrupted the classes of elected officials to act completely against the greater good/common sense.
While not final/binding, this is simply absurd and completely detached from the bigger picture.
While not final/binding, this is simply absurd and completely detached from the bigger picture.
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It would be genuinely hilarious if China gets to the moon and sets up a base before the Americans can get back there with all of this bickering. Unlikely, Americans are much richer and more experienced with spaceflight so they just need to focus for like a few years to achieve it; once China is close I fully expect them to just go for it, but it would be hilarious if they didn't manage. Very Roman or British vibes.
Tell you what though, China's long term vision and plan for space is kilometres ahead of the US's in terms of being an actual plan with a goal. They want to (in order):
1. Implement crewed spaceflight
2. Implement a temporary space station
3. Land rovers on the moon
4. Implement a permanent space station
5. Send an orbiter/lander/rover mission to Mars
6. Land humans on the moon
7. Set up a base on the moon
All towards the goal of the industrialisation of cislunar space for the production of solar power satellites, and scientific exploration outside that. Crazy, right? Like they know what they want to do. In the West you only see this sort of commitment to a specific long-term goal from Bezos and Musk rather than the actual government. They've completed steps 1 through 3 on time and they're on track to complete number 4 this year, 2020 (here's hoping the coronavirus outbreak and everything else going on doesn't delay it). No specific timeline for 5 and 7 so far, and little for 6 (just "before 2036").
Tell you what though, China's long term vision and plan for space is kilometres ahead of the US's in terms of being an actual plan with a goal. They want to (in order):
1. Implement crewed spaceflight
2. Implement a temporary space station
3. Land rovers on the moon
4. Implement a permanent space station
5. Send an orbiter/lander/rover mission to Mars
6. Land humans on the moon
7. Set up a base on the moon
All towards the goal of the industrialisation of cislunar space for the production of solar power satellites, and scientific exploration outside that. Crazy, right? Like they know what they want to do. In the West you only see this sort of commitment to a specific long-term goal from Bezos and Musk rather than the actual government. They've completed steps 1 through 3 on time and they're on track to complete number 4 this year, 2020 (here's hoping the coronavirus outbreak and everything else going on doesn't delay it). No specific timeline for 5 and 7 so far, and little for 6 (just "before 2036").
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With the expectation, that they sell lot of A380s and recoup that money with profit on top. What is the recoup and profit on SpaceX spending say 50 billion OF THEIR OWN MONEY in developing and launching mission to Mars.
It is one thing to say SpaceX use 10 billion to develop rocket and vehicle to sell it to NASA as launch services. The profit motive is clear, NASA will provide the profit. While as public entity with democratic agreement NASA can dump 50 billion to Mars mission and say "We will never see that money back, but this isn't about profit". SpaceX is about profit. As much as Elon talks about grand plans for benefit of human kind, to operate SpaceX needs profit. It doesn't have tax payer base, that can fund missions as completely cost and loss missions. Unlike publicly funded space exploration, who have that tax payer base to whom the cost can be sold on other grounds than "this will return your money with interest". Since governments and society is about more than making money. Hence the fundamental difference, why government entities can do stuff corporate entities can't.
Ofcourse there is private funded similar option available. But the runner of the mission won't be SpaceX then. it will be say "Friends of Mars Exploration Foundation", which will take donations from willing billionaires to fund the space mission and then pay SpaceX (who still needs to make profit) to do the mission. While the foundation just doesn't make nothing of that money, except fullfill their chartered mission of collect money for and implement a Mars exploration mission for public interest.
Haven't seen any "give us money so we can burn it on a Mars mission on your behalf (be noted, you will lose all this money, this is not an investment, but a donation)" foundations or co-operatives lately. Until I see that, the most realistic option is public government funded mission.
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Airbus has sold 6 A380s since 2015 and has had 72 order cancellations in that time. Production will end at 251 with the last delivery in 2021. They basically broke even on production, but the $25 billion development cost was a near total loss. Had Emirates not bought 123 of them, it would have been a complete flop.
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Problem is one things to prove is how humans behave for extended periods away from the comforting safety of the LEO. How does being in deep space (outside of the magnetic shielding of Earth) affect things, does being so far away for so long have some unexpected mental effects. One can't simulate that on Earth. Even with all the Mars 500s etc. the crew knew, behind that wall is Earth and atmosphere. Do these extra stresses cause for example larger life support utilization etc. How large is the lifesupport utilization on celestial surface space. How much space do we need in that space without the crew going nuts from tight spaces and isolation from rest of humanity. On ISS one can look at Earth easily and be reassured one is one small lifeboat landing away from home. On moon already it's well we have to leave moon and then go to Earth. That takes multiple days. On Mars months and months.
Some of these things can only be tested on a celestial body under realistic enough conditions to be meaningfull. Much of with to do with the hardest part of the mission: Humans. Rocketry to mars isn't hard. We have done it for decades as shown the current rovers on Mars. The hard part of manned Mars mission is the MANNED part. Not just the extra mass, but the magnitudes more complecity in myriad of ways in machinery and equipment, that has to work perfectly the first time, every time. Life support is hard, clinical space medicine even harder (also necessary for Mars length mission away from Earth medical facilities and as of the moment NON EXISTENT). If it was just about lifting extra mass, we would most likely have already done it. But there is psychology, space medicine, human bio factors, lots of unknown unknowns with the biological machines involved in mission.
There is also stricter safety envelope forces on the mission due to public opinion. The crew might be willing to die, but the tax paying public isn't prepared for them to die. Since public pay the bills, well crew being willing to die is of little consequence. So massive safety and redundancy regime it is. You lose a rover? Well it's just gear, build new and send it. NASA loses Astronaut? Nation just lost a hero and whole manned mars program is under extreme jeopardy of being shutdown, since one went and got a national hero killed. Specially, if it is found out the death was due to being too hasty and taking too much risk.
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EXPECTATION. What happens later, happens later. Also eh..... Airbus taking massive loss on 25 billion on complex expensive aerospace project.... That should be re-assuring to SpaceX, that these complex and costly aerospace projects always return profit..... Also Airbus is way bigger conglomerate, that can handle 25 billion of unexpected loss. what are SpaceXs cash reserves to write down to accounting (just lost 50 billion dollars on a Mars mission, no body seem to be willing to buy extra missions. Might have something to do with tens of billions per mission price tag.)
So come the real hard part of actually starting to prep mission gear and not just generic heavy lift rocket, they bean counters in SpaceX most likely will tell Elon: Boss this is a bad bad idea and will bankrupt the company, unless you can secure as a sure customer willing to pay tens of billions before we even start the mission hardware development. Elon is ofcourse free to ignore that, but then will most likely bankrupt the company way before them being anywhere near complete space mission.
Also I would like to see the crew willing to embark on 2 year mission to Mars, backed by entity that might go bankrupt during those 2 years. Ground support? hello yeah, what is up on Earth? Yeah we all got fired, company is bankrupt. This is our last call.
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This makes no sense. And the heavy "leans Boeing" makes even less sense considering the boondoggle the SLS program has been.
It's not like the cost-plus major-contractor way has been working even moderately well. If it had been, there could be an argument for going all-in on it. Stupid cheaply bought politicians.
It's not like the cost-plus major-contractor way has been working even moderately well. If it had been, there could be an argument for going all-in on it. Stupid cheaply bought politicians.
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That would be perfectly in line with Congress' lunar base plans!
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I believe the opposite has been done & is more feasible - a small burn to capture into a highly elliptical orbit, then a series of high atmosphere Pe passes to lower Ap towards circularisation. Even that small burn can potentially be avoided due to the magicks of multi-body physics.
Obviously not great for manned missions due to time taken - there you're better off either going direct-to-surface ala Starship or using electric engines for a completely different trajectory that eases you into orbit anyway.
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Delta-V is only one part of the calculation when comparing Earth vs Moon surface to LEO. Earth has 6x the gravity and it has an atmosphere.
A huge chunk of the fuel launching from Earth is spent lifting the engines and the fairing. Lower gravity means lower thrust, which means smaller, lighter & cheaper engines. The actual Moon->Earth transfer can even be done with ultra-efficient electric engines which are useless for leaving Earth.
There are massive obstacles and infrastructure requirements, of course, and if Starship pans out that will drastically reduce the cost of Earth-to-LEO. But looking several decades ahead, the country that is ahead in Lunar (or potentially asteroid, I'll grant you) fuel production will be the one that is sending millions to Mars and beyond by the end of the century.
And the exploration towards that Lunar/asteroid build-up is starting now, just not by NASA.
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Looking at that map, why's the dV to get to the surface of Venus from low orbit so large (27 km/s) ? Now, yes, aerobreaking would be of considerable benefit for Venus, but still, that diagram suggests that the total dV budget to land on Venus would be substantially more than to land on Mercury, which seems counter-intuitive.
(Or does this fit your "not the most correct" comment about the diagram ?)
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Venus has an incredibly thick, dense atmosphere. That could be drag/gravity losses. You'll note that Earth is listed as 9.4km/s required, even though LEO energy is only ~8km/s. It could be an "adjusted" value accounting for the fact that ambient pressure makes rocket motors nearly useless on the Venusian surface. It could be that it's a map for a video game mod (KSP + RSS), and the extreme conditions of the planet are not well modeled by the game engine.Looking at that map, why's the dV to get to the surface of Venus from low orbit so large (27 km/s) ? Now, yes, aerobreaking would be of considerable benefit for Venus, but still, that diagram suggests that the total dV budget to land on Venus would be substantially more than to land on Mercury, which seems counter-intuitive.
(Or does this fit your "not the most correct" comment about the diagram ?)
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the most important number is cost, you need infrastructure that doesnt even exist yet on luna
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Getting it to LEO from Earth isn't less costly, if you need five launches to refuel Starship, you're spending vast majority of your fuel for lift, not payload.
You do realize you don't have to process the water in the moon? Just ship it as it is, you can do the electrolysis in LEO as needed, as a bonus you don't have a 2 week night to deal with. Space(X) orbital gas station now open for business with low low cost on water, oxygen and hydrogen..
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This is your space program run by lobbyists who control bureaucrats, whilst paying off politicians. FIFY
I understand that Munch's famous painting was nearly titled "The Taxpayer".
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The whole point of Starship is to make launch cheap, cost of a launch is just fuel (couple million) and operations (another few million) plus whatever margin SpaceX wants on it,
edit plus you need to factor in the cost of hydrolox engines, likely RL-10, and your ascent vehicle will still likely be methalox anyways to keep it more reasonably sized, so keep it all methalox and do it all with one vehicle
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Are you maybe somehow building those rockets out of Lunar regolith?
You see, to lift the water from the Moon you first need to get the rockets there somehow, meaning you launch them from Earth anyway, packed with fuel instead of water. Might need to refuel on LEO anyway. Then you use some of that fuel to land on the Moon and the rest of it launching again with the water, flying back to LEO and parking there. How is that supposed to be less costly than just lifting the water from Earth to LEO in the first place?
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theradicalmoderate
Ars Tribunus Militum
Yeah, I'm not sure that means that much, other than the people on the committee know on which side Boeing butters their bread. It may have escaped your attention, but the Democratic leadership's been kinda busy in the past few weeks, and might not have been paying huge amounts of attention to stuff coming out of the House Science committees.
It may be that Kendra gets herself pulled aside for a quick lesson in national electoral strategy in the next few days. And if she doesn't, she may find herself amended to death when this puppy comes to the floor.
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eegads... the goons in DC have learned nothing.. its not going to get done quickly or cheaply with only Boeing leading it! Congressional meddling continues to hinder any real effective progress. Last time I checked there arent exactly any engineering experts among the congressmen who would have any idea how to get any of this done or what exactly makes sense. NASA has some excellent engineers but they are hampered by ridiculous congressional whims that change more than the breeze coming from a swarm of fly farts.
Its such a monumental waste of resources (our tax money) and time. We deserve better! I watched the first moon landing when I was 6 years old.. and then some 18 years later was a space shuttle flight controller... and now 32 years later.. we dont even have a fully operational manned spacecraft to get to orbit. It not for a lack of engineering talent... its merely because of a lack of clear focused and consistently managed direction, which seems impossible given the congressional idiocy and meddling. (rant over).
Its such a monumental waste of resources (our tax money) and time. We deserve better! I watched the first moon landing when I was 6 years old.. and then some 18 years later was a space shuttle flight controller... and now 32 years later.. we dont even have a fully operational manned spacecraft to get to orbit. It not for a lack of engineering talent... its merely because of a lack of clear focused and consistently managed direction, which seems impossible given the congressional idiocy and meddling. (rant over).
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or launching a bunch of SS without payload to transfer prop into the departing SS
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Agreed. The infrastructure investment is huge hence talk of decades to set it up.
But having made that investment, the cost per ton of fuel delivered to LEO could be drastically, drastically lower. Cost of engines, cost of refurbishment due to aerodynamic damage, environmental cost of burned fuel, and so on.
I should add, I would be as delighted as anyone if instead in 50yrs time we're running fusion-powered atmospheric carbon capture operations to produce methalox etc. fuel here on Earth, with benefit of being virtually free and offsetting launch emissions (so who cares how many Starship launches it takes to fuel up in LEO). But any responsible power needs to be pushing all options at this stage, until one proves itself out ahead of the others.
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There was a joke on one of these discussions recently that space is uphill bothways. That might be true for gravitational effects, but it isn't true for atmospheric effects - a thick atmosphere is detrimental on departure, but advantageous on arrival. That would seem to suggest that the total dV (both [retro]propulsive and from aerobraking) differs according to direction, and so a subway diagram of the Solar System needs two figures quoted for landings, at least for planets with a noticeable atmosphere.
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A launcher of some sort (linear, or SpinLaunch-style) is a very large mass investment from the earth to the moon. However, once there the incremental cost of each kg of ice to orbit is essentially zero. That doesn't take into account the processing required to prepare the ice for transport. But a fully automated robotic facility could approach zero cost as well - if the lunar dust doesn't cut everything to shreds and force new hardware deliveries.
So basically it's an economies of scale argument. Launching propellant from the ground is probably cheaper until you're at a lot of MT/yr to orbit. There's the options of continuously reusing your rockets to bring them from lunar surface to LLO but that uses some of that water you had to mine. Until we start doing that, we don't know if there's ever a crossover with that.
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Oxygen and hydrogen are great and all, but their engine runs on methane.
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Aerodynamic damage? how about the cost of dealing with a second propulsion system because the base system cant handle hydrolox?
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This is forward planning. Avoid the messy 737 MAX-induced bankruptcy, and make sure that Boeing has enough of a revenue stream to develop the 797, without any "subsidies". It is almost clever, but a cress-sized fig leaf is all one needs when dipping into the taxpayer's pocket. And I understand that a rocket might get built as an unintended side effect.
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Reusability is key here. Clearly doing this once you're better off launching fuel direct from the surface. But 10x, 100x, more for a single launch of the flotilla from Earth and it could start to be worthwhile. Add in potential mining of regolith and/or asteroids for heavy materials needed in orbital construction, using similar infrastructure.
As in other posts, I recognise this is many decades away, but the issue here is the baby steps with a view to long-term exploitation, so a decades-long return on investment is part of the package.
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Not sure how great hydrogen is, for prop transfer type work, it doesn't like to stay liquid and it leaks through almost anything.
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SpaceX isn't just going to drop $50B and buy all the stuff they need for a Mars mission off the shelf, both because they don't have the money, but also because that stuff doesn't exist yet. The biggest part of the cost is designing, testing, and manufacturing those items, not the marginal cost once in production.
Most of the things they need for Mars are closely related to things they need for operations that are currently profitable or expected to be profitable for LEO and cislunar missions. For example: Their heavy lifter, transport hab, entry vehicle, initial surface hab, Mars ascent vehicle, and Earth return vehicle, Starship, is one they expect to be profitable launching satellites for Starlink and other customers. Their IVA suits and ECLSS will be similar to ones they are designing for profit-making missions like Commercial Crew and dearmoon. They will probably build a deep space comms system based on Starlink.
There are, obviously, a lot of other things they need, and not all of them are profitable to make and use on or near Earth. But they will minimize those costs with partnerships, some of which will be with public resources. For example, they are researching orbital refueling and the effect of large engines landing on regolith with NASA MSFC and KSC, respectively. More of these partnerships will form as they get closer to an actual mission to Mars.
And, as you note, they will probably get some funding to bring NASA astronauts on the crewed missions, mostly because NASA would be idiots not to do so.
Bottom line, the keys for SpaceX to Mars are:
1) profits from current services
2) synergies between profit services and Mars
3) partnerships with groups that are interested in Mars
4) customers that will pay to ride to Mars
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One of those new maintenance free rockets? SpaceX can manage low double digit launches right now, if they need six launches for one flight, to keep similar cadence for Starship it'd need substantial increase in stock, new launch sites and so on. I know Elon has visions of < 1 day turnaround but I think we can agree that one is not going to happen anytime soon.
The whole concept rotates around the fact that from Earth to LEO you have around 5% effective payload vs rocket mass (Falcon Heavy) and that's if you throw away the boosters.
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Why on earth would you want to build the rockets on the Moon? Fill up your vehicle in LEO for the initial trip and then you can do round trips limited by maintenance not fuel. Up front cost is the same as hauling fuel for the rocket but that's just doing it once, not every time. Your follow up rockets wouldn't even need that top-up fuel from Earth.
Yes it's high concept but since the original question was why bother with the Moon at all.
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SpaceX could dump $50B without needing to see a profit. Just because they are a for-profit company does NOT mean that every dime they spend has to generate revenue.
They won't do that, of course. At least for a while, mainly because they don't have $50B, but also because they want to be sustainable. Just dropping a huge chunk of cash (either public or private) on a few missions probably isn't going to make anything sustainable. That was the Apollo model, and it obviously didn't work even with public funding. It was also the X-Prize model, for a much smaller value of "huge", and that didn't work either.
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