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Why We're Still Stuck On Earth
Once&FutureRocketman writes: "The latest newsletter from the Space Access Society contains an insightful article (the first one after the introduction) on why it still costs so damn much to get into orbit. The reasons are, quite unsurprisingly, much more political and economic than technical."
Basically it was a tall skinny triangular rocket that could takeoff vertically, hover, move horizontally while still upright, and then land. They distributed an mpeg of the flight and called it a dramatic success....unfortunately that was the last I ever saw of this technology. Does anyone have a better long term memory than me? (Yes, I googled a bit but didn't find it)
SuperID
I hadn't really considered the 'vested interests' argument before; but it makes sense. If the price per kilo is to come down, it'll happen because of competition from a new source; most likely private enterprise.
Already we see China, Japan and Brazil expanding their space activities, with India planning a mission to the moon. More and more companies, too, are getting in on the act; I believe the Roton was mentioned here before.
The more countries and/or companies there are involved, the more incentive there is to lower the prices to something reasonable.
Of course, if we had a space elevator, it'd be far, far cheaper. And faster. And better.
The only reason the New World Order doesn't want us in space is because then we'd see all the UFO's trying to make contact with us, all the spy satellites, the secret bases on the dark side of the moon, and we'd be able to get a clear view of the face on Mars from space... They don't want us to be able to look down on Area 51 and intercept the MIND BEAMS they use to control earth's population!
</CONSPIRACY>Oh boy, I dread the day when the blueshirts at SpaceFlight, Inc. will start trying to raise profitability by cutting costs. "In related news, an aging Airbus A600 operated by United Airlines has suffered structural breakup during an emergency atmospheric reentry. Large sections of the Boston area reported contaminated by nuclear fallout."
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This sounds like something I was following back in the day. A VTOL rocket system that I THINK [correct me if I'm wrong] was called the "Delta V" or something similar to that name. it was an insanely cool concept, but from what I remember, turned out to be seriously itchy-bitchy in application: the test model crashed in a most spectacular fashion. Something to do with balancing lift and the fragile landing struts- if you're the slightest bit unstable, down it goes.
At least they managed to get it working in application. Now if onl they'd get some sort of railgin going that could lift passengers into orbit via magnetics- launch it to the east near the equator [finally, a use for the Andes- a launch tube ramp!] and you're in business.
As much as I loath advertising, if that's what it takes to get us back up there, i'm all for it!
The Problem: Space travel is costly. We can't lower the price because there isn't enough demand to make up the volume. Furthermore, the last few price drops didn't increase the demand. So space travel will remain costly.
The Solution: Increase the demand in some way other than reducing price. Add value to space travel. Or advertise the value you already have.
Specific ideas: Make a deal with Hollywood to make a space epic actually shot in space ("On location...from the moon!"). Hype some medical device/technique that came from space research ("the defrobbinator, developed by NASA for the Mars mission, saved Joe Schmoe's life today...").
And don't try to tell me this is already going on. I'm not talking about John Glenn commemorative plates. I'm talking about touching Joe Sixpack. Get him to realize that satellite cable depends on satellites which depends on rockets and he will whip his checkbook out so fast it'll make your head spin.
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What chance have we of escaping the gravitational pull of the Earth ?
......
We are incapable of training our kids to resist the gravitational pull of a McDonalds.
We are also incapable of producing policemen who can resist the gravitational pull of a doughnut.
By the time we colonise another planet, if ever, KFC will have already sold franchises there. Mark my words
Stephen Hawking has written another book. It's about time as well.
I realize that politics play huge role in scientific development and progress, but why involve governments at all. Now I know that my idea might seem a little far fetched, but here it is:
All non-corporate scientists would work for a section of the UN. Their research would be funded by each government putting X, Y, or Z percent of their budget into the project, depending on the economic status of their country, and all the scientists would be able to draw from that pool. This would mean that the scientists would be unaffected by politics. There would, of course, be a governing group, it would be made up of one representative from each government, who would make decisions regarding the government.
I realize that my idea might sound very strange, but it could work, if implemented properly.
The government doesn't trust the average schmo to find his way home let alone to build a rocket. Since it is them (and their other government friends) that control all of the technology in the space buisness do you think they are going to let just anybody use it? Not without paying dearly, at least. The biggest downside (to them) is how much they have to pay to keep up the illusion of high prices. They could be using that money for much better purposes... like invading Canada... or measuring the speed of various Catsups/Ketchups.
;-)
Some Picket Signs for this one:
"If you can't trust your citizens who can you trust?"
"Come on, this is rocketry not brain surgery."
"Heinz, Hunts, who cares?"
Devil Ducky
Devil Ducky
MY peers would get out of jury duty.
i see being stuck on earth as a good thing...
i mean, sure, space exploration sounds exciting, but have you ever thought why it is exciting? consider nasa. nasa has a recent history of losing things in space and/or crashing them into distant planets. do you want these people making your flight arrangements? I can just hear it now: "We're going to fly you past the moon, and then... uh... you're gonna just keep going... maybe"
Next, space isn't known for it's friendly environments. if you want to know what a human being in space feels like, stick a marshmallow into a vacuum chamber. Add to that the fact that the temperature of other planets is either really, really hot or really, really cold, but never even close to being habitable. And then there's atmospheric pressure, gravity, and food and water, and all these other things you'd have to think of when nasa accidentally shoots you at the wrong planet and loses contact with you until you were Lost in Space
"I hope I don't make a mistake and manage to remain a virgin." - Britney Spears
Here is an article about the same sort of concept except with a solution from 1993.
Why are we still on Earth? Because nobody really cares about space any more. Back at the time of the Moon landings people cared, it was a matter of national pride to Americans to get there before the Russians did, and because of that the Americans were able to spend a rediculuous amount of their national budget on a trophy project with no real value.
But now you can't even get funding for NASA to buy extra pencils without Congress screaming bloody murder, and the public are so jaded by "yet another shuttle launch" that they'd rather watch "Armageddon" than anything happening in the real world. The current generation of Americans seem to have lost their fire; without the Red threat there is no real motivational force in the American psyche.
Of course American is now just one of several players in the space market. Whilst its vast body of experiance languishes, becoming more and more obsolete, other nations are still expanding their space programs.
Who'll be the next on the Moon? The Chinese is my guess. And they'll be doing a lot more than putting a Red flag there, because their space program is still on the up.
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Jon E. Erikson
Jon Erikson, IT guru
At least this way after a hard night up I wake up with a hangover in someone elses apartment. It'd be far more of a bugger if in my incapable state I think it'd be 'f**king cool' to head down to another solar system to see if the bars are still open.
The major established launch contractors have no incentive to invest in lower space launch costs, beyond minor investments aimed at minor cost reductions that show up in higher profits on existing traffic. Large investments aimed at major cost reductions would tend to have the effect of significantly reducing their launch business cashflow, as their largest single customer, the government, would insist on having the savings passed along.
I take it this means that if they get the costs down, the government would insist that they charge less so they wouldn't make any money anyway. It's a fair comment, but I don't completely agree with this.
When polystyrene was invented as part of the space program ages ago, it cost millions of dollars per cubic meter. (Sorry I don't speak imperial well, but that's something like a cube with 3.3 foot edges.) It wouldn't have cost anything to produce, but that didn't mean they made a huge loss on development. It was completely justified to put that price on it until the research and development was paid off.
In any case, even if it costs the government some sort of reward or bonus to the launch companies to make this investment, it would pay off big time for all sorts of business that it would generate when the launch costs come down (eventually) as a result.
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I'm as die hard a capitalist as the next guy, but Earth Orbit can not be the free-for-all that relying on the free market would dictate. The problem is, quite simply, what you stated above. Without a national (global?) agency to control what goes in what orbit, the resulting chaos of independent launches could actually reduce the usefulness of satellites. Plus the free-market is not exactly known for its environmental concern. There's enough junk up there now, wait until Microsoft starts launching rockets......
"Fifty million Americans can't be wrong," said Rep. Billy Tauzin. Gore - 50,999,897 Bush - 50,456,002
Roton
Space planes (X-33)
SSTO articles
HOTOL
Considering that the financial benefits to mankind of space research have been estimated at about 6 times the cost of it, why aren't NASA pointing this out in six inch high letters on prime-time TV. Because all that the media focus on is the short-term cost (blah blah blah tax dollars) instead of the medium to long term benefit. Let's hope that the other space-enabled blocs are not as short-sighted. Fat chance of that though. There should at the very least be a scientific base on the Moon by now, paid for by all the countries of the world. Instead of focusing purely on why the US government is failing, start focusing on why the various governments aren't pooling their resources and co-operating on this. It's too important to let petty national differences get in the way.
This was a good article, with a good analysis of the current market state of space launches. Not all that surprising, in my case - this is what you deal with when you have an out-of-house company doing rocket launches (or a government agency - say hello to pork barrel). Unfortunately, this is the way that economies work in a capitalistic and democratic environment, because, quite simply, people are selfish.
:) That's probably some sort of fraud, however...)
Democracy will always have inefficiencies like pork barrel projects - people do not see 'national' benefits, they see local benefits. This is not a human flaw, this is a sort of information filter. The entire economic state of the nation, PLUS one's normal daily routines would be impossible, so we filter it down to the important issues - the local ones. So, if you want the *people* to govern themselves (and don't even think of doing a true democracy... nothing would get done) you split the country up into multiple sections (states, in our case) and let representatives from each one of those states do the governing. It makes sense - there isn't really a better alternative. However, your problem, flat out, is if you want the body of representatives to deal with the money allocation of the nation, you're going to have pork barrel projects, because in order to stay in office, they need to be noticed. In order to be noticed, they absolutely have to do something that their constituents will see.
That's government for you - but what's causing the capitalist companies to do what they're doing? The same thing - individual short-sightedness. Look at history - history has shown that any time one company starts to make a run at a new market, another one will start chasing after it, and they'll innovate, innovate, and innovate. However, Lockheed-Martin and Boeing et al. aren't chasing after the cheap end of launches. Why? Because there's no guarantee they'll win. It's not safe. Not only that, it's extremely risky. The better method for them is to attempt to slowly cut costs here and there (not showing the dropping cost to the consumer, of course... a price war would be bad. You might not win) and quietly funding research here and there, possibly.
Price wars are bad for the big players in a market - a lot of times they lose. Look at Intel and AMD, Amazon and (insert anyone), Apple and (any of the PC manufacturers nowadays). In each case, a price war started, and suddenly the original big player (Intel, anyone in the book selling business, and Apple) lost out - in some cases almost catastrophically. Price wars are good for upstarts - not necessarily in government spending (sometimes, though) but in the consumer market definitely.
What I take from this lesson in economics and politics is this: if we want to get cheap launches into space, we need to realize two things: don't look to politics, first off. Politics is propaganda, because with a nation of 300 some odd million people, it has to be. And second off, you need an upstart. Someone needs to found a cheap-space-launch business that works. It might not have the highest volume of Lockheed-Martin, or Boeing, but it would make government contracters ask LM and Boeing why their estimates aren't lower. And since LM and Boeing and others will simply buy out the first few upstarts, you need to keep founding them (if you're smart, you'd be one person, founding multiples of them with the same money that the major players give you
It should also be noted that the "flat...flat...flat... holy crap!" cycle is very common. Computers definitely follow that path as well, and we can again see that upstarts coming in were the major players in shaking up industries (first Dell/Gateway/Compaq/Packard Bell, now Emachines).
NASA is also funding a program besides the SLI program - the Breakthrough Propulsion Physics program, which is designed to very much so overcome the problems in spaceflight by poking at the holes in science currently.
If anyone out there is a student looking for an area of physics to study, look carefully at the BPP page, and follow my advice - find the 'holes' in physics which were found by EXPERIMENT, rather than by theory, and stab at them several thousand times over until they pop. My personal best bet? Anomalous weight changes over a superconducting surface, and the Casimir effect. Try everything. Literally. Chances are, at some point, you'll get something that makes people go "Huh?" - and at that point, you've hit on something, and go at it like crazy.
(BPP project: http://www.lerc.nasa.gov/WWW/PAO/warp.htm)
(I don't use HTML tags because I'm lazy. Sorry. Chalk it up to humanity.)
Fact: Most of the weight of the first stage is in the oxidizer. (liquid oxygen).
Question: Why are we carrying oxygen around in the atmosphere?
It seems to me that jet engines do a good job of handling the 0 to the speed of sound part of the speed range. Using jets in the first stage has a number of advantages:
Jets are much safer than Rockets.
Jet engines are available off the shelf.
Jet engines have a much higher specific impulse than rockets (Isp = pounds of thrust / pounds of fuel burned per sec)
Jet engines are reusable.
A Beowulf cluster of Jet engines (sorry, I couldn't resist the Joke) would generate large amounts of thrust.
A launch with hybrid Jet engine first stage would be much less expensive than a pure rocket launch.
I suspect that the first stage of boosters use rockets because "That's the way we've always done it".
Comments from veterans at NASA or other space agencies would be appreciated.
I know, I know, you're all going to shoot me...
But has anyone read "The Big Book of the Unexplained"? It's a graphic novel-type book dealing with bizarre phenomena. One of the many things mentioned is the curious silence that astronauts usually have regarding the possibility of extraterrestrial life. Also, with Apollo 13, there's the infamous "Houston, we've just been told Santa Claus exists" quote.
To make a long story short, one of the reasons postulated by the author for a lack of return flights to the moon or longer-term (out of orbit) missions is extraterrestrtial warning. Forgive me if I sound conspiracy-minded, but it's a possibiltity. Maybe a tad far-fetched, but a sound possibility nonetheless.
"I'm not even supposed to BE here today!"
What are the alternatives?
I don't know enough about the subject to comment very intelligently, but it must be dependent on what the major costs are. Can anyone fill us in on this? Of the $10k that it costs NASA to put a pound of matter into orbit, how much goes where?
For example, if a major cost is fuels, then the way to go must surely be a more efficient propulsion system - yup, nuclear unless anyone's got a better idea. Actually, I think that more efficient propulsion has to be the answer for another reason - that then we can drop the costs of carting all that fuel around for the first few minutes of the flight. Presumably the fuel for a putative nuclear drive would have negligible mass compared with all that liquid oxygen.
So where else are the costs?
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"Mass Fraction" means you're lucky to get a couple of percent productive payload because you're using a newtonian reaction drive. Unfortunately that's all we know how to do at the moment. But it means you throw 95% of yourself away to get to mars, and then 95% of what's left away to get back.
Clearly the corolory here is you have to start with a lot of stuff, and that's what makes space expensive.
The fault isn't with government or big business, it's with our current state of ignorance of useful physics. What NASA needs to do is more of what it's doing a tiny bit of right now, and that's finance radical new propulsion concepts.
Check out NASA's Breakthrough Propulsion Physics program.
Yeah, sure it sounds like star-trek, but remember that landing on the moon sounded exactly like the most fanciful science fiction only a few decades before. Get over reaction drive limitations, and then we're going places! . Keep throwing yourself away to go somewhere, and you're staying firmly at home.
The biggest problem right now is politics. It is politically expedient to maintain a marginally successful space shuttle program even though it does not fulfill its requirements. Space science needs two things in orbit, people and stuff. The two have radically different tolerances. People are the hard part. They need to ride in some type of space-plane with more controlled ascent and descent. Stuff needs a cheaper system for lugging it into orbit and a cheap high-efficiency system for moving it from there. Ever hear of a mass acclerator? It would be the cheapest way to get the payloads into orbit but building a new system cost votes of those who run the old one. Ergo, the politics say we won't get efficient about going to space for quite some time.
So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
How about that small, yet extremely powerful computer you used to post that message?
I used to work at a Home Healthcare company, and lots of the really cool things, such as ultra-light sports-wheelchairs, are directly related to technology derived from the space program.
Maybe we should join with the ultra-extreme-environmentalists in an effort to raise the cost of mining on earth :-)
Our read of Lockheed-Martin is that they've reacted to this by a dual-track strategy of, to date, soaking up most available government cheap-launch R&D money so none of their competitors (competitor, now) could get the jump on their existing high-cost launch business, while pursuing government financing for their own "Venturestar" concept in the hope of using other people's money to get the jump on their remaining competitor.
The only remarkable thing about the US government creating a duopoly, IMHO, is that they left a competitor. Anyway, now it seems we're stuck in the middle. Problem with being stuck in the middle is, everybody knows you've got to go somewhere, but they can't agree on which way.
The authors continue to insist that the government must be the investor of last resort in pushing launch costs down to "radically" lower levels - the country and the world would benefit hugely, but getting past the break-point in the demand curve has so far taken too much money and time for private investors in the current climate.
And that's the problem with government involvement in the market; a little is never enough. The author(s) must surely have seen the other road: cut government R&D money. Level the playing field by removing the artificial barrier to entry for private investors. Let the market set the price, rather than expecting the price to create the market.
Now that's a risk. To apply the article's words in a different context, the potential payoff may be huge, but it's a long-term and speculative payoff; the new markets can't be straight-line projected from current markets, and they won't spring into being overnight.
Maybe the barrier to entry will still be too high; maybe government funding to date has made this duopoly too tough to crack. Maybe the lack of support would lead to even worse stagnation than the present "flat demand curve".
On the other hand, maybe it wouldn't. $600/lb. is just a best-guess critical point for spurring enterprise; maybe smaller companies would find cunning paths through the level field; maybe revolutionary growth in the space economy is closer than we think.
I don't know; I'm a libertarian, not an economist. But before anyone goes criticizing the big companies (which these guys don't) for not taking visionary risks with their money, consider how brave you feel taking visionary risks with your vote.
I can certainly see why these guys would be leery of such a scheme. I worked with a small company which created a nifty little program, and the time came when some of us proposed GPL-ing it. Our poor boss, much as he loved the free software movement, underwent visible anguish over the prospect; this was his baby. And I understood; I couldn't promise that freeing the software wouldn't kill the company.
We didn't take the risk. The company's doing... okay.
"The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed." - Alexander Hamilton
And Russian launches are cheaper than Arianne, and would be cheaper still if it weren't for price-fixing agreements with the US.
Why do you think Boeing uses a Russian rocket for its Sealaunch programme?
Why do you think Boeing uses a Russian rocket for its Sealaunch programme?
because russian "proton" (i believe its their name) rockets are currently most advanced/can get most kg's into space. there is nothing that can be compared to them.
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I've heard that the ISS will be visible from Earth with the naked eye. This may sound like a silly idea, but I think this feature may be one of the most valuable aspects of the project. The ISS will serve as a very real reminder to current and future generations of what is possible, more than any multi-million dollar sci-fi film or live feed of a Martian landing. Though it may take time, this could help generate more support for space programs. It may seem superficial, but the addition of a new landmark in the sky will make many people dream of what can be.
No. High prices that exist because the technology to make them cheaper is "technical." High prices that exist despite technology to make them cheaper is "economic."
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Just because Sagan used Vega doesn't mean that it isn't real. As a matter of fact, the Earth is precessing, and Vega is going to be the Pole Star in 20 or 30 thousand years.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
People who knew anything about the company had high hopes to be watching manned commercial space launches and landings at the Mojave Airport.
The company is currently looking for enough investment money to build and fly the space flight version of Roton, which was esitmated to run $1000/lb on a 7000lb payload capacity to low-Earth orbit. The Space Access Newsletter that this Slashdot article refers to mentions that Hudson recently left Rotary Rocket, which of course indicates that things have not been going well there. Since the company is still in business, one can assume that a large investor could still rescue it. But I don't know what to think about the chances of that happenning...
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
For a second there, I was afraid this would be an "Ask Slashdot" feature:
Ask Slashdot: Why Are We Still Stuck On Earth?
Posted by Hemos on 07:15 AM July 11th, 2000
from the wanna-go-to-mars dept.
Anonymous Coward writes: "Me and my friends were sitting around and we started wondering, hey! Why can't we go and live on Mars?! I wanna live on Mars. Don't you? Does anyone here have any experience with living on planets other than earth and maybe can give us some pointers?" Anonymous Coward raises some important points. Maybe someone working at Transmeta can steal some tech from work and help us along?
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
Unfortunately, because of its high inclination orbit, the ISS is essentially useless as a stopover to anywhere. As a matter of fact about the only useful thing about that orbit is its politics, because it's readily accessable to both Canavaral and Baikanaur. (I know I really messed the spelling on that last one.)
We launch from Canavaral because it's reasonably close to the equator, and can take advantage of the Earth's rotational speed as a fraction of orbital velocity. Don't forget, as someone else mentioned, of the importance of that first thousand MPH, in terms of fuel.
A high inclination orbit throws away several hundred of that first thousand MPH, diminishing launch capacity and shortening the launch window. The launch window to ISS is on the order of 10 minutes, and it's HARD to get big payloads up there.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
There is nothing wrong with spending money on trying to cure AIDS.
/., sell the servers, and send the money to Africa? Or dismantle CNN? CBS? The Democratic Party?
As to curing world hunger or promoting global peace, these are fundamentally political problems which cannot be cured with money. The best you can do with money is to create a band-aid, but world hunger will only be cured and global peace achieved when regional politicians put the good of the people and the good of local partnerships that create infrastructure and distribution centers above their own petty parochial squabbling.
But just because there is AIDS in the world and madmen who would blow you up rather than listen to your words, and just because politicians would rather allow the wondering nomadic people of northern Africa starve to death because it suits their political aims does not mean we should halt all other socio-economic activities cold until we can all come together and sing cumbya.
For example, have you sold your house and car, packed your bags, and moved to Somalia to feed the starving children? Should I? Should we dismantle
To anyone who suggests we should solve the problems of earth before we reach the stars, I suggest that it is this very attitude that is creating the problems on earth in the first place. That is, it is the presumption that your own parochial desires (such as owning a house, having a Mercedes, or a seat in the corporate boardroom of Ted Turner's conglomerate) takes precedence over the "starving children", while my desires (such as making space tourism economically viable in my lifetime) should be set aside as "wasteful foolishness" until we achieve world peace.
It's this fundamental lack of respect for other people which cause the lack of world peace, and which cause politicians to act selfishly and prevent the infrastructure construction necessary to feed people through the world.
Bah. I have little patience with patently stupid crap like this.
(Yes, I know: you weren't advocating that we should cure AIDS before we spend money on a better orbital launch vehicle--only pointing out the argument made by others. I just had to get that rant out of my system.)
- Electric cars were once more popular than gasoline cars. They are undeniably simpler, quieter, and smoother than primitive autos like the Model T, and they sold quite well.
- The electric car lost its popularity before the rise of Big Oil, while Edison (the beneficiary of electric-car "fuel" sales) was enjoying his heyday. Hell, Edison was winning the competition for the domestic lighting market, beating out kerosene.
- The petroleum-powered car beat the electric because it was technically superior, especially in range. When cars and roads became better and people wanted to go longer distances, batteries were unable to provide sufficient energy. A battery takes hours to recharge, a gas tank takes minutes to refill (and a gas can is a lot lighter to carry than a battery if you run out in an inconvenient place). What would you rather drive?
Similar dissection skewers your claims with regard to space exploration. Yeah, the discovery of microbes on Mars would really threaten the entire World Order... NOT! I'm afraid it really is all down to economics and coalition politics; "human social development" has nothing at all to do with it.--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
I heard all of this summed up pretty well a few years ago. The real problem is that there's not anything drawing most people toward space. Columbus 'discovering' the New World is a close analogy.
For thousands of years people had been bobbing about in fat wooden boats with canvas sails, and they were generally slow. Those boats handled all of the boating jobs pretty well, though. After 1500AD Europeans decided that there was some really valuable stuff that was at the limit of where they could go in their boats. They started working real hard to get across the ocean faster with more cargo capacity.
Within decades there were entirely new classes of ships to deal with the various ocean-crossing needs that had arisen. By 1807 we had steam ships. 52 years later the internal combustion engine appeared, and a few decades later useful aircraft were developed. All because there were a lot of business reasons for them to exist. An interesting point here is that until WWII most airplanes were built from the same materials as Columbus's ships.
Now we need the same thing for space. We know we can do the technology, but there is just not enough motivation - an earlier post referred to the "killer app" for space. When someone finally discovers that motiviator we'll all be astounded by the changes that will occur almost overnight.
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
Conventional rockets operate with two energy givens. The first is the amount of kinetic energy it takes to get to Earth orbit (about 32 MJ/kg), and the second is the energy available in the fuel (about 15 MJ/kg for O2/H2). Since there is not enough energy in the fuel to get to orbit by itself, you have to use a large amount of fuel to get a smaller amount of fuel plus the vehicle and payload up to a point where the remaining fuel has the energy to get you to orbit.
It turns out that what is left at the end is about 13% of your starting weight (the other 87% was fuel). Making a vehicle that weighs 15% of total takeoff weight is reasonable, and one that weighs 10% of total takeoff weight is really hard. So you've got somewhere in the range of -2% to +3% left over for cargo.
The traditional approach to the small payload problem is to not take the whole vehicle to orbit. Since you lose so much weight between takeoff and orbit, you don't need to take all your engines and tanks all the way. This is called staging. The other thing that helps is that loadbearing structure you only use once can be built lighter than stuff you want to use many times (a factor of 10 reduction in fatigue life buys you about 10% in weight savings).
Of course, having to put your rocket back together after a flight, and having it last only a few or one flight makes things expensive. That's how we got in the fix we're in.
There are several ways to work the problem. One is to use more advanced structural materials. So for the same weight as you used to build a throwaway structure, you build one that lasts hundreds of uses. Unfortunately, the attempt at making a lightweight composite tank for the X-33 didn't work out, but the general idea of using lighter, stronger materials is a good one.
Using an air-breathing engine at the start helps because the effective energy content of the fuel you carry is higher. You can give the vehicle a head start with some sort of ground accelerator, or by starting from the top of a tall tower. You can lower the destination with an orbital tether. You can feed energy to your vehicle with a laser.
There isn't any one 'best' answer. Which one makes the most economic sense depends on what you want to fly, how often, when you want to start (technology progresses), how much you can afford to spend to push technology faster, and how much risk you want to take.
Daniel
When we finally do see Consumer Space flight become a reality, I could easily see the FAA and NASA joining together...as we will need a US agency to make sure everything works well....
It will be called the Federal Air and Space Administration....
Also known as FASA.
(next they'll be designing the next generation of ground transport with large armored walking units....)
-Julius X
-Julius X
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How come this article did not make a single mention of Arianespace which are easily the largest commercial launch company? Boeing and L-M are definitely also-rans in comparison.
-- "It's a sad day for American capitalism when a man can't fly a midget on a kite over Central Park" - Jim Moran
J. Storrs-Hall, until recently the moderator of the sci.nanotech newsgroup, wrote an interesting proposal for what he calls a space dock. It's a platform 300 km long, at a height of 100 km above sea level, where air drag is much smaller. Your spaceship would ride an elevator to get up to the platform, and once there, a linear motor would accelerate it (at 10 G's for 80 seconds, survivable for humans) into circular orbit (8 km/sec), from which it's relatively easy to hit escape velocity.
This does not require nanotechnology. It would be possible (albeit initially expensive) to do it with existing materials and techniques. Once the construction is amortized, the total energy cost of putting a kilogram in orbit (elevator plus linear motor) is 43 cents. With hourly launches, it would be possible to amortize the cost of construction by charging about a dollar per kilogram.
In estimating cost of construction, JoSH writes: The wildcard is the cost of the diamond (and the ability to fabricate it into structural beams). Diamond is a bit expensive today! If an Apollo style (and -cost) project could do for diamond what the original one did for electronics, we could build the tower in the next decade or so, and with regard to near-term feasibility he writes: Even commercially available polycrystalline synthetic diamond with advertised strengths of 5 GPa would work.
WWJD for a Klondike Bar?
[javac] 100 errors
The SR-71 is a fabulous example of engineering for the task at hand. Friction against the atmosphere (even the thin atmosphere at 80,000 feet) causes so much heat that the plane actually grows by 6 inches during flight. The engineers at the ol' Skunk Works took this into consideration when designing it. As an unfortunate side-effect, the plane fits together so poorly when not in flight that it leaks fuel like a sieve on the runway!
---
Gort! Klatu Barata Nikto!
That was the DC-X (DC-XA, after a set of upgrades); one of it's proposed followons, the "Delta Clipper", was a bid for the X-33. It lost the bid for the X-33, because Lockheed-Martin made a proposal that would try out all sorts of new shiny technologies, whereas all the Delta Clipper would do was get to space and back.
It was paid for (and was over budget IIRC, but on a remarkably cheap budget) by the ballistic missile defense people, who flew it twice in one day (by comparison, each shuttle might fly twice in one year). The program was turned over to NASA, who promptly crashed it and didn't want to build any more.
As the article pointed out, when you are launching a $100 million satellite, cheaper launch services would be nice but they wouldn't make much of a difference in your decision to launch a satellite. You would be more concerned about the reliability of the launch vehicle. Nobody wants to be the pioneer with a new or redesigned launch vehicle. More often than not, something goes wrong and your satellite is lost.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
(-1, Crackpot)
Friends don't let friends misuse the subjunctive.
Well, really, you're right but you're also wrong.
The first problem we have to solve, before we can do anything at all useful in space, is getting to orbit efficiently. Until we do that, the best we can do for interplanetary stuff is "photos and footprints", like we did with Apollo.
If you're talking about getting to orbit cheaply, your mass fraction needs to be good enough to lift a worthwhile payload. And obviously the more you can lift, the better off you are.
However the primary cost driver of current launch systems is not the fuel: Liquid O2 (which is most of the propellant mass) is about $.05/lb. That's still $10Ks for a full propellant load, but that's not where the real expenses come into play.
The real expense in current launch systems is in the operational nature of the vehicle. Most launchers are expendable, remember. And most of those vehicles are based on ICBM designs, which sacrificed economic efficiency for the sake of getting every last bit of performance out of the system. This does not make for a cheap vehicle. Beal is tackling the problem from this direction by building an expendable launcher that is designed to be CHEAP. And you know what, they're probably going to succeed (although they may not make much money, because it's not clear that they can break the $600/lb price barrier with this approach).
As far as reusable vehicles go: The Space Shuttle requires practically a full refit between each flight. They have to -- no shit -- deweld parts of the engines in order to replace internal components EVERY TIME they fly. Then they have to put them back together, test them, etc, etc. Something like 30,000 people put their hands on the vehicles between each flight, and thousands more are needed at the actual launch. This is not the way to fly cheaply!
Cheap reusable vehicles are possible with current technology, but they require a level of systems engineering that has not been present in most recent NASA designs (it's certainly not there on the X-33). For various reasons, single stage vehicles would be much cheaper to operate, but making a reusable SSTO launcher requires a very high degree of optimization, and some difficult engineering trades. Throw in the need to please 15 different bureaucrats and politicians, and the job becomes impossible.
Your point about advanced propulsion technologies is well taken: for interplantary work, mass fraction is all-important (because you have to lift not only the vehicle but also all the damn fuel). But most of those systems are not suitable for launch, and those that are, are very far out. We don't need fancy new technologies to make that first step, getting to orbit cheaply. We just need some money (not very much, maybe $100-200M) and a good engineering team.
"Research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing." -- Wernher von Braun
If we can get a heroine in the oval office we might be able to put a human on Mars but we can't even get a heroine to RUN for president so I say never.
The demand for launches isn't flat with respect to cost. The cost of launches just hasn't fallen much since the 1970s. This is because the political powers found the prospect of the boomer generation breaking out into space more threatening than the prospect of them becoming earth-bound basket cases -- even if it meant a neo-Guttenberg revolution via computer networking.
The threatening-but-far-less-so information technology revolution occured because Moore's law was already unleashed by 1970. By the time the bulk of the boomers were hitting the age where they were making career committments (1975) the network revolution was inevitable. The "market analysis" by a "government sponsored industry group" upon which the Space Access Society relies is reminiscent of when, in the early computer industry of the 1950's, IBM president Thomas J. Watson's market analysts provided a similarly flawed estimate of the demand for computers: six. That's right -- their cost demand calculations "flattened out" at six computers total -- no more computers would be built because the demand wouldn't justify it. Of course, it didn't take the transistor, let alone the integrated circuit and Moore, to show that estimate to be nonsense. Reality was that the cost demand curve wasn't as "flat" as the industry-dominating IBM would have liked and there simply wasn't as much perception that political power would be lost by expanding the access to computing as there was that, at the height of the Apollo program, power would be decentralized by expanding access to space for the boomer generation.
The historic analogue of the current situation is to be found in the fact that Leif Erikson not only mapped the first routes to the new world --he provided (under duress of the christian King of Norway) Iceland with its first Bishop of the Roman church -- which probably provided Rome with crucial information, if not maps, of potential new trade routes. But like all empires, they have to keep things "manageable". What followed was a similar "flat demand curve" for new world exploration as Mediterranean theocratic nepotism ("Is the Pope Italian?" used to be rhetorical question.) over potential trade-routes excluded northern european peoples until the Sephardic Jews, expelled by the theocratic Spanish Inquisition, teamed up with the Dutch and then, via Cromwell, with the British. This created the Protestant reformation which broke the Mediterranean monopoly on the trade routes (although it didn't allow the reestablishment of real mythic independence as would have the mass printing of the Eddas and Sagas) -- thus unleashing the age of exploration and establishment of the protestant colonies of north and west Europe.
Who are the Sephardim and potential "protestants" of the modern era? I tend to believe we should belooking for hysterical inquisitions against more genetically dominant cultures by the current theocracy of "political correctness" as it realizes African tribes, for example, are far from "politically correct". What will happen if more traditional African tribes team up with rural Americans, Russians, Australians, etc.? Certainly no one expected the combination of Guttenberg and Sephardic-edited Masoretic texts to unleash the old germanics from their domination to Rome's monopoly on trade routes.
This is the main reason why I recently spent a month travelling in Africa.
As I've said repeatedly in the past:
Promotion of politics exterminates apolitical genes in the population.
Promotion of frontiers gives apolitical genes a route to survival.
Change the tools and you change the rules.
Seastead this.
It should also be noted that the "flat...flat...flat... holy crap!" cycle is very common. Computers definitely follow that path as well,
Not a bit. Everybody who has worked with computers always wants more speed, more memory, more software, more everything. There's always one more thing you could do with a bit faster computer or a bit more storage.
From the very first fully automatic programmable computer, there has always been more demand than supply. At first it was "if only it was a bit cheaper, we could calculate these vital military trajectories" then "if only it was a bit cheaper, we could use it to run our accounting" then "if only it was a bit cheaper, we could have one at home for games and schoolwork" then "if only it was a bit cheaper, we could put it in our appliance/toy/greeting card". From the first real computer, there has always been an economic motive to make it just a bit better because there were always people lining up to put the chips in something else (or put a few more chips in, or replace one of the chips with a better one).
That's why sitting still isn't and never was feasible for computer companies (and most big companies are bound to falter sooner or later, and get some idiot manager who thinks he can squeeze for a bit more profit if he slows down progress). Anyone can come in, make an incremental improvement based on the works of the establishment, and expand the marketplace instead of trying to wrest the established company's market away from it.
This is not the case for rocketry. An upstart launch company would have a very hard time luring customers away from the establishment. After all, satellites are very expensive things, and nobody wants to take a chance on a no-name rocket, even if it's 30% less expensive, not to mention the incredible red tape they'd have to cut through to be allowed to launch. The reason "Nobody Gets Fired For Buying IBM" didn't kill the competition was the potential for expanding the market, which doesn't exist in the field of rocketry.
Don't defend the red scare because it fulfilled some adolescent sci-fi fantasy of driving around on the moon in a buggy. I'm glad people don't wan't dangerous, expensive, and arguably useless missions like landing men on moons. You accuse people of glorifying sci-fi movies, but at the same time you demand sci-fi like missions because real science is just so boring.
... is completely cut NASA's budget.
Forcing NASA to *STOP WASTING OUR GODAMN TAX PAYERS MONEY ON OVERBUDGETED, OVERPRICED CRAP*.
Which will then force NASA to make missions cheaper and more cost effective - which takes *REAL* engineering, not just budget-flyboy science.
Get rid of the motivation for the incredibly wasteful *hobbyhorsing* that goes on at NASA, and we'll start seeing some really refined stuff coming from the engineers, but continue to pay the exorbitant "NASA Tax" being demanded in order to pull off basic science missions, and the US Gov't is only encouraging wasteful, costly flights of fancy for NASA managers to get wet pants over.
We could go to Mars for US$50billion, but NASA tells us it'll cost $500billion, because there are too many hobbyhorsers in the ranks beefing up the budget estimates for their own special projects.
Cut funds, make NASA leaner and meaner, and we'll get to space faster and cheaper.
It's an overfed cow right now.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Government approval isn't needed unless you are doing something weird...
Government approval is always needed, it just won't be granted in some cases, and they'll make you pay to prove to them that they should let you.
If you are developing a new launch vehicle, you will have to convince the government that you can keep flaming wreckage from landing on nearby cities before they let you launch a rocket.
...in part by being an old, well-respected (by the government; meaning past military contracts) aeronautical company using a tried-and-true design. The costs of getting permission to launch anything else carrying a significant payload into orbit would likely be around a billion dollars (on top of whatever it costs to build an launch the thing), unless it is an affiliated NASA project, in which case they'll just red-tape the rocket down to the ground.
Personally, I think the government is against cheap space travel. Right now, the USA pretty much rules the world with the world's largest economy and military. Once people go live in space, groundbound organizations will be less important, and anyone up there with the capability to move around can throw rocks that feel like nukes.
"to fish with a moving line, especially one with a revolving lure; hence to allure; to entice; to draw on"
(Heh, gotcha! I bet many of you had thought it came from the mythical Scandinavian folklore beings, didn't you? Or, perhaps, some of you thought trolls were a J. R. R. Tolkien invention?)
What they don't publicise on tv is when they come back from low gravity enviroments, a matter fo days in space can render your heart in a near dead state, fit astronauts come back to earth and can't walk for a month, months in space can potentially kill a person, you think hollywood stars or joe six pack could survive being blasted into outer space? and no, the exercises they do in space don't help this, all they do is slow the process down a bit. Space travel is not for the even the slightest bit out fo shape person.
--Nuintari
slashdot : where an opinion can be wrong.
NASA demands to be deeply involved in testing any new launch vehicle, and they're a typical bungling government bureaucracy that only ever succeeds through sheer force of funding.
Example: DC-X. NASA didn't build it. It flew beautifully. On another test flight, NASA technicians screwed up and left a vital component unconnected so a landing strut didn't come down, and the prototype crashed and burned. NASA loudly proclaimed the design unsafe. That was the last we heard of DC-X.
Example: Hubble. NASA didn't check the optics before sending it up. The main mirror was exquisitely built to the wrong focus, which they never tested.
Example: The shuttle. How many of the damned inefficient things did they build with the same design? After building the first one, they learned that it was more expensive than using disposable rockets for any purpose whatsoever. However, when they realized their mistake, instead of following the original plan of learning from the first one to make better ones, they started building near-exact copies!
As the old true half-joke goes: when NASA was confronted with the problem of writing in space, they spent millions of dollars developing a pen; the Russians just used pencils. Bureaucracies with too much money lose any connection to common sense; the managers find ways to increase their budget for the status it gives them, increasing complexity and causing stupid mistakes.
People have been promising cheap launch services since the 60's if only NASA wasn't involved. None have been allowed to try.
Since anyone who wants to launch a rocket must meet NASA's requirements, they are all limited to NASA's technical capabilities. The NASA attitude is "if we couldn't built it, nobody else possibly could," and as long as they are involved, they are right.
I don't know how buckytubes stand up under compression. I assume you could prevent buckling by packing them tightly enough. It will be interesting if buckytubes make the space dock practical.
The advantage of the space dock over tethers, 3001 towers, and similar schemes is that it's a lot less mass. If a tether breaks, it's a major planetary catastrophe. If the space dock suffers some kind of collapse (say, by getting hit by a meteor), the area of danger would be limited to a few hundred miles radius. Maybe <100 miles, if it's only a partial collapse, which is likely with a good design. There are plenty of big empty places in the Southwest where you could put it to minimize damage.
WWJD for a Klondike Bar?
It's not politics it's physics. You've got to throw away about nine times reaction mass just to get into orbit. Whether you do it all from your ship or from tanker ships that are suppling fuel at high altitude for the orbit boost, it's what takes to get to orbit baring magic.
For this discussion I'm defining magic as technology needed to pursue a goal that does not have a foundation in practical or theorectical science. i.e. usable anti-gravity, FTL, etc. And the problem is we're damm short on that magic the Star Trek guys have bleeding from their ears.
I'm all for funding folks who want to create some of that "Star Trek" magic--even if they don't succeed, I suspect unleashing a bunch of guys to do this sort of research is bound to cough up something good.
And I know Space isn't the solution--frankly, opening up cheap interplanetary transport that is cheap enough to allow settlers to go to Mars will probably create as many social problems as it would claim to solve.
But damn it, I'm not going to sit around and allow some idiot to tell me what to do who thinks that we should not spend a dime on interplanetary travel until we create their earth-bound "utopia" first.
But the fact that he was talking about making electric "too cheap to meter", so to speak (actually, he wanted to give the world free power, via wireless energy transmission). His backers didn't go for this - and they pulled financing. Tesla continued to try to go at it alone (Wardeclyff Tower), but in the end, had too many depts to the hotel he was staying at, and they scrapped the tower to help pay off those debts - Tesla died a penniless man.
Reason is the Path to God - Anon