Slashdot Mirror
From PayPal to Planetary Travel
furnk writes "PayPal founder Elon Musk muses about his plans to send rockets to space and his eventual hopes for making life 'multi-planetary.' 'I said I wanted to take a large fortune and make it a small one, so I started a rocket business,' Musk said. SpaceX is not new, but in a speech at Virginia Tech, Musk talked about the company's troubles and its lawsuit against Boeing and Lockheed as he tries to get a slice of the valuable Air Force contracts."
What is it with them ? Like the Amazon owner who wants to get into rockets, now this guy and don't forget Richard British guy who tries to break every meaningless record.
News. We have rockets already.
Try and beat Pegasus for cost/lb.
Charles Hill, professor of aerospace and ocean engineering, said the university had a $1 million spacecraft that was mothballed after the Columbia explosion.
Whatever happened to the good ol' days where astronauts had balls and the administrators let them prove it? Spaceflight is a little dangerous, sure; but I'd volunteer if I was given a 50/50 chance of returning alive. I'm sure many other people would too.
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
The former CEO of paypal just dropped a $100k matching challenge to the singularity challenge. Transcend humanity first, then the stars are nothing in comparison. Why terraform for oxygen when you can run on antimatter?
Don't get me wrong -- I kind of like the Singularity Institute. However, could you point me towards some of the technological advancements they've been responsible for recently, or some of their research publications? As far as I can tell, there's zero.
I can't help thinking about all the explorers who set out from a tired conservative European world to find the 'new world'; multi-year trips, many lost ships, false starts, disasters and discoveries. In some ways we now live in a very conservative risk averse world that likes to try and keep the status quo rather than push the boundaries and explore new hosizons.
How long will it be and how many 'lost ships' will we see before we get another Christopher Columus, Marco Polo or James Cook?
Not *nearly* that easy.
First off, boosters typically get jettisoned at unstable altitudes. If you wanted to take the space shuttle main tanks up to LEO, for example, you'd have to fly without payload. You'd need to bring up everything that goes in and on the tank in subsequent flughts.
Secondly, space stations are far more than an airtight container. They're hundreds of thousands to millions of parts, each needing to be attached. Often this involves breaches of your structure, which you would need to make re-airtight at many points.
The shapes are often odd. They often have complicating factors, such as residual chemicals or clouds of insulation or outgassing around them. They may not weld well. And in-space assembly itself is already incredibly difficult (not to mention that an astronaut in orbit is the highest labour cost you'll ever find).
It's much easier just to build it on the ground and launch it. Even Skylab, which was just a modified upper stage, was modified on the ground (even then it had problems). It just makes more economic and structural sense to do your work here on Earth, even if it means more (or bigger) launches. And yes, this has been considered before - what would later become ISS had the possibility of being made of shuttle ETs considered several times.
"He's a liar whose lawyer is lying about his lying lawyer's lies."
Why would anyone become "multi-planetary" when there's no reason to do so? Other planets are harsh, inhospitable places. What's the incentive to spend the billions upon billions of dollars it'd take to develop the technology for a colony? "Coolness?" Not to mention the unknown health costs of living in a lower gravity for years.
It's all about economics, and if the economics aren't their the lowest launch costs imaginable aren't going to matter. The closest economic benefit we've got is mining Helium-3 from the moon, and even that's a pipe dream. I'm sure there will be a manned mission to Mars someday, but that's not anything like being "multi-planetary"
AccountKiller
...in order to be able to take some payload, but your basic point remains sound. Shuttles are effing expensive beasts to run. Far better to use something much simpler, more robust and reliable which more importantly was designed to do exact what you want to achieve.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing