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United Launch Alliance Plans For 1,000 People Working In Space By 2045 (blastingnews.com)
What if you could produce rocket fuel in outer space -- making it 83% cheaper? One company sees this as the basis a self-sustaining "space economy" based on refueling Earth-orbiting spaceships. Slashdot reader MarkWhittington writes: Jeff Bezos, of both Amazon and Blue Origin, may ruminate about moving a lot of industry off the planet, but the United Launch Alliance, that joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Boeing, has a concrete plan to do so. ULA is working on an idea to have 1,000 people operating in Earth-moon space by 2045, less than 30 years away...
What are people actually going to do a a job in space, at what point will it be cheeping to sustain a human in space than a robot, rocket fuel for example, why would they need people in space doing that manually.
I guess you didn't even read the slashdot version of the article that says they can do it 83% cheaper in space...you know 'we need something that is cheaper in space than on earth'\
But your anonymous coward post does suggest you're most likely a troll or the article submitter trying to get comments.
The rocket fuel still needs to be used for something. I doubt launches into Earth orbit would benefit from all that hassle. Manned or unmanned deep space missions with substantial cargo are another thing entirely but still decades away...
This should have been happening in the 1980s and '90s, except that Congress decided that killing brown people was more profitable for their true constituents in the MIC. In the 1970s I (and almost everyone else) assumed that we would have people living and working in space within the next decade. Now forty years later we still only have a (comparatively) small lab in LEO. By the time Bezos and the few other visionaries finally get their operations under way I'll be far too old to go.
If I ever spend any time in California I'll make it a point to go to the grave sites of Nixon and Reagan and piss all over them
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Apple will invent the teleporter
Corporations will do business in space to avoid paying "Earth Taxes".
I'm guessing that producing rocket fuel will cost exactly the same in orbit that it does on Earth. The saving will be made by NOT having to burn 83% of the produced fuel to get the remaining 17% into orbit.
why not have the robots make it?
That's the point. That's nice to produce cheaper fuel, but for what purpose? Someone still have to buy this fuel and use it in a profitable way to consider the whole operation profitable. Or maybe it is just about sucking more taxpayers dollars for no purpose at all other than making a bunch of guys rich.
Achille Talon
Hop!
Would be so awesome, whenever you want to take a break you just can take a floating nap... no more sleeping on desk and keyboards!
Because JOBS for AMERICANS.
Which means PROFITS for CORPORATIONS.
Absolutely but in the overall scheme of things, if you want to send something into the solar system or further, it's much cheaper to send it with enough fuel to get into orbit, then refuel in space and send it further. As far as pocket lining goes, this is much cheaper. Which could turn into more affordable missions prompting further space development.
There is a lot of business going on in higher earth orbit, for example geosynchronous orbit: comms satellites, weather satellites. Making the fuel to go from low earth orbit (100 km up) to geosynchronous orbit (30000 km up) 6 times cheaper is a big deal.
We don't need the rocket fuel in space. We need it down here to launch stuff into space. Making fuel in space isn't all that useful -- you simply do not need a lot of it up there.
The vast majority of launch cargo ends up in either geostationary or low earth orbit. LEO launches are basically done by the time you could refuel them, so no joy there.
You might launch something into LEO, dock with a refueling craft, and then boost into geostationary orbit with your new fuel (that's suggested in the article). But now there are a lot more things that can go wrong, and you haven't really saved all that much money. If you build a rocket with enough fuel you don't need dock with anything - it's already there. Somehow all the refueling infrastructure has to be paid for - the mining operation, the refining, the tankers moving the fuel from the moon into LEO.
I suspect there's a whole lot of optimism is baked into the cost analysis. Based on past experience doing anything in space is damn expensive, and we're talking about a huge, complex project. They're going to have a thousand people in orbit, with all the logistics that implies, and still deliver fuel more cheaply than launching it? I guess if you had enough launches to amortize it all out you could make the numbers work, but I haven't seen a serious proposal on that scale. What could we possibly build that's worth that kind of effort?
Huh. "The joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Boeing." So, kind of a... united aerospace coproration?
Great, you're another software person with completely delusional beliefs about space.
This sounds like a very short-sighted proposition as it consumes a resource that could be put to far better use for lunar colonisation.
It also puts the nascent LEO -> "out there" transportation business at the financial mercy of whoever owns and controls the Moon-sourced fuel supply.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Actually, it looks like you're making stupid posts anonymously and then replying to them logged-in to whore karma.
But it won't work with anybody else's teleporter so you will have to wait for Apple to build a store at Alpha Centauri.
ULA can't compete with the current US space prices provided by Space-x. ULA cost per rocket $200[1] Million vs $62[2] MIllion Space-X. Estimated future cost of ULA is $99 Million vs Space-X $10-20 assuming reuse.
Let's say the best case for ULA happens and the worst-case for Space-X happens... ULA still can't compete: best case for ULA is $99 Million vs worst case for Space-X is $62 Million...
---
This story is just trying to create a diversion... buy some time or something. e.g. "LOOK A SHINY".
[1] google "Brett Tobey ULA" who laid out the real cost
[2] 100% transparent... just go to their website to get a price: http://www.spacex.com/about/capabilities
They're only going to need one person with an office in space to put their headquarters there.
What if you could produce rocket fuel in outer space -- making it 83% cheaper?
Hey ULA, here's a unique idea for you, think how cheap space would be if you could reuse your rocket bits instead of burning them up!
Seriously, ULA is a big, overgrown fat, lazy organization....its days are numbered, trying to make headlines this way is a sign of its failure
They need to catch up with the competition before anyone will take their ideas seriously.
That's nice, except for the little problem that it's not the production of the fuel that is expensive, it's lifting the mass from Earth. Fuel doesn't magically appear from nothing, and you don't make the mass of fuel spontaneously appear during production, so the raw materials still take roughly the same amount of fuel to launch them fromearth. Where hare the raw materials coming from, if not from earth?
It's not like there are a lot of hydrocarbons on the moon or asteroids, and certainly not the noble gasses like argon that we typically use for reaction mass in ion engines. And even if there were sufficient raw materials found on the moon, it's still a gravity well, just a lot shallower one. Not that we would know about raw materials for fuel, other than some rocks we brought back around 1970 (mostly basalt and some nasty sharp dust), and some unknown quantity of ice that we think we can see reflecting from inside craters at the poles. And some helium-3 that we won't even be able to start using for at least fifty years, which could probably be made just as cheaply on earth anyhow.
Some might also wonder about who will use this magically-produced fuel once it is in orbit. but at least I don't think that would be a problem. Just as how improved launch vehicles and soon engine launch recovery are bringing down the cost of launches, making entire new categories of missions possible, cheaper refueling will help too. Maybe one day we'll even de-orbit and land a vehicle entirely by retro-thrust, instead of using atmospheric braking, if there's a benefit from using extra fuel to do so.
But ULA, huh? As in the ones who say "Us too!" about launch engine recovery, but haven't yet made any actual attempts to do so? Talk is cheap, guys, let's see you do something new for once, instead of the same decades-old rocket designs.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Right now, the obvious choices (perhaps in a decreasing order of probability of taking place) are: cheaper GEO operations, actual feasibility of cleaning up orbital junk, way cheaper heavy scientific missions into the solar system, Apollo-style lunar missions in the several-billion-dollar range (>10x-30x cheaper than Apollo was), a lunar base for the same capital and operating costs as the ISS is right now (which ultimately prove to be politically feasible), and finally a reasonable pathway to a mission to Mars. One somewhat less obvious but perhaps not so far-fetched idea is that this could eventually bootstrap an infrastructure for ultimately extracting fuel from NEO asteroids, or even places like Ceres, where we know there's a shitload of water but in a much shallower gravity well (the Moon kind of sucks in this respect - less than the Earth but it still sucks).
Ezekiel 23:20
The "business" is happening here on Earth, in space there is just a camera or an antenna. The fuel is the cheapest part of a rocket flight, this is why SpaceX wants to reuse rockets, remember?
Geez you Space Nutters better get your myths straight.
This has absolutely nothing to do with space. There's a reason why, e.g., transportation containers have a certain size. Making them too big would make transportation problematic. Making them too small would increase the costs by increasing the overheads involved (and limiting useful cargo item sizes). The very same idea is at play here - not having to launch a very heavy satellite on an SLS-class LV would mean substantial savings, but that's simple abstract logistics.
Ezekiel 23:20
This is only true if you're stopping in low earth orbit. Unfortunately, even now, most of the commercial value is in the geostationary orbit. And effectively, the extra five tonnes remaining in LEO to get your five tonne satellite to GTO are not the same thing as five tonnes of fuel on the ground. They actually translate to something like two hundred tonnes of fuel on the ground. It's a little bit like with time value of money - I guess you could call it the positional value of fuel. The further away from Earth you are, the more valuable it is.
Ezekiel 23:20
This is the ULA trying to pretend they can be visionaries like Elon Musk too. The difference is that Elon actually works towards their goals, ULA is just rehashing fantasy that people have dreamed of ever since the 60s. Nobody is seriously working on asteroid mining technology, at best we have a few sample return missions that don't do refinement, don't do anything at scale and don't plan to return it in any way that would be commercially viable. In short it's a science mission and not a prelude to anything industrial, even a proof of concept that you could do it at all is at least a decade away and I don't see the ULA funding any of it.
And any off world production on the Moon or Mars is only going to be cheap compared to bringing the return fuel with you, sure you can pretend fuel on the ground will cost the same and that launch costs scale with gravity and come up with a fantasy number but nothing that passes the giggle test. Particularly if we soon have low-cost used rockets that can blast fuel packets most of the way into LEO then return for landing with a modest success rate. It's exactly the sort of thing you don't need 100% for.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
there are some questions that should not be put in your resume, like:
- Is telecommuting feasible ?
- Can I keep the window of my office wide open ?
etc.
I guess you didn't even read the slashdot version of the article that says they can do it 83% cheaper in space..
I read that and laughed. Nobody knows what it will cost in 2045. If you assume we'll have cheaper ways to source fuel from the moon by then, you also should assume we'll have cheaper ways of sending it up from earth. And either way, numbers without considering infrastructure costs are not really that useful.
might come sooner than we think...
That's true. But SpaceX was clearly talking about the cost of fuel on Earth. The same amount of fuel in orbit requires about thirty times as much fuel on the ground to lift it, plus extra hardware to contain it (and extra engines to get it off the ground in the first place). And even reusable hardware has to be amortized, so it's not ultimately clear whether long-term-wise, it's cheaper to lift propellant from Earth (=more difficult to do technically) or from the Moon (= larger initial R&D for a new kind of equipment, but single-stage devices could transport it).
Ezekiel 23:20
ULA is planning to use the BE-3 and XCOR engines on their new upper stage. That's about as new as you can get. The economies of scale (more than twice the capability for the same price as the Centaur) plus better manufacturing plus the potential for the upper stage to be used for multiple times or as a basis for a specialized vehicle (XEUS) are where ULA's value lies right now.
Ezekiel 23:20
it's much cheaper to send it with enough fuel to get into orbit, then refuel in space and send it further
It might be easier to engineer a vehicle that can be boosted in two parts (payload and secondary thruster) so they can be connected while in LEO. But making fuel in space, either on the Moon or on an asteroid, makes no sense at all. Way too much infrastructure for the number of missions that will ever be flown.
I live very close to Cape Canaveral and have several neighbors who work for ULA. All of them expect to be laid off in the next two years due to ULA not being able to compete with SpaceX and Blue Origin. None of them expect ULA to be around in five years due to the competition.
Even returning to Earth costs fuel, as you need to reduce your velocity enough to start aerobraking. Not having to haul that fuel from the surface means that a larger payload can be lofted into orbit.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
SpaceX seems to be funding the reusable stuff by taking profits from their transport contracts.
Is ULA proposing to fund the project to put mining and refining on the moon, or are they hoping NASA will bite?
Fuel in space needs a customer other than fuel in space.
It seems that the most likely path to get things to GEO cheaper might be to use small, more efficient engines driven from solar panels.
If this pans out, then the economics supporting the fuel in space would have to come some other mission.
It would be nice if there were a strong economic reason to have a big space station or folks on the moon.
Lacking that, exploring Mars seems the most likely public funded mission.
In space, there is just a camera or an antenna. There is little need for this extra fuel. Life isn't like the comic books you read as a child, or worse, the 1960s NASA space propaganda.
"Just a camera..."
"Just an antenna..."
"Little need for this extra fuel..."
Maybe you could learn math and physics one day. Once you get into high school.
Ezekiel 23:20
So where are the people running this stuff in space? Are you sure you replied to me? Because all you did was agree with me and be an ass.
Speaking of math and physics, how do you plan on feeding these 1000 people in space?
You fucking Space Nutter.
I have never mentioned a thousand people in space anywhere. Are you sure you replied to me? :D
Ezekiel 23:20
" if you want to send something into the solar system or further"
"This has absolutely nothing to do with space"
Um, yes? Are you fucking stupid or what? Space is empty, there's nothing there, that's why the only things we send there are antennas or cameras. There are no "substantial savings" if you require sci-fi levels of non-existent technologies to live out your fantasy.
It's over, space is dead. None of your fantasies will come to pass. Ever. And because you have a religious belief based on faith, there are no facts that will change your mind. Only time has a chance of making you understand.
But you think space is the same as America pre-1492. I guess you think there are Space Aztecs living in the Space Jungle mining Space Gold and building Space Ziggurats and just waiting to be conquered by Space Horses...
Fuck me, the kind of people on here are tragic.
I suppose you prefer to starve to death here... With the population growth plus global warming issues there will be NO where to live.
Starvation riots have occurred before... along with plagues... which in combination can reduce the earths population to something manageable again... about 1/10 what it is now.
First, I was merely pointing out how the reason for the proposed infrastructure for space operations (LVs, depots etc.) is not peculiar to space operations but to logistics as we know it on Earth. Of course the reason is also applicable to space logistics, but it's not exclusive to it. Maybe with a bit of reading comprehension, your life would have been easier?
Second, the actual benefit of discovering the Americas was the establishment of a vibrant, progressive community that led to the economic powerhouse of the 20th and 21st century that is the United States of America. This had nothing to do with jungles, Aztecs, or gold, and couldn't have been predicted. Since we don't know what we don't know yet, it stands to reason that some (moderate) level of investment into high-risk, high-reward projects is justified, especially if there's an order of magnitude more money being wasted on provably useless things such as ruining other countries.
Ezekiel 23:20
first, ion/plasma engines don't need argon. It just happens that argon is easy to store, doesn't react with the storage vessel, won't freeze... Oxygen can be used... So can hydrogen.
As far a fuel goes - asteroids (and all bodies including earth) is 2/3 oxygen. There are a LOT of organic materials in space. After all, where do you think the organic materials on earth came from? Even measures from meteors indicates at least 4.3% contain organics.
It's actually perfectly possible that it will still be cheaper to lift it from Earth. You've got a great point there. However, we know of reasonably accessible places in the Solar system such as Ceres when you can almost literally scoop a big chunk of ice out of the ground and send it to Earth using very simple means (basically a solar steam rocket), almost without limitations on how large chunks you could be sending in a single payload (no gravity well to speak of that you have to cope with). This could mean that in the very long term, hauling things from Earth AND the Moon is doomed simply because you can't beat the $/kg figure for water from asteroids.
Ezekiel 23:20
Not if you want to go for the Double Lunar with A Martian Sandwich. :D In that case, you need two people with two offices.
Ezekiel 23:20
The only jobs available will be in space. Because robots don't works in space. This is the future of the human species.
"Space Nutter" - when you just can't think of a rational reason to hate "the sky".
"living in space"
does this mean they'll finally admit that people are having sex in space?
Frankly, I suspect that the ACs using this shibboleth are actually a single person with vast powers of psychological projection and strawmanship. But to be honest, if this AC stumbed upon a certain funny guy named Gary Church in the past, I'd completely understand where the "space nutter" shibboleth came from. I've been dumbfounded by this individual as well. Projecting this onto other people, however, is inadvisable.
Ezekiel 23:20
You must be new to this universe. You can't go around saying things are either a few years or decades away and expect to be taken seriously. Things that were a few decades away have happened quickly and things that were supposed to happen quickly have been decades away.
You should log in, Space Nutter AC Retard. It gladdens my heart that all this space stuff goes on, seeing how deliriously angry it seems to make you.
And even if there were sufficient raw materials found on the moon, it's still a gravity well, just a lot shallower one.
Shallow gravity wells aren't a problem. Deep ones like Earth are.
Delta V to get off the moon is trivial compared to Earth. That matters quite a lot if you're attempting to use space as a place to source fuel from, e.g. Shackleton crater on the moon which seems to contain significant amounts of water ice.
I have no idea if it works out in practice, but on the face of it it makes sense.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Then they should have said the cost of DELTA V is higher on earth. That makes sense, 'fuel', ie Kerosene or even Liquid Hydrogen is relatively inexpensive.
If you want to orbit around a different object than the one you're currently orbiting, you need fuel.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
If you have fuel that is already in space, you can build a smaller rocket that holds less fuel and stop in low Earth orbit refuel and then move to a higher orbit.
Yeah, and I'm sure the outcome of the ULA Plans for Space will be a nifty diorama to be presented at the next World's Fair. Look children, see the world of the future! Over there in the corner is the Jetsons!
I'm not at all convinced that the ULA has anything in store for the real world beyond government work. Which will get 1,000 people into space, working, in about 2 centuries. Or maybe 5 centuries.
SpaceX looks way more committed, and brings something to the table which could actually happen in the next decade. I'm not sure SpaceX's Mars plans are viable on the timeline they propose. However there's a sense of mission and purpose that's missing from ULA.
Fuck me, the kind of people on here are tragic.
Your math and trolling suck but at least you've got irony down.
Those things show specifically people not working in space and why they're not.
83% ? It's been made up by Barney Stinson :
http://how-i-met-your-mother.w...
You don't get the business on Earth (worth billions) without the antenna up there. refueling half way let's you put a bigger antenna, or use a smaller rocket. I agree that the space industry is full of crap, but this one may be more realistic and significative than most.
Nitpick: BE-4, I believe, the new (in development) methane/LOX engine. BE-3 is efficient enough to make sense as an upper-stage engine but is probably unsuitable for some other reason.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
I still don't see which one is profitable in your list. I mean, being cheaper to go elsewhere in the solar system isn't a profitable business. It is still a burden expense for the whole human kind without any profit on the horizon. Mars is just bullshit to convince the taxpayers to spend dollars on something without future. Cleaning junk makes no profit, etc.
Achille Talon
Hop!
Cleaning junk makes no profit
Cleaning junk may be necessary to prevent Kessler Syndrome from taking off. That's worth spending quite a lot of money on, depending on which orbits are threatened: space-based navigation (GPS), communications, and earth observation (weather, military surveillance, Google maps) are extremely valuable to the global economy.
Almost all of the other proposed justifications for investing in space infrastructure are either bogus or over-valued though, in my opinion:
- Exploring moons and other planets has some value, but nowhere near enough to justify the current insane expense of sending people.
- Mining anything less easily accessible or less value-dense than a near-Earth asteroid made mostly of gold looks to be a net negative: the more space mining we do, the poorer we'll become.
- Self-sustaining colonies built on current technology are pure fantasy. Trying to support even a single large colony via supplies from Earth would probably bankrupt the world.
Economically useful exploitation of deep space will most likely require some combination of dramatic improvements in propulsion technology, Von Neumann machines (robots that can build copies of themselves out of mass which is 99.9+ % collected automatically from the extraterrestrial environment), and closed-loop life support systems. I'm not discounting the possibility of any of those things, but if people really want to live on Mars or whatever, the sane way to pursue that right now is to invest in such game-changing technologies - not to spend endless billions on inherently inadequate schemes based on shipping everything from Earth using absurdly large chemical rockets.
I suppose you prefer to starve to death here... With the population growth plus global warming issues there will be NO where to live.
It's economically impossible to relieve population pressure on Earth via space with current propulsion technology. For every one person launched in to space, thousands (millions?) more must stay on Earth building and operating space launchers. This is just a waste of resources that could have been spent on developing better technological solutions to the various problems at hand.
Moreover, there is nowhere to send those people, since the technology to sustain life - let alone duplicate the world economy - on another planet does not currently exist. Right now, sending people to permanently live in space either means killing them (perhaps slowly), or committing to support them in a fashion that is thousands of times more expensive than if they had just stayed on Earth.
These problems might eventually be overcome through improved technology - or they might not. If they can be overcome, it is virtually guaranteed that the same technology will also be used to massively increase the carrying capacity of the Earth, which is naturally compatible with human life - unlike Mars, or any other known candidate for colonization.
I mean, being cheaper to go elsewhere in the solar system isn't a profitable business.
It doesn't have to be profitable for lower prices to be still desirable. Arguing against it is like saying that researching oceans or the Antarctica isn't profitable so it can be as expensive as possible and nobody would care. Well, guess what, science would.
I still don't see which one is profitable in your list.
Apparently, SpaceX and SES do, otherwise they wouldn't be willing so much to put satellites into orbit at significantly lower prices. If you're the one with cheaper operations, you have a competetive advantage, and if everyone can do that, the market broadens and the usefulness of the technology in question improves (right now, that's apparently an issue in places like Indonesia where land lines are very impractical). There wouldn't be much of a point in cars if all cars were executive limousines for statesmen, right?
Ezekiel 23:20
And your argument is? Nothing I said required presence of people either.
Ezekiel 23:20
No, BE-3. Notice the "upper stage" part. See here, for example.
Ezekiel 23:20
Gathering space junk to recycle the parts for other satellites or space missions may be a profitable reason to do the collection in the first place as well.
- Self-sustaining colonies built on current technology are pure fantasy. Trying to support even a single large colony via supplies from Earth would probably bankrupt the world.
It depends where the colony is. A floating colony on Venus is quite doable with today's technology.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
A floating colony on Venus is quite doable with today's technology.
Venus would make some things easier, like solar power generation. It would also make some things harder, like mining metals. Either way, choosing that location does not solve the hardest problems for true space colonization: long-term life support independent of Earth (including food, medicine, and pest control) and recreating Earth's gigantic, elaborate industrial supply chains from scratch.
The life support problem (think ecosystems, not air scrubbers) is, at this moment, completely unsolved and very poorly understood. The supply chain problem has one known solution - the present-day global economy, which is far too big to launch into space. Both of those problems may well be solved - eventually - with enough research and development. But, by definition, the result will not be "today's technology". Wake me when we have self-sustaining cloud cities on Earth; then we can talk about how we're going to put them on Venus.