There is, of course, one situation that would change this, and it's what SpaceX is working towards: radical reductions in launch costs. Just like it's a common oversimplification of manned space exploraiton advocates to pretend like humans can fix anything and do a million times more than robots, it's often a weakness on our side to dismiss how much it actually costs to engineer long-term reliable high-throughput autonomous vehicles (probes, rovers, etc). Right now, they pretty unquestionably provide a better cost return on scientific data gathering. But this isn't some fundamental law of nature; it's only this way because launch costs are so high, so miniaturization and reduction of consumables is so critical. Change the launch cost picture dramatically, you change the optimal parameters for exploration.
That said, this isn't really the driving force. The driving force is, humanity becoming a multiplanet species would be a very good thing, both in our ability to survive catastrophic events and for our ability to bring the vast resources of space into our reach. Nobody who's being realistic about it thinks that some offplanet colony could be independent any time even remotely soon. But you have to start at some point. That "start" means bringing costs down and doing the required engineering. And I see no need to damn SpaceX for doing so.
How much excitement did that ever generate? The mars rovers landed in 2004 and NASA's budget (in constant dollars) has only gone down since.
Yes, nothing since to Mars since 2004! Excepting of course MRO, Curiosity, MAVEN, InSight, and the upcoming Mars 2020 Rover. Some of those being much more expensive than the MERs.
. There's no reason for the government to throw money at Musk that they wouldn't throw at NASA
Nor is there any expectation nor plan of such. SpaceX and NASA have a no-cost arrangement, where NASA provides free consultancy, access to the DSN, and sterilization assistance, while SpaceX will provide any data they collect.
and Musk certainly can't afford to do this on his own.
The opinions of experts interviewed on the subject are almost in universal disagreement with you on this, at least concerning Red Dragon. SpaceX already shoots things up to GEO; the energy required to get to a Mars Transfer Orbit is not much more. SpaceX already decelerates capsules with an aeroshell facing an entry load similar to that needed for aerocapture at Mars. And Dragon is already designed for automated vertical powered landing. Red Dragon is not some super-ambitious mission, it is quite doable without any radical advancements.
Actual colonization, boots on the ground, is of course a much bigger challenge. This will be many years in development. But SpaceX was specifically founded for this purpose. Just like how Tesla was founded when Musk found that he couldn't pay anyone to build him a clone of the tzero, SpaceX was founded when Musk found that nobody could launch him payloads to Mars for an affordable price. Ultimately getting humans to Mars is a founding principle of SpaceX. All of its investors are aware of this. SpaceX will continue to work towards this so long as they are an operating entity. And unlike NASA, they're not burdened with massive mandated costs and constantly changing mandated missions, both of which have utterly crippled it over the past decades.
The article made a ridiculous comparison between the non-vacuum optimuzed Merlin and the (near) vacuum optimized raptor. The merlin 1d vacuum is 348 sec, not 311.
300 bar is pretty extreme for an engine. But SpaceX has so far had a good record with engines, so here's to hoping they can carry that forward:)
The weird thing, if it is the COPVs, is... there was so much attention focused on them after CRS-7. It'd be weird if this was the cause. And extremely frustrating, too, as they're not manufactured in-house. SpaceX surely tests the tanks, so they too would bear some responsibility for it getting past their test procedures, if this is the cause. Personally (as I mentioned elsewhere in the comments), having a composite vessel sitting in liquid oxygen always strikes me as a dangerous situation to begin with.... if we were good at maintaining LOX-composite compatibility, we'd be making the stages themselves out of composites rather than aluminum.
Of course, the COPVs aren't the only part of the "helium pressurization system". Still concerning that whatever it was slipped past them.
It's not stored as a liquid, but as a compressed gas in a composite overwrapped pressure vessel (COPV) located inside the LOX tank. And yes, it is used as a pressurant.
The helium isn't used for cooling; it's a pressurant. It's lower mass to make a small COPV and have that store your pressurant in it than to have the whole LOX tank be strong enough to withstand the pressure.
It's always bothered me, the concept of having a COPV sitting around in LOX, though. Ignoring the thermal cycling, LOX and epoxy aren't exactly fast friends. We don't make LOX tanks out of composites because composites tend to become impact sensitive in LOX (there've been some attempts, but it's still an active reseach field, not a "solved problem"). Not sure there's that much difference between making your whole tank out of composites vs. having a composite tank inside of one. I don't know what SpaceX does, if anything, to try to protect them, but the general concept has always concerned me.
None of those things have anything whatsoever to do with information moving faster than the speed of light. You might as well have brought up monk seals or the color green; they have as much to do with FTL as quantum entanglement and virtual particles.
To put it another way: the total mass of the universe is about 180000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 kilograms, which is the mass equivalent of 16200000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 joules. There is no shortage of "resources" in the universe. Even the rarest of "resources" is available in unthinkable abundance to any entity that has a range broader than a single planet. Not like it's particularly easy to actually exhaust resources on a given planet; you just move from the easiest ones to the much more abundant, but harder to access ones (while simultaneously your technology advances with time, making resources in general more accessible; prices are based on the competition between these two factors, but in the long term generally follow a downward trend)
Russia doesn't seem to be looking to restart a space race. As usual they make grand pronouncements, but meanwhile their funding just keeps getting cut further. On the other hand, China might bring one. We're far from there now, but China keeps trying to push themselves rapidly forward in regards to space; they see it a way to mark themselves as being a legitimate, technologically advanced superpower rather than just a country of factories churning out trinkets. Right now it's things like space stations and simple probes. But suppose it gets to the point where they actually announce and fund an interplanetary mission (and if they announce it, it will actually happen; they don't go through the whole "changing cycles of congressmen" that the US does). How does the US respond? Just let China totally outshine the US on a highly publicized technical field?
It's not 19.2 billion extra. It's 19.2 billion total NASA funding, which is not some sort of relevant boost from their past funding. They're trying to present this as "giving money to NASA", when they're really just telling NASA how they must spend their money.
As far as I can tell, they're not actually "giving" NASA any more money of relevance, they're just telling them how they need to spend it. Standard congressional stuff, except this time they're amusingly trying to say "nobody can change this in the future"
I'll take the concept of a government-funded mission to Mars seriously whenever they actually give NASA billions more in annual funding at the same time as mandating it.
I assume the whole aluminum oxide = "VERY poisonous" is some sort of joke.
Of the metals in solid rocket fuel, aluminum is the most common, followed by iron. Aluminum and iron oxides in dust form are otherwise known as "clay".
The hazardous chemical that comes out of SRBs is hydrochloric acid. But it's not super-dangerous in the quantities that are released over the areas that it's released over.
The GP is correct, the hypergolic fuels are much worse for the environment. Some experimental ones have been even worse, such as boron-boosted (zip fuels) and fluorine-based fuels. Crazy-high performance - the highest ISP rocket engine ever built was a fluorine-hydrogen-molten lithium triprop** - but they're a nightmare to work with. I can guarantee you that if beryllium wasn't so crazy expensive it would have gotten a shakedown as well.
** The fun thing in that rocket is that the hydrogen both enters and leaves in the same form, H2. It exists solely to function as a working gas, to maximize the expansion potential of the heat released from the lithium-fluorine reaction. A lot of things with rocket propellants are counterintuitive that way - for example, with aluminized hydrocarbon-based rocket propellants, the optimal combustion is to burn the hydrocarbons to H2 and CO, not H2O and CO2. It's not worth the extra energy release to carry more oxidizer, and you need as much light gases as possible to transfer the energy from the aluminum since it condenses out of the gas stream at high temperatures and thus can no longer contribute directly to expansion.
Science and physics once said fusion and fision were impossible
Alchemists spent most of early human history trying to change elements into other ones. The concept of the nucleus was discovered at roughly the same time as the discovery that it can change (aka, radioactive decay) - around the end of the 19th century - which immediately launched searches into the possibilities of various means of transmutation. There was no point in time in which the nucleus (aka, a fundamental requirement for either fusion or fission) was known where there was any sort of acceptance that it could not be changed. There was a period of about 75 years where the nucleus was unknown, but the concept of atoms was known. However, fission and fusion wouldn't have made much sense as concepts without the concept of a nucleus.
the sun couldn't possibly exist as it produced more energy than physically possible.
Nobody every believed "the sun couldn't possibly exist". There was a period before the discovery of fusion where there were disputes between geologists and astronomers, with the former believing that the world was older and the latter believing that it was younger (they knew that stars could be powered by collapse - and indeed, they are during their formation - but not of a continued power source). This was a well known dispute and was treated as an unsolved problem, not a "gee, we were all wrong" thing.
couldn't explain how the honeybee flew
There was never any sort of mystery among scientists about how honeybees flew. People can't even track down the origin of this widely cited myth precisely, although there's a number of different theories crediting it to different individuals. A likely source is from a French entomologist, Antoine Magnan, citing secondhand off-the-cuff calculations from an assistant (and had nothing to do specifically with bumblebees). There was never any sort of "scholarly mystery" debated among mystified scientists about impossible-flying bumblebees.
or heavier than air travel.
You're citing Lord Kelvin, but he also had a lot of crazy ideas about things being impossible, even things that had already been invented. During Lord Kelvin's day, there were many respectable teams working on heavier than air aircraft. Not to mention that nature had already more than demonstrated that it was possible, given a sufficient power to weight ratio.
We already have working theories on bendIng space.
Yes, if you can make a continuous chain of black holes along the entire path, for example. Gravity bends space. Inflation bends it in the other direction. We know of nothing else that bends space, and have good evidence that nothing else does.
Except when it is possible... Hawking believes worm-holes are likely, which would make both FTL and even backwards time-travel possible, at least in theory.
I'm not sure what Hawking's current view on wormholes is, but I know that he is not a believer in backwards time travel. Indeed, it seems to proclude macroscopic stable wormholes, period, since they seem to inherently imply a capability for backwards time travel. They also seem to inherently represent either unfathomably large amounts of energy to form and operate, or a source of unlimited free energy - the latter of which would be highly doubtful, the former of which would be in effect useless.
Current physics is just one theory,
Physics is anything but "one theory". And the fact that there exist things that are poorly understood doesn't mean that you can just make up whatever you want and pretend like there's realistic odds of it existing. Nobody knows what's 1000 meters underneath Meridiani Planum, does that mean that we should start speculating that it might be fairies, because hey, there's still things about Mars we don't know? All evidence that humans have encountered, from all fields, from the tiniest of scales to the most distant of astronomical observations, shows that nothing moves faster than the speed of light in a vacuum. Yes, space itself may inflate, gravity can warp space, but for a given reference frame, c is the limit.
Certainly not in the present, or the anywhere-near future. But geological timespans are long. Ultimately, making antimatter comes down to taking plasma, getting it up to high speeds, and colliding it in an environment to extract antiprotons from the resultant "debris". Space has no shortage of energy sources (even plasma sources) of scales numerous orders of magnitude larger than we deal with today.
Antimatter spacecraft anytime remotely soon? Not the slightest chance. But at some point in the future, over geological timespans? That's an awful lot of time... so long as we don't kill ourselves first.
You have a strange definition of "intrinsic". And "are", for that matter. Particularly given that as you speak there are humans orbiting over your head.
Slashdot Mirror
What's the viewership on any video NASA's put out in the past decade vs. on every single SpaceX launch?
There is, of course, one situation that would change this, and it's what SpaceX is working towards: radical reductions in launch costs. Just like it's a common oversimplification of manned space exploraiton advocates to pretend like humans can fix anything and do a million times more than robots, it's often a weakness on our side to dismiss how much it actually costs to engineer long-term reliable high-throughput autonomous vehicles (probes, rovers, etc). Right now, they pretty unquestionably provide a better cost return on scientific data gathering. But this isn't some fundamental law of nature; it's only this way because launch costs are so high, so miniaturization and reduction of consumables is so critical. Change the launch cost picture dramatically, you change the optimal parameters for exploration.
That said, this isn't really the driving force. The driving force is, humanity becoming a multiplanet species would be a very good thing, both in our ability to survive catastrophic events and for our ability to bring the vast resources of space into our reach. Nobody who's being realistic about it thinks that some offplanet colony could be independent any time even remotely soon. But you have to start at some point. That "start" means bringing costs down and doing the required engineering. And I see no need to damn SpaceX for doing so.
Yes, nothing since to Mars since 2004! Excepting of course MRO, Curiosity, MAVEN, InSight, and the upcoming Mars 2020 Rover. Some of those being much more expensive than the MERs.
Nor is there any expectation nor plan of such. SpaceX and NASA have a no-cost arrangement, where NASA provides free consultancy, access to the DSN, and sterilization assistance, while SpaceX will provide any data they collect.
The opinions of experts interviewed on the subject are almost in universal disagreement with you on this, at least concerning Red Dragon. SpaceX already shoots things up to GEO; the energy required to get to a Mars Transfer Orbit is not much more. SpaceX already decelerates capsules with an aeroshell facing an entry load similar to that needed for aerocapture at Mars. And Dragon is already designed for automated vertical powered landing. Red Dragon is not some super-ambitious mission, it is quite doable without any radical advancements.
Actual colonization, boots on the ground, is of course a much bigger challenge. This will be many years in development. But SpaceX was specifically founded for this purpose. Just like how Tesla was founded when Musk found that he couldn't pay anyone to build him a clone of the tzero, SpaceX was founded when Musk found that nobody could launch him payloads to Mars for an affordable price. Ultimately getting humans to Mars is a founding principle of SpaceX. All of its investors are aware of this. SpaceX will continue to work towards this so long as they are an operating entity. And unlike NASA, they're not burdened with massive mandated costs and constantly changing mandated missions, both of which have utterly crippled it over the past decades.
F-1 wasn't vacuum optimized. You're making the same mistake that TFA made when comparing Raptor with Merlin.
The article made a ridiculous comparison between the non-vacuum optimuzed Merlin and the (near) vacuum optimized raptor. The merlin 1d vacuum is 348 sec, not 311.
300 bar is pretty extreme for an engine. But SpaceX has so far had a good record with engines, so here's to hoping they can carry that forward :)
The weird thing, if it is the COPVs, is... there was so much attention focused on them after CRS-7. It'd be weird if this was the cause. And extremely frustrating, too, as they're not manufactured in-house. SpaceX surely tests the tanks, so they too would bear some responsibility for it getting past their test procedures, if this is the cause. Personally (as I mentioned elsewhere in the comments), having a composite vessel sitting in liquid oxygen always strikes me as a dangerous situation to begin with.... if we were good at maintaining LOX-composite compatibility, we'd be making the stages themselves out of composites rather than aluminum.
Of course, the COPVs aren't the only part of the "helium pressurization system". Still concerning that whatever it was slipped past them.
Correction: vesselS (plural), not singular - they use multiple.
It's not stored as a liquid, but as a compressed gas in a composite overwrapped pressure vessel (COPV) located inside the LOX tank. And yes, it is used as a pressurant.
The helium isn't used for cooling; it's a pressurant. It's lower mass to make a small COPV and have that store your pressurant in it than to have the whole LOX tank be strong enough to withstand the pressure.
It's always bothered me, the concept of having a COPV sitting around in LOX, though. Ignoring the thermal cycling, LOX and epoxy aren't exactly fast friends. We don't make LOX tanks out of composites because composites tend to become impact sensitive in LOX (there've been some attempts, but it's still an active reseach field, not a "solved problem"). Not sure there's that much difference between making your whole tank out of composites vs. having a composite tank inside of one. I don't know what SpaceX does, if anything, to try to protect them, but the general concept has always concerned me.
None of those things have anything whatsoever to do with information moving faster than the speed of light. You might as well have brought up monk seals or the color green; they have as much to do with FTL as quantum entanglement and virtual particles.
To put it another way: the total mass of the universe is about 180000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 kilograms, which is the mass equivalent of 16200000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 joules. There is no shortage of "resources" in the universe. Even the rarest of "resources" is available in unthinkable abundance to any entity that has a range broader than a single planet. Not like it's particularly easy to actually exhaust resources on a given planet; you just move from the easiest ones to the much more abundant, but harder to access ones (while simultaneously your technology advances with time, making resources in general more accessible; prices are based on the competition between these two factors, but in the long term generally follow a downward trend)
How does the periodic table imply "burning through all of one's resources"? Your argument thusfar is "Because 1 + 1 = 2, then banana."
None of those things allow information to move faster than the speed of light, despite how they've become a sci-fi trope for doing so.
Russia doesn't seem to be looking to restart a space race. As usual they make grand pronouncements, but meanwhile their funding just keeps getting cut further. On the other hand, China might bring one. We're far from there now, but China keeps trying to push themselves rapidly forward in regards to space; they see it a way to mark themselves as being a legitimate, technologically advanced superpower rather than just a country of factories churning out trinkets. Right now it's things like space stations and simple probes. But suppose it gets to the point where they actually announce and fund an interplanetary mission (and if they announce it, it will actually happen; they don't go through the whole "changing cycles of congressmen" that the US does). How does the US respond? Just let China totally outshine the US on a highly publicized technical field?
I'm not in the EU but I am in Europe, and I find it unfortunate how little we spend on space.
It's not 19.2 billion extra. It's 19.2 billion total NASA funding, which is not some sort of relevant boost from their past funding. They're trying to present this as "giving money to NASA", when they're really just telling NASA how they must spend their money.
As far as I can tell, they're not actually "giving" NASA any more money of relevance, they're just telling them how they need to spend it. Standard congressional stuff, except this time they're amusingly trying to say "nobody can change this in the future"
I'll take the concept of a government-funded mission to Mars seriously whenever they actually give NASA billions more in annual funding at the same time as mandating it.
I assume the whole aluminum oxide = "VERY poisonous" is some sort of joke.
Of the metals in solid rocket fuel, aluminum is the most common, followed by iron. Aluminum and iron oxides in dust form are otherwise known as "clay".
The hazardous chemical that comes out of SRBs is hydrochloric acid. But it's not super-dangerous in the quantities that are released over the areas that it's released over.
The GP is correct, the hypergolic fuels are much worse for the environment. Some experimental ones have been even worse, such as boron-boosted (zip fuels) and fluorine-based fuels. Crazy-high performance - the highest ISP rocket engine ever built was a fluorine-hydrogen-molten lithium triprop** - but they're a nightmare to work with. I can guarantee you that if beryllium wasn't so crazy expensive it would have gotten a shakedown as well.
** The fun thing in that rocket is that the hydrogen both enters and leaves in the same form, H2. It exists solely to function as a working gas, to maximize the expansion potential of the heat released from the lithium-fluorine reaction. A lot of things with rocket propellants are counterintuitive that way - for example, with aluminized hydrocarbon-based rocket propellants, the optimal combustion is to burn the hydrocarbons to H2 and CO, not H2O and CO2. It's not worth the extra energy release to carry more oxidizer, and you need as much light gases as possible to transfer the energy from the aluminum since it condenses out of the gas stream at high temperatures and thus can no longer contribute directly to expansion.
Alchemists spent most of early human history trying to change elements into other ones. The concept of the nucleus was discovered at roughly the same time as the discovery that it can change (aka, radioactive decay) - around the end of the 19th century - which immediately launched searches into the possibilities of various means of transmutation. There was no point in time in which the nucleus (aka, a fundamental requirement for either fusion or fission) was known where there was any sort of acceptance that it could not be changed. There was a period of about 75 years where the nucleus was unknown, but the concept of atoms was known. However, fission and fusion wouldn't have made much sense as concepts without the concept of a nucleus.
Nobody every believed "the sun couldn't possibly exist". There was a period before the discovery of fusion where there were disputes between geologists and astronomers, with the former believing that the world was older and the latter believing that it was younger (they knew that stars could be powered by collapse - and indeed, they are during their formation - but not of a continued power source). This was a well known dispute and was treated as an unsolved problem, not a "gee, we were all wrong" thing.
There was never any sort of mystery among scientists about how honeybees flew. People can't even track down the origin of this widely cited myth precisely, although there's a number of different theories crediting it to different individuals. A likely source is from a French entomologist, Antoine Magnan, citing secondhand off-the-cuff calculations from an assistant (and had nothing to do specifically with bumblebees). There was never any sort of "scholarly mystery" debated among mystified scientists about impossible-flying bumblebees.
You're citing Lord Kelvin, but he also had a lot of crazy ideas about things being impossible, even things that had already been invented. During Lord Kelvin's day, there were many respectable teams working on heavier than air aircraft. Not to mention that nature had already more than demonstrated that it was possible, given a sufficient power to weight ratio.
Yes, if you can make a continuous chain of black holes along the entire path, for example. Gravity bends space. Inflation bends it in the other direction. We know of nothing else that bends space, and have good evidence that nothing else does.
I'm not sure what Hawking's current view on wormholes is, but I know that he is not a believer in backwards time travel. Indeed, it seems to proclude macroscopic stable wormholes, period, since they seem to inherently imply a capability for backwards time travel. They also seem to inherently represent either unfathomably large amounts of energy to form and operate, or a source of unlimited free energy - the latter of which would be highly doubtful, the former of which would be in effect useless.
Physics is anything but "one theory". And the fact that there exist things that are poorly understood doesn't mean that you can just make up whatever you want and pretend like there's realistic odds of it existing. Nobody knows what's 1000 meters underneath Meridiani Planum, does that mean that we should start speculating that it might be fairies, because hey, there's still things about Mars we don't know? All evidence that humans have encountered, from all fields, from the tiniest of scales to the most distant of astronomical observations, shows that nothing moves faster than the speed of light in a vacuum. Yes, space itself may inflate, gravity can warp space, but for a given reference frame, c is the limit.
Certainly not in the present, or the anywhere-near future. But geological timespans are long. Ultimately, making antimatter comes down to taking plasma, getting it up to high speeds, and colliding it in an environment to extract antiprotons from the resultant "debris". Space has no shortage of energy sources (even plasma sources) of scales numerous orders of magnitude larger than we deal with today.
Antimatter spacecraft anytime remotely soon? Not the slightest chance. But at some point in the future, over geological timespans? That's an awful lot of time... so long as we don't kill ourselves first.
A lot of the atrocities committed on the natives were indeed for forced labour or resources. But a lot were also committed in the name of religion.
We can certainly speculate on what sort of philosophy aliens might live by, but it would be nothing more than speculation.
Because? Do you think interstellar civilizations are based around burning coal?
Come on, you know the answer to this one ;)
You have a strange definition of "intrinsic". And "are", for that matter. Particularly given that as you speak there are humans orbiting over your head.