Firstly NASA didn't build the Redstone and Atlas that launched the Mercury capsules. They were ICBMs developed over the previous decade. Secondly, NASA consumed 4.5% of the US budget during the 1960's. Thirdly, and most importantly, NASA cannot do those things any more. They haven't successfully built or commissioned a new launcher in 30 years.
SpaceX built two new launchers, and brand new rocket engine, and a capsule, for less than NASA spent on the Ares I/Orion launch abort system. Why is it so hard for people like you to celebrate that? Hell, you can't even accept other people celebrating it. Does it really hurt you so much?
Apparently, John Galt ain't all that.
I am not a Randroid. Randroids are universally cretins.
SpaceX (and those like them) gives NASA (and taxpayers) more bang for their buck than NASA's traditional contractors. Therefore we should do more of that. (OTOH, public health care is cheaper and less wasteful than private health care. Therefore we should do more of that.)
The most efficient design here is just a big fucking rocket with a payload on the top.
It costs $X to build the fixed facilities. $Y/yr to maintain the facilities and minimum workforce. And $Z to build the actual rocket. Therefore the cost of launch of one rocket is $X/total-rockets + $Y/rockets-per-year + $Z.
So now your giant rocket costs $2X to build the facilities, $2Y to maintain the facilities. And $2Z to build. But it launches 4 times the payload. So it's twice as efficient, right? Except that you are launching 1/4 of the rockets for the same payload.
So that's $8X/rockets + $8Y/rockets-per-year + $2Z. Still potentially more efficient, if Z is larger than X+Y. But it's not. In rocketry, X+Y is always the dominant part of the costs. NASA's annual shuttle budget was almost the same whether they launched one shuttle per year or four (or none).
SpaceX's ReallyBigRocket has the advantage of using two F9 first stages as boosters for another F9 first stage. That increases their production rates without adding whole new designs. Likewise, they use lots of Merlin engines on all their rockets, F1, F9 and FH. Lots of units-per-year, lower cost-per-unit.
Nasa's ReallyBigRocket uses shuttle engines on the first stage, solid rockets motors on the boosters, and yet another rocket engine on the second stage. It will launch about once a year. Therefore the cost per launch is the entire annual budget of the program, plus a year's worth of the amortised cost of developing and maintaining three different systems. Horrible way to do business.
tl;dr - Economies of scale in rocketry is based on the number of units per year, not the size of the units.
Re: ISS cost.
The high cost of ISS wasn't due to its modularity. It was due to the lack of incremental development of technology leading up to its design. NASA didn't learn how to build space stations before they tried to design and build the Freedom Space Station. (Same thing happened with the shuttle. Trying to go from a 6 tonne Apollo capsule to a 100 tonne spaceplane in one step.)
Have you ever built anything that required a completely new skillset? Did you notice that the third one you built was easier than the first? Did you notice that scaling up slowly made it easier still? (In fact, scaling up was often easier than building that first small version.)
Apollo followed from Gemini which followed from Mercury, all within the same decade, which followed from the previous decade's missile development. Even within Apollo, each flight added and tested one extra step of the final mission. One flight, one mission.
tl;dr - Learn your craft before you design your "craft".
anyone honest at SpaceX would tell you the new private industry owes a vast debt to NASA's programmes.
Errr, they do. Openly. Like Bigelow acknowledges that their modules are based on Transhab.
What people like you seem to be unable to acknowledge, is that all of that NASA R&D has been available to NASA for the entire time they've failed to develop a shuttle replacement.
NASA can't do any of those things either. Even though it spends fifty to a hundred times as much as SpaceX for the privilege of not doing those things.
I'm getting tired of hearing about what they're gonna do and would like to hear a little more about what they've done
Between June 2002 to December 2010, they: Designed, built and flew an entirely new rocket engine. And designed, built and flew two completely new launchers based on that new rocket engine. And designed, built, flew and landed and recovered an entirely new pressurised cargo capsule large enough to be modified to carry crew. And they spent about $600 million on all those developments. NASA and its prime contractors literally cannot do that.
Now they are working on man-rating their launcher. And making that launcher reusable. And building an entirely new type of launch abort system for their capsule. And make a crewed version of that capsule. And building an even bigger launcher. And building a new bigger rocket engine. And getting commercial and government customers for their existing launchers. And all for a shoestring contribution from NASA.
In the same period NASA and its prime contractors tried to build two new launchers based on existing hardware, with a new capsule, for several tens of billions of dollars. And failed. So they are now hoping to build one big launcher based on existing hardware, and a capsule, for several more tens of billions of dollars. And if they are very lucky, they will have it ready for manned launch by 2020.
And I'm revealing my plans for world domination with an army of supermodels.
And if you had already taken over several nations with a battalion of regular models, I would take you more seriously.
It's a war between the elites of society. But only one group of elites realise there's a war. The rest - scientists, teachers, public servants, senior commanders, media, etc etc - think it is just a misunderstanding, something that can be sensibly negotiated through. A few groups, like PEER, realise that their members are under attack, but even they don't grasp the scale of the war.
No, they are set in law. In Australia we have privacy/data-collection laws. Using collected data for a purpose that the customer didn't authorise, or reasonably expect, or giving the data to a third party (including law enforcement without a court-order), is against that law.
To be honest, I'm not sure how an automated system is going to comply with the law. There's no way to get the initial consent. (Merely driving into a carpark would not be considered reasonable consent under the law.)
Hypothetical: Judge gets annoyed with infinitesimal patent differences, and strikes down a whole bunch of patents as invalid, both Apple's and Motorola/Google's.
Question: Which side walks away with a sly smile on their faces?
Sorry if this is a little ignorant, as I'm not a nuclear engineer, but how exactly is this suitcase reactor any different from an RTG?
Unused reactor fuel is not inherently heat producing. It's not even especially radioactive. It starts producing heat when a large enough amount of fuel is brought together for the neutrons emitted to start cascade reactions in the fuel. As it reacts, it produces waste radioisotopes, which are inherently "hot" (in both senses of the word.) (Remember Fukushima? The reactors scrammed during the tsunami, so the uranium in the fuel wasn't producing more heat, but waste in the fuel rods needed to be kept cool to prevent the rods from melting and pooling at the bottom of the tank, which would have been enough mass to start the uranium reacting again.)
RTG's, otoh, use the radioisotopes themselves (plutonium, IIRC) to generate heat.
(IANA nuclear engineer either. So I'm sure I ballsed up the explanation.)
So how exactly would a Moon-based plant work? There's no rivers to dump the heat into, and there's no air for cooling towers.
In the images with the story, there's a large radiator array sticking up above the reactor. The reactor itself might be suitcase sized, but the heat exchanger is larger.
I don't know whether the author was talking about a circulating fluid + turbine + heat exchanger type reactor, or one that uses thermocouples like Russian orbital reactors and American RTGs. If the former, then only the reactor itself would qualify as "suitcase sized".
From what I've read, the Russian orbital reactors produced no more power than an RTG. But that is based on 1960's thermocouples. It's possible that modern thermocouples are better. And on the moon, there's at least a bit of gravity, which makes pumping fluids around much easier, so old fashioned liquid-to-gas-cycle heat exchangers and turbines becomes more practical.
[RTGs] Of course, there's a big problem with this: they don't make much power.
Apparently, the really big problem for NASA is that the "fuel" for RTGs is no longer produced in large quantities. The second biggest problem is that they are "hot" when launched, which is bad PR mojo. Reactors can be launched "cold", only turned on in space.
on the Moon without building a large solar array.
14 days of sunlight, 14 days of night. It's going to take a lot of batteries to store 14 days worth of power, and a lot of panels to produce enough 29 days worth of power in 14 days.
Moon. No atmosphere. No hydrosphere. No biosphere.
This nuke could explode and you'd have a bunch of small lumps of uranium spread over a few tens of metres, increasing local background radiation at that spot by a few percent. A nuclear waste dump on the moon would be open dumping in a small crater, marked with a small flashing beacon so you can find it again because you'd have to be on top of it before you can detect it.
We can say "the best time to feed the animals is at 4 PM" and that applies to everyone on the planet. With your scheme we would have to give a much longer-winded explanation.
Interestingly, it would make a lot of business calls harder, not easier. Office hours are generally 9am to 5pm. But say there are no time-zones and you are in London and you want to call the Sydney office, when do they open/close?
Right now, you know 9-5, so you look up local-time in Sydney, it's 10:15am, so you're golden. (Actually it's 2:50am.)
Post-timezones: How do you figure it out quickly? Don't say "Sydney is 10hrs ahead", because there's no such thing any more. Similarly, there's no simple time-zone-conversion websites, because there's no time-zones. Instead, you have to hope that every business posts its UTC operating hours on their website. If not, you have to try to convert longitude into olden-day time-zones, then back into UTC. Gak.
Off-topic, but: Why is it "eerily similar" and not just "similar"? Even "suspiciously similar" I could understand, if that was the point. But what was "eerie" about it?
Slashdot Mirror
Firstly NASA didn't build the Redstone and Atlas that launched the Mercury capsules. They were ICBMs developed over the previous decade. Secondly, NASA consumed 4.5% of the US budget during the 1960's. Thirdly, and most importantly, NASA cannot do those things any more. They haven't successfully built or commissioned a new launcher in 30 years.
SpaceX built two new launchers, and brand new rocket engine, and a capsule, for less than NASA spent on the Ares I/Orion launch abort system. Why is it so hard for people like you to celebrate that? Hell, you can't even accept other people celebrating it. Does it really hurt you so much?
Apparently, John Galt ain't all that.
I am not a Randroid. Randroids are universally cretins.
SpaceX (and those like them) gives NASA (and taxpayers) more bang for their buck than NASA's traditional contractors. Therefore we should do more of that. (OTOH, public health care is cheaper and less wasteful than private health care. Therefore we should do more of that.)
The most efficient design here is just a big fucking rocket with a payload on the top.
It costs $X to build the fixed facilities. $Y/yr to maintain the facilities and minimum workforce. And $Z to build the actual rocket. Therefore the cost of launch of one rocket is $X/total-rockets + $Y/rockets-per-year + $Z.
So now your giant rocket costs $2X to build the facilities, $2Y to maintain the facilities. And $2Z to build. But it launches 4 times the payload. So it's twice as efficient, right? Except that you are launching 1/4 of the rockets for the same payload.
So that's $8X/rockets + $8Y/rockets-per-year + $2Z. Still potentially more efficient, if Z is larger than X+Y. But it's not. In rocketry, X+Y is always the dominant part of the costs. NASA's annual shuttle budget was almost the same whether they launched one shuttle per year or four (or none).
SpaceX's ReallyBigRocket has the advantage of using two F9 first stages as boosters for another F9 first stage. That increases their production rates without adding whole new designs. Likewise, they use lots of Merlin engines on all their rockets, F1, F9 and FH. Lots of units-per-year, lower cost-per-unit.
Nasa's ReallyBigRocket uses shuttle engines on the first stage, solid rockets motors on the boosters, and yet another rocket engine on the second stage. It will launch about once a year. Therefore the cost per launch is the entire annual budget of the program, plus a year's worth of the amortised cost of developing and maintaining three different systems. Horrible way to do business.
tl;dr - Economies of scale in rocketry is based on the number of units per year, not the size of the units.
Re: ISS cost.
The high cost of ISS wasn't due to its modularity. It was due to the lack of incremental development of technology leading up to its design. NASA didn't learn how to build space stations before they tried to design and build the Freedom Space Station. (Same thing happened with the shuttle. Trying to go from a 6 tonne Apollo capsule to a 100 tonne spaceplane in one step.)
Have you ever built anything that required a completely new skillset? Did you notice that the third one you built was easier than the first? Did you notice that scaling up slowly made it easier still? (In fact, scaling up was often easier than building that first small version.)
Apollo followed from Gemini which followed from Mercury, all within the same decade, which followed from the previous decade's missile development. Even within Apollo, each flight added and tested one extra step of the final mission. One flight, one mission.
tl;dr - Learn your craft before you design your "craft".
anyone honest at SpaceX would tell you the new private industry owes a vast debt to NASA's programmes.
Errr, they do. Openly. Like Bigelow acknowledges that their modules are based on Transhab.
What people like you seem to be unable to acknowledge, is that all of that NASA R&D has been available to NASA for the entire time they've failed to develop a shuttle replacement.
NASA can't do any of those things either. Even though it spends fifty to a hundred times as much as SpaceX for the privilege of not doing those things.
I'm getting tired of hearing about what they're gonna do and would like to hear a little more about what they've done
Between June 2002 to December 2010, they: Designed, built and flew an entirely new rocket engine. And designed, built and flew two completely new launchers based on that new rocket engine. And designed, built, flew and landed and recovered an entirely new pressurised cargo capsule large enough to be modified to carry crew. And they spent about $600 million on all those developments. NASA and its prime contractors literally cannot do that.
Now they are working on man-rating their launcher. And making that launcher reusable. And building an entirely new type of launch abort system for their capsule. And make a crewed version of that capsule. And building an even bigger launcher. And building a new bigger rocket engine. And getting commercial and government customers for their existing launchers. And all for a shoestring contribution from NASA.
In the same period NASA and its prime contractors tried to build two new launchers based on existing hardware, with a new capsule, for several tens of billions of dollars. And failed. So they are now hoping to build one big launcher based on existing hardware, and a capsule, for several more tens of billions of dollars. And if they are very lucky, they will have it ready for manned launch by 2020.
And I'm revealing my plans for world domination with an army of supermodels.
And if you had already taken over several nations with a battalion of regular models, I would take you more seriously.
Because cats and cars aren't "natural" in northern Australia?
Who's saying that the employees conversations on these phones won't be tracked?
Yeah, but securely tracked.
It's a war between the elites of society. But only one group of elites realise there's a war. The rest - scientists, teachers, public servants, senior commanders, media, etc etc - think it is just a misunderstanding, something that can be sensibly negotiated through. A few groups, like PEER, realise that their members are under attack, but even they don't grasp the scale of the war.
Your country is being led into a very bad place.
All these expectations are not set in stone,
No, they are set in law. In Australia we have privacy/data-collection laws. Using collected data for a purpose that the customer didn't authorise, or reasonably expect, or giving the data to a third party (including law enforcement without a court-order), is against that law.
To be honest, I'm not sure how an automated system is going to comply with the law. There's no way to get the initial consent. (Merely driving into a carpark would not be considered reasonable consent under the law.)
Hypothetical: Judge gets annoyed with infinitesimal patent differences, and strikes down a whole bunch of patents as invalid, both Apple's and Motorola/Google's.
Question: Which side walks away with a sly smile on their faces?
That's the side that isn't abusing patents.
Spiders.
Sorry if this is a little ignorant, as I'm not a nuclear engineer, but how exactly is this suitcase reactor any different from an RTG?
Unused reactor fuel is not inherently heat producing. It's not even especially radioactive. It starts producing heat when a large enough amount of fuel is brought together for the neutrons emitted to start cascade reactions in the fuel. As it reacts, it produces waste radioisotopes, which are inherently "hot" (in both senses of the word.) (Remember Fukushima? The reactors scrammed during the tsunami, so the uranium in the fuel wasn't producing more heat, but waste in the fuel rods needed to be kept cool to prevent the rods from melting and pooling at the bottom of the tank, which would have been enough mass to start the uranium reacting again.)
RTG's, otoh, use the radioisotopes themselves (plutonium, IIRC) to generate heat.
(IANA nuclear engineer either. So I'm sure I ballsed up the explanation.)
So how exactly would a Moon-based plant work? There's no rivers to dump the heat into, and there's no air for cooling towers.
In the images with the story, there's a large radiator array sticking up above the reactor. The reactor itself might be suitcase sized, but the heat exchanger is larger.
I don't know whether the author was talking about a circulating fluid + turbine + heat exchanger type reactor, or one that uses thermocouples like Russian orbital reactors and American RTGs. If the former, then only the reactor itself would qualify as "suitcase sized".
From what I've read, the Russian orbital reactors produced no more power than an RTG. But that is based on 1960's thermocouples. It's possible that modern thermocouples are better. And on the moon, there's at least a bit of gravity, which makes pumping fluids around much easier, so old fashioned liquid-to-gas-cycle heat exchangers and turbines becomes more practical.
[RTGs] Of course, there's a big problem with this: they don't make much power.
Apparently, the really big problem for NASA is that the "fuel" for RTGs is no longer produced in large quantities. The second biggest problem is that they are "hot" when launched, which is bad PR mojo. Reactors can be launched "cold", only turned on in space.
on the Moon without building a large solar array.
14 days of sunlight, 14 days of night. It's going to take a lot of batteries to store 14 days worth of power, and a lot of panels to produce enough 29 days worth of power in 14 days.
The good news is that you are judging them, not by the color of their skin, but by the quality of their character.
The bad news is the quality of their character.
I think most sensible people would agree that Gibson should have to prove the rare wood used in their factory was legally obtained.
No, people should expect the accuser to prove their accusation, not the defendant.
Crocodiles are endangered?
You're think of RTGs. This is a proper grown-up 40kW reactor, shrunk to the size of a suitcase.
Moon. No atmosphere. No hydrosphere. No biosphere.
This nuke could explode and you'd have a bunch of small lumps of uranium spread over a few tens of metres, increasing local background radiation at that spot by a few percent. A nuclear waste dump on the moon would be open dumping in a small crater, marked with a small flashing beacon so you can find it again because you'd have to be on top of it before you can detect it.
Space. Totally different game.
We can say "the best time to feed the animals is at 4 PM" and that applies to everyone on the planet. With your scheme we would have to give a much longer-winded explanation.
Interestingly, it would make a lot of business calls harder, not easier. Office hours are generally 9am to 5pm. But say there are no time-zones and you are in London and you want to call the Sydney office, when do they open/close?
Right now, you know 9-5, so you look up local-time in Sydney, it's 10:15am, so you're golden. (Actually it's 2:50am.)
Post-timezones: How do you figure it out quickly? Don't say "Sydney is 10hrs ahead", because there's no such thing any more. Similarly, there's no simple time-zone-conversion websites, because there's no time-zones. Instead, you have to hope that every business posts its UTC operating hours on their website. If not, you have to try to convert longitude into olden-day time-zones, then back into UTC. Gak.
Maybe, I got served the plain list version, "because of the number of requests for this document". Or words to that effect.
Off-topic, but:
Why is it "eerily similar" and not just "similar"? Even "suspiciously similar" I could understand, if that was the point. But what was "eerie" about it?
Mask, costume and cape. It's the only way to be sure.
You were stoned when you heard it, so it's not your fault.
Saturday morning breakfast cereal, for a change.
Question, is the Atlas rocket man rated for space?
Not yet. But three of the four CommercialCrew contractors have chosen the Atlas. (The fourth, obviously, is SpaceX.)
Why are we developing new LEO rockets when we already have working ones, aside from payload capacity?
Independent experts in Utah have advised certain learned members of congress that no alternative is viable.
Humans simply aren't good at staring at a sea of harmless stuff and then spotting something dangerous.
That seems to be it. Lots of false-alarms, few actual threats, is going to be difficult for either humans or machines.
Finally - this thing talks about mm waves - but I thought that the machines in the US were backscatter x-rays?
Doesn't the US use both? (Google says Wikipedia says LAX and SFO both have mm-wave scanners, so does the Trans-Hudson (PATH) train.)