> Let's just ask Elon what a Falcon XX will cost instead.
A rocket closely resembling the Falcon XX was actually part of the analysis, and was one of the two designs which scored well. The initial analysis assumed a traditional government acquisition process though, which of course negates many of SpaceX's advantages, although we'll presumably see an analysis incorporating SpaceX's proposed fixed-cost acquisition in the next NASA report to Congress (due in a couple months).
I assume the reason the shuttle-derived rocket was chosen as the main "design reference" is because it more closely fits what Congress asked for.
Also, here's what Elon Musk estimates a SpaceX-built heavy lift rocket will cost (compared to the $12B+ for the current NASA design):
Based on a roughly evenly split $10 billion budget for heavy lift, with half for the boost stage and half for the upper stage, "we're confident we could get a fully operational vehicle to the pad for $2.5 billion--and not only that, I will personally guarantee it," Musk says. In addition, the final product would be a fully accounted cost per flight of $300 million, he asserts. "I'll also guarantee that," he adds, though he cautions this does not include a potential upper-stage upgrade.
> Elon's guarantees are somewhat suspect given the scheduling and cost overruns of Falcon 9.
Last I checked, Elon's schedule and cost overruns for developing rockets tended to be considerably better than NASA's. Anyone else remember how the cost of former NASA Administrator Michael Griffin's Ares I rocket rapidly balloon from an initial ~$15 billion to well over $40 billion? This was for a rocket which was advertised with the motto, "safe, simple, soon."
Also, unlike NASA, Elon Musk has actually successfully developed and launched an orbital rocket in the past 30 years. Sadly, almost everybody at NASA with actual rocket development experience is either retired or dead.
Another point which I haven't seen mentioned, and is perhaps one of the greatest contributors to the excessive costs with solid rocket boosters, is that they make assembly and operations much more difficult. Something like 90% of the mass of a rocket is fuel. If you use a liquid fuel, like SpaceX does, you can do all your assembly horizontally, truck the rocket to the launch pad, rotate it to vertical, and fuel it up.
The Space Shuttle, however, requires assembly to all happen while the rocket is vertical, inside the Vehicle Assembly Building, the 4th-largest building in the world. Having the solid boosters are highly explosive present while all this assembly is taking place makes things quite a bit more difficult in terms of safety precautions. Once it's all assembled, they have to be transported to the launch pad using a crawler transporter, the largest self-powered vehicle in the world. On top of that, since solid rockets can't be restarted, you aren't able to do any on-pad test firings to make sure that everything is operating ok. All of this stuff adds immensely to cost.
On the flip side, it's nigh-impossible to get a rocket funded if you don't promise funds to ATK, the politically-powerful arms manufacturer which builds the solid rocket boosters. So NASA's kind of screwed here.
First off, NASAspaceflight has a much more thorough article on this, which I highly recommend reading.
From what I've seen over on the NASAspaceflight forums (where the DIRECT project first came together), most of the DIRECT proponents are pretty frustrated with this new proposal. One of the main goals of DIRECT was to require as little development as possible before NASA could have an operational heavy-lift launcher, using existing SRBs, lower- and upper-stage engines, external tanks. Also, the DIRECT plan was to develop the J-130 ASAP, capable of lifting 75mt without an upper stage, before NASA proceeded with the J-246, which would add an upper stage
This new plan perhaps satisfies recent demands by the House better, but at much higher cost and probability of program failure. Instead of requiring as few new developments as possible, it requires development of 5-segment solid rocket boosters, development of the J-2X upper-stage engine, and also requires concurrent development of the upper stage. This is a recipe for failure, particularly when you consider how many times NASA has failed at developing new solid rocket boosters, new engines, and new rockets in general, without a single success over the past 30 years.
Do you really want your tax dollars going toward research for Soccer (Football everywhere else in the world) and video game sounds?
As one might expect, the characterization you allude to from the YouCut project page isn't quite accurate. First off, here's links to actual research info on the so-called "soccer research" (actually research into a means of quantifying individual contributions to team performance) and the sound rendering for physically based simulation project. Here's some snippets from a news article regarding the projects:
But the researchers behind these projects say Smith has misrepresented their work and the amount of money spent on the projects. "This was not $750,000 given by NSF for us to develop an algorithm to look at the performance of soccer players," Northwestern University engineering professor Luis Amaral told LiveScience. Amaral, who was the lead investigator on the soccer study cited by Smith, called the congressman's portrayal of his work "not only incorrect, but misleading." "This was $750,000 that was given to a larger team of researchers to study a very broad range of questions related to creating provocative, efficient teams of researchers who innovate," Amaral said.... Amaral's soccer study, published in June in the open-access journal PLoS ONE, was supported by two NSF grants. The first was a $450,000 award to develop efficient methods to evaluate the productivity of researchers and research institutions. The second was a $300,000 grant to study how teams collaborate. By quantifying researchers' contributions to their fields, Amaral and his colleagues hope to help funding agencies like the NSF allocate money more effectively. How do those grants translate to studying soccer? According to Amaral, an M.D./Ph.D. student was rotating through Amaral's lab to learn the computer software Amaral and his colleagues use to model complex systems such as to explore how creativity and innovation arise from networks of researchers. The researchers decided to train the young scientist using easily available data from the World Cup. Soccer was particularly appealing, because team performance is difficult to rank using regular statistical methods, Amaral said.... Smith's second target, research to model the sound of breaking objects, is supported by an ongoing $1.2 million grant given to three researchers over four years. The goal of the research is to create advanced simulation technology for virtual environments, Cornell's James told LiveScience.... "Just think of the impact of computer-graphics rendering, and now imagine the combined potential for realistic computer-sound rendering," he said, citing possible uses of realistic simulations for engineering cars, aircraft and even spacecraft. The results may also be useful in designing rehabilitation and training simulations like those used in the military. Even robots could become better at navigating their environments with higher-level sound processing, James said.
> (OK, to do an actual lunar mission, we need a LEM, but there, exact duplicates of the original, flawless design would do - let's hope the Gruman design sheets are still around).
As I mentioned in another comment, during the press conference Elon Musk said that the next-generation Dragon will be capable of powered landings. This would allow it to function as, or at least serve as a predecessor to, a lunar lander (or even Mars lander).
* The heat shield on the Dragon capsule is massively overengineered to survive not only reentry velocities from low-Earth orbit, but also the much faster velocities from Lunar or Martian return trajectories.
* Instead of solely relying on parachutes, the next generation of the Dragon capsule will incorporate thrusters which will allow it to make a precise landing on the ground, on a target as small as a helipad. Musk didn't say this explicitly, but this is of course a key requirement for building a Lunar or Mars lander.
* During the press conference Musk fired some rather surprising shots at NASA's Orion capsule. Orion is the under-development capsule NASA intends to use for beyond-Earth exploration, and Elon Musk claimed that "anything Orion can do, Dragon can do better." This is quite arguably true, but it's unclear if this was the wisest thing for him to do politically.
* As Musk has stated a number of times before, the whole reason he started a company in the space industry, which historically has comparatively mediocre profit margins, is because of his dream of enabling Mars colonization.
> Why is it better for the US Government to pay a corporation to build spacecraft?
You seem to have a somewhat idealized view of how the US government operates.
In the government's case, a rocket/spacecraft is designed to garner political support -- you won't get funding for the rocket unless it meets the demands of politically-powerful congressmen and creates as many jobs as possible in their congressional districts. For example, with the Shuttle and Shuttle-legacy vehicles, you have (perhaps most importantly) solid rocket boosters manufactured in Utah (depending on the year, Sen. Orrin Hatch is chairman/ranking member of the Judiciary Committee), program management and integration in Alabama (Sen. Richard Shelby is a key member of the Appropriations committee funding NASA), launch and other operations in Florida, a capsule built in Colorado, etc. To add to this complication, a government launch vehicle project is pretty much required to be managed by Alabama's Marshall Spaceflight Center, which performed admirably in the 1960s but unfortunately hasn't been able to transition away from the Space Race's "waste anything but time" mentality, and for the past 20 years has had more than a half-dozen launch vehicles programs they've managed go horribly overbudget and have to be canceled.
With a corporation, they have an eye on profit. There's some areas where political favoritism does the job better than profit motivation, but the opposite is also true in some cases. As an added bonus, in SpaceX's case the CEO is a (ahem) starry-eyed idealist who left more profitable industries to pursue his dream of enabling Mars colonization.
Update: The Dragon has successfully made a soft landing in the Pacific! This makes it the first-ever commercial spacecraft to return from orbit, and the first American capsule splash-down since 1975. A recovery vessel has already arrived at the capsule and is currently attaching floatation devices to it. NASA and SpaceX are doing a press conference as early as 3:30pm EST, which will presumably be broadcast both on NASA TV and SpaceX's website.
SpaceX has also released a video pointing out a window of the Dragon capsule while in orbit. They apparently also have video of the descent and presumably more video from inside the capsule which will soon be available.
It's not just about velocity. You also have to be able to carry enough supplies to keep the crew alive. Also - and this is the kicker - you need to have big enough heat shields to come back down. See, lunar missions do not carry enough fuel to settle into an Earth orbit before re-entry. It's basically a nice three day drop from the moon into the Pacific. You need a massive heat shield to do that. Dragon doesn't have one massive enough.
Actually, the Dragon's heat shield is pretty massively over-engineered, to the extent that it can survive reentry from both lunar and Martian return velocities:
The Dragon's heat shield will also be put to the test during re-entry. The capsule's blunt end is coated with phenolic impregnated carbon ablator, a resistant insulator used by NASA's Stardust mission that returned comet samples to Earth.
The ablator, called PICA-X for short, was tested inside an arc jet laboratory at NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif.
"It's actually the most powerful stuff known to man. Dragon is capable of re-entering from a lunar velocity, or even a Mars velocity with the heat shield that it has," Musk said.
Sure thing. The list might be a bit dated, though -- I'm not sure how active TGV currently is. I"m fairly certain all the other companies on the list are quite active, though.
NASA is seriously hampered by the fact that its purse strings are controlled by a senator who runs the state where the solid rocket boosters are made. Therefore, No SRBs - no money for NASA.
Yup, it's problematic. SpaceX can address the political issues a little bit by building their large tanks in Louisiana and involving Alabama's Marshall Spaceflight Center. Hopefully not -too- much involvement from the latter, considering MSFC's atrocious track-record of consistent failures for the past 30 years. There's no way they can incorporate Utah's SRBs without turning the rocket into costly mess, though.
Using SRBs would negate most of SpaceX's cost-effectiveness efforts. Besides the problems inherent to producing the SRBs and transporting them from Utah, there's a number of problems they'd pose for the rocket itself. For example, they wouldn't be able to just horizontally assemble the rocket, cart the rocket to the pad, turn it vertical and fuel it up, but they'd need to do what the Shuttle does, where it's vertically integrated in a special facility, where the heavy SRBs are attached and pose an explosion hazard to workers during the entire assembly process, and then transported on specially-made crawlers. They also wouldn't be able to conduct hold-down test firings, or resume an aborted launch as they've done several times in the past.
Who says they are turning a profit? The kind of people that would invest in SpaceX probably don't care if they see a return on their initial investments for 10 years, if ever. The point is to prove that commercial spaceflight is possible and desirable, not to make money out of the gate. That comes later if all goes well.
FYI, SpaceX is already profitable. Their total expenditures so far during their ~7 years of operation have been around half a billion, and they've already made a fair bit more than that. Granted, a lot of the money they've "made" is for contracts which they haven't launched the payloads for yet, although development (the phase which they've just now completed) is typically the most cost-intensive part of a rocket's lifecycle.
It used to be that if you wanted to work on space technology (in North America), you had to work at NASA. Well it seems I could now apply at a few different companies to work on that kind of stuff. And that's exciting. More jobs in the field means more research, more activity, more growth. And Space exploration is one field that is exciting for Growth.
On that note, it's worth mentioning that SpaceX is actively hiring. It's not just aerospace/electrical/materials engineering jobs they're recruiting for, either, but also IT staff, technical writers, embedded systems programmers, and so forth.
Clark Lindsay's (really awesome) site has a list of several other private space companies which are hiring.
In case it's helpful, the other day I came across a really cool infographic which shows the relative sizes and capabilities of the SpaceX Dragon, the Soyuz-launched Progress, China's Shenzhou, Orbital's upcoming Cygnus, Europe's ATV, and the in-progress Orion capsule.
Each Dragon capsule can deliver more payload to the ISS than Progress, but not as much as the ATV. Unlike the other two disposable craft, however, Dragon is designed to reenter the atmosphere, which will make it the only way to get significant amounts of equipment/material/samples back from the ISS after the Shuttle's last flight.
This one includes both a ground camera and cameras streaming from a couple points on the rocket itself. Besides the launch at T-0 (one minute after video start), other highlights are stage separation at T+3 minutes and Dragon deployment at T+9:30.
I didn't get around to making this a separate submission, but I figure folks might be interested in another SpaceX-related news item from an interview with Elon Musk. As some of you know, Congress has mandated that NASA construct a super-heavy lift rocket (at least 75mt payload) by 2016. This is expected to use cost-plus contracts, utilize as many Shuttle components/workers as possible, and is expected to cost at least $10B.
SpaceX has another (IMHO much better) proposal, though, which would be to build a 150mt rocket that's essentially an upgrade of the rocket which was launched today. This rocket would be able to lift heavier payloads than the Saturn V. SpaceX proposed to do this with a $2.5B fixed-price contract, where SpaceX eats any cost above this amount. Some remarks from Musk on this:
He's even starting to think ahead to the next giant leap -- the development of a super-heavy-lift rocket, more powerful than the Apollo era's Saturn 5, which could put 150 metric tons of payload into Earth orbit. Musk said facilities in Utah, Alabama, Ohio, Florida and other places around the country could be involved in the project, and he's willing to build the rocket for $2.5 billion. "Anything above that, SpaceX will pay for," he promised.... Musk said his $2.5 billion figure for a super-heavy-lift rocket was based in part on the concept that 80 percent of the money Congress is expected to devote to heavy-lift development would go toward the standard cost-plus method for funding spacecraft development, with 20 percent going to the kind of fixed-price, milestone-based approach that is being used for the NASA program that's funding SpaceX's effort. "I find myself in this bizarre position where people are saying, 'You couldn't possibly do it for such a low amount as $2.5 billion,'" he said. "And actually, I have trouble trying to figure out how we'd spend so much money. In order to get to $2.5 billion, I'd have to assume that a whole bunch of things go horribly wrong during the development process."
Ongoing updates will be posted to SpaceX's twitter account. The Dragon capsule is expected to orbit the Earth a few times and then land off the California coast about three hours after the launch, and SpaceX has announced that they're doing a press conference an hour or two after the landing.
Also, the idea that NASA components are built by the lowest bidder is laughable. Saying that they're built by the most politically-connected bidders (e.g. ATK and the solid rocket boosters) is closer to the target.
The problem is that "best" has many components, often conflicting:
* Best design for launching heavy payloads once or twice a yaer * Best design for launching light payloads many times a year and attaching them together in space * Best design to push technological boundaries * Best design to minimize development cost * Best design to minimize operation costs * Best design to ensure astronaut safety * Best design to promote the US space industry as a whole * Best design to ensure future support from "space state" congressmen, who are the only people in congress willing to push for NASA funding
K... I just cut the cord off a lamp... somerone talk me through this O.O
DISCLAIMER: I've run tDCS experiments in an academic setting before. The info provided below is merely for speculative/educational purposes, and if someone fries their brain it's not my fault.
It's actually surprising how simple the setup for a tDCS experiment is. All you need are some sponge elecrodes, some saline to soak them in, and a way to deliver a constant current (say, 1 mA). Sponge electrodes can be purchased online, or they could potentially be made at home. I'm not sure what size electrode they used in the experiment, but I imagine 2"x2" would work.
Sponges should be soaked in enough saline to transmit electricity with little resistance (resistance tends to result in uncomfortable heat), but not so wet that water is dripping down. An elastic headband is handy for keeping the sponges in place.
The device used in lab was a fairly inexpensive (by research/medical standards) iontophoresis drug delivery device, powered by an off-the-shelf 9V battery. I think those are only available to practitioners, but I imagine that all you really need is a simple (ideally battery-powered for safety) current source which can send 1mA through the electrodes. (again, don't have access to the paper, so don't know if 1mA is what they used)
One sponge would go over one of the parietal cortices, on the back-top-right or back-top-left of the head. The other sponge would go over either the opposite parietal cortex or a "neutral" location like the vertex on top of the head. tDCS has a fairly crude spatial resolution, so one doesn't have to worry about being precisely pinpointed over a particular brain region.
I'll add in a disclaimer again that the above is quite possibly entirely wrong, and it's quite possible I've made a mistake in my description, I'm not liable, etc. etc.
And part of the reason I don't trust private sector space exploration at this stage of space exploration.
You do realize that all robotic space exploration missions for many years now, such as the Mars rovers and the multi-billion dollar Cassini-Huygens mission, are launched on private launch vehicles, right?
Nature 467 , 1104–1108 (28 October 2010) doi:10.1038/nature09510 Received 08 January 2010 Accepted 14 September 2010 Published online 27 October 2010
Daily life continually confronts us with an exuberance of external, sensory stimuli competing with a rich stream of internal deliberations, plans and ruminations. The brain must select one or more of these for further processing. How this competition is resolved across multiple sensory and cognitive regions is not known; nor is it clear how internal thoughts and attention regulate this competition1, 2, 3, 4. Recording from single neurons in patients implanted with intracranial electrodes for clinical reasons5, 6, 7, 8, 9, here we demonstrate that humans can regulate the activity of their neurons in the medial temporal lobe (MTL) to alter the outcome of the contest between external images and their internal representation. Subjects looked at a hybrid superposition of two images representing familiar individuals, landmarks, objects or animals and had to enhance one image at the expense of the other, competing one. Simultaneously, the spiking activity of their MTL neurons in different subregions and hemispheres was decoded in real time to control the content of the hybrid. Subjects reliably regulated, often on the first trial, the firing rate of their neurons, increasing the rate of some while simultaneously decreasing the rate of others. They did so by focusing onto one image, which gradually became clearer on the computer screen in front of their eyes, and thereby overriding sensory input. On the basis of the firing of these MTL neurons, the dynamics of the competition between visual images in the subject’s mind was visualized on an external display.
Slashdot Mirror
> Let's just ask Elon what a Falcon XX will cost instead.
A rocket closely resembling the Falcon XX was actually part of the analysis, and was one of the two designs which scored well. The initial analysis assumed a traditional government acquisition process though, which of course negates many of SpaceX's advantages, although we'll presumably see an analysis incorporating SpaceX's proposed fixed-cost acquisition in the next NASA report to Congress (due in a couple months).
I assume the reason the shuttle-derived rocket was chosen as the main "design reference" is because it more closely fits what Congress asked for.
Also, here's what Elon Musk estimates a SpaceX-built heavy lift rocket will cost (compared to the $12B+ for the current NASA design):
Based on a roughly evenly split $10 billion budget for heavy lift, with half for the boost stage and half for the upper stage, "we're confident we could get a fully operational vehicle to the pad for $2.5 billion--and not only that, I will personally guarantee it," Musk says. In addition, the final product would be a fully accounted cost per flight of $300 million, he asserts. "I'll also guarantee that," he adds, though he cautions this does not include a potential upper-stage upgrade.
> Elon's guarantees are somewhat suspect given the scheduling and cost overruns of Falcon 9.
Last I checked, Elon's schedule and cost overruns for developing rockets tended to be considerably better than NASA's. Anyone else remember how the cost of former NASA Administrator Michael Griffin's Ares I rocket rapidly balloon from an initial ~$15 billion to well over $40 billion? This was for a rocket which was advertised with the motto, "safe, simple, soon."
Also, unlike NASA, Elon Musk has actually successfully developed and launched an orbital rocket in the past 30 years. Sadly, almost everybody at NASA with actual rocket development experience is either retired or dead.
Another point which I haven't seen mentioned, and is perhaps one of the greatest contributors to the excessive costs with solid rocket boosters, is that they make assembly and operations much more difficult. Something like 90% of the mass of a rocket is fuel. If you use a liquid fuel, like SpaceX does, you can do all your assembly horizontally, truck the rocket to the launch pad, rotate it to vertical, and fuel it up.
The Space Shuttle, however, requires assembly to all happen while the rocket is vertical, inside the Vehicle Assembly Building, the 4th-largest building in the world. Having the solid boosters are highly explosive present while all this assembly is taking place makes things quite a bit more difficult in terms of safety precautions. Once it's all assembled, they have to be transported to the launch pad using a crawler transporter, the largest self-powered vehicle in the world. On top of that, since solid rockets can't be restarted, you aren't able to do any on-pad test firings to make sure that everything is operating ok. All of this stuff adds immensely to cost.
On the flip side, it's nigh-impossible to get a rocket funded if you don't promise funds to ATK, the politically-powerful arms manufacturer which builds the solid rocket boosters. So NASA's kind of screwed here.
First off, NASAspaceflight has a much more thorough article on this, which I highly recommend reading.
From what I've seen over on the NASAspaceflight forums (where the DIRECT project first came together), most of the DIRECT proponents are pretty frustrated with this new proposal. One of the main goals of DIRECT was to require as little development as possible before NASA could have an operational heavy-lift launcher, using existing SRBs, lower- and upper-stage engines, external tanks. Also, the DIRECT plan was to develop the J-130 ASAP, capable of lifting 75mt without an upper stage, before NASA proceeded with the J-246, which would add an upper stage
This new plan perhaps satisfies recent demands by the House better, but at much higher cost and probability of program failure. Instead of requiring as few new developments as possible, it requires development of 5-segment solid rocket boosters, development of the J-2X upper-stage engine, and also requires concurrent development of the upper stage. This is a recipe for failure, particularly when you consider how many times NASA has failed at developing new solid rocket boosters, new engines, and new rockets in general, without a single success over the past 30 years.
Do you really want your tax dollars going toward research for Soccer (Football everywhere else in the world) and video game sounds?
As one might expect, the characterization you allude to from the YouCut project page isn't quite accurate. First off, here's links to actual research info on the so-called "soccer research" (actually research into a means of quantifying individual contributions to team performance) and the sound rendering for physically based simulation project. Here's some snippets from a news article regarding the projects:
But the researchers behind these projects say Smith has misrepresented their work and the amount of money spent on the projects. ... ... ...
"This was not $750,000 given by NSF for us to develop an algorithm to look at the performance of soccer players," Northwestern University engineering professor Luis Amaral told LiveScience. Amaral, who was the lead investigator on the soccer study cited by Smith, called the congressman's portrayal of his work "not only incorrect, but misleading."
"This was $750,000 that was given to a larger team of researchers to study a very broad range of questions related to creating provocative, efficient teams of researchers who innovate," Amaral said.
Amaral's soccer study, published in June in the open-access journal PLoS ONE, was supported by two NSF grants. The first was a $450,000 award to develop efficient methods to evaluate the productivity of researchers and research institutions. The second was a $300,000 grant to study how teams collaborate. By quantifying researchers' contributions to their fields, Amaral and his colleagues hope to help funding agencies like the NSF allocate money more effectively.
How do those grants translate to studying soccer? According to Amaral, an M.D./Ph.D. student was rotating through Amaral's lab to learn the computer software Amaral and his colleagues use to model complex systems such as to explore how creativity and innovation arise from networks of researchers. The researchers decided to train the young scientist using easily available data from the World Cup. Soccer was particularly appealing, because team performance is difficult to rank using regular statistical methods, Amaral said.
Smith's second target, research to model the sound of breaking objects, is supported by an ongoing $1.2 million grant given to three researchers over four years. The goal of the research is to create advanced simulation technology for virtual environments, Cornell's James told LiveScience.
"Just think of the impact of computer-graphics rendering, and now imagine the combined potential for realistic computer-sound rendering," he said, citing possible uses of realistic simulations for engineering cars, aircraft and even spacecraft. The results may also be useful in designing rehabilitation and training simulations like those used in the military. Even robots could become better at navigating their environments with higher-level sound processing, James said.
> (OK, to do an actual lunar mission, we need a LEM, but there, exact duplicates of the original, flawless design would do - let's hope the Gruman design sheets are still around).
As I mentioned in another comment, during the press conference Elon Musk said that the next-generation Dragon will be capable of powered landings. This would allow it to function as, or at least serve as a predecessor to, a lunar lander (or even Mars lander).
First off, watch the post-mission SpaceX/NASA press conference. There's written notes here. A few relevant points made by Elon Musk:
* The heat shield on the Dragon capsule is massively overengineered to survive not only reentry velocities from low-Earth orbit, but also the much faster velocities from Lunar or Martian return trajectories.
* Instead of solely relying on parachutes, the next generation of the Dragon capsule will incorporate thrusters which will allow it to make a precise landing on the ground, on a target as small as a helipad. Musk didn't say this explicitly, but this is of course a key requirement for building a Lunar or Mars lander.
* During the press conference Musk fired some rather surprising shots at NASA's Orion capsule. Orion is the under-development capsule NASA intends to use for beyond-Earth exploration, and Elon Musk claimed that "anything Orion can do, Dragon can do better." This is quite arguably true, but it's unclear if this was the wisest thing for him to do politically.
* As Musk has stated a number of times before, the whole reason he started a company in the space industry, which historically has comparatively mediocre profit margins, is because of his dream of enabling Mars colonization.
> Why is it better for the US Government to pay a corporation to build spacecraft?
You seem to have a somewhat idealized view of how the US government operates.
In the government's case, a rocket/spacecraft is designed to garner political support -- you won't get funding for the rocket unless it meets the demands of politically-powerful congressmen and creates as many jobs as possible in their congressional districts. For example, with the Shuttle and Shuttle-legacy vehicles, you have (perhaps most importantly) solid rocket boosters manufactured in Utah (depending on the year, Sen. Orrin Hatch is chairman/ranking member of the Judiciary Committee), program management and integration in Alabama (Sen. Richard Shelby is a key member of the Appropriations committee funding NASA), launch and other operations in Florida, a capsule built in Colorado, etc. To add to this complication, a government launch vehicle project is pretty much required to be managed by Alabama's Marshall Spaceflight Center, which performed admirably in the 1960s but unfortunately hasn't been able to transition away from the Space Race's "waste anything but time" mentality, and for the past 20 years has had more than a half-dozen launch vehicles programs they've managed go horribly overbudget and have to be canceled.
With a corporation, they have an eye on profit. There's some areas where political favoritism does the job better than profit motivation, but the opposite is also true in some cases. As an added bonus, in SpaceX's case the CEO is a (ahem) starry-eyed idealist who left more profitable industries to pursue his dream of enabling Mars colonization.
Update: The Dragon has successfully made a soft landing in the Pacific! This makes it the first-ever commercial spacecraft to return from orbit, and the first American capsule splash-down since 1975. A recovery vessel has already arrived at the capsule and is currently attaching floatation devices to it. NASA and SpaceX are doing a press conference as early as 3:30pm EST, which will presumably be broadcast both on NASA TV and SpaceX's website.
SpaceX has also released a video pointing out a window of the Dragon capsule while in orbit. They apparently also have video of the descent and presumably more video from inside the capsule which will soon be available.
For more updates:
http://twitter.com/SpaceXer
http://spaceflightnow.com/falcon9/002/status.html
It's not just about velocity. You also have to be able to carry enough supplies to keep the crew alive. Also - and this is the kicker - you need to have big enough heat shields to come back down. See, lunar missions do not carry enough fuel to settle into an Earth orbit before re-entry. It's basically a nice three day drop from the moon into the Pacific. You need a massive heat shield to do that. Dragon doesn't have one massive enough.
Actually, the Dragon's heat shield is pretty massively over-engineered, to the extent that it can survive reentry from both lunar and Martian return velocities:
http://www.spaceflightnow.com/falcon9/002/100716firststage/
The Dragon's heat shield will also be put to the test during re-entry. The capsule's blunt end is coated with phenolic impregnated carbon ablator, a resistant insulator used by NASA's Stardust mission that returned comet samples to Earth.
The ablator, called PICA-X for short, was tested inside an arc jet laboratory at NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif.
"It's actually the most powerful stuff known to man. Dragon is capable of re-entering from a lunar velocity, or even a Mars velocity with the heat shield that it has," Musk said.
Sure thing. The list might be a bit dated, though -- I'm not sure how active TGV currently is. I"m fairly certain all the other companies on the list are quite active, though.
NASA is seriously hampered by the fact that its purse strings are controlled by a senator who runs the state where the solid rocket boosters are made. Therefore, No SRBs - no money for NASA.
Yup, it's problematic. SpaceX can address the political issues a little bit by building their large tanks in Louisiana and involving Alabama's Marshall Spaceflight Center. Hopefully not -too- much involvement from the latter, considering MSFC's atrocious track-record of consistent failures for the past 30 years. There's no way they can incorporate Utah's SRBs without turning the rocket into costly mess, though.
Using SRBs would negate most of SpaceX's cost-effectiveness efforts. Besides the problems inherent to producing the SRBs and transporting them from Utah, there's a number of problems they'd pose for the rocket itself. For example, they wouldn't be able to just horizontally assemble the rocket, cart the rocket to the pad, turn it vertical and fuel it up, but they'd need to do what the Shuttle does, where it's vertically integrated in a special facility, where the heavy SRBs are attached and pose an explosion hazard to workers during the entire assembly process, and then transported on specially-made crawlers. They also wouldn't be able to conduct hold-down test firings, or resume an aborted launch as they've done several times in the past.
Who says they are turning a profit? The kind of people that would invest in SpaceX probably don't care if they see a return on their initial investments for 10 years, if ever. The point is to prove that commercial spaceflight is possible and desirable, not to make money out of the gate. That comes later if all goes well.
FYI, SpaceX is already profitable. Their total expenditures so far during their ~7 years of operation have been around half a billion, and they've already made a fair bit more than that. Granted, a lot of the money they've "made" is for contracts which they haven't launched the payloads for yet, although development (the phase which they've just now completed) is typically the most cost-intensive part of a rocket's lifecycle.
It used to be that if you wanted to work on space technology (in North America), you had to work at NASA. Well it seems I could now apply at a few different companies to work on that kind of stuff. And that's exciting. More jobs in the field means more research, more activity, more growth. And Space exploration is one field that is exciting for Growth.
On that note, it's worth mentioning that SpaceX is actively hiring. It's not just aerospace/electrical/materials engineering jobs they're recruiting for, either, but also IT staff, technical writers, embedded systems programmers, and so forth.
Clark Lindsay's (really awesome) site has a list of several other private space companies which are hiring.
In case it's helpful, the other day I came across a really cool infographic which shows the relative sizes and capabilities of the SpaceX Dragon, the Soyuz-launched Progress, China's Shenzhou, Orbital's upcoming Cygnus, Europe's ATV, and the in-progress Orion capsule.
Each Dragon capsule can deliver more payload to the ISS than Progress, but not as much as the ATV. Unlike the other two disposable craft, however, Dragon is designed to reenter the atmosphere, which will make it the only way to get significant amounts of equipment/material/samples back from the ISS after the Shuttle's last flight.
Also, it looks like a rip of SpaceX's camera stream has been posted on youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-ci9xIgNZM
This one includes both a ground camera and cameras streaming from a couple points on the rocket itself. Besides the launch at T-0 (one minute after video start), other highlights are stage separation at T+3 minutes and Dragon deployment at T+9:30.
I didn't get around to making this a separate submission, but I figure folks might be interested in another SpaceX-related news item from an interview with Elon Musk. As some of you know, Congress has mandated that NASA construct a super-heavy lift rocket (at least 75mt payload) by 2016. This is expected to use cost-plus contracts, utilize as many Shuttle components/workers as possible, and is expected to cost at least $10B.
SpaceX has another (IMHO much better) proposal, though, which would be to build a 150mt rocket that's essentially an upgrade of the rocket which was launched today. This rocket would be able to lift heavier payloads than the Saturn V. SpaceX proposed to do this with a $2.5B fixed-price contract, where SpaceX eats any cost above this amount. Some remarks from Musk on this:
http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2010/12/06/5600599-spacex-gets-set-for-next-giant-leap
He's even starting to think ahead to the next giant leap -- the development of a super-heavy-lift rocket, more powerful than the Apollo era's Saturn 5, which could put 150 metric tons of payload into Earth orbit. Musk said facilities in Utah, Alabama, Ohio, Florida and other places around the country could be involved in the project, and he's willing to build the rocket for $2.5 billion. "Anything above that, SpaceX will pay for," he promised. ...
Musk said his $2.5 billion figure for a super-heavy-lift rocket was based in part on the concept that 80 percent of the money Congress is expected to devote to heavy-lift development would go toward the standard cost-plus method for funding spacecraft development, with 20 percent going to the kind of fixed-price, milestone-based approach that is being used for the NASA program that's funding SpaceX's effort. "I find myself in this bizarre position where people are saying, 'You couldn't possibly do it for such a low amount as $2.5 billion,'" he said. "And actually, I have trouble trying to figure out how we'd spend so much money. In order to get to $2.5 billion, I'd have to assume that a whole bunch of things go horribly wrong during the development process."
The official SpaceX video (which includes things like a view from the rocket itself) hasn't been released yet, but CNN has posted NASA's video here:
http://edition.cnn.com/2010/US/12/08/space.flight/
Ongoing updates will be posted to SpaceX's twitter account. The Dragon capsule is expected to orbit the Earth a few times and then land off the California coast about three hours after the launch, and SpaceX has announced that they're doing a press conference an hour or two after the landing.
> Was the landing fully automated, or was it manned remotely?
I'm guessing fully-automated, since there's a long period of communication blackout during atmospheric reentry.
A neat video from a thermal camera showing the X-37B immediately after landing, while taxiing down the runway:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTxMbda-j4Q
There's also a bunch of post-landing photos at the Air Force Space Command's Facebook page:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=265891&id=78118717073&l=f24f107baa
Might it have something to do with every component being built by the lowest bidder because funding keeps getting cut anytime someone at NASA blinks?
This statement doesn't match up with the actual numbers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Budget#Annual_budget.2C_1958-2010
Also, the idea that NASA components are built by the lowest bidder is laughable. Saying that they're built by the most politically-connected bidders (e.g. ATK and the solid rocket boosters) is closer to the target.
Let's use this motto from now on, please NASA?
The problem is that "best" has many components, often conflicting:
* Best design for launching heavy payloads once or twice a yaer
* Best design for launching light payloads many times a year and attaching them together in space
* Best design to push technological boundaries
* Best design to minimize development cost
* Best design to minimize operation costs
* Best design to ensure astronaut safety
* Best design to promote the US space industry as a whole
* Best design to ensure future support from "space state" congressmen, who are the only people in congress willing to push for NASA funding
K... I just cut the cord off a lamp... somerone talk me through this O.O
DISCLAIMER: I've run tDCS experiments in an academic setting before. The info provided below is merely for speculative/educational purposes, and if someone fries their brain it's not my fault.
It's actually surprising how simple the setup for a tDCS experiment is. All you need are some sponge elecrodes, some saline to soak them in, and a way to deliver a constant current (say, 1 mA). Sponge electrodes can be purchased online, or they could potentially be made at home. I'm not sure what size electrode they used in the experiment, but I imagine 2"x2" would work.
Sponges should be soaked in enough saline to transmit electricity with little resistance (resistance tends to result in uncomfortable heat), but not so wet that water is dripping down. An elastic headband is handy for keeping the sponges in place.
The device used in lab was a fairly inexpensive (by research/medical standards) iontophoresis drug delivery device, powered by an off-the-shelf 9V battery. I think those are only available to practitioners, but I imagine that all you really need is a simple (ideally battery-powered for safety) current source which can send 1mA through the electrodes. (again, don't have access to the paper, so don't know if 1mA is what they used)
One sponge would go over one of the parietal cortices, on the back-top-right or back-top-left of the head. The other sponge would go over either the opposite parietal cortex or a "neutral" location like the vertex on top of the head. tDCS has a fairly crude spatial resolution, so one doesn't have to worry about being precisely pinpointed over a particular brain region.
I'll add in a disclaimer again that the above is quite possibly entirely wrong, and it's quite possible I've made a mistake in my description, I'm not liable, etc. etc.
And part of the reason I don't trust private sector space exploration at this stage of space exploration.
You do realize that all robotic space exploration missions for many years now, such as the Mars rovers and the multi-billion dollar Cassini-Huygens mission, are launched on private launch vehicles, right?
There's also the actual research abstract:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v467/n7319/abs/nature09510.html
On-line, voluntary control of human temporal lobe neurons
Moran Cerf, Nikhil Thiruvengadam, Florian Mormann, Alexander Kraskov, Rodrigo Quian Quiroga, Christof Koch & Itzhak Fried
Nature 467 , 1104–1108 (28 October 2010) doi:10.1038/nature09510
Received 08 January 2010 Accepted 14 September 2010 Published online 27 October 2010
Daily life continually confronts us with an exuberance of external, sensory stimuli competing with a rich stream of internal deliberations, plans and ruminations. The brain must select one or more of these for further processing. How this competition is resolved across multiple sensory and cognitive regions is not known; nor is it clear how internal thoughts and attention regulate this competition1, 2, 3, 4. Recording from single neurons in patients implanted with intracranial electrodes for clinical reasons5, 6, 7, 8, 9, here we demonstrate that humans can regulate the activity of their neurons in the medial temporal lobe (MTL) to alter the outcome of the contest between external images and their internal representation. Subjects looked at a hybrid superposition of two images representing familiar individuals, landmarks, objects or animals and had to enhance one image at the expense of the other, competing one. Simultaneously, the spiking activity of their MTL neurons in different subregions and hemispheres was decoded in real time to control the content of the hybrid. Subjects reliably regulated, often on the first trial, the firing rate of their neurons, increasing the rate of some while simultaneously decreasing the rate of others. They did so by focusing onto one image, which gradually became clearer on the computer screen in front of their eyes, and thereby overriding sensory input. On the basis of the firing of these MTL neurons, the dynamics of the competition between visual images in the subject’s mind was visualized on an external display.