A quote from an article on the Verge says "Musk declined to comment on the exact cost of the trip, but said it was “comparable” or a little more than the cost of a crewed mission to the International Space Station."
Does anyone have a rough estimate how much a manned mission to the ISS currently costs?
If I remember correctly, the price of a Soyuz seat is around $20,000,000USD for tourists, with NASA's price to fly on Soyuz being much higher per seat.
At least from NASA's standpoint, looks like they budget single-digit $Billions for human spaceflight, out of a yearly budget in the range of $18B. I'm not sure how cleanly that can be broken down per-mission, since stays aboard the ISS can now exceed 12 months. https://spaceflightnow.com/2015/02/02/nasa-outlines-fy-2016-...
For perspective, it cost about $200 million to get your name on an America's Cup trophy. So as billionaire vanity projects go, this is pretty reasonable.
I wonder what the life insurance policy costs -- though perhaps in this case these individuals don't need one due to their existing wealth. I guess super-wealthy people just "self insure" eh?
> We are excited to announce that SpaceX has been approached to fly two private citizens on a trip around the moon late next year. They have already paid a significant deposit to do a moon mission.
Can't wait to hear who booked this trip! Definitely one of the coolest ways to spend a lot of superfluous money :)
Not sure everyone will see it that way. One could look at it as taking the whole "wasteful private jet" to the extreme. Think of the sheer amount of fuel burned in the earth's atmosphere so a rich guy can fly in space.
Not for the Falcon 9/Falcon Heavy that will be used in this launch; it uses RP-1 (basically very pure jet fuel, AKA kerosene) and liquid oxygen as fuel.
The Shuttle and the new Space Launch System will use hydrogen/LOX, which exhausts basically water vapor.
RP-1/LOX also exhausts basically water vapor, plus CO2. There should be little NOx emission since it's not burning air, but there's probably some organic emissions from unburned fuel.
Is it? I know very little about rocket fuel, but I always assumed that CO2 is involved. A short bit of Googling "composition of rocket fuel exhaust" wasn't immediately helpful. :/
Other responses go into this in more detail, but basically there are a few very chemically different types of rocket fuel. Usually for main engines these are bipropellants, with a fuel component and an oxidizer component.
The expensive, exotic, high-specific-impulse, but low-density and dangerous option is liquid hydrogen + liquid oxygen (hydrolox), which does indeed create water vapor as exhaust. This particular rocket, however, uses RP-1 (similar to jet fuel - just highly refined kerosene) + liquid oxygen - still burning hydrocarbons, still releasing CO2, but favored because it's cheap, dense, safe, and doesn't need cryogenic cooling.
For comparison, the ITS (and many other Mars mission concepts) use liquid methane + liquid oxygen (methalox), which also outputs CO2, needs cryogenic cooling and is not as safe or dense as RP-1/LOX, but is still safer and denser than hydrogen, doesn't need to be kept quite as cold, and is easy to synthesize on-site on another planet.
Just look at the composition of the rocket fuel, and add oxygen to that. It the fuel has lots of carbon atoms in it, CO2 will be the result in the same proportion.
True as long as you intend to fly your rocket within the troposphere, the lower ~10 miles of the atmosphere. Above that, water vapor seems to stick around a long time and is currently understood to be quite harmful[1]. This is also an issue with high-flying planes (not that flying low is better, due to the decreased efficiency). However, more research is needed[2].
Doesn't really matter what it exhausts, it expends energy either way. If it ran on hydrogen, you'd probably have to use electrical energy to produce that. Even if you somehow got the hydrogen "for free", there are other things you could use it for.
This is all quite separate from the moral issue, to which I have nothing to add.
> Doesn't really matter what it exhausts, it expends energy either way.
Energy usage is not the only consideration, and it certainly does matter what it exhausts. Exhausting an inert gas is definitely preferable to a greenhouse gas, which would be preferable to exhausting anthrax, etc.
The composition of the exhaust is going to affect the positivity of the public reaction to a billionaire burning it into public air space for leisure.
Or you can look at it like someone is bankrolling a significant trial of several potentially species saving technologies. (I understand you're playing the devil's advocate, just trying a response)
The flight is a necessary step toward viable interplanetary travel. Even NASA slung people around the Moon before later flights landed thereon. Gotta send a rocket up & around & back, with passengers, to make progress toward the "colony on Mars" goal, so may as well do it with someone willing to fund a good chunk of the excursion.
I actually think today we'd be in a better situation if NASA had stopped there and didn't land on the moon (in the 1960s). Here's my reasoning:
(1) It's much easier to orbit the moon than to land on it.
(2) Both the US and the USSR had the capability to send many people on orbital flights around the moon.
(3) With both the US and USSR orbiting the moon, the space race wouldn't have ended (because both had the same capability and neither had put a flag on the surface).
(4) Once both countries are orbiting the moon for a few years, at some point in the 1970s one or the other would have made a landing.
(5) Both great powers would be competing incrementally in the same space, but at the same time it's not a situation which could have plausibly lead to a war, so it would have been safe for humanity.
Well, 215,000 L for the 747, 175,000 L for a Falcon 9, and 470,000 for the Falcon Heavy so in the same rough range. The Falcon Heavy is also carrying another 780,000 L of oxygen but that doesn't contribute any extra carbon, of course.
Depending on how you count, it does. The 747-8 freighter can carry 240k L of fuel [1], and 308k lbs of cargo [2], so 1.3 L/lb. The Falcon Heavy can launch 120k lbs of cargo into low-Earth orbit [3], and according to the grandparent, is carrying 1250k L of fuel (including oxygen, which is an essential component of "fuel" in this case), so 10.4 L/lb. Still, that's better than I expected. And if you want to go to Mars, you can take 30k lbs, so 41.7 L/lb, for only 4X LEO, quite the bargain!
(Interestingly, the average cost of a 10 hr 747 flight is about $40k [about $14k for fuel, which is about 33% of costs], compared to $90m [estimated] for a Falcon Heavy launch. So one order of magnitude more fuel, but almost 4 orders of magnitude more price.)
Would it be erreneous to say that no matter how 'green' our industries and power consumption on ground becomes, aviation and space flight would always require carbon based fuel?
An electric plane could be a possibility, depending on advancements in battery technology or power storage in general. Space flight would most likely require some kind fuel, at least in our lifetimes - so far we haven't found any other way to move mass in vacuum other than expelling propellant.
However, not all rocket fuel/propellant is carbon based, in fact, most aren't.
We may be able to develop better electricity storage to allow electric planes to be more practical than they currently are.
However, there's also a lot of interest in using biofuels for aviation, so you may see that in the mid-term future we're using carbon-based fuels but they're largely carbon-neutral.
If we can make renewable energy cheap enough it'll start making economic sense to synthesize fuel oil out of the air and water rather than mining it out of the ground, leading to no net carbon consumption.
Fair question. In short: Unless you're buying Tesla your car expenditures won't fund any significant research into improving cars in a way that benefits humankind.
Yes, i made the claim, however i don't stand by it. I was challenged, realized my knowledge may not be up to snuff and asked that someone more knowledgable than me be nice enough to share, and i meant that earnestly. I'm not interested in winning contests, i just want to have good knowledge.
A Lexus would do much of the same; Toyota's already got plug-in hybrids, and is working on hydrogen fuel cells.
(As for the other expenditures proposed above: real AOC Champagne supports the vineyards and traditional practices of the Champagne province of France; caviar... supports sturgeon fishermen? But consuming both together is just conspicuous consumption -- Champagne is a dessert wine. :) )
The key phrase in this statement is "for humanity", not "for an individual".
Automobiles, while useful, are mostly a solved technology (unless you're buying Tesla or some other prototype, pushing-the-envelope model). Buying another one - or for that matter, making another typical automobile - has negligible marginal impact on advancement of technology. Taking humans to the Moon again - first time in 45 years - will have a huge impact both on our technological capacity as a species[0] and on the public's willingness to pursue those advancements.
Also, spaceflight is an immature area of knowledge, so one could argue that in general, each dollar put in it has more marginal benefit than the same dollar put into buying typical consumer goods.
--
[0] - Which is arguably not ever-increasing; we've pretty much lost the manned deep spaceflight capabilities with the end of Apollo program. There are practical details we need to rediscover, and those details will be important in efforts to put humans on Mars and elsewhere in the Solar System.
Quite a few jobs are created by demand for champagne, caviar, and cars. And also jobs with living wages for farmers, fishermen, production line workers, drivers, and even engineers. While I'm all for space exploration, I wouldn't make any judgement calls on what activities are "better" for humanity.
> Can't wait to hear who booked this trip! Definitely one of the coolest ways to spend a lot of superfluous money :)
Imagine it ends up being some celebrity, like Leonardo di Caprio (who has shown interest in space IIRC) or Lady Gaga. Don't you think it would somehow tarnish the whole thing?
Why would a figure with so much PR fire power tarnish it? If anything it would put space exploration front and center for so many young and adolescence people.
I think the image that is being tarnished here is yours... Imagine we aren't told who the astronauts are until a long time after the mission (the photos and video have their faces redacted or something) would the revelation that one of them was Mr Bieber really make it suddenly less of an achievement or 'tarnish' it?
More practical, science-wise? Yes. Cooler? Definitely not.
Sending humans to space has a very important non-scientific factor - human emotions and imagination. It's an important driving force that's also necessary until we bootstrap a proper profitable market that'll do the driving.
"We seem to have somehow miscalculated our trajectories and the vehicle is now permanently locked in low lunar orbit forever with no recourse. Sorry for the inconvenience."
Same way politician candidates often acquire some military background. It builds their profile and they have something to tell stories about. It doesn't really matter what they actually did there.
In modern times, most people at least in the US doesn't have military experience and they tend to give it a somewhat mythical status. Those who do, can feel that the candidate relates to them.
So it can be an rhetoric for anything "you know, the time was I went around moon, this happened, which made me realize that x is more important than y". No-one can really discount that experience easily or politely since they haven't done that, and somewhat more admirable and mythical than creating a social networking website.
Huge SpaceX fan here, but I've heard from various news sources that the company is famous for aggressively posting dates and then slowly letting them slide. Might that be the case here? (Still, even if it's 2 or 3 years, wow!)
The main factor supporting their claim is that they have a very strong incentive to be ferrying crew to/from the ISS around this time, so barring any big mishaps with Falcon Heavy (supposed to be ready this summer/fall), all the pieces should be in place if not by next year, then certainly just a year or two later. Which, as you mentioned, is just as impressive!
"...The draft report from the GAO, which is Congress’ investigative arm, also concluded that neither SpaceX nor the Boeing Co. is likely to conduct regular space taxi flights to the space station by 2018..."
Shotwell's response is in the best interests of her company, but SpaceX is (as well as Boeing) woefully behind on a reasonable timeline to reach human-rated flight for both their rocket and crew module.
We should have learned from both the early Apollo program, and the Shuttle failures, that human lives shouldn't be treated as expendable capital in this industry.
Both SpaceX's current announcement, and the US Gov's desire to put humans on the first flight SLS flight, are deeply troubling in that regard.
I wonder if it is going to be only two people who are going to go. Will they add more people if they come forward with significant amount of money too?
Seems to me like the cost of taking in another person will be negligible in comparison to the funding they could contribute. This is literally a one-in-a-lifetime experience
That's probably it. Not as much space I think, but life support for an extended period of time. This is one key difference between Dragon/CST-100 and Orion: the latter is designed for extended deep space travel with full crew, and can support them accordingly, while the former are primarily LEO taxis with more limited deep space capabilities.
The problem with the Orion is that there simply aren't many useful missions. Orion can also go around the moon, just like Dragon 2, but for both craft that is the end of the line (at least for Crewed versions).
The difference is that Orion cost about as much as Dragon 1, Dragon 2, Falcon and Falcon Heavy combined. If we add the cost of a SLS launch it goes into another dimension of cost.
The two private citizens will need a support team in capsule unless they are experienced astronauts and have the technical skills to learn all the systems on the dragon crew capsule.
Do you have a source stating that the people crewing the Dragon would need to do anything at all? Won't it just be on autopilot, what duties is the crew of the capsule expected to perform?
Why do we expect that an "expert" could do anything for an automated craft? Will there be soldering involved? Changing batteries? Rather than allowing for such things, just build more redundancy. Unlike Apollo, this program will have access to powerful computers and other electronic components.
Where would one find an expert in lunar circumnavigation?
Planes can take off, fly, and land themselves. Do you expect that a pilot can do anything for it? They don't solder anything, nor change batteries.
> Where would one find an expert in lunar circumnavigation?
The branch of astronautics that deals with navigation in space is called Astrodynamics. It is taught at universities across the world. You can find experts among the astronauts of the various space agencies. Or you can train your own, the same way those agencies do.
Which planes are these? I've never seen an autopilot that could take off or land.
The people who need to know astrodynamics are those who plan the tour. They will encode all the maneuvers required before launch. In the exceedingly unlikely event that corrections need to be made, they'll be made by radio. Even if they wasted an $80M berth on a pilot, where would she practice twiddling the knobs?
> Which planes are these? I've never seen an autopilot that could take off or land.
Have you seen many autopilots, to be that certain?
Civil planes equipped with autoland are commonplace.
Some fighter jets take off from carriers in autopilot. The pilots are actually required to grab a couple of handlebars in the cabin during take off, to make sure their instinct doesn't overcome them.
> In the exceedingly unlikely event that corrections need to be made
The set of bad things that can happen in a complex spacecraft isn't limited to needing a route correction. That is obvious, but even if it wasn't obvious to someone, history tells us.
> where would she practice twiddling the knobs?
Do you honestly think astronauts go to space untrained, because "where would they practice"?
They practice in simulators. Even the two tourists will have to be trained, for obvious reasons.
So, hmm, we wants to send people around the moon, a year and a half from now, with a rocket he never tested and with a capsule that never flew?
I expect half of the directors of SpaceX to resign in the next two days...
The cold war? A national effort? Dead crews during the project?
I mean, I'm half joking, I believe that it is a possible objective, as much as it is possible to manufacture 500k Model 3s a year.. next year. Possible, but a monumental effort and something on which Musk strongly disagrees even with the top managers in his own companies.
The space ship is already being developed for the Commercial Crew program. The rocket is a new rocket but with the same engines and the same upper stage.
This does not seem so impossible. A couple of delays will happen, but all in all, there is no fundamental problem.
I agree, there is no fundamental problem. But that couple of delays will bring the actual date much further away than "late next year". I'm sure Elon Musk is capable of great things, it's just that he's very obviously squeezing the people in his companies to the limits and beyond, by publicly announcing objectives that are just about possible, provided that his employees will work day and night for entire years.
I simply don't understand why people are always up in arms about his companies being so bad with their employees. Lots of companies push people to do more ours. God knows, I have worked insane hours for far worse reasons.
Plus the actual evidence for Elons companies being far worse then anybody else is not really there.
Plus, its not like all those educated people that work at SpaceX would live in the gutter if they can't do the job.
That's a completely different matter, I just meant to say that Elon Musk's estimates are often extremely optimistic.
You know (if you're a developer) when you're working on a very exciting piece of code that will do wonderful stuff, and you have clear in your head what you're doing and how to do it, and think "it'll take me an hour, can't wait to see it working" and then at 4 AM you're still there, always in the same state of mind, with half of your brain asleep and the other half still perfectly focused on the result? Yep, I think that's Elon Musk. Still in the splendour of his early twenties :)
They are going to test the rocket later this year, and the rocket is based on the F9 design, so nothing done from scratch. The crew capsule is also just an enhancement of the capsule which travelled to the ISS and back again several times. It also is going to be tested with flights to the ISS before this planned moon mission. Once you exchange the F9 for the F9 Heavy, going to the moon is not really anyhow more difficult than going to the ISS. You need a bigger launch speed, but then you orbit the Moon and return back. A Moon landing however would be a distinctively different effort.
Ok, let's put it like this: how much are you willing to bet that they'll be sending two passengers around the Moon on board of Falcon Heavy/ Dragon 2 next year?
One was a ground incident that wouldn't have had people nearby even with a manned mission, and the other would have saved its passengers with the abort system.
And if people are willing to pay the money and take the risk, why not?
> One was a ground incident that wouldn't have had people nearby even with a manned mission, and the other would have saved its passengers with the abort system.
Not sure how that would mitigate the risk of explody Space-X rockets?
Exactly the way it was described. People are on board the rocket for the minimal amount of time before launch and not during the most risky operations in order to mitigate the risk of explosion. While the people are on board the rocket there are systems in place to increase their chances of escape, again mitigating the risk.
e: I realize you are saying none of this reduces the risk of the rocket exploding but at some point that doesn't matter because there's never going to be an absolute guarantee. The mitigation of risk that the rocket explodes is the further test flights the new rocket will complete before a manned mission to the moon.
Two lost rockets in a year is a lot better than previous years.
> Two lost rockets in a year is a lot better than previous years.
Uh no.. they're losing MORE rockets now than before, mostly because the rockets are getting bigger and more powerful - and they have the Heavy versions coming.
Consider that 2 of their last 13 rockets exploded.. that's not a good track record. Compare that to ULA, which hasn't had an explosion over 100 Atlas/Delta launches.
I don't think either of the explosions were related to the rockets getting bigger or more powerful. The CRS-7 failure would have happened on any version of the Falcon 9. It happened on that particular one because that one happened to have a defective strut. The AMOS-6 explosion happened because of their experiments with supercooled propellants.
Two losses in two years is a lot better than the very early days when they lost their first three Falcon 1s in a row, but worse than the early years of Falcon 9 where the only failure was a single engine out that didn't hurt the primary payload, and is certainly not a good track record overall.
Onto next year? Not too much. Schedules slip, and space flight schedules even slip faster. But if not 2018, 2019 would be very likely. The next big milestone is the F9 Heavy flight. Other than that, they first have to fly a manned mission to the ISS first. Once that has been achieved, flying around the moon is not especially difficult, probably technically even easier than to the ISS, as less precision is required.
Musk's #1 goal from the beginning is to put a lot of people on Mars, and do it in a rather short time (per human-history scale). We're talking a guy who literally invented PayPal just to make enough money to really get the project started. His other endeavors are as well, while laudable in their own right, really just ways of accumulating the resources to achieve that goal.
Go read Musk's biography at WaitButWhy.com - and you'll see that summarizing it into a two-line post is difficult. Suffice to say it all serves the goal of colonizing Mars.
While this feat depends on hitting a lot of intermediate milestones - Falcon Heavy Test, Crew Dragon Unmanned to ISS, Crew Dragon manned to ISS, etc, there is no "show-stopper" that is apparent right now.
I like how they have avoided committing to the much harder "landing on the Moon and then return" scenario.
We choose to not go to the moon, but do the other things, not because they are hard, but because they are relatively easy, and we can make a quick buck.
"Relatively" being very much a keyword here. Nothing about sending two people around the moon is easy, there's a reason it hasn't been done in several decades.
>there's a reason it hasn't been done in several decades
Because it lost its novelty. Clearly the technology's already been there and had the potential to get better with continued funding.
Apollo 11 was a huge moment for the US and the world. We beat the Soviet Union to the moon, and that was the primary goal. By the time Apollo 17 rolled around there were other things going on that grabbed our attention (like Vietnam). We had already spent too much money on the Apollo program and the public didn't really care anymore, so it ended.
The surprising thing about this announcement is that its a private mission. SpaceX has long resisted private tourism, to pursue CRS and Commercial Crew missions. I'm sure several billionaires would have written a large check, long ago, to go into orbit.
Have they really resisted it? SpaceX haven't had, and still don't have, a spacecraft capable of carrying people into orbit, so it's not like they've left money on the table. Delivering satellites and cargo was a good way to fund and prove the rocket themselves, without which any tourism is obviously a non-starter. And working with NASA on the Commercial Crew programme provides access to NASA expertise and facilities that SpaceX would otherwise have to develop from scratch. I suspect tourism was always part of the long-term plan.
If I had to guess why they decided to start with this mission in particular, I think it is probably because it provides a better PR opportunity than simple orbital tourism. SpaceX are clearly very image conscious, and beginning by taxiing billionaires into orbit perhaps sends the wrong signal. It's not doing anything that Russia hasn't already done, and undercuts the idealistic image they put across.
On the other hand, sending people beyond LEO for the first time in over forty years is clearly a major accomplishment. And having them be private citizens, even very rich ones, sends a very strong message that private spaceflight has come of age.
Indeed, the last time people went beyond LEO was Apollo 17 in 1972. Having the capability to do so is a big step towards re-attaining the Apollo level of humans in space.
Yes, SpaceX resisted earlier tourism opportunities for a few reasons. One reason was they didn't have the corporate resources to do tourism flights, and do the R&D for CCDev & Commercial Crew Program (CCP), so they focused on Commercial Crew.
Another reason is that NASA doesn't want tourist flights to the ISS, and no private destinations were close to ready. Lets say CCP funding was delayed, and a private team offered $400m for tourist flights, they'd have to develop two different Dragon capsule specifications. One for ISS, and one for private tourism. Similar, but with non-identical requirements. With the CCP further along, the different specifications may no longer be an issue.
Another reason is SpaceX doesn't have a training program for space tourists, and they'd require a training program. The Russians require 3-6mo of training for a space tourist on the Soyuz.
That said, there are reasons SpaceX went for this plan now, and not before.
Everyone replying is missing this oppositized JFK quote: "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard."
I think possibly lots of people are missing it. How well known is Kennedy's speech for those who weren't alive at the time? And yes it was a joke, but contained within the joke is a pointed commentary.
I think it's one of the most famous quotations in the country (it has it's own wikipedia page[0]), and the reference wasn't exactly subtle. I'm betting most downvoters (myself included) got the reference.
Sorry, a bit dense maybe, but what's 'oppositized' about it? That looks like a verbatim quote to me.
EDIT: Oh, not your usage! You're suggesting people somehow haven't realised the GP was mis-quoting JFK, I guess? I think it's more likely that everyone reading that GP comment realised, since it was a pretty obvious context for the reference.
Everyone's always so cynical... They're sending (presumably) two non-astronauts further than any humans have ever been. I assume there will be future milestones that probably include landing on the moon to test the Mars landing.
Landing on the moon to "test" the Mars landing makes almost no sense. The a moon is just to different, landing on mars can be trained much better on Earth or on Mars itself.
The simuliertes are not enough to make it sensible if you don't have another reason to land on the moon too.
There's gravity and a rock. Ignoring all the differences these still two extremely hard things to solve first before you start thinking of anything else.
The Earth has a full atmosphere with winds, an expansive array of magnetic and electric fields, and a much much higher gravitational pull then Mars or the moon. About a factor of 10 removed from mars and about a further factor of 10 removed from the moon.
You'd obviously need more fuel, and fuel that can burn in a completely different atmosphere then it's intended to run in. It's an invalid test for the kind of useful metrics that would be obtainable in a "pure" vacume out in space.
I wonder if there's an altitude you could do a "landing" at that would be thin enough atmosphere and weak enough gravity to get close to Martian conditions.
NASA does indeed use high-altitudes on earth to test Mars aerobraking, atmospheric entry, and supersonic parachute deployment[0]. For the actual terminal descent and landing speeds are low enough the atmosphere is not significant, you can just test that at sea level.
Gravity will still be too high, gravity at the ISS is 0.89 times gravity on the ground and you obviously need to be lower than that. But it's definitely the closest we can get to a large scale martian atmosphere.
Rockets carry oxidizer along with fuel, so the composition of the local atmosphere doesn't really figure. Also, your factors are way off; Martian gravity is a bit shy of 0.4g, and lunar gravity a bit proud of 0.1.
Finally, we don't need to land on the moon, or Earth, or anywhere else, to validate a method of landing on Mars, because we already know how to land on all of those things. We've done it plenty of times before, in all cases; the difference between doing it manned and doing it unmanned is purely one of mass.
We've only landed light things on mars, curiosity is the heaviest at 889kg, and the methods used don't scale easily.
Anything that can sustain humans for an extended period of time is going to weigh a lot more. EDL (Entry descent and landing) is a solvable problem, but it's not a solved one. You can find lots of recent work on it by googling that term.
Not to disagree that we can test on Earth better than the moon. Mars has a light atmosphere, but it doesn't have no atmosphere.
You're wrong about the gravity. The escape velocity of Mars is 5 km/s, half of Earth's and twice the Moon's. The surface gravity is also .4G which is about half the Earth's and two and a half times the Moons. So they're all a lot closer together than you said.
The Moon has no atmosphere to use to shed speed. Very different animal than a Mars landing, to the point where it'd need a totally different landing vehicle than Mars.
Think heavy, shielded Apollo command modules versus the spidery lunar landers.
There's about .7kPa of atmos on mars. I'd have a hard time seeing how that would meaningfully influence escape or entrance velocity. In fact it should make entry easier because you'll have a higher resistance coming in meaning you'll have to do a lower deceleration burn.
Could you provide a source, of someone with experiance in this sort of work, telling me why this is the case? Why does this completely change the game? Why is a moon landing not the eaisiest "we know basically what we're doing"?
You can bounce on the atmo and by passing threw it multible times you can bleed away speed. Then you can fly your capsule like a wing for a bit losing even more speed.
That's why a Dragon 2 can land on Mars, but not on the Moon.
Money quote: “There’s too much atmosphere on Mars to land heavy vehicles like we do on the moon, using propulsive technology completely,” said Manning, “and there’s too little atmosphere to land like we do on Earth. So, it’s in this ugly, grey zone.”
I believe that comment is more or less based on the shuttle landing and/or the soyuz capsules (eg parachutes) - but as far as I can tell, SpaceX is the only one currently capable (and using) propulsive landing on earth - so essentially they've already leapfrogged the grey zone to a large extent.
Makes me wonder whether testing a propulsive landing on an airborne drone barge is feasible? A blimp with a well-insulated large pad on the top - though I'm not sure how you'd effectively anchor it in the air - probably a active propulsion system as well.
Sure, if you ignore all the other problems. Why not fly to the Venus and test there? Why not on Saturn? The reason is simple, the cost of doing so outweighs the benefits of doing so.
Look, its simply almost as expensive to make such a test on the moon, as it is on mars. If mars is your goal, then testing on the moon makes absolutely no sense.
People seem to believe that because the moon is closer, it means its much easier there. The reality is that the deltaV is not that different, plus mars gives nice tools to actually land, like an atmosphere.
OTOH, if you are "rapidly" (insofar as that is possible in space technology) iterating on some aspect of the system that is relatively insensitive to the differences between the Moon and Mars, the Moon being closer shortens your cycle time considerably. Delta-V isn't the only cost you might be concerned with.
True, but nobody has the money to develop something that needs multible moon test mission before it ever gets used productively.
Also, SpaceX has actually thought about the problem quite a bit and until somebody payed them they clearly said they are not going to do anything moon related.
They clearly did the same calculations. Moon is only worth it, if you actually want to go to the moon.
You can repeat that as often as you want, that does not make it true.
SpaceX clearly did not think that for their mars architecture needed a moon testing step. Mars concepts such as Mars Direct did not include such a step.
Unless you have extreme time pressure its much, much, much preferable to test on Earth and Mars, rather then the Moon. Earth because it's by far the cheapest, and it shares a reasonable amount with Mars, and Mars because that's where you want to go anyway.
The only advantage that the moon has is that it is closer than mars in pure distance. That advantage is eradicated when you consider the much more important DeltaV.
No. The Moon is in orbit around the Earth and both the Earth and Mars are in orbit around the sun. The Moon varies between 360,000 and 400,000 km away and the closest Mars gets to us is 54,600,000 kilometers. Those numbers are a bit of an exaggeration because how much fuel you need is just as important as absolute distance/time to travel and for that you need 4 km/s of delta-v to get from Earth orbit to Moon orbit and 5.7 km/s to get to Mars orbit.
I meant that the Earth is closer to Mars than the Moon is, not that Mars is closer to Earth than the Moon is (of course it isn't, that would make for a big, big blood moon)
Exactly and that's not mentioning the benifit of being able to easily recover a failed prototype or even just analysis of a failed prototype.
Imagine trying to diagnose a problem that comes up 10 months into the program after the probe is no longer in a direct visual path or while communications via microwaves start taking 10-20 seconds from point to point.
There are too many questions to be answered before we can just say "you know while we're at it lets just risk the lives of 10-20 people, who cares right?"
On the other hand, 10-20 people in a bus out of control on a mountainside can get in the news, even if it ends in tragedy. But we don't color our whole view of auto travel because of it. We don't make policy or even many business decisions because of it.
Space travel can be dangerous. We will likely lose some crews. Rescue will always be too far away to matter. But I think folks will do it anyway.
> plus mars gives nice tools to actually land, like an atmosphere.
Actually Mars is a pretty difficult place to land. The atmosphere is just thick enough to require heavy heat shields, but too thin for parachutes to be sufficient.
Still, you can get rid of most of the velocity for a Mars landing using aerobraking alone. To land on the Moon you'll be bringing all of that delta-V with you as fuel. Landing a Dragon on Mars already takes a lot of propellant: https://youtu.be/ZoSKHzziLKw
Even if Mars's atmosphere only kills 90% of your orbital velocity instead of the 99% you'd get on Earth[1] you're still saving a humongous amount of fuel, far more than the mass of the heat shield you have to carry along. If you're designing a new heat shield for each mission then the added complexity might make that not worth while but SpaceX is reusing the same heat shield design they've been testing on Earth so that isn't a concern.
Have they said they'll test Martian equipment with Lunar landings? I'd guess it'd make a pretty poor testing ground, considering the cost of getting there.
That's a coin with a flipside though: you also don't need much in terms of heatshields so in that sense it is easier than on Mars.
A Mars landing needs both heatshields (because it does have an atmosphere) and retro-rockets to land with (because that atmosphere is not so dense that you can use it for gliding).
Well, they haven't got a lander for one thing. The Apollo LM had its design finalised in '63, and only flew in '65. SpaceX would surely do it quicker now, with the benefit of experience, but from scratch to operations in a year for such a unique vehicle is quite unrealistic.
Dragon is only capable of crash-landing using its engines? I.e. there is not enough propellant, legs, etc... to do a soft landing? (not even considering take-off right now)
It can land on Earth, because it uses the atmosphere to shed most of its speed, and rockets for the very last couple hundred miles an hour. No such luck on the airless Moon.
Depends on the rocket. With some modifications and the right rocket it should be possible to land a Dragon 2 on the moon. However, there it will be for a very long time. No chance to come back.
If you want to send up more propellant, you need to send up even more propellant to get the propellant you want up to space. Which means you have no room left for your actual payload.
Back in 2013, before SpaceX had recovered any rockets at all, Elon Musk talked about how the way they were going to get reusable rockets was by making the rocket and the reusability more efficient: https://youtu.be/vDwzmJpI4io?t=26m30s
Not on the Moon. On Earth or Mars it can aerobrake away most of its orbital velocity but you can't do that on Mars. The Dragon 2 only carries 400 m/s of delta-v and you'd need 1.7 km/s to get from low lunar orbit to the surface even ignoring the need to brake into an orbit.
The Apollo LM first flew in earth orbit on the Apollo 9 mission in March 1969. Its first test flight was only 4 months before the Apollo 11 mission landed one on the moon! And the first all-up Saturn V flew unmanned in November 1967. The incentives and funding were there very rapid development.
I wonder what NASA is thinking about this? The NASA Commercial Crew program which helped fund the development of the Dragon was funded for manned flight to the ISS. I'm curious if they see this as part of the project scope?
Read the article: "By also flying privately crewed missions, which NASA has encouraged, long-term costs to the government decline and more flight reliability history is gained, benefiting both government and private missions."
The COTS and Commercial Crew program have specifically been made so that Companies can reuse the hardware for other projects as well. This is the exact thing that NASA has hoped for.
This is exciting news. Some time ago, looking at the F9 Heavy, it seemed to me that SpaceX could fly to the moon with it anytime they decided to. Of course their focus is the Mars. But in the day and age of multi-billionaires and the commercial availability of space flights via SpaceX, this makes absolutely sense. Private funding could push space flights much quicker ahead.
Absolutely incredible. This will be the furthest that humanity has journeyed away from Earth in a very long time.
However it is worth noting that there hasn't been a single crewed Dragon flight yet. There are demonstator flights scheduled for this year though with the first NASA crewed mission slated for May 2018. That's an incredibly aggressive timeline but if anyone can achieve it, SpaceX can.
The long duration flight beyond the moon will be a fantastic proving ground, however.
It worked before. Kennedy's moon shot speech was 8 years and 2 months before Apollo 11 landed on the moon. The speech was made before the US had put a person in orbit.
It definitely works, and you might argue that when it comes to forwarding humanity, then what of a few exhausted engineers! But in other contexts perhaps not an elegant methodology.
Of course, that time around it lead to the Apollo 1 fire killing the first crew in on-the-ground testing before they even got as far as trying to launch them into Earth orbit. Probably not something to be looked up to.
I would bet that the astronauts in the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs thought there would be more than one fatal spacecraft failure by the end of Apollo. A number of astronauts (who never got to space) also died during training (in aircraft crashes in other incidents).
It's a reach to suggest that the pressure to get to the moon directly caused the Apollo 1 fire. There's no evidence that the engineering decisions that led to the fire or the poor escape hatch design would have been avoided with a longer timeline, many of them were choices made in reaction to near death experiences for previous accidents - in particular, both the choice of pure oxygen and the hatch design.
The get attention because the incredible things they already do. If they were some random company that had not done much nobody would care. However with SpaceX its actually reasonable to believe that they will actually do it in the next couple years.
Probably... the Falcon Heavy rocket has been "only a year from its first launch" for about 6 years. That said, I think they're probably correct about it now
They've already had Dragon flights where they've said "if there were humans aboard, they'd have been just fine", i.e. the Dragon's life-support capabilities have been tested.
You don't have to have flown humans to test whether you can fly humans, you know you were able to maintain a breathable atmosphere, and you know you have enough fuel to launch a few hundred kilos of meatbags, food & water.
Note also that SpaceX is going to start flying cargo in a derived-from-Crew-Dragon Dragon, so they'll have more experience with the changes in Crew Dragon, and can practice propulsive landings on Earth for cargo before trying it for crew.
Who are the two "private citizens"? Seems to be mere urge of "universal human exploration" to go around the moon and not landing on it, etc. isn't doing much exploring, but rather taking a lot of risk on a manned spacecraft that has never been tested with people.
Presumably they will test the spacecraft at least once before sending it out manned. We sent crewed capsules around the moon without landing during the Apollo program too.
Well the spacecraft will be tested multiple times before this mission and there are health and fitness tests before departure just like it says there. Both of those were addressed, I think you may have misread this.
I think you're missing the point, of course in an ideal situation where risk is minimized that would be a good question. But by focusing on money I think you neglected to address the obvious point that I raised namely what if it blows up.
Just looking up records: the furthest anyone has ever been from Earth is Apollo 13 who passed 158 miles above the lunar surface.
I imagine that would be a pretty easy record to break, if you're doing a translunar flight anyway then getting a bit higher doesn't take much more energy (source: played a lot of Kerbal).
On the other hand the passengers might prefer a close-up view of the Moon to a record.
But the moon isn't at a fixed distance. It's possible that one of the other cislunar or landing Apollo missions was more distant, geocentrically, even with their standard 69-mile lunar orbital heights.
Is it still a thing, where going to space makes you infertile due to radiation? I feel like I remember basically once you go into space (male or female) kids are off the table afterwards unless you have frozen your sperm or eggs beforehand. Not sure if that was solved at some point or not.
> The Mars Radiation Environment Experiment (MARIE) was launched in 2001 in order to collect more data. Estimates are that humans unshielded in interplanetary space would receive annually roughly 400 to 900 mSv (compared to 2.4 mSv on Earth) and that a Mars mission (12 months in flight and 18 months on Mars) might expose shielded astronauts to roughly 500 to 1000 mSv. [0]
NASA actually has a post on what the statuses of the flags are; they are probably bleached or disintegrated.[1] Interestingly, I would guess that the flag most likely to have survived would be the one from Apollo 11, because it was too close to the lander, and got knocked over by the ascent module; it may have been covered with dust and protected, but this is only a remote possibility.
note: the post says that the LROC shows shadows from the flags, but it seems highly unlikely they are pristine or even intact.
There's even the reverse - People who claim they can pinpoint the U.S moon flag with a telescope, trying their hardest to convince others the landings were real.
Finally. I am so so hyped for SpaceX's development. Hopefully they can stay afloat to experience stability and a stage where they can sit on funding and provide credit for fusion and/or antimatter research. Glad they're here to give us a glimpse into the future of space travel.
Note that NASA, I believe at Trump's urging, recently said they would try to place humans on the first flight of the Space Launch System (the new heavy lift rocket) - i.e., no unmanned testing first.
Is Musk still maintaining a relationship with Trump? When Uber founder Travis Kalanick left Trump's business council, Musk was still on it AFAIK. I wonder if Musk is doing this or announcing it for related reasons. Certainly Trump has a history, even in his short tenure, of pressuring businesses into announcements that suit his agenda. And the announcement seems to fit Trump's pattern: Impossible, brazen bravado. (Musk gives the impossible some credibility, but that's what is meant by lending someone your credibility.)
It's speculative, but it's also sad and a bad sign when we must look for government interference in the free market at this level, to provide propaganda for the President.
NASA agreed to do a study to see if they could place humans on the test flight. That seems to me like the NASA equivalent of saying "Sure, I'll look into that" while trying to not look horrified.
I'm pretty sure that study will conclude that this is a bad idea.
I sure hope so! I wouldn't want to be on that flight.
The NASA article brought to mind a story of a well-known Cosmonaut knowingly launching in an unreliable vehicle because the politicians insisted. He died. He flew because he didn't want his understudy to be killed in his place. (I'm sure someone on HN knows the story better than I do ...).
The explosion from that helium tank was slower than the emergency rockets on the dragon, from what I understand. So, had the capsule been fitted with them, it would have stayed entirely clear of the event. It'd be a rough ride, but it would have been a survivable event.
The thing is that NASA doesn't want to put anyone on something has the chance of doing that. The emergency system is for emergencies. Ideally it should NEVER be used. Vetting for manned missions is a lot different than cargo. That's all I'm getting at here. When rockets have recently exploded NASA gets pretty worried about putting humans on it.
> had the capsule been fitted with them, it would have stayed entirely clear of the event. It'd be a rough ride, but it would have been a survivable event.
Safety isn't defined by, 'did it work out ok?', but by the risk. In this case, the outcome the parent describes is hypothetical; among other things, it assumes the emergency escape system would have worked perfectly. I assume NASA wants to evaluate the risk of the helium tanks, not the hypothetical outcome.
For example, some people have survived plane crashes; the fact that it worked out doesn't mean that the risk was acceptable.
Launch Abort is a system that should _never_ have to be activated. If you use Launch Abort, the series of failures preceding it was so catastrophic that you had no alternative to avoid loss of life.
I'm pretty sure Musk is doing what's reliably necessary to keep his companies running under Trump.
An administration full of oil wealth and climate change deniers are a significant business risk when you make electric cars and have States banking photovoltaics.
> "Falcon Heavy is due to launch its first test flight this summer and, once successful, will be the most powerful vehicle to reach orbit after the Saturn V moon rocket."
SpaceX at its usual :) . By which criteria Energiya is less powerful vehicle to reach orbit than Falcon Heavy?
I think it's a bit of weird language. From comparing what specs I could find Energia had significantly greater LEO capacity (200% of Falcon Heavy), and a slight advantage in GTO payloads, a slight disadvantage at trans-lunar payloads and has no capacity at all for trans-Martian payloads where the Falcon Heavy can deliver 14,000kg/14 tonnes/30864.717lbs of payload.
So I think they are claiming that title due to Energia dropping off after trans-lunar ranges assuming Falcon Heavy reaches "orbit" and then travels further beyond.
Shouldn't they consider a staged approach, not unlike FDA trials. Start with a Laika dog, proceed with a chimp, as all other space programs have done in the past?
Also, if this succeeds, what happens to Google's moonshot projects? Is rebranding in the works?
Well there's a huge difference when talking about radiation exposures going to the moon and Mars. For one you don't expect a solar event to happen, you really hope one doesn't, when going to the moon. Going to Mars you expect a few.
With cosmic radiation we're talking about the difference between a few days and a year. Plus you have to have pretty good shielding when crossing the Van Allen belts.
You can consider the Apollo missions the trial phases. We learned a lot there.
Ah, in that context, yes. We'll have to see a lot about the flight performance of the Heavy and whatever crew capsule they come up with. I would imagine they would do it similar to how the Apollo missions were done. First you do the dress rehearsal where no one lands. They could use that mission to put supplies in orbit as well. For Mars, they might need more than one. I'll be interested in what they come up with, but I still think their goal of 2025 is pretty quick. Doable, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
Mars as a goal is laudable, but 2025 strikes me as more likely to be murderous. There's no doubt that human lives can grease the wheels of progress, and often have in the past. I feel like people have already accepted that as the way space will be too, when it still doesn't have to be... yet.
AFAIK, those incremental tests in the past were done because we didn't know the effect(s) space would have on humans. That's not really an issue now.
There's not much point in saying "Ok we've got this thing 98% safe let's send up a chimp and see if we explode" when you could just as easily not send up a chimp and get the results you need to get to the next level of safety, eventually reaching something reasonable to put humans in.
Best news I've heard today, if I had that much $ I too would want to do something that only a handful of humans have ever experienced. If Elon reads this I will give you everything in my bank account and everything I will earn in the next 5 years to orbit the earth. It has been a dream of mine and seeing the privatization of space flight gets me so excited for the future. Sucks to be my kids as I hope I get to blow their inheritance on a trip to the moon.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 334 ms ] threadDoes anyone have a rough estimate how much a manned mission to the ISS currently costs?
http://www.businessinsider.com/astronaut-cost-per-soyuz-seat...
Russia currently charges $58 million per seat to the ISS, with the price expected to increase to $80ish million by 2018.
http://www.businessinsider.com/space-travel-per-seat-cost-so...
Can't wait to hear who booked this trip! Definitely one of the coolest ways to spend a lot of superfluous money :)
https://twitter.com/RichardGarriott/status/83632784187673804...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_Dynamics
At least, I expect many will spin it that way.
The Shuttle and the new Space Launch System will use hydrogen/LOX, which exhausts basically water vapor.
The expensive, exotic, high-specific-impulse, but low-density and dangerous option is liquid hydrogen + liquid oxygen (hydrolox), which does indeed create water vapor as exhaust. This particular rocket, however, uses RP-1 (similar to jet fuel - just highly refined kerosene) + liquid oxygen - still burning hydrocarbons, still releasing CO2, but favored because it's cheap, dense, safe, and doesn't need cryogenic cooling.
For comparison, the ITS (and many other Mars mission concepts) use liquid methane + liquid oxygen (methalox), which also outputs CO2, needs cryogenic cooling and is not as safe or dense as RP-1/LOX, but is still safer and denser than hydrogen, doesn't need to be kept quite as cold, and is easy to synthesize on-site on another planet.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerosene The combustion reaction can be approximated as follows, with the molecular formula C12H26 (dodecane):
2 C12H26(l) + 37 O2(g) → 24 CO2(g) + 26 H2O(g); ∆H˚ = -7513 kJ
The atomic makeup of RP-1 is about CH1.97[1], so at stoichiometric ratio[2] that would yield 71.3% CO2 and 28.7% H2O by mass.
[1] http://www.qrg.northwestern.edu/projects/vss/docs/propulsion...
[2] in reality Falcon 9 burns fuel-rich
[1] http://www.grida.no/publications/other/ipcc_sr/?src=/climate... (kind of old, but I think the more recent IPCC reports are in a similar vein)
[2] https://eos.org/research-spotlights/the-forgotten-water-vapo...
This is all quite separate from the moral issue, to which I have nothing to add.
Energy usage is not the only consideration, and it certainly does matter what it exhausts. Exhausting an inert gas is definitely preferable to a greenhouse gas, which would be preferable to exhausting anthrax, etc.
The composition of the exhaust is going to affect the positivity of the public reaction to a billionaire burning it into public air space for leisure.
You may have a point regarding the public perception; don't really care to weigh in.
Uhh, what moral issue, exactly?
(1) It's much easier to orbit the moon than to land on it.
(2) Both the US and the USSR had the capability to send many people on orbital flights around the moon.
(3) With both the US and USSR orbiting the moon, the space race wouldn't have ended (because both had the same capability and neither had put a flag on the surface).
(4) Once both countries are orbiting the moon for a few years, at some point in the 1970s one or the other would have made a landing.
(5) Both great powers would be competing incrementally in the same space, but at the same time it's not a situation which could have plausibly lead to a war, so it would have been safe for humanity.
2) All the nations have a capability to stay on Earth
…
(plus or minus)
(Interestingly, the average cost of a 10 hr 747 flight is about $40k [about $14k for fuel, which is about 33% of costs], compared to $90m [estimated] for a Falcon Heavy launch. So one order of magnitude more fuel, but almost 4 orders of magnitude more price.)
[1] https://www.reference.com/vehicles/much-747-weigh-8b0c48a1d8... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_747-8 [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_Heavy [4] https://www.quora.com/How-much-fuel-does-a-Boeing-747-or-777... [5] https://www.quora.com/How-much-of-the-cost-of-an-airline-tic...
However, not all rocket fuel/propellant is carbon based, in fact, most aren't.
However, there's also a lot of interest in using biofuels for aviation, so you may see that in the mid-term future we're using carbon-based fuels but they're largely carbon-neutral.
How? I'm not saying you're wrong, but gut instinct is that automobiles are more useful to humans. I'd like to hear your thought process.
clock_tower did so here, very excellently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13749603
(As for the other expenditures proposed above: real AOC Champagne supports the vineyards and traditional practices of the Champagne province of France; caviar... supports sturgeon fishermen? But consuming both together is just conspicuous consumption -- Champagne is a dessert wine. :) )
http://bart.volgers.eu/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Dilbert-El...
Automobiles, while useful, are mostly a solved technology (unless you're buying Tesla or some other prototype, pushing-the-envelope model). Buying another one - or for that matter, making another typical automobile - has negligible marginal impact on advancement of technology. Taking humans to the Moon again - first time in 45 years - will have a huge impact both on our technological capacity as a species[0] and on the public's willingness to pursue those advancements.
Also, spaceflight is an immature area of knowledge, so one could argue that in general, each dollar put in it has more marginal benefit than the same dollar put into buying typical consumer goods.
--
[0] - Which is arguably not ever-increasing; we've pretty much lost the manned deep spaceflight capabilities with the end of Apollo program. There are practical details we need to rediscover, and those details will be important in efforts to put humans on Mars and elsewhere in the Solar System.
Imagine it ends up being some celebrity, like Leonardo di Caprio (who has shown interest in space IIRC) or Lady Gaga. Don't you think it would somehow tarnish the whole thing?
Either the rocket would blow up on the pad or it would never come back. ;)
Also, hopefully not Matt Damon.
Sending humans to space has a very important non-scientific factor - human emotions and imagination. It's an important driving force that's also necessary until we bootstrap a proper profitable market that'll do the driving.
He clearly has political ambitions, but he must acquire personality. Being an space-tourist would help.
In modern times, most people at least in the US doesn't have military experience and they tend to give it a somewhat mythical status. Those who do, can feel that the candidate relates to them.
So it can be an rhetoric for anything "you know, the time was I went around moon, this happened, which made me realize that x is more important than y". No-one can really discount that experience easily or politely since they haven't done that, and somewhat more admirable and mythical than creating a social networking website.
"...The draft report from the GAO, which is Congress’ investigative arm, also concluded that neither SpaceX nor the Boeing Co. is likely to conduct regular space taxi flights to the space station by 2018..."
http://www.geekwire.com/2017/gao-journal-spacex-rocket-turbo...
We should have learned from both the early Apollo program, and the Shuttle failures, that human lives shouldn't be treated as expendable capital in this industry.
Both SpaceX's current announcement, and the US Gov's desire to put humans on the first flight SLS flight, are deeply troubling in that regard.
Seems to me like the cost of taking in another person will be negligible in comparison to the funding they could contribute. This is literally a one-in-a-lifetime experience
The difference is that Orion cost about as much as Dragon 1, Dragon 2, Falcon and Falcon Heavy combined. If we add the cost of a SLS launch it goes into another dimension of cost.
> "Other flight teams have also expressed strong interest and we expect more to follow."
Where would one find an expert in lunar circumnavigation?
> Where would one find an expert in lunar circumnavigation?
The branch of astronautics that deals with navigation in space is called Astrodynamics. It is taught at universities across the world. You can find experts among the astronauts of the various space agencies. Or you can train your own, the same way those agencies do.
The people who need to know astrodynamics are those who plan the tour. They will encode all the maneuvers required before launch. In the exceedingly unlikely event that corrections need to be made, they'll be made by radio. Even if they wasted an $80M berth on a pilot, where would she practice twiddling the knobs?
Have you seen many autopilots, to be that certain?
Civil planes equipped with autoland are commonplace.
Some fighter jets take off from carriers in autopilot. The pilots are actually required to grab a couple of handlebars in the cabin during take off, to make sure their instinct doesn't overcome them.
> In the exceedingly unlikely event that corrections need to be made
The set of bad things that can happen in a complex spacecraft isn't limited to needing a route correction. That is obvious, but even if it wasn't obvious to someone, history tells us.
> where would she practice twiddling the knobs?
Do you honestly think astronauts go to space untrained, because "where would they practice"?
They practice in simulators. Even the two tourists will have to be trained, for obvious reasons.
I mean, I'm half joking, I believe that it is a possible objective, as much as it is possible to manufacture 500k Model 3s a year.. next year. Possible, but a monumental effort and something on which Musk strongly disagrees even with the top managers in his own companies.
This does not seem so impossible. A couple of delays will happen, but all in all, there is no fundamental problem.
Plus the actual evidence for Elons companies being far worse then anybody else is not really there.
Plus, its not like all those educated people that work at SpaceX would live in the gutter if they can't do the job.
You know (if you're a developer) when you're working on a very exciting piece of code that will do wonderful stuff, and you have clear in your head what you're doing and how to do it, and think "it'll take me an hour, can't wait to see it working" and then at 4 AM you're still there, always in the same state of mind, with half of your brain asleep and the other half still perfectly focused on the result? Yep, I think that's Elon Musk. Still in the splendour of his early twenties :)
This is really premature. I'd be surprised if they do this by 2020.
And if people are willing to pay the money and take the risk, why not?
Not sure how that would mitigate the risk of explody Space-X rockets?
e: I realize you are saying none of this reduces the risk of the rocket exploding but at some point that doesn't matter because there's never going to be an absolute guarantee. The mitigation of risk that the rocket explodes is the further test flights the new rocket will complete before a manned mission to the moon.
Two lost rockets in a year is a lot better than previous years.
Uh no.. they're losing MORE rockets now than before, mostly because the rockets are getting bigger and more powerful - and they have the Heavy versions coming.
Consider that 2 of their last 13 rockets exploded.. that's not a good track record. Compare that to ULA, which hasn't had an explosion over 100 Atlas/Delta launches.
Two losses in two years is a lot better than the very early days when they lost their first three Falcon 1s in a row, but worse than the early years of Falcon 9 where the only failure was a single engine out that didn't hurt the primary payload, and is certainly not a good track record overall.
He has also been clear that he had three goals:
1) Expanding solar power use.
2) Popularizing electric vehicles.
3) Making human life multi-planetary.
I am paraphrasing and perhaps understating his desired level of success.
I like how they have avoided committing to the much harder "landing on the Moon and then return" scenario.
Because it lost its novelty. Clearly the technology's already been there and had the potential to get better with continued funding.
Apollo 11 was a huge moment for the US and the world. We beat the Soviet Union to the moon, and that was the primary goal. By the time Apollo 17 rolled around there were other things going on that grabbed our attention (like Vietnam). We had already spent too much money on the Apollo program and the public didn't really care anymore, so it ended.
The surprising thing about this announcement is that its a private mission. SpaceX has long resisted private tourism, to pursue CRS and Commercial Crew missions. I'm sure several billionaires would have written a large check, long ago, to go into orbit.
If I had to guess why they decided to start with this mission in particular, I think it is probably because it provides a better PR opportunity than simple orbital tourism. SpaceX are clearly very image conscious, and beginning by taxiing billionaires into orbit perhaps sends the wrong signal. It's not doing anything that Russia hasn't already done, and undercuts the idealistic image they put across.
On the other hand, sending people beyond LEO for the first time in over forty years is clearly a major accomplishment. And having them be private citizens, even very rich ones, sends a very strong message that private spaceflight has come of age.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_17
Another reason is that NASA doesn't want tourist flights to the ISS, and no private destinations were close to ready. Lets say CCP funding was delayed, and a private team offered $400m for tourist flights, they'd have to develop two different Dragon capsule specifications. One for ISS, and one for private tourism. Similar, but with non-identical requirements. With the CCP further along, the different specifications may no longer be an issue.
Another reason is SpaceX doesn't have a training program for space tourists, and they'd require a training program. The Russians require 3-6mo of training for a space tourist on the Soyuz.
That said, there are reasons SpaceX went for this plan now, and not before.
-JFK
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_choose_to_go_to_the_Moon
EDIT: Oh, not your usage! You're suggesting people somehow haven't realised the GP was mis-quoting JFK, I guess? I think it's more likely that everyone reading that GP comment realised, since it was a pretty obvious context for the reference.
JFKa-ching!
The simuliertes are not enough to make it sensible if you don't have another reason to land on the moon too.
You'd obviously need more fuel, and fuel that can burn in a completely different atmosphere then it's intended to run in. It's an invalid test for the kind of useful metrics that would be obtainable in a "pure" vacume out in space.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-Density_Supersonic_Deceler...
Gravity will still be too high, gravity at the ISS is 0.89 times gravity on the ground and you obviously need to be lower than that. But it's definitely the closest we can get to a large scale martian atmosphere.
Finally, we don't need to land on the moon, or Earth, or anywhere else, to validate a method of landing on Mars, because we already know how to land on all of those things. We've done it plenty of times before, in all cases; the difference between doing it manned and doing it unmanned is purely one of mass.
Anything that can sustain humans for an extended period of time is going to weigh a lot more. EDL (Entry descent and landing) is a solvable problem, but it's not a solved one. You can find lots of recent work on it by googling that term.
Not to disagree that we can test on Earth better than the moon. Mars has a light atmosphere, but it doesn't have no atmosphere.
Think heavy, shielded Apollo command modules versus the spidery lunar landers.
Could you provide a source, of someone with experiance in this sort of work, telling me why this is the case? Why does this completely change the game? Why is a moon landing not the eaisiest "we know basically what we're doing"?
That's why a Dragon 2 can land on Mars, but not on the Moon.
Check out the Scott Manley video on Youtube for lots of details, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zuFdVkVxpM.
Money quote: “There’s too much atmosphere on Mars to land heavy vehicles like we do on the moon, using propulsive technology completely,” said Manning, “and there’s too little atmosphere to land like we do on Earth. So, it’s in this ugly, grey zone.”
Makes me wonder whether testing a propulsive landing on an airborne drone barge is feasible? A blimp with a well-insulated large pad on the top - though I'm not sure how you'd effectively anchor it in the air - probably a active propulsion system as well.
Look, its simply almost as expensive to make such a test on the moon, as it is on mars. If mars is your goal, then testing on the moon makes absolutely no sense.
People seem to believe that because the moon is closer, it means its much easier there. The reality is that the deltaV is not that different, plus mars gives nice tools to actually land, like an atmosphere.
Also, SpaceX has actually thought about the problem quite a bit and until somebody payed them they clearly said they are not going to do anything moon related.
They clearly did the same calculations. Moon is only worth it, if you actually want to go to the moon.
No one would be willing to fund anything that hasn't gone through at least one viability test on the closest short term analogous scale.
SpaceX clearly did not think that for their mars architecture needed a moon testing step. Mars concepts such as Mars Direct did not include such a step.
Unless you have extreme time pressure its much, much, much preferable to test on Earth and Mars, rather then the Moon. Earth because it's by far the cheapest, and it shares a reasonable amount with Mars, and Mars because that's where you want to go anyway.
The only advantage that the moon has is that it is closer than mars in pure distance. That advantage is eradicated when you consider the much more important DeltaV.
http://i.imgur.com/SqdzxzF.png
Imagine trying to diagnose a problem that comes up 10 months into the program after the probe is no longer in a direct visual path or while communications via microwaves start taking 10-20 seconds from point to point.
There are too many questions to be answered before we can just say "you know while we're at it lets just risk the lives of 10-20 people, who cares right?"
Space travel can be dangerous. We will likely lose some crews. Rescue will always be too far away to matter. But I think folks will do it anyway.
(Incidentally, this lovely song is a good answer to a lot of comments on this story.)
How many died conquering America? Exploring the poles? The Everest?
To this day people die in the Everest. It's their choice to risk their lives in such a way. Yet I don't hear people saying "don't go there".
Space is riskier, but also has more rewards.
Actually Mars is a pretty difficult place to land. The atmosphere is just thick enough to require heavy heat shields, but too thin for parachutes to be sufficient.
Here's a Wired article that talks about some of the issues - https://www.wired.com/2011/11/landing-on-mars/
[1] numbers vague guesses
A Mars landing needs both heatshields (because it does have an atmosphere) and retro-rockets to land with (because that atmosphere is not so dense that you can use it for gliding).
Back in 2013, before SpaceX had recovered any rockets at all, Elon Musk talked about how the way they were going to get reusable rockets was by making the rocket and the reusability more efficient: https://youtu.be/vDwzmJpI4io?t=26m30s
A quick check also reveals that the LM carried in excess of 10 tons of fuel, when Dragon carries less than 1.5.
However it is worth noting that there hasn't been a single crewed Dragon flight yet. There are demonstator flights scheduled for this year though with the first NASA crewed mission slated for May 2018. That's an incredibly aggressive timeline but if anyone can achieve it, SpaceX can.
The long duration flight beyond the moon will be a fantastic proving ground, however.
Sometimes i wonder if that's an strategy from the management team to put pressure in the engineers.
It seems to a preferred motivation method though.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0T1ztqhYQ7g
Or simply a way to generate press and attention, including on Hacker News.
You don't have to have flown humans to test whether you can fly humans, you know you were able to maintain a breathable atmosphere, and you know you have enough fuel to launch a few hundred kilos of meatbags, food & water.
Sergey Brin and Larry Page
Two of his freind rich enough, geeky enough, to go first.
Why would billionaires waste their money or time on insurance?
I imagine that would be a pretty easy record to break, if you're doing a translunar flight anyway then getting a bit higher doesn't take much more energy (source: played a lot of Kerbal).
On the other hand the passengers might prefer a close-up view of the Moon to a record.
https://phys.org/news/2011-01-sex-space-houston-problem.html
[0] http://space.stackexchange.com/questions/14704/do-astronauts...
When you get interplanetary, like on a trip to Mars, radiation exposure becomes arguable the most difficult problem to solve.
> The Mars Radiation Environment Experiment (MARIE) was launched in 2001 in order to collect more data. Estimates are that humans unshielded in interplanetary space would receive annually roughly 400 to 900 mSv (compared to 2.4 mSv on Earth) and that a Mars mission (12 months in flight and 18 months on Mars) might expose shielded astronauts to roughly 500 to 1000 mSv. [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_threat_from_cosmic_rays...
Weirdest thing, I can't delete this comment now that the other comment has been fixed.
They'll just say the new images are faked, just as they say the original missions were.
note: the post says that the LROC shows shadows from the flags, but it seems highly unlikely they are pristine or even intact.
[1] https://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/ApolloFlags-Condition.html
Still looking for the tall black monolith, though.
https://www.quora.com/Can-you-see-the-American-flag-on-the-m...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/15/science/nasa-looks-to-spe...
Is Musk still maintaining a relationship with Trump? When Uber founder Travis Kalanick left Trump's business council, Musk was still on it AFAIK. I wonder if Musk is doing this or announcing it for related reasons. Certainly Trump has a history, even in his short tenure, of pressuring businesses into announcements that suit his agenda. And the announcement seems to fit Trump's pattern: Impossible, brazen bravado. (Musk gives the impossible some credibility, but that's what is meant by lending someone your credibility.)
It's speculative, but it's also sad and a bad sign when we must look for government interference in the free market at this level, to provide propaganda for the President.
I'm pretty sure that study will conclude that this is a bad idea.
The NASA article brought to mind a story of a well-known Cosmonaut knowingly launching in an unreliable vehicle because the politicians insisted. He died. He flew because he didn't want his understudy to be killed in his place. (I'm sure someone on HN knows the story better than I do ...).
Nature has a way to do things we don't expect it to do.
Safety isn't defined by, 'did it work out ok?', but by the risk. In this case, the outcome the parent describes is hypothetical; among other things, it assumes the emergency escape system would have worked perfectly. I assume NASA wants to evaluate the risk of the helium tanks, not the hypothetical outcome.
For example, some people have survived plane crashes; the fact that it worked out doesn't mean that the risk was acceptable.
The millions of people that fly every day despite past plane crashes would disagree with you.
An administration full of oil wealth and climate change deniers are a significant business risk when you make electric cars and have States banking photovoltaics.
He needs to be within Trump's monkeysphere.
I loved that. Thanks for a good chuckle.
Downvotes be damned.
SpaceX at its usual :) . By which criteria Energiya is less powerful vehicle to reach orbit than Falcon Heavy?
So I think they are claiming that title due to Energia dropping off after trans-lunar ranges assuming Falcon Heavy reaches "orbit" and then travels further beyond.
Also, if this succeeds, what happens to Google's moonshot projects? Is rebranding in the works?
With cosmic radiation we're talking about the difference between a few days and a year. Plus you have to have pretty good shielding when crossing the Van Allen belts.
You can consider the Apollo missions the trial phases. We learned a lot there.
There's not much point in saying "Ok we've got this thing 98% safe let's send up a chimp and see if we explode" when you could just as easily not send up a chimp and get the results you need to get to the next level of safety, eventually reaching something reasonable to put humans in.
There are ethical concerns and legal limitations regarding experimentation on some animals.