You're in luck. SLS is the rocket being built by NASA (and contractors) and is the same class as Saturn V and will launch in a year or two. (SpaceX's Starship likely to do the same.)
Hopefully they will build in the same level of remote cameras as SpaceX does. It's way more fascinating to watch a live view from the rocket, 2nd stage, etc. on SpaceX's streams than to see a 90s-era-quality 3D rendering of a 2nd stage in orbit with a few data points in Courier on the screen.
The last decade of Shuttle launches had fantastic remote camera and ground tracking coverage (including 4K and views from the SRBs and external tank after separation), even better than SpaceX's. In part they did this because they were watching for potential foam strikes, etc, but it makes for a fantastic view.
SLS is likely to have an even greater level of video documentation since technology will have progressed another decade and it will be such a high profile event (versus the regular Shuttle launches). I suspect many of these views will be live, too.
They keep delivering inspirational "we're in the future" moments like no one else.
I suspect it's going to start affecting the kind of things that some people will want to be working on. Hard to get excited about many of the (ad) tech companies after seeing 2 rockets simultaneously return back to Earth...
That's an excellent point. I think their ability to sidestep the media and interact directly with their fans and people via social media makes SpaceX feel more personable and accessible. There's no denying SpaceX has increased the enthusiasm for space related topics lately.
Ah yes, selling a vaporware product with no timeline for delivery to a crowd of adoring fans, definitely one of the hallmarks of a totally above-the-board enterprise.
I'm not sure you know what 'vaporware' means. SpaceX has successfully completed 81 launches to space, including many smallsat payloads (which is what they're selling here).
The stock is finally now completely disconnected from the fundamentals of the company, so tbh I'd probably consider it too radioactive to touch on the long or short side, unless you are a very experienced and nimble trader and keep position sizes very small.
Haven't really been keeping up with the company internals too much to comment, but Montana Skeptic is posting again and is probably a good place to look if you want to catch up. I did see he mentioned recently that Q1 will be a disaster but did not dig into his reasoning.
I wasn't specifically asking if it was a good investment at its current valuation - however clearly it shows enough people believe it is a good investment. It sounds like you'd invest in Tesla if it was at a lower valuation though - but not SpaceX or other spinoffs?
How does this pump up the balance sheet? SpaceX takes in $1 million in a rideshare deposit, and now has a corresponding and equal liability to provide the service (hopefully for $1mm or less in costs) at a future point in time.
Falcon fleet sitting in the Cape warehouse is paid for. It's just opex for each launch at this point. They're optimizing for revenue traditionally ignored by launch service providers.
If you buy a laptop to build software on, you can pay for the laptop with what you earn in a year, but that doesn't stop you amortising the cost over three. (It just increases your year one profit at the expense of years two and three, making the books more consistent.)
There was an internal SpaceX presentation video which was leaked to r/SpaceX that stated their launch cost to be $30 million per launch. The video was taken down later that day, but that's the currently best known number for how much a fully loaded reusable Falcon 9 launch costs.
Well, there are whispers today that SpaceX is going to try to spin off Starlink and IPO. Seems odd, considering Musk has spent 2 years railing against the public markets. If that's the case when will get to see the financials.
Riding on the back of a commsat probably isn't very luxurious. You'll have a hell of a view though between the cargo fairing opening up and the point where you run out of oxygen.
The payload fairing has holes, it's not hermetically sealed. The air escapes as the rocket ascends. It's a windshield, not a pressure vessel. Falcon 9 reaches above breathable air seconds after launch.
200kg capacity so you could build a tiny space capsule with enough air to keep you alive for a few hours. Getting back to Earth alive is an exercise left up to the reader.
You'll also have to fit yourself (and your spacecraft) into a 24"x24"x24" space so I suggest consulting with some contortionists and losing some weight. Do you really need legs?
So how long before the first space stowaway? Maybe when launches become 100x or 1000x more common, one firm will have lax enough security that some teenager can sneak aboard in a homemade spaceship or spacesuit.
This is soooo cool! I’m excited for them to keep lowering the cost of access to space. Maybe one day it will be a few thousand dollars, and I can buy a satellite to hack around with.
I don't understand the economics of space launches but it has reported that Rocket Lab charges about $5.7 mil to launch a 150-225kg payload. SpaceX seems to be miles cheaper at $1 mil for a 200kg payload. How can rocket lab compete? More flexibility?
Given that space is tinkering with Starship and Superheavy, they will be able to bring their costs massively down. It will just take them a few more years most likely.
In reality, the cheaper access to space opens up so many more opportunities for new customers. When it is affordable for a college to send up some cubesats for research, they're going to do it.
If you get on a SpaceX ride share, you don't get to choose your own orbit. You'll have to make-do with an orbit that may (or may not) be close to your desired one. Unless you want your satellite to have propulsion, which might eat up any cost advantage. With Rocket Lab, you'll get the orbit you want typically, since you'll probably be the only vehicle on board.
I suppose if SpaceX had an enormous manifest of small sats they could bin them into similar orbits, but that would really depend on just how successful they are.
Slight clarification: SpaceX offers ride shares to distinct orbits, and customers can select what ride works best for their payload. Obviously if you're interested in an equatorial orbit, you're not going to select a launch from Vandenberg...
Well it really depends on what you want to do with your satellite. Are you trying to view earth? If so, then inclination and altitude matter, as they will determine what parts of earth’s surface you can see at all. Do you want to take pictures? Then you probably want something sun synchronous so the lighting is reliable. Need to do communication at high latitudes? You’ll want something like a polar orbit. At lower altitudes your orbit will decay faster due to aerodynamic drag.
It’s totally like riding the bus: you wouldn’t typically get off at just any stop and call it good.
Here’s a good YouTube on different types of orbits. Not sure if it covers everything but certainly entertaining:
Bus vs taxi. Bus fare is cheap, but it only goes according to its schedule and only to predetermined stops. Recently SpaceX have announced improved schedule for rideshares (up to monthly frequency) but a rideshare still can't choose the day or the exact orbit.
Difference between a rideshare and a bespoke delivery orbit I presume. If it ain't going where you want to go, you're going to have to wait/hope that another ride comes along.
Well, if you're going to a 53 degree orbit, you're in luck. But if you have a specific polar orbit, well... You'll need a special transfer vehicle package (SpaceX is partnering with Momentus), which will increase the mass you need to launch and has its own costs, making it more comparable to RocketLab.
RocketLab will let you go to whichever orbit you choose.
Also, RocketLab is pursuing reusability as well, so that may allow RocketLab to compete more directly on cost. Also, RocketLab can launch smaller payloads (in bundles with other customers) for less than the $1 million minimum SpaceX has.
Still, I think SpaceX has a sizable advantage for a lot of launches.
IF you have a payload that needs a non-standard orbit you absolutely need it to make your project work at all. Problem is that there are 50+ small launchers trying to make it and with the big volume going SpaceX its hard to see how the economics works out for that.
The market size is growing, but not as fast as some people hopped.
Rocket Lab is currently working on booster recovery. If they're successful, you can expect that cost to come down significantly. I also wonder if they can do a Kerbal approach and stick 3 of their rockets together to get more payload at a lower cost/kg.
I know at the moment there is some controversy with the spacex satellites blocking astronomy viewing and I really hope there is a fix soon.
But I would really like to see the day when governments aren't the only ones who build telescopes like the Hubble or James webb.
That instead amateur enthusiasts crowdfund and build custom telescopes, launched on sub $250k rocket launches which then can allocate hours of control at a time at cost or at least give the telemetry for free. Imagine 25, 50, or 100 telescopes in space all looking out and mapping the night sky at ever increasing rates.
Couple this with advanced ML techniques for anyone to go over the data. I'm sure a golden age for star gazing would just be beginning.
According to [0], we have only discovered a small glass in comparison to a sea on earth.
This is one thing that "governments" are really, really good at. NASA routinely launches things into space designed to last a few weeks that end up lasting for a decade or more because they are so amazingly overengineered. They don't do it for profit. They do it for science.
Private business is almost always about short term gain (because it kind of has to be). I don't think I want a bunch of crowdfunded garbage just adding more crap to the skies hoping to turn a quick buck. We have enough crowdfunded garbage here on earth. The only crowdfunded thing I'd support at this point is filling a rocket with a bunch of e-scooters and shooting it into the sun.
I know it's super trendy now more than ever to hate on the "government" but space exploration is one that that all governments—the US in particular—seem to do really, really well.
The cost and schedule overruns on JWST are a good argument against the statements you have made. The program is ~$4B over budget, and 3 years behind schedule.
NASA does some things well, and is absolutely terrible at others.
We need to stop pretending that these missed estimates are a catastrophe. They're inventing new things, and there's uncertainty.
We'd be a lot better served, as a nation and a society, if we accepted these realities in the same way that our best businesses do. Instead, we're stuck with a Day 2 mentality, where the risks associated with grand endeavors are unacceptable because a bunch of whiners will complain.
The same assholes who whinge about the JWST being $4b over budget will happily cheer for hundreds of billions to be spent on wars or whatever. They're not arguing honestly, and we need to learn to ignore them.
Whle that is true, to some extend this can be pushed into the absurd and people still make excuses for it.
The JWST yes is new and great and better and technically difficult. But a serious discussion must be had about how NASA spends its money. Many of the things they do are not that innovative and the big companies basically have no accountability and essentially know that delays to JWST will keep them in business. That money could simply have been spent a better way.
Now with the JWST at least you are pushing the possible and I agree you have to be willing to keep pushing those things beyond the initial budget.
However other things, like SLS, Orion and a number of other programs are just charity for big companies. They do not push the possible in terms of technology, but rather are mostly old technologies that they can incrementally work on.
So overall I do agree you have to go over budget and accept that as a reality. However you need to be careful and not just give a free pass not unlimited spending, when that money could be used to improve a dynamic space infrastructure and industry rather then having 50% of your budget in the 3 huge programs that have little accountability.
> We need to stop pretending that these missed estimates are a catastrophe. They're inventing new things, and there's uncertainty.
Uncertainty is certain! We also need to accept the fact that sometimes we go down paths, make discoveries, and need to reverse course, or hold people accountable so the wrong people don't pay for the mistakes of others. None of that is happening with JWST, while Northrop gets to pull in billions. That's in addition to ~$30B/year Northrop is pulling in building weapons.
> The same assholes who whinge about the JWST being $4b over budget will happily cheer for hundreds of billions to be spent on wars or whatever.
That's just not true, and the criticism of the F35 program is a fine example.
Beyond that, Webb going over budget is stifling progress on dozens of other pursuits that could probably use the funds more constructively.
> We also need to accept the fact that sometimes we go down paths, make discoveries, and need to reverse course,
All of which are made harder by people who share your preference for exceedingly inefficient but low-error processes.
> or hold people accountable so the wrong people don't pay for the mistakes of others.
This part of your sentence isn't compatible with the first part of your sentence. This is at the core of the problem. The prevalence of this attitude leads to a culture of ass-covering rather than ambition and risk-taking. That ass-covering creates gross inefficiencies, leading to every step costing 10x too much, and taking 5x too long.
The cost overruns are an example for my argument, not against it. They make economically non-viable decisions. Instead of, you know scrapping the project or cutting corners and launching garbage like 99% of all crowdfunding disasters.
Imagine a world where e.g. a moderately well-funded university science department can launch instruments into space. It sounds absolutely fucking amazing. Near-Earth space is going to fill up regardless, and I'd like to live in a world where big corporations and governments aren't the only entities that can afford to put stuff up there.
Meanwhile, our space exploration program basically exists as an excuse to rob the American taxpayer to fund massive, obsolete rockets and get politicians re-elected. That's not to say that the instruments themselves aren't examples of the finest technology ever created by the human species, but their way of doing business needs an overhaul. They need some competition, and SpaceX and other new space companies are bringing it.
> Not sure what world you live in. I went to a state school where a number of people worked on instruments for Cassini.
Good for you. I went to a small private school where such things were a pipedream, and I expect in poorer countries than the USA the outlook is even bleaker for universities sending hardware to space.
> Not sure what politicians get elected over NASA projects in the last 40 years. Maybe for cutting their budget.
Are you seriously claiming that space pork doesn't exist?
I mean, e.g. Richard Shelby hasn't come out and said "I use my political clout to shackle science and exploration missions to the SLS because it is an economic boon to my constituency at the general expense of the American taxpayer", but if you have eyes to read between the lines it's not a difficult leap to make.
> Good for you. I went to a small private school where such things were a pipedream, and I expect in poorer countries than the USA the outlook is even bleaker for universities sending hardware to space.
Sounds like we should probably invest more in improving the public school system.
It's all published and anyone can make their own too. Using off the shelf products.
Having a colossal budget to blow isn't always the answer to everything in fact it's sometimes more of a hindrance which is clear to anyone ever involved with government procurement and how it works.
Slightly OT (payload rather than instrumentation), but I was able to work on a CubeSat [0] project as an undergraduate at a small state school, which was an absolutely amazing experience.
I later went to ASU where I worked for the School of Earth and Space Exploration (SESE) which is a world-class department for students interested in aerospace.
Awesome aerospace R&D is certainly not solely the realm of Ivy League private schools.
> Slightly OT (payload rather than instrumentation), but I was able to work on a CubeSat [0] project as an undergraduate at a small state school, which was an absolutely amazing experience.
This is a great example of how downward-trending costs of putting things in space have already opened doors. There are certainly more dimensions to that trend than SpaceX selling cheap launches.
When I went to university, CubeSats were barely a thing, unfortunately.
Also, the idea of filling up space with little chunks of non-government science and engineering seems to go against the stated position of the guy I've been replying to.
> NASA routinely launches things into space designed to last a few weeks that end up lasting for a decade or more because they are so amazingly overengineered.
i worked on some of those. they're not overengineered, they're underpromised.
and no, i can't provide a source for that because the whole point is to look good to the public. there's not a line in the proposals about how long things are _actually_ supposed to last if you want to ever get another contract.
if the delivery estimates were good, we'd see a nice uniform distribution about expected lifetime. instead we see everything lasting so much longer than "expected". if we're attributing it to the engineers, then that's bad engineering. but the discrepancy isn't the fault of the engineers.
Government routinely plans projects on horizons spread over decades. See for example, the MTA, the Big Dig, LA's Metro system, pretty much everything handled by NASA, the Army Corps of Engineers, the NPS, the Dept of Transportation, DARPA, etc.
Private business has trouble seeing beyond this quarter's financials... especially when said business is publicly traded.
Meanwhile, forestry companies routinely plant trees that won't be harvested for 50 years
Depends very heavily on the type of tree. Red Oak is on a 50-year timeline, but Douglas fir is usually on a 5-10 year timeline (depending on whether it's grown for Christmas trees or for lumber), most big box store lumber is on the 10-20 year timeline, and bamboo is frequently harvested the same year it's planted (but is also technically not a tree...). This is a matter of necessity, not far-term vision. If they could get away with not thinking long-term they would, but the modern lumber industry has learned from the excesses of the colonial and pre-Industrial lumber industry.
> I see major public corporations staying competitive for decade after decade.
Not sure what "competitive" means in this context, but there is no shortage of examples of large companies which have been run into the ground for the sake of short term payouts for executives and insider stakeholders: Lehman Brothers, AIG, PG&E, Boeing, likely IBM, any number of the drained husks left in the wake of private equity like Toys R Us and Payless, etc.
Corporations can be run well or badly, and governments can be run well or badly. It's just a question of the competence and moral character (or lack thereof) of decision-makers.
By competitive I just mean that they keep performing well decade after decade. Many Fortune 500 companies have been on that list for decades.
> Lehman Brothers, AIG, PG&E, Boeing, likely IBM, any number of the drained husks left in the wake of private equity like Toys R Us and Payless, etc.
I doubt all of those were victims of shortsightedness. Sometimes, it's time for institutions to die and leave room for new things.
But of course you're right that this happens. I wasn't claiming that all private companies are run perfectly with epic time horizons and no executive ego involved etc. I was just arguing against the idea that they never think beyond the next quarterly result report.
> Corporations can be run well or badly, and governments can be run well or badly.
Sure!
> It's just a question of the competence and moral character (or lack thereof) of decision-makers.
I'd focus a lot more on what incentives the decision-makers are under. And I claim the politician who will be fired in 2 years unless he makes himself look awesome on Election Day has more short term focused incentives that a company CEO.
> And I claim the politician who will be fired in 2 years unless he makes himself look awesome on Election Day has more short term focused incentives that a company CEO.
Here's where the disagreement starts. We have insufficiently different facts on the table, but those unspoken are on the different sides. So you decide that governments are under more short-term pressure to demonstrate results, while I think modern corporations have shorter periods when shareholders can allow CEOs not to bring them tangible results. And for corporations existing for decades I have examples of governments existing at least as long.
If governments are so good at aerospace then why can a man with no training and some funding come along and cut the launch price per kg by 80% within a decade or so.
Governments are notoriously bad at procurement, especially in this sector.
Governments are very much about short term gain too, just with money that's not their own.
A man with a ridiculous amount of money and a cult following hired a bunch of very smart people, many who used to work for the government, to work for him to build rockets for other people so he could make more money.
NASAs goal was never to build rockets for cheap. It was to do great science.
What a shame that the thousands of people who have been elected in that time by the public and with a budget a few magnitudes larger couldn't manage somehow it. Either they are wildly incompetent or the one person with far less money is highly competent. Maybe the truth is somewhere in the middle?
Guess it was too hard, political considerations and such, certainly some aerospace CEO's got rich regardless in the meantime, so good for them yes?
I'm not sure what is flamewar about that comment Dan but will endeavour to be more generalist I guess? Respect the tough job you have and will keep it more impersonal.
US aerospace funding by the government is clearly broken, this is known the world over. SpaceX came along and cut costs by half within a decade, that's surely common knowledge by this point?
> US aerospace funding by the government is clearly broken, this is known the world over.
I generally agree with you here - but we'll need to separate "privatizable" aerospace projects from others.
Rocket design is quite old, being a prerequisite to all else. No wonder a lot of experience was gained and - by now - private enterprises can optimize this, so governments should step aside.
At the same time there are projects which could produce commercial benefits after much longer time spans. Automatic interplanetary stations are in that range. So are space telescopes.
That explains how, simultaneously, SpaceX can outwit NASA in rocket design - yet doesn't yet venture into space telescopes business, nothing serious there.
Designing and fabricating optics comparable to Hubble's is not an amateur job -- it requires engineering meter-sized objects to micrometer tolerances, with similar requirements for alignment. (This was initially botched in Hubble itself, with a 2.2-micron fabrication error in the 2.4-meter diameter primary mirror seriously compromising the instrument, until some of the other optical elements were swapped out with replacements designed to cancel out the error.)
To give some sense of the difficulty in machining to that precision: the difference in a 4" block of steel at 68 degrees vs 74 degrees F is about 5 microns. Everything gets MUCH MUCH MUCH harder as you get bigger if you want to maintain precision. Truly an amazing feat of engineering.
How is the thermal expansion coefficient of steel relevant? Wouldn't you use quartz for the mirror, which has an expansion coefficient more than two orders of magnitude smaller?[1] The James Webb telescope has a 6.6m wide primary mirror, but it's actually composed of 18 1.3m hexagonal segments.[2] (Unfortunately, I can't find any sources for the material used.)
The Hubble telescope was launched in 1990. It was, presumably, at the bleeding edge of modern engineering. 30 years later it shouldn't be unthinkable that commercial engineering could achieve something comparable at a fraction of the cost, not to mention all the improved methods for compensating for defects and utilizing smaller, more easily manufactured components. Similar advancements are what have made cheap launches possible.
Yes, the engineering required for these things is still amazing. But that doesn't imply it's still as expensive. Plus, there's more private wealth. Maybe crowd sourcing isn't practical, but I'd think universities could easily achieve this if the motivation was there. Nobody thought launch costs could be reduced as much as SpaceX has achieved. All it took was a highly motivated person. Musk didn't invent any new technology; like many industrialists he simply recognized the technology was already there or at least on the cusp, and assembled the assets to make it happen.
Optics technology is not advancing that fast. It had a rapid growth phase in the 17th and 18th centuries, and then a lot of the techniques remained almost unchanged until the mid-20th century, when the laser improved a lot of things. But consider that the big spectacular innovation of the last few years is Rayform, which patented a gradient-descent algorithm for making a makkyo mirror, as people have been doing for thousands of years.
There are some advances in, for example, using glass-ceramics instead of glasses, which give better strength, better rigidity, and enormously better fatigue tolerance. I don't think anybody makes multi-meter mirrors out of fused quartz, even though it would be a near-ideal material from a TCE perspective.
It's very difficult, but it's quite common for amateur astronomers to grind mirrors to a precision of 0.1 microns or better, using century-old techniques. (Typically the mirrors are smaller, but that's a matter of the available budget for materials and man-hours, not the metrological precision.) I think it's reasonable to assert that if a company doesn't have such amateurs on staff, it will not be able to fabricate optics to such demanding precisions. There are not currently any assembly lines for such things.
The century-old techniques are a little better now that you can use a laser instead of a candle, and there are improved techniques you can use, but amateur telescope fabrication techniques are totally capable of hitting λ/8 precision.
The accuracy isn't in the process of grinding; it's in the process of measurement. All the grinding process needs to do is to remove only a small amount of material, which is itself a nontrivial problem; a single large grain of grit can ruin weeks or months of work, so amateur astronomers may get very angry at you for things that seem unreasonably minor, like opening a door without washing your hands. But that's not a problem that scales superlinearly with mirror size.
Humble brag on my alma matter which has one of the worlds largest mirror labs underneath the football stadium. Cool 'Tom Scott' video of the process involved in the glass processing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BP9HNVuGb-g
I am similarly excited and hopeful, but you are somewhat misrepresenting how amazing current telescopes are. ML and other tricks are not enough to turn a bunch of cheap telescopes into a Hubble.
Newer satellites usually have a fuel budget to de-orbit or at least go into a parking orbit.
That, plus there's work on de-orbiting passive objects from earth or from cleaning satellites.
I'm with GP that this has huge potential, even if it's not in the hubble class.
Right now, it's not a big deal if 1% of satellites die before they can deorbit or go to a graveyard orbit. When there's thousands of satellites going up every year I think it starts to become a potential issue.
LEO has enough atmospheric drag to take care of most of it. At higher orbits it might be a problem, but humans mostly want satellites that help earth activities, which usually means LEO is preferable. This is actively monitored and worked on.
Not being able to leave the planet is not really ever going to be an issue.
Space debris can make specific orbits unusable, but you can pass through those orbits no worries.
You can think of it like the asteroid belt.
If you are flying out past the asteroid belt you don't really need to worry about it, as the objects are spread out so much your chance of intercepting one is very small.
If you want to have an orbit within the asteroid belt you will definitely need active course correction and obstacle avoidance.
Of course, there is a point in which if there were truly stupid amounts of debris in a specific orbit then you might have difficulty avoiding it, but that seems incredibly unlikely - if only that we would stop throwing debris into that orbit way before we got to that point.
> One implication is that the distribution of debris in orbit could render space activities and the use of satellites in specific orbital ranges difficult for many generations.
[Edit]
And farther down under 'Implications':
> the resulting debris cascade could make prospects for long-term viability of satellites in particular low Earth orbits extremely low. However, even a catastrophic Kessler scenario at LEO would pose minimal risk for launches continuing past LEO, or satellites travelling at medium Earth orbit (MEO) or geosynchronous orbit (GEO). The catastrophic scenarios predict an increase in the number of collisions per year, as opposed to a physically impassable barrier to space exploration that occurs in higher orbits.
Yeah, I'll second what others have said that designing (good) telescopes is not a quick/easy thing. Also, any telescope that is easy to slap together is probably so many orders of magnitudes worse that existing ones that you don't get any usable data from it.
I'll throw a couple examples out for you:
DESI[1] has 5000 individually movable fiber optic cables. It's also sitting on a 4m mirror. It is a massive engineering project, but also would make anything with similar goals that a handful of people could hack together for a few million dollars obsolete. It can get 5000 spectra every 15 mins and a small, slit based telescope can maybe do a handful per night. Large scale projects like "mapping the night sky" are going to be dominated by massive projects. See also GAIA [6]
Space based makes things way harder. Let's take JWST[2] as an example. Someone else has mentioned the tolerances on the mirror. You also need to keep everything cold (7 kelvin!). You need to be able to control this, keep it pointed in the right direction with stunning accuracy, etc, etc. And all this needs to work in space, after being shaken around through a rocket launch.
You also need a really compelling reason to go to space for a telescope. Those reasons include, observing things that you can't see from the ground (X-rays for example). You need really good seeing (no atmosphere). You need really low noise observations. I'd be surprised if those were what a small operation needed. Especially when it makes all the other things (control, servicing, etc) so much harder.
In fact, there are gaps where pretty simple ground based hardware can do good scientific work. Though, it is usually for pretty specific goals. [3] is a bunch of DSLRs that is one of the best instruments for finding really diffuse galaxies which are really interesting systems at the moment.
On the ML techniques, those are definitely being used in astronomy. One recent example [4] but go to ADS and look for things with ML in the title and you'll get a lot.
I don't believe its a big problem to either professional or amateur astronomy, but rather a publicity controversy acting on fears that night skies will be visibly tainted. The satellites are not visible to naked eyes, 240 have already been launched and no number of them can degrade dark skies as 'scare articles' suggest. Amateur astronomers may find they will appear rather too commonly in views and they may leave bothersome trails on non-digitally corrected exposures, but a very tiny percentage of people are in any position to be impacted by that (purely aesthetically).
Most of our skies both audibly and visibly feature large aircraft and contrail clouds - invisible satellites and the aesthetics of a few astronomers are of zero concern to most people. The frank reality is astronomers don't actually have any right to telescopically 'clear skies' - not even the masses have audibly and optically clear skies.
It is so so hard to give people a real grokking sense of scales of things. It's so easy to look at a satellite map and think, "wow look at that pollution!"
Until we get better at understanding scale, it'll always be so easy to exploit human fear.
What if SpaceX attached a small outward (away from earth)
facing camera to each satellite? Could he not then create the largest array of orbiting “telescopes” for crowdsourced astronomy? They already have power and comms?
You're still going to have to fill out a bunch of FAA paperwork about your ability to provide control over your box full of urns and ensure it re-enters in a predictable fashion and timeline.
> The Voyager service is a true mission of exploration, sending the Celestis spacecraft carrying cremated remains or DNA on a permanent celestial journey, well beyond the Moon.
I really want SpaceX to get into the end of life care market.
I would much rather get on a one way rocket with big windows (that runs out of air after a few hours probably) than go to Hospice and die slowly over a few months or a year.
A rocket launch is a very violent thing to experience. If you're months away from being dead, there's a good chance the G forces during launch would be too much for your body to deal with.
There's a lot of vibration, but the G forces are not that high, and they are particularly low during launch. The highest G force is right before the main engines cut off, once the rocket is already in space, at which point you presumably don't care anymore...
For falcon 9 you don't even reach 2G until more than 60 seconds into the flight when the engines throttle back up after passing through max Q.
Not without the ground pushing back against them, they wouldn't. Turn off the engines and the passengers feel weightless (because both vehicle and pax are accelerating earthward at 1G); therefore turn them back on @3.5G and they'll feel 3.5G, no?
That acceleration graph starts at 1G and goes up to 4.5 Freefall is 0G. The G force we feel is the difference between gravitational acceleration and our motion towards the center of gravity, so most of our lives we experience 1G. The complication is that gravitational acceleration doesn't feel like acceleration so remaining stationary in gravity does.
Old people are fragile, but a rocket launch is <3G [0], they could choose a gentle launch profile, and it's a nice constant force pushing you back into a nice padded seat.
What damage is it actually going to do in the very short term (which is all we care about in this scenario).
I think that could be a major funding source for a Martian or Lunar colony. I could see people opting to live in low gravity if the accommodations are decent and the alternative is spending the rest of their life in a wheelchair.
Tangential, but I've wondered about the opportunity for a company like Fedex to send freight on rockets between Fedex's major hubs, like Memphis to Guangzhou, so that you could get literal 'next day' service to the other side of the globe. Obviously very expensive, but also, at just $2,200/lb, there might be plenty of things that would be viable, like rushing an organ transplant or delivering an iPhone prototype, cutting out the 14-16 hour flight from Memphis to Guangzhou. Surely there are some scenarios where it starts to make sense, even at $10,000/lb
There’s usually a fixed overhead cost to offering such a service, especially across large orgs. Think about training customer support staff to know about it, developing procedures on how to handle it, etc.
So if it’s used 2 or 3 time’s a year, you might be looking at $2,200/lb plus $1 million divided by 2 or 3.
I don't think currently organ transplants happen between countries. Even in the US the transplant centers are on a regional basis and any shift in regions to even things out becomes highly contentious.
If you launch a parcel from Japan in the morning of Wednesday on a rocket (a suborbital shipment), you may still deliver the package to US customer - say, Hawaii, or even San Francisco - before the end of the business day of Tuesday. The motto is "when the shipment is really needed to arrive yesterday".
Now, this is direct path to Kessler Syndrome. $1M is in a range I can imagine many people and companies will want to drop something just for bragging rights and it is very likely to go down in price in future.
I think it should be recognized that safe space around Earth is a limited resource as every item added increases the chance of everything being effectively wiped in a short time.
156 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 212 ms ] threadGood on Spacex
SLS is likely to have an even greater level of video documentation since technology will have progressed another decade and it will be such a high profile event (versus the regular Shuttle launches). I suspect many of these views will be live, too.
I suspect it's going to start affecting the kind of things that some people will want to be working on. Hard to get excited about many of the (ad) tech companies after seeing 2 rockets simultaneously return back to Earth...
https://www.spacex.com/smallsat
Haven't really been keeping up with the company internals too much to comment, but Montana Skeptic is posting again and is probably a good place to look if you want to catch up. I did see he mentioned recently that Q1 will be a disaster but did not dig into his reasoning.
And I agree with @paxys, I'd love to get those credit card points too! :)
It helps the cash balance, sure.
Almost...the 2nd stage is one use only. I saw a post on Reddit that estimated that each 2nd stage costs SpaceX about $10M...which is peanuts.
I know one way or another that SpaceX's internal launch costs are a lot lower than the others. Good stuff.
You'll also have to fit yourself (and your spacecraft) into a 24"x24"x24" space so I suggest consulting with some contortionists and losing some weight. Do you really need legs?
In reality, the cheaper access to space opens up so many more opportunities for new customers. When it is affordable for a college to send up some cubesats for research, they're going to do it.
I suppose if SpaceX had an enormous manifest of small sats they could bin them into similar orbits, but that would really depend on just how successful they are.
It’s totally like riding the bus: you wouldn’t typically get off at just any stop and call it good.
Here’s a good YouTube on different types of orbits. Not sure if it covers everything but certainly entertaining:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PZAkiXNJIqc
The biggest claimed advantage is that customers get to pick launch date and exact orbit.
RocketLab will let you go to whichever orbit you choose.
Also, RocketLab is pursuing reusability as well, so that may allow RocketLab to compete more directly on cost. Also, RocketLab can launch smaller payloads (in bundles with other customers) for less than the $1 million minimum SpaceX has.
Still, I think SpaceX has a sizable advantage for a lot of launches.
The market size is growing, but not as fast as some people hopped.
I hope it becomes possible to connect any satellite directly to Starlink, so that it's easy to control / connect to them over the Internet.
But I would really like to see the day when governments aren't the only ones who build telescopes like the Hubble or James webb.
That instead amateur enthusiasts crowdfund and build custom telescopes, launched on sub $250k rocket launches which then can allocate hours of control at a time at cost or at least give the telemetry for free. Imagine 25, 50, or 100 telescopes in space all looking out and mapping the night sky at ever increasing rates.
Couple this with advanced ML techniques for anyone to go over the data. I'm sure a golden age for star gazing would just be beginning.
According to [0], we have only discovered a small glass in comparison to a sea on earth.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwtC_4t2g5M
p.s If you haven't see The Age of A.I. on youtube, it's an amazing documentary consisting of 8 episodes.
This is one thing that "governments" are really, really good at. NASA routinely launches things into space designed to last a few weeks that end up lasting for a decade or more because they are so amazingly overengineered. They don't do it for profit. They do it for science.
Private business is almost always about short term gain (because it kind of has to be). I don't think I want a bunch of crowdfunded garbage just adding more crap to the skies hoping to turn a quick buck. We have enough crowdfunded garbage here on earth. The only crowdfunded thing I'd support at this point is filling a rocket with a bunch of e-scooters and shooting it into the sun.
I know it's super trendy now more than ever to hate on the "government" but space exploration is one that that all governments—the US in particular—seem to do really, really well.
NASA does some things well, and is absolutely terrible at others.
We'd be a lot better served, as a nation and a society, if we accepted these realities in the same way that our best businesses do. Instead, we're stuck with a Day 2 mentality, where the risks associated with grand endeavors are unacceptable because a bunch of whiners will complain.
The same assholes who whinge about the JWST being $4b over budget will happily cheer for hundreds of billions to be spent on wars or whatever. They're not arguing honestly, and we need to learn to ignore them.
The JWST yes is new and great and better and technically difficult. But a serious discussion must be had about how NASA spends its money. Many of the things they do are not that innovative and the big companies basically have no accountability and essentially know that delays to JWST will keep them in business. That money could simply have been spent a better way.
Now with the JWST at least you are pushing the possible and I agree you have to be willing to keep pushing those things beyond the initial budget.
However other things, like SLS, Orion and a number of other programs are just charity for big companies. They do not push the possible in terms of technology, but rather are mostly old technologies that they can incrementally work on.
So overall I do agree you have to go over budget and accept that as a reality. However you need to be careful and not just give a free pass not unlimited spending, when that money could be used to improve a dynamic space infrastructure and industry rather then having 50% of your budget in the 3 huge programs that have little accountability.
Uncertainty is certain! We also need to accept the fact that sometimes we go down paths, make discoveries, and need to reverse course, or hold people accountable so the wrong people don't pay for the mistakes of others. None of that is happening with JWST, while Northrop gets to pull in billions. That's in addition to ~$30B/year Northrop is pulling in building weapons.
> The same assholes who whinge about the JWST being $4b over budget will happily cheer for hundreds of billions to be spent on wars or whatever.
That's just not true, and the criticism of the F35 program is a fine example.
Beyond that, Webb going over budget is stifling progress on dozens of other pursuits that could probably use the funds more constructively.
All of which are made harder by people who share your preference for exceedingly inefficient but low-error processes.
> or hold people accountable so the wrong people don't pay for the mistakes of others.
This part of your sentence isn't compatible with the first part of your sentence. This is at the core of the problem. The prevalence of this attitude leads to a culture of ass-covering rather than ambition and risk-taking. That ass-covering creates gross inefficiencies, leading to every step costing 10x too much, and taking 5x too long.
Meanwhile, our space exploration program basically exists as an excuse to rob the American taxpayer to fund massive, obsolete rockets and get politicians re-elected. That's not to say that the instruments themselves aren't examples of the finest technology ever created by the human species, but their way of doing business needs an overhaul. They need some competition, and SpaceX and other new space companies are bringing it.
Not sure what politicians get elected over NASA projects in the last 40 years. Maybe for cutting their budget.
Good for you. I went to a small private school where such things were a pipedream, and I expect in poorer countries than the USA the outlook is even bleaker for universities sending hardware to space.
> Not sure what politicians get elected over NASA projects in the last 40 years. Maybe for cutting their budget.
Are you seriously claiming that space pork doesn't exist?
I mean, e.g. Richard Shelby hasn't come out and said "I use my political clout to shackle science and exploration missions to the SLS because it is an economic boon to my constituency at the general expense of the American taxpayer", but if you have eyes to read between the lines it's not a difficult leap to make.
Sounds like we should probably invest more in improving the public school system.
Sometimes, it's best just to walk away.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonfly_Telephoto_Array
https://www.dragonflytelescope.org/
It's all published and anyone can make their own too. Using off the shelf products.
Having a colossal budget to blow isn't always the answer to everything in fact it's sometimes more of a hindrance which is clear to anyone ever involved with government procurement and how it works.
I later went to ASU where I worked for the School of Earth and Space Exploration (SESE) which is a world-class department for students interested in aerospace.
Awesome aerospace R&D is certainly not solely the realm of Ivy League private schools.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CubeSat
This is a great example of how downward-trending costs of putting things in space have already opened doors. There are certainly more dimensions to that trend than SpaceX selling cheap launches.
When I went to university, CubeSats were barely a thing, unfortunately.
Also, the idea of filling up space with little chunks of non-government science and engineering seems to go against the stated position of the guy I've been replying to.
i worked on some of those. they're not overengineered, they're underpromised.
and no, i can't provide a source for that because the whole point is to look good to the public. there's not a line in the proposals about how long things are _actually_ supposed to last if you want to ever get another contract.
if the delivery estimates were good, we'd see a nice uniform distribution about expected lifetime. instead we see everything lasting so much longer than "expected". if we're attributing it to the engineers, then that's bad engineering. but the discrepancy isn't the fault of the engineers.
Typically, governments are run to make things look good by the next election. That's a planning horizon of 2 years on average, assuming 4 year terms.
Meanwhile, forestry companies routinely plant trees that won't be harvested for 50 years.
Private business has trouble seeing beyond this quarter's financials... especially when said business is publicly traded.
Meanwhile, forestry companies routinely plant trees that won't be harvested for 50 years
Depends very heavily on the type of tree. Red Oak is on a 50-year timeline, but Douglas fir is usually on a 5-10 year timeline (depending on whether it's grown for Christmas trees or for lumber), most big box store lumber is on the 10-20 year timeline, and bamboo is frequently harvested the same year it's planted (but is also technically not a tree...). This is a matter of necessity, not far-term vision. If they could get away with not thinking long-term they would, but the modern lumber industry has learned from the excesses of the colonial and pre-Industrial lumber industry.
I know that's the snarky cliche, but where is the empirical evidence?
I see major public corporations staying competitive for decade after decade.
It's hard to understand how organizations that bet everything on the 2020 Q1 results while ignoring 2020 Q2 accomplish that.
> This is a matter of necessity, not far-term vision.
I'd say the far-term vision is a necessity to flourish far-term. therefore surviving companies have it.
Not sure what "competitive" means in this context, but there is no shortage of examples of large companies which have been run into the ground for the sake of short term payouts for executives and insider stakeholders: Lehman Brothers, AIG, PG&E, Boeing, likely IBM, any number of the drained husks left in the wake of private equity like Toys R Us and Payless, etc.
Corporations can be run well or badly, and governments can be run well or badly. It's just a question of the competence and moral character (or lack thereof) of decision-makers.
> Lehman Brothers, AIG, PG&E, Boeing, likely IBM, any number of the drained husks left in the wake of private equity like Toys R Us and Payless, etc.
I doubt all of those were victims of shortsightedness. Sometimes, it's time for institutions to die and leave room for new things.
But of course you're right that this happens. I wasn't claiming that all private companies are run perfectly with epic time horizons and no executive ego involved etc. I was just arguing against the idea that they never think beyond the next quarterly result report.
> Corporations can be run well or badly, and governments can be run well or badly.
Sure!
> It's just a question of the competence and moral character (or lack thereof) of decision-makers.
I'd focus a lot more on what incentives the decision-makers are under. And I claim the politician who will be fired in 2 years unless he makes himself look awesome on Election Day has more short term focused incentives that a company CEO.
Here's where the disagreement starts. We have insufficiently different facts on the table, but those unspoken are on the different sides. So you decide that governments are under more short-term pressure to demonstrate results, while I think modern corporations have shorter periods when shareholders can allow CEOs not to bring them tangible results. And for corporations existing for decades I have examples of governments existing at least as long.
I guess we have to keep disagreeing.
Governments are notoriously bad at procurement, especially in this sector.
Governments are very much about short term gain too, just with money that's not their own.
A man with a ridiculous amount of money and a cult following hired a bunch of very smart people, many who used to work for the government, to work for him to build rockets for other people so he could make more money.
NASAs goal was never to build rockets for cheap. It was to do great science.
Guess it was too hard, political considerations and such, certainly some aerospace CEO's got rich regardless in the meantime, so good for them yes?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
US aerospace funding by the government is clearly broken, this is known the world over. SpaceX came along and cut costs by half within a decade, that's surely common knowledge by this point?
https://theconversation.com/how-spacex-lowered-costs-and-red...
I generally agree with you here - but we'll need to separate "privatizable" aerospace projects from others.
Rocket design is quite old, being a prerequisite to all else. No wonder a lot of experience was gained and - by now - private enterprises can optimize this, so governments should step aside.
At the same time there are projects which could produce commercial benefits after much longer time spans. Automatic interplanetary stations are in that range. So are space telescopes.
That explains how, simultaneously, SpaceX can outwit NASA in rocket design - yet doesn't yet venture into space telescopes business, nothing serious there.
The Hubble telescope was launched in 1990. It was, presumably, at the bleeding edge of modern engineering. 30 years later it shouldn't be unthinkable that commercial engineering could achieve something comparable at a fraction of the cost, not to mention all the improved methods for compensating for defects and utilizing smaller, more easily manufactured components. Similar advancements are what have made cheap launches possible.
Yes, the engineering required for these things is still amazing. But that doesn't imply it's still as expensive. Plus, there's more private wealth. Maybe crowd sourcing isn't practical, but I'd think universities could easily achieve this if the motivation was there. Nobody thought launch costs could be reduced as much as SpaceX has achieved. All it took was a highly motivated person. Musk didn't invent any new technology; like many industrialists he simply recognized the technology was already there or at least on the cusp, and assembled the assets to make it happen.
[1] http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Tables/thexp.html
[2] https://jwst.nasa.gov/content/forScientists/faqScientists.ht...
There are some advances in, for example, using glass-ceramics instead of glasses, which give better strength, better rigidity, and enormously better fatigue tolerance. I don't think anybody makes multi-meter mirrors out of fused quartz, even though it would be a near-ideal material from a TCE perspective.
The century-old techniques are a little better now that you can use a laser instead of a candle, and there are improved techniques you can use, but amateur telescope fabrication techniques are totally capable of hitting λ/8 precision.
Really large mirrors are segmented anyway.
Indian and Chinese companies don't bother to EOL their satellites by burning them up; they just leave them where they are.
If you haven't seen Wall-E, watch it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome
Space debris can make specific orbits unusable, but you can pass through those orbits no worries.
You can think of it like the asteroid belt.
If you are flying out past the asteroid belt you don't really need to worry about it, as the objects are spread out so much your chance of intercepting one is very small.
If you want to have an orbit within the asteroid belt you will definitely need active course correction and obstacle avoidance.
Of course, there is a point in which if there were truly stupid amounts of debris in a specific orbit then you might have difficulty avoiding it, but that seems incredibly unlikely - if only that we would stop throwing debris into that orbit way before we got to that point.
> One implication is that the distribution of debris in orbit could render space activities and the use of satellites in specific orbital ranges difficult for many generations.
[Edit]
And farther down under 'Implications':
> the resulting debris cascade could make prospects for long-term viability of satellites in particular low Earth orbits extremely low. However, even a catastrophic Kessler scenario at LEO would pose minimal risk for launches continuing past LEO, or satellites travelling at medium Earth orbit (MEO) or geosynchronous orbit (GEO). The catastrophic scenarios predict an increase in the number of collisions per year, as opposed to a physically impassable barrier to space exploration that occurs in higher orbits.
I'll throw a couple examples out for you:
DESI[1] has 5000 individually movable fiber optic cables. It's also sitting on a 4m mirror. It is a massive engineering project, but also would make anything with similar goals that a handful of people could hack together for a few million dollars obsolete. It can get 5000 spectra every 15 mins and a small, slit based telescope can maybe do a handful per night. Large scale projects like "mapping the night sky" are going to be dominated by massive projects. See also GAIA [6]
Space based makes things way harder. Let's take JWST[2] as an example. Someone else has mentioned the tolerances on the mirror. You also need to keep everything cold (7 kelvin!). You need to be able to control this, keep it pointed in the right direction with stunning accuracy, etc, etc. And all this needs to work in space, after being shaken around through a rocket launch. You also need a really compelling reason to go to space for a telescope. Those reasons include, observing things that you can't see from the ground (X-rays for example). You need really good seeing (no atmosphere). You need really low noise observations. I'd be surprised if those were what a small operation needed. Especially when it makes all the other things (control, servicing, etc) so much harder.
In fact, there are gaps where pretty simple ground based hardware can do good scientific work. Though, it is usually for pretty specific goals. [3] is a bunch of DSLRs that is one of the best instruments for finding really diffuse galaxies which are really interesting systems at the moment.
On the ML techniques, those are definitely being used in astronomy. One recent example [4] but go to ADS and look for things with ML in the title and you'll get a lot.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1LVMox0KNc [2] https://jwst.nasa.gov/content/observatory/ote/mirrors/index.... [3] https://www.dragonflytelescope.org/ [4] https://www.kaggle.com/c/PLAsTiCC-2018 [5] https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/search/filter_database_fq_data... [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_(spacecraft)
Most of our skies both audibly and visibly feature large aircraft and contrail clouds - invisible satellites and the aesthetics of a few astronomers are of zero concern to most people. The frank reality is astronomers don't actually have any right to telescopically 'clear skies' - not even the masses have audibly and optically clear skies.
Until we get better at understanding scale, it'll always be so easy to exploit human fear.
Seems like a business opportunity for a funeral home.
Space burial was also discussed on xkcd, though not launching ashes but whole corpse: https://what-if.xkcd.com/134/
The biggest size for each smallsat is 24" x 24" x 24", but they also offer a smaller 15" size.
https://www.celestis.com/
> The Voyager service is a true mission of exploration, sending the Celestis spacecraft carrying cremated remains or DNA on a permanent celestial journey, well beyond the Moon.
> Starting at $12,500
(This is the most expensive option)
I would much rather get on a one way rocket with big windows (that runs out of air after a few hours probably) than go to Hospice and die slowly over a few months or a year.
For falcon 9 you don't even reach 2G until more than 60 seconds into the flight when the engines throttle back up after passing through max Q.
Acceleration graph: https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-23ba4a3fe7f535430bed80... (from https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-acceleration-of-a-Falcon-9)
Old people are fragile, but a rocket launch is <3G [0], they could choose a gentle launch profile, and it's a nice constant force pushing you back into a nice padded seat.
What damage is it actually going to do in the very short term (which is all we care about in this scenario).
[0] https://i.redd.it/c05xe7b5infx.jpg
So if it’s used 2 or 3 time’s a year, you might be looking at $2,200/lb plus $1 million divided by 2 or 3.
I don't think currently organ transplants happen between countries. Even in the US the transplant centers are on a regional basis and any shift in regions to even things out becomes highly contentious.
edit: It will be interesting to see the results of the DARPA responsive launch competition though— https://www.darpalaunchchallenge.org/
Hat tip to Michael Wallis, erps.org.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqE-ultsWt0
I think it should be recognized that safe space around Earth is a limited resource as every item added increases the chance of everything being effectively wiped in a short time.