I don't see the bizarre part. Wikipedia says Barron was born in 1927 when we were still figuring out the basics of aviation, and just a few decades later he was making these plans in the midst of the space race. Considering the rate of progress he had witnessed in his time, it's not very surprising that he expected us to aggressively colonize space in his lifetime.
Maybe I have overly romanticized notions of what could have been, but I feel like humanity lost out big time when the space shuttle was chosen over a manned mission to Mars.
Would a manned Mars mission really have been feasible? Is it feasible now? I have no idea, myself.
The shuttle might have been fine if it weren't twisted into the boxcar-like thing the Air Force insisted upon. And if the other parts came along with it: space tug, lunar-orbiting station, etc. Instead we got a starter salad and then were shown the door.
Perhaps it was a lack of money. The U.S. worrying so much about (South)East Asia meant money went to war and things like the DynaSoar X-20 and MOL were nixed.
>If we had done all this, we would be on Mars today, not writing about it as a subject for "the next 50 years." We would have decades of experience operating long-duration space systems in Earth orbit, and similar decades of experience in exploring and learning to utilize the Moon.
Thanks for your link about a NASA administrator saying "the shuttle was a mistake". As someone who was a pre-teen during the Apollo area, this warms my heart.
However, even is Saturn V was an extraordinary engineering feat, to explore space we needed something much less expensive, much less polluting, much more secure.
Perhaps SpaceX fills better this niche, but I hope that we simply become a space species with most jobs and people at least in orbit around Earth or Moon.
RP-1 is much less toxic than Hydrazine, but toxicity is not the same thing than pollution. One is qualitative, the other both qualitative and quantitative.
Burning a huge amount of kerosene is polluting.
For comparison a Boeing 747 (4 engines) consume 2,8 kg per second, while a Saturn V 1 first stage burns 13,600 kg per second, nearly 5000 times the amount of the Boeing 747.
I hope for a breakthrough in rocket engines, but I am quite sure it will not happen. We need something new.
Yes, but the Merlin engine doesn’t burn hydrazine, it burns RP-1 just like the F-1. I fail to see the environmental benefit.
Also, how energy efficient is the production of hydrazine? Non-fossil processes for making fuels tend to be pretty wasteful, take hydrogen from methane compared to hydrogen from electrolysis for instance.
SpaceX’s starship and superheavy are planned to use Methane rather than RP-1. The exhaust is much cleaner. It’s not as clean as just using Hydrogen, but that’s quite difficult to store at cryogenic temperatures, far less dense, and not as suited to long duration missions.
Yes, this is the whole reason they designed Raptor and get methane via the Sabatier reaction [1]. If you want to get back from Mars, you won't find tanks of RP-1 but you can make methane from abumdant CO2 and water (with solar arrays) which is available on Mars
Sabtier doesn't make H2, it makes CH4. You'd need to convert it at about 300degC with a catalyst (so that takes lots of energy). Then the byproduct would be CO, whilst that isn't a bad direct greenhouse gas it interact with hydroxyl radicals in the atmosphere. Hydoxyls ineract with other greenhouse gases to reduce their power, so it would have no net effect, if anything it could be worse. Just combust the CH4 directly, it's got better energy storage capacity anyway.
You would take the resulting CH₄ and split off the hydrogen using pyrolysis and put that in the car. Which is likely how you would get the H₂ to feed the Sabatier reaction in the first place, from CH₄ out of the ground. I don't know what is sillier, this or hydrolysis of water.
I suppose the benefit of removing and adding and removing carbon again would be that at each removal step you end up with a pile of solid carbon that you can put in a landfill. But I'm always wary of schemes to spend energy to sequester carbon, even if it is renewable energy. That's energy you probably could have used to greater effect elsewhere, like charging an electric car or supplanting a coal power plant.
I don't think we would be on Mars. The hard part isn't getting there, it's creating a sustainable semi-independent habitat that will get you there and keep you alive there between resupply runs.
This is not a "Oh, we'll just deal with that when we need to" problem. It's absolutely critical for long-term missions. And there's been shockingly little research done on it.
The ISS is trivial in comparison because you can send up stuff and take stuff down almost instantly with relative ease. Mars is seven months away. So your mission has to be self-sustaining for at least that long. And it's going to need a steady stream of resupply runs - with a seventh month lead time if have an accident or start running out of stuff.
And all of that - for what? Mars is not a pleasant or easy environment. Aside from unpleasant, difficult, and hostile living space it has no obvious resources.
"Because we can" is a good enough reason for an initial exploration, but it's not a sustainable project without a long-term goal.
Until we figure out a way to make lots of money from deep space missions, progress will be slow. The space race was, imo, mostly a race to optimize nuclear warhead delivery systems.
We probably would need to somehow uncover massive deposits of rare "earth" elements or similar to convince people to push for reaching to space seriously again.
Mining some Unobtainium from the asteroid belt seems to be the most plausible thing we can do in deep space that we can't do in LEO or right on the ground.
People who are saying that is not possible and that it does not make sense economically speaking have won. We are now in hands of managers, not dreamers.
It is possible, perhaps even 10 or 20 years ago, But it isn't economically feasible. You could build or refurbish the ISS into something that looked a Japanese capsule hotel 'fairly cheaply', but getting there still costs millions, we are thousands or 10s of thousands of spacecraft away from making them cheap to produce and run.
Hotels on earth aren't exactly money spinners and apart from the zero gravity and looking at the earth the novelty of being in space would probably wear off after a day or two. Projects like Virgin Galactic - for a 'near space' fun ride will probably be more lucrative in the short term. Getting (government funded) astronauts and satellites into orbit is where the money is right now.
Actually rocket fuel although very old fashioned doesn't seem that costly.
Falcon 9 flight to LEO costs $200K in fuel but can lift 22,800Kg. If a person and their seat could be squeezed into 200Kg that's only $2K per person. I think the biggest cost is that the forces and extremes of temperature mean the 'rocket' needs to be engineered and maintained very well as any small failure is likely to be catastrophic - its very hard to abandon ship or divert to the the nearest airport.
And potentially near-zero emissions with hydrogen/liquid oxygen rockets. Of course, methane rockets probably ends up having lower emissions in practice due to hydrogen typically being produced in methods that emit CO2.
Ultimately, even if we massively increased the rate of rockets being launched, the greenhouse gas impact would be pretty minimal compared to cars, electricity, and cement production.
LEO is ~10$ per kg in fuel. Given a similarly reusable vehicle space travel could be relatively cheap.
The economic issues are more about how space flight has been funded than the underlying physics. The space shuttle for example had some terrible tradeoffs relating to which orbits it could achieve and needing to return cargo etc. SpaceX has dramatically lowered the cost to orbit, but they don’t have the funds to explore dramatically different designs.
But what is economy anyway ? Recent events showed us that money was not economy, you can print as much as you want and 'helicopter' it.
It is more about the resources, do we have enough of it to make it possible for regular people to travel to space ? Probably not on earth, so let's build mega factories on the Moon. You might argue it's not possible or feasible for some physic reasons, so let's find a solution. But not money, money does not exist, it's made up.
The purpose of humanity as I see it is not to go smoothly and safely, to be able to go without troubles to a final destination (that does not exist). I say buckle up and let's do it! As Billy said you need to be solution oriented.
Bureaucrats, not engineers. The difference being that bureaucrats are there to pour glue over something to stabilise it, whereas engineers are meant to try new things.
As it mentions, 2001: A Space Odyssey came out about a year later with a Hilton in a space station, so that pretty much portrays the vision at the time.
Yeah there's nothing bizarre about it. Moore's law could as well be applied to space travel, why shouldn't you expect that a field that was new would reduce costs exponentially over the next few decades? Turned out to hit a wall but there were reasons to be optimistic at the time.
And the demand side of that business is still there. Who wouldn't book a hotel in space for a few days if the price came down to an annual salary, then a monthly?
And we have achieved what ? 99 other ways to share naked women’s photos. I hope young people get bored with this stupidity real soon and dream about the bigger space future. Elon is on right path with that one too.
I'd say if you're watching star trek or some other sci-fi show from earlier than the 90s, we may not have achieved FTL or teleportation, but the whole "magic device that contains all knowledge and can communicate with anyone at any time" thing we actually did pretty well on.
I remember reading Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy when I was young and thinking how amazing it’d be to have a such an all knowing device that could look up anything, but didn’t think it was possible, never imagined everyone would have one in their pocket someday.
The original idea of the first step in outer space exploration by Korolev & co was a mission to circumnavigate Venus (before the surface conditions were known) or Mars. The N family or rockets, the concept of which had been studied before R-7 ever flew, was envisioned as a tool to assemble the large modular interplanetary spaceship in LEO.
Moon wasn't terribly popular among Soviet space engineers because orbital construction was seen as necessary tech, and a single launch mission would have accomplished nothing towards it. But the party decided to participate in the moon race so the largest rocket in the family, N-1, which was never optimized for TLI missions, has been selected and repurposed for this task (and never flew since the concept itself turned out to be flawed in several regards unlike R-7).
Hard to say whether this vision was right - too many unknowns, and they would probably have finished in early 80s at best - but the outcome of that idea was the modular space station tech.
I guess it's really impossible to know for sure but imagining an alternative history of the space race is always fun. I really liked how For All Mankind did it.
"Bizarre" seems a bit strong - anyone remember reading Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator by Roald Dahl? I remember reading it as a kid, and the concept of the "Space Hotel USA" seemed a little fantastical, but not out of the realm of possibilities. That was published in 1972.
Moon is the spot for tourists. It's only a day a way! But, the real money maker on the moon is televised sports. Moonball is going to be awesome to watch.
Yeah there are carnival rides that basically do this. If scaled up to maybe 100 meter diameter horizontal ring the coriolis forces shouldn't be too bothersome. The floor would be banked to seem level to the people inside. There would still be some weird second order effects but it seems like it could be livable for days at a time. The room should be as thin as possible if the floor is to be flat in one direction to minimize weirdness. Having the outside of the wheel moving at around highway speed with >45 degree bank angle should give about 1.5 g.
Someone must have built a centrifuge barracks or something during the cold war. Have never heard of such a thing, though.
"In the late 1950s, two scientists, Carl Clark and James Hardy, had a more daring idea. Physics dictated that if a spacecraft could be steadily accelerated at 2 Gs, it could reach the moon or Mars in days or even hours. But could a human being survive the constant acceleration? Clark used the centrifuge to find out.
“He essentially moved into the cab, brought his La-Z-Boy from home, and stayed in there at 2 G for 24 hours,” says Shender. Clark slept, ate, worked, and lived at two Gs for a full day under constant medical surveillance. He suffered nothing more than fatigue. Further marathon rides were planned, but more immediate space missions loomed and the idea was set aside. "
It might work in Dragonball, but IRL they would probably come back with wrecked joints and compressed spines. Not to mention whatever effects you'd get from having blood rushing to your feet and away from your brain.
The only bizarre thing is that after having people on the moon fifty years ago, nobody bothered to go back. The natural progression would have been to keep on launching more and bigger rockets and put more stuff up there. Eventually going to Mars (the moon rockets were actually over-engineered on purpose to eventually allow that). However, that never happened and NASA settled for some cheaper successes in low orbit. The Russians kind of checked out of the whole thing after failing to get there first and after they got bogged down economically due to the cold war. And having more or less won that by the eighties, the US dialed down spending as well.
It's only now that we have some commercial companies making serious attempts to make space travel more cost effective that we are contemplating going there again. A commercial hotel starts making a lot of sense as soon as you have wealthy tourists going up there or highly skilled people traveling there for "work" that have Ph. Ds, rich employers, etc. Classic target audience for hotels. They'll want comfy accommodation, nice food & beverages, etc. Still a great business plan as soon as somebody figures out how to get stuff up there cost effectively. Millionaires are lining up to visit ISS. E.g. Tom Cruise is going there apparently. But ISS is not a hotel of course. It also lacks a lot of things that people might want to pay for. Like toilets you don't have to share with others, privacy, air that isn't foul smelling (a big thing apparently), etc.
> The only bizarre thing is that after having people on the moon fifty years ago, nobody bothered to go back. The natural progression
Natural progression? :)
Contemporaneous with the dream of "we will settle space", was one of "we will settle the continental shelves". The progression? Skylab-like habitats, abandoned, nothing ISS-like, and now only temporary work camps. A tourism of many brief shallow visits, and a few shallow subs and hotels. Military subs. No large commercial subs, a few semi-submersibles. Limited shallow seabed mining. Very limited floating towns. Drift nets and bottom trawling. No bases and cities under the sea. No commercial divers looking around at the seafloor and thinking, "I want to raise my family here someday". Lessons? Find some space resource extraction, for which robots are inadequate, and with better economics than seabed mining. Militarize space. Encourage recreational high-altitude ballooning, parachuting, and suborbital.
"We will settle the Antarctic"? Science bases grew a bit, got prettier. Little commerce, no industry, no extraction, no settlement. Some tourism, visiting ships, and tear-down-each-season hotels. Emphasis on preservation. So a planetary protection "Mars international-park planet: take only photographs, leave only footprints"?
"We will colonize the air"? Societal emphasis on safety cripples innovation? Clear-eyed investors deny funding? (Early railroads and canals often operated profitably... after a bankruptcy or three disposed of the cost of making them.) No floating cities. Few aerostats. Enormous ratio of paper dreams to metal. Lessons... ?
"We will settle the deserts"? Cairo's cities in the sand? Diversely poor, industrial, and gated. China's ghost cities? So focus on incentivizing developers, and then move something there to attract people?
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 160 ms ] threadMaybe I have overly romanticized notions of what could have been, but I feel like humanity lost out big time when the space shuttle was chosen over a manned mission to Mars.
The shuttle might have been fine if it weren't twisted into the boxcar-like thing the Air Force insisted upon. And if the other parts came along with it: space tug, lunar-orbiting station, etc. Instead we got a starter salad and then were shown the door.
Perhaps it was a lack of money. The U.S. worrying so much about (South)East Asia meant money went to war and things like the DynaSoar X-20 and MOL were nixed.
No less than Michael Griffith, *the NASA Administrator*, said in 2007 that the shuttle was a mistake (<https://aviationweek.typepad.com/space/2007/03/human_space_e...>), and that NASA should have instead continuing launching Saturn rockets:
>If we had done all this, we would be on Mars today, not writing about it as a subject for "the next 50 years." We would have decades of experience operating long-duration space systems in Earth orbit, and similar decades of experience in exploring and learning to utilize the Moon.
However, even is Saturn V was an extraordinary engineering feat, to explore space we needed something much less expensive, much less polluting, much more secure.
Perhaps SpaceX fills better this niche, but I hope that we simply become a space species with most jobs and people at least in orbit around Earth or Moon.
It would be better if we have several good reasons to stay permanently in orbit.
Isn't the SpaceX Merlin a fuel-rich RP-1 engine too, just like the Rocketdyne F-1? Or is it another source of pollution that you have in mind?
I hope for a breakthrough in rocket engines, but I am quite sure it will not happen. We need something new.
Also, how energy efficient is the production of hydrazine? Non-fossil processes for making fuels tend to be pretty wasteful, take hydrogen from methane compared to hydrogen from electrolysis for instance.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabatier_reaction
I suppose the benefit of removing and adding and removing carbon again would be that at each removal step you end up with a pile of solid carbon that you can put in a landfill. But I'm always wary of schemes to spend energy to sequester carbon, even if it is renewable energy. That's energy you probably could have used to greater effect elsewhere, like charging an electric car or supplanting a coal power plant.
This is not a "Oh, we'll just deal with that when we need to" problem. It's absolutely critical for long-term missions. And there's been shockingly little research done on it.
The ISS is trivial in comparison because you can send up stuff and take stuff down almost instantly with relative ease. Mars is seven months away. So your mission has to be self-sustaining for at least that long. And it's going to need a steady stream of resupply runs - with a seventh month lead time if have an accident or start running out of stuff.
And all of that - for what? Mars is not a pleasant or easy environment. Aside from unpleasant, difficult, and hostile living space it has no obvious resources.
"Because we can" is a good enough reason for an initial exploration, but it's not a sustainable project without a long-term goal.
I think you mean 'crewed Mars mission'.
Hotels on earth aren't exactly money spinners and apart from the zero gravity and looking at the earth the novelty of being in space would probably wear off after a day or two. Projects like Virgin Galactic - for a 'near space' fun ride will probably be more lucrative in the short term. Getting (government funded) astronauts and satellites into orbit is where the money is right now.
Falcon 9 flight to LEO costs $200K in fuel but can lift 22,800Kg. If a person and their seat could be squeezed into 200Kg that's only $2K per person. I think the biggest cost is that the forces and extremes of temperature mean the 'rocket' needs to be engineered and maintained very well as any small failure is likely to be catastrophic - its very hard to abandon ship or divert to the the nearest airport.
If SpaceX's Starship plans come to fruition, the $/kg to orbit cost will fall dramatically.
Ultimately, even if we massively increased the rate of rockets being launched, the greenhouse gas impact would be pretty minimal compared to cars, electricity, and cement production.
The economic issues are more about how space flight has been funded than the underlying physics. The space shuttle for example had some terrible tradeoffs relating to which orbits it could achieve and needing to return cargo etc. SpaceX has dramatically lowered the cost to orbit, but they don’t have the funds to explore dramatically different designs.
"I could get used to a view like this" - Flynn Ryder
It is more about the resources, do we have enough of it to make it possible for regular people to travel to space ? Probably not on earth, so let's build mega factories on the Moon. You might argue it's not possible or feasible for some physic reasons, so let's find a solution. But not money, money does not exist, it's made up.
The purpose of humanity as I see it is not to go smoothly and safely, to be able to go without troubles to a final destination (that does not exist). I say buckle up and let's do it! As Billy said you need to be solution oriented.
Engineering is innovation and maintenance. Bureaucrats slow good change while pushing to cut corners.
And the demand side of that business is still there. Who wouldn't book a hotel in space for a few days if the price came down to an annual salary, then a monthly?
Gordon Moore only stated his thesis almost two decades after the start of the semiconductor era.
It was an empirical observation based on the history of integrated circuits.
Why would you assume a Moore's law in fields that have never shown anything resembling Moore's law?
I'd say if you're watching star trek or some other sci-fi show from earlier than the 90s, we may not have achieved FTL or teleportation, but the whole "magic device that contains all knowledge and can communicate with anyone at any time" thing we actually did pretty well on.
As long as you can find a sci-hub mirror that hasn’t been taken down.
https://twitter.com/ZachWeiner/status/1402314414515273728?s=...
Moon wasn't terribly popular among Soviet space engineers because orbital construction was seen as necessary tech, and a single launch mission would have accomplished nothing towards it. But the party decided to participate in the moon race so the largest rocket in the family, N-1, which was never optimized for TLI missions, has been selected and repurposed for this task (and never flew since the concept itself turned out to be flawed in several regards unlike R-7).
Hard to say whether this vision was right - too many unknowns, and they would probably have finished in early 80s at best - but the outcome of that idea was the modular space station tech.
“When I say I want the moon, I expect the moon.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOmsorZ1Y1U
Someone must have built a centrifuge barracks or something during the cold war. Have never heard of such a thing, though.
"In the late 1950s, two scientists, Carl Clark and James Hardy, had a more daring idea. Physics dictated that if a spacecraft could be steadily accelerated at 2 Gs, it could reach the moon or Mars in days or even hours. But could a human being survive the constant acceleration? Clark used the centrifuge to find out.
“He essentially moved into the cab, brought his La-Z-Boy from home, and stayed in there at 2 G for 24 hours,” says Shender. Clark slept, ate, worked, and lived at two Gs for a full day under constant medical surveillance. He suffered nothing more than fatigue. Further marathon rides were planned, but more immediate space missions loomed and the idea was set aside. "
https://www.airspacemag.com/history-of-flight/the-g-machine-...
Then, there will be the dirt biking on the moon dunes, which will also be gnarly.
They licensed and further developed NASA's inflatable habitat technology. They actual have a module on the International Space Station right now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bigelow_Expandable_Activity_Mo...
It's only now that we have some commercial companies making serious attempts to make space travel more cost effective that we are contemplating going there again. A commercial hotel starts making a lot of sense as soon as you have wealthy tourists going up there or highly skilled people traveling there for "work" that have Ph. Ds, rich employers, etc. Classic target audience for hotels. They'll want comfy accommodation, nice food & beverages, etc. Still a great business plan as soon as somebody figures out how to get stuff up there cost effectively. Millionaires are lining up to visit ISS. E.g. Tom Cruise is going there apparently. But ISS is not a hotel of course. It also lacks a lot of things that people might want to pay for. Like toilets you don't have to share with others, privacy, air that isn't foul smelling (a big thing apparently), etc.
Natural progression? :)
Contemporaneous with the dream of "we will settle space", was one of "we will settle the continental shelves". The progression? Skylab-like habitats, abandoned, nothing ISS-like, and now only temporary work camps. A tourism of many brief shallow visits, and a few shallow subs and hotels. Military subs. No large commercial subs, a few semi-submersibles. Limited shallow seabed mining. Very limited floating towns. Drift nets and bottom trawling. No bases and cities under the sea. No commercial divers looking around at the seafloor and thinking, "I want to raise my family here someday". Lessons? Find some space resource extraction, for which robots are inadequate, and with better economics than seabed mining. Militarize space. Encourage recreational high-altitude ballooning, parachuting, and suborbital.
"We will settle the Antarctic"? Science bases grew a bit, got prettier. Little commerce, no industry, no extraction, no settlement. Some tourism, visiting ships, and tear-down-each-season hotels. Emphasis on preservation. So a planetary protection "Mars international-park planet: take only photographs, leave only footprints"?
"We will colonize the air"? Societal emphasis on safety cripples innovation? Clear-eyed investors deny funding? (Early railroads and canals often operated profitably... after a bankruptcy or three disposed of the cost of making them.) No floating cities. Few aerostats. Enormous ratio of paper dreams to metal. Lessons... ?
"We will settle the deserts"? Cairo's cities in the sand? Diversely poor, industrial, and gated. China's ghost cities? So focus on incentivizing developers, and then move something there to attract people?
So many natural progressions to choose from. :)
Plenty of desert cities in the US: Las Vegas, Palm Springs, Scottsdale, etc. For more extreme deserts, lots of middle eastern cities.