Tag: space

Starship

On Starship progress:

If SpaceX hit the targets for the Starhopper and the Starship then SpaceX will have accelerated rocket development by 4x. This would be 10-20x faster than most of their competition. SpaceX continues to get more ambitious with its rockets and is accelerating its rate of progress. This faster rate of development will mean that the world will get the space program that we have always wanted.

2019-09-09: What the future may hold for starship:

The next 7 years could see space habitation increase 100s of times. We can go from 6 people in space to 100s in a larger rotating one gravity space station and a lunar mining base.

2019-10-15: What moon missions and bases look like:

SpaceX will leave most Starships on Mars or the Moon, when they are flown for long-range missions. SpaceX will need to use ~5 launches of Super Heavy Starships to fully fuel a Super Heavy Starship in orbit. They will then send a fully fueled Super Heavy Starship to Mars. The Super Heavy booster will separate around the orbit of the moon. The booster will return and 37 Raptor engines will be reused. The 6 Raptor engines in the Starship will take the Starship to Mars with ~100 tons of payload.

Starship Moon mission needs a 10-ton lunar lander
2019-11-05:

Robert Zubrin indicates there is a need to stage the SpaceX Starship from low earth orbit or injection orbits for the moon and Mars. Missions to the moon would be far more efficient with a 10-ton lunar lander. This could be a mini-starship.

2021-03-03: History!!! To celebrate, let’s cancel SLS

2021-05-13: Robert Zubrin on the profound potential that Starship represents

Starship won’t just give us the ability to send human explorers to Mars, the moon, and other destinations in the inner solar system, it offers us a 100x increase in overall operational capability to do pretty much anything we want to do in space. That includes not only supporting a muscular program of probes to the outer solar system, and making all sorts of experimental investigations in Earth orbit economical, but enabling the construction of giant space telescopes. Much of our knowledge of physics has come from astronomy. This is so because the universe is the biggest and best lab there is. There is no better place to do astronomy than space. The 2.4-meter Hubble Space Telescope has made extraordinary discoveries. What might we learn once we are able to build 2.4-kilometer telescopes in deep space? The possibilities are literally inconceivable.

2021-10-12: a FT take focusing on competitors complaining, instead of scrapping their obsolete approaches:

SpaceX’s vertically integrated manufacturing approach will also deprive other US suppliers of business, weakening the wider industrial base the country had built up to support its long-term ambitions in space, Amazon and others warn. However, SpaceX’s customers — including those in government — do not seem to share the misgivings. “Before SpaceX we only really had the ULA, so we’re in a better position than we were,” says Phil McAlister, director of Nasa’s commercial space flight division. Diamandis goes further: “The US government is lucky to have a company like SpaceX based here,” he says, since its efficiencies feed through directly into the US space programme. And companies that compete with SpaceX in some markets seem more than happy to use its launch services, despite supporting a rival.

2021-10-30: Another interesting take that argues that Starship will change the entire space industry away from “reduce weight at all cost” towards rapidly producing space worthy hardware at scale:

Starship obliterates the mass constraint and every last vestige of cultural baggage that constraint has gouged into the minds of spacecraft designers. There are still constraints, as always, but their design consequences are, at present, completely unexplored. We need a team of economists to rederive the relative elasticities of various design choices and boil them down to a new set of design heuristics for space system production oriented towards maximizing volume of production. Or, more generally, maximizing some robust utility function assuming saturation of Starship launch capacity. A dollar spent on mass optimization no longer buys a dollar saved on launch cost. It buys nothing. It is time to raise the scope of our ambition and think much bigger. Prior to Starship, heavy machinery for building a Moon base could only come from NASA, because only NASA has the expertise to build a rocket propelled titanium Moon tractor for $1b per unit. After Starship, Caterpillar or Deere or Kamaz can space qualify their existing commodity products with very minimal changes and operate them in space. In all seriousness, some huge Caterpillar mining truck is already extremely rugged and mechanically reliable. McMaster-Carr already stocks 1000s of parts that will work in mines, on oil rigs, and any number of other horrendously corrosive, warranty voiding environments compared to which the vacuum of space is delightfully benign. A space-adapted tractor needs better paint, a vacuum compatible hydraulic power source, vacuum-rated bearings, lubricants, wire insulation, and a redundant remote control sensor kit. I can see NASA partnering with industry to produce and test these parts, but that is no way to service the institutional overhead embodied by a team of 100s of people toiling on a single mission for 10 years. There is a reason that JPL’s business depends on a steady stream of directed flagship missions with $1b price tags. Hordes of PhDs don’t come cheap and need a lot of care and feeding.

2021-11-05: The new 10 year NASA research plan doesn’t yet take vastly better costs into account. The telescopes in particular need to be rethought completely. Perhaps a combination of HavEx and LUVOIR, redesigned to be 10x cheaper, would do the trick.

2 current NASA mission concepts, HabEx (Habitable Exoplanet Imaging Mission) and LUVOIR (Large UV/Optical/IR Surveyor), are aimed at pulling this off. Both would use large, extremely clear mirrored optical telescopes, UV rays, and infrared to hunt for exoplanets with signs of water, oxygen, and ozone. HabEx would use a “starshade” to block out light from stars to reveal the planets surrounding them; LUVOIR would use a very large system of unfolding mirrors. A blend of the 2, though—now that might be just right for a mission that “combines a large, stable telescope with an advanced coronagraph intended to block the light of bright stars,” as the survey states, and is “capable of surveying a 100 or more nearby Sun-like stars to discover their planetary systems and determine their orbits and basic properties. Then for the most exciting ~25 planets, astronomers will use spectroscopy at ultraviolet, visible, and near- infrared wavelengths to identify multiple atmospheric components that could serve as biomarkers.”

Building in Space

The most technically feasible ways to make travel around the solar system routine and fast and then to build a foundation for interstellar flight is to build large and light space structures. It will be easier to build bigger in the low gravity of space. We need robots and new construction systems. All of our Earth-based megastructures will look tiny in comparison to the space-based structures. Fully reusable rockets are the game changer that SpaceX is creating now. The next steps are robotic construction capabilities and megawatt and gigawatt power. No matter what the large power source is we have to build large in space to radiate the heat from the large power systems.

The Wandering Earth

The movie is basically a retelling of some of the earlier parts of Genesis. The Chinese do in fact succeed in building the Tower of Babel, both physically and linguistically. They survive that which is analogous to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. They thwart the Noah’s Ark plan, reject the notion of their own intrinsic sinfulness, and save the remainder of humanity. It is the Chinese Christ figure who sacrifices himself to achieve the happy ending, thereby overturning what might be understood to be the will of God. By the end of the movie the Chinese can indeed “do anything.”

AWS Ground Station

Amazon EC2 made compute power accessible on a cost-effective, pay-as-you-go basis. AWS Ground Station does the same for satellite ground stations. Instead of building your own ground station or entering into a long-term contract, you can make use of AWS Ground Station on an as-needed, pay-as-you-go basis. You can get access to a ground station on short notice in order to handle a special event: severe weather, a natural disaster, or something more positive such as a sporting event. If you need access to a ground station on a regular basis to capture Earth observations or distribute content world-wide, you can reserve capacity ahead of time and pay even less. AWS Ground Station is a fully managed service. You don’t need to build or maintain antennas, and can focus on your work or research.

Drosophila Titanus

This is very cool. In some sense, we have a moral imperative to spread life in the cosmos.

Your experiment involves creating flies that could survive on Titan. I understand that Titan is incredibly cold so the flies have to gradually get used to the very low temperatures but what would be the impact of Titan’s orange sky and the low frequency radio waves that emanate from Titan on their bodies? And how do you prepare them for that? The project involved adapting the flies for a range of environmental conditions that are very different to those found on Earth. The cold is the most obvious along with the different atmospheric composition. There is also increased atmospheric pressure, radiation, chromatic characteristics and so on. To reach what could be conceived as the end of the project I would need to condition the flies for all of the characteristics of Titan. The radio waves experiment has been earmarked for a future stage in the project so I haven’t got too much to say about that right now. However, the chromatic adjustment has been something I’ve been working on over the last couple of years. The natural phototaxis of Drosophila – its instinct to move towards a certain type of light – is geared towards the blue end of the electromagnetic spectrum. To overcome this I kept the flies for a year under a Titan analog orange light before testing for adaptation. The selection experiment was modelled on a Y-Trap apparatus, a simple way of offering an organism 2 choices. The flies crawl up a tube and are faced with a junction offering orange light in one direction and blue light in the other, each tube ending with another non-return trap. Any flies taking the orange option are considered adapted and kept for breeding. Repeated iterations of the project smooth out random events.

The Case for Space

A vibrant Space Program will inspire millions of children

2019-06-04: Robert Zubrin on the Case for Space

The author surveys the resources available on the Moon, Mars, near-Earth and main belt asteroids, and, looking farther into the future, the outer solar system where, once humans have mastered controlled nuclear fusion, sufficient Helium-3 is available for the taking to power a solar system wide human civilization of trillions of people for billions of years and, eventually, the interstellar ships they will use to expand out into the galaxy. Detailed plans are presented for near-term human missions to the Moon and Mars, both achievable within the decade of the 2020s, which will begin the process of surveying the resources available there and building the infrastructure for permanent settlement. These mission plans, unlike those of NASA, do not rely on paper rockets which have yet to fly, costly expendable boosters, or detours to “gateways” and other diversions which seem a prime example of (to paraphrase the author in chapter 14), “doing things in order to spend money as opposed to spending money in order to do things.”

2019-09-09: Why we should go to space.

When I share enthusiasm for some new space exploration or colonization initiative, I occasionally hear the retort that we should focus on saving Earth first, often with climate change in mind as the imminent existential threat. A recent articulate example from Facebook: “It seems to me that we are in such a significant emergency (really interrelated emergencies) that we need to focus all of our ingenuity and resources on transforming our energy systems, infrastructure, agriculture, transportation, political systems, etc. right here on this planet. I am afraid that we will end up exporting our exploitative culture to space and not make the changes here that we need to restore the life support systems of our planet.” And my reply: When I have heard these concerns in the past, I have dashed off a retort about the false dichotomy, but the concerns persist, so let me try to be a bit more thoughtful, and please let me know if you find any of this to be persuasive: 1) Positive inspiration: living in space is the ultimate recycling and sustainability challenge. A fair number of people like to dream of something grand as they simultaneously solve the problems of today. You mention transforming energy, ag and transportation. Think of the advances that some of the “space people” have made in this area. Tesla came after SpaceX. Some of my most recent investments have been in fusion power and animal-free meat manufacturing. They are both HUGE priorities to save the Earth (we have to stem the growth of hundreds of new coal power plants in China and meat manufacturing globally, both major sources of GHG). But they are also essential for off-world colonies — energy and food production challenges are more acute when imagining a lunar or Mars base. For a breakthrough solution, you often have to imagine a challenge greater than the creeping incrementalism of “problem fixing.” 2) Direct synergy: where would the environmental movement and the climate change science be without space? From the whole-Earth image of our pale blue dot to the Earth observation satellites, one could argue that space initiatives have been the greatest advance for the environmental movement (Sierra Club). The founders of Open Lunar are the founders of Planet; like me, they still have their day jobs where they image the entire Earth every day from space. Other space entrepreneurs are putting up GPS-RO satellites to measure upper atmosphere weather (essential to climate models and weather prediction) and this data cannot be gathered from the ground. These satellite constellations are now cost-effective because of the lowering launch costs from SpaceX and some of their competitors. 3) Differential advantage: not everyone on the planet should be focused on the same thing. You provide a partial list of priorities, but should a domain expert on poverty or the diseases of the poor shift entirely to something on your list of emergencies? Do you want to argue that climate change trumps other priorities, and even if it does, do you have a rank list of what to prioritize within that domain? This climate-change prioritization list surprised me as to the space-synergies. 4) Experimentation zones: this is a new opportunity. If we want to perform experiments in geoengineering, Mars and Venus might be better places to start as we hone our skills and verify our simulations. And if we can make one habitable, and humanity becomes multi-planetary, it would be one of the greatest accomplishments for our civilization. These experimentation zones could include the “political systems” you mention and go beyond the “charter cites” that Paul Romer espouses to “charter civilizations” with experiments in better governance among the off-world colonies. In short, exploring the final frontier and saving the Earth are not mutually exclusive; rather, they are deeply synergistic, inspirational and focused on the ultimate sustainability challenge. And the entrepreneurial drive to forge a future that inspires future generations with the potential of progress is a worthy endeavor in its own right.

Solar System Destinations

Poor old Europa isn’t out to kill you, per se. It’s a big oceanic world, after all, just waiting for us to find life. It seems to have all the right ingredients for it hiding under a thick ice shelf.

The problem comes in when you consider Europa’s location: firmly within the radiation belts of Jupiter. Io and Europa are bombarded with lethal amounts of radiation. The future Europa Clipper mission even avoids orbiting Europa directly to lengthen the craft’s lifetime. If you landed Europa’s surface, the radiation dose would kill you—and anything else—within days.

SpaceX has won

Every other Space Agency in the world knows that SpaceX has won with reusable rockets. All of the existing non-reusable rockets cannot compete. The Japanese, Chinese, Europeans and Russians know that SpaceX is going to take all of the commercial space launch. SpaceX already has over 50% of the commercial space launch. The US just needs to kill Space Launch System (SLS) and put the $4B per year into incentivizing more flights of SpaceX rockets. The US could redirect the SLS money to just purchase SpaceX BFR flights and put up 1000s of people into space, build 1 GW of space-based solar power and establish lunar bases and space mining. This would give the US a lead in space that could be sustained until 2100.

Turbo Rocket

The Turbo rocket is the only rocket with the delta-V to get back to earth from the moon.

A SpaceX BFR needs 5 refueling missions to go to the moon and back. SpaceX BFR would be $12k per kg to the moon and back. This is ~16x more expensive than the turbo rocket. The Turbo Rocket architecture represents a new paradigm for access to space economics.

Large payload fractions of 35-50%, Low Construction Cost and Full Reuse
Cost to LEO: less than $85/kg w/10 flights
Cost to Luna: less than $715/kg w/10 flights
Staged Combustion: Lowest Cost to LEO
Nuclear Thermal: Lowest Cost for Near Earth Return and Larger Payloads to Everywhere