southernplain

Big yikes for Boeing

Sure, absolutely Shuttle was an important part of spaceflight history. It taught us many valuable lessons and contributed mightily to our understanding of crewed spaceflight technologies. However, we also got stuck in LEO for 30 years, it cost approximately $200 billion dollars, and the lives of 14 people. A Shuttle program that proved the concept of refurbishable spaceplanes and then was retired for Shuttle 2.0 without killing anyone would have been an unqualified success. That wasn't what we got, due to the politics of it all. We don't start with orbital assembly right now, my point was merely that we should not tailor our LV development specifically to avoid it at all costs. A 100t+ class reusable LV gives us enormous capabilities regarding orbital assembly. If Starship is as cheap as SpaceX say it could be, we can afford to mess around with "research, development, testing, and practice." Without a fully reusable SHLV, that probably isn't going to be feasible. I would enjoy seeing "anybody else" develop, and fail, fast like SpaceX. Visible progress massively increases my interest in their programs. Also, slick launch coverage helps. SpaceX leads the industry in launch day coverage by a wide margin if you ask me.

Its obviously of no use at all! I'll be darned if those NASA hippies get a shuttle while the Soviets are the only ones to militarize space! Uncle Sam can do it better, why our military space program will have card games and women of ill-repute! Yee-haw! - Cold War USAF planners. I think a comparatively huge advantage SpaceX has in the pursuit of a reusable launch system is they are basically only beholden to Musk and small number of hand-picked investors. As long as Musk stays in the picture, SpaceX can pursue whatever design they need to fulfill the mission without being beholden to dozens or hundreds of government stakeholders. Congress has a tendency to lose sight of the big picture end goal when the pork gets rolling.

I get the sense Elon doesn't care about the cash burn and SpaceX selects its own investors. In fact, it is rather refreshing that SpaceX is burning capital building SS/SH at a breakneck pace. I only wish BO would burn some more money to go faster and mount a credible competition. Then their HLS protests would carry more water than just sour grapes at losing a contract.

Something like the DC-X or the Chrysler SERV maybe: http://www.astronautix.com/s/serv.html There were lots of wacky alt-shuttle designs floating around in the 60's-70's although I don't know of too many VL variants. Shuttle is honestly a terrible thing to benchmark your design program around though. So many political decisions fed into the requirements that the end product was seriously compromised. I got the sense in the Everyday Astronaut video, in the parts on Shuttle, that Elon was trying not to trash NASA's history there. However, it is really hard to call the Shuttle anything other than a cautionary tale. Step 1: Make requirements less dumb. If NASA/DOD had followed that, we wouldn't have got Shuttle as we did.

Why though? Orbital assembly works and we are going to have to do more of it if we want to become a spacefaring civilization. Engineering and building a 500t LV is much harder than a 150t LV. Its almost as if Shuttle's design stems from a combination of requirements that Starship is not bound by. The DOD isn't going to require absurd cross range from Starship and it doesn't have to land like an airplane.

Sure having a second architecture would be good, all other things being equal. However, BO's bid was not equal to Starship's capability/$. It wasn't even in the same ballpark. BO's statement in the CNBC piece includes this gem: This is insanity. There was a competition. BO lost it. Moreover, they lost not just because of the budgetary issues, but also because SpaceX was the better bid for the program (tied in the technical rating and better in the management rating per the HLS source selection statement.)

There was a competition. BO lost. This is insanity.

United Launch Services, LLC (ULS) is a subsidiary of United Launch Alliance, LLC. On behalf of ULA, ULS contracts for launch services using the Atlas and Delta launch vehicles. https://www.ulalaunch.com/about If you want to fly on a ULA rocket, you deal with ULS as I understand it.

So like a thousand or ten-thousand ton interplanetary freighter? I don't see why we can't make something like that a priority to build if we are serious about Mars colonization. Starship is pretty cool, but it is a tiny early modern carrack compared to modern oceangoing cruise liner/cargo carrying behemoths. We are going to need to outgrow Starship if we are serious about planetary colonization.

If you wanted to fly to Mars, how would you want to get there?

You missed the point. I was addressing the idea that living with the threat of decompression is some unbearable mental strain. If we are colonizing Mars or Venus or the Moon or wherever, it is a racing certainty that things will break and people will die. Just our limited forays into space have already resulted in the deaths of 17-19 people (depending on how you count Challenger, Soyuz 1, and Micheal Adams' X-15 flight). The astronauts on Apollo 13 probably should have died from SA-508's pogo event or from the CSM failure, thankfully they didn't. The possibility that there may be deaths is not a reason to not attempt to go to Mars or Venus or wherever. However, we can plan and design to account for unexpected failures. We do the same with ISS, there aren't emergency Cargo Dragons or Progresses sitting around in case something happens (AFAIK, let me know if I am wrong). In a time limited emergency, astronauts can abort home, otherwise we know the risks and they are acceptable until the next resupply mission. The same processes can be designed for Mars, with much greater redundancy (enabled by Starship's down mass capabilities). Mars colonists could abort home (early on), abort to another settlement, or sit tight for resupply. Equipment failures can be handled routinely enough given sufficient planning and redundancy. You are right, it is incredibly unlikely Starship ever takes 100 people anywhere. However, starship, if it becomes fully operational, can provide us with amazing capabilities that make Mars colonization feasible.

I definitely understand the history behind why Mars has been targeted for colonization. However, saying there are no logical reasons to go to Mars is not true. It has a very conveniently earthlike day night cycle and it is the only planet with an atmosphere we can land on, to name just a few points. I understand these points, and I won't say you are wrong in raising them. However, Venusian gravity isn't strictly Earthlike, it is about 10% less than Earth. Given that we don't have very much data at all about partial gravity environments it isn't fair to say that Venusian gravity is Earthlike for humans. The answer is that we need more data on partial gravity enviroments. I think that a solid surface is important insofar as we can land stuff there, use the surface as a staging point, and extract resources from the surface. Every single built environment on Venus needs to be shipped in except for the atmosphere and what we can extract from it. For example, we can mine water ice on Mars (using techniques we perfect at Shackleton crater on the Moon), and bury habitation modules in regolith. 1. As far as I know, this isn't an insurmountable problem. Mars isn't particularly seismically active. Marsquakes do happen, but from the evidence that we have they are mild compared to earthquakes. INSIGHT was barely able to detect the marsquake it observed. 2. It is not clear why colonies need to be widely separated on Mars, please explain. There is as much surface area on the surface of Mars as there is on all of the land on Earth, but we don't need to have widely separated colonies to start with. 3. This seems quite overstated. Astronauts on the ISS live in a decades old artificial pressure vessel millimeters from literal vacuum and it doesn't seem to impose undue stress on them. Leaks on ISS are easily detected and quite slow, leaving lots of time to react and patch the hole. The same principle applies to Mars if we can suitably engineer the habitation modules. 4. A reasonable point, but not a show stopper. A backup power source, nuclear energy seems quite good for Mars, is definitely needed. This concern seems a bit exaggerated given that the only thing we can observe from SpaceX is progress on the transportation infrastructure. Starship is a natural starting place because as it stands, no amount of money will let us put someone on the surface of Mars or floating on Venus. That isn't to say that there is no work being done behind closed doors or that SpaceX can't leverage NASA's expertise, on ECLSS, habitation, human biomedical needs, et. al, when (if?) Starship is fully operational. I doubt that SpaceX is going to throw some humans at Mars and hope to sustain them later. They can do that with hardware because the consequences are low, but I would guess that they will be quite cautious with humans.

The big money national programs, like NASA, ESA, CNSA, and Roscomos, all have significant Mars exploration programs that are enabling human spaceflight to Mars (MOXIE on Perserverance only makes sense in the context of future human missions). NASA and CNSA are both planning to actually send people there. Need I point out that NASA hasn't sent anything to Venus beyond flybys since Magellan in the 1990's (although we will be returning soon). The point, rather tenuously made and perhaps overstated, is that money and engineering resources are being spent on going to Mars and solving the problems for staying there. Sure it is political flags and footprints nonsense, but national programs and SpaceX are devoting time and money to the problem. The same can not be said for Venus, despite its advantages, which makes Venus a less achievable destination near term. I am in favour of getting humans living on other planets as fast as possible. Yes, we need to land infrastructure on Mars for long term habitation. I am all for building a transportation infrastructure that allows us to put massive quantities of material on the surface of Mars. Just naturally, we will start will short term habitation modules and land the infrastructure needed to make it more permanent. Given Starships capabilities, the initial short term habitation infrastructure need not be actually very small or limited. We could pre-stage hundreds or thousands of tons of stuff per person on the surface before the first humans get there. The only thing that matters is that the down mass keeps coming, that the volume increases with each synod, and that it is relatively affordable to get there. Earth (regolith?) moving machines are commercially available off the shelf (although I definitely concede they will require extensive modification), it isn't exactly impossible to imagine putting a few on the surface of Mars given the capabilities of Starship. Digging isn't that complicated given our rovers are already doing it on Mars (albeit at a hilariously tiny scale). No one is designing Venus dirigibles, although perhaps NASA should throw some money at that problem. We need to be able to get to the destination and return from it, so the equipment we have is absolutely relevant for where we go first. Exploration and settlement of the Caribbean proceeded before exploration and settlement of the South Pole for a reason. There are no near-term hardware proposals for a spaceflight architecture that allows Venus descent and return for humans. Starship's architecture is being designed to go to Mars. If you want to propose an alternate architecture to go to, and come back from, Venus, well then I am all on board. Then we need to sell it to SpaceX or whoever else has billions of dollars to spend turning metal into reality. But it seems very unlikely that we are going to throw hundreds of Starships to the bottom of the Venusian gravity well with no way to get them and the people on board back out. Mars colonization is never going to be about the loony Mars to stay proposals. Some, maybe most, of the people who go to Mars (especially early on) are going to want to rotate onto and off of Mars. Competition between national programs, NASA and CNSA, will be good for Mars colonization long term as they look to find the best solutions to the problems of living on Mars. The technological developments needed to go there, even temporarily, and the data collected while we are there, will enable the colonization process long term. Yes, we need a huge amount of infrastructure on Mars for long term habitation. We won't start with a million tons of down mass before the humans get there. We will start with short term settlements and build out from there like every other human settlement program on Earth. The Pilgrims didn't show up to a fully built out 21st century Plymouth when they landed, they had to build the entire society bit by bit. The trick is finding suitably motivated settlers who are willing to take on the risks to build the initial settlements. Incidentally, Venus has the same problem. The infrastructure to support human atmosphere is straightforward, but the rest of the human built environment has to be shipped down there as well since there is no surface to build on and no solid materials to use. You seem fixated on the "short miserable lives." I think it is far too early to say with confidence that future Mars colonists will be miserable. Underground cities aren't exactly unheard of in human history (see Derinkuyu), but permanent floating societies are functionally unheard of. No one has ever lived long term in a dirigible or hot air balloon. Which isn't to say we can't live like that, but I don't think it is exactly fair to say underground at Mars is miserable, but floating at Venus is great given how limited our dataset is. This is just spit balling, but it seems likely that never seeing solid ground has some psychological toll on humans who have had a million years of evolutionary history on the surface of Earth. Finally, and I would like to make this point abundantly clear, I do not think this is an either or proposition. Lets colonize both! That is the sci-fi future I would like to live in.

I don't think Venus is a bad option overall, but it is not clear to me that preferring Mars over Venus is "entirely silly" when every single national space program targets human Mars landings first. Venus has the problem of the surface being literally hell for human life. At least we can be on the ground at Mars and build initial surface structures (which may be able to share design lessons from 2020's heritage Lunar landing infrastructure). The Martian gravity well is quite a bit less of a problem for spaceflight infrastructure than Venus as well (Venusian escape velocity is pretty much Earthlike). Starship (Marsship?) can SSTO at Mars, it is not clear that it could SSTO at Venus or what Starship "landing" at Venus even looks like. I think gravity and radiation are the obvious biggest threats at Mars. If 0.38g is too low for long term human habitation or if mitigating the radiation threat is insurmountable, then Venus really is our best option. SpaceX isn't designing SSTOs.

Your definition of only fully self-sustaining settlements being colonies is arbitrary. Europe founded dozens of colonies during the early modern period that took centuries to become fully self-sustaining (arguably some of them are not even today). Here is the modern OED definition of a colony: "A settlement in a new country; a body of people who settle in a new locality, forming a community subject to or connected with their parent state; the community so formed, consisting of the original settlers and their descendants and successors, as long as the connection with the parent state is kept up." Quibble with the definition as we may, it doesn't require the colony to be self-sustaining. Human colonization efforts on Mars don't become a colony once we reach some arbitrary fully self-sustaining threshold, it happens over the generations of consistent attempts by the people living on the planet who intend to stay there. Fully self-sustaining settlements will also tend to transcend the parent-colony dichotomy. I think SpaceX has that reason as a goal, and they actively believe in it. But for the long term survival of the colonization attempt, I do not think this will become the primary motivation for human settlement on Mars. Nice side benefit? Sure. Primary reason? No. I am totally willing to discuss the reasons Mars might not work for human settlement. Mars is the best planet we have after Earth, whether we can live there long term is questionable.

Colonization is a process that is going to take decades or centuries to reach some arbitrary definition of self-sustaining. Just because we can't be self-sustaining from the first landings doesn't mean we can't continue the process of colonization. As the colonization process unfolds, we would be shipping enormous amounts of stuff to Mars to bootstrap the colonization process. That is what SpaceX is trying to accomplish, providing a (relatively) cost-effective means to ship stuff to Mars. Never mind the fact that we are reasonably certain Mars has sodium and chlorine in some quantities just at the landing sites we have sampled. Synthesizing the frankly trivial amounts to satisfy daily human dietary salt intake isn't out of the realm of possibility after a decade or two of colonization attempts. We don't synthesize salt here on Earth because it is insanely cheap and plentiful, but that constraint need not apply to Mars.

I loved the aesthetic of Ares I, definitely not ugly. I wouldn’t want to ride on one, but it looked good IMO.

This is an absurd argument. Recommended human adult salt intake per day is 1.5-2.3 g, per year that is 0.547-0.839 kg per adult. One starship per synod of table salt downmass is enough to sustain a colony of ~60 000 people. There are certainly obstacles to Mars colonization, salt is not one that will “doom” the attempt.

RTLS is the best

Not sure why you are defending this, it is all self-inflicted on China's part. They don't need to launch inland and drop spent hypergolic stages on populated areas, they choose to.

Also cost. Filming something close to accurate might cost X. Getting it more accurate costs X+Y (especially with science fiction). Unless it is hyper important to the plot, it generally isn't worth the extra expense. Good enough will fit in the budget, great might not. Case in point, they didn't try to simulate a 1/3g environment in the Martian. The differences are small and the cost and complexity are very high for no real benefit to the plot.

Big yikes to be that close to UDMH/NTO hypergols. Very embarrassing to drop spent hypergolic stages over populated areas.

Definitely seems like New Glenn development is a mess. We kind of knew that based on the lack of progress though I suppose.

Wouldn’t the water table pose a problem for a Boring Company tunnel? The area is all wetlands and the ocean is just a few hundred meters away.