Super heavy-lift launch vehicles - What do you launch on them?

[DDE]

@kerbiloid, they've either been talking too much to aliens, or too little to their 3D artists.

@Codraroll, the market for oversized sats is basically dwindling because satellites are becoming lighter; the days of huge nuclear-powered relay sat projects that prompted the creation of an RD-301 ammonia-fluorine upper stage for Proton are long gone. This leaves superheavies, especially non-reusable superheavies, with a limited range of missions that I think can be summarized as:

• High-efficiency space station construction - costs per m^3 drops sharply as module diameter increases, and total mass to LEO drops equally sharply as fewer modules (and hence tugs and docking ports) are involved.
• Delivery of large ship components to LEO assembly locations
• Direct insertion of manned missions, e.g. Apollo or Mars Direct - a single superheavy is enough for a planetary flyby or a one-way landing
• High-energy, high-mass probes to the gas giants, with chemical orbital insertion stages and landers - simple orbital insertion using a whacking big cryogenic stage was once considered very prospective, causing development of such fuel pairs as ethane-OF2.

[Jovus]

The recent historical answer has been spy satellites. Some of thos suckers are really big.

[kerbiloid]

This thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brick_Moon

[sevenperforce]

What new technologies would enable/demand runaway demand for SHLVs?

Note that I'm not talking about new technologies for launch vehicles themselves, but rather new technologies which would make launching payloads into LEO (or beyond) more profitable. Like my earlier example of quantum supercomputers that only work in microgravity.

[Casualnaut]

15 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

  Hide contents

Jets look turning down 90° after releasing from horizontal nozzles.

Magnetic plasma redirector enabled?

 

Magnetic Plasma Redirectors aren't my department. 

[Codraroll]

2 hours ago, sevenperforce said:

What new technologies would enable/demand runaway demand for SHLVs?

Note that I'm not talking about new technologies for launch vehicles themselves, but rather new technologies which would make launching payloads into LEO (or beyond) more profitable. Like my earlier example of quantum supercomputers that only work in microgravity.

I guess asteroid mining or a really large and for some reason well-funded lunar colony might do it.

For asteroid mining, one would need both excavators, separators and refineries. No need to bring tons of ore back to Earth if you're only going to get a few kilograms of refined metal out of it. Not after the first few rounds, at least, where the scientific and novelty value of even "useless" asteroid slag has diminished. An industrial asterioid mining vehicle or station would be a really big and heavy thing, requiring lots of material to be placed in orbit. Might as well do it in as few launches as possible, and/or do as much assembly as possible on Earth and sending it to space in large, prebuilt chunks.

And lunar colonies... I guess if somebody found some incredibly lucrative reason to go to the moon, a large amount of equipment would have to be hauled there in a relatively short time frame. That would probably be mining-related as well, once again needing large and heavy-lift capable rockets.

[wumpus]

13 hours ago, Jovus said:

The recent historical answer has been spy satellites. Some of thos suckers are really big.

I really have to wonder if Hubble-level resolution (the shuttle cargo bay was sized to fit a specific keyhole spy satellite, Hubble was sized to fit that same bay) can really be justified for such things or is that generals knowing nobody gets to ask why.  I'd much rather have a low-angular resolution wide-angle image of the ground so I could see anything new.  Note that storing that type of data and doing image comparisons at that speed was probably impossible when the shuttle-sized spy-satellites when up.

[StrandedonEarth]

3 hours ago, sevenperforce said:

What new technologies would enable/demand runaway demand for SHLVs?

First you start with inexpensive, mass-produced prospecting probes, launching as many as you can fit on a launch vehicle at a time, to assay the asteroids and find new ones. When they finally start finding interesting targets, there'll be interest in launching massive tugs and mining equipment, especially if they find a biggish chunk of platinum.

[_Augustus_]

1 hour ago, wumpus said:

I really have to wonder if Hubble-level resolution (the shuttle cargo bay was sized to fit a specific keyhole spy satellite, Hubble was sized to fit that same bay) can really be justified for such things or is that generals knowing nobody gets to ask why.  I'd much rather have a low-angular resolution wide-angle image of the ground so I could see anything new.  Note that storing that type of data and doing image comparisons at that speed was probably impossible when the shuttle-sized spy-satellites when up.

The KH-11/12/13s have very wide fields compared to Hubble. WFIRST uses KH-12 optics.

Edited July 1, 2017 by _Augustus_

[DerekL1963]

1 hour ago, wumpus said:

I'd much rather have a low-angular resolution wide-angle image of the ground so I could see anything new.

Which is useful for determining if there is anything "new", but not really useful for determining what exactly that new thing is or how it differs from old things.  For that you need (drum roll) high resolution.

More seriously, though the high resolution cameras get all the attention, they flew a variety of cameras with a variety of resolutions for various purposes.  Low res mapping cameras for cartography.  Medium res survey cameras to look for "new" stuff and to surveil targets for the high res cameras.  High res cameras for really close up views of specific targets.  This was especially important back in the days of film.  Nowdays, bandwidth being what it is, they probably just use the narrow angle high res cameras for everything and stitch the images together when needed.
 

1 hour ago, wumpus said:

Note that storing that type of data and doing image comparisons at that speed was probably impossible when the shuttle-sized spy-satellites when up.

 
They're still Shuttle (cargo bay) sized - you can't get high resolution out of any much smaller.

[kerbiloid]

4 hours ago, DerekL1963 said:

 Low res mapping cameras for cartography.  Medium res survey cameras to look for "new" stuff and to surveil targets for the high res cameras.  High res cameras for really close up views of specific targets.  This was especially important back in the days of film.  Nowdays, bandwidth being what it is, they probably just use the narrow angle high res cameras for everything and stitch the images together when needed.

One could name this somewhat like "total permanent multispectral Earth monitoring". A space mirror the Earth would be looking into.

Asteroid mining (exactly) and lunar colony (probably) would require so much energy, that they anyway require fusion and fission correspondingly.

Here on Earth they use chemistry to get the metals from the ore. That's why all that metallurgical magic with retorts and powders. They save energy using chemistry.
On other celestial bodies there are no coal, lime, fluorite and other alchemical things 
You have either to deliver them from the Earth, or to produce much energy and stupidly heat and split the ore, magnetically separate and gather your Precious.
(Though the coal and lime delivering would take not less energy, too).

So, asteroid mining will be available only when you have portable thermonukes, and thus, portable thermonuke engines.
Having portable fusion engines, you have so enormous delta-V onboard, that you need neither lauch vehicles, nor orbital stations.
You can just lift and land with a plane speed to avoid heat and stress.
You will just build a huge pressurized hull, preferrably horizontal to make loading/unloading easy.

Spoiler

Firefly

Raza

Prometheus

 

This space ro-ro just shuttles between the asteroid and a terrestrial desert.

So, the asteroid mining is from another tale than launch vehicles.

 

Lunar colony needs a lot of support.
There are 3-6-up-to-8-but-in-glorious-past humans on ISS and the KSP forum celebrates every successful cargo deliverance with fireworks and flowers.
A lunar colony would have at least same crew, which needs at least same amount of supplies. Due to both life support and merciless expoitation.
You must provide them with work. When a lunar slave crewman isn't sleeping. he must be working. Though, when he is sleeping, he can still be working as an object for medical studies.
So, every Progress, HTV or Dragon should be sent to the Moon.
All this means you need fission-powered lunar base itself, fission-powered transorbital tugs and fission-powered LEO station. And thousands tons to delivers to LEO.
This makes chemical heavy LVs impractical. you need something like fission-powered variant of Nexus, with 100 flights lifespan.
So, lunar saga is also not about heavy launch vehicles, it's about 1-2 fission-powered cauldron-shaped shuttles.

Edited July 1, 2017 by kerbiloid

[magnemoe]

1 hour ago, kerbiloid said:

One could name this somewhat like "total permanent multispectral Earth monitoring". A space mirror the Earth would be looking into.

Asteroid mining (exactly) and lunar colony (probably) would require so much energy, that they anyway require fusion and fission correspondingly.

Here on Earth they use chemistry to get the metals from the ore. That's why all that metallurgical magic with retorts and powders. They save energy using chemistry.
On other celestial bodies there are no coal, lime, fluorite and other alchemical things 
You have either to deliver them from the Earth, or to produce much energy and stupidly heat and split the ore, magnetically separate and gather your Precious.
(Though the coal and lime delivering would take not less energy, too).

So, asteroid mining will be available only when you have portable thermonukes, and thus, portable thermonuke engines.
Having portable fusion engines, you have so enormous delta-V onboard, that you need neither lauch vehicles, nor orbital stations.
You can just lift and land with a plane speed to avoid heat and stress.
You will just build a huge pressurized hull, preferrably horizontal to make loading/unloading easy.

  Reveal hidden contents

Firefly

Raza

Prometheus

 

This space ro-ro just shuttles between the asteroid and a terrestrial desert.

So, the asteroid mining is from another tale than launch vehicles.

 

Lunar colony needs a lot of support.
There are 3-6-up-to-8-but-in-glorious-past humans on ISS and the KSP forum celebrates every successful cargo deliverance with fireworks and flowers.
A lunar colony would have at least same crew, which needs at least same amount of supplies. Due to both life support and merciless expoitation.
You must provide them with work. When a lunar slave crewman isn't sleeping. he must be working. Though, when he is sleeping, he can still be working as an object for medical studies.
So, every Progress, HTV or Dragon should be sent to the Moon.
All this means you need fission-powered lunar base itself, fission-powered transorbital tugs and fission-powered LEO station. And thousands tons to delivers to LEO.
This makes chemical heavy LVs impractical. you need something like fission-powered variant of Nexus, with 100 flights lifespan.
So, lunar saga is also not about heavy launch vehicles, it's about 1-2 fission-powered cauldron-shaped shuttles.

Agree on temprature but one option is to use sunlight, you can build some very large mirrors in space, has been some work on robots for this. 
And even if you have fusion its unlikely to work as an ssto outside landing on asteroids. Two issues, one is TWR the other is heat, you have an pretty low trust but high isp engine. 
 

[kerbiloid]

59 minutes ago, magnemoe said:

And even if you have fusion its unlikely to work as an ssto outside landing on asteroids. Two issues, one is TWR the other is heat, you have an pretty low trust but high isp engine. 

1. Almost any fusion needs kick starter fission. So, a ship would have both high-energy and low-energy units by design.

2. Aneutronic fusion (probably the only appropriate as "compact" one) products charged particles, which in turn must be caught into a magnetic loop and utilized, releasing their energy in a generator. So, the energy waste could/should be even less than for any other engine type.
Anyway, without the fusion, Jupiter and probably asteroids are unreachable for alive humans, so we can presume that when they start mining, they already had solved this problem.

Mirrors work bad at 3 AU from the Sun, especially when they must melt millions tons of rock. And they also should be delivered or manufactured in-situ, what means energy.

Earth doesn't need asteroid iron, it needs asteroid cesium or yttrium. So anyway the asteroid mining means that they must melt and split into atoms thousand tons of rock to get a bag of the product,
Which in turn means a lot of energy and technologies of magnetic splitting of plasma, i.e. 90% of what the fusion needs.
So, when you get fusion, you already can easily refine, and to refine easily you need even not necessary fusion itself, but "90%" of fusion technologies.
This makes "fusion" and "refining" synonyms.

Edited July 1, 2017 by kerbiloid

[53miner53]

I think that we could add a large centrifuge module to the ISS to help with microgravity. Or launch one for a Mars mission. Or strap a reusable spaceplane to the top of one for crew transfers.

[tater]

For NRO type stuff, bigger aperture, as angular resolution is limited by objective diameter (1.22*wavelength/objective_dia for small angles).

[kerbiloid]

4 hours ago, 53miner53 said:

I think that we could add a large centrifuge module to the ISS to help with microgravity.

They were going to add a small centrifuge module to the ISS to help with microgravity. But even this one appeared to be too expensive.

[tater]

If you have something capable of lifting north of 400 tonnes to LEO, scrap ISS, and start over.

[Racescort666]

I had always been under the impression that near-term asteroid mining would be focused on mining ice/water from asteroids. Mostly for getting fuel. Once a fuel/tug network is up, maybe a lunar base is more feasible? 

[Hannu2]

I do not think that anyone will spend enough to space exploration to make fuel production on asteroids feasible in foreseeable future. There should be enough water on Moon for some kind of traffic between the base and Earth. But I suspect that also Moon bases stay on papers decades. It has not great propaganda or marketing value and absolutely no economic value at all.

I think that if there will be significant operations on asteroids in next decades it will be mining of precious metals for use on Earth (or investigation and experimenting for mining). It is the only way to get real large scale profit from space. Utilization of water may be part of it and selling it to explorers secondary business.

Tourism will be very limited and all commercial exploration services, like possible private stations, rockets, spacecrafts, even bases, depend on states spending in exploration.

[Nefrums]

What types of payloads that are possible depend heavily on the prize tag.

When the launch cost have dropped an order of magnitude, space tourism will kick off for real. Probably ~10-20 years from now.  Tourism is a trillion $ industry.

When the launch cost drop anoder order of magnitude space mining becomes viable, etc.

[DerekL1963]

2 hours ago, Nefrums said:

When the launch cost have dropped an order of magnitude, space tourism will kick off for real. Probably ~10-20 years from now.  Tourism is a trillion $ industry.

That's the theory, reality is much harsher.  The tourism industry is built almost entirely around going desireable places - and space isn't a place in that sense.  That part of the tourism industry dedicated to providing experiences is much, much smaller...   And experiences is all "space tourism" offers for the foreseeable future (even with a drop in launch prices of a couple orders of magnitude).
 

3 hours ago, Hannu2 said:

I think that if there will be significant operations on asteroids in next decades it will be mining of precious metals for use on Earth (or investigation and experimenting for mining). It is the only way to get real large scale profit from space.

 

2 hours ago, Nefrums said:

When the launch cost drop anoder order of magnitude space mining becomes viable, etc.

Not really, no.  There's nothing (in the way if minerals and metals) that can be found in space that isn't abundantly available here on the surface.  Even with such a drop, your capital costs are still going to be higher than the terrestrial equivalent because the equipment will have to operate in zero-G and vacuum.

[YNM]

3 hours ago, Nefrums said:

When the launch cost have dropped an order of magnitude, space tourism will kick off for real. Probably ~10-20 years from now.  Tourism is a trillion $ industry.

Well, there were the jetsets when plausible commercial jet planes first come before it become commonplace, would we see the "rocketset" ?

15 minutes ago, DerekL1963 said:

That's the theory, reality is much harsher.  The tourism industry is built almost entirely around going desireable places - and space isn't a place in that sense.  That part of the tourism industry dedicated to providing experiences is much, much smaller...   And experiences is all "space tourism" offers for the foreseeable future (even with a drop in launch prices of a couple orders of magnitude).

Really ? You really don't want enjoy looking over the Earth from your hotel porch, or Saturn rings from your space pool ? I know these will need changes of several orders of magnitude in cost reductions, increase of average purchasing power, and increase in energy production and consumption...

I have to admit, it's not going to be completely possible and plausible under tens of generations, but if it's anything, western society appears to be much closer to proper space tourism than the rest of the world.

Edited July 4, 2017 by YNM

[tater]

On the one hand I agree with @DerekL1963 that any desirable destination in space needs to be built first (living in a small can for a couple weeks is more akin to a climbing expedition than a vacation). On the other hand, with low enough costs, and true HLVs (many hundreds of tons to LEO), it might become possible to build a destination that people would actually want to visit as "tourists" vs "adventurers."  This would require airline level safety, however. Few are going on vacation at all with even a 1:1000 LOC risk when modern air travel is one event every 2.5 million flights.

It would still be more experiential than not. A "been there, done that" sort of thing, but that's a lot of regular tourism anyway. You go to Hawaii, and you take snorkeling lessons, and surfing lessons, and helicopter rides, it's not all lying around on the sand. As business ventures go in space, I actually see tourism as much more bottomless than other ideas, but it's all about price. A regular family vacation costs thousands, this would cost far more, even at grossly reduced launch prices.

Of course with launch prices heading that low, many would get their fill of such tourism on suborbital flights---not tourism flights, but perhaps as a mode of travel. A VTVL vehicle that is incredibly reliable (aircraft level safety, not 1:300 LOM) would give regular passengers a LEO level view as part of the deal.

Edited July 4, 2017 by tater

[kerbiloid]

Every 70th space flight finished tragically, and every 70th person, flying to space, died in this flight.

So, price is not the only problem.

Also, tourism is about exploiting the adults' sins, and selling to them different useless trash for their kids to stop them screaming. And of course, selfies near something.
As told above, there is no something to make a selfie with.
No sins run better in zero-G.
No pool and swimming. No dances except jumps from wall to wall. No skiing. No skating. No bowling. No roller coasters.
Playing sand volleyball you would mostly clean your eyes and ears than play, and the ball doesn't fall down.
Two drinks more than usual - and they gather your vomit from walls. All walls. If you weren't sleeping, If were sleeping - there will be suffocation and nice funerals (other tourists like this, they can make rare selfies with a space coffin).
They even don't have adult movies about orbital stations, afaik. Just Moonraker and s1e01 of Expanse, so marginal this theme is for entertainment industry.

And you can't go there and back for a weekend to casino. Only fundamental and expensive vacation in hell,

[NSEP]

Multiple payloads?