SeaDog

In the JUICE mission details, getting too close to Jupiter is avoided because of radiation. It might be possible to do an aerobreak, but it might not be worth it because of the new mission specs that would require.

I agree that there are many armchair engineers who don't understand the difficulties of complex systems. My own field is more related to robotics and automatic control than rocketry, and I often feel the need to be the party pooper who tells everyone that the robots from for example boston dynamics arent really that revolutionary. They're basically just a development of 70's technology and that the real reason why our world isn't run by robots is simply because it's still insanely expensive to have robot do something that you can have a poor human do for one dollar per hour. We're absolutely not on the edge of some sci-fi robot revolution, sorry. At the same time though, I do think you have to realize that simply because major players don't do something doesn't mean it's impossible. Back to my own field of autonomous control, I think major car manufacturers are lazy when it comes autonomous vehicles and machines. I think the basic problem is that they're good at making cars and machines that are fun, safe and easy to drive. All manufacturers develop their machines around the operator. If you try to make self driving machines, you're bringing the operator out of the equation, and nothing scares the major manufacturers more than that, becuase building around the operator is what they think they're good at. So they only do halfhearted attempts, because they feel the idea is fundamentally bad. I've been in touch with the industry on these halfhearted attempts, and it's amazing to se a company try and do something that it actually doesn't believe in. They're doing a project mostly to show investors that it doesn't work. Mindboggling. That's not to say that all new ideas would work, but many companies are not really trying new stuff even though they say they do. And without having detailed knowledge about rocketry, I think the problem could be similar here. Major rocket developers feel that their strength lies in producing cheap rockets from serial production that need a bare minimum amount fuel. For reusability, you're strapping on extra fuel in order to reduce production series. That just does not fit in the mindsets of these developers, it seems stupid. It is the opposite of what they've been doing. So they try halfhearted stuff like reusable boosters, but they would never dare to do rockets that are designed to be reusable to begin with, because it would make their primary strenghts useless. It would be like admitting that what they've been doing before was leading down the wrong path.

And solar energy isn't free since solar panels don't grow on trees in space, and suitable asteroids are not free since they're rarely in earth orbit. Never the less, replace "free" with "potential" and the article has a bit of a point.

Well, KSP makes that seem a lot simpler than it actually is. I could possibly see them bringing the stage for interplanetary transfer seperately, but as for the habitable module, it's problably simpler to build a huge friggin rocket than it is to assemble it in orbit. Besides, with the reusability they're planning, they will have to build very large rockets for moderately sized launches anyway. They can then cancel the reusability for this particular launch, and that might easily be cheaper than orbital assembly. No, those calculations must be off. I think they're missing some aerobreaking or assuming full reusability will be used for that particular launch, which I don't think is the case. That's the catch here, a launch vehicle capable of sending 100 tons to mars surface would, when full reusability is used, be able to do smaller missions, such as probes to outer planet moons or large space telescopes. I even think a system like that could turn out cost effective for communications satellites to GEO. They are generally growing simply because one big satellite is cheaper to maintain than several small ones, and you can send several per launch.

Science has always been like this and always will be. I don't think its a big deal. It is a big problem in cultures where you burn people at the stake if the are proponents of some different paradigm, but we don't. You need paradigms in order for the scientific community to stay focused. Otherwise everyone would be busy studying crackpot articles in order to decide if they were onto something or not. The fact is also that due to the natural selection of paradigms, the current ones are usually pretty darn good paradigms. They effectively sort out the good ideas that can lead to useful science from the bad ideas that won't lead anywhere. Once they stop being good at that, they will soon be replaced.

I've seen this argument before, and I think its a bit strange. It doesn't seem to take into account how any industry develops. Just because you have a viable way of getting the materials back to earth does not mean you're able to flood the market. First, the platinum market is something like 200 tons per year. So at around 100 tons per year, I guess we could say we have flooded the market. But what would that require? It would require a mining operation that can produce 100 tons per year, or a few hundred kilograms per day. That in turn would likely require a similar amount of oxygen and hydrogen, most likely also mined, for transportation between asteroids and earth. Then you'd need the infrastructure for the transportation and the fuel mining and the platinum mining rig itself. It seems pretty obvious to me that this requires putting many hundreds if not thousands of tons into LEO. In other words, we're nowhere near having the infrastructure for that kind of scale to be plausible right away, no investor would go for a plan like that. Secondly, no one really knows how you'd build this system, so we'd need to try several different ways of doing this, and the first ones will probably not be profitable. The first attempts will be mostly about demonstrating the possibility and testing various systems. If profitability is unlikely, you'll want to keep the scale as small as possible. I'd say one ton per year is a very large scale for the first attempt. I think it would take atleast two decades between the one ton scale to the 100 ton scale. And all the while, people would still be unsure wether this was profitable in the long run or not, just like it is with regular mines. It would not be like the gold rushes in the americas, where people suddenly discover a resource that was cheaply available. Instead, it would be like modern mining operations, where everyone is mostly aware to some extent that the resources are there, but nothing happens until enough investors decide that it's worth the risk to try and develop it. This means it will be a very careful development (that might at any time stop to be resumed a few years later with new investors) with relatively little real competition because, frankly, few people believe in it. And again, the scale will be kept at a minimum, because not even the investors who do believe in it want to make the risk bigger than it has to be. So yeah, it's been said that this whole asteroid mining thing is fantasy and science fiction, and there's probably some truth in that. But the "flooding the market"-criticism is even more sci-fi in my opinion. I don't see how anyone who understands the mining industry or the space industry could believe THAT to be a significant problem here.