Nibb31
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Everything posted by Nibb31
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Have you looked at the rest of the forum? There are at least 3 new threads on it. No need to dig up yet another one.
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I would expect at least 10 tons of cargo for each human. Probably more for the basic infrastructure. Sending more than 10 people on the first couple of synods isn't realistic. An ECLSS capable or supporting 100 people for 120 days is sci-fi territory anyway?
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No, not really any. There really aren't many scenarios that wouldn't leave a few million survivors An asteroid big enough to completely obliterate the Earth is unlikely. The Earth has pretty much cleared its orbit and a rogue Moon-sized object on an intersecting orbit would have been detected by now. Any likely collision event with global repercussions would still give us plenty of time to react. The dinosaurs weren't wiped out overnight, it actually took decades or centuries to kill them off. A large number could make it through an event like that with current technology. So then it comes down to the expense/risk ratio for your backup plan, which is a classic insurance-type calculation. What proportion of your revenue are you willing to spend for a specific insurance policy that covers your house from something highly unlikely, like an alien invasion ? A handful of people on Mars isn't much more capable than a collapsed civlization on Earth. If Earth is destroyed, it won't be coming back. Backing up humanity is like backing up your family by sending your youngest child to live in Antarctica, just in case your country is wiped out by a zombie invasion. If your family dies, all you have achieved is that your child is alive in Antarctica (for now). There is no backup, and you're actually exposing your child to a much higher risk by sending her away than by keeping her with you.
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Lifting bodies are nothing new. I think what Firemetal is referring too is the huge window on the front and the magical solar arrays that fold out of nowhere. It definitely has a sense of "form defines function" instead of the opposite, like a Hollywood spaceship designed to look cool and then making up technobabble to justify the styling. And what sort of imperative would that be ? What would you actually save and for whom ? There is no single event that would make Earth less hospitable than Mars, or that would create population bottleneck smaller than the population that could be sustained on Mars. In fact, a Mars colony would be much easier to wipe out than 1% of Earth's population. The "backup of humanity" analogy simply doesn't work. It would be like backing up your PC to an old 3.5" floppy drive, and storing it on top of a loud speaker cabinet in the sunlight. And that 3.5" floppy would cost a decent portion of your revenue too.
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Musk said a lot of things. A lot of things in what was presented yesterday aren't practical. Expect a lot of changes in those plans in the years to come. He said that they could potentially bring the refueling process down to a couple of weeks, in which case the crew could hang around. He also said that if it took longer they could send up the crew separately. That could be on another crewed ITS, or they could use another tanker as a depot. There are plenty of options. One thing is for sure: the ITS can land on Earth and it's going to need maintenance. There is no reason to leave it to loiter on orbit in between synods.
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Because you might need the pad to launch a different booster. Or you might want to do some maintenance on it before launching it again.
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Why would they do that ? They can fill a tanker with another tanker, launch the crewed ITS, fill up on the full tanker, and go.
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Forget about the old american far west analogies. None of them apply here. It would be far easier, cheaper and safer to emigrate to a country without an oppressive law system. Or a slave to the corporations that keep you breathing on Mars.
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If you have an absolute imperative to settle another planet right now. Which we don't.
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I never said it will, neither did I say that I believe in Musk's vision or that much of the engineering showed yesterday is feasible. What I'm saying is that the number of engines alone is not a good metric to judge the potential reliability of a new vehicle.
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Reliability isn't necessarily linked to the number of engines. The N1 failures weren't directly linked to the number of engines. They were more related by the lack of proper testing and a shoddy working environment. 42 engines allows a certain number of engine failures and you should still be able to reach orbit. If one engine fails on an SLS, you lose a multi-billion dollar mission.
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Ownership implies government recognition. No government has the legal ability to recognize or uphold land property on Mars. Even gold and platinum are not worth transporting back to Earth. They are also orders of magnitude harder to extract in an extreme cold environment, near vacuum, atmosphere, from highly toxic regolith.
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I think the biggest issues would be cost, noise, and emissions. Even if the ICT costs the same as an A380, it burns hundreds of tons of LOX and Methane, it makes a racket, including a sonic boom, at it releases tons of CO2 on each flight. It might be fast, but it would be an order of magnitude more expensive than Concorde.
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And ?
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The fins already contain the landing gear. Jettison goes against the reusability requirement.
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Thousands of spaceships departing isn't going to happen anytime soon. That would be once a self-sustaining colony is well established. The first synods are going to be 1 or 2 ships. Also, he mentioned getting the total refueling process down to a couple of weeks, which means maybe 2 flights per week. I don't think anyone is envisioning a turnaround of a couple of hours.
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The whole point is that it isn't flat. The booster has no landing legs, but fins that guide the rocket into slots in a launch mount stand. You don't carry the landing legs, they stay on the ground and you "dock" with them. IMO, this concept won't survive the first couple of review cycles, for two reasons: There are too many faliure modes and a single mishap puts your entire program at risk. Miss the landing structure by a few feet, get a gust of wind during the last seconds, come in too hard, and you lose everything. Musk claims that LC-39A will be a single launch pad for F9, FH, and BFR. Having common trench design for F9 and FH is one thing, but including the launch/landing mount structure and a flame trench for the BFR (as well as acoustic suppression systems) at the same time is going to be complex. The benefits are simply not worth the risk.
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The volumes are uncomparable. Planes started off with 1 person, then 2, then 10, then 100, then 1000. Progress was incremental. No single aircraft has ever introduced more than one or two major technical innovations. There is also a lot of experimentation and testing involved, with prototypes, certification, regulations. Aviation didn't go from the Wright Flyer to the 747 in one step, which is what SpaceX wants to do.
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The only people likely to make any money are the Earth-based corporations who will be selling canned air, water, and supplies to the colonists. If Musk does get the price down to $200K (I don't believe that's possible), then actually staying alive on Mars is going to cost a lot more than the ticket to get there. Nobody on Mars is going to get rich. Think about it: Buy ticket to Mars. Fly to Mars Boots on Martian regolith with your suitcase ????? Profit. Steps 1 to 3 are actually the easiest part of this colonization thing. Everyone (including Musk) seems to be handwaving step 4 away as if it was a mere detail that we can figure out later.
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There is no LES. The idea is that it works or it doesn't, like an airliner. The difference is that airliners have millions of flight hours of experience. This is a whole new vehicle, designed with some very risky assumptions and (in my opinion) many new failure modes that don't seem to have been properly thought through.
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Given that both are powerpoint plans at this stage, it doesn't make a difference. I was talking about selling a DRM plan to Congress. Although there are still many details in SpaceX's plan that don't withstand casual scrutiny...
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In the light of Musk's announcement, a new Mars DRM involving multiple SLS launches is going to be hard sell...
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The booster could probably be SSTO, just like the F9 booster, could be an SSTO if you wanted to, with zero payload and no getting it back. What would be the point ?
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That sounds more like a place where you would send life convicts than where people would want to spend their life savings to go to. Unfortunately, it would be orders of magnitude more expensive than keeping those life convicts in prison. There probably wouldn't be much unskilled manual labor by the way. Most of it would be highly technical work. Outside construction work would be done with remote-control/automated equipment. EVAs would be limited to the strict minimum to preserve resources.
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There is no way you could keep 100 people alive on Mars with 1st Century technology. Who wants to go to Mars if there is no toilet paper, no toothpaste, and the only thing you eat is hydroponic tofu? Look at the effort it takes to keep a supply chain for 6 people on the ISS. Look at the effort it takes to sustain 50 people at Scott-Amundsen base. You litterally need major infrastructure just to keep a handful of people alive in hostile conditions, let alone millions.
