Blue Origin Thread (merged)

[munlander1]

Thanks

 

Edited February 26, 2017 by munlander1
Wrong emoji

[Nibb31]

Instead of a manned EM-1, they should do an EFT-2 with a Delta IVH and a systems-complete Orion with full ECLSS. No need to man-rate the D IVH:

• Fly unmanned in LEO for a week, including propulsion tests and maneuvers.
• Dock to the ISS, be boarded by crew and tested for a week in LEO.
• Undock and free-fly for a week, including manned propulsion tests and maneuvers.
• Dock to the ISS, disembark crew.
• Undock and reenter.

You might even be able to squeeze an EVA from Orion in the schedule somewhere.

That plan would need some logistics, including having the two fully-functional IDAs installed at the ISS, and rotating the astronauts trained on Orion into an ISS expedition. But it would be cheaper and safer than a manned EM-1.

Of course, the long pole here is a "systems-complete Orion" with a functional ECLSS. I doubt that will be ready before EM-2 anyway, so speculation about a manned EM-1 is a bit moot.

Edited February 26, 2017 by Nibb31

[KSK]

1 hour ago, Nibb31 said:

Instead of a manned EM-1, they should do an EFT-2 with a Delta IVH and a systems-complete Orion with full ECLSS. No need to man-rate the D IVH. Orion could docked to the ISS, be boarded by crew and tested for a week in LEO, doing various manoeuvers, disembarked crew at the ISS again, and reentered. The ISS would be a safe-haven if something went wrong with the vehicle.

That plan would need some logistics, including having the two fully-functional IDAs installed at the ISS, and rotating the astronauts trained on Orion into an ISS expedition.

In many ways I think that would be much cooler than the Apollo 8 lite mission being proposed for EM-1. To me, using the ISS as a genuine space base to conduct orbital missions and test flights from sounds a lot more futuristic than a free-return around the Moon. The latter would be more visually impressive for the general public though I suspect.

[KSK]

8 hours ago, Veeltch said:

It probably is.

What's the point of growing crystals anyway?

In principle, to study how microgravity affects their growth, both directly and through other effects caused by microgravity e.g.  lack of convective cooling. A lot of technologically important materials (including metals) are crystalline or polycrystalline - can they be engineered to have new and useful properties by growing them in zero-G? 

More helpfully for space industry fans - are any of those properties useful enough to warrant scaling up space-based manufacturing?

 

Edited February 26, 2017 by KSK

[DerekL1963]

47 minutes ago, KSK said:

More helpfully for space industry fans - are any of those properties useful enough to warrant scaling up space-based manufacturing?

More accurately - will any of the resulting materials have sufficient market value and demand to recoup the enormous costs of establishing and operating a production facility?  It doesn't matter how useful the material is if you can't produce it at a cost the market will bear.

[Nibb31]

And that is the whole point. SpaceX has been offering DragonLab as a commercial proposal for nearly a decade now, and it hasn't found any interest in the market. The cost of buying rack space on a DragonLab flight is one thing. The cost of developing, miniaturizing and automating a microgravity wafer or crystal production facility to fly on it is probably much higher. The economics simply don't work out.

4 hours ago, SargeRho said:

No, the wafers are just one step in the production of microprocessors. They're cut into much smaller pieces, the actual processors, after the etching, etc., But you can fit many more processors onto a wafer that's twice as big as one could be on Earth, drastically reducing the price, or making it drastically more profitable per ingot.

Only if you obtain the same quality and rejection rate. To produce those wafers in microgravity, you need to completely automate the manufacturing and quality control process and make it fit on a spacecraft. Building a manned space station and sending factory workers into space is simply never going to be competitive.

However, once you have developed that level of automation and miniaturization, you could apply the exact same techniques to your conventional production process. Instead of sending a trailer-sized wafer factory to orbit, shut down your factory, fire your employees, and park a dozen of them in the parking lot. This will also drastically reduce costs, regardless of wafer size, and make microgravity production less attractive. 

 

Edited February 26, 2017 by Nibb31

[Lukaszenko]

On 2/3/2017 at 3:58 PM, DerekL1963 said:

How the hell do I get rid of this quote? I'm not trying to quote anybody.

The size of wafers is nowhere near limited by gravity yet. It is limited by economics. The amount of chips you can print on a wafer is only one ever-decreasing part of the overall cost of a chip, and it just isn't worth it anymore to go larger. To go larger AND do it in space would be economic suicide.

Edited February 26, 2017 by Lukaszenko

[tater]

7 hours ago, Nibb31 said:

Instead of a manned EM-1, they should do an EFT-2 with a Delta IVH and a systems-complete Orion with full ECLSS. No need to man-rate the D IVH:

• Fly unmanned in LEO for a week, including propulsion tests and maneuvers.
• Dock to the ISS, be boarded by crew and tested for a week in LEO.
• Undock and free-fly for a week, including manned propulsion tests and maneuvers.
• Dock to the ISS, disembark crew.
• Undock and reenter.

You might even be able to squeeze an EVA from Orion in the schedule somewhere.

That plan would need some logistics, including having the two fully-functional IDAs installed at the ISS, and rotating the astronauts trained on Orion into an ISS expedition. But it would be cheaper and safer than a manned EM-1.

Of course, the long pole here is a "systems-complete Orion" with a functional ECLSS. I doubt that will be ready before EM-2 anyway, so speculation about a manned EM-1 is a bit moot.

I agree. As a PR thing, I think that the Moon is much more interesting, but from a testing standpoint, this is exactly what I was thinking. It seems like their current plan results in flying EM-1, but wasting the mission by not actually testing the actual spacecraft.

[YNM]

I think the whole chip-growing talks should be moved to another topic ? This ?

[wumpus]

On 2/24/2017 at 5:16 PM, SuperFastJellyfish said:

I thought they said that they weren't going to try to land the center booster anymore.  Did that change, or are you just speculating here?

I may have been  guilty of much of the "can't land the center booster" speculation.  It certainly will have to stage after providing a lot more delta-v to the upper stage, presumably going over mach 10 (well, if it were in the atmosphere) during separation for a 25 ton payload and faster with more mass.  I'm curious to see how much they slow it down with the back burn (and thus how much fuel they hold in reserve to do so).  I'd also expect a three engine landing if they are even considering doing that anymore (it may have damaged the booster they tried it with too much).

Spacex publishes costs for full recovery [attempts] and masses for non-recovery launches.  I wouldn't be surprised if the cheapest launch costs/ton for Spacex would be a disposable center stage with just the right amount of mass (a fairly unlikely case, but presumably there would be a considerable range below that which couldn't be recovered at all so would take the disposable route and possibly "spare payload").

I expect the "fully disposable falcon heavy" was just thrown out there for the maximum possible mass to orbit.  Landing the side boosters won't lower the cargo rating enough that they will ever launch a rocket that they couldn't recover the side boosters.

[softweir]

They don't have to make wafers in space. All they need to do is make crystals, which are large, solid lumps which would be quite able to survive reentry. Then, once returned to Earth, they can be shipped to a wafer fabrication plant and sawn into wafers, which would be mounted on supports that would stop them snapping under their own weight.

At present, silicon crystals are made by a process of "drawing". Silicon is melted in a crucible and a crystal is dipped into it and then slowly raised out. As the crystal is lifted, fresh silicon solidifies onto the crystal. The crystal has to be kept just cool enough that fresh silicon can solidify on it, and the crucible has to be kept just hot enough that the silicon doesn't solidify too fast so that as the seed crystal is drawn out, a column of the exact diameter can be formed. If the silicon hardens too fast or too slow then that can create flaws in its structure that would ruin any chips made from the flawed areas of silicon. Tiny fluctuations in temperature can make it very difficult to control the process. Even vibrations can have untoward effects.

Once the silicon crystal has been made, it is then sawn into thin sheets (the wafers) which are checked for detectable flaws, polished and surfaced. The sheets are mounted on supports to protect them during further processing.

a big problem in the drawing process is the effect that convection in the silicon melt has on the crystal. A convection current can force silicon melt against the growing-surface of the crystal in such a way that a new crystal with different alignment can form, thus creating a flaw. The flaw may be small, thus causing a few dozen chips to fail, or it may be large enough that it extends the length of the crystal effectively splitting it into two crystals, and making it useless.

It is believed that growing silicon crystals in microgravity will prevent convection, thus making it easier to create one, large, unflawed crystal. It would require a different crystallization technology to operate, as thew drawing process is fundamentally dependant on gravity stopping the melt sticking to the crystal in one big lump as it is drawn out. What that technology will turn out to be is anybody's guess, though I am sure a lot of academics have their own ideas about that!

Another technology which would benefit from microgravity crystallization is the creation of single-crystal turbine blades for gas turbine engines such as used in high-performance jet engines. Here the crystal is formed out of a different metal, but convection in the melt can create unwanted flaws that can either be expensive (the flaw is detected by X-ray and the blade trashed) or dangerous when the flaw goes undetected and the blade disintegrates in flight.

The economics are the sticking point: manufacturers wouldn't want to pay 100 million of any currency to get a larger, purer crystal, they need the cost per unit to be only a few thousand more. For space fabrication to make sense, launches and retrieval have to get a lot cheaper. SpaceX and other companies could make a lot of money if they can get their costs down, and if the assumptions about the benefits of microgravity fabrication turn out to be correct!

[tater]

A question out there for anyone who keeps up with the specifics more than I do:

Is man-rating SLS/Orion any different than man-rating Dragon 2, or CST-100? When, for example, is the max-Q LES test for Orion? They did a pad abort test at White Sands, but I cannot find a video of a max-q abort, nor any indication of a launch before EM-1---or did I miss it somehow?

They have to do this, right, or do only Boeing and SpaceX (and any other commercial crew vessels) have to do this?

[Mitchz95]

Falcon Heavy? ITS? Spacesuits?

[_Augustus_]

12 minutes ago, Mitchz95 said:

Falcon Heavy? ITS? Spacesuits?

Falcon Heavy.

[munlander1]

12 minutes ago, Mitchz95 said:

Falcon Heavy? ITS? Spacesuits?

Funny, I was just reading about that. Is it going to be on Twitter?

[CatastrophicFailure]

14 minutes ago, Mitchz95 said:

Falcon Heavy? ITS? Spacesuits?

(sorry, couldn't resist)

No but seriously, my money's on Falcon heavy and another disappointing delay. I really really hope I'm wrong. 

[Rakaydos]

57 minutes ago, CatastrophicFailure said:

No but seriously, my money's on Falcon heavy and another disappointing delay. I really really hope I'm wrong. 

Falcon heavy is finally, officially, going to launch in FIVE months!

[Nothalogh]

2 minutes ago, Rakaydos said:

Falcon heavy is finally, officially, going to launch in FIVE months!

With a payload of Half-Life 3

[CatastrophicFailure]

Interesting side note: according to this article, the last SpaceX launch went up with an experimental automatic self-destruct system. Actually a really fascinating concept that should help speed up the cadence of launches.

But, I was struck by a certain sense of... irony. 

[kerbiloid]

Quote

The on-board safety system, relying on Global Positioning System satellite navigation data, replaces decades-old radars and tracking equipment that required military officers to manually send commands to destroy errant boosters, and their human and robot passengers, before they could threaten people and property.

To help it get man-rated.

Spoiler

 

[tater]

Apparently the max q abort test will be before EM-2 using a peacekeeper missile. 

How do they get their 1:500 loss rate numbers (requirement for commercial crew) from SLS after just one flight to man rate the LV (that's 4 times better than Shuttle managed, up and down).

[kerbiloid]

1 hour ago, tater said:

Apparently the max q abort test will be before EM-2 using a peacekeeper missile. 

Launching a 15 t craft with a 4 t payload rocket?

[Nibb31]

1 hour ago, tater said:

How do they get their 1:500 loss rate numbers (requirement for commercial crew) from SLS after just one flight to man rate the LV (that's 4 times better than Shuttle managed, up and down).

LOC/LOM rates are calculated from the failure rates of individual subsystems, which are calculated from the failure rates of components, etc...

Doing all these calculations is the major component of "man rating" a vehicle.

Edited February 27, 2017 by Nibb31

[magnemoe]

2 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

To help it get man-rated.

  Reveal hidden contents

 

If the self destruct system activates it would first trigger the launch escape system. 
If crew trigger LES the rocket should self destroy too.
 

[Streetwind]

I don't think it's Falcon Heavy. What are they gonna say? "Yeah ummm we're testing a side core right now". Yeah, those who care already knew that, and those who don't know will be mildly whelmed at best. Even a launch date would not really be worth pre-announcing the announcement; Elon would just write a tweet saying "FH NET 05/27 w/dummy payload" or something to that effect. He's announced more important things with less flourish in the past.

No, there is marketing going on here. PR stuff. Something to catch the attention and imagination of the broad public. And that can only happen when it involves manned spaceflight. So I think it will have to be revealing their space suit. It fits especially well considering Boeing revealed theirs just last month, with major media buzz and celebrity participation. It's a great way for SpaceX to say that "hey guys, we're actually just as far as them, if not farther ahead!"