Blue Origin Thread (merged)

[_Augustus_]

1 minute ago, tater said:

Argh! Daughter out of school Monday for a teacher inservice day, and son out Thursday and Friday for the same at his school... I wish it was one of those days, I'd pull the other one out and drive down.

That's unfortunate...

[tater]

I might do it anyway... though I hate paying a zillion bucks a year for private school, then taking them out  .

I'll see what they think... daughter might not like the extra work she'd have to do, my son would be happy.

10:50 ET? Crap, that's 8:50 here in NM.  Means leaving maybe 4-4:30. Hmm.

[Mitchz95]

I do like the idea of colonizing Antarctica first. That would make a great proving ground for Mars.

Perhaps SpaceX will team up with other other organizations to set up some test sites and get more information about what a colony would be like. The Mars Society is already doing something like that in a few spots around the world, albeit on a much smaller "Apollo-style" scale.

Regarding the backup issue, it's not just planet-killing asteroids that could ruin things. Here's a Musk quote:

Quote

The spaceships from Earth could stop coming for other reasons—it could be WWIII, it could be that Earth becomes a religious state, it could be some gradual decline where Earth civilization just sinks under its own weight. At one point the Egyptians were able to build pyramids, and then they forgot how to do that. And then they forgot how to read hieroglyphics, until the Rosetta Stone. Rome as well—they had indoor plumbing, they had advanced aqueducts, and then that fell apart. China at one point had the world’s biggest fleet of sailing ships and they were sailing as far as Africa, then some crazy emperor came along and decided that was bad and had them all burnt. So you just don’t know what’s gonna happen. The key threshold to pass is the number of people and tons of cargo required to make things self-sustaining. And that’s probably something like a million people and probably something like 10-100 million tons of cargo.

The way things have been going lately, a "gradual decline" doesn't seem that unlikely. Even if it doesn't happen, it makes sense to start while we can.

Edited September 29, 2016 by Mitchz95

[tater]

The problem with "millions of people living and working in space" is that there is no reason for them to do so, and doing so becomes less and less required, even with valuable resources out there as robotics improve.

It's literally only "because it would be cool." Incidentally, this is the entire reason for manned spaceflight, period.

[blowfish]

1 hour ago, Exoscientist said:

Using the ideal delta-v number, the required delta-v to orbit is in the range of 30,000 ft/s, about 9,100 m/s; so this value is well above that.

Correct, the numbers I gave are pure speed, which is not the same as delta-v expended.  A lot is lost to gravity, especially on the first stage, and a bit is lost to drag and to steering.

[ment18]

So I did math about the ISRU.  CO2 should be easy to get because it is in the atmosphere.  However, the hydrogen must be obtained by mining water.  To make 600t of fuel, they would have to mine about 270t of water to get 30t of hydrogen.  Thats about 300m^3 of ice.  6.6m cube.

Or they could bring 30t of hydrogen with them.  Cut into cargo but makes ISRU a lot simpler.

[evileye.x]

1 hour ago, Nefrums said:

There will be a third type of ship launched from the top of that booster. one with a cargo hold like the space shuttle, but bigger.

With 360t cargo to LEO

That one is going to make all the profits needed to finance the rest.

How 360t cargo to LEO can make profit? Unless you have tons of commsats in one go...

[Green Baron]

8 minutes ago, evileye.x said:

How 360t cargo to LEO can make profit? Unless you have tons of commsats in one go...

The presentation mentions how they finance it. SpaceX is not after the direct money with this project. But it's still a few years ahead, let them find the cause of Falcon 9s second stages anomaly first ;-)

[_Augustus_]

2 hours ago, tater said:

I might do it anyway... though I hate paying a zillion bucks a year for private school, then taking them out  .

I'll see what they think... daughter might not like the extra work she'd have to do, my son would be happy.

10:50 ET? Crap, that's 8:50 here in NM.  Means leaving maybe 4-4:30. Hmm.

I have a weird school program where I only have one day in-person a week, then another day of online classes, and I wish I lived in NM and that the flight wasn't on a Tuesday so I could go see it.

4:30 AM? I wake up earlier than that for astronomical observing.

Edited September 29, 2016 by _Augustus_

[_Augustus_]

1 hour ago, evileye.x said:

How 360t cargo to LEO can make profit? Unless you have tons of commsats in one go...

NASA, ESA, etc. would die for using that for probes. Just think - you could have a FREAKING PLUTO ORBITER IN ONE LAUNCH.

Interstellar missions, KBO/SDO/Oort flybys and orbiters, giant 10-ton gas giant missions, you name it.

Oh, and 360t is only if you re-use it. If you burn through all the fuel it's 500.

Yeah, and there's also launching 30 big comm sats at a time, which would be cool too.

Edited September 29, 2016 by _Augustus_

[tater]

11 minutes ago, _Augustus_ said:

I have a weird school program where I only have one day in-person a week, then another day of online classes, and I wish I lived in NM and that the flight wasn't on a Tuesday so I could go see it.

4:30 AM? I wake up earlier than that for astronomical observing.

Leaving by 4. Means getting the kids up earlier, then driving at an hour where only drunks are on the road  .

[_Augustus_]

Just now, tater said:

Leaving by 4. Means getting the kids up earlier, then driving at an hour where only drunks are on the road  .

Yeah, I wake up at 3 sometimes. TBH there isn't really anyone on the road before 5AM, the drunks go home by 1:30-2.

We need to stop derailing this thread, though.

I'm certainly excited about the launch...

[tater]

If I can figure out a way to drive down there, I'll certainly post any pics I take. I guess I could grab a buddy, and not take the kids (my 10 year old would not be pleased with that).

[ISE]

So anyway if this isn't the first of its kind (and please correct me to the right place if I'm not there already) then let this be the space thread for updates of anything spacex regarding musk, dragon, falcon9, or anything having to do with the company itself. If nobody corrects me about this, then I will be constantly updating, editing, and posting info regarding spacex. 

 

This is in a way the draft of thread, and if I'm giving no reason to stop this attempt, I will make this thread a great place and reliable updated area for the subject of spaceX. Again that is if nobody else has made one before me. Thanks stay tuned or not, we will see what happens.

[A Fuzzy Velociraptor]

The SpaceX reusibility and recovery thread a little further down already pretty much serves that purpose.

[tater]

 

[ment18]

1 hour ago, _Augustus_ said:

NASA, ESA, etc. would die for using that for probes. Just think - you could have a FREAKING PLUTO ORBITER IN ONE LAUNCH.

Interstellar missions, KBO/SDO/Oort flybys and orbiters, giant 10-ton gas giant missions, you name it.

Oh, and 360t is only if you re-use it. If you burn through all the fuel it's 500.

Yeah, and there's also launching 30 big comm sats at a time, which would be cool too.

Those devices cost a lot of money to develop.  Even if launches were free, the cost of the satellites themselves are still quite high.

[wumpus]

25 minutes ago, ment18 said:

Those devices cost a lot of money to develop.  Even if launches were free, the cost of the satellites themselves are still quite high.

How much of a satellite's cost is due to weight minimization?  If you could simply stroll over to the Digikey website and build your satellite out of off-the-shelf parts (plenty of parts from newegg and microcenter) and simply weld and enormous heatsink/radiator to it, your costs are likely to go down.  You would also presumably need multiple birds in flight because your reliability would be nothing like the billion dollar birds in use.

This almost certainly isn't an option for GSO satellites: there are only 120 slots or so around the equator, and most of them are over empty ocean.  The ones that are "owned" aren't going to be wasted on cheap satellites (although they might wind up being *large* high reliability monsters).

[Kryten]

6 minutes ago, wumpus said:

How much of a satellite's cost is due to weight minimization?  If you could simply stroll over to the Digikey website and build your satellite out of off-the-shelf parts (plenty of parts from newegg and microcenter) and simply weld and enormous heatsink/radiator to it, your costs are likely to go down.  

There's very little in a real sat you can buy off-the-shelf, they're not just computers in boxes. Good luck getting travelling-wave tube transponders on newegg.

[wumpus]

22 hours ago, Nibb31 said:

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.

They may have to,  but they also might simply throw away a "used up" ITS after n flights.  Perhaps some modules will have longer lifecycles than others and they will detach and deorbit certain modules and replace them, leaving other older parts to go back to Mars.  Certainly, the lion's share of the cost will getting the thing from Earth to LEO, so they don't want to do that any more times than necessary (regardless of how many times the BFR can be reused).

Landing a ITS on Earth seems like the option they will avoid as long as they can.

[magnemoe]

11 hours ago, evileye.x said:

After watching the video, I think project is quite unrealistic even by KSP standarts.

Especially all-in-one SSTO and Mars to Earth transfer spaceship... With casinos and hookers aboard  

And transfer for 30-60 days - non Hohmanns tranfers -  what amount of delta-v this thing must have?

Don't let my kerbal's know the features on human interplanetary ships. 
30 days to Mars is very hard, an decent fusion drive or an orion I would say, forget nerva or anything weaker. 

[Wjolcz]

I think I remember reading somewhere that they want to replace the nine Merlin engines with one Raptor engine in the first stage?

[sojourner]

No. they don't. They love redundancy of multiple engines. Going to one engine goes against their design ethos.

[sojourner]

The hard part is all that acid.

 

Oops. this was in response to something much earlier in the thread.

Edited September 29, 2016 by sojourner

[DerekL1963]

36 minutes ago, Veeltch said:

I think I remember reading somewhere that they want to replace the nine Merlin engines with one Raptor engine in the first stage?

On Falcon 9 cores?  I don't think a Raptor can throttle that low, I don't think it can throttle at all.  Even if it could, staged combustion engines have nasty startup transients.