Blue Origin Thread (merged)

[Northstar1989]

31 minutes ago, tater said:

Yeah, I have no idea what they would do to test. I suppose you could send a small-scale test up in a couple Dragons. Then just pump cryos back and forth on orbit for a long time, and at least see what the failure modes look like.

Wouldn't take long for the cryos to heat up, vaporize, and explode the tanks due to overpressurization doing that (or simply all boil off, if you vented the vapors quickly enough).  You'd need to simulate an actively-cooled fuel system to realistically work out the issues...

 

Regards,

Northstar

Edited October 11, 2016 by Northstar1989

[tater]

11 minutes ago, Northstar1989 said:

T(1)  Doctors prescribe antibiotics like candy, even to diseases they KNOW are viral (pharma company "gifts" might be related to this in some cases, shutting up whiny mothers is in others).

The current incentives are entirely wrong, at least in the US. The ACA links government set reimbursement (which private insurance contracts are pegged to) to patient satisfaction surveys now. Don't give a script with a visit, the doc gets dinged, then all their payments in the future drop. Don't give the drug-seeking patient meds... ditto. As in most such customer service situations, disgruntled people are vastly more likely to answer the surveys. Antibiotics in places like India are inf act over the counter, and not proscribed empirically at all, you take what your neighbor said they took when they were sick. Scary. My wife did biology (PhD), then med school, so she's down on the GPs throwing antibiotics at people. She uses them sparingly, for actual organisms she has identified. 

11 minutes ago, Northstar1989 said:

(2)  People don't take their entire course of antibiotics to completion (they stupidly try to "save" some for if they get sick again), leading to the survival and spread of resistant strains.

Patients are indeed dumb. Profoundly so in many cases (my wife is a surgeon).

If they did this people would complain about expense, and say that "big pharma" was paying off the docs, they can't win.

11 minutes ago, Northstar1989 said:

(4) Farm-factories routinely make prophylactic use of antibiotics in crowded animal living sutuations, at low doses.  This leads to the rapid development and spread of progressively more resistant strains.

This is a huge problem, and is indeed the large majority of antibiotics used by mass as I understand it.

11 minutes ago, Northstar1989 said:

All of these issues can be solved.  And bacteria with antibiotic-resistance genes lose them over time and generations (many bacteria reproduce as often as once a minute- so a single day can represent literally thousands of generations for natural selection to do its work) in the absence of antibiotic exposure, as there is a fitness penalty to carrying around useless genes in bacteria... (bacteria face heavy selection pressure to develop and maintain small grnomes, as they can be more quickly replicated...)

If we take needed precautions and invest in the development of new antibiotics while the prevalence of resistance to older types declines as they fall out of use (we will eventually need to cycle back to them), and are careful to control the spread of multi-resistant strains, then the end of effective antibiotics shouldn't be an issue.

Solving these issues is certainly possible, but so are farming issues to improve efficiencies there, as well. If you pick a baseline where "people find a way to make it work" then neither antibiotics, nor farming limitations have much bearing on carrying capacity until the numbers are vastly higher than something like 12-15B, IMO. 

8 minutes ago, Northstar1989 said:

Wouldn't take long for the cryos to heat up and explode doing that.  You'd need to simulate an actively-cooled fuel system to realistically work out the issues...

Yeah, they'd have to have a scaled testbed, including cooling (they could perhaps deploy a sun shield from the truck, too).

[Northstar1989]

9 minutes ago, tater said:

The current incentives are entirely wrong, at least in the US. The ACA links government set reimbursement (which private insurance contracts are pegged to) to patient satisfaction surveys now. Don't give a script with a visit, the doc gets dinged, then all their payments in the future drop. Don't give the drug-seeking patient meds... ditto. As in most such customer service situations, disgruntled people are vastly more likely to answer the surveys. Antibiotics in places like India are inf act over the counter, and not proscribed empirically at all, you take what your neighbor said they took when they were sick. Scary. My wife did biology (PhD), then med school, so she's down on the GPs throwing antibiotics at people. She uses them sparingly, for actual organisms she has identified. 

Patients are indeed dumb. Profoundly so in many cases (my wife is a surgeon).

If they did this people would complain about expense, and say that "big pharma" was paying off the docs, they can't win.

This is a huge problem, and is indeed the large majority of antibiotics used by mass as I understand it.

Solving these issues is certainly possible, but so are farming issues to improve efficiencies there, as well. If you pick a baseline where "people find a way to make it work" then neither antibiotics, nor farming limitations have much bearing on carrying capacity until the numbers are vastly higher than something like 12-15B, IMO. 

Yeah, they'd have to have a scaled testbed, including cooling (they could perhaps deploy a sun shield from the truck, too).

And what about the collapse of the biosphere due to population pressures on the envuronment and global-warming?  Eventually, humans are going to come smashing into one limit or another if we just keep trying to cram more poeople into our one planet rather than seeking to colonize the solar system...

Also, very cool that your wife's a surgeon with a PhD (where did she get her MD?).  I'm currently applying to medical schools myself, and have a Master's (long story there- but the reasons I went for a Master's instead of a PhD were mostly fiscal)- but medical schools are *ungodly* picky these days... (comes from not growing class-sizes to meet population expansion, and hospitals trying to replace MD's with PA's and Nurse-Practitioners rather than pressuring med schools to turn out more doctors...)

 

Regards,

Northstar

Edited October 11, 2016 by Northstar1989

[DerekL1963]

11 minutes ago, Northstar1989 said:

And what about the collapse of the biosphere due to population pressures on the envuronment and global-warming?  Eventually, humans are going to come smashing into one limit or another if we just keep trying to cram more poeople into our one planet rather than seeking to colonize the solar system...

We aren't "trying to cram more people into one planet", all the demographics show the numbers leveling out in a century or not too far above current levels.  Seriously the "Club of Rome" carp you're spouting has been discredited for decades now.  Not to mention that "colonizing the system" will do pretty much nothing to reduce numbers on Earth - short of dedicating a substantial fraction of the world's industrial capacity (which isn't going to happen) we simply can't move enough people fast enough.

[CatastrophicFailure]

Oh for Jeb's flarping sake can y'all please take it to a different thread, already? Or better yet, to PM's.  This whole mess has gone SO far off topic it's beyond absurdity!

 

[Ten Key]

Remember when this thread was about rockets and spacecraft? That was pretty neat. 

[Northstar1989]

13 minutes ago, DerekL1963 said:

We aren't "trying to cram more people into one planet", all the demographics show the numbers leveling out in a century or not too far above current levels.  Seriously the "Club of Rome" carp you're spouting has been discredited for decades now.  Not to mention that "colonizing the system" will do pretty much nothing to reduce numbers on Earth - short of dedicating a substantial fraction of the world's industrial capacity (which isn't going to happen) we simply can't move enough people fast enough.

I never said that the human population would continue growing (although I posit things will end in disaster if it does) or that colonizing Mars would substantially alleviate population pressures on Earth...

I posited that having more people would create piles of new intellectual property, scientific discoveries, etc. and then compared the cost/benefits to supporting those people on Earth vs. colonizing Mars.  My point was and is that colonizing Mars is the best way to expand the human population size, and therefore there IS a strong economic motivation to develop Musk's dreamed-of self-sufficient Mars colony.

See, not off-topic at all.  

 

Regards,

Northstar

[Technical Ben]

8 hours ago, tater said:

http://spacenews.com/shotwell-says-spacex-homing-in-on-cause-of-falcon-9-pad-explosion/

 

Dunno what a "business process issue" is, but good to see them making progress.

"Put the pump pressure up to 77? Ok then..."

"Oh, did you check if that was a 11 or a 77 on the handwriting from the office, oh did you double check and have two people confirming?"

"Nah, not enough time..."

That's the kind thing a "change in business practice" would need.

[CatastrophicFailure]

2 hours ago, Ten Key said:

Remember when this thread was about rockets and spacecraft? That was pretty neat. 

I know, right? Speaking of cryogens, some folks need to take a page from a certain chilly blonde and LET. IT. GO!

Hmm. Maybe if I start singing. That usually clears a room pretty quick. 

1 hour ago, Technical Ben said:

"Put the pump pressure up to 77? Ok then..."

"Oh, did you check if that was a 11 or a 77 on the handwriting from the office, oh did you double check and have two people confirming?"

"Nah, not enough time..."

That's the kind thing a "change in business practice" would need.

That's what it sounds like to me. Nothing physical was "wrong" with any component, there was an error in the filling process. These supercooled fuels are still pretty new tech. Gleaned the following off a comment thread elsewhere, if accurate it puts it understandable terms:

 

Quote

SpaceX was tweaking countdown loading timelines to add hold time capacilities when using Subcooled LOX. combination & timing of warm high pressure Helium loading coinciding with subcooled LOX loading caused a harmonic resonance within the He system. this is similar to hydraulic water-hammer effect. just like the acoustic hum & vibration when you run water in your home at certain rates or turn off water too fast

 

[Technical Ben]

Sounds interesting... so the wobble Kraken hit?

Back in my attempt in KSP, I've decided to scavenge parts from the cargo lander (which could theoretically return same as the crew lander) for pre-fab accommodation. So while the crew lander would return after some time, a couple of cargo landers would drop part of their outer shell to use as buildings.

[tater]

Wonder if they can return to flight and go every 2 weeks and fix this backlog issue.

[Northstar1989]

7 hours ago, CatastrophicFailure said:

I know, right? Speaking of cryogens, some folks need to take a page from a certain chilly blonde and LET. IT. GO!

Hmm. Maybe if I start singing. That usually clears a room pretty quick. 

That's what it sounds like to me. Nothing physical was "wrong" with any component, there was an error in the filling process. These supercooled fuels are still pretty new tech. Gleaned the following off a comment thread elsewhere, if accurate it puts it understandable terms:

 

 

Gotta fill the wait until the next launch somehow.  

Seriously, though, this thread has been subject to countless merges.  It's not fair to ask me to go off and discuss other SpaceX things in another thread if every time I do the moderators just merge it in here and I get berated by you for going "off-topic" again...

I think I've said my piece on the SpaceX plans anyways.  There's really not much to say besides this- when I do out the math, it still looks like Musk's Mars plan will end up with costs about an order of magnitude too high, if it even works.  None of the ideas I suggested will shave more than 10 or 20% off the costs, in a best-case scenario, and a lot less if R&D costs end up being high for them...

So, it's clear to me that Musk will either (a) have to give up on his plan when costs turn out too high for most people to afford a ticket *and* all the cargo they need to syrvivebon Mars (b) Musk will realize before it is too late that his estimates of what people are willing to pay are too high, and come up with new, technological cost-saving measures, (c) he won't, and the colony will fail either due to insufficient colonists or because too many of those who go to Mars die there due to bringing inadequate amounts of cargo, or (d) Musk will seek government funding to make up the difference, like in the "public-private partnerships" he hinted at in his presentation.  And all that assumes the ITS even works, which I'd say is a 50-50 proposition, and only that knowing SpaceX's superb history and determination.

Guess what options I'm hoping/praying for?

 

Regards,

Northstar

Edited October 12, 2016 by Northstar1989

[insert_name]

 

Could ITS  be used as an asteroid hauler? How much cargo can it landed on earth with?

[Streetwind]

Well, it has 9 Raptor engines. Leaving out different expansion ratios for the moment for simplicity, let's just go with a flat 3 MN thrust for each Raptor.

To comfortably execute a propulsive landing, you probably want a TWR of at least 2. It can be done with less, but it's impractical and less fuel efficient, based on my own experience in KSP.

In order for 9 Raptor engines to develop a TWR of 2.0 at touchdown under Earth standard gravity, the vessel is allowed to weigh about 1376 tons. After subtracting your best guess for the currently unknown dry mass of the spacecraft, you get a rough over-the-thumb idea of the possible payload it can land on Earth. This 'payload' would be further reduced by the fuel mass required to perform the landing.

If you desire to have a minimum TWR of 3.0, this mass allowance further decreases to 918 tons minus dry mass minus fuel.

Edited October 12, 2016 by Streetwind

[Red Iron Crown]

1 minute ago, Streetwind said:

Well, it has 9 Raptor engines. Leaving out different expansion ratios for the moment for simplicity, let's just go with a flat 3 MN thrust for each Raptor.

To comfortably execute a propulsive landing, you probably want a TWR of at least 2. It can be done with less, but it's impractical and less fuel efficient, based on my own experience in KSP.

In order for 9 Raptor engines to develop a TWR of 2.0 at touchdown at Earth standard gravity, the vessel is allowed to weigh about 1376 tons. After subtracting your best guess for the currently unknown dry mass off the spacecraft, you get a rough over-the-thumb idea of the possible payload it can land on Earth.

There's some prospective numbers for the craft here: http://www.spacex.com/sites/spacex/files/mars_presentation.pdf

Only the three atmo-optimized Raptors are used for landings, so about 9MN of thrust available. The dry mass for the ITS is listed at 150t, so a bit over 300t of cargo and propellant could be returned with TWR 2.

[shynung]

2 hours ago, Red Iron Crown said:

There's some prospective numbers for the craft here: http://www.spacex.com/sites/spacex/files/mars_presentation.pdf

Only the three atmo-optimized Raptors are used for landings, so about 9MN of thrust available. The dry mass for the ITS is listed at 150t, so a bit over 300t of cargo and propellant could be returned with TWR 2.

And he funds it by... stealing underpants?

[Red Iron Crown]

Just now, shynung said:

And he funds it by... stealing underpants?

Have to agree that the financial side of the presentation was incredibly wanting. Lots of handwaving to get the cost where they wanted it (amortizing booster cost over 1000 launches, really?).

[shynung]

9 minutes ago, Red Iron Crown said:

Have to agree that the financial side of the presentation was incredibly wanting. Lots of handwaving to get the cost where they wanted it (amortizing booster cost over 1000 launches, really?).

True. Maybe he plans to redirect some profits from Tesla to fund this project?

Also, their timeline states that Red Dragon will be ready before this. Maybe they plan to use that as a learning tool, the way they used Grasshopper to learn how to land rocket stages?

[Diche Bach]

20 hours ago, Ten Key said:

Remember when this thread was about rockets and spacecraft? That was pretty neat. 

Well, to be fair . . . the thread is about SpaceX and the mission of that organization is not simply to "build rockets and spacecraft" but to build those things as part of a much broader vision, which I understand to be "to do what is possible to promote and accelerate the evolution of humanity into a spacefaring species." The fact that this organization has such laudable--and controversial goals--inevitably will lead many of the purely technical discussions away from the engineering and technical science and back toward the social/biological sciences as well as philosophy and politics on which the SpaceX vision might be founded.

However, I'm here to help: I created a thread that is more or less begging for this type of contentious discussion and I encourage any and all of you who want to get down and dirty and talk about controversial stuff like population pressure, climate change, terraforming, cost-efficiency, or how many gerbil wheels it would take to power a Mars-based tacan antennae to come join us in the Prospecting the Solar System thread.

Elon and his visions/plans were one of the main things I had in mind when I started that thread, but what I'd like the thread to be is: less of either a (a) criticize else (b) laud Elon/SpaceX/Rocket design nest, and more of an open-minded discussion of the broad visionary scheme that Elon and those of the same ilk have expressed, including the extent to which their visions are meritorious or wanting.

[DerekL1963]

53 minutes ago, shynung said:

True. Maybe he plans to redirect some profits from Tesla to fund this project?

If Tesla ever becomes profitable, and that point is a number of years off even if they didn't have a significant debt load.  (AIUI, Tesla doesn't even had a positive cash flow at the moment.*)  Solar City is currently his only profitable enterprise, and it's suspected in some quarters that it was recently purchased by Tesla to tap it's cash flow.

* Yes they recently came into a lot of cash from deposits on the Model 3, but unless they're getting a bit dodgy with their accounting that has to balanced in the books by the cost of the future commitments represented by those deposits.  (That's how my wife, an accountant, reads the situation.)

[Diche Bach]

8 minutes ago, DerekL1963 said:

If Tesla ever becomes profitable, and that point is a number of years off even if they didn't have a significant debt load.  (AIUI, Tesla doesn't even had a positive cash flow at the moment.*)  Solar City is currently his only profitable enterprise, and it's suspected in some quarters that it was recently purchased by Tesla to tap it's cash flow.

* Yes they recently came into a lot of cash from deposits on the Model 3, but unless they're getting a bit dodgy with their accounting that has to balanced in the books by the cost of the future commitments represented by those deposits.  (That's how my wife, an accountant, reads the situation.)

What are your long term thoughts on Tesla Derek? Is it going to saturate its market, and go belly up? Even restricting the consideration to the plug-in car market, Tesla doesn't seem to be that competitive compared to models like Prius, eh?

Is there any 'movement' toward the expansion of suitable infrastructure beyond the handful of major urban areas so that these machines can become interstate-capable? I vaguely recall an article a year or so ago about the rate of increase in super-charger stations; memory is quite fuzzy but it seems like even in major metro areas they are still rather scarce?

And last question: has anyone actually done the math to see if an average Tesla (or any plugin car) used over the course of its entire lifetime in a 'normal' pattern actually has less sum environmental impact (meaning carbon emissions at least, but ideally EVERYTHING involved in the building, use and maintenance of the vehicle) than a comparable petrol vehicle? Ultimately an "electric car" is powered by whatever fuel the local power grid gets its electricity from, and in the U.S. my understanding is that, at this point, most of that is natural gas, with small amounts of coal, nuclear, and hydrodynamic, and tiny fractions of other (solar, biofuel, aeolian etc.). I'm disappointed in humanity and science that these big calculations seemingly have yet to be done and so many have fallen for the "electric green = good / petrol black = bad" rhetoric.

Depending on the cost and resource-burden to build the infrastructure to make battery-powered vehicles a viable alternative to oil, and with all possible forms of pollution considered (not simply the carbon fetish), it may well be that anything other than status quo is MORE of environmental burden. 

[DerekL1963]

Just now, Diche Bach said:

What are your long term thoughts on Tesla Derek?

Completely off topic here.  I merely note their short term financials as it may (or may not) impact SpaceX/ICT over the same term.

[Technical Ben]

Not got time to go through that PDF... but it does come across as a presentation for a stapler/widget/album. As in, planning for something small scale. Do the details get better after the first 10 or so slides?

[shynung]

1 hour ago, Technical Ben said:

Not got time to go through that PDF... but it does come across as a presentation for a stapler/widget/album. As in, planning for something small scale. Do the details get better after the first 10 or so slides?

Most of them are low content, sprinkled with some Venn diagrams, tables, and comparison pictures. But they do send the message clearly.

[magnemoe]

1 hour ago, Diche Bach said:

What are your long term thoughts on Tesla Derek? Is it going to saturate its market, and go belly up? Even restricting the consideration to the plug-in car market, Tesla doesn't seem to be that competitive compared to models like Prius, eh?

Is there any 'movement' toward the expansion of suitable infrastructure beyond the handful of major urban areas so that these machines can become interstate-capable? I vaguely recall an article a year or so ago about the rate of increase in super-charger stations; memory is quite fuzzy but it seems like even in major metro areas they are still rather scarce?

And last question: has anyone actually done the math to see if an average Tesla (or any plugin car) used over the course of its entire lifetime in a 'normal' pattern actually has less sum environmental impact (meaning carbon emissions at least, but ideally EVERYTHING involved in the building, use and maintenance of the vehicle) than a comparable petrol vehicle? Ultimately an "electric car" is powered by whatever fuel the local power grid gets its electricity from, and in the U.S. my understanding is that, at this point, most of that is natural gas, with small amounts of coal, nuclear, and hydrodynamic, and tiny fractions of other (solar, biofuel, aeolian etc.). I'm disappointed in humanity and science that these big calculations seemingly have yet to be done and so many have fallen for the "electric green = good / petrol black = bad" rhetoric.

Depending on the cost and resource-burden to build the infrastructure to make battery-powered vehicles a viable alternative to oil, and with all possible forms of pollution considered (not simply the carbon fetish), it may well be that anything other than status quo is MORE of environmental burden. 

Tesla will have an problem then more traditional car companies moves more into the electrical/ hybrid marked in the coming years. Tesla is in the segment with BMV and Audi here.

Regarding environmental impacts, an obvious benefit is that its almost no local pollution in cities. Emission from an gas plant will also be less as its much more efficient than an car engine.
Plugin hybrids is more like standard cars with the benefit of having much lower emissions in typical start and stop city traffic.