Super heavy-lift launch vehicles - What do you launch on them?

[sevenperforce]

2 minutes ago, NSEP said:

Multiple payloads?

You'd need space tugs.

[NSEP]

Just now, sevenperforce said:

You'd need space tugs.

Yeh, but that adds extra weight, wich is good for a super-duper massive heavy launch vehicle.

[sevenperforce]

14 minutes ago, NSEP said:

Yeh, but that adds extra weight, wich is good for a super-duper massive heavy launch vehicle.

What's more efficient? Launching a bevy of GTO payloads into LEO along with a couple of refuelable bipropellant tugs and an expendable propellant depot, or sending the whole terminal stage on a GTO trajectory and then using burns to change the argument of periapsis between each payload release?

I daresay the former would be more efficient if the tugs could carry small heat shields and return to LEO by aerobraking.

 

[kerbiloid]

24 minutes ago, NSEP said:

Multiple payloads?

Say, you have a 500 t capable Nexus. Which 5 payloads each 100 t heavy could be launched at once? 500 one-tonne payloads look also unclear.

Edited July 4, 2017 by kerbiloid

[DerekL1963]

Disclaimer:  Yes, I've swapped meaning for experiences.  I misspoke in my first post and limited "experiences" to "sitting around admiring the scenery of a given place".  @tater's post clarified my thinking.  Admiring the view is certainly something tourists do, but that doesn't generate much in the way of economic activity other than transport and lodging.  That's what I'm trying to get across here, the tourism industry is, as tater makes clear, more than just sitting there admiring the view.
 

3 hours ago, tater said:

It would still be more experiential than not. A "been there, done that" sort of thing, but that's a lot of regular tourism anyway. You go to Hawaii, and you take snorkeling lessons, and surfing lessons, and helicopter rides, it's not all lying around on the sand. As business ventures go in space, I actually see tourism as much more bottomless than other ideas, but it's all about price. A regular family vacation costs thousands, this would cost far more, even at grossly reduced launch prices.

Certainly, going to Hawaii isn't all about laying around on the sand, but first and foremost it's Hawaii.  Secondarily, it's the other activities - pretty much none of which will be available on orbit.  No reefs to snorkel, no waves to ride, no sugar plantations or nature preserves to visit, no...  well, you get the picture.  While going to space is certainly important because, after all, SPACE!!, it doesn't offer much of anything else in the way of experiences.  And those experiences are a huge part of the cash flow and economic activity generated by tourism, and are the primary drivers for the balance.  (That is for transport and lodging.)

That is, the income from transport and lodging are driven by their usefulness in providing access to experiences.  While Space (and zero-G) has a certain attractiveness in it's own right, the lack of secondary experiences and amenities reduces the potential market dramatically.  The more limited the experience, the smaller the potential traffic flow.  Not as many people are going to pay to sit in a cabin while admiring a view and eat MRE's as would pay to get out into that view and eat further upscale.

[NSEP]

15 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

Say, you have a 500 t capable Nexus. Which 5 payloads each 100 t heavy could be launched at once? 500 one-tonne payloads look also unclear.

I dont know actually. I was actually thinking of 100 massive "cubesats". In a huge truss of course.

[tater]

Yeah, I think we're completely on the same page, @DerekL1963, and you added a lot more than I wrote, but I agree 100%.

Early tourism will be of the adventure variety---which is still a non-trivial market, but the numbers I think drop a lot based on safety. Hundreds of thousands trek Nepal, but they don't expect a 1/500 chance of death to do so.

[DerekL1963]

1 hour ago, tater said:

Early tourism will be of the adventure variety---which is still a non-trivial market, but the numbers I think drop a lot based on safety. Hundreds of thousands trek Nepal, but they don't expect a 1/500 chance of death to do so.

Hundreds of thousands visit Nepal... [1]  But only 35,000 visit Everest.  700-1000 of them attempt the summit, but only 350-500 make it. [2]  Though the numbers vary sharply by year, it appears an average of six climbers per annum climb the mountain eternal. [3]  (Caveat:  Some of the peak numbers are due to mass casualties which makes figuring an average rather more difficult.)

Less often mentioned is the number of Sherpas who die supporting those climbers.  The actual number of deaths per annum is actually higher because the Sherpas aren't generally counted in the statistics as climbers are.

Edited July 4, 2017 by DerekL1963

[tater]

Yeah, I specifically mentioned trekking not climbing (I've personally spent almost 5 months in Nepal) since it is rougher tourism than say my trip last year to Italy. It's getting less rough, though, when I went around Annapurna it took 21-25 days on foot, away from any road. The road goes most of the way now.

The analogy was meant to be about eating meh food, "interesting" toilet facilities, etc. Even with all that, plus loads of hiking, it's very safe. If it were anything like spaceflight dangerous, far fewer people would pay even trekking vacation prices for space (several thousand $). It needs to be safe for mass tourism, otherwise you are right, the numbers might map more like climbing trips to the region.

[kerbiloid]

8 hours ago, DerekL1963 said:

While going to space is certainly important because, after all, SPACE!!

Yes, say, 10 m³ of space per human.
A day later he will realize that all available space here he had already touched with hand, and not once, and the only thing to watch is the Earth in the window.

As if the tourist would be locked in a Hawaiian boat station looking at the window.
And without anything available in typical Hawaiian boat station.
Btw, there is no sand, too.

4 hours ago, DerekL1963 said:

Hundreds of thousands visit Nepal.

But they don't spend their vacation sitting inside a mountain hut and looking at the mountain.

6 hours ago, tater said:

1/500 chance of death

1+3+7+7 = 18 (Even without Apollo-1). It's a little greater than 1/500.

 

Do we have mass underwater tourism? On submarines or bathyscaphes?

They are available for a centrury, and have much better conditions.

[tater]

16 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

1+3+7+7 = 18 (Even without Apollo-1). It's a little greater than 1/500.

 

Do we have mass underwater tourism? On submarines or bathyscaphes?

They are available for a centrury, and have much better conditions.

I am assuming that they would work to make it safer before bothering on any large scale, and even then it would not be safe enough for mass tourism, which was my entire point (and Derek's).

 

 

[DerekL1963]

6 hours ago, tater said:

The analogy was meant to be about eating meh food, "interesting" toilet facilities, etc. Even with all that, plus loads of hiking, it's very safe. If it were anything like spaceflight dangerous, far fewer people would pay even trekking vacation prices for space (several thousand $). It needs to be safe for mass tourism, otherwise you are right, the numbers might map more like climbing trips to the region.

I posted the info on Everest more as comparison-and-contrast than anything else.  It's an interesting look at how many (or few) people will pay tens of thousands of dollars ($50k+) to take on a challenge with significant risk on failure, injury, and death.

[tater]

Yeah, exactly. I was underlining the trekking bit as space tourism once the travel bit is safe, but you're still in a can wearing dirty clothes, etc.

The more realistic version is exactly what you compare it to, climbing (in terms of risk, not effort).

[kerbiloid]

A nuclear submarine _{oops... sorry,} Submarine Cruiser.
Carries 16-24 missiles, each 40..60 t heavy. I.e. 1000..2000 t of payload (including mechanisms).

Much safer than a spaceship, people spend months onboard and ask for moar.
A journey onboard is several orders of magnitude cheaper than a spaceflight.
No special abilities or space health are required unless you are a crewman and indeed have to spend months inside.

Can travel around all over the world like Nemo in Nautilus, wondering at wonders.
Sea monsters, whales, krakens, fish herds, coral reefs, sunken ships, accidentally snapped transoceanic cables - all is available to see.

Can surface every day at any time to let the tourists breathe with the healing sea air.
Can dock in every port to let them buy souvenirs and spend their money in other ways.

Is big enough to place a whole hotel inside. 
1500 t of apartments, atriums, pools, casinos, restaurants, etc.

Any beach is available. 
What can be better than a sun bath on a Hawaii sand near a huge submarine, waiting for all of you to continue the journey?

And all this is safe and cheap right now, and needs no rockets.
Just take your family and come.

There are tens if not hundreds decommissioned Submarine Cruisers around the world.
How many of them are now cruising hotels for tourists?

A space hotel is like this hotel, but without sea, restaurants, pools, beaches, whales, corals, sunken treasures.
And you have to lift it to orbit. 
Could it be a successful entertainment if even a submarine (a dream of teenagers, too) is not required.

Spoiler

Offtop.
I know, "Nemo" means "nobody", and this is a cosplay of Odysseus, but just realized that it is also "Omen" if backwards.

 

Edited July 5, 2017 by kerbiloid

[DerekL1963]

1 hour ago, tater said:

Yeah, exactly. I was underlining the trekking bit as space tourism once the travel bit is safe, but you're still in a can wearing dirty clothes, etc.

I wouldn't push that analogy too far...  because if you're trekking, you're going someplace and doing something - not sitting in a can, regardless of how wonderful the view is.
 

38 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

Much safer than a spaceship, people spend months onboard and ask for moar.

Some people do, most don't.  Not until they get much older and pine for their salad days.  Myself, I served with some incredibly talented people (some of whom I'm still friends with after thirty years), and prize the experience greatly...  But I miss being 22 much, much more than I do going to sea.

 

47 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

1500 t of apartments, atriums, pools, casinos, restaurants, etc.

Less than a third of a typical SSBN's displacement (the former missile compartment) is available.  The rest is taken up by machinery and crew quarters vital to operating the ship.
 

41 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

There are tens if not hundreds decommissioned Submarine Cruisers around the world.
How many of them are now cruising hotels for tourists?

Hundreds?  There were only two hundred odd ever built, and the bulk of those were Soviet - which no sane person would willingly ride.  (They appear to have only four no longer in service, but not yet scrapped.)  Of the rest, there's only seven remaining - but only six still have their reactors.  Two (missing their missile compartments and virtually all their non-engineering equipment) in the US, and four (essentially intact) in the UK.  None of them are now cruising hotels because they're hideously expensive to operate and require a highly trained crew.

[kerbiloid]

9 minutes ago, DerekL1963 said:

Hundreds?

Well, not of them are that big, of course. But I can't see even small underwater cruising hotels, too.

Where are that old submarines with Polaris, Poseidon? None of them is carring extremal tourists, afaik. Though, its 16-rocket compartment is to be empty now.

And every, say 2 x 15 m vertical tube is not much smaller than any module of ISS inside.

9 minutes ago, DerekL1963 said:

they're hideously expensive to operate

Do we talk about orbital stations where every kg of toilet paper costs 10 kg of rocket?

A space hotel's dream - to be as cheap as a hotel in a decommissioned submarine, I guess.
But the latter looks not very required, too.

Edited July 5, 2017 by kerbiloid

[tomf]

The problem with the submarine analogy is that there are much easier ways to see the sights of the ocean, just use a boat on the surface and then dive under when you are over something interesting as huge numbers of people already do. You cant just pop into space for an hour in the same way.

I imagine that a space trip would involve a few days on the surface being trained in some basics which should be interesting, followed by the excitement of a launch which will put you at the top of a giant tube of explosives, even after the reliability has bee increased to a "safe" level the noise and g forces will still be pretty thrilling.

Once in orbit I can think of quite a few things you could do in zero-g that you couldn't do on earth, some of which are a little bit sinful. And apparently ISS astronauts take a very long time to get bored of looking at earth spinning below them.

At realistic prices I agree that the number of people buying a ticket would be small and it would be a challenge to build a long term business. I would certainly do it if the price was affordable though.

[kerbiloid]

33 minutes ago, tomf said:

just use a boat on the surface and then dive under

Just 10-100 meters under and with efforts.
While inside a submarine you can look without efforts and danger 500 meters and deeper  (depends on a submarine).

And in the sea abyss there are living or just moving objects: fishes, crawfishes, jellyfishes, etc. While from the space you can look only at the Earth, as there is nothing more around.
But by some reason they prefer to watch Cousteau's movies on TV.

33 minutes ago, tomf said:

And apparently ISS astronauts take a very long time to get bored of looking at earth spinning below them.

You can read about, say, Skylab astronauts.
I was shocked killed by a phrase: "While (...) was sleeping, (...) was reading a book".
I could imagine this if they were flying to Alpha Centauri. But that's after just several days in orbit.

The same with chess parties in Salyut and so on.

33 minutes ago, tomf said:

Once in orbit I can think of quite a few things you could do in zero-g that you couldn't do on earth, some of which are a little bit s

Stealing something from upper shelf?

Edited July 5, 2017 by kerbiloid

[DerekL1963]

9 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Where are that old submarines with Polaris, Poseidon?

Cut up for razor blades, mostly because their hulls and systems are worn slap out.

 

9 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

And every, say 2 x 15 m vertical tube is not much smaller than any module of ISS inside.

0.o ISS Modules are four meters + in diameter and generally eight to twelve meters in length.   And most (Western) missile tubes are more like 10-11m in length...  The tubes have MUCH less volume.
 

5 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

While inside a submarine you can look without efforts and danger 500 meters and deeper  (depends on a submarine).

And in the sea abyss there are living or just moving objects:

The place most tourists will pay to look (near reefs and near the bottom) are places nobody is going to take a submarine of any size.

Or, to put it another way, pretty much all of the assumptions behind this subthread are arrant nonsense.

[kerbiloid]

21 minutes ago, DerekL1963 said:

ISS Modules are four meters + in diameter

4 m - outer diameter.

TKS-based modules have corridor 2x2 m.

And I don't mean leave the cylinders inside. I mean total volume inside the rocket compartment is compatible to an orbital station.

21 minutes ago, DerekL1963 said:

assumptions behind this subthread are arrant nonsense.

I'm sure they are. Like most assumptions about space hotels.

I just compare one useless thing with another one.

Edited July 5, 2017 by kerbiloid

[tater]

@kerbiloid, perhaps you are entirely misunderstanding us. I think we are both saying that a tiny handful of people with loads of money can do billionaire space tourism, and that at best maybe there could be a slightly larger group of millionaire tourists willing to spend hundreds of thousands on a once in a lifetime experience. That's it for the foreseeable future. We're not really arguing in favor of it being realistic for anything even approaching mass markets. In my case, I said that it could not increase past tiny numbers of travelers without safety being on par with commercial airliners (or perhaps the helicopter rides so many take in places like Hawaii, which I'm sure are less safe than airliners, but still pretty safe).

 

Suffice it to say that low-volume (of people, not spacecraft!) space tourism might be a thing at some point, but it will be incredibly expensive, and nothing like a typical, terrestrial tourist experience for a long, long time.

In LEO, it pretty much means at most: horsing around in zero-g, looking at the earth out the window (don't discount this, it's gotta be mind-blowing, and people will likely only be up for a few days), and perhaps a sort of curated EVA for the full space experience (if I were selling LEO tourism, I'd work on that, but the suits would likely be hard suits, not custom suits). Still, very expensive, and because it's a been there done that thing, duration would be short. Increased time would be mostly in increase value per unit time, since getting there would be so expensive. On a personal note, I was talking to Senator Garn after his shuttle flight years ago (I was driving him to the airport after a conference because I had the most presentable car (I was at university)). I asked him about the experience being in orbit---and he was incredibly sick in orbit, legendarily so. He said it was so amazing he compared going just the one time to finally... being with a woman, and being told that was it, never again in your life. So file that for reference.

Lunar flyby/orbit would be much the same, and just like LEO, an incredibly small market, with commensurately high prices.

If we ever got to the point of a lunar facility on the surface, at least the participants could walk around, or take rover rides, etc (plus all the looking out the window on the round trip). The issue here is that the costs are going to be astronomical for the foreseeable future, and hence the number of such tourists will be really small as far forward as we can imagine.

Hence my earlier mention of suborbital---as a mode of transport. If you could get international suborbital flights down to something in the same order of magnitude as 1st class flights now, there could be a market as long as the safety was there. The safety being the (very) hard part I would imagine. At that point, the LEO stuff goes away, mostly, as you get the out the window stuff into the bargain.

Edited July 5, 2017 by tater

[magnemoe]

Low gravity is probably more fun than zero, you could run on water on the moon just to take one. Less disorienting and you feel like an super hero. yes this would require an decent sized facility. 
An argument for an space hotel should have spin, you don't need much, moon gravity would be more than enough and you would want an zero g part. 
 

[sevenperforce]

50 minutes ago, tater said:

Hence my earlier mention of suborbital---as a mode of transport. If you could get international suborbital flights down to something in the same order of magnitude as 1st class flights now, there could be a market as long as the safety was there. The safety being the (very) hard part I would imagine. At that point, the LEO stuff goes away, mostly, as you get the out the window stuff into the bargain.

Multistage rockets for suborbital international travel are a bit messy, though. You'd almost definitely want a single-stage vehicle.

Of course then you have to deal with very, very limited launch and landing sites.

[Jouni]

Adventure tourism is a huge business. At several hundred billion dollars a year, it's something like 10x bigger than launch industry and satellite manufacturing together. (Incidentally, it's also several times bigger than video games industry.) A lot of people have a lot of money, and they are willing to spend it to experience new things.

The price of a short trip to LEO is currently in tens of millions. If we can decrease that to hundreds of thousands and reduce the risks to a level comparable to more extreme forms of adventure tourism, there are huge business opportunities. Millions of people could reasonably afford the trip, and many of them would take it.

What would people do in space? Zero-g sports is the obvious answer. If you can fly, why not enjoy it? There might even be a professional league after a while. Or, if you want to film zero-g scenes for a movie, why not do it in zero-g?

[sevenperforce]

11 hours ago, Jouni said:

Adventure tourism is a huge business. At several hundred billion dollars a year, it's something like 10x bigger than launch industry and satellite manufacturing together. (Incidentally, it's also several times bigger than video games industry.) A lot of people have a lot of money, and they are willing to spend it to experience new things.

The price of a short trip to LEO is currently in tens of millions. If we can decrease that to hundreds of thousands and reduce the risks to a level comparable to more extreme forms of adventure tourism, there are huge business opportunities. Millions of people could reasonably afford the trip, and many of them would take it.

What would people do in space? Zero-g sports is the obvious answer. If you can fly, why not enjoy it? There might even be a professional league after a while.

Adventure tourism is a huge business because it is accessible. Raise the cost of entry, and you lower the access and the demand. There are a lot of people with a significant amount of money, but there are not as many people who can throw six or seven figures at a single brief experience.

A ride on the Vomit Comet will run you $5,000. A guided trek up K2 is four times as much, at $20K. The South Pole, which exceeds LEO in terms of amenities, will run between $30K and $60K, and it attracts only a few hundred people a year. Only a small fraction of those people would be able to afford a trip ten times more expensive, which is nowhere near enough volume to make tourist LEO trips profitable.

Quote

Or, if you want to film zero-g scenes for a movie, why not do it in zero-g?

Because it is cheaper to do it with trick photography on Earth. You can't switch gears from talking about a tourist industry (adventure tourism) to a for-profit industry (film). No film production company is going to foot a massive bill for something they can achieve less expensively.