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

[Jouni]

1 hour ago, sevenperforce said:

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.

I think you are underestimating how skewed the wealth and income distributions are.

For $5k, you can go hiking in Bhutan or climb Kilimanjaro. Tens of thousands do that every year. For $20k, you can fly to Ushuaia and take a ship to Antarctica. Tens of thousands do that every year too.

The price of a typical Everest climb is around $50k, but less than a thousand people a year attempt it. The reason is not as much the price as the time it takes to climb Everest. While the expedition itself only takes a couple of months, you need to train hard before attempting it. For an upper middle class professional, the time spent training instead of working may cost hundreds of thousands.

Here we have hundreds of people every year willing to spend potentially hundreds of thousands and face risk and hardship for a brief experience. Their number increases every year, as there are more wealthy people and the culture is shifting to favor experiences. That sounds pretty good for space tourism.

1 hour ago, sevenperforce said:

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. 

You missed the point. If we can get the price of orbital tourism down to hundreds of thousands, filming in space is no longer expensive by Hollywood standards. If we have an industry whose entire purpose seems to be making things bigger and more impressive, they won't choose the mundane option if they can get results with the exotic choice for a similar price.

[tater]

Yeah, I agree that low cost---combined with reasonable safety---can be transformative in terms of human spaceflight applications. The cost for a flight has everything to do with launch, and much less to do with duration for the regime of short stays (a couple weeks or a couple days have little cost difference I would imagine).

Assume ITS (lol, we're assuming super heavies, right?). Booster and ship are supposedly on the order of 500 M$, but good for 1000 flights for booster, 12 for spaceship. The spaceship flights can really be doubled (2 take offs per flight, 2 entries). Long duration, too. Assume is instead a sort of space cruise ship. 200 people, LEO for a week or something, no tanker.

Cost would be ~half a million for the booster flight (all this from ITS wiki), and the maintenance per spaceship claims 10M. Unsure if it needs that for LEO vs Mars, though.

At the 10.5 M$ per flight, with 200 people (no cargo needed, and Musk said it could likely take 200 to Mars later), is $52,500 per person. That's surprisingly reasonable. If the 10M spaceship costs per launch can be reduced due to much lower requirements for a short hop, then this could become even cheaper.

Safety is the kicker here, though. With no LES, most any problem would be fatal, and mass fatal at that, like an airliner crash. I can't imagine any way to get ITS to anything approaching airliner safety---even safety stats as of 50+ years ago. Heck, probably less safe that transatlantic sailing traffic from the mid-1800s, lol. That's the real problem.

[DerekL1963]

1 hour ago, Jouni said:

For $5k, you can go hiking in Bhutan or climb Kilimanjaro. Tens of thousands do that every year. For $20k, you can fly to Ushuaia and take a ship to Antarctica. Tens of thousands do that every year too.

25k per annum for Kilimanjaro, 35k for Antarctica.  So, yes, "tens of thousands" but barely.  (And why do you keep tossing around vague numbers when real numbers are so easily acquired?)

 

1 hour ago, Jouni said:

Here we have hundreds of people every year willing to spend potentially hundreds of thousands and face risk and hardship for a brief experience.

Then...  why do you keep bringing up people who pay far less?  Why can't you cite people who have done so or a single event that costs that much?

Don't bring up Everest or any other form of mountaineer.  They may spend hundreds of thousands cumulatively over a period of years or decades on their sport but they do not do so for a single brief experience.  In general they seem to average around $200k - and there's only about a thousand per annum.  200 million dollars per year sounds very impressive, but that'll only buy you three or four Falcon 9 launches at current prices.  (Maybe four to six with a reused first stage if the rumours are correct.)  That is "hundreds of thousands" for a single experience isn't nearly enough - current prices are in the millions (as in "tens of".)

Not to mention that Everest is generally climbed as the culmination of years spent in the sport - not a one off experience.

That's what folks seem to fail to grasp - flight costs per individual (currently roughly $20m/per) have to come down at least two orders of magnitude to start attract the cream of the most wealthy adventure tourists.  Halve that and you start getting into triple digits per annum.  Halve again and you start getting in four to five figures per annum.  But to really pull in the numbers, you half to halve again on top of that.  And do so with airliner levels of safety.

People are getting wealthier, and the culture is shifting to experiences, but the two trend lines (cost of space flight coming down, and the number of people and the amount they're willing to pay) are still impossibly far apart.  And there's no indication that's going to change any time soon.  (Unless you've drunk from Musk's kool aid.)

Edited July 6, 2017 by DerekL1963

[sevenperforce]

44 minutes ago, DerekL1963 said:

25k per annum for Kilimanjaro, 35k for Antarctica.  So, yes, "tens of thousands" but barely.  (And why do you keep tossing around vague numbers when real numbers are so easily acquired?)

Then...  why do you keep bringing up people who pay far less?  Why can't you cite people who have done so or a single event that costs that much?

Don't bring up Everest or any other form of mountaineer.  They may spend hundreds of thousands cumulatively over a period of years or decades on their sport but they do not do so for a single brief experience.  In general they seem to average around $200k - and there's only about a thousand per annum.  200 million dollars per year sounds very impressive, but that'll only buy you three or four Falcon 9 launches at current prices.  (Maybe four to six with a reused first stage if the rumours are correct.)  That is "hundreds of thousands" for a single experience isn't nearly enough - current prices are in the millions (as in "tens of".)

Not to mention that Everest is generally climbed as the culmination of years spent in the sport - not a one off experience.

That's what folks seem to fail to grasp - flight costs per individual (currently roughly $20m/per) have to come down at least two orders of magnitude to start attract the cream of the most wealthy adventure tourists.  Halve that and you start getting into triple digits per annum.  Halve again and you start getting in four to five figures per annum.  But to really pull in the numbers, you half to halve again on top of that.  And do so with airliner levels of safety.

People are getting wealthier, and the culture is shifting to experiences, but the two trend lines (cost of space flight coming down, and the number of people and the amount they're willing to pay) are still impossibly far apart.  And there's no indication that's going to change any time soon.  (Unless you've drunk from Musk's kool aid.)

Everything you said, except that not even Musk's koolaid is THIS spiked.

[Jouni]

17 minutes ago, DerekL1963 said:

25k per annum for Kilimanjaro, 35k for Antarctica.  So, yes, "tens of thousands" but barely.  (And why do you keep tossing around vague numbers when real numbers are so easily acquired?)

The real numbers are irrelevant, misleading, and very soon obsolete. We are talking about an industry where the annual growth has been 40-60% in the recent years, depending on who you ask and how they define adventure tourism.

17 minutes ago, DerekL1963 said:

That's what folks seem to fail to grasp - flight costs per individual (currently roughly $20m/per) have to come down at least two orders of magnitude to start attract the cream of the most wealthy adventure tourists.  Halve that and you start getting into triple digits per annum.  Halve again and you start getting in four to five figures per annum.  But to really pull in the numbers, you half to halve again on top of that.  And do so with airliner levels of safety.

If you reduce the costs by two orders of magnitude, you end up with $200k, which is no longer as much as it used to be. It's a few months' income for someone among the 3 million highest-earning Americans. That's roughly the amount of money people spend on weddings and other once-in-a-lifetime experiences.

[tater]

Unless you really PO the bride, or live in the sort of backwards outhouse where they shoot guns in the air at weddings, weddings have a very low fatality rate.

The critical issue for any slightly mass market would be safety. Massive cost drops require craft taking airliners full of people, but that makes safety much harder.

[Jouni]

The fatality rate on Everest is around 1.5% (if we ignore Sherpas and other local staff), which is comparable to manned spaceflight. The risk appears to be low enough to sustain a limited form of tourism.

Kilimanjaro death rate seems to be around 1-in-5000 for tourists. Altitude is the biggest killer, as most people ascend too quickly.

The death rate on Everest Base Camp treks is probably somewhere between 1-in-20000 and 1-in-10000. Environmental factors kill less people than on Kilimanjaro, as people take their time to ascend, the area is populated, and there is a helicopter rescue service available. On the other hand, Lukla airport seems to be a major killer.

Because climbing Everest is generally seen as being dangerous but high-altitude trekking isn't, 1-in-10000 is probably an acceptable risk for adventure tourism. That's three orders of magnitude more dangerous than commercial airlines.

[magnemoe]

6 hours ago, Jouni said:

I think you are underestimating how skewed the wealth and income distributions are.

For $5k, you can go hiking in Bhutan or climb Kilimanjaro. Tens of thousands do that every year. For $20k, you can fly to Ushuaia and take a ship to Antarctica. Tens of thousands do that every year too.

The price of a typical Everest climb is around $50k, but less than a thousand people a year attempt it. The reason is not as much the price as the time it takes to climb Everest. While the expedition itself only takes a couple of months, you need to train hard before attempting it. For an upper middle class professional, the time spent training instead of working may cost hundreds of thousands.

Here we have hundreds of people every year willing to spend potentially hundreds of thousands and face risk and hardship for a brief experience. Their number increases every year, as there are more wealthy people and the culture is shifting to favor experiences. That sounds pretty good for space tourism.

You missed the point. If we can get the price of orbital tourism down to hundreds of thousands, filming in space is no longer expensive by Hollywood standards. If we have an industry whose entire purpose seems to be making things bigger and more impressive, they won't choose the mundane option if they can get results with the exotic choice for a similar price.

Main issue with Everest is that you have be so interested you are an mountaineer or you would not manage it. 
it would not be much physical requirements for an orbital cruise outside of reasonable good health. 
An major difference between an activity who is expensive and require very high skills and one who just very expensive.

Orbital I would want an hotel with some spin, you don't need earth gravity, moon would be more than enough. 
This would keep zero g sickness away and you would feel like an super hero. 
You would obvious want zero g areas too, 
Next level up would be Moon orbit, after than an Moon landing and stay on moon. 

You could do dual missions, the orbital only flights would bring fuel to the hotel who is used for Moon and Mars flights. 

But yes ITS would need an escape system. Best idea would probably be to use the top for seats during accent and decent, then a way to separate and land this for an abort.
You would be seated during accent and decent anyway. 
Sharped charges in the compartment below would work. having part of it still attached would act as fins, as an compromise the escape pod can not reenter, if you can not return you launch an new ITS to pick up crew, you would probably want to repair too. 
Fail during reentry would not be possible to abort from anyway. so it would be relevant during first stage burn and landing, you would need to either aerobrake or do an braking burn with second stage on an second stage fail.
 

[tater]

Some artificial gravity would be ideal, but for tourism aside from those who want the bragging rights for having done something really dangerous, launch safety has to be vastly safer than current LOC requirements.

Airlines have a safety of around 3-4 incidents per million departures. Call it 1:250,000. 1000 times better than the commercial crew requirement. You'd probably be ok with it more like 1:25,000, so only 100 times better, but that's still non-trivial given how hard even commercial crew has been in that regard.

[kerbiloid]

And the next problem; how many billionaires should be spent to get a real statistics.

[tater]

7 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

And the next problem; how many billionaires should be spent to get a real statistics.

We want to keep the space guys, they're providing us was awesome entertainment, and a new space race of sorts to watch  .

Estimated safety vs the real stats will always be an issue. At least with capsule designs there are solutions to most failure modes so that even if there is a failure, it need not result in LOC.

For large numbers of tourists, the trouble is lack of those abort modes. The BFS doesn't have launch escape capability, for example. It might never happen that space gets safe enough for mass tourism, honestly. 

[wumpus]

14 hours ago, tater said:

Airlines have a safety of around 3-4 incidents per million departures. Call it 1:250,000. 1000 times better than the commercial crew requirement. You'd probably be ok with it more like 1:25,000, so only 100 times better, but that's still non-trivial given how hard even commercial crew has been in that regard.

I'd strongly suspect that many of the people drawn to space and have the means for such a trip already own a plane or use private jets (fractionally owned or similar).  Safety there isn't at all similar to commercial airlines (I suspect it is close to driving a car).  In fact, I'd rather compare safety against a driving trip from Washington DC to New York City (or perhaps LA to San Francisco, I understand that elsewhere rail is more popular, but in the US people dither between trains for DC-NYC and ignore the rest).

But yes, safety will be critical.

[tater]

Good point, I suppose that pegging it to the most dangerous thing most people do---driving---might make more sense. 

The issue there is that driving safety is generally per km, and the travel bit for space is quite short distance wise. You could market it as safer counting the total travel distance of the trip, though, which would make it look safer.

[sevenperforce]

1 hour ago, tater said:

Good point, I suppose that pegging it to the most dangerous thing most people do---driving---might make more sense. 

The issue there is that driving safety is generally per km, and the travel bit for space is quite short distance wise. You could market it as safer counting the total travel distance of the trip, though, which would make it look safer.

I suspect that for the sort of clientele who would be able to afford trips to space, marketing about safety is not going to have much of an effect. They are going to know exactly how safe it is.

[Kryten]

2 hours ago, tater said:

Good point, I suppose that pegging it to the most dangerous thing most people do---driving---might make more sense. 

The issue there is that driving safety is generally per km, and the travel bit for space is quite short distance wise. You could market it as safer counting the total travel distance of the trip, though, which would make it look safer.

If you have to trick people into thinking what you're doing is safe, you have deeper problems.

[tater]

That is why the rate per departure makes more sense, or the rate per trip with a vehicle---though for cars your risks are in fact scaled to distance unlike aircraft and spacecraft, which generally have risk associated with flights.

[wumpus]

1 hour ago, Kryten said:

If you have to trick people into thinking what you're doing is safe, you have deeper problems.

Doesn't matter.  Humans simply are lousy at that type of analysis.  This is why the airlines have to be so obsessed with safety: one downed plane sticks in the mind so much more than tens of thousands of car deaths annually.  They *see* the crash on TV, they don't hear about the crashes (when a car crashes that isn't news.  That's expected.  So of course humans aren't afraid of it).

I'd be fairly surprised if adventure tourism didn't include things like skydiving.  They aren't selling safety, they are selling [perceived] risk (and bragging rights from the risk).

[sevenperforce]

27 minutes ago, tater said:

That is why the rate per departure makes more sense, or the rate per trip with a vehicle---though for cars your risks are in fact scaled to distance unlike aircraft and spacecraft, which generally have risk associated with flights.

Here's an idea that could make the space tourism thing a little more attractive. What about a lunar cycler? A big fancy space hotel with lots of room for labs and experiments, all on a regular Earth-Moon loop. It raises the required dV for launches, since the LV needs to match the cycler at perigee, but it changes the pricing considerations considerably. A space station needs regular resupply launches, which will maintain a high launch cadence. There's also a range of prices for tourism, because the cost of the launch is separate from the cost of staying on the cycler. Tourists can choose how many loops around the Earth-moon system they want to take. With costs being driven down by high launch cadence, companies can afford to send scientists up for research purposes.

Separate the travel from the destination.

[YNM]

On the note of vacations, I'll just put these up :

0. Humans are irrational. They know things are risky (or insert anything bad here) but they still do it, and so the opposite may be true instead, or none, or both (case where only the brave  (stupid ?) survives I think).

1. Base reason for vacation is to experience something different (doesn't have to be truly new). Being entertained is also an option, but for those you don't need that much, maybe just watch things or do something else. Getting someone else to experience it anew is also an option.

2. Most of the world doesn't have provisions for pricey vacation. I'll just put that ; most people can only spare much less than 1% of their income on vacations. So those who are willing to do a $10,000 vacations have incomes which may easily surpass that by two, three or four magnitude. For people who only have income as pricey as these vacation they're just a wild dream, or may as well be non-existant.

3. Cheaper doesn't mean more accessible. Before machines, consumable products were very expensive, but even after them, it doesn't mean you get more (because you're going to be paid somewhat less and you probably starts wanting better things).

So, the only viable customer for space exploration are probably either extremely wealthy young people (I don't presume you can send old people up ?) or... not tourist. It's only when we are, for all reasons, well up in space, does space tourism becomes a thing. My previous point still stands that we need a lot more than just one or two magnitudes of cost reductions.

Edited July 7, 2017 by YNM

[Jouni]

36 minutes ago, YNM said:

2. Most of the world doesn't have provisions for pricey vacation. I'll just put that ; most people can only spare much less than 1% of their income on vacations. So those who are willing to do a $10,000 vacations have incomes which may easily surpass that by two, three or four magnitude. For people who only have income as pricey as these vacation they're just a wild dream, or may as well be non-existant.

That 1% figure sounds extremely low. Maybe it's another difference between Europe and the US. The average Finnish household spends around 3% of their income on their summer holiday, and middle-class people often spend significantly more than that. Quick googling reveals similar figures from many other European countries.

[sevenperforce]

25 minutes ago, Jouni said:

That 1% figure sounds extremely low. Maybe it's another difference between Europe and the US. The average Finnish household spends around 3% of their income on their summer holiday, and middle-class people often spend significantly more than that. Quick googling reveals similar figures from many other European countries.

The US is awful in that regard. Only a tiny fraction of jobs in the United States offer any paid vacation, and those that do typically offer less than the average in every other developed country. 

[Ithirahad]

On 7/4/2017 at 1:08 PM, sevenperforce said:

You'd need space tugs.

Why? If your first + second-stage lifting capacity is so massive, just carry (for example) four different third stages for four different payloads. I'm going to start doing this in RSS someday.

Edited July 7, 2017 by Ithirahad

[sevenperforce]

6 minutes ago, Ithirahad said:

Why? If your first + second-stage lifting capacity is so massive, just carry (for example) four different third stages for four different payloads. I'm going to start doing this in RSS someday.

It's an optimization problem. You can treat each third stage as part of the payload, so that the second stage places your entire payload stack into an almost-orbit, all four payloads plus their stages are released, and each one circularizes and then does its own transfer to the desired orbit. On the other hand, if you can make propellant transfer work, then you can use a larger second stage and a single, small third stage with a heat shield. The second stage establishes a parking orbit with significant residual propellant, and then the third stage takes the first payload to its desired orbit and then does a short deorbit burn at apogee to aerobrake back into LEO. Rendezvous, refuel from the second stage, and repeat. 

Which option is more efficient depends on a lot of factors.

[DerekL1963]

2 hours ago, wumpus said:

I'd be fairly surprised if adventure tourism didn't include things like skydiving.  They aren't selling safety, they are selling [perceived] risk (and bragging rights from the risk).

0.o  Everyone I know who indulges in such things, and everything I see about them (in various media) emphasizes that they take safety very seriously.  They know there's a risk, but they do everything within reason to mitigate those risks.  The most risky forms of any given activity are generally reserved to the experienced and knowledgeable, and those that don't make that cut are actively discouraged from taking those risks.  They are in fact selling safety - "this is a risky endeavour, but we've done everything possible to minimize, mitigate, and eliminate the risk".

Nowhere in the civilized world does anyone routinely allow a n00b to participate in any activity as risky as human spaceflight.  Note how in all the tourist flights to date, the n00b has undergone extensive training prior to the flight - "minimize, mitigate, and eliminate".

[insert_name]

32 minutes ago, DerekL1963 said:

0.o  Everyone I know who indulges in such things, and everything I see about them (in various media) emphasizes that they take safety very seriously.  They know there's a risk, but they do everything within reason to mitigate those risks.  The most risky forms of any given activity are generally reserved to the experienced and knowledgeable, and those that don't make that cut are actively discouraged from taking those risks.  They are in fact selling safety - "this is a risky endeavour, but we've done everything possible to minimize, mitigate, and eliminate the risk".

Nowhere in the civilized world does anyone routinely allow a n00b to participate in any activity as risky as human spaceflight.  Note how in all the tourist flights to date, the n00b has undergone extensive training prior to the flight - "minimize, mitigate, and eliminate".

The same is true for Everest and other big  mountains, as well as the grand canyon