What do you think the medium term future of space exploration will be like?

[DAL59]

Not really.  Remember, the BFR is reusable.  They had to build a new Saturn V for every flight.  

[Green Baron]

Me again, the spoilsport :-)

Wouldn't it be grammatically correct to say "Imagine, the BFR will be reusable." ?

[tater]

5 hours ago, DDE said:

His purse isn’t bottomless, and he couldn’t finance Apollo. To assume the BFR would be cheaper than that is ludicrous.

Actually, this I disagree with. Apollo never had cost as a parameter that mattered. As a government project, in some ways it was designed to maximize cost, if anything. I think BFR/BFS can be developed for vastly less (in constant dollars) than Apollo. 

[Diche Bach]

On 11/6/2017 at 4:23 AM, DDE said:

@Diche Bach, I think you underestimate how much firepower that will summon on your аss. The last circa three years in international relations have shown that bone-headed politics trump economics every goddamned time, no pun intended. You can fully expect your attempt to dominate the markets be boycotted by every player that matters, and then you yourself getting droned as a threat to world peace.

Basically, if you're gonna pull a Garin by crashing the world’s precious metal markets, you better have a death ray.

 

I love your sense of humor!

You are probably correct. However, it wouldn't necessarily stop Kim Jong Il Dong!

ADDIT: Ah and I see reviewing the last 24 hours posts that Ultimate Steve is getting cranky about the thread going off topic so I'll shut up

Edited November 7, 2017 by Diche Bach

[tater]

Law seems to give ownership of what is extracted from asteroids to the companies, but not the actual asteroid.

This needs to be the case to encourage the market. This is likely a medium-term possibility for rare Earth elements, and I would expect it before the turn of the century.

[DDE]

35 minutes ago, tater said:

Law seems to give ownership of what is extracted from asteroids to the companies, but not the actual asteroid.

This needs to be the case to encourage the market. This is likely a medium-term possibility for rare Earth elements, and I would expect it before the turn of the century.

For me it's a 50:50 between REEs and propellant.

[tater]

Both are certainly possible, even likely, it's just a matter of timing.

[magnemoe]

9 hours ago, tater said:

Actually, this I disagree with. Apollo never had cost as a parameter that mattered. As a government project, in some ways it was designed to maximize cost, if anything. I think BFR/BFS can be developed for vastly less (in constant dollars) than Apollo. 

This, cost was secondary to speed, also you had to develop lots of new technology, this is expensive 
Rocket technology is also much cheaper now 

[DDE]

11 hours ago, magnemoe said:

This, cost was secondary to speed, also you had to develop lots of new technology, this is expensive 
Rocket technology is also much cheaper now 

Yes, but I find Musk’s optimistic belief that they’ll be able to casually escalate to deep-space flight suspect. SpaceX has no proven manned spaceflight capability as of yet. And nearly every issue regarding the massively increased flight duration is handwaved.

SpaceX may be good at boosters, but there’s no evidence they have any expertise in interplanetary flight.

[Kerbal7]

On 11/6/2017 at 6:34 PM, tater said:

We'll be lucky to see a manned Mars mission by mid century.

It would be near miraculous if it happens by mid-century. If it would happen, it would take a government effort, and that government would be Chinese. No NewSpace effort would be able to put that together, braggadocio notwithstanding.

21 hours ago, tater said:

 I think BFR/BFS can be developed for vastly less (in constant dollars) than Apollo. 

I don't see how. Apollo was a program that topped off with a  tiny capsule that 3 people squeezed into. It went to the moon. BFR is supposed to carry 100+ people all the way to Mars and back. I think that's the idea for BFR? That's bucu $$$.  

[NSEP]

1 hour ago, Kerbal7 said:

It would be near miraculous if it happens by mid-century. If it would happen, it would take a government effort, and that government would be Chinese. No NewSpace effort would be able to put that together, braggadocio notwithstanding.

I don't see how. Apollo was a program that topped off with a  tiny capsule that 3 people squeezed into. It went to the moon. BFR is supposed to carry 100+ people all the way to Mars and back. I think that's the idea for BFR? That's bucu $$$.  

The BFR does not need a LM and a CSM for every crew, its one big thing, remember.

[DDE]

43 minutes ago, NSEP said:

The BFR does not need a LM and a CSM for every crew, its one big thing, remember.

That makes the individual craft even more expensive.

And in the long term, where economies of scale start making sense over an expendable flag-and-footprints, it’d require a lot more BFRs than Apollo CSM/LM stacks were produced.

Edited November 8, 2017 by DDE

[tater]

I mean the cargo version more than the crew vehicle, since that’s first in terms of dev cost.

I will be cheaper than the government, becaause everything is cheaper than the gov doing something.

For manned Mars, life support is the hurdle, I think.

[DDE]

9 minutes ago, tater said:

becaause everything is cheaper than the gov doing something.

Once you get to a certain project scale, the difference starts to diminish. If it’s a public good project rather than a commercial project (which the BFR is highly likely to end up as), the difference is naught.

[tater]

Nope. The government doing it increases price every time, no exceptions. (the US government, anyway, can't speak for anywhere else)

BFR under government contract would have them spending less than expected, for example, then the end of the fiscal year they'd all throw their computers away and buy new ones, just to make sure they spend every penny they were given so that this year they'd get the same or more. Delays? Who cares, it's funded. 

Half the people I know work for Sandia National Laboratories or Los Alamos, trust me, that's how they roll.

Edited November 8, 2017 by tater

[wumpus]

32 minutes ago, tater said:

Nope. The government doing it increases price every time, no exceptions. (the US government, anyway, can't speak for anywhere else)

BFR under government contract would have them spending less than expected, for example, then the end of the fiscal year they'd all throw their computers away and buy new ones, just to make sure they spend every penny they were given so that this year they'd get the same or more. Delays? Who cares, it's funded. 

Half the people I know work for Sandia National Laboratories or Los Alamos, trust me, that's how they roll.

Most of those issues occur in any corporation where the majority stockholder doesn't walk in and out of the door every day.  The (US) Government simply has the advantage of being even bigger (and thus less accountable) than anything on the Fortune 500.  Also I'm fairly surprised the issue isn't "through more personnel/overtime at it" than "buy more stuff".  The people who I know "work" for NASA don't get their paychecks from NASA but this year's contractor (if somebody else wins the contract they hire the old batch to work for them and hand them a new ID/badge).  Since the contractor gets a cut for personnel and not computers (that goes to a sweetheart deal to somebody else), I'd expect pressure that way.

Musk's passion for vertical integration has to deal with these size inefficiencies.  As they expand to cover more and more skills, they tend to look more and more like the inefficient government model (where people are expected to follow braindead rules to empower some other guys fiefdom).  Expect as much innovation from Spacex after Musk leaves as Microsoft gained market share after Gates left.

[DDE]

1 hour ago, wumpus said:

Expect as much innovation from Spacex after Musk leaves as Microsoft gained market share after Gates left.

As a Microsoft brat... Yes. Not sure how much more can I say before somebody a) an old NDA shows up, or b) a security agency from one of Eurasian countries knocks at my door.

[magnemoe]

11 hours ago, DDE said:

Yes, but I find Musk’s optimistic belief that they’ll be able to casually escalate to deep-space flight suspect. SpaceX has no proven manned spaceflight capability as of yet. And nearly every issue regarding the massively increased flight duration is handwaved.

SpaceX may be good at boosters, but there’s no evidence they have any expertise in interplanetary flight.

Timeline is idiotic optimistic, most at all for the manned missions, SpaceX also said that long duration life support is the most challenging part of it. 
Economical I think they can build it, however fast and cheap is always in conflict. 
It would be vise of them to keep the falcon 9 production lines open, yest perhaps move most over to BFR but keep the lines and the know-how even if you don't need it at the moment because of stockpiles and reuse. 

[tater]

On 10/27/2017 at 4:33 AM, Kerbal7 said:

There are no reusable rockets for a Mars program either. There are no reusable rockets in serious developement for a Mars program. Because there is no real Mars program. Because the price for such a program would be gargantuan.

There are 2 reusable rockets in serious development right now. BFR/BFS, and NG. They are not attached to a "Mars Program" as part of government, however. The plus is that this means there is a non-zero chance they might actually happen.  

 

Quote

Zubrin, and no one else, is putting flags and footprints on Mars for 30 billion. If these people want to put an earnest program together they are going to need 10 times that. They talk about going to Mars, show us the 300 billion-ish. Somewhere around that number. Then we'll know they're going somewhere beyond pipe dreams.  

Zubrin is putting nothing, anywhere, ever.

He's putting stuff on Mars about as much as we are here.

His 30 B$ figure from back in the day (1990s) assumed a non-existent heavy lift LV system. Perhaps shuttle derived (Jupiter? Shuttle C?). It was ~120 tons to LEO. 30 B$ is about what SLS/Orion will have cost by the time it actually launches. Because pork. There is no possible way even his original plan happens using NASA hardware for 30B$ in 1990s dollars, much less current ones.

As a reality check, NASA used 2 costing models to estimate Falcon 9 dev costs. The traditional model they use was 4 B$, there other (tweaked to estimate a more commercial approach) was 1.7 B$.  The actual cost was under 400 M$.

source: https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/586023main_8-3-11_NAFCOM.pdf

So NASA's default dev estimate was off by an order of magnitude.

BO has not actually been spending anything like 1B$/year of Bezos' money, but they may start doing so soon. NG will cost a couple billion, likely, though that will include a lot of infrastructure, honestly (rocket factory, etc). 

What will a crew BFS cost? I have no idea of the specifics, but less than 300 B$, certainly. If it could actually send crew to Mars is another issue  

*(I find the cargo/tanker version to be a great idea, but the crew version I'm not so sure about, wait and see)

 

 

Edited November 8, 2017 by tater

[DAL59]

21 minutes ago, tater said:

It was ~120 tons to LEO.

So is the SLS... and the ITS, though launching Mars Direct via the ITs would be...unnecessary.  

8 hours ago, DDE said:

the difference starts to diminish.

Not really.  SpaceX manufactures its own parts, rather than shipping from a hundred contractors around the country.  

Remember the JWST cost 18 times more than predicted.  

Also, this thread isn't the mars colonization thread.  On that note, I think there could be swarms of cube sats sent to the outer planets.  

[tater]

Cube sats to outer planets would not work well. You want high-gain antennas, or the bandwidth sucks.

You could send a mother sat to relay, I suppose.

[DAL59]

Or laser communication.  

[DAL59]

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20050217106.pdf

[magnemoe]

8 hours ago, DDE said:

As a Microsoft brat... Yes. Not sure how much more can I say before somebody a) an old NDA shows up, or b) a security agency from one of Eurasian countries knocks at my door.

And I have an new background image on my office computer

Honestly win ME was created by marketing / sale, they thought lots of software would not run on the win 2000 NT core, they was very correct then it came to games. 
I ran NT 4.0 I think on home computer but I had to crack all games to get them to run on it because of drm exploiting weaknesses in cd drivers would fail after win 98.

Windows 8 was created by marketing / sale because they wanted into the mobile marked, well compare to rockets N1 was successful,

As an result Windows 9 was dropped and they went directly for windows 10. Have some sympathy for the windows 8/ 9 team. 

Future miniaturization will help. 

[DAL59]

Nothing to do with space exploration...