I am talking about the near space - Earth orbit, cislunar space, inner Solar system. Saying that it will take thousands of years for us to, say, establish a small settlement on Mars or take a core sample on Mercury (in person) is patently ridiculous. This is the modern era, not the Ancient Egypt or the Dark Ages where progress occurred over such a ridiculously long timespan.
Why do you need to go to Mercury to take a core sample? It is perfectly possible with (much cheaper) machines, especially considering future advances in technology.
This is the modern era, but Space is no Earth. As I said, hundreds, or even thousands of years- setting up even a small base on Mars in 100 years could be regarded as enough of an achievement to dwarf the thousands of years of Egyptian history.
You totally disregard the snowball effect. Once the first barrier to our space expansion falls, things will get moving and with every new success it will accelerate because it will attract more attention and thus investment, both private and public.
Yes, I am totally disregarding the snowball effect.
Because there is no reason to spend billions of dollars on unprofitable ventures to colonise uninhabitable hyperdeserts.
Currently the chief obstacle to space development is the ridiculous price of getting mass to LEO.
And the fact that it makes no sense.
This is not something set in stone, it is a result of decades of government controlled, heavily regulated space launch programmes
And the limitations of... accelerating huge amounts of mass to orbit.
It is
not easy.
Then came SpaceX and in a few short years, they've demonstrated that if you build a relatively primitive launcher rocket with the existing technology (which has been there for decades) and you do it without getting stuck in the mud of defence contracts and NASA bureaucracy, you can produce something MUCH cheaper.
What is primitive with the Falcon rockets, and why is using existing technology a bad thing? It means you do not have to spend millions on some... pre-cooled... ramjet... hybrid...
thing.
Falcon 9 heavy is said to cost around $2200/kg... well, that's what they
say.
That is no, but not magic $100/kg low.
The people behind Skylon promise to reduce the cost by an order of magnitude, and this is their realistic baseline scenario.
STS also promised $1000/kg. Guess what happened.
There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical.
Skylon would be an IMMENSELY disruptive technology.
I'll agree with you here... Skylon, even if it fulfilled its promise partially, would be extremely disruptive to conventional launcher technology.
Many of the things that are impossible with current prices will be perfectly viable in a decade or two (or three, if you insist on being pessimistic; or four, if you want to be obstinate; any further and you you move to an asylum).
I fear this is too much of an assumption, though I suppose you could also say it could happen in 200 years if you were 'pessimistic' enough.
Nevertheless, it is important to note that launch costs are the
most serious problem- once it is out of the way, another problem could raise its ugly head.
The challenge of doing things there won't be so formidable any more.
But they'll still be there. The Moon has no air, but the Namib does. If you posess the technology to make living on the Moon viable, then living in the Namib would be a cynch.
So why go to the Moon when the Namib is easier to get to, easier to live in, and easier to make a profit from?
If you insist on using ideologically loaded term like "Manifest Destiny", be my guest. Others have explained why we Europeans don't like it that much.
I am just as American as you are. Granted, 'manifest destiny' was used to justify the Mexico-American war, but the "destined to expand across the North American continent" bit is a very good parallel to expansion into space.
Because currently it is this ideology- the space expansion ideology, that is- that is the cause of the whole space colonisation idea. If the idea of "Manifest Destiny IN SPACE" didn't exist, this discussion would be utterly pointless.
Some will be fully automated, some will need to have a crew - you can automate simple processes; however, it's far more difficult to automate a very complicated production process. At some point, especially in space, it starts making sense to just have someone up there who can fix problems that would need very complicated solutions if you insisted on full automation. In other words, the cost of automating a very complicated process becomes greater than the cost of maintaining a permanent crew. Other facilities - labs, space hotels - need human crew by definition.
That depends. Our technology is advancing; it would be hard-pressed to see a future where generalist computer programs and adaptable robotic systems do not exist, because they would be so incredibly advantageous.
And the other aspect is... even if your generalist automated system is more complex technologically, than having a crew onboard, it could be, overall, less taxing on the whole infrastructure than a manned presence.
Remember that for a useful application in space- satellite communications, space manufacture, observation, the ideal operational number of humans oboard is 0. Because you need a huge amount of mass to sustain humans.
I mean, say you have a 50 ton habitation section, it supports 3-4 people. At $100/kg launch rates that is still $5 million to LEO. Is you have a 10 ton robotics module and it costs less overall than the crew module and performing crew rotations, it's a good idea to use the automated system than to have a crew onboard.
Granted, there's always some use for a crew onboard... but whether you have a crewed system or not depends on the tradeoff. Hubble became useful and has seen decades of service due to servicing missions by STS, but was it really cheaper to launch servicing missions as opposed to whole new telescopes on cheaper launchers? That is interesting food for thought.
Of course, STS had a pretty high cost/kg, so it is understandable that things would change with a cheaper system. But then again, we did not have astronauts permanently stationed at Hubble- only people visting every few years.
Let's say, now we have a small manufacturing facility producing some fancy platinum nano-membrane or something like that. It can't be produced on Earth, because you (for some reason) need a zero-G environment to make it. The problem is, lifting raw materials from Earth to LEO is expensive. Hm, wouldn't it make sense to move the production facility to L1 and use materials mined from the Moon instead? As the demand for this fancy stuff grows and the investor wants to expand production, it might. Heck, we can ask the guys who run the lunar hotel opened last year to lease us a part of their base to support this mining operations. Or we can strike a deal with the government agency that's operating a small science outpost there.
I think the difficulty of lunar resource processing is underestimated. There are lots of chemicals, for example, that are used in the refinement process of aluminium and other metals, that are hard to come by on the Moon. There are also various items of processing plants and mining equipment that would need to be brought to the Moon first, even in the example of a "seed" factory, and this could be quite costly.
Maybe eventually due to dV constraints using lunar materials and launching stuff from the Moon would be cheaper, but everything depends on your infrastructure.
But crap, there is a problem. Now we have a lot of our employees up there and they need to eat. Supplying all the food from Earth is expensive, so let's construct a dedicated space and/or lunar hydroponic farm that will produce the staple foods for our people. When we're at it, let's sell the surplus to other guys who are doing business in space for a nice income boost.
Isn't some sort of renewable life support cycle necessary anyway?
How are you going to make a profit using that? If you launch it into space? That cost is non-zero, even on the Moon.
And that's just one thought experiment meant to show you once again what I mean by gradual expansion in space. Each new layer builds on the previous one and the overall complexity of our space economy begins to grow rapidly.
And how accurate is that though experiment? It could be argued that a space enthusiast(s) will consistently design scenarios that lead to space development, where in reality such processes would be far less successful.
(I could do a similar thought experiment concerning the clean-up of LEO and GTO. At some point, we will need to get rid of all the defunct satellites that are quickly becoming a pain in our collective butts. There you heave another opportunity for the private sector - governments and companies doing business in Earth orbit will pay others to remove the trash. I am sure someone will find a way to recycle parts of the old satellites in orbit and sell the recovered material to others for profit. The opportunities are endless.)
The oppurtunities are endless... but so are the limitations.
Space cleanup is an interesting concept, but it is also one that need not be manned.
Furthermore using space-based materials is a double-edged sword... it would likely be, especially considering lower launch costs, easier to build satellites on Earth where the industry for it exist, and then launch them, than build satellites in space from an inadequate industry.
But debris are a problem. The big ones we can collect... the smaller ones... probably not. We just have to wait for air drag to bring them down in the best case.
According to their calculations, if you used Skylon to lift your stuff to the orbit instead of the proposed Ares rockets, you could do a Moon mission akin to that specified under Constellation with a budget of less than a billion.
I am extremely skeptical of that. It isn't about launch costs alone, hardware costs and development costs come into play to. Considering that Apollo was supposedly $170 billion in 2007 dollars, even if you cut that by a factor of 10, it'd be 17 billion, which is pretty cheap, but still quite a bit higher than 1 billion.
When you add other clever ways of reducing the costs (robotic orbital assembly, in-space refuelling, solar sails, ion/plasma propulsion systems, ISRU on the Moon), you realize that building and maintaining a lunar base can be done very cheaply, at least in comparison with the current estimates that speak of hundreds of billions of dollars, which is insane.
How cheap is ISRU on the Moon, really? How expensive would it be to create 4 tons of sintered regolith constuction material (approximately the amount that you need to shield a square meter of area against cosmic radiation)?
Space travel is dangerous, yes. Large part of the danger is related to unreliable launchers - would you buy an air ticket if 1% of flights ended in a crash? I think not. Skylon is set to reduce the risk of failure by two or three orders of magnitude, which would make travelling to space only marginally more dangerous than other forms of transportation. Travelling in space isn't nearly as dangerous as some people claim.
I seriously, seriously doubt that Skylon is suddenly going to reduce risks by "two or three orders of magnitude", making it "marginally more dangerous than other forms of transportation". Skylon is doing far, far more than other forms of transportation. It's a reusable, rocket powered spaceplane... there is a huge amount of things that could go wrong.
And travelling in space
is dangerous. Maybe not as dangerous as on launch or reentry (where you can have a LOCV in seconds), but it is dangerous in the fact that failure of just one crucial system can have fatal results. And a spacecraft has a huge number of crucial systems.
Apollo 13 is a good example. They managed to get out of that situation, with a lot of ingenuity. A lot of the incidents that happened with the Mir station are another example- fires, collisions. As well as the (admittedly less severe) set of problems that have been encountered on the ISS.
In addition, there was that scary incident during the Gemini program involving the spacecraft stack spinning out of control. And of course there was the loss of cabin pressure during Soyuz 11, which occured over 100 km (but still during the return to Earth).
Let's go through several different modes of transportation:
- If you're in a motor vehicle or a train and your propulsion system fails, you will coast to a halt and stop.
- If you're on a waterborne craft such as a ship and your propulsion system fails, you will coast to a stop and start to drift, where you will be able to either be sighted by another ship, or radio for help.
- If you're in an aircraft and your propulsion system fails, you can attempt to glide to the nearest landing strip.
- If you're in a spacecraft and your propulsion system fails, and you're not on a free return trajectory to safety,
you die. Space is vast and empty, so the chance of meeting up with someone who can rescue you is virtually zero, and a rescue mission could be pretty difficult, considering the trajectory of your vehicle and launch windows to rendezvous.
That Apollo 13 cryostir was scheduled for later on in the mission, when the CM would have been in lunar orbit and the LM would be on the surface of the Moon. If that explosion occured in lunar orbit, all three crewmembers would have had no chance of escape or rescue and would have died.
One thing that I have learnt first-hand, is that whenever you lull yourself into a sense of security, a failure
will occur. This is exemplified by both LOCV incidents with STS. There were problems, that were ignored and/or understimated.
In spaceflight, there are no compromises. Because with compromises come failure.
So again, you're blowing the known problems out of proportion in order try to make them look insurmountable even though they're clearly not.
Which is a pretty poor argument, because I can claim the same; that you are showing the tail of the lion, but hiding its head.
Skylon is supposed to reduce the cost to $600/kg in 20 years, $130/kg if the market grows fast enough Your 25% cost reduction estimate is demonstrably and wildly pessimistic.
STS was supposed to get costs down to $1000/kg. It never did.
I'd love to see those cost figures, I really would, but we have every reason to be skeptical.
If things go as planned, it will initially be about $1 million, then the price will go down to the realm of five digits numbers, maybe even lower. That's better than any of that suborbital tourism hype that is currently circulating in some circles. (Funny, considering that Skylon is totally disconnected from space tourism, they didn't even counted with it in their market calculations.)
The cost of launching people is not only about the cost of launching their mass, but the mass needed to keep them alive and safe as well. And there are other issues involved too, I am sure.
If your estimates of ticket cost to LEO are lower than the ticket price of suborbital space tourism efforts that are
far closer to actually existing, isn't that a cause for concern?
Again you're extrapolating the future based on current exorbitant prices, which makes about as much sense as predicting the future of computers based on vacuum tube technology did in 1940s.
I do not blame the people of the 1940s for making the predictions that they did. After all, they had no evidence to suggest otherwise.
In this case, we have no evidence to suggest that spaceflight will suddenly explode into popularity, and actually quite a few reasons why it would not. "But look at the people of the 1940s! Look at computers! They greatly underestimated the power of computers in our era" isn't a very good comparison, just because it exists. After all, the people of the 1940s thought that by our time we would have all sorts of advanced stuff... that never happened.
On the contrary. That RE guy was very sceptical about it. Basically he said you can't make these vehicles safe enough with the money they plan to invest, and in the end you end up with $200K ticket for a few minutes of weightlessness and a nice view. If you wait a little longer, you'll buy 48-hour orbital flight for similar amount of money. If you wait still longer, you'll be able to buy a week-long stay in an orbital hotel.
Yeah, and Pan Am established a waiting list for future flights to the Moon in the 1960s. Just because people say something will happen doesn't mean it actually will.
Uh, no. It's available to the super-rich now, and it hasn't generated any backlash, on the contrary. In 15 years, it will be available to the "just" rich. In 30 years, it will be available to those "well-off". In 60 years, it will be available to the upper middle class in most developed countries. Heck, if it cost me 100,000 US dollars to buy a ticket and I started saving for it now, I'd be able to afford it eventually even though the average salary in my country is below the EU average.
You seem so sure about your predictions. :shifty:
It's available to the super-rich and there are no objections, no, but if a large number of the super-rich were doing it, it'd suddenly attract those sort of connotations from the greater public.
There is nothing magical (literally speaking) about the numbers I mentioned. I didn't just pull them out of thin air, whereas you just take current prices and say "ok, let's assume they'll only go down at an injured snail's pace for the next million years". That's not even in line with the image of "Mr Rational Realist" you're obviously aiming for here, that's downright irrational - again, no offence intended.
Saying that it's downright irrational is a pretty bad argument, because I can claim exactly the same thing of what you are saying. No offence intended or taken, I'm just saying that the point is mute.
I picked $5000 because it was a healthy price- between US and Russian launchers, presumably, a timeframe of 30 years because that is roughly how long one could assume a launcher would be in service, and a 25% decrease with each increment because it wasn't wildly high (50%) or wildly low (1%). If you pick $2000/kg- around the cost/kg of Falcon 9 heavy, then you will get to a cost/kg of $1000 or $100 far faster.
You're assuming that technology
will come around in 20-30 years, and it
will do as promised, because the guys behind it say it will. Well, that's nice. But clearly from a historical perspective, grand claims generally don't tend to come true.
The cost of developing Skylon is set to be about $12 billion, less than A380. Let's be pessimistic and assume 100% cost overrun with the final development cost at about 25 billion US dol..., no let's make it €uros just for the heck of it. It's still comparable to large industry projects that are being done all around the world as we speak.
That's what they
say it would be. It could end up being much higher in reality.
Ergo, we won't go to Mars for 300 billion dollars, we'll go there for a fraction of that cost. Space will be done in a smart way or not at all. I think the former is more likely.
Except for the fact that you can't do space in a smart way, because space isn't 'smart'.
Even a 10 billion dollar Mars mission isn't going to pay itself off.
It's not just that. Space-related topics commonly attract public attention. Every Shuttle launch is reported, almost every docking at ISS steals some time in news bulletins and the same goes for each probe that lands somewhere in the solar system.
Compared to other events? When there's a shuttle mission they showcase the launch and the landing, and maybe make a mention or two about what's going on during the mission... and then it's back to more important news like the situation in Libya or Japan.
Your pessimistic view that people are inherently uninterested in space or even hostile to space exploration is patently false.
I'm sorry, that is just what
I have experienced throughout my life. Maybe I somehow attract space-haters to myself somehow.
And you are disregarding people who are not in the west/developed nations, though arguably, developed nations would be the ones to develop space, so it is a moot point.
At least there is some science in it
Next I am sure it will be "the science of dating" or "the science of house-training your puppy". :facepalm:
I didn't say I was immune On the other hand, given the average life expectancy in my country, I can't postpone these things that much - it would mean that nothing would be allowed to happen for the next 50 years at least, which is inconsistent with the predictable trends I wrote about.
Hey, limiting development due to your lifespan is just as bad as overestimating it... factors of reality should determine development, not lifespan, be it postponing things just so that they won't happen during your lifetime, or accelerating things so that they would.
What's so radical about it? I predict some presence on the Moon, very limited utilization of asteroids (probably NEOs) and small outposts on Mars. Most of the space economy will still be based in Earth orbit and 2nd generation SSTOs will just have been introduced.
Because you're predicting something that doesn't pay for itself. Mining the asteroids
does not make any sense, you've predicted a huge presence on the Moon (compared to what we have... I know), and a full-fledged space economy, and it is still debatable as to whether such a thing could plausibly exist or not.
And that's after I killed a significant fraction of Earth's population and plunged it into a decade of economic recession caused by environmental exhaustion and collapse in some parts of the (so-called) 3rd world. I am probably being too pessimistic there.
Kill just 1% of 10 billion people, and you have killed 100 million.
WWII killed about 40 million, and that came with an economic and technological stimulus... environmental collapse just kills people.
There is no expiry date for the third world, as that collapse is happening right now. The poverty that is abundant in so many places around the world, the conflict, the resource exhaustion... is really not sustainable. These places need to develop or collapse further into a cesspit of failure.
The biggest challenge of the 21st century will be supplying many tens of terawatts of power to billions of people, and learning how to manage energy and resources in a sustainable manner. That is a big challenge, and if anyone is going to care about expansion into space, it is going to be a very small amount of the planet.
I agree there, I myself am not a fan of the exponential technological growth theory, technological singularity and whatnot. Actually I think the rate at which new discoveries are made will slow down by the end of the century. Research is getting more expensive, time-consuming and difficult to do as we go "deeper".
Yeah. I think there is a grain of truth to it, I mean, it does happen, that is undeniable... but... there are limits. If a person of the 1950s was to extrapolate airliner development, they'd end up with absurd vehicles flying around in our era, whereas we still use aircraft designs that originated in the decade after the '50s.
In addition to practical and physical limits, there is also the "low hanging fruit" of discovery. We've picked the low hanging fruit. Now we're onto a whole lot of stuff that we understand, but can't turn into practical technology yet. Fusion is an example, while we understand the science behind it, it has been 20 years away... for the last 50 years.
Our technological abilities aren't expanding like they were at the turn of the last century. Granted, there is development of computers... and maybe some development in the field of biochemistry... but to be honest I really can't see how the latter field is expanding exponentially. It's stuff we don't know about, we have to learn about via scientific discovery... and scientific discovery is not technology that can necessarily be held accountable to a Moore's Law-like pattern.
unless we expand into space
Because places that make the Namib look like a paradise are the major areas for future development? :uhh:
(Gods this took me much longer than I planned)
Long posts tend to do that. :blink:
I honestly haven't followed this thread very much, but I just came across this blog post by Wayne Hale and I think it's fairly relevant (or at least a decent read).
While I find Hale's rhetoric good, particularly in that instance, that is a reason that heavily ignores the practical disadvantages to space travel, and does not really fit into space development at all.
:lol:
