The "Real Aerospace" Thread

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icekatze
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Re: The "Real Aerospace" Thread

Post by icekatze »

hi hi
As noted above, the block buy lowers the incremental lower end Atlas V launch costs to less than $100 million/
- The source Mjolnir cited.

It is important to note that the line item for the ULA contract includes maintenance and facilities for all of their rockets, including the larger more expensive Deltas, and that the original long term contract called for more launches but was scaled back. It is also important to note that the same budget line that gives the 164 million block launch cost also includes the funds that were spent on Space X's certification, among other things.

I wish I could get better information about the actual launch costs of various launch vehicles, prior to the addition of launch company profits. Unfortunately that information seems difficult to find.

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Re: The "Real Aerospace" Thread

Post by fredgiblet »

Nemo wrote:I still dont understand why we want to bother going to Mars in person anyway. Let the rovers go down in the gravy well. Use the people to man stations on the moon and start up some manner of resourcing and manufacturing capacity. Even that can be largely auto or tele-operated.
Because it's there.

More seriously we really should push to get a functioning, self-sufficient colony on a different planet. There's ALWAYS the possibility of an extinction level event happening here on Earth, whether it's super-volcano or asteroid strike. As a species we need to expand to ensure our own survival.

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Re: The "Real Aerospace" Thread

Post by Mjolnir »

icekatze wrote:hi hi
As noted above, the block buy lowers the incremental lower end Atlas V launch costs to less than $100 million/
- The source Mjolnir cited.

It is important to note that the line item for the ULA contract includes maintenance and facilities for all of their rockets, including the larger more expensive Deltas, and that the original long term contract called for more launches but was scaled back. It is also important to note that the same budget line that gives the 164 million block launch cost also includes the funds that were spent on Space X's certification, among other things.

I wish I could get better information about the actual launch costs of various launch vehicles, prior to the addition of launch company profits. Unfortunately that information seems difficult to find.
That was the incremental cost. That's not even the average cost (which is $225 million per launch for the block buy), it's only of interest if you are considering adding another launch to a $17.6 billion contract consisting of a 36-core, 28-launch block buy, 50-launch prior buy, and $6.9 billion for operations and infrastructure. There is precisely one customer who would do such a thing...and guess what, if you made that kind of guarantee to SpaceX, they could probably offer a better deal as well.

https://twitter.com/torybruno/status/584032353787326464

And even if $100 million was actually representative of the launch cost, it still wouldn't be anywhere close to the price you claimed.

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Re: The "Real Aerospace" Thread

Post by Mjolnir »

fredgiblet wrote:
Nemo wrote:I still dont understand why we want to bother going to Mars in person anyway. Let the rovers go down in the gravy well. Use the people to man stations on the moon and start up some manner of resourcing and manufacturing capacity. Even that can be largely auto or tele-operated.
Because it's there.

More seriously we really should push to get a functioning, self-sufficient colony on a different planet. There's ALWAYS the possibility of an extinction level event happening here on Earth, whether it's super-volcano or asteroid strike. As a species we need to expand to ensure our own survival.
The biggest threat is ourselves. It needn't even be something as dramatic as a war or plague, a bad enough economic crash might destroy our capability to maintain a high-tech civilization, with recovery being difficult or impossible due to all the easily-accessed resources being long gone. Just losing space capability means losing weather satellites, with massive impacts to agriculture and shipping. A small self-sufficient off-planet industrial base capable of producing moderately sophisticated electronics for weather and comm satellites would make a huge difference in our ability to recover.

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Re: The "Real Aerospace" Thread

Post by icekatze »

hi hi

The $225 million average cost is including the launches of Delta IV heavy rockets, which are significantly more expensive, and carry a significantly larger payload. (Not to mention, people have been wanting to retire the Delta IV, because they know it is old, but haven't been able to secure a replacement yet.) There is a lot of other expenditures that went into the long term contract that are not directly related to any individual launch's costs, but are still important.

The further down the rabbit hole I look into this, the more reasons I see why comparing the various launch costs with the aggregated pricing figures quoted by CEOs on all sides of the issue is not really increasing my understanding of the efforts involved. Although it has been someone informative to see how the requirement to have launch vehicles on standby for immediate use at any time increases maintenance costs.

Considering how much time I've spent trying to dig into this, I think I'm just going to have to leave it, and watch how things unfold. Space X might succeed, they might not, and there are some pretty competent minds predicting one, the other, and everything in-between.

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Re: The "Real Aerospace" Thread

Post by Absalom »

Mjolnir wrote:
Absalom wrote:Now, more interestingly, does anyone know what the wording for the mission-to-Mars earmark was? NPR made me wonder if NASA is supposed to do a cycler (I really want an automated Moon base to build habitat hulls for 4+ year Mars orbiters, but there's no way that could get off the ground as fast as conventional sourcing).
What mission-to-Mars earmark? There's no manned Mars mission being funded, just the ExoMars lander and the 2020 rover.
Is that based off the 2015 budget, or the 2016 budget that added ~1 billion to NASA's funding? I wasn't able to catch most of what was said at the time for some reason, and looks like I misunderstood what was being funded.
fredgiblet wrote:
Nemo wrote:I still dont understand why we want to bother going to Mars in person anyway. Let the rovers go down in the gravy well. Use the people to man stations on the moon and start up some manner of resourcing and manufacturing capacity. Even that can be largely auto or tele-operated.
Because it's there.

More seriously we really should push to get a functioning, self-sufficient colony on a different planet. There's ALWAYS the possibility of an extinction level event happening here on Earth, whether it's super-volcano or asteroid strike. As a species we need to expand to ensure our own survival.
I question whether it should be so specific as a planet (there are proposals for O'Neill cylinders & such, after all, and shorter-term for "dumbell" stations), but yes.
icekatze wrote:Although it has been someone informative to see how the requirement to have launch vehicles on standby for immediate use at any time increases maintenance costs.
And this is why ICBMs use solid fuels (stability is measurable in decades), and the Ares 1 should eventually be resurrected in some form for quick launches of "life boats".

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Re: The "Real Aerospace" Thread

Post by fredgiblet »

Absalom wrote:I question whether it should be so specific as a planet (there are proposals for O'Neill cylinders & such, after all, and shorter-term for "dumbell" stations), but yes.
Sure, but can those serve long-term on their own? You need to have the ability to acquire natural resources and produce spare parts. Hard to do floating in space.

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Re: The "Real Aerospace" Thread

Post by Absalom »

fredgiblet wrote:
Absalom wrote:I question whether it should be so specific as a planet (there are proposals for O'Neill cylinders & such, after all, and shorter-term for "dumbell" stations), but yes.
Sure, but can those serve long-term on their own? You need to have the ability to acquire natural resources and produce spare parts. Hard to do floating in space.
The difficulty of sourcing materials in space is tied to distance (mostly distance to volatiles such as bulk hydrogen, phosphorus, & other such (though if you succeed in building cloud facilities on Venus, then hydrogen, sulfur, and nitrogen should be covered)), and zero-gee. The reason I think we should mine the Moon first is so that the materials thusly sourced can be used to build a mining unit large enough to handle small asteroids. The simplest possibility I can think of is a big aluminum bag and an overpowered laser: the laser fires on the asteroid, material vaporizes & condenses on the bag, when enough has been condensed the bag is cut into pieces & reprocessed. This might be doable without lunar materials, but I doubt that any other industrial-size processes would be, and the bag method could prove rather slow.

Refining is not precisely identical to the same thing on Earth, but the asteroids are actually already semi-differentiated, and even if they weren't it would just be an issue of storing the stuff that wasn't immediately needed. Not a big deal, especially considering that:
1) most of the extra will probably be non-volatile materials we would want to use in bulk anyways, such as aluminum & silicon,
2) not only is sunlight 4x as strong directly outside the Earth's atmosphere as it is at sea level, but zero-gee allows comically flimsy mirrors to work well, so energy is not the issue in space that it is on Earth.
Sodium & potassium (to refine oxidized materials) are more of a concern than almost anything else.

As for producing parts, just use the same processes in space as you would on Earth. If you have a lot of fragile parts that are subjected to huge stresses, then you've done something wrong, because most of the stresses should be taken up by multi-hull pressure hulls, with few moving parts (the only moving parts subjected to high stress should be airlocks, honestly). There's little to no need for high weight efficiencies, and if you try for it in a space-born bulk habitat or infrastructure project, it just demonstrates a lack of consideration for safety margins. The high-mass-efficiency designs we commonly associate with space are honestly mostly built like that due to the need to launch them: when the materials are already most of the way out of a gravity well, we aren't trying to get things around fast, and solar sails are available for maneuvering, design priorities are less inclined towards balsa-wood hulls barely thick enough to withstand a light breeze, and more inclined towards steel or titanium hulls sufficient to withstand a hurricane.

Or were you thinking in terms of projects not occurring outside the station hulls? Because that would be like cities without any of the projects (farming, mining, etc.) that support them: lacking in a foundation, and thus doomed by mismanagement.

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Re: The "Real Aerospace" Thread

Post by fredgiblet »

Mining asteroids isn't as simple as most sci-fi would have you believe, just finding and getting to them is gonna be a pain in the ass. You're going to burn a LOT of fuel getting there and back in a reasonable timeframe.

Getting natural resources is significantly more difficult in space than on a planet, expanding is more difficult and expensive in space than on a planet, keeping healthy is more difficult in space than on a planet. The only thing that I see as better about space-born living would be short-term setup, it would probably be faster to get a functional colony set up in a space habitat than on Mars.

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Re: The "Real Aerospace" Thread

Post by Nemo »

Asteroid mining can be long term replenishment as metals on the moon become more difficult to acquire. Use small efficient engines or sails and aim them at the moon with a designated impact zone for a given time frame. Mostly its a matter of getting as much of the mass and material you need for any endeavor already out of the gravy. Until you have that capacity, talk of colonizing other planets is just Disney style wishful thinking.

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Re: The "Real Aerospace" Thread

Post by Absalom »

fredgiblet wrote:Mining asteroids isn't as simple as most sci-fi would have you believe, just finding and getting to them is gonna be a pain in the ass. You're going to burn a LOT of fuel getting there and back in a reasonable timeframe.
I suspect that when you say "reasonable time" you're thinking about months between (for example) Earth & Mars, or possibly even weeks.

When I say "reasonable time" for this sort of scenario, I'm thinking about years between Earth and Mars. Moving hydrogen? Package it into a chemical that doesn't leak away so easily (hydrocarbons, for example), shield it from energy sources, and ship it like it's any other bulk commodity. Non-leaky bulk commodities? Ship them in either pressure hulls, or in blocks exposed to the vacuum (in some cases this could even be a metalurgical processing stage). Everything else? Either it's rare materials, or you won't be getting it from an asteroid, unless it was a new station that might as well be built near the materials source.

Asteroids get you bulk commodities instead of this year's iPhone, so you ship them appropriately: with a solar sail. Choose a few distribution points (if you're shipping in-system from the asteroid belt, you'd probably go for Mars, and three of it's Lagrange points), build a free-space warehouse at each, distribute from each according to the arrival season.
fredgiblet wrote:Getting natural resources is significantly more difficult in space than on a planet, expanding is more difficult and expensive in space than on a planet, keeping healthy is more difficult in space than on a planet. The only thing that I see as better about space-born living would be short-term setup, it would probably be faster to get a functional colony set up in a space habitat than on Mars.
Are you counting the time to build the habitat in the set-up time? O'Neill thought that the first station would take ~30 years to build, due to the time needed to build up the industry.

At any rate, the only foreseeable advantage that planets other than Earth provide for a properly designed system is the lack of a need to provide a gravity replacement... IF you are living on Mars, Venus, possibly the Moon or Mercury or other objects of that size if you never need to go anywhere else, and the atmospheres of the gas giants. Everywhere else modifies the challenges faced in living off of the Earth, but doesn't get rid of them:

Mercury has low gravity, no atmosphere, and horrible temperature extremes that only come close to disappearing at the poles; Venus has a horribly hostile lower atmosphere that will melt AND dissolve most things; the Moon has low gravity, no atmosphere, AND high-abrasive dust; Mars has barely any atmosphere, very long-lived dust clouds, and the dust is likely decently abrasive (though it should be much more friendly than on Luna); Jupiter's upper atmosphere is too self-irradiated for habitability with sensible structures; most of Jupiter's moons are bad for the same reason as Jupiter's atmosphere, including Europa; Callisto, I'll admit, might be a good choice, and if you're willing to go out to Jupiter then it might be considered superior to Mars, but it still has a minor atmosphere and low gravity; If you remove those four major moons of Jupiter, you're left with 0.003% of the mass orbiting Jupiter, so they might as well be asteroids; Saturn is much better than Jupiter for atmospheric colonization, but the lack of a solid foundation means that if your atmospheric colony needs external flotation support, then loss of flotation can result in death even if the colony hull remains intact, adding one potential source of colony destruction, still a decent choice if you're willing to go that far out, though; Titan is reasonably close to a good choice if you're willing to go as far as Saturn, but if you want to terraform then forget it, because both the distance from the sun and the hydrocarbon-dominated environment make that absurd, regretfully it's gravity and temperature are both low, and the atmospheric density actually makes the temperature a concern; Enceladus is a good source of water, but the constant spray suggests that an orbital collection system may be wiser than surface operations, lest your colony turn into a glacier; The rest of Saturn's moons should fall in the same general category as Callisto, Enceladus, or asteroids, since Titan is ~96% of Saturn's orbiting mass; Uranus would probably be the best of the gas giants to place atmospheric colonies in, if not for the distance, as it's escape velocity is lowest, and it's gravity is ~90% of Earths at 1 bar of atmospheric pressure; Saturn's moons are all smaller than Titan, and mostly ice, Titania would probably be the one to aim for if a colony was to be placed on one, since it's the largest; Neptune presumably has no advantages for atmospheric colonization over Uranus; Titan barely has gravity or atmosphere, but it has over 99% of the mass orbiting Neptune, and is suspected to have some potential for geothermal energy; anything further out is basically going to be no better than Titan.

Out of curiosity, what conditions were you thinking favored planets? The only advantage that reliably exists for them is the fact that there's already a floor to stand on.

And, if you think about it, any practical colonization effort (unless you're colonizing to the Moon) is going to call for one or more space-borne habitats on a cycler orbit, since using disposables quickly becomes a unjustified waste.

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Re: The "Real Aerospace" Thread

Post by fredgiblet »

Absalom wrote:Out of curiosity, what conditions were you thinking favored planets? The only advantage that reliably exists for them is the fact that there's already a floor to stand on.
The existence of natural resources within relatively easy reach. Also you mentioned building habitats, keep in mind that you can also go DOWN no a planet like Mars. That necessitates mining of course, but not building more habitats. You could theoretically have an entire city underneath one building, though that's not likely ideal. In space EVERY square foot requires construction.

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Re: The "Real Aerospace" Thread

Post by icekatze »

hi hi

Although it is a reasonable enough approximation, a spinning habitat is not quite the same thing as a massive body with gravity. Also, there's that whole radiation thing. Having lots of filler material to put between yourself and cosmic radiation and micro meteors is handy.

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Re: The "Real Aerospace" Thread

Post by Absalom »

fredgiblet wrote:
Absalom wrote:Out of curiosity, what conditions were you thinking favored planets? The only advantage that reliably exists for them is the fact that there's already a floor to stand on.
The existence of natural resources within relatively easy reach.
Define "easy reach". Silicon and aluminum oxides should be all over the place, but they behave very similarly, so unless you land right on an ore vein the only easy use of them will be as sinter-crete, glass, etc., which places you right back at the first stages of a Lunar mining base. As far as I know, the only stuff that has been identified as being vaguely pure is at the poles, where you have vaguely pure water and dry-ice. You can try looking for fairly pure meteoric metals but... those are meteoric, and we already know where to find corresponding asteroids: 16 Psyche, for example, is suspected to be 90% metallic, and is thought to have enough nickel and iron to supply the entirety of Earth's needs for both of those for over a million years. Other asteroids are suspected to be dominated with other categories of elements, due to spectral analysis.

You said earlier that for space colonies we'd have to search for asteroids to mine, but that's simply not true: we already know where most of the big asteroids are, and what we're most likely to get from them. The places where we'll have to go looking are actually the planets, as most of the useful ore will be buried, just like it is on Earth.

As for power, you can try for geothermal as a replacement for solar, but Mars has twice as thick a crust as Earth, so that won't go so easily.
fredgiblet wrote:Also you mentioned building habitats, keep in mind that you can also go DOWN no a planet like Mars. That necessitates mining of course, but not building more habitats. You could theoretically have an entire city underneath one building, though that's not likely ideal. In space EVERY square foot requires construction.
And excavating qualifies as a form of construction itself, though I suspect that it's in many ways more difficult, since we mostly avoid it on Earth. You have to build every cubic meter of shirt-sleeve volume for a space habitat, but you also have to build every cubic meter of shirt-sleeve volume on, for example, Mars. You can shift the details around, but you can't get around the necessity of the construction, and once you have the infrastructure in place you can construct massive volumes in space much easier than on a planet (the resulting surface area will be linearly dependent on the hull, yes, but you can always build up, since you have a shirt-sleeve environment already: allocation of volume is as flexible as you want it to be, and I personally think that "thick" hulls with multiple floors are the way to go).

icekatze wrote:hi hi

Although it is a reasonable enough approximation, a spinning habitat is not quite the same thing as a massive body with gravity. Also, there's that whole radiation thing. Having lots of filler material to put between yourself and cosmic radiation and micro meteors is handy.
Yeah, it's been suggested that you'd use a rocky-type asteroid for the construction materials, as they should contain plenty of iron for the structural requirements (assuming that you paid attention when selecting the asteroid), and a lot of discards that can be used as dumb-mass radiation shielding. The radiation solution is basically the same in space as on the Moon or Mars.

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Re: The "Real Aerospace" Thread

Post by icekatze »

hi hi

I'll have to hunt down the article again, but I remember reading a little piece once about how spinning up rocky asteroids for gravity will potentially cause them to break apart. Probably not impossible to make it work, but could involve some interesting engineering challenges.

Geothermal power may not be so hot on Mars (oh the pun!) but in terms of dumping waste heat from a nuclear power plant, having a massive heat sink on hand could make managing heat a little easier.

As for myself, I expect that if we ever do manage to colonize space, it will at first be incidental. Habitats will pop up around whatever industry we manage to first operate in space, and will go from there. Whether that's on another planet or one of those insanely rich asteroids, I suppose it could go either way. Unfortunately, as it stands, the people with the money and wealth to personally fund space colonization are the ones who have the best living arrangements on the entire face of the Earth already.

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Re: The "Real Aerospace" Thread

Post by Absalom »

icekatze wrote:hi hi

I'll have to hunt down the article again, but I remember reading a little piece once about how spinning up rocky asteroids for gravity will potentially cause them to break apart. Probably not impossible to make it work, but could involve some interesting engineering challenges.
I meant in the sense of using a rocky asteroid as the source of the materials that you process and assemble into a habitat station, not in the sense of digging a cave in it and using it directly. After all, a lot of rocky asteroids are thought to just be rubble piles, so they won't even hold an atmosphere if you dig wrong. The main reason to use a rocky asteroid instead of a metallic one is that you can use the silicon-based rocks as radiation shielding (which doesn't need to spin, but which you'll build to stand some acceleration regardless).
icekatze wrote:As for myself, I expect that if we ever do manage to colonize space, it will at first be incidental. Habitats will pop up around whatever industry we manage to first operate in space, and will go from there. Whether that's on another planet or one of those insanely rich asteroids, I suppose it could go either way. Unfortunately, as it stands, the people with the money and wealth to personally fund space colonization are the ones who have the best living arrangements on the entire face of the Earth already.
Several of them actually want to see it happen though, and that is what will eventually make it possible for everyone else.

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Re: The "Real Aerospace" Thread

Post by Arioch »

SpaceX launched a Dragon ISS supply mission today and stuck the experimental landing of the Falcon first stage booster at sea on an automated barge named Of Course I Still Love You.



(Click this link for the moment of landing)
https://youtu.be/7pUAydjne5M?t=1647

It's still fun to hear the crowd of SpaceX employees going absolutely berserk as if they're watching a rock concert.

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Re: The "Real Aerospace" Thread

Post by GeoModder »

They act like they get a raise or extra vacation day each time a first stage makes a succesful return. :lol:
Image

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Re: The "Real Aerospace" Thread

Post by Nemo »

https://www.theguardian.com/science/201 ... tar-voyage

$100 million for Breakthrough: Starshot. Build a giant laser and melt propel a child's kite (sized) sail to high velocity carrying a microchip sized package to distant locales.


Still waiting on Breakthrough: Lunar Resourcing or Breakthrough: Orbital Manufacturing.

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Re: The "Real Aerospace" Thread

Post by Absalom »

Orbital manufacturing probably depends on metal 3D printing (as a bootstrap technology, not as the main implementation), and exo-Earth resourcing.

At any rate, the only real barrier to Lunar resourcing is someone putting up the money. Even I know how to do it, and I'm neither metalurgist, nor chemist (see, you start with aluminum, because the only basic purposes it isn't useful for are ones you need to bootstrap towards anyways...).

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