/sci/ - Science & Math

[Anonymous No.6544455]

Hi sci. I have been interested in spaceflight in earlier years, and some 15 years ago I lost interest, dissappointed by stagnating technology and costs.
Recently I heared about the Orion capsule and became interested again, but I'm really not up to date anymore.
What kind of progress in technolohy did spaceflight experience during the last years? Are engines today more efficient? More cost effective?

[Anonymous No.6544515]

The main progress right now seem to be SpaceX (in part because they have good PR). They began from scratch in 2002 and developed engines, the cheapest launch vehicle yet, a spacecraft which have sent cargo to the ISS.
They are now testing the crew version of this cargo, a heavy lift launcher and reusability of their launchers.

A project still in development is the Skylon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylon_%28spacecraft%29)), looks pretty cool but it will be "for real" in at least ten years

[Anonymous No.6544518]

>>6544455
Costs in general are stagnant because there is no pressure to decrease them. Governments can pay any price, and government launchers can be subsidized to match any commercial need.

Except for one company: SpaceX.

It is led by Elon Musk, who is after a long term goal instead of quarterly profits. That goal is settlement of Mars.

To reach this goal, he found that launch costs MUST decrease, so he has bent his entire will to make that happen.
* use of proven instead of cutting edge tech: RP-1/LOX pintle engines. Merlin engine optimized for reliability and ease of assembly instead of pushing efficiency limits
* make company a vertical business, building everything in-house to control quality and costs.
* design for mass production. Each Falcon 9 takes standard width tanks and 10 of largely the same engine. Even the avionics are modular.
* staged development plan: light falcon 1, cheap to fail and learn lessons with. Falcon 9 first serious launcher, only used for five launches, still learning. Falcon 9 1.1, applied lessons learned and testbed for reusability. Falcon 9R will have a reusable first stage, a first for mankind. Falcon Heavy with three cores will lift 50 tons. Future work on MCT (Mars Colonial Transport) will use larger methane/LOX Raptor engines, suitable for refueling on Mars.

[Anonymous No.6544528]

>>6544455
In contrast to SpaceX, the Orion capsule and Ares and SLS launchers are the same old government pork. The goal is to spend money in many districts, not to accomplish any particular mission. Did you know the SLS launcher has solid boosters not for any good engineering reason, but to keep the ATK company in Utah afloat? This and other design elements are explicitly written into the SLS legislation! SLS will end up being a worse committee design than even the Shuttle. As designed, it will be about $1B per launch, so we will only be able to afford one launch per year maximum.

[Anonymous No.6544529]

>>6544518
This sounds to good to be true.

[Anonymous No.6544542]

Wow I really like the skylon spacecraft while many of its technological challenges seem not to be solved yet

[Anonymous No.6544546]

>>6544528
sad to hear that

[Anonymous No.6544585]

>>6544518
>Except for one company: SpaceX.
They're hardly the only ones. They're just the most famous and won the most funding.

The thing about their strategy of using "proven" technology instead of "cutting-edge" is that it's easy for them to get something working, but hard to get something that achieves ambitious goals.

For instance, SpaceX went with the low-tech but rather dirty and low-performance all-kerosene/oxygen gas-generator so they could get to orbit as quickly as possible. Then they started selling their rocket as a non-reusable one.

They've been selling under cost and beyond their capabilities, and relying on subsidies and progress that will increase their launch rate and lower their cost. So it's all kind of a house of cards right now.

Blue Origin started with VTVL tests and went to hydrogen/oxygen for the best performance and reusability. They're not flying anything expendable, or selling anything they might not be able to deliver. They're off to a slower start, but could blast by SpaceX's expendable-to-reusable strategy and deliver true full-system, airliner-like reusability years ahead of them.

[Anonymous No.6544599]

>>6544529
Doesn't it though! Watching the company progress since 2002 has been a heady experience, like living in a Heinlein novel! They just had a capsule splashdown yesterday! Still waiting to hear details of how it went.

There have been setbacks, like losing the first three Falcon 1s, an engine failure on one launch, and lots of pad delays. The current launch was supposed to be on May 10, but a helium tank burst and they had to delay a month for repairs. Also they are fighting tooth and nail just to be allowed to compete against the established defense launcher ULA.

Also they drive their workers hard, lots of late nights and higher than average turnover.

[Anonymous No.6544611]

>>6544585
>They've been selling under cost and beyond their capabilities
says who?

>relying on subsidies
all the government money has been for specific development milestones or specific delivery contracts. A pittance compared to ULA's $1B a year subsidy for "mission assurance". The Russian boycott of the Atlas V RD-180 engine will really put that to the test.

I also cannot think of a single other company that is reducing launch costs. Russian, India's, and China's costs started low, due to low labor costs, but they have been going up lately as their labor gets more expensive.

[Anonymous No.6544642]

>>6544611
>all the government money has been for specific development milestones or specific delivery contracts.
Getting paid for "development milestones" is a subsidy, not a service. The delivery contracts are sweetheart contracts, paying considerably more than SpaceX's advertised prices.

>A pittance compared to ULA's $1B a year subsidy
Not comparing them to ULA, just pointing out the truth of their situation.

>>They've been selling under cost and beyond their capabilities
>says who?
Says me. It's obvious when you look at what capabilities they've actually demonstrated. Just look at their huge backlog of launches, and their schedule slips. They're years behind. At their demonstrated launch rates, with their staff, they can't possibly make money at their advertised prices.

SpaceX has promised things before having the capability to deliver them, depending on new technology to emerge before the contract deadlines run out.

[Anonymous No.6544682]

>>6544518
>That goal is settlement of Mars.

That proves Musk is just another idiot with money.

Once you get out of the gravity well you're not about to fucking go back down one. And that goes double for a bitterly-frozen, wholly-arid, essentially-airless wasteland like Mars. Colonizing the barest Antarctic spot makes 1000 times more sense than Mars... because it has 1 atm of pressure, lots of water, and access to trade routes and markets.

Mars is a sick and stupid fantasy by balding, fat, old nerds who can't deal with reality.

[Anonymous No.6544715]

>>6544682
Antarctica has no light for half of the year. It's not any easier to launch rockets into space from Antarctica than from other places on Earth. If you spill radioactive or chemical waste in Antarctica, it could seriously affect people elsewhere on Earth, or wildlife.

In Antarctica, you have to deal with heavy snowfall, snowstorms, and freezing rain. The oxygen-rich environment causes fire hazards and fast deterioration of many materials. With the high air pressure, it is very costly to construct chambers and pumps for industrially useful vacuums. The soil and its mineral resources are largely inaccessible due to being buried under a great deal of ice.

[Anonymous No.6544716]

>>6544682
thats true, but the Antarctic is on the same planet, not really a location for a humanity backup station

[Anonymous No.6544721]

>>6544682

Yes, I'm sure you're much smarter than Elon Musk. You couldn't possibly be missing the point or anything.

[Anonymous No.6544733]

>>6544682
>Colonizing the barest Antarctic spot makes 1000 times more sense than Mars

And colonizing southern California makes 1000 times more sense than Antarctica. The weather is great! That's the point, right? To find somewhere with nice weather that's easy to get to?

[Anonymous No.6544773]

>>6544682
> And that goes double for a bitterly-frozen, wholly-arid, essentially-airless wasteland like Mars. Colonizing the barest Antarctic spot makes 1000 times more sense than Mars...

You I like.

[Anonymous No.6544793]

>>6544455

we have ion engines now extremely high specific impulse but extremely low throughput.

it's a particle accelerator strapped to a satellite effectively.

we now have aerospikes (which sorta kinda don't really actually work yet) which should help with fuel economy in the atmospheric ascent

we have kerbal space program now, which makes every nerd an expert on all shit spaceflight now.

[Anonymous No.6544827]

>>6544793
These aerospikes could be some real progress, saving fuel and costs. I wonder why not putting more effort in development before planning new missions.

[Anonymous No.6544837]

>>6544721
>You couldn't possibly be missing the point or anything.

The point is ECONOMICS. And I didn't miss anything. You did. And Musk is playing you like a fool, which is an occupational hazard for an old fat neckbeard like yourself.

The POINT is that once you escape the economics-killing gravity well, you won't go back down on, ever again. You'd stay in space and make use of asteroids and comets and even moons. That's what ECONOMICS says you'd do... just like ECONOMICS says today that nobody, Nobody, NOBODY is actually investing in a construction shack ("space station") and lunar manufacturing facility, because THOSE CAN'T RUN A PROFIT.

Question for /sci/ducks: What is HERP to the DERP power? MOST OF YOUR POSTS, that's what.

[Anonymous No.6544845]

>>6544733
>And colonizing southern California makes 1000 times more sense than Antarctica. The weather is great! That's the point, right? To find somewhere with nice weather that's easy to get to?

Exactly. That's why we've colonized Southern California, over Antarctica. How many people live in Antarctica? 1000? 2000? There are 22 million people in SoCa.

And it might cost about $100K per person to emigrate to Antarctica, from SoCa. Sadly, it will cost about $1 billion per person to emigrate to Mars.

HERP^DERP = average /sci/duck post

[Anonymous No.6544861]

>>6544827
we're behind in materials science

the spike gets too hot

[Anonymous No.6544878]

>>6544455
Orion itself is fine vehicle. Here it is compared with other capsules. It is scheduled for a test launch on a Delta Heavy at the end of this year, though that schedule is likely to slip.

[Anonymous No.6544888]

>>6544878
and spaceplanes. Dream Chaser is still in the running for the Commercial Crew contract.

[Anonymous No.6544905]

>>6544837
>>6544845
VSG posting with his name off again?

[Anonymous No.6544918]

>>6544455
Two websites to follow space-related stuff
http://www.space.com/
http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/ (the forum part is quite interesting, with people from SpaceX, REL, or even ULA posting sometimes)

[Anonymous No.6544951]

>>6544888
I don't think it's supposed to be a competition. The goal of Commercial Crew is to establish more than one option.

As a spaceplane, Dream Chaser has some major advantages over any capsule. In particular, it offers a gentler ride and a much greater cross-range capability (i.e. more freedom to return from a wider variety of orbits at specific times and to specific landing locations). On top of that, it has non-toxic propellant and can land at any commercial airport.

CST-100 is basically the conventional option. It's pretty much guaranteed to work, going up and coming down. If Dream Chaser fails and SpaceX goes bankrupt, CST-100 will be there.

Dragon is being developed hand-in-hand with Falcon 9. While lacking in spaceplane capabilities, it has potential to beat the other options in price by orders of magnitude. In any case, it is likely to work and least offer a redundant crew launch capability at a competitive price.

[Anonymous No.6545022]

>>6544715
Yeah. Now imagine Mars as 100 times worse. Why does anyone want to go there again?

[Anonymous No.6545083]

>>6545022
But Mars doesn't have those problems, but "100 times worse". It doesn't have those problems at all, and it has advantages that no place on Earth has, which was kind of the point.

I personally think that the moon is a much better place to develop than Mars initially (mostly because the travel time is shorter, but also because it's more different from Earth), but Mars is interesting in many of the same ways as the moon, while offering greater long-term potential for human habitation.

Note that we do have outposts in Antarctica, and have had them for hundreds of years, as soon as it became feasible. Why should the example of Antarctica support the conclusion that we won't establish an outpost on Mars?

[Anonymous No.6545099]

>>6545083
1. Can't even breathe on Mars without (expensive) equipment

2. Mars is extremely far away and difficult to get to

[Anonymous No.6545107]

>>6545083
Mostly it's just how hard it is to get there. The moon landings took the absolute largest rocket ever constructed to get to the moon and back, and they only stayed on the moon for some hours. Let alone making a rocket that can go to Mars, stay there for at least some months, and come back.

Frankly I think the only feasible way to do it is to construct the thing in orbit. Getting out of the atmosphere with a rocket designed for a mars round-trip would be unfeasibly and staggeringly large, and building it orbit would reduce the size requirements significantly.

[Anonymous No.6545116]

>>6545107
>Frankly I think the only feasible way to do it is to construct the thing in orbit
This was never a question

It would still be outrageously expensive though, and where are you going to find competent volunteers? Have you seen those autismo retards Mars One has? I guarantee they'll trigger the self destruct a week into the journey (if it ever actually happens).

[Anonymous No.6545122]

>>6545116
Same way we got volunteers to go to the moon I imagine. Maybe once China or Russia or someone start considering it the US will kick things into gear and do it just to beat them.

[Anonymous No.6545136]

>>6545122
The moon is different. How long does it take for a return trip, like a week or two? A one way trip to Mars takes ~6 months. Then (assuming you're coming back and it's not for life) you spend another 2 years cooped up inside some kind of pressurized habitat doing fuck knows what waiting for a launch window back home. A further 6 month travel time back to Earth is next. Provided you haven't gone insane at any point along this, I guess you'd be welcomed back with fame and glory. But seriously, what kind of person signs up for that? It's like volunteering for several years of solitary confinement in prison.

[Anonymous No.6545174]

>>6545099
>1. Can't even breathe on Mars without (expensive) equipment
You can't breathe underwater without "(expensive) equipment", but I could take up SCUBA diving for a hobby if I wanted.

When we mass produce this stuff, it'll get cheaper and more reliable.

>>6545107
Mars is actually easier to get to than the moon in some ways. You can aerobrake as you reach Mars, which means you can land using very little propellant.

We're not going to do Mars like an Apollo mission. It requires more cleverness. Fortunately, we've got about half a century of additional technological progress on our side.

Basically, most plans for going to Mars involve figuring out how to make the return propellant from Martian air, and closed-loop life support fed by a nuclear reactor.

[Anonymous No.6545178]

>>6545136
I'd sign up, go ahead and call me crazy.

There are two great technical challenges for a manned mars shot that aren't being discussed enough. The first is communication. We don't have the infrastructure for a manned mission, our transfer rates are just 128kb/s to Martian orbiters.

The second is landing. The area of your decelerator upon entry goes up with the square of your payload mass. There's no way we could fit the large aeroshell required for landing humans on Mars in a rocket fairing. Inflatable heat shields are a long way off, though I beleive JPL's LDSD mission plans to test a prototype in the coming weeks.

[Anonymous No.6545198]

>>6545116
>>Frankly I think the only feasible way to do it is to construct the thing in orbit
>This was never a question
Well sure it was. There have been lots of proposals to do Mars missions without in-orbit construction. As far as I can tell, the SpaceX plan doesn't involve doing anything in Earth orbit.

It's not a one-launch plan. You send supplies and equipment first. You land that stuff on Mars, check that enough of it got there, and is in good condition, then you send people.

With what you launch the people in, the just to be able to survive until they reach Mars, and land. Then they'll have the previously launched equipment and supplies to work with.

[Anonymous No.6545205]

>>6545174
>You can aerobrake as you reach Mars, which means you can land using very little propellant.
You do realize that your "aerobrake" will also work as a brake when you're trying to leave too?

[Anonymous No.6545222]

>>6545205
Are you making a joke, or are you really this clueless?

[Anonymous No.6545233]

>>6545205
Um, no. When aerobraking, you fly through the atmosphere parallel to the surface. Upon launch, ascent in the atmosphere is mostly vertical. Drag force is in proportion to the square of velocity, and velocity in atmosphere upon entry is much greater than launch.

Thus, the effect of drag due to Mars's thin atmosphere on the Delta-V requirements of an ascent vehicle is small.

[gnuspace !!hSW0IcZr/fQ No.6546153]

>>6544455
Yeah the Orion won't take many astronauts to Mars. It may replace Soyuz for the space station though.

In the settlement of extra-terrestrial bodies, there are two schools of thought.
One consists in developing a full-blown colonial transport system and establishing a human base on Mars as soon as possible. The cost of this expedition is astronomical, however Elon Musk puts it at about half a billion american dollars per person. This is obviously far from being irrelevant as there are many people with that kind of money on planet Earth.
The second method is to automate the construction of a settling environment. This alternative requires more ingenuity, but is less costly because we remove the early cost of having the mission need to be human-rated.

The idea of emulating the effort done on Moon settlement is relevant here. The technological limit is being able to assemble a self-replicating robot, which will use in-situ resources to self-replicate and once in large numbers enough, create a small-scale industry and eventually a human-rated landing site and refueling station, as well as a set of pressurized, powered and self-sustaining human shelter.
This process if started, would use what we already know in chemistry, electronics, mining, mechanical and electrical engineering and may jump-start the STEM industry in the process, with a limit of course on NASA's budget, until at least space tourism and asteroid mining(which should be a parallel endeavor), start turning a profit.

[gnuspace !!hSW0IcZr/fQ No.6546160]

>>6546153
>half a billion
I meant half a million.

[Violent Simians Guy No.6546371]

>>6546153
>The cost of this expedition is astronomical, however Elon Musk puts it at about half a billion american dollars per person. This is obviously far from being irrelevant as there are many people with that kind of money on planet Earth.

That's just more HERP^DERP. You're clearly assuming that most people with $500M to spend will choose to emigrate. That's so appallingly stupid that you're clearly just another neckbeard who never saw more than $5000 in one place in his life.

The overwhelming hypermajority of rich people aren't interested in emigrating off Earth. They are very narrow minded as a class, and only care about MAKING MORE MONEY. And they can't do that by emigrating to Luna, etc.

You /sci/ducks continue to fail in the most important Human endeavor ever: UNDERSTANDING HUMAN NATURE. And the heart of Human Nature is ECONOMICS.

Human emigration off Earth is far too expensive. It will never happen. It will ALWAYS be much, much cheaper to just stay here and herd the useless eaters into the gas chambers when they get too feisty.

The rich have zero motivation to leave Earth. Stop watching stupid scifi like "Elysium" since it's rotting your brain.

[Violent Simians Guy No.6546380]

>>6545198
>There have been lots of proposals to do Mars missions without in-orbit construction. As far as I can tell, the SpaceX plan doesn't involve doing anything in Earth orbit.

That's why it's doomed to be another stupid one-shot attempt. It can't create anything sustainable since there's no INFRASTRUCTURE in place from the effort.

This is why Musk is another con artist. He's selling the same snake oil that has always been sold to the neckbeards about space development. You can't do everything from Earth, PERIOD. The gravity will kills that idea. It's too much of an energy consumer, hence makes space operations too expensive to conduct in a real, economic sense.

You have to have an infrastructure composed of AT LEAST a construction shack (i.e. space station), and a bulk manufacturing supplier (i.e. a lunar base). The surface of Luna is Humanity's factory floor for becoming a space-faring species. Period. This isn't up for discussion since it's rationally obvious based upon the minimum required understanding of physics, selenology and economics.

[Anonymous No.6546568]

>>6546380
>It can't create anything sustainable since there's no INFRASTRUCTURE in place from the effort.
Oh VSG, why do you fail so hard at basic reading comprehension?

You build reusable boosters on Earth, that's infrastructure. You can use that over and over again. It's not made for one-shot missions. This is SpaceX's whole schtick. The boosters are something like 90% of the launch cost.

You launch equipment to Mars, to stay, that's infrastructure. Again, the goal is to build a self-sustaining industry which can support human life indefinitely

From what I've heard, they're even talking about reusing the Earth-departure stages, by refuelling them on Mars. Fuel production is pretty easy on Mars, as long as you've got a power source, such as a nuclear reactor. There's lots of CO2, and even water can be usefully extracted from the atmosphere. There's a lot more water to be had with some pretty straightforward operations.

You don't need infrastructure specifically in low-Earth orbit, to be invested in making the journey and stay cheaper. It's not clear that LEO infrastructure would even help.

[Anonymous No.6546573]

>>6546153
>Yeah the Orion won't take many astronauts to Mars. It may replace Soyuz for the space station though.
It is mandated that Orion be designed as a backup to other manned transport to the ISS. But this is only to make it more politically viable, giving it a default mission in case we can't fund anything more interesting beyond earth orbit. In practice it would be far far too expensive and over-designed for ISS transport. Not to mention it wouldn't fly until after the ISS is scheduled to be decommissioned.

[Anonymous No.6546575]

>>6546568
>>6546380
...and by the way, the energy costs of space launch aren't prohibitive. In terms of fuel consumption, getting to orbit is not much worse than intercontinental flight on an airliner.

The extreme cost of launching stuff into space is because our vehicles aren't efficiently reusable. When we get that sorted out, the cost of launch, to orbit or even to Mars, will be in dollars per kilogram, rather than thousands of dollars per kilogram.

[Violent Simians Guy No.6546689]

>>6546568

You have no idea what infrastructure is. You're still trying to run a spacefaring operation entirely from the BOTTOM OF A FUCKING GRAVITY WELL. Economics says you're 100% wrong. You make infrastructure OFF PLANETS to alleviate the unaffordability of the effort. That means a construction shack in orbit, and a lunar manufacturing facility. WHICH ONE OF THOSE IS AT THE BOTTOM OF A HUGE GRAVITY WELL?!?!??

Once again, slowly and patiently: You can NOT run space efforts from the bottom of a gravity well. It requires so much energy that it becomes immediately uneconomic, therefore private industry won't touch it... and that's still the case, since SpaceX and the rest wouldn't exist at all if it wasn't for free govt cheese.

Get it yet? Or are you addicted to being a retard?

[Violent Simians Guy No.6546693]

>>6546575

Launch costs will NEVER be in dollars per kg. The current price of $10000/pound or whatever, is holding solidly. Like many other /sci/ducks, you fail to understand that INDUSTRY TAKES ENERGY TOO. Everything we do takes energy (Physics 101, perhaps you've heard of it), and energy costs money (Economics 101, I'm sure you never fucking heard of that).

[Anonymous No.6546711]

>>6544837
Because we landed on the moon for ECONOMICS.
Musk is an idealist. If he wanted a quick buck, he would have developed better oil extraction methods rather than advancing the electric car. Same with space.

[Anonymous No.6546739]

>>6546693
>The current price of $10000/pound or whatever, is holding solidly.
SpaceX is advertising launch prices at $1154/pound, without reusability. They've already made roughly one order of magnitude improvement, they have another lined up with their booster flyback reusability, another one with all-stages rapid reusability, and one more after that with a giant methane-fueled rocket.

The general lack of effort to lower launch prices has been based on the presumption that the only market is satellite launch, and the reality that satellite launch demand does not increase much with lower prices.

The difference between traditional launch services and things like SpaceX, Blue Origin, XCOR, and Virgin Galactic is that the new companies are more speculative. They're gambling that new customers will emerge to take advantage of their dramatically lower prices.

The old launch companies were simply not trying to drive prices down. They were investing in capabilities and reliability, but not in dramatic cost reduction. Lack of progress resulted from lack of willingness to invest in making that progress.

[Anonymous No.6546798]

>>6546689
>Economics says you're 100% wrong.

where is this economics guy, i'd like to meet him and see if his dick is worth sucking as much you make it seem

[Anonymous No.6546838]

Fun space progress news:
http://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/ast/media/20140513_DragonFly_DraftEA%28Public%29.pdf

After the success of their Grasshopper (Falcon 9 first stage) propulsive landing test program, SpaceX is getting permits to do similar tests with a version of their Dragon crew capsule, which they're calling the DragonFly.

They're going to be dropping it from the helicopter, and having it land with softly with parachutes and rockets, and with rockets alone, to test its performance with full tanks, and they're also going to have it take off from the ground under its own rocket power, and land both with parachute and with rocket power alone.

So we can look forward to watching that on Youtube, probably starting very soon.

[Anonymous No.6547031]

>>6546693

>You explorers will NEVER settle the new world, because things take energy. First you would need to build a huge shipyard in Greenland, because it is literally economically impossible to send a ship across the entire atlantic ocean. Technology, as you know, never improves, and if something has never been done before then it is clearly impossible. Besides, it makes 1000 times more sense to just colonize France instead, because there's nothing in the new world except for wilderness and Indians, so you could never make a profit there.
>I HAVE AN IMPECCABLE UNDERSTANDING OF ECONOMICS AND A VIVID IMAGINATION