Did SpaceX Just Change The Rules?
The @SpaceX architecture described by @ElonMusk makes anything @NASA has contemplated thus far pale by comparison #ParadigmShift #IAC2016 pic.twitter.com/2JEIfGOCId
— NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) September 27, 2016
The @SpaceX architecture described by @ElonMusk makes anything @NASA has contemplated thus far pale by comparison #ParadigmShift #IAC2016 pic.twitter.com/2JEIfGOCId
— NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) September 27, 2016
Most of the technologies on the attached slide are at HRL 8 or above ( Hype readiness level ). TRL, a bit less.
gotta love NASA speak 🙂 Where would you place the Raptor which is already being test fired?
Okay, just confirming – we are talking about a deep space workhorse engine here, turbopumped LOX/methane ? That is supposed to take a trip in deep space for a couple years, pass through Jupiters radiation belts, land in a completely unknown environment with unknown surface composition, and then reliably light up, somehow have enough propellant in tanks and take its passengers back up?
Considering that the state of the art in deep space propulsion is pressure fed hypergolic, both biprop and monoprop storable propellants, with four-way redundancy. Considering that nobody has as much as spun a pump in deep space or tried to keep LOX in tanks for longer than a few hours.
I’d estimate somewhere between TRL2 which translates to approximately “yeah, our kids watch cartoons too” to TRLOL
You might want to talk to ULA about long term cryogenic storage. Their engineers have been publishing papers on the topic for years. Perhaps with the ACES upper stage, if it’s ever funded, they’ll finally get to put their designs to the test in the real world.
“Always listen to experts. They’ll will tell what can’t be done, and why. Then do it.’ Robert A. Heinlein
Landing a booster on a barge is a good recent illustration of this principle in action 🙂
Did you notice how many precursor test beds, explosions and tries it took to get that to work ? And how most of the testing was paid for ?
It’d be real interesting to hear how does one plan to test out these Jovian moon landings exactly
Which is the difference between Elon Musk and NASA. He is not afraid to take risks and lose some vehicles in the learning process, which is why he has succeeded in landing boosters on barges.
NASA by contrast is so risk adverse it studies ideas for years and as soon as something goes wrong abandons it.
Look at the Space Shuttle. it was not bad as an beta version of a space plane. But NASA lost the Orbiter Columbia and not only abandoned the Shuttle but the very idea of doing space planes anymore. Instead it retreated to 1960’s era “Spam in a Can” for its space flight future.
Yes, a couple of these will blow up in testing, and the sonic waves will probably be picked around the world when it happens. But he will work out the bugs and make the work just as with landing on a barge.
Yes but the key point: how it was paid for. SpaceX found an excellent way to pay for landing testing. It’s hard to see how it will work with anything heading to deep space
Why exactly is that a ‘key point’? Initially I read your comments to be engineering-based- the point about pumps in deep space, for instance. Funding/ motivation seem unrelated.
Engineering challenges are always manageable if there is a way to pay enough engineers long enough and capacity to pay for their mistakes long enough too. How exactly do you set up a program where a team of engineers has a long enough opportunity to iterate on engineering issues of Europa landing ? Notice, iterate is important. SpaceX customers paid for engineering iterations of their landings. Good luck finding someone to pay for iterating on several attempts of Europa landings.
Good points on iteration. Reframing the issue as it might have been asked in 1995: “good luck finding someone to pay for iterating several attempts to recover a booster”.
Along comes a dreamer, a dreamer with money, and the issue goes away. The fact that our near-term space activities are in the hands of a few well-heeled individuals is a larger question I suppose.
On the other hand as Mr. Matula points out down-thread, Mr. Ford singularly had world-changing ideas. Similarly Mr. Jobs, among others.
No, the rules don’t change until we have hardware.
Who is going to pay for this?
I wish that he hadn’t put in Europa. Nobody will ever go there. The radiation is just too strong, four orders of magnitude higher than on Earth.
First, it is not going to cost as much as you think. This isn’t NASA building the SLS to create a jobs program for aerospace workers in selected Congressional Districts. This is a private entrepreneur looking to make money.
Second, he is already paying for it. They are test firing the Raptor it is based on and have test built the tanks it will use.
The trick is that he’s not even trying to make money, or he would close everything and invest in barbecue restaurants in China.
Neither did Mr. Ford when he changed the world, that is the difference between visionary entrepreneurs and normal investor entrepreneurs.
Once SpaceX begins to put the hardware pieces together, there’ll be space minning, tech and governments putting money for using the future capabilities. And the cost is lower for three factors: no bureaucracy, less meetings and no shareholders. It’s like Apple on the second Jobs term: Once you prove your ideas work, everybody supports you.
How do you know? I didn’t say anything about cost. I only asked WHO would pay.
But it will cost more and take longer than Musk is saying now. It always just does.
But Musk’s number of $10 billion is silly. Depending on what is included in that number. Musk doesn’t say.
There isn’t enough cost information in the Musk proposal to critizise it.
I have to wonder whether one of his intentions is to capture the imagination of his wealthy Silicon Valley compatriots. More than a few of them have plenty of billions they might offer up.
Larry Page said he’d like to leave his fortune to Elon when he dies. Perhaps he’d be willing to make a multi-billion-dollar downpayment on that promise. I can think of a lot worse places to put my money. (Sorry, my accounts don’t have quite that many zeros…)
Change the rules? No. Changing the rules would be seeking to develop technologies that would obviate the need for a 1950’s rocket the size of Mt. Rushmore.
Spending immense amounts of money and brute forcing it does not demonstrate innovation.
Changing the rules would be to actually accomplish something regardless of the tech.
And that would be a great thing. But where is the realistic near-term prospect of such a technology?
They’re firing the Raptor engine it uses on the test stand, and then there’s the small matter of a (huge) prototype composite LOX tank for the spacecraft already under test.
https://uploads.disquscdn.c… https://uploads.disquscdn.c…
I wonder if the real scientists could explain the benefits of a single large tank over a gang of smaller tanks? It’s true that much less of the contents is exposed to the warm interface. And weight is one very obvious issue, though the size surely includes internal bracing, possibly doubling with some sort of slash control; similarly plumbing. But still: the tank is a single point of failure.
Weight. I’m not aware of any modern rockets that do not use single large tanks for fuel and oxidizer.
I haven’t thought about it much, but I suspect it is the mass. The ratio of tank mass to fuel mass is a real, key issue for a rocket. People talk about the rocket equation being an exponential function of delta-v, but that’s not quite true. When you write it in terms of the payload mass, not the final mass, it’s much worse. The tank mass introduces a pole at about three times the exhaust velocity. Despite anti-slosh and internal bracings, larger tanks have a lower tank-to-fuel mass ratio.
Sure, those are advances. But I don’t think Dr. P was talking about rockets at all.
I would say that lowering launch costs by a factor of 1,000 changes the rules. Forget flags and footsteps to exotic destinations, think of SBSP, factories in orbit and on the Moon, large scale lunar mining. At $9-10/lb the Cislunar space is open for business!
Yes, you need to have spaceships able to launch payloads in the hundred of tons at costs of $9-10/lb to achieve real breakthrough.
Of course NASA will need to invest some money into moving the viewing stands at KSC further back so the sound doesn’t deafen the tourists. Since it would be NASA doing it I expect it will probably cost them more for the contractors to do it than launching one of these rockets 🙂
Those “spaceships” also have to be fully reusable. Throwing away billions of dollars in hardware (i.e. several SLS launch vehicles, at a minimum) for a Mars mission isn’t going to scale beyond “flags and footprints”.
The SLS is not a spaceship, it is just an oversize artillery round like the Saturn V was 🙂
Mr. Musk is The Man. Finally, for all us invested in space and interested in the future, while NASA wastes time and billions of taxpayer dollars trying to recreate Apollo so that one hero astronaut can put his foot on Mars-and actually they are not thinking that far-NASA would be happy if they could just send anyone anywhere beyond LEO-Mr. Musk is planning to take civilization to the stars. This is brilliant. This is the new von Braun paradigm. I don’t think the American people need to support with their taxes-I think Musk and investors need to create a new interplanetary investment company analogous to The Virginia Company of the 1600s that invested in the creation of colonies in the Americas. Musk has a goal; he has a strategy; he has a plan. In the meantime NASA wanders aimlessly trying to recreate past glory. This is the most exciting thing I have seen since 1969.
so far Musk & Co. have been depended on taxpayer money. And back in the days creation of colonies was supported by governments i.e. naval armadas, cavalry troops, etc.
No reason why the government can’t be an investor too. Just as was done in the 1600s and by the US Government in the transcontinental railroad in the 1800s. NASA ought to sell bonds to the public to raise the money. Musk can open it to commercial investors.
They created the original Falcon rocket and Merlin engine using Elon’s money alone. The 70-odd launches now on their manifest are mostly commercial work.
Remarkably few troops are likely to be needed on the Moon.
Oh, that’s not entirely true. A few million dollars for Falcon 1 development came from DARPA and the Air Force.
http://www.militaryaerospac…
I think for an interplanetary craft like the one Musk shows he needs to design in an artificial-G capability. If the common people are going to be journeying for months, I think it will be important to maintain health and stamina over the mission duration, especially for going to the outer planets as he shows.
Note that the transport times he’s talking about to Mars is still less than the time astronauts routinely spend on ISS.
True. They are also outstanding physical specimens who train regularly in T-38 jets.
I wouldn’t call all astronauts “outstanding physical specimens”, especially some of the “tourists” who have flown to LEO and back. It’s largely a myth that you need to be in top physical condition to fly into space and back. Most modern spacecraft limit launch and landing G loads to 3 Gs. That’s not a lot of acceleration. While in micro-gravity, it is important to exercise, which shouldn’t be a problem since the passengers will have plenty of time to do so.
Good heavens… the double standard.
NASA puts together a flashy piece of PR with a lot of promises, and you spend an utterly enormous amount of energy reminding everybody that hardware to be used 20 years in the future, shockingly (not really) isn’t funded yet and has no launch date. Really. Because that’s the standard for government space now. If the launch day and dollar amount isn’t planned a generation ahead of time, it’s a fantasy.
SpaceX puts together a flashy piece of PR with a lot of promises. And it’s a “#ParadigmShift”? Is that a joke? Don’t get me wrong. I HOPE SpaceX succeeds. But this is also the company whose Falcon Heavy is years behind schedule (and Musk’ hype), and certainly well behind the ambitions of those who boosted it as the “obvious” and “now” alternative to the SLS. The delays are fine. But the gulf between hype and reality is quite large.
PR is PR and Promises are Promises no matter who is making them. I’d be thrilled if SpaceX succeeds in this vision. Musk’s vision is exciting. But it’s just a vision. It’s more promises, more CG art, more of exactly what NASA has fed us decades before there was a SpaceX.
More pertinently, the uncritical and low bar set by the the editorial position of this website towards SpaceX is severely undermining the credibility of a website I’ve visited multiple times per day since the 1990s. It’s having a spillover effect into other articles. No Keith, you don’t get to shoot holes in NASA’s #JourneyToMars PR, and then bask in the radiance of SpaceX’s #ParadigmShift PR. This site is supposed to be about a critical eye and high stanards, I thought, not fanboyism. Is it “NASAWatch” or “SpaceXFans”?
Sorry if my words come off as overly tough, but this is one of the best Websites their is on the internet and made me much more critical towards programmatic performance of all types, in all places, in general. And this post is just so far beneath it. I could eat up SpaceX hype all day. But I don’t come here to get hyped. I come here to get a critical perspective. Maybe I was mistaken.
Well said!
Well said, I couldn’t have stated it better.
What does one do when they have *NO* ability to justify SLS and capsule that costs 3B/yr + completely expendable?
* not refilling on orbit is 5-10x the size and cost
* does not spread the lift capacity to reduce costs/schedule
* reuse with refilling makes performance shortfalls incremental
* over $10B/person using traditional methods….
* have no way of reducing costs….?
That’s it! Create false dichotomies, enemies, alternative realities….. Then add lots of fake likes!
You are correct however on making the rules…citizen’s united and gerrymandered districts rule..not technical merit. Congrats? 50 years of oil left at current world consumption..heaven forbid….does SLS help with this plan?
http://www.autostraddle.com…
I disagree.
NASA’s ambition is the creation of half an Apollo-a Command Module with limited capabilities. In fact its really half of a half of an Apollo. No LM, The SM so far is not in ESA’s long term plan, certainly not for Mars.
NASA has said they will send people to the vicinity of Mars in 15-20 years. NASA has not identified a real purpose; it certainly appears that it is for flags and footprints-an unsustainable motive, and really supports only the astronaut hero model. NASA has not shown a real spacecraft configuration that could make the trip; and even the part NASA is currently working on, the CM, is not a Mars vehicle. It was designed for lunar vicinities. I don’t think it provides a motivational dream for most people.
Musk may only have a concept, but there is a strategy-there is a purpose, the design could work and he is producing some real prototype hardware.
It is not necessarily how far along the hardware is. Musk has a plan and a strategy and a meaningful goal. NASA has none of these. They have no shortage of dreamers, and NASA has some really competent engineers, but so far, after a dozen years, we have not seen a well laid out plan or strategy.
NASA doesn’t have a personnel problem. NASA has a leadership problem. A lot of NASA’s problem is figuring out out to get a job done effectively. Their recent history shows they do not know how.
Musk is a dreamer and a doer. He identifies what the job is, what it takes, and he applies the requsiite resources to get the job accomplished. He is head and shoulders ahead.
SpaceX might well fail to get anything to Mars. The company might not even succeed with launches to LEO. On the other hand, Musk has a pretty good track record with his commercial ventures to date.
And the same doubts have been raised about most pioneering companies. Recall the cold reception given to Jobs and Wozniak when they shopped their microcomputer idea to Hewlett-Packard. (They had working hardware at the time, IIRC.)
NASA, of course, is controlled by Congress — that body that, even while Putin’s Russia became increasingly antagonistic to America’s interest over the past several years, has been unable to approve the development of a rocket engine to end our dependence on Russia.
I know which way I’d bet.
Jonny, Jonny, Jonny.
Let’s back up a little:
Elon has actually been ‘bending metal’, as the catchy phrase amongst cognoscenti goes. SLS? not so much.
Elon actually has a manifest for the BFR. SLS? Not so much.
Mr. Musk has a back-of-the-napkin way to pay for much of the future cost. Not all.
Schedules? He’s been very clear about the schedule issue. And he keeps going. It is called iteration.
Even as a paper rocket Mr. Musk’s approach has the benefit of simplicity.
As to Mr. Cowing’s editorial approach: he can take care of himself.
“Did SpaceX Just Change The Rules?” Why yes they did. Proposing a very large fully reusable TSTO with a second stage that can be refueled (by multiple reusable tanker flights) in order to go to Mars is quite different than the approach NASA is taking. NASA’s approach of using a completely expendable launch vehicle to assemble a mission to Mars in LEO will never get more than a handful of people to Mars due to the insanely high cost of transportation.
Reducing transportation cost is the key.
I think with this Mr. Musk might have jumped the shark.
It’s bravery like this and immunity to scoffers that makes Musk Musk. Will it come to fruition? Beats me. But I love the attitude.
I think it goes beyond immunity to scoffers – Zubrin has that.
What Musk has that Zubrin lacks is two things – calm credibility and the resources to back it up. He has built things that actually fly and he does what he says he will do.
Quite. It’s one thing to have a vision, it’s quite another to have the resources to actually pull it off. The history of spaceflight is littered with grand visions that never got the money needed to get off the ground.
I like the idea of re-useable vehicles although there is a hidden cost that will put a dent in a lot of current estimates. This is an overly aggressive plan and proposing a fully functional system before 2030 wold, in my humble oppinion, be a miracle. Not to take away all the efforts and achievements the engineers at SpaceX have achieved, but nothing new has been accomplished that, at this point, has had an impact on the current launch operations. Granted a few boosters have been recovered but none have been re-used. So if you look at it from the perspective of the launch business, so far instead of in the ocean, Elon’s boosters are in a warehouse. To propose a fully functional system as is outlined, by 2025 is ridiculous, again in my opinion and a few other posters. This is why I said that he has jumped the shark, like Fonzy in Happy Days, one too many stunts.
What’s the hidden cost that everyone else has overlooked?
The re-work that is associated with getting hardware that has flown re-qualified for flight is indeterminate at this point. Flying a booster and dropping it in the drink leaves many issues unknown. When you get a stage back you will find out problems you have had that you previously did not know about. Take the shuttle as an example. When it was first proposed, it had a turn around time of two weeks ? ( correct me of I am wrong please). At the end it was on the order of multiple months between launches, which also increases the cost. I understand that the impact on SpaceX’s time lines will not be as severe as it was for the Shuttle, but there will likely be more than just re-fueling to be done between launches.
I don’t think anyone has overlooked that. Indeed, that’s been a point of fierce debate by many people for many years.
SpaceX has already made many improvements based on what they’ve learned from the rockets they have recovered. They are pushing for reuse that will only require inspection, with minimal or no refurbishment prior to the next launch.
I am sure that many people have thought of that, but that turnaround depicted in the presentation implies that nothing except for fuel is needed for the next launch. With 42 engines that seems highly unlikely.
Land, refuel, launch again is the conops they are aiming for. “Airline-like” operations, minimal inspections between flights with periodic in-depth inspections and an annual overhaul. It will take several years to prove it out with the Falcon 9, but by the time the BFR is ready to fly, they may have perfected it, or at least shown how close it is possible to get to it.
They’ve already said much of the Merlin tooling and procedures are transferrable, and Raptor & propellant tank development are apparently nearing completion. With reports of an order for up to $3 billion in aerospace composites being negotiated, what else is left beyond design lock?
I think you meant to post this to enginear.
Actually, once there is a successful return to flight mission (I would assume with a freshly made booster) they will return to the idea of used rockets, as there has been a reuse mission (and customer) on the manifest for a while now.
As for the hackneyed Fonzie reference- you should look instead to Richie Cunningham as a more apt metaphor. Ron Howard stayed fresh and jumped from youngster in movies, to TV and back to movies as a director.
Musk has a virtuous circle thing going on with his companies. Yes, I do believe that currently he may have too many irons in the fire (premature takeover of Solar City). But I would imagine- like Steve Jobs in his later years -Musk has good people helping to channel his boundless vision and enthusiasm.
If you missed it- Musk mentioned potential employment for Louisiana (Michaud) and Alabama (Marshall) He is throwing the gauntlet, not the towel.
SpaceX is a lot further along with the BFR than anyone thought. They have a prototype carbon fiber LOX tank completed already! Along with a complete Raptor being test-fired, that’s extraordinary. It implies they are a few years away from engineering test articles, qualification articles, and a test flight, not a decade.
No.
I think what we have with Space X is vision. It is the very thing that is missing, and has been missing, since the departure of Von Braun from NASA. Musk is providing that vision and from what I see it is far superior to the vision I see at NASA — or the lack thereof. Bold new projects require bold new visions. Vision are not the complete design but the outline, and require many new items to be developed in order to compete that project. When Kennedy proposed Apollo, the computers required for landing on the moon were still years in the future. The interesting thing about Musk vision is that many of the items shown in his plan are already working and tested, like re-usable booster stages, and high count multi-engine rockets.
Well, SpaceX will have to change one rule. Musk’s presentation did not say anything about planetary protection. Any human presence on Mars will require some changes, and the idea of a sizable colony would probably mean giving up on forward contamination control entirely. (Not that I mind.) I don’t even want to think about back contamination, since no one even has a clear idea about the current rules.
Don’t believe that SpaceX have change the rules of the game. Instead they change the game they are playing. Like going from minor league baseball to the major leagues.