• SpaceX to provide BFR Update + Lunar Tourist announcement at 1am UTC Tuesday
    67 replies, posted
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdJs-xtIdTU
I made a joke about Logan Paul being picked in the Spacepunch discord oh god no please anyone but him.
[https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/558/73485893-b97b-4553-b16d-23766c4b3b62/image.png] I was making this exact config in KSP 2 days ago out of MK3 parts, I switch on the internet for some good ol inspiration and this comes along. God speed, if it works in Kerbal it must work IRL.
They could drop him off
Reminds me of this http://i.imgur.com/1kewz.jpg
Man, waking up the next day and thinking back on this, it's insane to see BFR being more 'official' than it actually was. It seems so much closer now than it did a few days ago. They still have to figure out commercial crew and get that settled, but if they are moving to BFR-focus a year from now... It is going to be a very exciting next few years. Astronauts launched on US-built, reusable, cheap spacecraft, and then BFR entering full-tilt development. I want BFR to be actualized so badly, simply because that kind of lift capacity is unprecedented. Even outside of the awesome aesthetics and inspiration that such a launch vehicle would create, the actual physical reality of being able to put that much mass in orbit for so cheap if it matches its predicted costs is insane. Orbital foundries, increased ability for companies to reach into space, etc. Once the ability to put stuff up there en masse is around, who knows what could start happening. It's just exciting.
I (unfortunately) reckon that the market will be sluggish in response, if the timelines are kept and the prices remain about where they are. The amount of thinking, designing and building that'll have to occur to take advantage of what BFR could put into orbit is going to take longer than the vehicle may do. I don't think it's too far off to expect that BFR will essentially do what Falcon 9 has been doing outside of "blockbuster" missions that SpaceX themselves perform. The exciting period for low-earth orbit could well not start until the late 2020s. Sorry for the downer perspective but SpaceX too fast.
It's possible to support his ambitions to push the boundries and do something no government is willing to do for the betterment of mankind while also deriding his complete social ineptitude, you know
I think that's part of why SpaceX is branching out into satellite internet. They already can launch more stuff into orbit than the current market needs. The failure of smallsat launchers (including Falcon 1) pretty much disproves the idea of "lower prices to stimulate demand". So just to be able to exploit the increased launch volume they get from reusability, they need to make their own payloads. I'm sure eventually the payload market will expand, especially since BFR opens up whole new industries, but in the meantime, SpaceX is probably going to become their own biggest customer.
It's not a downer at all! The market will definitely take a few years to adjust once BFR is realized, macro-scale engineering just takes a long time and no one is going to design a payload for a rocket that may not even start to exist. This is where SpaceX's own projects will mostly come into play IMO, as well as potentially re-purposed missions for things like SLS. If this first tourism mission is a success, we could potentially see more, not to mention there will probably be a few pioneering companies who try to rush projects into LEO/Moon/Mars. Plus regardless of how things shake out, Elon will want to do something with the first Mars window they have after BFR is flying. It will take the industry time to catch up but it will still be interesting times!
Considering the main objective of missions planned for SLS is "give SLS a reason to exist", I kind of doubt they'll switch to BFR even if SLS gets canned like it should have been years ago.
SLS is the backup plan if elon munsk fails
I think BFR offers some unusual customer options. Like I said earlier it's essentially a yacht. I would love to see a cruise ship company to buy one and paint it in their livery and do regular (few times a year) cruises around the moon for top dollar. They can afford it. They bought 4 Oasis class ships for $1.4 billion each. If they can price the cruises to eventually turn a profit then theres no reason not to. The first space Cruise would get a lot of publicity and people would definitely buy it after this Dear Moon mission provides a proof of concept.
Being able to price it profitably is indeed the problem. An Oasis-class can carry 5000+ passengers, and last 20+ years, easily 800+ cruises. A BFS could carry maybe 80 and I don't see them doing more than 100 flights. So a water ship passenger just needs to pay 1/4,000,000th the ship's cost, while the space ship passenger would need to pay 1/8,000th, literally three orders of magnitude more. And that's not even getting into operational costs, which are going to be far higher. I'm not saying it's impossible but the economics are going to be very different. It's going to be limited to a very exclusive market for a long time. (But hey, even if tickets cost $100,000 instead of $1000, that's a substantial improvement on the current cost of $NaN).
So why do you people actually think this thing will be built within the 2020s or even the 2030s? This is the largest, most complicated, most powerful machine ever built by mankind yet SpaceX will build it much faster than machines that are much smaller? Rockets of this scale have only been built by organizations stretching the resources and industrial output of superpowers, and even then it took a decade. This thing is more complicated than any of those rockets yet it will be built faster with less funding and access to resources? Forgive my heavy skepticism, but I think you guys are letting your Sci-Fi fantasies cloud your mind.
The Saturn V used computers less powerful than your phone, and would already be launching by now if both developments started at the same time. It will take time, but it won't take 20 years to do it.
It's mostly relying on tech SpaceX has been working on for a long time. The engines are proven, and you'll probably be surprised with how quickly things will proceed from now when it comes to the hull. In a way, it's nowhere near as complex as the megaproject that was the Saturn V, simply because so much of the research required to build it has already been done.
The Saturn V was an incredibly specialized and expensive vehicle to launch. It was created with the sole purpose of delivering man to the Moon and really nothing else. It's why it was only used for Skylab after Apollo was finished. NASA just couldn't afford to keep launching it when the funding started to be slashed. Speaking of funding, the Saturn V emerged in an era when NASA was receiving near 5% of the entire federal budget. Hence why I mentioned stretching the resources and funding of superpowers. Also, there's a difference between incremental improvements on an existing rocket on a scale seen worldwide and producing a man rated rocket on a scale only seen three times before. (Saturn V, N1, and Energia) But aren't SpaceX using a brand new engine to power the thing? So not only do they have to test and man-rate the largest rocket ever, they also have to test and man-rate brand new engines as well. Even the SLS, which has engines NASA has decades of experience with, will take around 8 years from design finalization (2012) to first launch (best estimates now put it in Q1 2020 provided nothing goes wrong.) The BFR doesn't even seem to have a finalized design. It started off as a Sea Dragon sized monstrosity before becoming a Saturn V sized monstrosity. Now the design changed again to incorporate Shuttle-esque fins and stabilizers.
The Saturn V was also built in the 60s, as was the N1, Energia and Shuttle were two "Heavy Lift" systems of the 80s. 30 years on we have 4-5 "Big Rockets" in development or that have just started flying. Vulcan will continue the logical progression from Atlas V and Delta IV, combining the best features of both. Falcon Heavy has just started flying, it's the natural end-point of what can be done with SpaceX's current capability. New Glenn is going to be interesting, I know to little about it to comment much, it's pretty much a more capable Falcon 9. BFR is an upsized Falcon 9 with a shuttle-esque second stage, it's goals as far as reuse, lower cost to orbit and high launch cadence are all the same as the Shuttle program was meant to be, but where Shuttle was hamstrung by too many demands, BFR is meant to go to Mars, first and foremost. The System is designed in such a way that it can also do Earth orbit activity, go to the moon surface and whatever else you can manage with orbital refueling. This whole new system is being built off of the lessons learned from Falcon 1 through to the Commercial Crew program, there are fewer and fewer unknowns for them to deal with and the fact that we've seen 3 variants of the same system now (ITS, BFR17, BFR18) shows that they are still doing incremental changes, they aren't stubbornly sticking to a design from 10 years ago. BFR's "blockbuster" missions remain 4-5 years away, while we see they want to do their first test in the next year. This may seem fast when compared to almost every other aerospace entity but that is why SpaceX have done so well. SpaceX have had this rocket and the architecture to go with it in some sort of development for nearly 8 years now. The thinking and designing is almost done, building comes next. So much of what this rocket is meant to do has already been tested, the Merlin Engine taught them about how to make reusable engines (they were made to be reusable before the Falcon 1 ever flew!), if there was one entity in the world who knows how to make an utterly reliable reusable engine it's SpaceX, the Merlin 1D engine has never failed in flight or reflight. It's a big leap sure, I'd probably wager it's on par with jumping from Falcon 1 to Falcon 9, there could be growing pains but they've handled this kind of shift before. NASA had to learn how to go from the Saturn 1 to the Saturn 5, SpaceX will do the same. SLS isn't an applicable comparison to any other heavy lift vehicle in history or currently in development. It's a jobs program. There isn't a defined end goal apart from "uh uh Mars?", unlike every other heavy lift vehicle in history. Saturn V and N-1 were meant to go to the Moon. Shuttle and Energia(Buran) were the shuttle rockets, Energia was designed to allow the Soviets to do more in Space than ever before. Vulcan is meant to enable ULA to bid on every contract, from Commercial up to Heavy Lift (which the Atlas V and Delta IV Heavy already do) Falcon Heavy was meant for Mars, but also to allow SpaceX to compete on every contract as well. New Glenn is much the same as these two, but with an eye on Moon cargo. BFR has an end goal, enabling HSF to Mars/Moon/Wherever. The fact it can do other things is great, but SpaceX's ambitions (and Mr. Musk's) haven't been met yet, they're willing to put the money into that system and to get it done ASAP. Government's no longer have a monopoly on heavy lift launchers or access to space anymore, it's not a surprise that a commercial entity is going to try and do something like this.
While I think this is awesome, they should probably send an engineer along as well as the artists. It's such a large, complicated craft, flying for a week on a test flight. It's not like things haven't gone wrong around the moon before.
The Saturn family didn't start development until 1960, and Apollo 11 was 1969. That is less than 10 years for the Saturn V from design to the most influential spaceflight mission of human history in an era where they were doing orbital calculations on the backs of sheets of paper, or doing flight calculations on massive blackboards. BFR has been in the design stage for probably close to a decade now, and it will still be another 6 years before we see it flying deep space missions in earnest. Saturn and other governmental rocket programs are also mired in an absolutely mind boggling amount of bureaucracy and red tape. Just look at the Senate Lunch System. If anything being designed by a private company with less resources is a boon, not a setback. Government agencies have changing whims based on administration, constituency, bribes, etc. Not to mention the ridiculous backwards-thinking processes that they've been using since the 60s. The only reason things like Saturn V were as expensive as they were were because they were stretching the limits of technology at the time (which we are not doing as much now) and also because of the cost inflation due to the contracting and subcontracting and sub-subcontracting that the bidding system NASA uses encourages. It is definitely going to be a challenge, but it is extremely possible. SpX has repeatedly, over and over again, proven naysayers wrong in the past. First with Falcon 1, then Falcon 9, then reusability, then FH. Honestly, BFR is probably less complex and less of a challenge than FH is/was. BFR is more of a challenge of scale than design, the actual design is quite simple for the scale. It's much less complex than a rocket like the Saturn V. Also, don't compare anything to SLS. As @Hick2 already pointed out, SLS is an absolute embarrassment to NASA and spaceflight as an industry. It learns nothing from the mistakes of STS and is a meaningless pork-barrel legislation program that will probably launch once (at a massively inflated cost), maybe twice (to launch Europa Clipper) and then be canned in favor of whatever the next administration thinks is a better solution. SLS has the potential to kill NASA as a vehicle designer, that's how much of a joke it is in the current industry climate.
Yeah, BFR isn't all that complicated. The engines are much more complex than Falcon (full-flow staged combustion rather than gas-generator) but they shed a little bit of complexity by burning methalox instead of kerolox. The difficulty lies purely in scale, and we've built much bigger things than BFR. Landing requires precision but they've got a pretty good handle on it now. BFS is the complex bit. It's a full upper stage, with reentry and landing capabilities. It's got moving aerodynamic parts. There's going to be three variants, ranging from the tanker (which has to do docking and propellant transfer), a satellite deployer (longer-endurance flights, power bus, and more), and then the crewed spacecraft version (which is just a pile of complexity because you humans are so fucking needy with stuff like respiration and hydration and all those gross bodily functions).
as an aside, i find it funny that spacex advertises one of the capabilities of bfr being to deliver astronauts to the ISS, when BFR has a larger internal pressurized volume than the entire iss
You put in a lot into your post and so much of it is questionable at best. You mention SLS being a jobs program yet the Saturn V or really any other government program isn't? The SLS does have a goal, allow the scientific and manned exploration of space beyond LEO. It doesn't need a defined end program because it's not a rocket built for only a specific program, it's a rocket to allow NASA to explore deep space for decades. Ask yourself this "what was the shuttle's defined end program?" It didn't have a specific one other than "increase mankind's involvement in LEO," which it did. SLS will do the same except for deep space. The whole fact that don't even have a finalized design puts "manned test in 6 years around the Moon!" into heavy, heavy skepticism. A design needs to be finalized before serious work can be done. And I fail to see how "SpaceX did normal sized rocket!" is any indication that they would be able to create such a monstrosity in any sort of reasonable time scale. Many countries and corporations have done the same, taking landing from the Douglas DC-X and incorporating it into their rocket really means nothing. Yet again you mention the SLS having no clear mission when it wasn't designed on having a clear mission other than to "expand human influence beyond LEO." There's already a slew of scientific missions being drafted up to use the SLS's power. Europa Clipper will be launched on a direct course to Europa and shave years off travel time. No other rocket can do this. It's not meant to be a modern Apollo, it's meant to be a Shuttle for beyond LEO. SLS is not a dinosaur, I've only seen this from people who don't understand the RS-25s. The RS-25s are literally the most efficient rocket engines ever built and are engines NASA has decades of experience with. You complain about the SLS taking long and then in the next paragraph complain that they are using existing technology to save time and money. I never understood this. It's Shuttle derived in the sense that it uses the Shuttle's engines and boosters. It shares nothing else in common with the shuttle other than the use of Hydrolox. You act as if Kerosene is the be all end all of fuel choices, it's not. Hydrolox is the most efficient fuel type around and since NASA don't care about turning a profit, cost is irrelevant to them. The Ares V is different rocket entirely and only similar in the fact that they both use the Shuttle SRBs. The Ares V used RS-68 engines, was larger, and was never planned on being man-rated. You what? The SLS has nothing to show for it? The piles of hardware sitting around KSC waiting for the full fire test next year don't exist? The fact that contractors have already started building parts for EM-2 doesn't mean anything? Just because you choose to not look at NASA press releases and all those pretty pictures of massive piece of hardware being moved around doesn't mean that nothing has been done on the program. Gateway is not a useless program. It's flexible project designed to allow for a semi-permanent human presence in lunar orbit and allow a jumping off point for future Martian/Lunar missions. It's designed so that if a new administration comes around and says "We want to go to Mars or we want to go back to the Moon." NASA can say "LOP-G will allow use to do this." Do you want a repeat of Apollo or something? Go to Mars/the Moon, land, take some pretty pictures, leave and not do anything for decades? LOP-G will allow NASA to go to the Moon and stay there. Are you completely ignoring the cooperation between NASA and Roscosmos? Wherein some parts of the station will be built and delivered by the Russians while ensuring that Federatsiya will be able to use the station as well? Are you also ignoring that the ISS started out much the same? "Freedom" would've been only accessible with government rockets and nothing more. Now it can be used by all of those rockets you listed and is starting to be used to test commercial purposes. Almost as if such projects are designed to spear head commercial development. And really? There's nothing a space station in LUNAR ORBIT can do compared to a space station in LEO? Really no scientific questions or engineering problems to be tackled that could be useful for a future Mars mission? Really no value at all? I'm sorry, but if you can see the value in a lunar station then you are just ignorant. We're getting side tracked, let's talk about BFR, shall we? Let's see, a massive overly designed rocket that has the vague goal of colonizing Mars. How will such a massive rocket get funded? Launch business is a razor thin margin business with little profits. Who will go to Mars? What will they do there? How can they establish a permanent when even 6 people in a space station require regular supply missions? What's the point in colonizing Mars? It's a toxic desolate wasteland that is extraordinarily hostile to human life. Backup planet? We can't even colonize the Sahara or Antarctica yet we're somehow going to magically make self sustaining societies on a land that is order of magnitude more hostile to life? Where's the magic 24 hour reusability that Musk so often promises will finally happen on his massive boondoggle when it hasn't even been proven on a much smaller rocket? Where are the profits in such a vehicle? Such massive payloads are only made by governments since really nobody needs that much mass in space and there's only so many billionaires who want to risk their life going to space. The end goal is shakey and reeks of Sci-Fi masturbation at best. There's no purpose in colonizing a different planet. And the only "progress" has been some flashy CGI and promises by a man who constantly makes promises that are never delivered. I'm sure the guys over at NASA are quaking in their boots that a company that they are solely responsible for still existing are making some flashy CGI PowerPoints while they're making the largest and most powerful rocket ever.
I mean, colonizing Mars and the Moon are definitely important but they're long protracted projects while we have a dying planet. They really shouldn't be used as a substitute.
First off, your last jab is irrelevant. DM-1 was delayed to a potential Dec. date because of HTV taking up the schedule and being pushed back. That is not a fault of SpaceX, it's simply a scheduling conflict that they have to work around. The capsule and booster for DM-1 are ready for integration at the Cape, so why would there be delays on SpX's side.... Also, CST-100 has had a pretty crippling setback with its hypergolics leak, but you don't mention that... Second, I have to confess, I am not an aerospace engineer, I'm simply an engineering student with an interest in spaceflight, so I may make some mistakes or have inaccuracies, I apologize. Since I'm unsure of how to break down your post, I'll simply respond to your questions (pardon not answering them in order, but I figured it would be better to group them by subject). >How will such a massive rocket get funded? Launch business is a razor thin margin business with little profits. I'm unsure of this, since SpaceX hasn't said anything as such, but I would assume that it would be through a combination of their goal of being able to reuse most of their Block 5 F9s (which, granted, we haven't seen are capable of the boasted number of flights yet), plus having a majority of the launches per year would mean that even if the margins are as thin as they have been in the industry (which if they are being truthful about the assembly and launch costs of the F9, would be a little more meaty for SpX than for traditional launchers) would mean that they should be able to build up a fair amount of capital. In addition, Starlink has potential to generate a large amount of capital for SpX, but that is in the near-future, and isn't shown to be workable right now. Honestly, this is a point I'm curious about, since presumably F9/FH were built using EELV contract funds? Maybe SpX has submitted a bid for EELV2 with BFR? It will certainly be interesting to find out. >Where's the magic 24 hour reusability that Musk so often promises will finally happen on his massive boondoggle when it hasn't even been proven on a much smaller rocket? Well, at the moment there isn't a demand for it, so it probably won't be demonstrated until SpX feels comfortable demonstrating it and have customers who are okay with having their payloads launched in such a manner. Gwynne recently had an interview where she said that right now the turnaround on a Block 5 was less than four weeks, so presumably after they have more experience and more data with launching additional Block 5s, the speed will rise. However, I fail to see how the 24-hour window is 'magic' or why this is relevant. >Where are the profits in such a vehicle? Such massive payloads are only made by governments since really nobody needs that much mass in space and there's only so many billionaires who want to risk their life going to space. Well, payloads are generally designed around the vehicle, not vice versa, so it would make sense that SpX is hoping a market for larger payloads emerges, rather than exists right now. Saying that nobody needs that much mass in space is fairly disingenuous since there are applications in LEO which have been mass limited up until this point. Even if there were no mass-limited applications that existed right now, someone would come up with a payload that could take advantage of the larger mass. Imagine if JWST (or an even larger telescope!) could be launched without the compromises that JWST has had to endure. And that's just a payload that already exists! Even if there was zero application for payloads of larger mass than we have right now, if BFR's cost/launch analysis is correct, it would still be the best solution for launching the payloads we have right now, and could even carry multiple per launch. >Who will go to Mars? What will they do there? How can they establish a permanent when even 6 people in a space station require regular supply missions? What's the point in colonizing Mars? It's a toxic desolate wasteland that is extraordinarily hostile to human life. Backup planet? We can't even colonize the Sahara or Antarctica yet we're somehow going to magically make self sustaining societies on a land that is order of magnitude more hostile to life? First off, I think it is disingenuous to say that we aren't capable of colonizing the Sahara or the Antarctic. Granted, I haven't looked into it, but I would assume that with proper resources, we would be more than capable of creating self-sustaining populations in these regions if we had reason to do so. Back to your questions, I would assume that scientists and engineers would be the people going to Mars. Presumably for the same reason we have scientists and engineers on the ISS, to perform experiments and offer technical support. I'm sure mission planners could come up with something for them to do. Even if you don't believe there is a higher reason (e.g. idealogical) reasons for going, I think it is disingenuous to argue that there are benefits for LOP-G without extending that same benefit of the doubt to a potential settlement on Mars. >The end goal is shakey and reeks of Sci-Fi masturbation at best. This isn't a question, but what is wrong with dreaming? You describe it as 'sci-fi masturbation', but why are you opposed to these goals? What is disdainful about them? >There's no purpose in colonizing a different planet. First off, this is an objectively false statement. There are purposes in colonizing another planet. The argument is whether you believe they are worth it. Again, I believe it is disingenuous to argue that LOP-G deserves to exist if you can't extend that same courtesy to a settlement on another body. Ignoring the benefits of position (e.g. as a stopover on flights to deeper targets in the solar system), anything a station in LOP-G could do, the ISS or another LEO station could do just as well. Or at least, I would assume. I might be talking out of my ass here but I would assume for the purposes of scientific research, the context/setting of experiments would be identical between a lunar lagrange point and LEO? I'm actually unsure, but I would think zero-g would be identical everywhere and anything that it derives from being in proximity to the moon could be achieved by just having a base on the surface. Maybe I'm missing something. Please let me know if you think otherwise! >And the only "progress" has been some flashy CGI and promises by a man who constantly makes promises that are never delivered. Well they have built tooling and shown article tests of the fuel tank and first sections of the main body, and I would argue that SpX has delivered on most if not all of its promises. It's okay if you don't like Elon but SpX isn't entirely attached to Elon, it has its own merits. I apologize but this statement simply seems mean-spirited. As it is this post is 85% of the way to the post limit so I'll stop it here for now. Looking forward to your response! I enjoy talking about this subject and it's interesting to debate it with someone who is 'on the other side' although I would hope we are all on the same side of human space flight
The problem isn't that we can't come up with things to do with SLS, it's that we've put the rocket first and the projects second. Consider the "lunar gateway". A Skylab-class space station, put into lunar orbit by SLS, with the first crew coming along in an Orion on the same rocket. What do we need a moon-orbiting station for? It's claimed to be a way to more efficiently land and return from the Moon, but... that's not how orbital mechanics work. Rendezvous and docking takes dV - having a stopping point halfway to the Moon is more like a stoplight than a rest stop. And it's not being proposed alongside solid plans for lunar landing - it's a support for a project that doesn't exist yet. And even if we did want it... if you scratch the "must launch single-piece station and crew on one booster" requirement, you could do the same with a dozen Falcon Heavy launches for a tenth the price. Design constraints are being added to payloads to make them only usable by SLS in order to justify SLS's existence. Before that, there was the whole asteroid capture-sample plan. Take a near-earth asteroid, nudge it into lunar orbit, then send a crew up to grab samples. Sure, there's some scientific merit... but was that really the best idea we could come up with? Are asteroids the most interesting thing we could be exploring? Not really. The Shuttle had design requirements. It had to be able to launch payloads of a certain weight and size into certain orbits, as it was intended to serve the Air Force's need for recon satellites. Once they knew the payload, they started designing to meet that need. They anticipated other payloads, obviously, but there was a clear and definite goal that they did, indeed, accomplish (although post-Challenger the USAF switched back to expendable launchers and abandoned Shuttle). All the commercial rockets had similar design requirements. They did market research (or had it dictated to them by the USAF), and figured out what their maximum payload mass and dimensions were, and the highest-energy destination, and built a rocket that could handle it. SLS is going backwards. We designed a rocket, attempting to use already-designed parts to make it quick and cheap, and then scrambled to find a reason for it to exist. The RS-25 is a very remarkable engine. You know one of the remarkable features? It's designed for reusability. It was built for the Shuttle, and as such is designed to be taken apart, inspected and maintained, and reflown. SLS is going to take them and dump them in the sea. We're going to throw away very expensive, historic engines, because... why? If we're serious about SLS being a long-term rocket, we'll have to restart production anyways (at least of the revised, non-reusable RS-25E), so why drag museum pieces out of the NASA vaults and throw them in the ocean? Hell, by NASA rules they should have to re-validate the rocket after switching engines. Hydrolox has the highest specific impulse, ignoring crazy stuff like tripropellants or fluorines. That does not make it the best - specifically, it has very low density, and being a deep cryogenic fuel, it requires a substantial mass of insulation. It's also not that well suited for long-endurance missions, as it boils off easily. There is no single "best propellant". There are tradeoffs and compromises. SLS didn't carefully pick hydrolox by weighing the pros and cons, it picked hydrolox because the RS-25 burns hydrolox and the main reason it's getting funded is to keep Rocketdyne's factories open. SLS is being made with pre-existing engines, pre-existing boosters, and a pre-existing upper stage. The engine is literally about half the complexity of a rocket, so they should have been able to kerbal one up with their off-the-shelf parts in far less than the nine years they're currently sitting at. For comparison, Delta IV took about as long to build, and that was a from-scratch design (save the upper stage). Orbit is orbit. Keeping a station pressurized, keeping everyone on board alive, is equally easy whether in LEO, geostationary orbit, lunar orbit, earth-sun L5, pretty much anywhere. So no science would be done on the station itself. And what science of the moon can be done from orbit, but only with a human? Not much - we've mapped the Moon plenty by remote. Look at a delta-v map sometime. For the energy needed to rendezvous and dock in lunar orbit, you can land on Mars. The gateway makes things LESS efficient, not more. BFR is over-designed? They're using the same fucking nozzles for sea level and orbit, just to shave some complexity at the cost of about a third their payload. Do not mistake "big" for "complicated". BFR is big, that's literally the first letter in the acronym. It is not, by any stretch, complicated. As for the profit margins, they are only thin for expendable launchers. With each one flying ten times, Falcon 9 would be profitable at a tenth the price... but the competition can't come close, so instead SpaceX gets something like a 90% profit margin. And, because it looks like demand won't be able to keep up with their supply, they're looking at ways to exploit their own ability to put huge numbers of satellites into orbit for cheap. That's what their whole Starlink project is - extracting profit from their extreme competitive advantage in efficiency. Much of the rest of your post is equally as ill-informed as the points I chose to address, but I have actual work to get done today and don't have time to disprove you point-by-point. If you think you have a single winning point, let me know so I can refute it.
You act as if there hasn't been clambering for a Lunar Space Station for decades and you've missed my point despite me repeating it often. The SLS is not a one program rocket. It's designed to facilitate an increased human presence beyond LEO. Why is this so hard to understand? After LOP-G is built it won't just be shelved, there are a slew of scientific missions that can benefit from its power. There are already proposals for massive telescopes like ATLAST and for deep solar system probes to be larger with literal years being shaved off the travel time. It already has a scientific mission, Europa Clipper, on its manifest the benefits greatly from the rocket's power. The remaining RS-25s weren't decommissioned, they were stored in case they could be used in the future, and you don't think NASA didn't consider that using reusable engines in an expendable format to be inefficient? That's why they decided to order Rocketdyne to make a cheaper expendable variant of the RS-25, the RS-25E, for when they burn through their existing stock. Does NASA have any choice in engines other than the RS-25? An existing man-rated engine that NASA engineers have decades of experience with? Even then, you don't think NASA considered developing new engines? They did the calculations and to make engines comparable to the RS-25 would require billions and tack on several more years to the SLS's schedule. I again repeat my observation of SLS critics complaining about the schedule and cost of the project while insulting the fact that they use existing parts to speed up the schedule and cut costs. Rocketdyne doesn't need the RS-25 contract to turn a profit. The vast majority of their business comes from the construction of missile engines. You can't just "Kerbal" a 400 foot tall rocket together, especially one that is to be man-rated. Rocketry just doesn't work that way. Size begets complexity. Yes. It is over designed and incedibly complicated. I do not understand how anyone can interperet "31 engine first stage that lands and second stage that also lands after coming in from space" as anything less than complicated. And really your entire point about their profit margins means absolutely nothing. Unless you have access to their private financials, I'm just going to assume that you're talking out of your ass and taking a corporations word at face value. For someone who insults me by calling me "ignorant" you yourself are pretty ignorant to how NASA designed the SLS and the future use of the SLS.
Prove it. List five scientific missions that can be more easily, more efficiently, or more effectively accomplished by building a space station in lunar orbit. The current plan requires five SLS launches to construct LOP-G, I think it only reasonable that at least as many launches should be done to utilize it. I'll go ahead and tell you up-front that "use it as a staging area for beyond-Earth-Moon-system missions" is wrong. Look at a delta-V map - from LEO to lunar orbit to Mars intercept is about 5700m/s (as a low estimate, I skipped a few things that were hard to find data on), while LEO to Mars intercept directly is about 4300m/s. Why increase your dV requirement by a full third? And you'll see similar numbers for Venus or Jupiter as a destination.
I'll accept that that whole post was disorganised and rambly, I came back to that post several times over an hour or two while doing work. But hey, let's discuss this. Saturn V was the result of the "need" to beat the Soviet Union to putting a man on the moon, I mention originally that the mantra for everything NASA did up until Apollo 11 was "Waste anything but time". This is why Saturn V was built using so many different companies for the same rocket. It was the most time effective way of getting that behemoth up and running. All 3 HSF programs prior to Apollo-Soyuz had clear and obvious goals. Mercury was about initial manned flight and learning everything that that involved. Gemini was about learning all of the required orbital mechanics needed to attempt Apollo, rendevous, docking and the like. Apollo was "get to the moon and land on it". The design of the rockets and spacecraft in those programs reflected these requirements and were executed quickly and by throwing money at the problem whenever they occurred. Shuttle is harder to explain, it was meant to be what people are expecting BFR to be (although constrained to LEO). The fact that it couldn't go beyond LEO was intentional in it's design, it was meant to be a single cog in a repertoire of spaceborne systems. In the end however Shuttle was the only thing funded and that decision had an effect on the entire service time of the Shuttle. Shuttle had almost the same problem as SLS has now, a rocket without a mission. The aspirations for Shuttle (fast turnaround, cheap and regular access to orbit) however meant that much of the work Shuttle did had real value, without shuttle we wouldn't have Hubble or the ISS as we know it. The Shuttle for all it's faults was an extraordinary platform for accomplishing LEO milestones and building ISS. SLS as designed can't be made use of in a way in LEO that Commercial Rockets that exist today could not also achieve. A problem the Shuttle didn't have until well into it's first two decades of use and part of the reason why Shuttle was designed in the first place. Constellation was a shambles but at least that program had a clear end goal. Get people back to the moon while also avoiding a HSF gap like between Apollo-Soyuz and STS-1. After Constellation's cancellation they had a geared up workforce to build both the Ares I and V. https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/558/940dfe27-99df-44e6-9afb-2be848d48ca4/image.png So here is a hard one, can you tell where the SLS came from? SLS wasn't designed to accomplish anything except keep people in work who'd had the program pulled from under them. SLS is a rocket with nowhere to go, as I said in my above post, the goalposts have kept changing in regards to what this rocket is meant to achieve and yet the design has barely changed since 2011 and only slightly from the Ares IV/V of the post-2006 era. If this rocket had a true end goal the minute someone said "Mars" this rocket should've been cancelled. Yet it continues to cancerously suck up money that could be spent effectively on purpose-driven program. This kind of reinforces the above paragraph, the design has kept changing because unlike NASA and SLS, BFR has to be a viable product and not a boondoggle. It has to work properly and achieve it's stated goals (Full and rapid reuse, orbital refueling, landing on Mars and Moon). As engineering questions are asked and answered the design is going to change for the better. Every change in the public eye has been for the benefit of the vehicle and how soon it may fly. They don't have money to waste, but they also don't have time (in their eyes), which is why the trade-off right now is payload performance. The leap from Falcon 9 (as it exists now) to BFR is way, way smaller than the leap from Saturn I (even the IB) to Saturn V. The "monstrosity" as you call it is a two stage to orbit rocket, the same as every SpaceX orbital rocket to date. The major challenge facing them now is successfully building the BFS and BFR from carbon fiber, not actually assembling a rocket of that size. Only two vehicles have ever crossed the Karman line and returned for a propulsive landing successfully. New Shepherd and Falcon 9, the fact you are so dismissive of this is mind-boggling. Not even NASA has done that before, the only two players in the entire world with a working knowledge of that technique are Blue Origin and SpaceX, it means everything to the economics of the systems those companies are developing and is what will springboard both of them to being unassailable in the commercial market. 'Aight, that's cool. By "slew" you mean one right? Europa Clipper is also written by law into being an SLS payload, so even if another rocket could do it, and FH hasn't been conclusively proven to be incapable of it, congress would likely block that bid. "Shuttle for beyond LEO" You can't be serious, you really can't. Shuttle flew regularly 4-5 times or more per year, it in itself was a worthwhile payload due to the fact that it could do things nothing has come close to matching before or since, Orion can't hold a candle to Shuttle. About the only thing the capabilities of those two rockets share is their ability to launch interplanetary probes. SLS/Orion will fly once per year in a crewed configuration, that's the pace the entire production line is geared for. You're right too, it's not a new Apollo, it's a bigger, heavier, less capable version of Apollo, it certainly won't ever result in manned lunar landings, it might just be able to distantly flyby the moon occasionally with a piece of space station attached to it. I understand the RS-25 quite well tbh, they're the first really reusable rocket engines ever built and were remarkable for their time, they are efficient but that's more a Hydrolox thing than a RS-25 thing. The complaint here is that they jammed as many shuttle parts in the rocket as possible, they had to make engineering compromises to do this and it's part of the reason why it's taking so damn long for even the first launch of SLS to occur. SLS as a vehicle is suffering because the engines are there not because of their merits and suitability, but because they were told they had to be. "You complain about the SLS taking long and then in the next paragraph complain that they are using existing technology to save time and money. I never understood this." Have a think about this statement and you may understand where I'm coming from. I never once said Kerolox is the be-all end-all, don't put words in my mouth. Hydrolox just isn't good enough for first stage propulsion, it's too bulky and the equipment required to insulate LOX and LH2 from one another on the scale of first stages is so heavy it means they can barely be used without some manner of auxiliary propulsion alongside them. In space, LOX/LH2 is fantastic for high energy orbits, don't get me wrong. Cost is absolutely not irrelevant to NASA, they have a budget they need to stick within and they are pissing it away on SLS. If NASA had infinite money then the conversation we'd be having would be interplanetary, not international. The Ares V is different in that SLS will use 4 RS-25s and an RL-10 instead of 5 RS-68s and a J2. For much of Ares V's life it was intended to be much smaller, it was the mass (literal mass) budget overruns of Orion and Altair that caused it's growth, as originally designed it is shockingly similar to SLS, right down to using SSMEs in it's original configuration before the costs of 5 SSMES on Ares V would've killed that rocket dead anyway. And yes, the metric for how successful a rocket program has been so far is the amount of shit lying around on the ground 2 years from being launched 7 years after the program was started. Constellation wasn't far behind where SLS is now when it got cancelled. NASA haven't launched a NASA rocket for 7 years. In that time the Falcon 9 has flown ~55 times and been upgraded numerous times. I am a space fan, I'm not just SpaceX or just ULA or just NASA, I read whatever I can whenever I can, and enjoy any launches and programs I follow. It's that fact which has made me so jaded about SLS. Gateway is useless in my eye. There isn't one thing it's capable of that couldn't be done on ISS or unmanned satellites. We're well aware of what microgravity does to the human body, the only thing Gateway would achieve is testing this but with added radiation to the astronauts. If you can name one thing that Gateway could do that can only be achieved via Gateway then please tell me, I am dying to hear one good reason for Gateway's existence. Any administration could take one look at Gateway, laugh and rubber stamp a Mars Direct plan for 8 years. If some president comes in and says "MARS" s/he's not going to go be happy when NASA insist on them taking a stop in Lunar Orbit first to dock with a station built 10 years ago, adding cost and complexity to any mission. Gateway only makes sense if it can be served by the most capable launch system for the next 10 years, that absolutely isn't SLS, the only time that looked like being the case was 2011-2012. We're well past the point where SLS would've been worth doing and we're certainly past the point where that future system needs Gateway to enable it's work. ISS became commercialised because Obama and Bolden (correctly) guessed that the private sector could do it cheaper, faster and better than NASA could by using Constellation, SLS aiming at some non-defined point BEO meant it couldn't do either Cargo or Crew transport. If shuttle was still flying then neither CRS or ComCrew would exist. "I'm sorry, but if you can see the value in a lunar station then you are just ignorant." Hey dude, at least we agree on something! I would address your final points but it's clear that you're off the rails into just hating on BFR at that point in your post and gman003-main addressed quite a few of them better than I probably could anyway. The reason I'm so up in arms about this is the fact that for the first time (for me) SpaceX seem like they'll beat NASA to the major firsts of Beyond Earth Orbit Human Spaceflight in this century. NASA and the lawmakers that define their goals have had ample time, money and changes in administration to sort their shit out and they haven't done so. And so it seems the plucky Californian company that NASA saved in 2008 with pocket change (comparatively) is going to blast past a decadent organisation that seems to lack the will to be as pioneering as they once were. Apologies for the essay but I needed to try and clear up my points a bit.
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