Isn't that kind of the point of the space program though? Testing, proving, and demoing? As some others have brought up here the point isn't just to repeat the Saturn V mission, it's to set us up...
Pet theories, doing things that are new because they are new, and using a program as a tech demo
Isn't that kind of the point of the space program though? Testing, proving, and demoing? As some others have brought up here the point isn't just to repeat the Saturn V mission, it's to set us up for future missions. I'm with Dustin that we should be using efficient engineering, but moonshots are called moonshots for a reason.
The tech demos should occur way before the mission. And the technology even once proven sound should not be used for anything where the stakes are extremely high until we can be reasonably sure we...
The tech demos should occur way before the mission. And the technology even once proven sound should not be used for anything where the stakes are extremely high until we can be reasonably sure we can rely on it time and time again
What about it exactly could cause doors to close? Who would dislike what he has to say and then make future choices influenced by the talk? Both specific to this situation and the “workplace...
What about it exactly could cause doors to close? Who would dislike what he has to say and then make future choices influenced by the talk? Both specific to this situation and the “workplace politics” game in general, i just don’t understand how a friendly negative opinion can cause possible future harm
NASA is a government organization and literally run/funded by politics. People don’t like when you point out their billions of funding is being misspent and wasted, and NASA is very much in the...
NASA is a government organization and literally run/funded by politics.
People don’t like when you point out their billions of funding is being misspent and wasted, and NASA is very much in the game of telling people what they want to hear, arguably more than engineering these days.
I listened to an interesting episode of Corecursive recently that talked a lot about the politicization in NASA https://corecursive.com/lisp-in-space-with-ron-garret/. Granted they're talking...
I listened to an interesting episode of Corecursive recently that talked a lot about the politicization in NASA https://corecursive.com/lisp-in-space-with-ron-garret/. Granted they're talking about the late '80s, but still feels relevant.
Thought this was an interesting video from Smarted Every Day. Not sure if I completely agree, but I have started reading NASA SP287. I was a little worried when I saw the 1 hour runtime, but I...
Thought this was an interesting video from Smarted Every Day. Not sure if I completely agree, but I have started reading NASA SP287. I was a little worried when I saw the 1 hour runtime, but I found very engrossing to watch.
I thought his points about communication were interesting and applicable even outside of NASA.
For those who already know Destin and his bona fides (or just don't care), skip to 21:00 for the main message of the talk. The gist is that there are many aspects of the Artemis architecture that...
For those who already know Destin and his bona fides (or just don't care), skip to 21:00 for the main message of the talk. The gist is that there are many aspects of the Artemis architecture that are vastly more complex than the Apollo landings, and he calls into question whether that's truly necessary.
To preface this, I got burnt out on space talk having to explain "no we aren't going to mars anytime soon" over and over again once Musk brought it to the mainstream, and when I saw the artemis...
To preface this, I got burnt out on space talk having to explain "no we aren't going to mars anytime soon" over and over again once Musk brought it to the mainstream, and when I saw the artemis program I had my issues and just decided to ignore it rather than deep dive again, so I've done very little research.
With that said, why is the lander separate? This video brings up so much of what I thought might be an issue just at first glance, but I haven't seen this explained (i won't have time to watch it all until later).
I don't know for certain but my educated guess is that it's probably due to mass. The Saturn V is still one of the most powerful launch vehicles ever built and it could only send 52 tonnes to...
I don't know for certain but my educated guess is that it's probably due to mass. The Saturn V is still one of the most powerful launch vehicles ever built and it could only send 52 tonnes to Trans-Lunar Injection. The baseline for HLS is 45 tonnes – nearly the wet mass of the Apollo CSM and LM combined.
Apollo only needed to get two people to the moon and back, and that alone was barely possible in the 60s so we did it the only way we could. The LM was absolutely bare-bones and each vehicle was used only once.
Artemis has a fundamentally different mission. The goal is to develop technologies we'll eventually need for Mars, which is why we have the Lunar Gateway. HLS needs to have a much greater payload capacity (to facilitate a more permanent presence on the moon) and ideally be reusable. And since Gateway already requires multiple launches to assemble, sending the lander on its own doesn't add much more complexity.
Yeah, Destin glosses over the fact that Artemis' goal is not to only land humans on the moon, but to also establish a base and for that you need cheap payload capacity. Which is definitively not...
Yeah, Destin glosses over the fact that Artemis' goal is not to only land humans on the moon, but to also establish a base and for that you need cheap payload capacity. Which is definitively not the case for the SLS+Orion combo. Funny how his point of them not communicating enough, can be extended to their marketing efforts, where even someone doing hours of research could miss this.
Basically, they already had a contract for the orion capsule due to the Constellation program under Obama which ended up being cancelled, so they wanted to integrate it somehow. Part of the reason...
Basically, they already had a contract for the orion capsule due to the Constellation program under Obama which ended up being cancelled, so they wanted to integrate it somehow. Part of the reason is that HLS is not safe to hold crew during earth ascent due to a lack of an abort system/human rating. Also, orion can be used for missions to the gateway space station when landing isn't necessary. Lots of the architecture is weird partially for political reasons, where congresspeople will lobby NASA to give contracts in ways which maximise jobs instead of effectiveness.
So really enjoyed listening to this talk and can absolutely nod my head along with all the points he made. The only thing I disagree about is bringing up, "why not just use hypergols? No...
So really enjoyed listening to this talk and can absolutely nod my head along with all the points he made.
The only thing I disagree about is bringing up, "why not just use hypergols? No ignition!" I worked at a hypergolic thruster company and did development and test. His description of simplicity of in-orbit operations hides the insane ground development time.
Maybe back in the 60's when we didn't care if someone inhaled this stuff, we could develop hypergolic thrusters short period in time. But the accidental release procedures for the air and ground of these chemical is insane. I partially am in support for these crazy rules and regulations because that stuff is SCARY. Red clouds ain't a joke... The entire industry is pivoting to in-space ignition with Nitrous Ethane or Methalox because hypergols takes way too long to develop new hardware.
When I was little, the shine from the moon landings was beginning to wear off. By the time I was a teenager and the shuttle flights started, the shine was gone. We didn't know a lot of details...
When I was little, the shine from the moon landings was beginning to wear off. By the time I was a teenager and the shuttle flights started, the shine was gone. We didn't know a lot of details then (though we definitely do now), but the shuttle program was teetering and struggling to get things done. A huge amount of luck went into it. Most of it was just a jobs program for a lot of contractors in key Congresscritter states.
So the years kept passing. And space ... was still this thing that's Out There. Impossible. A fucking dream, and not the inspiring kind but the "grow up and get serious" kind.
Worse, tons of people seemingly never missed a chance to pile on and proclaim it all a huge waste. Never mind satellites (GPS/comms), computers, and hundreds of other things more or less were invented directly or heavily iterated because of space science. Because of the act of scientists and engineers sitting down to say "we're here, we want to be up there, let's figure it out" or "we were up there, these things happened, let's figure them out." The course of the figuring it out has yielded huge advancements for humanity.
And even today people still bitch and moan about space. "That money's better spent here" is a common refrain. "We have enough problems to fix on Earth first" is another. "Waste of time" comes up a lot.
Until very recently, space was a nation state level investment. Now it's kind of not, as long as you have a company with the will to invest. I say company because governments (and the people in them) change on a yearly basis, and that yanks and shifts and moves will and funding around. Wasting it while never letting NASA or any other space program count on being able to advance year-by-year.
Private space investment is the big change in the past decade. Before, you had legacy aerospace contractors sucking on the government teat, with basically no real incentive to not drag the program out. To not milk it for every dollar they think they can squeeze out, and then more still as long as they keep their lobbyist program properly rolling. Their goal was to profit, not to succeed.
A private company can set its own agenda, and they do every day. A couple of companies have started to shape themselves towards long term investment in space. Obviously there's a very high profile one that's leading that charge, but it seems impossible to mention it or discuss it without people wanting to score edgy internet points by not talking about space and instead talking about personalities if it comes up, so I'm not bringing it up.
And surprise of surprises, it turns out a lot of "impossible" problems are getting solved now that some entities with honest, good faith interests in space (rather than in milking the government for contracts) are involved.
Rockets were disposable ... until they weren't. Without needing to bespoke-build each launch vehicle, what was a Multi-Billions with a B investment to contemplate a program of launches to Get Something Done In Orbit came down in cost by an order of magnitude or more.
What happens when that affordable launch capacity is used to put a fuel station in orbit? They run into some problems. The engineers and scientists will scratch their heads, study, think, try, and launch solutions. Then there'll be an orbital fuel station.
Which makes a moon mission that isn't two guys crammed into a tin can you can use a screwdriver to puncture not just feasible, but likely. Being able to jump off from orbit, rather than all-in-one from Earth, makes a lot of things more likely.
And who the fuck knows what we find out when we land a long term manned presence with proper resources on the moon? A whole lot of scientists and engineers have some thoughts on that. And when people are On The Moon, data will flow back, and the scientists and engineers will start scratching their heads before their pencils go scratch-scratch-scratch on paper and ... surprise, figure more cool shit out.
I'm so tired, so sick, of hearing "why moon" and "why Mars." Because it's fucking there, that's why. The same reason people crossed the oceans, which was once an insane idea. Except it's been centuries since it was insane, and now it's commonplace, so people think of that as normal. They think of hopping on a damned plane with one to three hundred others to fly across the oceans as equally commonplace.
Frankly it's amazing NASA has managed to get anything done in my lifetime, what with all the bullshit constantly going on that keeps them from being able to Do Science. Because politicians have rarely missed a chance to interfere and keep anything productive from being done.
Corporations are a lot of things, most of them bad; but when the people at the top want something, they often work seriously and honestly to make it happen. Sure people might leave, but senior executives tend to have longer tenures than politicians' election cycles. Especially when profit is rolling in.
Affordable launch is opening up new corporate opportunities. Some companies are utilizing them, hoping to open new markets and create fresh revenue streams. Fine, as long as it Gets Us To Space. Hell, the past year or so, countries that never had space have their own satellites now. Wonder how that happened; oh yeah, space happened.
There are a lot of things that go into engineering success. Into the act of succeeding at engineering a solution to a problem that seems daunting. One of them is that often it requires admitting the scale of the problem. Accepting that scale. Believing in how the solution to this very, very, very large problem the engineers are scratching their heads over, will just have to be BIG. Huge. And how they'll just have to go with that, and keep scaling their attempts to deal with that problem appropriately.
Sometimes the scale really is impossible. We can't teleport matter, for example. No amount of "scale" can fix something that actually is physically (as in physics) impossible.
But getting to the moon or Mars is not impossible. Neither is an actual 21st century orbital station. None of it's even highly unlikely. Doing so is a matter of harnessing physics we understand and know how to manipulate. It's simply a matter of investing. And for a hell of a lot less than what the US spends on defense every year.
The point of going to the moon isn't to repeat the PR stunt of the 60s. Where we waved the flag (literally; they made damned sure to bring the flag, and film and photograph it, and distribute those images worldwide to show America had done it).
The point is to have a permanent, growing orbital presence that will jumpstart the age of Space Exploration. An orbital base that acts as a platform to build off of. Something that multiplies and attracts more investment, more effort, more opportunity.
What starts as a fuel station turns into manned one. Then they add a science section. Some commercial industrial stuff goes up. They start noticing things, working on those issues. The station grows. Someone else starts another one, to compete (because one thing humans are good at, it's one-upping each other for the lolz).
Those stations make it less of a multi-year project to launch to the moon, Mars, anywhere else. An asteroid redirect mission (for orbital mining, to reduce orbital construction material payload costs) starts to become not just more doable, but more likely. Who knows what else?
Why just one Hubble or James Webb. Telescopes on the ground used to be a bespoke thing you had to be almost a magician to construct; now any kid can order one for less than a hundred bucks off the internet. What happens if there are dozens of Things That Look Out At Space up in orbit, accessible to people who aren't closeted behind layers of government?
We've wasted most of my life not doing anything to get to the point of being an orbital species. It's always basically been fiction, to contemplate Working and Living in space. In orbit. On the moon, or another planet. Traveling to see what's Over There so we can Report Back and humanity can collectively scratch its head and go hmmm the way we've always done.
That hmmm is what's brought us out of dark caves. Some jackass decided to venture out. The cavepeople in his cave very probably laughed at him, or tried to block him, or screamed that he was taking an insane chance. And it turns out ... there was shit outside the cave. He brought some of it back. Then it wasn't the cave, but over the hill. Then across the river. Eventually it was the desert, or an ocean, or a mountain chain.
Now it's the planet. What's off planet? Let's go find out.
People always say "it can't be done." Whatever it is, always it cannot be done. Impossible. They fall all over themselves to tell you no, to laugh, to sigh and warn you off.
Until it can. It gets done, and then they suddenly want in on the action.
It's past time to get in on the space action. It's doable now. It's affordable now. The fucking GDP of America is more than 23 trillion dollars. The federal budget is more than 6 trillion. The budget of NASA is 30 Billion, with a lot of it earmarked for pork to support congresscritter contractors who are wasting it. And NASA has to fight and beg and thieve to get even that much.
If politicians and youtubers and environmentalists and all the other "it's impossible" people would just leave NASA and their private corporate partners alone to ... you know ... get science done, about the time I'll probably be on my deathbed a whole bunch of those edgy "it's impossible" people will be crowing over how profitable and valuable it is that we're in orbit. Doing things in orbit. Building things, learning things, thinking about things.
And someone on one of those space stations, on that moon base, headed to Mars, will look out a thick rad-shield window at Space right at their fingertips. They'll look at the stars in a way you can't from down here at the bottom of an atmosphere.
Living in orbit is indeed impossible with current tech, but in the future that will be downgraded to being merely pointless - living in orbit is hella expensive, and robots are only getting better...
People always say "it can't be done." Whatever it is, always it cannot be done. Impossible. They fall all over themselves to tell you no, to laugh, to sigh and warn you off.
Living in orbit is indeed impossible with current tech, but in the future that will be downgraded to being merely pointless - living in orbit is hella expensive, and robots are only getting better in comparison to humans.
Air freight cost is ~5$/kg, cost per kg on rockets could plausibly reach 100$/kg (currently ~2000$/kg), while not cheap, doesn't seem exorbitantly expensive, especially with raw materials for...
Air freight cost is ~5$/kg, cost per kg on rockets could plausibly reach 100$/kg (currently ~2000$/kg), while not cheap, doesn't seem exorbitantly expensive, especially with raw materials for megaprojects being brought in from the moon, and large amounts of recycling resources. Robots are still way slower,more expensive and less adaptable than humans, and only currently excel at repetitive controlled work. Even the boston dynamics robots, while impressive, can't do many useful things other than walk around for inspections and search and rescue
In my mind the staggering flexibility and capability of humans is one of the best arguments for sending them out. Don’t get me wrong, NASA’s probes and rovers have been incredible, but for...
In my mind the staggering flexibility and capability of humans is one of the best arguments for sending them out. Don’t get me wrong, NASA’s probes and rovers have been incredible, but for planetary science nothing can beat a human specialist… they can get many tens or even hundreds as much science done compared to a rover, and even better they can pivot their activities to wildly different things not even conceived of in the mission’s planning phases, whereas often with robots little beyond the original mission scope can be done until many years later (sometimes as much as a decade or more) when the next mission with the correct hardware rolls around and gets rubberstamped and adequately funded by all of the relevant bureaucrats.
The rate of discovery is going to skyrocket as soon as we have long-term crewed presences on the surface of the Moon and Mars.
Just to be clear: Robots can be remote-controlled, so if you can maintain a reliable connection and handle the extra latency of remote-control, there's not much reason not to use robots. I'm not...
Robots are still way slower,more expensive and less adaptable than humans, and only currently excel at repetitive controlled work.
Just to be clear: Robots can be remote-controlled, so if you can maintain a reliable connection and handle the extra latency of remote-control, there's not much reason not to use robots. I'm not advocating for completely unsupervised robots, just for the supervision to happen from earth. There's not much you can't do if you have a pair of remote hands, and decent control over them. And while setting up a reliable connection to Mars is hard, setting up a connection to the moon is a whole lot easier, and getting a human to Mars is impossible right now and will continue to be so for quite a while. We might have to literally cure cancer, first.
Anything that's done by robots is an absolute fraction of the cost, because shipping humans+climate-control+food+etc is expensive. It's the weight difference between getting a drone to grab a tennis ball from the roof, and climbing up there yourself. Also, if the mission catastrophically fails then not much of value is lost, compared to people dying. Robots aren't as adaptable, but they don't need to be adaptable. We can just build another one.
Setting up any sort of space colony is an absurd long-term investment as a solution to a short-term problem, and more specifically to a short-term problem that can largely be worked around anyway. Most spaceships we send out are already unmanned, to the point that we don't even think about it - suggesting GPS satellites be manned would be absurd, for example.
Either way, $2000/kg will make cost of living in Manhattan look cheap, and I can't imagine rent costs for living on a literal spaceship will be any cheaper either. For any sort of permanent settlement you'd need a whole lot of baby-proofed spaceships and opportunities for low-skill work, it really just doesn't make sense as anything but an ego project or a big scientific experiment that wouldn't pass any respectable ethics board.
By the way:
cost per kg on rockets could plausibly reach 100$/kg (currently ~2000$/kg)
Is casually handwaving an order-of-magnitude difference. I don't trust it, because with the power of "could", it could get an order of magnitude more expensive. Due to Kessler syndrome, for example. It won't, but that's the point: there's no real point in assuming prices drop just because it's "plausible". Most of the cost of space freight isn't even getting the weight into space; it's getting it to travel ~10KM/s sideways once you're in space, or getting it the rest of the way to the moon in a reasonable timeframe.
Honestly, what bothers me the most about the whole "space colony" thing is that it reads exactly like my own thoughts whenever I'm working on some dumb impractical-and-I-know-it project and trying to rationalize why it should be the optimal solution, even though it's an obvious enough idea that multiple more-experienced people have definitely thought of it but were either unsuccessful or dismissed it because it didn't make sense in practice. Like airships. I love airships as a concept but I've stopped denying to myself that any potential major use in the current world will be niche at best. Nine tenths of engineering is accepting what's actually practical and working around it.
Actually, a better example might be space elevators. To copy off this video, the rope material needs to be both absurdly strong far beyond our capabilities, and it needs to be UV-proof and weatherproof and conduct electricity for the 'elevator' (or provide power to it in some other fashion), and the whole system needs to run fast enough that its passengers don't run out of food and starve to death before they reach their destination. Which might best be solved by attaching a rocket to the elevator car. This would also require the rope to also be quite heat-resistant. Also, it'll need to be able to survive being hit by a few stray particles travelling at orbital velocity without breaking apart. Also, the project should be cheaper than running lots of rockets without the space elevator.
But, if you justify the project by saying "well maybe we could have a massive, unexpected engineering breakthrough on all of these fronts" then you could justify basically any project with the same logic, and there are tons of utterly life-changing projects that wouldn't require as impressive a breakthrough - for instance, self-wiring electric trees, that grow themselves out automatically and output basically infinite free electricity once they've grown far enough. We know trees work, and we know electricity works, after all.
People often defend their dream by saying "stop being so cynical" or "you lack vision", instead of being honest and acknowledging that 1) their project is a stinker and doesn't have any rational chance of passing a cost-benefit analysis, but 2) they want to see it happen anyway. Which is fine, by the way. I want to see airships succeed. We don't have to always support the sensible thing. It might even turn out to be a good idea after all (although it probably won't). But if you support the people who tell you it is sensible, and that you're being oppressed by a bunch of fuddy-duddies who hate anything that challenges The Establishment or whatever, then you'll be disproportionately supporting grifters and incompetents, and you're even less likely to see real progress ever happen.
Remote control of a robot on the moon isn’t too much trouble, but on mars in the worst case you’re looking at a 20 minute delay both ways. Not impossible to work around, but limiting and extremely...
Remote control of a robot on the moon isn’t too much trouble, but on mars in the worst case you’re looking at a 20 minute delay both ways. Not impossible to work around, but limiting and extremely tedious.
In cases where the task is simpler you can chain a bunch of commands to send up, but that doesn’t work with anything that requires visual feedback or has a chance of failure… in that case you’re stuck telling it to do something, waiting 20m for the command to be received, and then another 20m to know if you need to try again or can proceed.
Putting people in space is hard, expensive, and dangerous yes, but that’s never going to change if we don’t practice it and figure out ways to make it cheaper and safer. I think it’s worth trying, so long as the people involved are willing.
I do agree that being conscious of grifters is necessary, though, because as proven by the likes of Mars One and other similar projects people will happily sell things that they can’t deliver.
Isn't that kind of the point of the space program though? Testing, proving, and demoing? As some others have brought up here the point isn't just to repeat the Saturn V mission, it's to set us up for future missions. I'm with Dustin that we should be using efficient engineering, but moonshots are called moonshots for a reason.
The tech demos should occur way before the mission. And the technology even once proven sound should not be used for anything where the stakes are extremely high until we can be reasonably sure we can rely on it time and time again
Ah that makes sense, are folks just jamming Artemis with subprojects?
What about it exactly could cause doors to close? Who would dislike what he has to say and then make future choices influenced by the talk? Both specific to this situation and the “workplace politics” game in general, i just don’t understand how a friendly negative opinion can cause possible future harm
NASA is a government organization and literally run/funded by politics.
People don’t like when you point out their billions of funding is being misspent and wasted, and NASA is very much in the game of telling people what they want to hear, arguably more than engineering these days.
I listened to an interesting episode of Corecursive recently that talked a lot about the politicization in NASA https://corecursive.com/lisp-in-space-with-ron-garret/. Granted they're talking about the late '80s, but still feels relevant.
Thought this was an interesting video from Smarted Every Day. Not sure if I completely agree, but I have started reading NASA SP287. I was a little worried when I saw the 1 hour runtime, but I found very engrossing to watch.
I thought his points about communication were interesting and applicable even outside of NASA.
For those who already know Destin and his bona fides (or just don't care), skip to 21:00 for the main message of the talk. The gist is that there are many aspects of the Artemis architecture that are vastly more complex than the Apollo landings, and he calls into question whether that's truly necessary.
To preface this, I got burnt out on space talk having to explain "no we aren't going to mars anytime soon" over and over again once Musk brought it to the mainstream, and when I saw the artemis program I had my issues and just decided to ignore it rather than deep dive again, so I've done very little research.
With that said, why is the lander separate? This video brings up so much of what I thought might be an issue just at first glance, but I haven't seen this explained (i won't have time to watch it all until later).
I don't know for certain but my educated guess is that it's probably due to mass. The Saturn V is still one of the most powerful launch vehicles ever built and it could only send 52 tonnes to Trans-Lunar Injection. The baseline for HLS is 45 tonnes – nearly the wet mass of the Apollo CSM and LM combined.
Apollo only needed to get two people to the moon and back, and that alone was barely possible in the 60s so we did it the only way we could. The LM was absolutely bare-bones and each vehicle was used only once.
Artemis has a fundamentally different mission. The goal is to develop technologies we'll eventually need for Mars, which is why we have the Lunar Gateway. HLS needs to have a much greater payload capacity (to facilitate a more permanent presence on the moon) and ideally be reusable. And since Gateway already requires multiple launches to assemble, sending the lander on its own doesn't add much more complexity.
Yeah, Destin glosses over the fact that Artemis' goal is not to only land humans on the moon, but to also establish a base and for that you need cheap payload capacity. Which is definitively not the case for the SLS+Orion combo. Funny how his point of them not communicating enough, can be extended to their marketing efforts, where even someone doing hours of research could miss this.
Basically, they already had a contract for the orion capsule due to the Constellation program under Obama which ended up being cancelled, so they wanted to integrate it somehow. Part of the reason is that HLS is not safe to hold crew during earth ascent due to a lack of an abort system/human rating. Also, orion can be used for missions to the gateway space station when landing isn't necessary. Lots of the architecture is weird partially for political reasons, where congresspeople will lobby NASA to give contracts in ways which maximise jobs instead of effectiveness.
So really enjoyed listening to this talk and can absolutely nod my head along with all the points he made.
The only thing I disagree about is bringing up, "why not just use hypergols? No ignition!" I worked at a hypergolic thruster company and did development and test. His description of simplicity of in-orbit operations hides the insane ground development time.
Maybe back in the 60's when we didn't care if someone inhaled this stuff, we could develop hypergolic thrusters short period in time. But the accidental release procedures for the air and ground of these chemical is insane. I partially am in support for these crazy rules and regulations because that stuff is SCARY. Red clouds ain't a joke... The entire industry is pivoting to in-space ignition with Nitrous Ethane or Methalox because hypergols takes way too long to develop new hardware.
When I was little, the shine from the moon landings was beginning to wear off. By the time I was a teenager and the shuttle flights started, the shine was gone. We didn't know a lot of details then (though we definitely do now), but the shuttle program was teetering and struggling to get things done. A huge amount of luck went into it. Most of it was just a jobs program for a lot of contractors in key Congresscritter states.
So the years kept passing. And space ... was still this thing that's Out There. Impossible. A fucking dream, and not the inspiring kind but the "grow up and get serious" kind.
Worse, tons of people seemingly never missed a chance to pile on and proclaim it all a huge waste. Never mind satellites (GPS/comms), computers, and hundreds of other things more or less were invented directly or heavily iterated because of space science. Because of the act of scientists and engineers sitting down to say "we're here, we want to be up there, let's figure it out" or "we were up there, these things happened, let's figure them out." The course of the figuring it out has yielded huge advancements for humanity.
And even today people still bitch and moan about space. "That money's better spent here" is a common refrain. "We have enough problems to fix on Earth first" is another. "Waste of time" comes up a lot.
Until very recently, space was a nation state level investment. Now it's kind of not, as long as you have a company with the will to invest. I say company because governments (and the people in them) change on a yearly basis, and that yanks and shifts and moves will and funding around. Wasting it while never letting NASA or any other space program count on being able to advance year-by-year.
Private space investment is the big change in the past decade. Before, you had legacy aerospace contractors sucking on the government teat, with basically no real incentive to not drag the program out. To not milk it for every dollar they think they can squeeze out, and then more still as long as they keep their lobbyist program properly rolling. Their goal was to profit, not to succeed.
A private company can set its own agenda, and they do every day. A couple of companies have started to shape themselves towards long term investment in space. Obviously there's a very high profile one that's leading that charge, but it seems impossible to mention it or discuss it without people wanting to score edgy internet points by not talking about space and instead talking about personalities if it comes up, so I'm not bringing it up.
And surprise of surprises, it turns out a lot of "impossible" problems are getting solved now that some entities with honest, good faith interests in space (rather than in milking the government for contracts) are involved.
Rockets were disposable ... until they weren't. Without needing to bespoke-build each launch vehicle, what was a Multi-Billions with a B investment to contemplate a program of launches to Get Something Done In Orbit came down in cost by an order of magnitude or more.
What happens when that affordable launch capacity is used to put a fuel station in orbit? They run into some problems. The engineers and scientists will scratch their heads, study, think, try, and launch solutions. Then there'll be an orbital fuel station.
Which makes a moon mission that isn't two guys crammed into a tin can you can use a screwdriver to puncture not just feasible, but likely. Being able to jump off from orbit, rather than all-in-one from Earth, makes a lot of things more likely.
And who the fuck knows what we find out when we land a long term manned presence with proper resources on the moon? A whole lot of scientists and engineers have some thoughts on that. And when people are On The Moon, data will flow back, and the scientists and engineers will start scratching their heads before their pencils go scratch-scratch-scratch on paper and ... surprise, figure more cool shit out.
I'm so tired, so sick, of hearing "why moon" and "why Mars." Because it's fucking there, that's why. The same reason people crossed the oceans, which was once an insane idea. Except it's been centuries since it was insane, and now it's commonplace, so people think of that as normal. They think of hopping on a damned plane with one to three hundred others to fly across the oceans as equally commonplace.
Frankly it's amazing NASA has managed to get anything done in my lifetime, what with all the bullshit constantly going on that keeps them from being able to Do Science. Because politicians have rarely missed a chance to interfere and keep anything productive from being done.
Corporations are a lot of things, most of them bad; but when the people at the top want something, they often work seriously and honestly to make it happen. Sure people might leave, but senior executives tend to have longer tenures than politicians' election cycles. Especially when profit is rolling in.
Affordable launch is opening up new corporate opportunities. Some companies are utilizing them, hoping to open new markets and create fresh revenue streams. Fine, as long as it Gets Us To Space. Hell, the past year or so, countries that never had space have their own satellites now. Wonder how that happened; oh yeah, space happened.
There are a lot of things that go into engineering success. Into the act of succeeding at engineering a solution to a problem that seems daunting. One of them is that often it requires admitting the scale of the problem. Accepting that scale. Believing in how the solution to this very, very, very large problem the engineers are scratching their heads over, will just have to be BIG. Huge. And how they'll just have to go with that, and keep scaling their attempts to deal with that problem appropriately.
Sometimes the scale really is impossible. We can't teleport matter, for example. No amount of "scale" can fix something that actually is physically (as in physics) impossible.
But getting to the moon or Mars is not impossible. Neither is an actual 21st century orbital station. None of it's even highly unlikely. Doing so is a matter of harnessing physics we understand and know how to manipulate. It's simply a matter of investing. And for a hell of a lot less than what the US spends on defense every year.
The point of going to the moon isn't to repeat the PR stunt of the 60s. Where we waved the flag (literally; they made damned sure to bring the flag, and film and photograph it, and distribute those images worldwide to show America had done it).
The point is to have a permanent, growing orbital presence that will jumpstart the age of Space Exploration. An orbital base that acts as a platform to build off of. Something that multiplies and attracts more investment, more effort, more opportunity.
What starts as a fuel station turns into manned one. Then they add a science section. Some commercial industrial stuff goes up. They start noticing things, working on those issues. The station grows. Someone else starts another one, to compete (because one thing humans are good at, it's one-upping each other for the lolz).
Those stations make it less of a multi-year project to launch to the moon, Mars, anywhere else. An asteroid redirect mission (for orbital mining, to reduce orbital construction material payload costs) starts to become not just more doable, but more likely. Who knows what else?
Why just one Hubble or James Webb. Telescopes on the ground used to be a bespoke thing you had to be almost a magician to construct; now any kid can order one for less than a hundred bucks off the internet. What happens if there are dozens of Things That Look Out At Space up in orbit, accessible to people who aren't closeted behind layers of government?
We've wasted most of my life not doing anything to get to the point of being an orbital species. It's always basically been fiction, to contemplate Working and Living in space. In orbit. On the moon, or another planet. Traveling to see what's Over There so we can Report Back and humanity can collectively scratch its head and go hmmm the way we've always done.
That hmmm is what's brought us out of dark caves. Some jackass decided to venture out. The cavepeople in his cave very probably laughed at him, or tried to block him, or screamed that he was taking an insane chance. And it turns out ... there was shit outside the cave. He brought some of it back. Then it wasn't the cave, but over the hill. Then across the river. Eventually it was the desert, or an ocean, or a mountain chain.
Now it's the planet. What's off planet? Let's go find out.
People always say "it can't be done." Whatever it is, always it cannot be done. Impossible. They fall all over themselves to tell you no, to laugh, to sigh and warn you off.
Until it can. It gets done, and then they suddenly want in on the action.
It's past time to get in on the space action. It's doable now. It's affordable now. The fucking GDP of America is more than 23 trillion dollars. The federal budget is more than 6 trillion. The budget of NASA is 30 Billion, with a lot of it earmarked for pork to support congresscritter contractors who are wasting it. And NASA has to fight and beg and thieve to get even that much.
If politicians and youtubers and environmentalists and all the other "it's impossible" people would just leave NASA and their private corporate partners alone to ... you know ... get science done, about the time I'll probably be on my deathbed a whole bunch of those edgy "it's impossible" people will be crowing over how profitable and valuable it is that we're in orbit. Doing things in orbit. Building things, learning things, thinking about things.
And someone on one of those space stations, on that moon base, headed to Mars, will look out a thick rad-shield window at Space right at their fingertips. They'll look at the stars in a way you can't from down here at the bottom of an atmosphere.
And they'll wonder, "what's over there."
Living in orbit is indeed impossible with current tech, but in the future that will be downgraded to being merely pointless - living in orbit is hella expensive, and robots are only getting better in comparison to humans.
Air freight cost is ~5$/kg, cost per kg on rockets could plausibly reach 100$/kg (currently ~2000$/kg), while not cheap, doesn't seem exorbitantly expensive, especially with raw materials for megaprojects being brought in from the moon, and large amounts of recycling resources. Robots are still way slower,more expensive and less adaptable than humans, and only currently excel at repetitive controlled work. Even the boston dynamics robots, while impressive, can't do many useful things other than walk around for inspections and search and rescue
In my mind the staggering flexibility and capability of humans is one of the best arguments for sending them out. Don’t get me wrong, NASA’s probes and rovers have been incredible, but for planetary science nothing can beat a human specialist… they can get many tens or even hundreds as much science done compared to a rover, and even better they can pivot their activities to wildly different things not even conceived of in the mission’s planning phases, whereas often with robots little beyond the original mission scope can be done until many years later (sometimes as much as a decade or more) when the next mission with the correct hardware rolls around and gets rubberstamped and adequately funded by all of the relevant bureaucrats.
The rate of discovery is going to skyrocket as soon as we have long-term crewed presences on the surface of the Moon and Mars.
Just to be clear: Robots can be remote-controlled, so if you can maintain a reliable connection and handle the extra latency of remote-control, there's not much reason not to use robots. I'm not advocating for completely unsupervised robots, just for the supervision to happen from earth. There's not much you can't do if you have a pair of remote hands, and decent control over them. And while setting up a reliable connection to Mars is hard, setting up a connection to the moon is a whole lot easier, and getting a human to Mars is impossible right now and will continue to be so for quite a while. We might have to literally cure cancer, first.
Anything that's done by robots is an absolute fraction of the cost, because shipping humans+climate-control+food+etc is expensive. It's the weight difference between getting a drone to grab a tennis ball from the roof, and climbing up there yourself. Also, if the mission catastrophically fails then not much of value is lost, compared to people dying. Robots aren't as adaptable, but they don't need to be adaptable. We can just build another one.
Setting up any sort of space colony is an absurd long-term investment as a solution to a short-term problem, and more specifically to a short-term problem that can largely be worked around anyway. Most spaceships we send out are already unmanned, to the point that we don't even think about it - suggesting GPS satellites be manned would be absurd, for example.
Either way, $2000/kg will make cost of living in Manhattan look cheap, and I can't imagine rent costs for living on a literal spaceship will be any cheaper either. For any sort of permanent settlement you'd need a whole lot of baby-proofed spaceships and opportunities for low-skill work, it really just doesn't make sense as anything but an ego project or a big scientific experiment that wouldn't pass any respectable ethics board.
By the way:
Is casually handwaving an order-of-magnitude difference. I don't trust it, because with the power of "could", it could get an order of magnitude more expensive. Due to Kessler syndrome, for example. It won't, but that's the point: there's no real point in assuming prices drop just because it's "plausible". Most of the cost of space freight isn't even getting the weight into space; it's getting it to travel ~10KM/s sideways once you're in space, or getting it the rest of the way to the moon in a reasonable timeframe.
Honestly, what bothers me the most about the whole "space colony" thing is that it reads exactly like my own thoughts whenever I'm working on some dumb impractical-and-I-know-it project and trying to rationalize why it should be the optimal solution, even though it's an obvious enough idea that multiple more-experienced people have definitely thought of it but were either unsuccessful or dismissed it because it didn't make sense in practice. Like airships. I love airships as a concept but I've stopped denying to myself that any potential major use in the current world will be niche at best. Nine tenths of engineering is accepting what's actually practical and working around it.
Actually, a better example might be space elevators. To copy off this video, the rope material needs to be both absurdly strong far beyond our capabilities, and it needs to be UV-proof and weatherproof and conduct electricity for the 'elevator' (or provide power to it in some other fashion), and the whole system needs to run fast enough that its passengers don't run out of food and starve to death before they reach their destination. Which might best be solved by attaching a rocket to the elevator car. This would also require the rope to also be quite heat-resistant. Also, it'll need to be able to survive being hit by a few stray particles travelling at orbital velocity without breaking apart. Also, the project should be cheaper than running lots of rockets without the space elevator.
But, if you justify the project by saying "well maybe we could have a massive, unexpected engineering breakthrough on all of these fronts" then you could justify basically any project with the same logic, and there are tons of utterly life-changing projects that wouldn't require as impressive a breakthrough - for instance, self-wiring electric trees, that grow themselves out automatically and output basically infinite free electricity once they've grown far enough. We know trees work, and we know electricity works, after all.
People often defend their dream by saying "stop being so cynical" or "you lack vision", instead of being honest and acknowledging that 1) their project is a stinker and doesn't have any rational chance of passing a cost-benefit analysis, but 2) they want to see it happen anyway. Which is fine, by the way. I want to see airships succeed. We don't have to always support the sensible thing. It might even turn out to be a good idea after all (although it probably won't). But if you support the people who tell you it is sensible, and that you're being oppressed by a bunch of fuddy-duddies who hate anything that challenges The Establishment or whatever, then you'll be disproportionately supporting grifters and incompetents, and you're even less likely to see real progress ever happen.
Remote control of a robot on the moon isn’t too much trouble, but on mars in the worst case you’re looking at a 20 minute delay both ways. Not impossible to work around, but limiting and extremely tedious.
In cases where the task is simpler you can chain a bunch of commands to send up, but that doesn’t work with anything that requires visual feedback or has a chance of failure… in that case you’re stuck telling it to do something, waiting 20m for the command to be received, and then another 20m to know if you need to try again or can proceed.
Putting people in space is hard, expensive, and dangerous yes, but that’s never going to change if we don’t practice it and figure out ways to make it cheaper and safer. I think it’s worth trying, so long as the people involved are willing.
I do agree that being conscious of grifters is necessary, though, because as proven by the likes of Mars One and other similar projects people will happily sell things that they can’t deliver.
Hands down the longest comment I've seen to date on the internet, well done