8 ms·

This to me is a good news as it help keep the topic alive, but I doubt that this effort will be very successive (I wish it the best). It will likely get too exp

by ptero 10y ago

This to me is a good news as it help keep the topic alive, but I doubt that this effort will be very successive (I wish it the best). It will likely get too expensive quickly. Both participants are bureaucratic (afraid of failures) and suspicious of each other (secrecy, national pride) which will also ramp up costs. We probably can set up a base now at a huge cost to set up and operation, but it will likely fizzle soon to next budget crisis. I think to bootstrap a useful permanent base on the moon or Mars (that can grow, provides safe and efficient transport) we need to accept significantly higher risk to life, say 20%, at the initial setup / prototyping period to allow rapid development and testing of new technologies for all stages of the process (flight, space stations, energy, mining, etc.). I think enough qualified individuals will gladly accept this for a chance to fly, but regulators will likely kill this if they consider it not safe enough. Private companies are more likely to achieve this, especially if they are not hamstrung by regulations. My 2c.

sidlls 10y ago
> Private companies are more likely to achieve this, especially if they are not hamstrung by regulations. On what do you base this? If it's too expensive and dangerous for governments, with the ability to leverage overwhelming resources if they chose to and not care a bit whether any revenue were generated, how is it more likely that a severely resource constrained company likely limited by a profit (or at least constrained loss) motive will succeed?
- jp555 10y ago
  Both profit-motives and a re-election motives can disrupt efforts. But I think being small is significant leverage for achieving new things, and small + technology is compounded leverage.
  - sidlls 10y ago
    What makes you think "small + technology" is an advantage in this space?
    - jp555 10y ago
      I think that a small effort must approach things more from a bootstrapping of minimal effective steps. I've found this often incompatible with the design-by-comitee approach of government procurement bureaucracy. A government approach tends to put more importance on not making any mistakes than doing things fast and efficiently. At a recent government placement I could buy post-it notes with the department budget, but not tissue paper. I could buy an iPad to test my software, but not a new monitor (that's IT!). I could buy an Adobe CC licence, but I couldn't install it or upgrade it without an IT admin. Process can eliminate judgement & autonomy.
      - throwaway2016a 10y ago
        > At a recent government placement I could buy post-it notes with the department budget, but not tissue paper. I could buy an iPad to test my software, but not a new monitor (that's IT!). I could buy an Adobe CC licence, but I couldn't install it or upgrade it without an IT admin. Process can eliminate judgement & autonomy. In fairness, that also describes many large private entities.
- ptero 10y ago
  On talking to a few folks I know who work for NASA. Government officials in most areas are VERY averse to risk taking. Managing and sometimes working on a mission with a fatal crash is likely the end of the career. Business as usual and not reaching far enough has no career downside. And safety is expensive -- getting the system from .99 to .999 P(success) leads to a large increase in complexity and makes developed technologies more difficult to reuse -- the systems designed for high P(success) are usually monolithic, tightly integrated, built for a single purpose things, not modular systems of reusable components. This has nothing to do with resource constraints; this is pre-conditioning / expectations that are not going to change for a large government organization. Unless there is a highly visible, universally accepted national need.
7952 10y ago
Even with very expensive risk avoidance these kind of missions can be ridiculously failure prone. Just look at how many Mars missions have been lost. Is there really much difference between a process that produces a 20% failure rate and one with 80%-100% (lost all your data)? This would seem like a difficult balance to strike.
vincnetas 10y ago
Regardless of regulations, as engineer you should be comfortable of flying a rocket that you designed/built/engineered. Would you go for that if odds of dying would be as high as 20% (one of five) ?
- throwaway2016a 10y ago
  That statistic is based on a very small samples size. In the span of less than a year the SpaceX failure rate is now about 7%. In another year it will probably be 2% if things go well. From an engineering and process perspective, early models are more failure prone.
- Chris_Jay 10y ago
  That would depend on other factors. For a test flight, I'd suggest we volunteer a chimp. If the plan was to establish a colony, and it meant my descendants might be some of the first humans to explore the wider galaxy... Well, let me put it this way: absent clinical immortality, I can't imagine being male, childless, and unwilling to take that chance.
- thaumasiotes 10y ago
  > as engineer you should be comfortable of flying a rocket that you designed/built/engineered I don't think this is true. Some examples: - If I were a flight engineer (which I'm not), I would be happy to design a plane that I was confident a pilot could fly within safety levels that were acceptable to me, regardless of whether I felt I could personally fly it as safely. - I've seen a modern blacksmith write about certain female customers' desire for chest armor molded into the shape of breasts. This is fairly dangerous -- such armor effectively aims a large metal spike at the center of your chest -- and completely unnecessary. He showed a photo, with a comment along the lines of "I made this woman a boob plate [his term] because she asked for it to be made that way. I live in fear that one day she will trip and crack her sternum. But wearing the armor makes her feel sexy, and that matters too." - If I design something with a 10% failure rate, and someone else is happy to operate it knowing it has a 10% failure rate, and it really does have a 10% failure rate, why is it my place to tell them "I wouldn't operate that myself, and therefore you can't either?"
adrianN 10y ago
I wonder whether you'd have regulatory problems if people died on the Moon compared to rockets blowing up in the atmosphere. The latter can easily harm people who haven't consented to potentially being blown up for science. But nobody has the authority to regulate what happens on the Moon, so you should be okay to use the El-Cheapo Inflatable Habitat, right?
amelius 10y ago
> Private companies are more likely to achieve this, especially if they are not hamstrung by regulations. Private companies are only interested if there is short-term profit in these missions.
- shawabawa3 10y ago
  Public companies are only interested in short-term profits. Technically a private company by an eccentric billionaire (musk? bezos?) could be perfectly happy to burn billions to build a moon base
  - paublyrne 10y ago
    I think we're talking about > 50 billion dollars. I'm not sure even those guys have the kind of resources you would need.
    - nickjarboe 10y ago
      Not yet.
  - jjcc 10y ago
    Good point. public and private funding are complementary to each other so there is a healthier Eco system for technology/social progress. Funding from (some time bureaucratic or socialist) government without concerning profit is necessary part of the system. Let me give you a few examples. Quite a few many pioneers like Hinton, Bingo ,maybe LeCun(was working with Hinton before moved to NY) are happened to be from Canada. I realized the answer for the mysterious coincidence until I watched the video that Hinton explained why he moved to Toronto: There was not enough funding from US other than Military at the time while there were some funding in Canada that didn't demand much instant result from his research. The healthcare system in Canada is also better than the states although it has a lot lot lot of problems. I believe socialist Canadians care more about people than efficiency of the system initially but it ended up with only 6 or 7 payers for the cost and less overhead instead of more than 2 thousands of payers along with less regulated but very complicated system. The hi speed train system in China funded by government totally changed the concepts of distance , time, space , contribute so much to economy beyond calculation. I guess if California government can do the same thing, Silicon Valley would spread to be a bigger area and a lot of developer can afford housing by living 100 miles away from where they work. BTW, I myself was quite pro small government/free market but became more moderate not because I'm influenced by my follow Canadians but by looking it at "High Order" level of efficiency.
neffy 10y ago
Yes and No. Both countries are currently in desperate need of sizeable public works programs to keep people usefully occupied. Cost is proxy for human activity, but not necessarily a useful one. If we really are looking at massive near term automation, this is exactly the kind of proposal we can expect to see get off the ground...
- T-A 10y ago
  I'm pretty sure there is minimal overlap between the set of people you'd want to hire for a lunar base program and the set of people in need of public works programs.
  - vkou 10y ago
    Really? Because there seems to be no shortage of unemployed young, educated people in Europe.
    - T-A 10y ago
      What would you have them do? Crew? No, you want middle-aged types, preferably past reproductive age, for that. Obvious reasons familiar from decades of discussions about astronaut selection include radiation exposure, elevated risk of casualties and psychology. Design? No, nobody sane would let inexperienced hands design hardware for human space flight and settlement. Hardware production? Maybe some of that. A few hundred people, maybe even a few thousand, mostly watching over the CNC machines doing the actual work?
      - vkou 10y ago
        I feel that you are vastly underestimating the amount of, and variety of work required in this kind of endeavour. Apollo annually took ~1% of the GDP of the United States to get off the ground. And most of the people who worked on it were not astronauts or rocket surgeons.
- eru 10y ago
  > Both countries are currently in desperate need of sizeable public works programs to keep people usefully occupied. Not really. The ECB will offset any inflation extra government spending might create. That's what inflation targeting does. And on the lower side, the ECB will cut rates and do QE if total spending and thus inflation fall short of their target.
arkh 10y ago
If the problem is loss of life and not material, I don't think we should keep with the "recruit the best of the best and send them there". Do it Australia style: select prisoners and launch multiple missions: if 7 out of 10 fail, you still have 3 bases working. Too bad for those who died.
mikeash 10y ago
20% is way too high. Even ignoring the (important!) human factors, that sort of failure rate would raise the expense tremendously all on its own. We are finally seeing a glimpse of true reusable rockets, which are the only way to do things in space at anything like a reasonable cost. A 20% failure rate means your reusable rockets can't be reused very much. Along similar lines, even if you ignore the fear and grief factor, a 20% fatality rate means you'll never create experienced astronauts. I also really doubt that putting the risk that high would be particularly useful. Even the worst non-man-rated rockets out there have a failure rate of something like 10%, and those failures generally wouldn't kill the astronauts if their spacecraft had a launch escape system. The Space Shuttle's fatality rate was about 2%, and that was only because it was a vastly over-complex, fragile machine with no realistic abort modes in many phases of flight. No other spacecraft made or planned could fail in the ways the Shuttle did. A government effort probably will be expensive, but only because they're slow to adapt. It will probably be quite some time before we see a(nother) reusable government rocket. However, a private effort won't go anywhere, because there's no business case for a moon base, nor even a "dream big" case for an Elon Musk type figure. (Mars is a better target by nearly every measure for the second one.) The best bet IMO would be a public-private partnership, with governments providing the basic goals and funding, and private companies providing the technology and services.
- ptero 10y ago
  Space Shuttle was not a major breakthrough -- we were in space and had orbital stations for a long time by then. It was supposed to be a cheaper, more convenient way to do things that we already did. Soviet space program, Apollo program are better examples and both had ~10-20% fatality rates, at least during the initial phases (for example, Apollo 11 (successful moon landing) was 6th Apollo mission; one out of those 6 (Apollo 1) was fatal). Ancient seafarers, voyagers, explorers faced more dangers and had higher fatalities than today's office clerks. If we are to keep making new voyages we should accept that there is danger involved. If we are spending $X and could make one step with success probability .9999 or 1000 steps with success probability .8 we should seriously consider both options, not let bureaucrats reject the riskier one out of hand. My 2c.
  - 10y ago
sandworm101 10y ago
20% is impossible. When dealing with so many factors, thousands of failure points, is boils down to either safe (1%) or nothing (100%) with a very slippery slope between. It is basic algebra. When you multiply lots of factors you must either aim very low or accept near-infinity. There isnt much advantage to midpoints. The individual factors before multiplication would be nearly identical, with slight errors quickly adding up to total unpredictability. The 20% rocket wont be much cheaper than the 1%. You will spend far too much effort bouncing around between 1 and 100 trying to hit the 20. No doubt savings can be made, but the overall reliability of such a complex system isnt directly and smoothly related to cost.
eru 10y ago
Just don't use any humans, and there's no risk of loss of human life.

by ptero 10y ago

sidlls 10y ago

> Private companies are more likely to achieve this, especially if they are not hamstrung by regulations. On what do you base this? If it's too expensive and dangerous for governments, with the ability to leverage overwhelming resources if they chose to and not care a bit whether any revenue were generated, how is it more likely that a severely resource constrained company likely limited by a profit (or at least constrained loss) motive will succeed?

jp555 10y ago
Both profit-motives and a re-election motives can disrupt efforts. But I think being small is significant leverage for achieving new things, and small + technology is compounded leverage.
- sidlls 10y ago
  What makes you think "small + technology" is an advantage in this space?
  - jp555 10y ago
    I think that a small effort must approach things more from a bootstrapping of minimal effective steps. I've found this often incompatible with the design-by-comitee approach of government procurement bureaucracy. A government approach tends to put more importance on not making any mistakes than doing things fast and efficiently. At a recent government placement I could buy post-it notes with the department budget, but not tissue paper. I could buy an iPad to test my software, but not a new monitor (that's IT!). I could buy an Adobe CC licence, but I couldn't install it or upgrade it without an IT admin. Process can eliminate judgement & autonomy.
    - throwaway2016a 10y ago
      > At a recent government placement I could buy post-it notes with the department budget, but not tissue paper. I could buy an iPad to test my software, but not a new monitor (that's IT!). I could buy an Adobe CC licence, but I couldn't install it or upgrade it without an IT admin. Process can eliminate judgement & autonomy. In fairness, that also describes many large private entities.
ptero 10y ago
On talking to a few folks I know who work for NASA. Government officials in most areas are VERY averse to risk taking. Managing and sometimes working on a mission with a fatal crash is likely the end of the career. Business as usual and not reaching far enough has no career downside. And safety is expensive -- getting the system from .99 to .999 P(success) leads to a large increase in complexity and makes developed technologies more difficult to reuse -- the systems designed for high P(success) are usually monolithic, tightly integrated, built for a single purpose things, not modular systems of reusable components. This has nothing to do with resource constraints; this is pre-conditioning / expectations that are not going to change for a large government organization. Unless there is a highly visible, universally accepted national need.

7952 10y ago

Even with very expensive risk avoidance these kind of missions can be ridiculously failure prone. Just look at how many Mars missions have been lost. Is there really much difference between a process that produces a 20% failure rate and one with 80%-100% (lost all your data)? This would seem like a difficult balance to strike.

vincnetas 10y ago

Regardless of regulations, as engineer you should be comfortable of flying a rocket that you designed/built/engineered. Would you go for that if odds of dying would be as high as 20% (one of five) ?

throwaway2016a 10y ago
That statistic is based on a very small samples size. In the span of less than a year the SpaceX failure rate is now about 7%. In another year it will probably be 2% if things go well. From an engineering and process perspective, early models are more failure prone.
Chris_Jay 10y ago
That would depend on other factors. For a test flight, I'd suggest we volunteer a chimp. If the plan was to establish a colony, and it meant my descendants might be some of the first humans to explore the wider galaxy... Well, let me put it this way: absent clinical immortality, I can't imagine being male, childless, and unwilling to take that chance.
thaumasiotes 10y ago
> as engineer you should be comfortable of flying a rocket that you designed/built/engineered I don't think this is true. Some examples: - If I were a flight engineer (which I'm not), I would be happy to design a plane that I was confident a pilot could fly within safety levels that were acceptable to me, regardless of whether I felt I could personally fly it as safely. - I've seen a modern blacksmith write about certain female customers' desire for chest armor molded into the shape of breasts. This is fairly dangerous -- such armor effectively aims a large metal spike at the center of your chest -- and completely unnecessary. He showed a photo, with a comment along the lines of "I made this woman a boob plate [his term] because she asked for it to be made that way. I live in fear that one day she will trip and crack her sternum. But wearing the armor makes her feel sexy, and that matters too." - If I design something with a 10% failure rate, and someone else is happy to operate it knowing it has a 10% failure rate, and it really does have a 10% failure rate, why is it my place to tell them "I wouldn't operate that myself, and therefore you can't either?"

adrianN 10y ago

I wonder whether you'd have regulatory problems if people died on the Moon compared to rockets blowing up in the atmosphere. The latter can easily harm people who haven't consented to potentially being blown up for science. But nobody has the authority to regulate what happens on the Moon, so you should be okay to use the El-Cheapo Inflatable Habitat, right?

amelius 10y ago

> Private companies are more likely to achieve this, especially if they are not hamstrung by regulations. Private companies are only interested if there is short-term profit in these missions.

shawabawa3 10y ago
Public companies are only interested in short-term profits. Technically a private company by an eccentric billionaire (musk? bezos?) could be perfectly happy to burn billions to build a moon base
- paublyrne 10y ago
  I think we're talking about > 50 billion dollars. I'm not sure even those guys have the kind of resources you would need.
  - nickjarboe 10y ago
    Not yet.
- jjcc 10y ago
  Good point. public and private funding are complementary to each other so there is a healthier Eco system for technology/social progress. Funding from (some time bureaucratic or socialist) government without concerning profit is necessary part of the system. Let me give you a few examples. Quite a few many pioneers like Hinton, Bingo ,maybe LeCun(was working with Hinton before moved to NY) are happened to be from Canada. I realized the answer for the mysterious coincidence until I watched the video that Hinton explained why he moved to Toronto: There was not enough funding from US other than Military at the time while there were some funding in Canada that didn't demand much instant result from his research. The healthcare system in Canada is also better than the states although it has a lot lot lot of problems. I believe socialist Canadians care more about people than efficiency of the system initially but it ended up with only 6 or 7 payers for the cost and less overhead instead of more than 2 thousands of payers along with less regulated but very complicated system. The hi speed train system in China funded by government totally changed the concepts of distance , time, space , contribute so much to economy beyond calculation. I guess if California government can do the same thing, Silicon Valley would spread to be a bigger area and a lot of developer can afford housing by living 100 miles away from where they work. BTW, I myself was quite pro small government/free market but became more moderate not because I'm influenced by my follow Canadians but by looking it at "High Order" level of efficiency.

neffy 10y ago

Yes and No. Both countries are currently in desperate need of sizeable public works programs to keep people usefully occupied. Cost is proxy for human activity, but not necessarily a useful one. If we really are looking at massive near term automation, this is exactly the kind of proposal we can expect to see get off the ground...

T-A 10y ago
I'm pretty sure there is minimal overlap between the set of people you'd want to hire for a lunar base program and the set of people in need of public works programs.
- vkou 10y ago
  Really? Because there seems to be no shortage of unemployed young, educated people in Europe.
  - T-A 10y ago
    What would you have them do? Crew? No, you want middle-aged types, preferably past reproductive age, for that. Obvious reasons familiar from decades of discussions about astronaut selection include radiation exposure, elevated risk of casualties and psychology. Design? No, nobody sane would let inexperienced hands design hardware for human space flight and settlement. Hardware production? Maybe some of that. A few hundred people, maybe even a few thousand, mostly watching over the CNC machines doing the actual work?
    - vkou 10y ago
      I feel that you are vastly underestimating the amount of, and variety of work required in this kind of endeavour. Apollo annually took ~1% of the GDP of the United States to get off the ground. And most of the people who worked on it were not astronauts or rocket surgeons.
eru 10y ago
> Both countries are currently in desperate need of sizeable public works programs to keep people usefully occupied. Not really. The ECB will offset any inflation extra government spending might create. That's what inflation targeting does. And on the lower side, the ECB will cut rates and do QE if total spending and thus inflation fall short of their target.

arkh 10y ago

If the problem is loss of life and not material, I don't think we should keep with the "recruit the best of the best and send them there". Do it Australia style: select prisoners and launch multiple missions: if 7 out of 10 fail, you still have 3 bases working. Too bad for those who died.

mikeash 10y ago

20% is way too high. Even ignoring the (important!) human factors, that sort of failure rate would raise the expense tremendously all on its own. We are finally seeing a glimpse of true reusable rockets, which are the only way to do things in space at anything like a reasonable cost. A 20% failure rate means your reusable rockets can't be reused very much. Along similar lines, even if you ignore the fear and grief factor, a 20% fatality rate means you'll never create experienced astronauts. I also really doubt that putting the risk that high would be particularly useful. Even the worst non-man-rated rockets out there have a failure rate of something like 10%, and those failures generally wouldn't kill the astronauts if their spacecraft had a launch escape system. The Space Shuttle's fatality rate was about 2%, and that was only because it was a vastly over-complex, fragile machine with no realistic abort modes in many phases of flight. No other spacecraft made or planned could fail in the ways the Shuttle did. A government effort probably will be expensive, but only because they're slow to adapt. It will probably be quite some time before we see a(nother) reusable government rocket. However, a private effort won't go anywhere, because there's no business case for a moon base, nor even a "dream big" case for an Elon Musk type figure. (Mars is a better target by nearly every measure for the second one.) The best bet IMO would be a public-private partnership, with governments providing the basic goals and funding, and private companies providing the technology and services.

ptero 10y ago
Space Shuttle was not a major breakthrough -- we were in space and had orbital stations for a long time by then. It was supposed to be a cheaper, more convenient way to do things that we already did. Soviet space program, Apollo program are better examples and both had ~10-20% fatality rates, at least during the initial phases (for example, Apollo 11 (successful moon landing) was 6th Apollo mission; one out of those 6 (Apollo 1) was fatal). Ancient seafarers, voyagers, explorers faced more dangers and had higher fatalities than today's office clerks. If we are to keep making new voyages we should accept that there is danger involved. If we are spending $X and could make one step with success probability .9999 or 1000 steps with success probability .8 we should seriously consider both options, not let bureaucrats reject the riskier one out of hand. My 2c.
- 10y ago

sandworm101 10y ago

20% is impossible. When dealing with so many factors, thousands of failure points, is boils down to either safe (1%) or nothing (100%) with a very slippery slope between. It is basic algebra. When you multiply lots of factors you must either aim very low or accept near-infinity. There isnt much advantage to midpoints. The individual factors before multiplication would be nearly identical, with slight errors quickly adding up to total unpredictability. The 20% rocket wont be much cheaper than the 1%. You will spend far too much effort bouncing around between 1 and 100 trying to hit the 20. No doubt savings can be made, but the overall reliability of such a complex system isnt directly and smoothly related to cost.

eru 10y ago

Just don't use any humans, and there's no risk of loss of human life.