12 ms·

> To say that this is truly an economic process is cheating slightly, since the ledger fails to account for the trivial matter of the $100bn or so spent to buil

> To say that this is truly an economic process is cheating slightly, since the ledger fails to account for the trivial matter of the $100bn or so spent to build the space station in the first place. The ISS is a laboratory, I don't think it's fair to consider its cost as a factor here in the same way you don't consider the cost of the University campus for other research. I highly doubt they'll be doing full-scale manufacturing on the ISS. They'll be using it (as it was designed) to conduct experiments on their technology and prove that it can be done. Only then will the real investment will begin where they construct dedicated manufacturing facilities. I wonder if this would be an opportunity for Bigelow Aerospace's inflatable modules?

HeadsUpHigh 8y ago
>I wonder if this would be an opportunity for Bigelow Aerospace's inflatable modules? Not just Bigelow but many other space startups. SpaceX is dominating the news atm with Blue Origin to follow but the reality is that the big bucks are in space activities not space transportation. This is only now starting to be realized with companies deploying fleets of cubesats for Earth observation but in the next decade there are plenty of companies that are looking to build commercial space stations. Some of these projects are more conservative, like using technology proven on the ISS coupled with cheaper components and more streamlined operations. These 2 factors combined with the fact that these are not cost plus contracts with the government mean at least an order of magnitude of cost savings. Then there is Bigelow who wants to move to the next stage of inflatables but also the Gateway foundation who want to launch the materials in space and assemble a huge station there. Everybody is waiting for the price per kg to drop to a certain threshold and then cheap human transportation to be made available. Crew Dragon is probably the first step towards that that might enable some small station but the big deal is BFR( when and if it launches).
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago
  > the big bucks are in space activities not space transportation This is an opinion, not a fact. They are presently in transportation. Moreover, the space mining and manufacturing pitch has been made (incorrectly) for at least forty years. I have yet to see a convincing business model for any of these activities, even assuming cheaper launch costs.
  - frgewut 8y ago
    Actually launch industry is minuscule compared to satellites ($5.5B for launch industry vs $13B only for satellite manufacturing) Edit: and then of course there is the satellites services which the report estimates in hundreds of billions $. [1] https://www.sia.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/SIA-SSIR-2017.pdf https://www.sia.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/SIA-SSIR-2017...
    - nscalf 8y ago
      42% is minuscule? They have reasonably comparable market caps considering the amount of time the industries have existed. The commercial launch industry really is in it's first/second decade (arguable depending on what you define as commercial, this field is radically changing), and you can trace satellite commercial use back decades to the 70's with GPS and telecom (the first satellite tv use was in 1978 for reference).
      - frgewut 8y ago
        Of course satellite manufacturing is only a small part of the satellite industry. I updated comment to reflect that.
      - barbecue_sauce 8y ago
        Even by their original figures, wouldn't it be 30%? 5.5B/(5.5B + 13B)?
        perl4ever 8y ago
        The point is, to some people "miniscule" implies different orders of magnitude.
  - HeadsUpHigh 8y ago
    I'm talking about LEO activities right now. Satellite operators per year make way more than the satellite launch market is.
- ohyes 8y ago
  And frankly, it must be stopped. We can’t have loads and loads of space junk floating around in near earth orbit. Space isn’t the internet, you “can’t move fast and break things,” and you can’t just create more of it. We have to be careful and systematic and decide exactly what is important enough to be placed into orbit. Having a high cost at least prevents a glut of crap being put up there, if it doesn’t necessarily prevent meritless things from being launched. Someone has to say humbug to this before the Lords of Silicon Valley screw it up and make the rest of us pay for it.
  - AlanSE 8y ago
    Poorly placed comment when the parent was discussing things like cubesats. Tiny satellites like these are probably better in the long-run for orbital debris due to a number of reasons. Firstly, by virtue of being smaller, atmospheric drag is greater and their decay is faster given a certain orbit. Second, they're more disposable than the larger sats, meaning lower orbit more economical when weighed against the capital cost of the mass-produced device itself. The real problem for debris is higher orbits that don't decay after a reasonable service life. Those just accumulate forever. On that subject, you would have a point for things like SpaceX's recent idea of putting up internet satellites, because those would be slated for orbits higher than more LEO missions, and would involve a large number of heavy objects there effectively on a permanent basis.
    - close04 8y ago
      Atmospheric drag affects small satellites more than large satellites, all other things equal?
      - navaati 8y ago
        I think it's more than as you go smaller the mass reduces faster than the drag, thus resulting in a higher amount of drag per unit of mass.
        nradov 8y ago
- samstave 8y ago
  What I think will be a very interesting development is when we scale a DaVinci Surgical robot from Intuitive to be remote-hands in the assembly of space things. If we can have people simply logging into a davinci-style-space-avatar who can get about to do the tasks required to assemble things, and have the dexterity of these robots have, that will be an interesting step. Another thing that shold be interesting is whomever develops the first orbital hangar. If we were to start by sending up components which get lego-ed into a platform onto which we can attach things we are building, and the robots we build them with - then we will be able to develop a repeatable method of bolting things together in space. Given that (from my ignorant perspective) the only real limiting factor to any space-born craft is the size and shape of the componentry which can be launched from earth to orbit - it would seem that just ensuring your minimal denominating factor is fitting into the weight/dimensions of the payload capabilities of the launcher. Then, ensuring that things have a standard way to fit together would be great, but if not - use a davinci style romote-arms for the fine work... Or is that all just naive daydreaming?
  - Terr_ 8y ago
    > What I think will be a very interesting development is when we scale a DaVinci Surgical robot from Intuitive to be remote-hands in the assembly of space things. Most of that kind of surgery is done in the same room, so dealing with latency will be a major issue. (I know there have been some experiments in long-distance tele-surgery, but it's hardly routine.) A low-earth-orbit installation (like the ISS) has a variable latency depending on where it happens to be and what chain of relays and other systems are being used. A geosynchronous satellite would have predictable latency (~250ms round-trip) but it'd be more expensive to launch and service at that distance. Anywho, I think "remote satellite work" will involve heavy reliance on pre-programmed sequences, "simulate locally, then send for execution remotely" tactics, and just generally structuring the manufacturing process to minimize any steps that can't be done atomically with pausing-points in-between.
    - samstave 8y ago
      Yeah, I was more referring to the dexterity of the bots than anything else.
nradov 8y ago
Very little actual research has been done on the ISS. The occupants spend most of their working time on maintenance and housekeeping. So I don't think it's reasonable to label it as a research facility. The ISS was primarily built to prop up the US aerospace industry, maintain human spaceflight capability, and give Russian rocket scientists something productive to do so that they wouldn't sell their skills to hostile countries. (And those aren't necessarily bad reasons to build a space station.)
- api 8y ago
  The ISS is primarily an engineering experiment, not a scientific experiment. This is lost on most of its critics. The objective was to build and operate a large space station for a prolonged period of time in order to study prolonged human space flight, closed circuit life support, in-space assembly and maintenance, etc., in order to practice for longer and further missions. There's only so much you can do on the ground. At some point you have to "ship it" (pun intended?) and get real contact with the problem domain. That's when you find out about the unknown unknowns. (This is true for any engineering effort of any kind.) This was done after the Apollo era because while we did make it to the moon the technology stack was far too immature for a robust space industry. It was horribly expensive, dangerous, and not suited for longer term missions. I've heard many Apollo engineers and astronauts remark that it's amazing we didn't lose anyone on those missions. We needed to develop and harden our space flight experience. During the same period we also worked hard on reusable launch vehicles. The Shuttle was the first serious attempt and was lacking in many ways, but it demonstrated that you could use an orbiter repeatedly. The Falcon/Dragon stack is more practical and represents a re-framing of the problem. It builds on Shuttle experience and also on the Delta Clipper project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-X https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-X I'm not sure how much direct engineering transfer occurred, but some indirect transfer certainly occurred as I'm sure people in SpaceX studied this and other related projects extensively before beginning their own work. We now have the technology to send prolonged missions with better safety margins and very nearly have a reusable (and thus more economical) launch stack to launch them.
  - nicktelford 8y ago
skriticos2 8y ago
Why not just send the weawer fitted to a dragon for a few dozen orbits and then land the produce? With block 5 they can make the trip for 50 million. Unless the machines are too big it won't get any cheaper. Little logistics needed.
- RhodesianHunter 8y ago
  Wouldn't you then need to ship up all of the machinery every time, as opposed to shipping it up once and only shipping raw materials thereafter?
  - skriticos2 8y ago
    Yes, but you'd simplify logistics. Maintaining a space station is magnitudes more expensive. Construction, complexity, upkeep, loading logistics. If the machines fit, you almost always come out ahead cost-wise.
    - solarkraft 8y ago
      Why? Stabilisation, maneuvering, possibly shielding come to mind. Are those that significant? Do you have a source/ good explanation for this?
      - skriticos2 8y ago
        With a capsule you load the machine and feedstock comfortably on the ground, shoot it up and press the start button. Wait for it to complete, deorbit, unload. With Dragon you have about 6 tons of weight to work with, so even if the aperture is 1-2 tons, you still can process 4-5 tons of material. Fairly reasonable and achievable with the right design. With an orbital station: first you need to build a station and keep it where it is (there are not a ton of orbital stations for a reason, they are expensive). If it has humans on it, everything becomes massively expensive. If not, well, you need future tech for onboard logistics and maintenance. Even if you ignore the ridiculous cost of building and maintaining an orbital station, life support and other crew issues.. You still need to rendezvous, dock, transfer feedstock, produce, transfer product back to capsule, land. Even just a station that works like a printer with the feedstock seamlessly plugging in it would make everything more complicated and expensive. Not even talking about how to fix your automated orbital platform when it breaks down. Now in a few hundred years when we have massive orbital platforms with readily available workforce for hire and workshops for rent.. maybe then. But with today's technology you are looking at cost differences between maybe a 100 million all in with a single shot automated capsule (+ your stuff) vs. several billions for the most simple station designs + a ton of risk and technical hurdles. Space is hard as we are fairly new to it (relatively speaking). It's all custom built as of now. Each moving peace you add increases cost exponentially. Adding humans just puts you on an entirely different chart altogether.
phyzome 8y ago
Also, the article calls that a sunk cost, but the ISS is extraordinarily expensive to maintain on an annual basis as well.

HeadsUpHigh 8y ago

>I wonder if this would be an opportunity for Bigelow Aerospace's inflatable modules? Not just Bigelow but many other space startups. SpaceX is dominating the news atm with Blue Origin to follow but the reality is that the big bucks are in space activities not space transportation. This is only now starting to be realized with companies deploying fleets of cubesats for Earth observation but in the next decade there are plenty of companies that are looking to build commercial space stations. Some of these projects are more conservative, like using technology proven on the ISS coupled with cheaper components and more streamlined operations. These 2 factors combined with the fact that these are not cost plus contracts with the government mean at least an order of magnitude of cost savings. Then there is Bigelow who wants to move to the next stage of inflatables but also the Gateway foundation who want to launch the materials in space and assemble a huge station there. Everybody is waiting for the price per kg to drop to a certain threshold and then cheap human transportation to be made available. Crew Dragon is probably the first step towards that that might enable some small station but the big deal is BFR( when and if it launches).

JumpCrisscross 8y ago
> the big bucks are in space activities not space transportation This is an opinion, not a fact. They are presently in transportation. Moreover, the space mining and manufacturing pitch has been made (incorrectly) for at least forty years. I have yet to see a convincing business model for any of these activities, even assuming cheaper launch costs.
- frgewut 8y ago
  Actually launch industry is minuscule compared to satellites ($5.5B for launch industry vs $13B only for satellite manufacturing) Edit: and then of course there is the satellites services which the report estimates in hundreds of billions $. [1] https://www.sia.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/SIA-SSIR-2017.pdf https://www.sia.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/SIA-SSIR-2017...
  - nscalf 8y ago
    42% is minuscule? They have reasonably comparable market caps considering the amount of time the industries have existed. The commercial launch industry really is in it's first/second decade (arguable depending on what you define as commercial, this field is radically changing), and you can trace satellite commercial use back decades to the 70's with GPS and telecom (the first satellite tv use was in 1978 for reference).
    - frgewut 8y ago
      Of course satellite manufacturing is only a small part of the satellite industry. I updated comment to reflect that.
    - barbecue_sauce 8y ago
      Even by their original figures, wouldn't it be 30%? 5.5B/(5.5B + 13B)?
      - perl4ever 8y ago
        The point is, to some people "miniscule" implies different orders of magnitude.
- HeadsUpHigh 8y ago
  I'm talking about LEO activities right now. Satellite operators per year make way more than the satellite launch market is.
ohyes 8y ago
And frankly, it must be stopped. We can’t have loads and loads of space junk floating around in near earth orbit. Space isn’t the internet, you “can’t move fast and break things,” and you can’t just create more of it. We have to be careful and systematic and decide exactly what is important enough to be placed into orbit. Having a high cost at least prevents a glut of crap being put up there, if it doesn’t necessarily prevent meritless things from being launched. Someone has to say humbug to this before the Lords of Silicon Valley screw it up and make the rest of us pay for it.
- AlanSE 8y ago
  Poorly placed comment when the parent was discussing things like cubesats. Tiny satellites like these are probably better in the long-run for orbital debris due to a number of reasons. Firstly, by virtue of being smaller, atmospheric drag is greater and their decay is faster given a certain orbit. Second, they're more disposable than the larger sats, meaning lower orbit more economical when weighed against the capital cost of the mass-produced device itself. The real problem for debris is higher orbits that don't decay after a reasonable service life. Those just accumulate forever. On that subject, you would have a point for things like SpaceX's recent idea of putting up internet satellites, because those would be slated for orbits higher than more LEO missions, and would involve a large number of heavy objects there effectively on a permanent basis.
  - close04 8y ago
    Atmospheric drag affects small satellites more than large satellites, all other things equal?
    - navaati 8y ago
      I think it's more than as you go smaller the mass reduces faster than the drag, thus resulting in a higher amount of drag per unit of mass.
      - nradov 8y ago
samstave 8y ago
What I think will be a very interesting development is when we scale a DaVinci Surgical robot from Intuitive to be remote-hands in the assembly of space things. If we can have people simply logging into a davinci-style-space-avatar who can get about to do the tasks required to assemble things, and have the dexterity of these robots have, that will be an interesting step. Another thing that shold be interesting is whomever develops the first orbital hangar. If we were to start by sending up components which get lego-ed into a platform onto which we can attach things we are building, and the robots we build them with - then we will be able to develop a repeatable method of bolting things together in space. Given that (from my ignorant perspective) the only real limiting factor to any space-born craft is the size and shape of the componentry which can be launched from earth to orbit - it would seem that just ensuring your minimal denominating factor is fitting into the weight/dimensions of the payload capabilities of the launcher. Then, ensuring that things have a standard way to fit together would be great, but if not - use a davinci style romote-arms for the fine work... Or is that all just naive daydreaming?
- Terr_ 8y ago
  > What I think will be a very interesting development is when we scale a DaVinci Surgical robot from Intuitive to be remote-hands in the assembly of space things. Most of that kind of surgery is done in the same room, so dealing with latency will be a major issue. (I know there have been some experiments in long-distance tele-surgery, but it's hardly routine.) A low-earth-orbit installation (like the ISS) has a variable latency depending on where it happens to be and what chain of relays and other systems are being used. A geosynchronous satellite would have predictable latency (~250ms round-trip) but it'd be more expensive to launch and service at that distance. Anywho, I think "remote satellite work" will involve heavy reliance on pre-programmed sequences, "simulate locally, then send for execution remotely" tactics, and just generally structuring the manufacturing process to minimize any steps that can't be done atomically with pausing-points in-between.
  - samstave 8y ago
    Yeah, I was more referring to the dexterity of the bots than anything else.

nradov 8y ago

Very little actual research has been done on the ISS. The occupants spend most of their working time on maintenance and housekeeping. So I don't think it's reasonable to label it as a research facility. The ISS was primarily built to prop up the US aerospace industry, maintain human spaceflight capability, and give Russian rocket scientists something productive to do so that they wouldn't sell their skills to hostile countries. (And those aren't necessarily bad reasons to build a space station.)

api 8y ago
The ISS is primarily an engineering experiment, not a scientific experiment. This is lost on most of its critics. The objective was to build and operate a large space station for a prolonged period of time in order to study prolonged human space flight, closed circuit life support, in-space assembly and maintenance, etc., in order to practice for longer and further missions. There's only so much you can do on the ground. At some point you have to "ship it" (pun intended?) and get real contact with the problem domain. That's when you find out about the unknown unknowns. (This is true for any engineering effort of any kind.) This was done after the Apollo era because while we did make it to the moon the technology stack was far too immature for a robust space industry. It was horribly expensive, dangerous, and not suited for longer term missions. I've heard many Apollo engineers and astronauts remark that it's amazing we didn't lose anyone on those missions. We needed to develop and harden our space flight experience. During the same period we also worked hard on reusable launch vehicles. The Shuttle was the first serious attempt and was lacking in many ways, but it demonstrated that you could use an orbiter repeatedly. The Falcon/Dragon stack is more practical and represents a re-framing of the problem. It builds on Shuttle experience and also on the Delta Clipper project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-X https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-X I'm not sure how much direct engineering transfer occurred, but some indirect transfer certainly occurred as I'm sure people in SpaceX studied this and other related projects extensively before beginning their own work. We now have the technology to send prolonged missions with better safety margins and very nearly have a reusable (and thus more economical) launch stack to launch them.
- nicktelford 8y ago

skriticos2 8y ago

Why not just send the weawer fitted to a dragon for a few dozen orbits and then land the produce? With block 5 they can make the trip for 50 million. Unless the machines are too big it won't get any cheaper. Little logistics needed.

RhodesianHunter 8y ago
Wouldn't you then need to ship up all of the machinery every time, as opposed to shipping it up once and only shipping raw materials thereafter?
- skriticos2 8y ago
  Yes, but you'd simplify logistics. Maintaining a space station is magnitudes more expensive. Construction, complexity, upkeep, loading logistics. If the machines fit, you almost always come out ahead cost-wise.
  - solarkraft 8y ago
    Why? Stabilisation, maneuvering, possibly shielding come to mind. Are those that significant? Do you have a source/ good explanation for this?
    - skriticos2 8y ago
      With a capsule you load the machine and feedstock comfortably on the ground, shoot it up and press the start button. Wait for it to complete, deorbit, unload. With Dragon you have about 6 tons of weight to work with, so even if the aperture is 1-2 tons, you still can process 4-5 tons of material. Fairly reasonable and achievable with the right design. With an orbital station: first you need to build a station and keep it where it is (there are not a ton of orbital stations for a reason, they are expensive). If it has humans on it, everything becomes massively expensive. If not, well, you need future tech for onboard logistics and maintenance. Even if you ignore the ridiculous cost of building and maintaining an orbital station, life support and other crew issues.. You still need to rendezvous, dock, transfer feedstock, produce, transfer product back to capsule, land. Even just a station that works like a printer with the feedstock seamlessly plugging in it would make everything more complicated and expensive. Not even talking about how to fix your automated orbital platform when it breaks down. Now in a few hundred years when we have massive orbital platforms with readily available workforce for hire and workshops for rent.. maybe then. But with today's technology you are looking at cost differences between maybe a 100 million all in with a single shot automated capsule (+ your stuff) vs. several billions for the most simple station designs + a ton of risk and technical hurdles. Space is hard as we are fairly new to it (relatively speaking). It's all custom built as of now. Each moving peace you add increases cost exponentially. Adding humans just puts you on an entirely different chart altogether.

phyzome 8y ago

Also, the article calls that a sunk cost, but the ISS is extraordinarily expensive to maintain on an annual basis as well.