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I have a space commercialization question. SpaceX is purportedly at some point going to be able to put 100 tons in LEO for around 100M. I'll roughly assume wit

I have a space commercialization question. SpaceX is purportedly at some point going to be able to put 100 tons in LEO for around 100M. I'll roughly assume with a second launch full of fuel, a purchaser with the right gear could put close to 100 tons on the lunar surface for 200M or so, once they get the kinks out and the price down. So why not just pre-purchase 20 of these for your favorite lunar project, such as the ULT? If they bring prices down you get a cool lunar base. If they don't, you don't pay. That much payload delivered to the moon for $4B would be an incredible bargain, and it also serves to further incentivize SpaceX. I'm sure I have something about the economics wrong, but I don't know what. Seems to me like we should be very close to a lot of back-burner space projects getting off the drawing boards. What don't I understand?

peterpost2 6y ago
The cost of rocket launches is not the largest part of creating a lunar base, designing and manufactoring all the landers, base, electronics, software etc. is the larger part of it. If I recall correctly, for the apollo program about 30% was for the launch vehicle.
- ethbr0 6y ago
  It seems like this would be somewhat of an interrelated valuation. If launch costs decrease by an order of magnitude, reliability of payload can be relaxed, and therefore costs of payload engineering and manufacture decrease.
  - m4rtink 6y ago
    If mass reduction is no longer super critical, you can use heavier but cheaper materials that provide the needed strength. There could be other knock off effect of cheaper and more frequent space launch - you can send multiple versions and see which works the best, ship prototypes back for extensive evaluation, send robots or people to fix broken things. A lot of things are done differently if you have just a couple super expensive shots per decade & everything needs to work without external help at the first time.
NickM 6y ago
I would assume engineering and building one of these things is non-trivial, and there may also be certain aspects tailored to the specific launch vehicle, so it’s not like as soon as SpaceX proves they can do what they plan to do that you can just pop a telescope on a rocket and go.
- _Microft 6y ago
  Launch providers list the characteristics of their vehicle and the customer has to ensure to stay within the constraints. SpaceX is special (or used to be special, maybe others have followed suit by now?) in that they make this information public. See here what loads, accelerations or vibrations the payload has to withstand during a launch on a Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy launch vehicle: https://www.spacex.com/media/Falcon_Users_Guide_082020.pdf#page=19 https://www.spacex.com/media/Falcon_Users_Guide_082020.pdf#p...
317070 6y ago
Imagine the same project (Lunar base? Moon telescope? Rocket fuel harvester?) but in the Sahara. Now add the constraint that you want it there, but without ever having any humans on site. That is what needs addressing. That level of automatisation is the hard part about space.
- retrac 6y ago
  Indeed. Slightly tangential, but when you start thinking about a Mars colony -- but here on Earth -- a self-sufficient hermetically-sealed environment somewhere underground -- it really starts to drive the scope of the problem home. We don't really know how to create a self-contained ecosystem here on Earth, with everything on-hand. And the residents won't even all die if someone accidentally pokes a hole in the wall in the Antarctic prototype base.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
    Indeed. If we're going to be serious about extraterrestrial colonies we should be workshopping our solutions right now here at home where the problems and consequences are orders of magnitude lesser.
  - jandrese 6y ago
    There was the Biosphere II project from the 90s, but it ultimately failed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2
    - BurningFrog 6y ago
      Run by Steve Bannon, of all people!
      - andrewem 6y ago
        From reading the Wikipedia article, it sounds like "run by" overstates his role, but wow nevertheless.
      - 6y ago
cma 6y ago
> If they don't, you don't pay. Do you have to put money down like with Tesla Full Self Driving?
dpifke 6y ago
Musk is claiming that Starship launches will be closer to $10M than $100M: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1328770804222468097 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1328770804222468097 (I've heard some ad hominem attacks that this will never happen, but haven't seen any actual evidence that it's impossible.)
- DanielBMarkham 6y ago
  This continues to befuddle me. So let's assume Musk nails it and can do this for $10M. Instead of my 20, imagine 200 100-ton landings of cargo on the moon, say over the period of ten years. Instead of everybody sitting on Earth, trying to design-session-out the perfect lunar base, why not just keep regularly-delivering supplies, then learn how to build a lunar base while on the moon, figuring it out as you go? After all, just like SpaceX, we're not trying to build a lunar base. We're trying to build a factory for constructing lunar bases, eventually hundreds of them. Solving the modular/generic problem is what we want to do, not build another Space Shuttle. Perhaps I'm wrong, but it seems like most of the people here, indeed most of the aerospace industry, naturally prefer these big, lumbering, paperwork-heavy, long-lasting bureaucratic programs. But without enough regularly-arriving supplies, why try to solve something up-front, all-at-once, and perhaps years or decades ahead of time when you can just figure out the bare minimum of things you need just as you need them? But like I said, I'm probably missing something. I've been saying for 20+ years that our real problem is cost-to-LEO. Now that we're just barely beginning to address that, the next problem very well may likely be changing the way we think of large space-based programs. That could very well end up being a bigger problem than cost over the long run. ADD: Seems to me that the Starship is a solution to delivering humans to space. We need reusable heat shields, booster packs, and payload capsules, along with an Earth-based mass-driver, to truly drive down cargo rates another 100x. At that point we'll begin seriously talking about becoming a space-faring species.
  - ChickeNES 6y ago
    > So let's assume Musk nails it and can do this for $10M. Instead of my 20, imagine 200 100-ton landings of cargo on the moon, say over the period of ten years. That cost is predicated on rapid relaunch, with multiple launches /per-day/. It wouldn't be ten years, more like two to four :)
azernik 6y ago
More like 5+ launches to get it refueled - the payload of Starship is MUCH smaller than its fuel load.
- valuearb 6y ago
  Fully fuel requires at least 8 tanker launches IIRC. Fully fueled Starship weighs 1,200 tons, 1,100 tons of fuel over 8 launches is nearly 150 tons per launch.

peterpost2 6y ago

The cost of rocket launches is not the largest part of creating a lunar base, designing and manufactoring all the landers, base, electronics, software etc. is the larger part of it. If I recall correctly, for the apollo program about 30% was for the launch vehicle.

ethbr0 6y ago
It seems like this would be somewhat of an interrelated valuation. If launch costs decrease by an order of magnitude, reliability of payload can be relaxed, and therefore costs of payload engineering and manufacture decrease.
- m4rtink 6y ago
  If mass reduction is no longer super critical, you can use heavier but cheaper materials that provide the needed strength. There could be other knock off effect of cheaper and more frequent space launch - you can send multiple versions and see which works the best, ship prototypes back for extensive evaluation, send robots or people to fix broken things. A lot of things are done differently if you have just a couple super expensive shots per decade & everything needs to work without external help at the first time.

NickM 6y ago

I would assume engineering and building one of these things is non-trivial, and there may also be certain aspects tailored to the specific launch vehicle, so it’s not like as soon as SpaceX proves they can do what they plan to do that you can just pop a telescope on a rocket and go.

_Microft 6y ago
Launch providers list the characteristics of their vehicle and the customer has to ensure to stay within the constraints. SpaceX is special (or used to be special, maybe others have followed suit by now?) in that they make this information public. See here what loads, accelerations or vibrations the payload has to withstand during a launch on a Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy launch vehicle: https://www.spacex.com/media/Falcon_Users_Guide_082020.pdf#page=19 https://www.spacex.com/media/Falcon_Users_Guide_082020.pdf#p...

317070 6y ago

Imagine the same project (Lunar base? Moon telescope? Rocket fuel harvester?) but in the Sahara. Now add the constraint that you want it there, but without ever having any humans on site. That is what needs addressing. That level of automatisation is the hard part about space.

retrac 6y ago
Indeed. Slightly tangential, but when you start thinking about a Mars colony -- but here on Earth -- a self-sufficient hermetically-sealed environment somewhere underground -- it really starts to drive the scope of the problem home. We don't really know how to create a self-contained ecosystem here on Earth, with everything on-hand. And the residents won't even all die if someone accidentally pokes a hole in the wall in the Antarctic prototype base.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
  Indeed. If we're going to be serious about extraterrestrial colonies we should be workshopping our solutions right now here at home where the problems and consequences are orders of magnitude lesser.
- jandrese 6y ago
  There was the Biosphere II project from the 90s, but it ultimately failed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2
  - BurningFrog 6y ago
    Run by Steve Bannon, of all people!
    - andrewem 6y ago
      From reading the Wikipedia article, it sounds like "run by" overstates his role, but wow nevertheless.
    - 6y ago

cma 6y ago

> If they don't, you don't pay. Do you have to put money down like with Tesla Full Self Driving?

dpifke 6y ago

Musk is claiming that Starship launches will be closer to $10M than $100M: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1328770804222468097 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1328770804222468097 (I've heard some ad hominem attacks that this will never happen, but haven't seen any actual evidence that it's impossible.)

DanielBMarkham 6y ago
This continues to befuddle me. So let's assume Musk nails it and can do this for $10M. Instead of my 20, imagine 200 100-ton landings of cargo on the moon, say over the period of ten years. Instead of everybody sitting on Earth, trying to design-session-out the perfect lunar base, why not just keep regularly-delivering supplies, then learn how to build a lunar base while on the moon, figuring it out as you go? After all, just like SpaceX, we're not trying to build a lunar base. We're trying to build a factory for constructing lunar bases, eventually hundreds of them. Solving the modular/generic problem is what we want to do, not build another Space Shuttle. Perhaps I'm wrong, but it seems like most of the people here, indeed most of the aerospace industry, naturally prefer these big, lumbering, paperwork-heavy, long-lasting bureaucratic programs. But without enough regularly-arriving supplies, why try to solve something up-front, all-at-once, and perhaps years or decades ahead of time when you can just figure out the bare minimum of things you need just as you need them? But like I said, I'm probably missing something. I've been saying for 20+ years that our real problem is cost-to-LEO. Now that we're just barely beginning to address that, the next problem very well may likely be changing the way we think of large space-based programs. That could very well end up being a bigger problem than cost over the long run. ADD: Seems to me that the Starship is a solution to delivering humans to space. We need reusable heat shields, booster packs, and payload capsules, along with an Earth-based mass-driver, to truly drive down cargo rates another 100x. At that point we'll begin seriously talking about becoming a space-faring species.
- ChickeNES 6y ago
  > So let's assume Musk nails it and can do this for $10M. Instead of my 20, imagine 200 100-ton landings of cargo on the moon, say over the period of ten years. That cost is predicated on rapid relaunch, with multiple launches /per-day/. It wouldn't be ten years, more like two to four :)

azernik 6y ago

More like 5+ launches to get it refueled - the payload of Starship is MUCH smaller than its fuel load.

valuearb 6y ago
Fully fuel requires at least 8 tanker launches IIRC. Fully fueled Starship weighs 1,200 tons, 1,100 tons of fuel over 8 launches is nearly 150 tons per launch.