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NASA Has Decided to Start Building the Lunar Gateway Using the Falcon Heavy
- soheil 6y agoWhere is the Lyft of SpaceX? When Uber came along many people assumed only the first to market will be able to take the cake, but as we saw Lyft was able to come in after Uber and play a great complimentary role. Now that SpaceX has proven reusability is possible why can't a couple of engineers there start their own company and compete against SpaceX on these lucrative Nasa and other commercial contracts? The capital required shouldn't exceed what Musk had to put in in early days of SpaceX, roughly equal to Series B of a random uninspiring SV start up [0]. [0] https://news.crunchbase.com/news/segment-raises-175m-for-big-data-infra/ https://news.crunchbase.com/news/segment-raises-175m-for-big...
- jbob2000 6y agoBetween NASA, SpaceX, and various other space initiatives, there probably aren’t enough skilled people available to do the work. It’s literally rocket science.
- zionic 6y agoThe person trying to do what you say also owns Amazon, and he’s utterly failing at it. Maybe space service and taxi cabs are not directly comparible.
- AYBABTME 6y agoIs Blue Origin failing? Utterly so? Do you mind expanding on what makes you say this. I have no information as to whether they're doing good or bad - I assumed they were doing fine but at a slower and less public pace - but your usage of a clear, non ambiguous critique makes me wonder.
- messe 6y agoBlue Origin seems to be targeting a slightly different market. I'm not sure exactly what that market is yet, but its public goals have always seemed to lean further toward crewed vehicles than SpaceX's have. I think it's still too early to be able have an interesting discussion comparing the two companies.
- rtkwe 6y agoTheir New Shepard seems very tourist friendly small and cheap because it's only doing a suborbital hop.
- manicdee 6y agoIt's been in development longer, and will not carry tourists to space before SpaceX has tourists in orbit. BO's development pace is glacial.
- rtkwe 6y agoWell New Shepard isn't ever going to bring tourist to orbit but it'll still be much more popular once it comes out because it will be significantly cheaper than the SpaceX offering.
- rtkwe 6y agoTheir launcher is only suborbital which is much simpler and smaller than an orbital vehicle. They have plans for a larger orbital reusable rocket but because they're less public so it's hard to know if it's anything beyond an engineering drawing at this point.
- frakkingcylons 6y agoThere’s enough public info to know that New Glenn is not vaporware. The engine, BE-4, has already been delivered to ULA for their Vulcan rocket.
- wlesieutre 6y agoBlue Origin is working on New Glenn, but no news recently on when there’re aiming to launch it. Rocket Lab is aiming for reusability on their Electron. Probably others I haven’t heard of.
- jessriedel 6y agoExactly. The author of the comment you're replying to doesn't seem to be familiar at all with the commercial launch industry, which, even putting SpaceX aside, has more innovation and competition than ever before.
- wlesieutre 6y agoGroups working on reusable rockets: Blue Origin (New Glenn), Rocketlab (Electron), China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (Long March 8), Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology (Long March 6), Landscape (Zhuque-2), iSpace (Hyperbola-2), Roscosmos (Amur), ArianeGroup (Themis), United Launch Alliance (Vulcan Centaur, reusable engines only), Indian Space Research Organisation (RLV, aiming for two stages and a winged shuttle) I might still be missing a few. SpaceX has a head start but absolutely everyone else is looking at them and thinking "If we don't catch up to that, SpaceX is going to eat this market."
- tus89 6y agoBuilding rockets that work is incredibly hard. Building rockets that work and land is that X 100.
- yarky 6y agoCost of entry. But wait until hardware gets cheaper
- s1artibartfast 6y agoSpaceX IS the Lyft of orbital spaceflight, and currently have about 25% of the global launches and ~60% of US launches There are about a dozen companies with rockets. The big dogs are: United Launch Alliance (lockheed/Boeing) -USA Northrop Grumman -USA ArianeGroup (airbus) -EU Mistsubishi -Japan Khrunichev -Russia
- adolph 6y agoDon’t forget China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology and China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation https://spacelaunchnow.me/launch/long-march-5-change-5 https://spacelaunchnow.me/launch/long-march-5-change-5
- s1artibartfast 6y agogood point, I was trying to stick to private companies but if I included Khrunichev, I should probably include them too.
- adolph 6y agoDrawing the line between private/public/government is kinda tricky. The way I understand CALT and CASTC is that they are government owned enterprises as opposed to a government agency like NASA. Maybe its a distinction without a difference, especially when their contracts are all government and presumably their "profits" go back to government as the owner?
- s1artibartfast 6y agoI agree. The point I was hoping to get at is that most people misconstrue Spacex being the first “private” rocket company as the first non governmental manufacturer. ULA is public in the sense you can buy stock, not that it is run by federal servants.
- adolph 6y ago
- tormeh 6y agoSpaceX is neither the first nor the last entity to build reusable rockets. It's the most successful one, by far, but now that's it's shown to be commercially doable every launch provider on the planet has a roadmap to (partial) reusability. It's going to be a very crowded space.
- risyachka 6y agoThey are so many years ahead that it is a totally different league (and will stay this way for many years). By the time other launch providers get to reusability SpaceX will probably be already flying Starship, decreasing price even further along with other advancements.
- adolph 6y agoRocketLab is getting pretty close. It’s a different size class, but they seem to be getting close. https://twitter.com/RocketLab/status/1362116590863409152?s=20 https://twitter.com/RocketLab/status/1362116590863409152?s=2...
- chasd00 6y agoA great thing rocket lab has done is demonstrate the feasibility of electric fuel pumps which dramatically simplify rocket engine design. Raptor is a breakthrough work of art obviously but the Rutherford engine lowers the barrier to entry for at least beginning the propulsion conversation.
- adolph 6y agoThe idea of electric fuel pumps is certainly interesting and I guess it works for Rocket Lab, but the idea of tossing out batteries as you gain altitude [0] just feels wrong. Maybe batteries are an intermediate step to decoupling the fuel pump from the turbo part, like the M-B F1 tech [1]? 0. https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/24570/what-was-ejected-from-rocketlabs-electron-launch-vehicle-at-t625-during-stage https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/24570/what-was-eje... 1. https://www.thedrive.com/news/34152/how-mercedes-amg-will-use-electric-turbos-from-f1-to-kill-lag-in-road-cars https://www.thedrive.com/news/34152/how-mercedes-amg-will-us...
- fiftyfifty 6y agoThe reality is no one is even close to SpaceX, SpaceX went from launching it's first orbital rocket, the Falcon 1 in 2008 to launching the first Dragon capsule into orbit on the Falcon 9 and recovering it in 2010. No launch company iterates or advances like that, no one. There simply is no Lyft to SpaceX's Uber. The closest private competitor to SpaceX right now IMO is Rocket Lab. They are the only company that has an orbital rocket that has a path forward for reusing the first stage right now. Rocket Lab's rockets are already pretty cheap for launching small sats and when they start reusing their first stages they might be able to get their cost per Kg to orbit close to what SpaceX can offer right now. But Rocket Lab's rocket is tiny compared to the Falcon 9, even SpaceX's first rocket, the Falcon 1 could put more payload into orbit than Rocket Lab's Electron rocket. It's not clear if Rocket Lab has any plans for making a bigger rocket. Blue Origin is the only other company (besides the Chinese) that is currently building reusable first stages. Blue Origin's BE-4 engine also looks really promising and was designed from the beginning to be reusable. I think a lot of people are giving up on Blue Origin because they have yet to launch anything into orbit and they've been around longer than SpaceX. If Blue Origin does get it's New Glenn rocket off the ground and can recover and reuse the first stage they have a good chance of being cost competitive with the Falcon 9/Falcon Heavy. The reality though is if SpaceX is successful with their Starship/Superheavy project they will be so far ahead in the cost/reusability department it will take a competitor a decade or more to catch up. Keep in mind part of what makes Starship even possible is the Raptor engine which SpaceX started developing in 2009. It's likely SpaceX has spent hundreds of millions of dollars just developing the Raptor, the Air Force chipped in over $40 million to the Raptor program at one point and SpaceX has built over 30 Raptors already at a cost of about $1 million a piece.
- soheil 6y agoAre there many companies that tried to do what SpaceX did but failed? I think the current incumbents are more like Sidecar and GetAround than Lyft tbh.
- pfdietz 6y agoThere were predecessors that failed at various approaches to space launch. Otrag, Beal, Kistler, Rocketplane, Rotary Rocket, Space Services Inc. (This is not intended to be an exhaustive list.)
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- areoform 6y agoBetween Clipper and this, we’ve arrived at an inflection for SLS - it’s a dead program walking. The Senator from Alabama, Sen. Shelby is set to retire. And so it has become politically viable to sunset SLS. I predict that the program will end after Artemis flies and they have a plan in place for the jobs it creates
- eloff 6y agoI think it's the sunk cost fallacy. Nobody likes to admit they were wrong, even if it couldn't have been predicted when they made the initial decision. It goes double for politicians who not only lose face, but lose political capital as well. SLS stopped making sense years ago. They need to cut their losses now.
- pfdietz 6y agoSLS made no sense from the moment it was proposed.
- Spartan-S63 6y agoIt did from the perspective of saving STS jobs.
- avmich 6y agoBut saving jobs by itself doesn't bring much benefits. Maybe if you're going to use that experience in a soon to come follow-up project... which with NASA could be very much not guaranteed.
- bumby 6y agoBenefits to whom? If you assume it’s to benefit NASA, but I think this statement is meant to speak to benefits to politicians
- 6y ago
- superkuh 6y agoIt's a shame that the lunar gateway is useless and itself a jobs program like SLS. Since NASA decided not to fund the version of the asteroid retrieval mission (ARM) that included de-spin there are no near earth asteroids that can be brought back to the proposed space station. All it can do is uselessly orbit the Moon, getting full cosmic radiation dose instead of less than half in Earth orbit in the magnetosphere. In terms of resources the moon itself only has water. But it's down in a difficult to access gravity well. There's no nitrogen. Far, far, better would be fully funding ARM and starting to despin and drag asteroids to the lunar gateway for study, resources, and eventually living space in space protected from radiation and, if you build sub-surface tracks, enough acceleration to live normally.
- generalizations 6y agoA simple first step done sooner is better than a complex first step done later. Also, seems like there's a lot to learn about space habitats just by building another one - we haven't made that many yet.
- ethbr0 6y ago11? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_space_stations https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_space_stations
- generalizations 6y agoMost of those things were largely too tiny to count as much more than practice runs for building actual space stations - in that list, the majority were less than 1/30th the size of the ISS - did you see the column on the side listing the cubic feet of space in them? 100m^3 is a ~4.5m box. So yes, we've put 11 space stations in orbit: only if you count a one-room flying can as a space station. I think we have a few more practice steps to go before we start hollowing out asteroids as GP was suggesting we do next.
- trhway 6y ago>It's a shame that the lunar gateway is useless with the number of billionaires walking around, it probably can make a decent money as a tourist destination. Especially if there is an option to get down for a walk on the surface. Though it can become quickly at least partially outdated once one can just charter a Starship to make a quick long weekend trip around the Moon.
- chasd00 6y agoIsn’t falcon heavy the least cost effective spacex product? Wouldn’t super heavy make more sense?
- nickik 6y agoFalcon Heavy is the cheapest kg to orbit rocket in the world by far right now and the largest one. Super Heavy is only a first stage booster. Combined with the Starship upper stage this system is also called Starship. This system is still in development and has not yet made orbit. NASA does not just pick some rocket for a huge expensive payload like that. A rocket needs to go threw a complex certification program, have a proven flight record and be well understood by NASA. While SpaceX hopes to be flying with Starship by the point this would launch, NASA simply doesn't work in those time lines.
- rtkwe 6y agoSuperheavy doesn't have an upper stage yet or even a complete first stage so if they're trying to start soon Falcon Heavy is the most economical option.
- mlindner 6y agoTo nitpick Superheavy's upper stage is Starship, so it has an upper stage in testing, and the first stage doesn't exist yet.
- spaetzleesser 6y agoI don't understand how NASA's manned space program has become such a mess and basically a political football while their unmanned scientific missions seem to go pretty well. Whenever I hear something about SLS I feel sad for the people working on it. Although the James Webb also seems to be a disaster.
- konjin 6y agoToday's NASA is what happens when you give people who don't believe in government control of government. Unlike other areas of government, like say education, where failure is difficult to see a rocket that fails does so with a handy fireball that lets you know just how badly you've fucked up.
- spijdar 6y agoI think this is a jab at some or a group of politicians, but I genuinely don't know who -- it seems NASA's problems go far enough back that several different parties/groups have held control of the government and NASA has mostly stayed the same, for better or worse.
- konjin 6y ago>I think this is a jab at some or a group of politicians Yes, all of them. The last politician that matter who believed in government was Nixon. Everyone since then has done their best to weaken it, with the result being a country that is unable to build any engineering project larger than a football stadium without cost and time overruns larger than the original projections. The US right now is in the position of the barbarian tribes squatting in the former Roman Empire. Using the infrastructure build before them, wearing togas and pretending to be Romans, constantly sniping each other over who is more virtuous, while everything rots and falls apart, only it's happening slowly enough that no one notices. We didn't need those baths anyway: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ruin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ruin
- spijdar 6y ago
- konjin 6y agoI'll believe it when I see it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constellation_program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constellation_program Every decade there's a plan to return to the moon by the next decade and it always gets cancelled half way through. I doubt the US can do this any longer as it has lost all the institutional knowledge of how to run such a program since the 70s. I'd go so far as to say that it is impossible to run a successful manned mission past low earth orbit with the current incentives in government and the risk aversion in terms of both cash and lives.
- JKCalhoun 6y ago> I doubt the US can do this any longer as it has lost all the institutional knowledge of how to run such a program since the 70s. Not sure I agree. I think the end of the Cold War and loss of our "competition" may be a bigger factor. China no doubt could light a fire under the U.S. again. Or, how I stopped worrying and learned to love Cold Wars.
- manderley 6y agoBut also, it really doesn't matter. The US has way bigger problems than whether it could launch a successful moon mission for pointless political posturing.
- JKCalhoun 6y agoPerhaps. The U.S. had problems in the 50's and 60's as well: fighting wars in South-Eastern Asian countries...
- manderley 6y agoWhat does that have to do with anything? That's just deflecting by posting something weird.
- ALittleLight 6y ago
- Ellahn 6y agoAm I the only one who's curious if the naming was related in any way to Andy Weir's book?!?
- Havoc 6y ago>NASA will send “the first woman and the next man” All for gender equality, but uhm wtf are they trying to say here?
- frosted-flakes 6y agoThat both men and women will be part of the mission.
- barbacoa 6y agoThat's good to hear. I always hate when they take a classic movie and remake it with an all female cast. Glad this won't just be a remake of apollo staring amy schumer.
- rtkwe 6y agoThat the mission will include men and women... so it'll be the first woman and the 13th man.
- codekansas 6y agoKinda hard to colonize another planet with just one sex
- mkl 6y agoWe're not talking about going anywhere near another planet.
- meepmorp 6y agoThey're letting girls on the moon now, so you'll have to find another place for your clubhouse?
- nabla9 6y agoIt's not clear for me how important gateway is. Many critics say it's not needed for lunar or Mars missions. It means just using more fuel to get there. There may be some advantages, like re-use ascent modules and risk reduction for lunar missions.
- manderley 6y agoThe next question is: Are manned lunar and mars missions useful in any way? No.
- larkeith 6y agoIn the long term, they're pretty much the most important missions possible - even absent disasters, Earth only has so many resources, so designing and testing the technology for extraterrestrial habitation is rather essential. Admittedly, there are alternatives to manned colonialization (e.g. seeding), but it seems rather worth exploring multiple options, considering the stakes.
- pfdietz 6y agoJust because something is valuable in the long term doesn't mean it's justifiable in the short term. Perhaps the route to colonizing Mars is to develop technologies that have nothing to do with going into space right now.
- manderley 6y agoLong-term, there's no solution at all. In the short-term, it's a waste of resources that could be put to better use.
- gpanders 6y agoFrom Wikipedia: > NASA's budget for fiscal year (FY) 2020 is $22.6 billion. It represents 0.48% of the $4.7 trillion the United States plans to spend in the fiscal year. NASA uses less than half of 1 percent of the federal budget. If you care so much about budget waste, there are a myriad of other places you could complain about (how about defense or healthcare spending?) The practical benefits of NASA's science and engineering efforts have been laid out many times in many different places. There are also less practical benefits; for example, how can you quantify the impact that the Blue Marble photo had on the environmental movement? That was only possible because we put someone on the Moon. Curmudgeons like you will always be around, and those of us who enjoy seeing humanity push itself and accomplish incredible things are happy to ignore you :)
- gnzoidberg 6y agoOuch
- aml183 6y agoIf you are a fan of the space industry, check out my newsletter, Payload. Once a week we send a newsletter covering the business of space. It includes business news, satellite launches, fundraising and more. Feel free to sign up below. http://payloadresearch.com http://payloadresearch.com
- Aachen 6y ago"feel free to do this thing I just asked you to do" is a weird way of putting it.
- rkagerer 6y agoIEEE ran an interesting article a while back touching on some reasons Gateway is a great / terrible idea: https://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/space-flight/nasas-lunar-space-station-is-a-greatterrible-idea https://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/space-flight/nasas-lunar...
- k1ll3r 6y agoExcited to see space developments take place
- rkagerer 6y agoIn retrospect, it was inevitable.