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This is really huge news. Starship has in about 18 months gone from a Elon standing next to a steel grain silo duct-taped into the shape of a rocket, to all the
by themgt 6y ago
This is really huge news. Starship has in about 18 months gone from a Elon standing next to a steel grain silo duct-taped into the shape of a rocket, to all the eggs in NASA's moon basket. The thing I kept thinking - and I have to believe was considered within NASA - is given the rapid progress SpaceX has been making along with the delays in Congressional funding, SLS, BlueOrigin's other projects etc ... if NASA hadn't selected SpaceX there was at least some chance they'd go ahead and do their own private Moon landing mission before NASA's, a massive egg-on-face moment.
There are still major risks with the Starship program so I don't think anyone should be 100% confident they can pull this off, but the massive side benefit is if they do NASA will have proven out a generic system, fully reusable and with orbital refueling, that can with minimal modification cost-effectively send humans to Mars and much of the rest of the solar system as well. A Model T or 737 in space. The original Artemis plan never made much sense as a Mars "proof-of-concept", but it actually does now.
If at some point say 2025, NASA says to the President "we can get the first human on Mars in 4 years for $15 billion" I have to imagine any American president being eager to sign their name on that accomplishment and give the JFK speech, "We choose to go to Mars in this decade, not because it is easy, but because it is hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win"
To me that's the real takeaway here: this is implicitly a huge NASA bet not just on the Moon, but Mars and the rest of the solar system. Finally.
- fukmbas 6y agoLet's be honest. This was a gentleman's agreement that happened on a golf course, nothing else. Tax payers are lining the pockets of musk instead of investing in our own government services.
- jk7tarYZAQNpTQa 6y ago> The original Artemis plan never made much sense as a Mars "proof-of-concept", but it actually does now. IIRC, in the Iliad Artemis helps out Ares (which is kinda the Greek version of Mars). Probably just a coincidence (I'm sure Artemis was chosen because she's Apollo's sister), but fun nonetheless.
- 7952 6y agoHuh. I always just assumed they were copying the Andy Weir book of the same name. Guess I am going to have to add Greek mythology to the todo.
- Galaxity 6y agoYou thought NASA named a program after a random sci-fi book and not for a Greek god like the Apollo program?
- jk7tarYZAQNpTQa 6y agoTo be fair, a lot of science is named after and even inspired from sci-fi works. The Alcubierre drive comes to mind, which was inspired by Star Trek. But yeah, Andy Weir is far from a classic in that regard.
- kleton 6y agoArtemis the goddess was associated with the moon.
- beambot 6y agoIf it was simply a matter of money, SpaceX could raise $15B in an IPO in a heartbeat given the incredible retail demand. I'm glad that Elon is remaining "conservative" in his financing of SpaceX to avoid the quartly Wall Street song & dance.
- cryptoz 6y agoLast I heard, SpaceX will IPO once there are regular trips to Mars with Starship. Looking forward to it to say the least. Edit: Not sure why all the downvotes, so here is a citation. If someone has newer information about it, please post. > SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell told CNBC in May that the company “can’t go public until we’re flying regularly to Mars.” https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/10/why-spacex-investors-arent-concerned-about-elon-taking-tesla-private.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/10/why-spacex-investors-arent-c...
- ncallaway 6y agoI'm not down voting but I think there's a pretty big delta between "can't go IPO before X" and "will IPO once X"
- mlindner 6y agoIn my head those mean the exact same thing, so I'm not sure why you say there's such a big delta. The only difference is the connotation.
- ncallaway 6y agoTo me they are pretty different. "A will happen once X" to me means X is a necessary and sufficient condition for A happening. "B can't happen before X" implies that X is a necessary condition, but it does not imply sufficiency to me. If someone says: "I will give you a million dollars once you do a dance", I understand that as a commitment to provide me with a million dollars after I do a dance. If someone says: "I can't give you a million dollars before you do a dance", I understand that dancing is a requirement for getting the million dollars, but I understand there may be other requirements as well (or they may not be willing to provide the money at all).
- the_duke 6y ago> There are still major risks with the Starship program To expand on this: I think it's reasonable to assume that the stack will reach orbit just fine and be a functional rocket. The big risks are related to recovery. Starship will require in-orbit refueling to go to the moon, so (rapid) reusability is somewhat of a hard requirement. Superheavy (the first stage) is huge and will land directly on the launch tower instead of using landing legs - to reduce turnaround times. This is innovative and completely unproven. And a RUD would at the very least put the launch tower out of commission for a while. Starship (the second stage) will also have to survive the high velocity reentry in a good condition and nail the crazy landing maneuver. SpaceX heat shield tiles and the general aerodynamic and thermal properties of the rocket are an unknown for now. Musk recently said that Starship will probably require "many test flight" to achieve successful reentry and landing. On top there have been quite a few reliability issues with their new Raptor engine, which need to be ironed out. I'm sure SpaceX will figure it out, but there are a lot of risks lurking in the development program. All this makes the choice to go for SpaceX more impressive for the usually so cautious NASA. But the payoff would be enormous. If the re-usability works out, Starship can completely change the game for the launch market and lift capability.
- simonh 6y agoI'm getting very nervous about manned propulsive landings. I know it's been done before, e.g. the LEM, but that at least had an abort option available and the flip manoeuvre seems to introduce a lot of unpredictability into the process. I wouldn't be surprised if they take up a Crew Dragon with them in a cargo bay to bring the crew back down separately for the first manned flights, until they've demonstrated a strong track record of successful propulsive landings. As for Lunar Starship, it's massively overengineered for the Artemis requirements, capable of taking 100 tons to the Lunar surface. That's great for later missions to set up a base, but even then you'd likely need a crew version just for shuttling people back and forth. So I wouldn't be surprised to see the first version of that to be somewhat scaled down from the concept art. That should massively reduce the number of refuelling missions needed for the early Artemis flights.
- NortySpock 6y ago
- medium_burrito 6y agoAnd it's winter for Gateway and SLS
- NortySpock 6y agoA Lunar Gateway still sort-of-makes-sense, as an outpost near the moon, using ISS-derived hardware, makes it hard for Congress to argue cancelling something that is (a) new and (b) we know will work. That being said, a few small LEO orbital depots makes more sense than Gateway. Or perhaps small LEO and Lunar gateways might make the safety-officer at NASA happier.
- 7952 6y agoI don't think these stations really do make sense from an exploration perspective. If you are not saving much delta v then what is the point? However, I think having permanent orbital stations is just as philosophically justified as going to the moon or mars etc. Living in space is amazing and we will learn a lot from it. So why not?
- kwertyoowiyop 6y agoThe JFK quote still gives me (good) chills!
- tmpz22 6y agoWill SpaceX be as generous with its IP as NASA was in the 1960s and 1970s? The original moon landing yielded huge technological advances, many of which made their way into commercial applications. Tesla may instead hoard these advances to increase the networth of Elon Musk.
- elihu 6y agoThis is what I worry about with privatization of space technology in general; a free market with competition can in some ways be more efficient than a government agency, but then again if all the parties are incentivized to hoard their technology then you could end up with a lot of duplicate work and wonky suboptimal designs to work around patents. I wonder if NASA has any technology sharing provisions in their contracts? Or at least agreements to make components available for sale to NASA or competitors, and to share as much data as necessary to allow parts from multiple vendors to interoperate.
- bumby 6y agoThere are very general Space Act agreements that try to make dissemination of information as wide as possible, but there is plenty of wiggle room for proprietary information. https://www.nasa.gov/centers/johnson/pdf/189228main_setc_nnj06ta26a.pdf https://www.nasa.gov/centers/johnson/pdf/189228main_setc_nnj...
- dwd 6y agoYou can possible expect them to do the same as with Tesla https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-you https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-you
- tiahura 6y ago“If at some point say 2025, NASA says to the President "we can get the first human on Mars in 4 years for $15 billion" I have to imagine any American president being eager to sign their name on that accomplishment“ Howard Stern had a great line in the 90’s about marijuana - “Every time you speak to these guys who dedicate their lives to legalizing marijuana, they go, “Hey dude, you can make rope out of marijuana.” I go, “Dude, don’t we have enough rope in this country?” —— Every time I hear talk of spending billions on Mars, I ask “Dude, don’t we have enough red dirt in this country?”
- the_cat_kittles 6y agowhy is going to mars even remotely high on the list of humanities priorities? it seems like people think its cool and then try to have their cake and eat it to by claiming its somehow important. im pretty sure for at least a very long time its just cool.
- scoofy 6y agoMeteor impacts, caldera collapses, nuclear war. Every single one of these things could happen tomorrow, and we'd never see it coming. If we want any chance if humanity to survive, we need to get people onto other planets.
- rtpg 6y agoEarth after a meteor impact and a nuclear war happening at the same time would still be 100x more livable than anything we can do on Mars. Saving humanity by going to Mars is like saving yourself from the titanic by jumping into the ice-cold water. We can barely make places like Antartica survivable! Huge chunks of "totally fine" places like Hawaii only exist thanks to massive shipping industries. If you have a way to build out a livable space on Mars, please give us Earthlings some of that technology cuz it would be pretty useful to a lot of people!
- m4rtink 6y agoAnything - including flight to and colonization off Mars - that moves humans closer to building mega scale space habitats is an important step forward. Thats where the road to immortality ultimately leads for humans as a species. And possibly for individuals as well, given the potentially almost limitless resources available in Space.
- kitsunesoba 6y agoOne thing I've seen becoming a spacefaring civilization explained as is a "coming out of the cave" of sorts, which doesn't line up perfectly but it's not far off. The species' possibility space will be severely restricted so long as offplanet infrastructure is limited.
- robbiep 6y agoGiven the risks and delays with SLS, I’d say it’s pretty likely that SpaceX can outlift/out launch NASA to the moon and probably still will. Going to be interesting
- Causality1 6y agoMy biggest worry is whether SpaceX can keep up its momentum without Musk driving it. It's not unreasonable to think he could behave badly enough to end up in jail or removed from a leadership position.
- mahkeiro 6y agoSpaceX is not a public company and he has a majority stake and controls 78% of the voting rights. He can even still manage it from jail, if he wants.
- Causality1 6y agoAlmost every prison facility prohibits inmates from managing a business from inside. Even if he was allowed to, he couldn't be the kind of energizing and driving force he is now.
- nickik 6y agoWorked for the mafia.