4 ms·

I don't know why, but I've had this gut-wrenching feeling for a couple of years now that Something Terrible is going to happen to this before it gets into posit

I don't know why, but I've had this gut-wrenching feeling for a couple of years now that Something Terrible is going to happen to this before it gets into position at L2. I really hope not, obviously, but this seems like an All Your Eggs In One Basket lesson in the making. We need to commodify this tech, make them somewhat disposable, and sent oodles of them up on Starships.

cnlevy 5y ago
Using 3 COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) components with 90% reliability can ensure 99.9% redundancy instead of having a Unique very reliable and even costlier 99.9% custom component can really lower costs. But it can happen only if mass is not a constraint. From Casey Handmer's blog: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/03/04/sls-what-now/ https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/03/04/sls-what-now/ The Perseverance Mars rover cost $2.4 billion, which works out to a few thousand salaries for just under a decade. Thousands of people are needed to build this rover because landing stuff on Mars is so hard that subsystem masses must be tracked to a tenth of a gram, on a system that weighs a tonne. The whole thing is meticulously handcrafted from custom silicon, PCBs, titanium tubes, motors, cameras, and other awe-inspiring instruments. Starship will be able to land 100 of them per flight. Now what? How can NASA feed a team that makes one feather light rover per decade for a billion dollars if the demand just jumped by a factor of a thousand and the unit cost fell by the same amount? Set up a production line? Work out how to make them with a team of ten? Build one every two weeks?
- CamperBob2 5y ago
  They should put that team to work on next-generation tech, the stuff that's not yet a commodity. They can start working on habitat construction materials and hardware, for instance. Although it is interesting to consider that we've put a lot of expense into optimizing payloads that, in retrospect, would have been smarter to put into better launch vehicles. SpaceX probably isn't going to spend $2 billion developing Starship (even if Boeing would have.)
  - meepmorp 5y ago
    IIRC, SpaceX is getting $2.89B from NASA for the Artemis lander, which proposal is based on Starship. Although, the GAO put that on hold recently, after complaints from BlueOrigin and Dynetics. Hardly surprising, I guess.
- throwaway2048 5y ago
  an important consideration is that SpaceX hasn't in fact, gotten 100 tons of equipment to mars yet.
pkaye 5y ago
The material requirements are extreme to what we typically us on earth. Handling temperature extremes, radiation, low outgassing, low weight.
- detritus 5y ago
  We Can Do This™ - ed. For clarification, I imagine that I personally can't, so instead: It Can Be Done™
machinehermiter 5y ago
I think this part of the problem though. We don't believe we can really do anything at this point so we have turned everything into a stochastic process with multiple draws needed and it gives everyone an out when things don't work. "Oops, JWST blew up, guess we just got unlucky with that single draw from the urn. Shouldn't have put all our eggs in one basket. " Just do it. No more urn thinking. Just launch , get in orbit and blow our minds with the data that is sent back. I don't want to hear about anything less than that.

cnlevy 5y ago

Using 3 COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) components with 90% reliability can ensure 99.9% redundancy instead of having a Unique very reliable and even costlier 99.9% custom component can really lower costs. But it can happen only if mass is not a constraint. From Casey Handmer's blog: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/03/04/sls-what-now/ https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/03/04/sls-what-now/ The Perseverance Mars rover cost $2.4 billion, which works out to a few thousand salaries for just under a decade. Thousands of people are needed to build this rover because landing stuff on Mars is so hard that subsystem masses must be tracked to a tenth of a gram, on a system that weighs a tonne. The whole thing is meticulously handcrafted from custom silicon, PCBs, titanium tubes, motors, cameras, and other awe-inspiring instruments. Starship will be able to land 100 of them per flight. Now what? How can NASA feed a team that makes one feather light rover per decade for a billion dollars if the demand just jumped by a factor of a thousand and the unit cost fell by the same amount? Set up a production line? Work out how to make them with a team of ten? Build one every two weeks?

CamperBob2 5y ago
They should put that team to work on next-generation tech, the stuff that's not yet a commodity. They can start working on habitat construction materials and hardware, for instance. Although it is interesting to consider that we've put a lot of expense into optimizing payloads that, in retrospect, would have been smarter to put into better launch vehicles. SpaceX probably isn't going to spend $2 billion developing Starship (even if Boeing would have.)
- meepmorp 5y ago
  IIRC, SpaceX is getting $2.89B from NASA for the Artemis lander, which proposal is based on Starship. Although, the GAO put that on hold recently, after complaints from BlueOrigin and Dynetics. Hardly surprising, I guess.
throwaway2048 5y ago
an important consideration is that SpaceX hasn't in fact, gotten 100 tons of equipment to mars yet.

pkaye 5y ago

The material requirements are extreme to what we typically us on earth. Handling temperature extremes, radiation, low outgassing, low weight.

detritus 5y ago
We Can Do This™ - ed. For clarification, I imagine that I personally can't, so instead: It Can Be Done™

machinehermiter 5y ago

I think this part of the problem though. We don't believe we can really do anything at this point so we have turned everything into a stochastic process with multiple draws needed and it gives everyone an out when things don't work. "Oops, JWST blew up, guess we just got unlucky with that single draw from the urn. Shouldn't have put all our eggs in one basket. " Just do it. No more urn thinking. Just launch , get in orbit and blow our minds with the data that is sent back. I don't want to hear about anything less than that.