26 ms·

A bevy of rovers heading for the Moon

89 points by tectonic 5y ago

tectonic 5y ago
For some reason, HN's link isn't going directly to the lunar rovers item, which is here: https://orbitalindex.com/archive/2022-02-16-Issue-156/#the-upcoming-bevy-of-lunar-rovers https://orbitalindex.com/archive/2022-02-16-Issue-156/#the-u... Thank you Jatan for his excellent contribution to today's issue of Orbital Index. Here's his longer form version as well: https://blog.jatan.space/p/lunar-rovers-launching-in-2020s https://blog.jatan.space/p/lunar-rovers-launching-in-2020s
- dang 5y ago
  That's because HN's software replaces URLs with canonical URLs when it finds one, and the submitted page includes https://orbitalindex.com/archive/2022-02-16-Issue-156/ https://orbitalindex.com/archive/2022-02-16-Issue-156/ as a canonical URL. In this case, though, the author's own source is more in keeping with the HN guidelines ("Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter.") so I've replaced the URL above with that one. Thanks! https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
dylan604 5y ago
"To illustrate this monumental change in capacity, Musk pointed out that in a single year, a Starship launching three times per week could put as much mass into orbit as has been launched by the entire world to date (~15,500 tons). " While that sounds impressive, the whole 3 starships per week for a year part just makes this seem ridiculous. Is Musk personally going to pay the <$10million per launch? <$10m x 3 x 52 = $1.56billion. That's just the launch. Never mind the expense of the payload being lofted into orbit. Nor the amount of time required to produce all of that payload. 3x per week is just an insane amount of launches.
- s5300 5y ago
  Well, if price of BTC 2x’s he can pay that tab pretty easily. No reason for him not to. And that much starship launch volume is invaluably more than the rovers or whatever they’d be bringing up. Quick & dirty reliability test for the world to see, launch turnover times, etc
- jsnodlin 5y ago
  That’s like saying having hundreds of airplanes in the sky at all times is an an insane amount in 1930.
- ttul 5y ago
  With launch costs 100x lower than historical norms, there is plenty of space cargo that becomes economically viable. I don’t think SpaceX will have any trouble filling those launches. I am surprised there isn’t already a venture fund dedicated to funding space startups so that they can exploit Starship economics.
  - dylan604 5y ago
    How much of that space cargo is payload ready for a vehicle that hasn't been finalized in design yet? How long does it take to fit that cargo into that ship once it is finalized? Able to meet the 3x/week launch schedule? It's obviously just a stat to make it sound impressive, but it is just totally impractical. I could easily say that with a launch every day, that capacity could be met in just 6 months! Fuck, with a measly 2 launches a day, we could do it this quarter!! Stats are sometimes meaningless, and when they are coming from this particular individual, they have to be taken with rather large grains of salt.
    - themgt 5y ago
      They're averaging 1x a week with Falcon 9 which requires throwing away an upper stage and Merlin engine each time. So yeah you "could easily say" whatever you want, but this hot take that SpaceX is just talking bullshit like any rando internet commentator is getting a bit old.
echelon 5y ago
Google's $20 million Lunar XPRIZE [1, 2] ended a few years too early in 2018. Would have been exciting had they kept until 2023 or 2025. > In the case of the Google Lunar XPRIZE, the audacious competition ended without a $20 million grand prize winner. [3] Seems like they got tired of waiting and redistributed the funds to other causes. They didn't realize how close we were. Sure would have been incredible publicity for Google had they not canned it. We'd be talking about the prize every year and with every launch, and we'd hold Google in esteem for being pioneers in science and space exploration. Pity. [1] https://www.xprize.org/prizes/google-lunar https://www.xprize.org/prizes/google-lunar [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Lunar_X_Prize https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Lunar_X_Prize [3] https://www.xprize.org/prizes/google-lunar/articles/a-new-era-the-post-prize-impact-of-the-google-lunar-xprize https://www.xprize.org/prizes/google-lunar/articles/a-new-er...
- germinalphrase 5y ago
  However, you must admit that canceling the program too soon is very on brand.
  - N19PEDL2 5y ago
    Best comment of this thread!
- johnwalkr 5y ago
  I was on one of the teams since 2010, and still at the surviving company now. The original deadline was “before a space agency went back” or 2013, whichever came first. There was about 30 teams, of which only about 4 were serious, and as far as I know, only 2 surviving as companies that are actually still working. Near the end they finally figured out how to pare down to a few teams instead of manage 25+ teams of a few people each, making press releases and experiments but there was a lot of years of nothing much happening aside from the Milestone prizes in 2014. Each year after that it was a real struggle from the people At xprize to convince google to extend by one more year (which needs an annual budget, not only the prize money), teams so and so are going to launch soon. Eventually it wasn’t credible, and after 11 years there was none of the original people involved at either xprize or google so there was no one left to convince higher-ups. News about GLXP was more and more negative each year as well. I was fortunate in that we were (at the time) only making a rover so we were partnered with or in discussion with all of the top teams at some point and got to travel around to meet them. It was a great time!
gataca 5y ago
Will this ever be safe enough to use as a hazardous waste disposal system? Can we just send the worst of the worst into the sun without too much risk of just spreading it out through the atmosphere in case of an explosion.
- dylan604 5y ago
  The launch of this material is probably safer than the transportation of that material to the loading/launch facility.
  - vkou 5y ago
    It's not, the probability of a SpaceX rocket spectacularly exploding is somewhere around ~1%. They'd need 860 more problem-free launches to hit ~0.1%. The probability of a truck spectacularly exploding on its way to the launch facility is way less than 0.1%. In fact, it's astronomically lower than 0.1%.
    - inimino 5y ago
      You can't calculate probabilites that way when the process itself is improving.
    - jessriedel 5y ago
      > They'd need 860 more problem-free launches to hit ~0.1% For what it's worth, SpaceX claims that they intend to reach this level of safety by literally performing thousands of launches. Time will tell if they can do that.
- bongoman37 5y ago
- tacLog 5y ago
  > Will this ever be safe enough to use as a hazardous waste disposal system? Can we just send the worst of the worst into the sun without too much risk of just spreading it out through the atmosphere in case of an explosion. I don't think it is impossible that launch capabilities become safe enough to lower the risk to something some people might consider acceptable. However the physics of it won't change. To even get into earths orbit we have to accelerate anything going up to an average of 7.8 Km/s, where to escape orbit to anywhere else it's 11.8 Km/s. I think the amount of energy to do that will always be the primary reason why this just isn't practical. Assuming you are advanced enough to be considering this, I would hope that your society is stable enough for long term containment and processing.
josefresco 5y ago
Love the Orbital Index. A weekly Space treat in my email inbox for sure! Subscribe link: https://orbitalindex.com/subscribe/ https://orbitalindex.com/subscribe/
- tectonic 5y ago
  Thank you!
squarefoot 5y ago
> a Starship launching three times per week could put as much mass into orbit as has been launched by the entire world to date (~15,500 tons). Finding a free spot to place all those objects without too much risk of collisions might become quite a challenge. http://www.stuffin.space/ http://www.stuffin.space/
- iso1631 5y ago
  It amazes me how empty space is. There's about a dozen objects on that map over California at the moment, at various heights. Now sure things are moving fast
chewbacha 5y ago
My first reaction to this wondering how long before the face of the moon is deformed to an extent visible from earth. Did anyone else feel that way too?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- polishdude20 5y ago
  Probably not for a long time. We can't even see human made structure on the earth from orbit let alone the moon. Except lights at night.
  - fennecfoxen 5y ago
    We totally can. But the moon is a lot further away.
    - jessriedel 5y ago
      What structures?
      - fennecfoxen 5y ago
        https://www.nasa.gov/vision/space/workinginspace/great_wall.html https://www.nasa.gov/vision/space/workinginspace/great_wall....
        jessriedel 5y ago
        That's about seeing things in photographs taken from space, not things seen with the naked eye. Like, we've all seen satellite reconnaissance photos, so we know those can see lots of important stuff.
      - markwkw 5y ago
        Astronauts can reportedly see highways, airports, dams with a naked eye from orbit.
shadowgovt 5y ago
Very excited about this mission for several reasons. The variety of rovers (different companies, different processes, different energy and propulsion) are quite exciting. It'll be useful to compare their efficacy. But also significant is the overall mission design. A rover swarm where every individual member is expendable has been bandied about at NASA for at least 18 years. It lets the mission take more risks: if you see an interesting rock over rough terrain or a cave or outcropping that might harbor water ice, you're not going to risk a whole Perseverance on checking it out. But it might be worth risking one Iris or a couple COLMENA.
- Melatonic 5y ago
  If we are lucky we might get a new season of Battle Bots: Lunar Edition
msadowski 5y ago
One more to the list: GITAI is hoping to send a centaur-like rover with a robot torso in mid-2020[0]. Given that the current version is using some off the shelf sensor I have no idea how realistic is this timeline though. [0] https://gitai.tech/en/2022/02/10/gitai-develops-lunar-robotic-rover-r1/ https://gitai.tech/en/2022/02/10/gitai-develops-lunar-roboti...
pyuser583 5y ago
Is “a bevy” the venereal term for a group of rovers? Because that would be pretty cool. https://infogalactic.com/info/List_of_English_terms_of_venery,_by_animal https://infogalactic.com/info/List_of_English_terms_of_vener...

89 points by tectonic 5y ago

For some reason, HN's link isn't going directly to the lunar rovers item, which is here: https://orbitalindex.com/archive/2022-02-16-Issue-156/#the-upcoming-bevy-of-lunar-rovers https://orbitalindex.com/archive/2022-02-16-Issue-156/#the-u... Thank you Jatan for his excellent contribution to today's issue of Orbital Index. Here's his longer form version as well: https://blog.jatan.space/p/lunar-rovers-launching-in-2020s https://blog.jatan.space/p/lunar-rovers-launching-in-2020s

dang 5y ago
That's because HN's software replaces URLs with canonical URLs when it finds one, and the submitted page includes https://orbitalindex.com/archive/2022-02-16-Issue-156/ https://orbitalindex.com/archive/2022-02-16-Issue-156/ as a canonical URL. In this case, though, the author's own source is more in keeping with the HN guidelines ("Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter.") so I've replaced the URL above with that one. Thanks! https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

dylan604 5y ago

"To illustrate this monumental change in capacity, Musk pointed out that in a single year, a Starship launching three times per week could put as much mass into orbit as has been launched by the entire world to date (~15,500 tons). " While that sounds impressive, the whole 3 starships per week for a year part just makes this seem ridiculous. Is Musk personally going to pay the <$10million per launch? <$10m x 3 x 52 = $1.56billion. That's just the launch. Never mind the expense of the payload being lofted into orbit. Nor the amount of time required to produce all of that payload. 3x per week is just an insane amount of launches.

s5300 5y ago
Well, if price of BTC 2x’s he can pay that tab pretty easily. No reason for him not to. And that much starship launch volume is invaluably more than the rovers or whatever they’d be bringing up. Quick & dirty reliability test for the world to see, launch turnover times, etc
jsnodlin 5y ago
That’s like saying having hundreds of airplanes in the sky at all times is an an insane amount in 1930.
ttul 5y ago
With launch costs 100x lower than historical norms, there is plenty of space cargo that becomes economically viable. I don’t think SpaceX will have any trouble filling those launches. I am surprised there isn’t already a venture fund dedicated to funding space startups so that they can exploit Starship economics.
- dylan604 5y ago
  How much of that space cargo is payload ready for a vehicle that hasn't been finalized in design yet? How long does it take to fit that cargo into that ship once it is finalized? Able to meet the 3x/week launch schedule? It's obviously just a stat to make it sound impressive, but it is just totally impractical. I could easily say that with a launch every day, that capacity could be met in just 6 months! Fuck, with a measly 2 launches a day, we could do it this quarter!! Stats are sometimes meaningless, and when they are coming from this particular individual, they have to be taken with rather large grains of salt.
  - themgt 5y ago
    They're averaging 1x a week with Falcon 9 which requires throwing away an upper stage and Merlin engine each time. So yeah you "could easily say" whatever you want, but this hot take that SpaceX is just talking bullshit like any rando internet commentator is getting a bit old.

echelon 5y ago

Google's $20 million Lunar XPRIZE [1, 2] ended a few years too early in 2018. Would have been exciting had they kept until 2023 or 2025. > In the case of the Google Lunar XPRIZE, the audacious competition ended without a $20 million grand prize winner. [3] Seems like they got tired of waiting and redistributed the funds to other causes. They didn't realize how close we were. Sure would have been incredible publicity for Google had they not canned it. We'd be talking about the prize every year and with every launch, and we'd hold Google in esteem for being pioneers in science and space exploration. Pity. [1] https://www.xprize.org/prizes/google-lunar https://www.xprize.org/prizes/google-lunar [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Lunar_X_Prize https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Lunar_X_Prize [3] https://www.xprize.org/prizes/google-lunar/articles/a-new-era-the-post-prize-impact-of-the-google-lunar-xprize https://www.xprize.org/prizes/google-lunar/articles/a-new-er...

germinalphrase 5y ago
However, you must admit that canceling the program too soon is very on brand.
- N19PEDL2 5y ago
  Best comment of this thread!
johnwalkr 5y ago
I was on one of the teams since 2010, and still at the surviving company now. The original deadline was “before a space agency went back” or 2013, whichever came first. There was about 30 teams, of which only about 4 were serious, and as far as I know, only 2 surviving as companies that are actually still working. Near the end they finally figured out how to pare down to a few teams instead of manage 25+ teams of a few people each, making press releases and experiments but there was a lot of years of nothing much happening aside from the Milestone prizes in 2014. Each year after that it was a real struggle from the people At xprize to convince google to extend by one more year (which needs an annual budget, not only the prize money), teams so and so are going to launch soon. Eventually it wasn’t credible, and after 11 years there was none of the original people involved at either xprize or google so there was no one left to convince higher-ups. News about GLXP was more and more negative each year as well. I was fortunate in that we were (at the time) only making a rover so we were partnered with or in discussion with all of the top teams at some point and got to travel around to meet them. It was a great time!

gataca 5y ago

Will this ever be safe enough to use as a hazardous waste disposal system? Can we just send the worst of the worst into the sun without too much risk of just spreading it out through the atmosphere in case of an explosion.

dylan604 5y ago
The launch of this material is probably safer than the transportation of that material to the loading/launch facility.
- vkou 5y ago
  It's not, the probability of a SpaceX rocket spectacularly exploding is somewhere around ~1%. They'd need 860 more problem-free launches to hit ~0.1%. The probability of a truck spectacularly exploding on its way to the launch facility is way less than 0.1%. In fact, it's astronomically lower than 0.1%.
  - inimino 5y ago
    You can't calculate probabilites that way when the process itself is improving.
  - jessriedel 5y ago
    > They'd need 860 more problem-free launches to hit ~0.1% For what it's worth, SpaceX claims that they intend to reach this level of safety by literally performing thousands of launches. Time will tell if they can do that.
bongoman37 5y ago
tacLog 5y ago
> Will this ever be safe enough to use as a hazardous waste disposal system? Can we just send the worst of the worst into the sun without too much risk of just spreading it out through the atmosphere in case of an explosion. I don't think it is impossible that launch capabilities become safe enough to lower the risk to something some people might consider acceptable. However the physics of it won't change. To even get into earths orbit we have to accelerate anything going up to an average of 7.8 Km/s, where to escape orbit to anywhere else it's 11.8 Km/s. I think the amount of energy to do that will always be the primary reason why this just isn't practical. Assuming you are advanced enough to be considering this, I would hope that your society is stable enough for long term containment and processing.

josefresco 5y ago

Love the Orbital Index. A weekly Space treat in my email inbox for sure! Subscribe link: https://orbitalindex.com/subscribe/ https://orbitalindex.com/subscribe/

tectonic 5y ago
Thank you!

squarefoot 5y ago

> a Starship launching three times per week could put as much mass into orbit as has been launched by the entire world to date (~15,500 tons). Finding a free spot to place all those objects without too much risk of collisions might become quite a challenge. http://www.stuffin.space/ http://www.stuffin.space/

iso1631 5y ago
It amazes me how empty space is. There's about a dozen objects on that map over California at the moment, at various heights. Now sure things are moving fast

chewbacha 5y ago

My first reaction to this wondering how long before the face of the moon is deformed to an extent visible from earth. Did anyone else feel that way too?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
polishdude20 5y ago
Probably not for a long time. We can't even see human made structure on the earth from orbit let alone the moon. Except lights at night.
- fennecfoxen 5y ago
  We totally can. But the moon is a lot further away.
  - jessriedel 5y ago
    What structures?
    - fennecfoxen 5y ago
      https://www.nasa.gov/vision/space/workinginspace/great_wall.html https://www.nasa.gov/vision/space/workinginspace/great_wall....
      - jessriedel 5y ago
        That's about seeing things in photographs taken from space, not things seen with the naked eye. Like, we've all seen satellite reconnaissance photos, so we know those can see lots of important stuff.
    - markwkw 5y ago
      Astronauts can reportedly see highways, airports, dams with a naked eye from orbit.

shadowgovt 5y ago

Very excited about this mission for several reasons. The variety of rovers (different companies, different processes, different energy and propulsion) are quite exciting. It'll be useful to compare their efficacy. But also significant is the overall mission design. A rover swarm where every individual member is expendable has been bandied about at NASA for at least 18 years. It lets the mission take more risks: if you see an interesting rock over rough terrain or a cave or outcropping that might harbor water ice, you're not going to risk a whole Perseverance on checking it out. But it might be worth risking one Iris or a couple COLMENA.

Melatonic 5y ago
If we are lucky we might get a new season of Battle Bots: Lunar Edition

msadowski 5y ago

One more to the list: GITAI is hoping to send a centaur-like rover with a robot torso in mid-2020[0]. Given that the current version is using some off the shelf sensor I have no idea how realistic is this timeline though. [0] https://gitai.tech/en/2022/02/10/gitai-develops-lunar-robotic-rover-r1/ https://gitai.tech/en/2022/02/10/gitai-develops-lunar-roboti...

pyuser583 5y ago

Is “a bevy” the venereal term for a group of rovers? Because that would be pretty cool. https://infogalactic.com/info/List_of_English_terms_of_venery,_by_animal https://infogalactic.com/info/List_of_English_terms_of_vener...