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NASA says SpaceX’s next Starship flight could test refueling tech
- silexia 3y agoElon Musk will be looked back on by history as one of our great heroes like Thomas Edison for his work bringing electric cars into the mainstream, improving electronic payments, bringing back free speech, building a global inexpensive Internet network, and rekindling man's interest in space.
- martythemaniak 3y agoI read a good analysis of Artemis a while back that essentially calculated the cost per hour of time-on-moon and in that sense it was easy to see that the program was a significant upgrade over Apollo and the costs weren't that bad when calculated per hour. Achieving a 10x improvement over the previous generation usually can't be done without doing something new and different that hasn't been done before, and in-orbit refuelling fits right in. Gemini and Apollo had to work out and develop far more tech to do what they needed to do.
- ChicagoBoy11 3y agoWhat's also fascinating is that they are going with, in VERY BROAD strokes, the concept that was Von Braun's preferred method to achieve this back in the day too, but it was abandoned in favor of the lunar orbit rendesvouz. For a critique of the current method, I found the SmarterEveryDay lecture on it gave some good food for thought!
- jauntywundrkind 3y agoWhat were Von Braun's reasons for something akin to a Near Rectilinear Halo Orbit? Links anyone? The SmarterEverDay concerns about the orbit seemed to be that while landing or taking off maneuvers were short & low energy (good), it meant the opportunity only came about every couple days (bad). SED also stressed that Artemis is relying on crulyonic fuel transfer. SED repeatedly pointed out this is a tech that has never been tested, ever.
- angiosperm 3y ago6 days (worse).
- nerpderp82 3y agoI watched the SmarterEveryDay lecture last night, so I was primed for this story. He mentioned fuel transfer being a huge unknown. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoJsPvmFixU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoJsPvmFixU The other thing he mentioned was the Apollo success playbook (SP-287), "What Made Apollo a Success?" https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19720005243/downloads/19720005243.pdf https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19720005243/downloads/19... Link to EPUB version https://old.reddit.com/r/SmarterEveryDay/comments/18aw4ca/i_converted_sp287_what_made_apollo_a_success_into/ https://old.reddit.com/r/SmarterEveryDay/comments/18aw4ca/i_...
- XorNot 3y agoThe more I've thought about that lecture the less I really agree with most of the things he raised, for the simple reason that Apollo is never, ever going to happen again. It's a lot of argument from increduality (e.g. it's easy to pretend starship launch's are "too many", without addressing that practical reusability has been a thing for years right now). At it's peak, the Apollo project was funded to the tune of 1.1% total US federal outlays during the time period it ran. That's an enormous amount of money, which failed to produce a remotely sustainable result. You got what you got: moon landings done quick, and then never again. The modern Apollo project is SLS which...is a big, expensive, absolutely cannot fail rocket (which is really a jobs program for preferred contractor districts, with technology choices decided by politicians not engineers). Basically the SED lecture spends a lot of time gesturing at Apollo, but never addresses the actual problem which is NASA is funded the way it's funded: of course they know they're going to miss their launch dates, they're not funded to hit them, and they're probably going to wind up redesigning the mission once Starship is flying to orbit and actual performance numbers are realized off-paper. The SLS is the SLS for the same reason: at the time the program started there was no SpaceX, nor Space Shuttle and it was something of a national embarrassment the US didn't have a manned space capability but the Russians still did. In short, for a lecture which opens talking about people worrying about disagreeing with their superiors, he stays well away from the actual live-wires of the issues.
- justrealist 3y agoYeah Apollo was obviously incredibly impressive but was sort of a technological dead-end. There was no path from that program to a permanent human presence on the moon. If they can really get Starship and orbital refueling working, it's a step function forward.
- panick21_ 3y agoI tend to disagree. There was very much a evolutionary path forward. There were already programs like NERVA in development for an advanced nuclear upper stage. Once you have that, making the Upper Stage refuel-able, makes it basically into a multi-use space tug for cis-lunar. Then you could evolve Saturn 1B into a reusable Saturn 1C, just like Falcon 9. That gives you a reusable heavy lifter. And it would also safe a gigantic amount of money that was spend on Atlas/Titan/Delta in the next 40 years. The Apollo capsule was not reusable but continuously evolving a capsule design in that direct was certainty possible. But its not the most important part of the system in terms of cost. What really need more development is the lander itself. Making a large reusable lander would have been costly but not really out of reach. You can use an occasional Saturn V for large things like Skylab and special deep space mission. That was a much better path forward then Space Shuttle and ISS.
- cratermoon 3y ago> a technological dead-end. "The Apollo lunar base proposal saw an uncrewed Saturn V used to land a shelter based on the Apollo Command/Service Module (CSM) on the Moon." <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Applications_Program#AES_(Apollo_Extension_Series)_Lunar_Base https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Applications_Program#AE...>
- justrealist 3y agoI feel this somewhat glosses over the unsolved challenge of how to land a Saturn V rocket.
- jdminhbg 3y agoMuch easier to do on the moon than on Earth though at least, right? No atmosphere, fraction of the gravity.
- panick21_ 3y agoIts hard to calculate because non of the costs are really all that clear. There are not even lander contracts for any mission after Artemis 3. It also depends on how long into to future you think this continue. And I think what that kind of analysis misses is how many important multi-use technologies are developed. Starship will mostly not be used for moon, but financed with moon money.
- YetAnotherNick 3y ago> Achieving a 10x improvement over the previous generation usually can't be done without doing something new It is definitely possible if the fixed cost(e.g. R and D, manufacturing capability, testing infrastructure etc) is majority of the cost and scaling up doesn't increase them linearly. Cost of raw materials like fuel or building material would be negligible for Apollo or SLS in comparison.
- danbruc 3y agoHow does this work out? Instead of one rocket they will have to launch a dozen or so rockets for one visit to the moon. Why did they choose this option to begin with? And is cost per time on moon not a bit misleading, just stay longer and this cost goes down? You obviously have to bring more food and air and so on, but is that really a significant amount? Or are there other limiting factors that prevent you from staying say a month?
- idontwantthis 3y ago> Why did they choose this option to begin with Because this will be the first time in history that the cost of a launch will be mostly the cost of the fuel. This is the first fully reusable rocket in history. If you had to throw away a dozen tankers it wouldn’t make any sense.
- alemanek 3y agoAlso being able to bring 100 tonnes to the surface of the moon is a fantastic reason as well. Everyone can bring a set of golf clubs and balls. Heck we can setup a little driving range with the extra mass allowance.
- angiosperm 3y agoNotably, we don't need to bring 100 tonnes to the surface of the moon. Or golf clubs. Stable hypergolic fuel would be useful, but there are no plans for that.
- alemanek 3y agoNASA has stated they want to maintain a long term presence on the moon. If we take them at their word then we absolutely do need to be able to bring 100 tons to the surface of the moon. Water, food, air, parts, habitats, ..etc. All of that adds up. Super Heavy lift capability and refueling will be vital to making those plans feasible.
- danbruc 3y ago
- imtringued 3y agoThe problem with EVA on the moon is the reliability and endurance of the space suits. Even if HLS delivers, there could be delays simply because there are no suits. When you consider the near rectilinear orbit having a seven day period, then bad suits are a deal breaker for the entire mission.
- XorNot 3y agoConversely if you have reliable payload to the lunar surface, delivering special-use lunar escape vehicles to keep on standby is a better option then having the entire mission pay an ongoing cost for what should be an exceptional and unlikely scenario. The problem of "we need to get off the moon now" is "okay, but where are you going and what's going to be there that's more useful then where you are?" It's not unreasonable to note that a medical emergency would be much better dealt with on the moon - where you have gravity - then in orbit, where you don't. Whereas if you need to bail out and get to Earth fast (which you can't) then you'd be better off just dropping a vehicle which can do that onto the surface.
- Kapura 3y agoWhy would you want to test if you could refuel a rocket that keeps exploding
- cratermoon 3y agoIt does seem like quite a leap from the FTS triggering before reaching orbit to refueling, doesn't it? My hunch is that whatever happens, we'll see scenes of SpaceX people clapping and cheering and SpaceX fans calling the flight a success. From what they tell me, no SpaceX launch has ever failed.
- ceejayoz 3y agoNo one's going to argue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_CRS-7 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_CRS-7 wasn't a failure. That's a production flight that went ka-boom with a lost payload. Test flights are a very different beast. Early tests can be expected to fail; some are supposed to fail ("destructive testing"). Explosions and other failures become much more concerning later in the process; for example, Boeing's Starliner's latest test flight was supposed to demonstrate everything was working correctly. It failed to do so. In the two Starship launches so far, SpaceX was very clear with expectations in advance. Each likely has dozens of objectives. The second flight very clearly accomplished more than the first; a successful test of the launchpad mitigations, a successful test of all first-stage engines staying lit, a successful test of separation, a successful test of the second-stage engines all lighting, etc.
- me_me_me 3y agohow come people with sliding rulers and navigation computers 'knitted' by local grannies have lost 0 Saturn rockets. But now an explosion is an expected outcome for your million dollar hardware. That approach works in software dev.
- pixl97 3y agoBecause Saturn rockets cost 1.3 billion dollars EACH. A test starship is nowhere near that, though we don't have exact numbers. Probably closer to $100 million. Also SpaceX is trying to solve a much harder problem. If you would have asked that Saturn team "Also, land all the stages of the rocket", the likely answer you would have got is "Screw off, you're insane" or "Give me 100 billion dollars".
- thebigman433 3y agoThis is pretty interesting, but Id be surprised if it actually happens on the next flight. Depending on the cost of the tanks/fittings/machines, it could be a fairly expensive loss if Starship doesnt reach orbit, which seems fairly likely still. Their last launch was impressive, but Id be wary to put a payload worth more than a few pennies on the next launch
- BryanLegend 3y agoIt's fantastic that the Super Heavy booster fully completed it's mission! Much bigger deal than the ship itself failing. Before that last flight it seemed like engine reliability wouldn't get solved. But now they have a clear path to orbit. I doubt the heat shields will hold up on the first several re-entry attempts but there's been recent sightings of a new heat shield that has tiles about half the size. Maybe smaller tiles will have less lever action and will have 4x the fasteners.
- ramesh31 3y ago>Maybe smaller tiles will have less lever action and will have 4x the fasteners. This is still the number one problem with Starship. There were all these wild claims of an exotic new liquid cooled reentry system at the beginning. But because physics they ended up going right back to using ablative. They'll suffer the same fate as the shuttle for it. Nothing has fundamentally changed in ceramic or adhesive technology since then, and the lack of aerodynamic control means they will have to survive even steeper descents with greater thermal load. I imagine the idea of Starship as an earth return vehicle in general will probably be abandoned, so they can optimize it for interplanetary transport and lunar operations.
- tekla 3y agoOf course the problem with this post is that the Starship heat shield isn't ablative, nor does it share the problems with the Orbiter heat shield (Needing glue to attach every single unique tile to the body of the ship.) > the lack of aerodynamic control There are literally wings on the ship.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y agoHow much does it cost them to lose a starship lower stage? Those things can't be cheap.
- BryanLegend 3y agoThey make a new booster about every six weeks.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y agoHow much does it cost though?
- SCM-Enthusiast 3y agoSpaceX's Raptors cost about $250k each according to some leaked sources. Given there are 33 engines in the booster, you get 8,250,000 just in engine costs. I would say it's safe to assume around 30% of the cost of flight is in engines, so probably around another 5,775,000 for the rest of the craft bring it in at around $14M for just the booster hard costs. That's not accounting for the $100m crane they've built, labor, propellant, nor the Starship itself which has another 9 engines. Keep in mind that the RS-25's cost $100m each. If it was atlas, the engines alone would cost $3.6B.
- danpalmer 3y agoI was under the impression the $250 was a long term goal, not a current development cost. Do you know what context you heard this in? Edit: propellant is relatively cheap I believe. My understanding is <$1m per launch.
- SCM-Enthusiast 3y agoinitially the merlin engines were $2m each, with raptor v2 coming in at under $1m, and they are pushing out 1 Raptor v3 a week now, so i'm sure they've come close to their goals. You might want to push that number up by 50% to get a more realistic estimate, and then by another 100% to include labor, propellant, etc. $44m per booster starts to sound like a more reasonable number.
- thepasswordis 3y agoI've been on a bit of an Apollo kick lately, and reading some of the history of the American space program in the 1960s and 1970s was depressing. Those people were tapped into something bordering on divine. It was depressing until I realized: SpaceX is absolutely carrying that spirit. Remember when all the experts said it was impossible to ever land their first stage? And then that it was impossible to ever make that economical? And then remember when Elon teased Starship (back then it was called BFR) and all the naysaying that went along with that? They've just kept going. Just an absolutely break-neck pace. Falcon heavy was barely supposed to even work, and now it's not even news when they launch one. edit: ha! I think there's actually a falcon heavy launch tonight!
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- halyconWays 3y agoFirst they laugh at you, etc.
- itsoktocry 3y ago>And then that it was impossible to ever make that economical? This one is yet to be determined, isn't it?
- thepasswordis 3y agoSpaceX is a private company so you're right, we can't know. But it would seem pretty foolish for SpaceX to be continually reusing rockets this much if that cost them extra money? (I mean extra vs building new ones)
- sebzim4500 3y agoWe won't know for sure unless SpaceX goes public, but leaks suggest the marginal cost of a reusable F9 launch is below $20M and the sticker price is $67M, and that goes up fast if you want vertical integration etc.
- panick21_ 3y ago
- slackfan 3y agoIt could also serve me a hamburger or explode on the launch pad.
- inglor_cz 3y agoIt is baffling how many HNers in this thread don't understand what "test flight" means. Yeah, for SpaceX, experimental hardware is expendable. Yeah, it is not very typical in space industry. But it is a tried-and-tested approach, which gave them the Falcon 9, the most reliable and technologically advanced launcher of today.
- preisschild 3y agoTbf we just saw SpaceX launch two rockets, which both failed, for 2 bln dollars per rocket
- inglor_cz 3y agoYeah, but this is development of a brand new reusable superheavy launch system. Can't be cheap. We should keep that in mind and compare the comparable. Looking at the Western space industry history, Starship development is only comparable to the Apollo or the Space Shuttle program - both of which would be insanely expensive in 2023 dollars, certainly exceeding 100 billion USD each, perhaps 300 billion USD in case of Apollo.
- DylanSp 3y agoGot a citation on that $2 billion cost for each Starship launch? It's not clear what the exact cost is, but I haven't seen any estimates that are nearly that high.
- gpm 3y agoI don't have any problem with them adopting a test flight heavy methodology, however it is extremely misleading to suggest that this is the methodology which gave them the Falcon 9. The falcon 9 succeed on it's first launch, it was not a test flight heavy program. The falcon 1, SpaceX's only orbital rocket prior to the falcon 9, did fail on it's first three flights, however it was never intended to and that nearly bankrupt the company. They destroyed third party payloads on flights 1 and 3, because these were intended to work, not be test flights. Long after it was in production the falcon 9 did begin a "test-flight" heavy program, but that was for developing the ability to recover boosters after they had successfully delivered a customer payload in an operational flight, not for developing the rocket itself.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y agoOh, they could? Let's hope they do! It seems that they're afraid to stake out the goal of these launches because if they keep it vague they can always claim a V. If they say their goal is to test refueling tech and it explodes before reaching orbit that's a failure. They were also supposed to test the heat shields last launch and they didn't make it that far. I have zero faith they'll deliver without bankrupting themselves. Musk has said they've spent about $2bn a year on Starship over two years.
- tigershark 3y agoAnd yet spacex was profitable this year. So if it’s true that they are spending $2B per year on starship while being profitable it’s unbelievably good for them.
- sebzim4500 3y agoFalcon 9 prints money and Starlink will likely be making similar profit by the end of next year. I don't think there is any chance of SpaceX going bankrupt, even ignoring how easy it is for them to raise capital.
- destitude 3y agoMeanwhile at Blue Origin.....
- cooper_ganglia 3y agoAn equally blue future with even bluer investors.
- HereIGoAgain 3y agoThis is pretty cool. We need to be putting a lot more resources into space tech TBH. It should ideally be a single digit percentage of the budget/GDP as a starting point. The future of mankind really rest on it.
- farrarstan 3y ago[dead]
- stilist 3y ago‘The future of mankind’ only rests on life beyond earth if everybody gives up on keeping earth livable. The biggest threat to humanity is humanity, and a colony on the moon or Mars isn’t going to fix that problem.
- avmich 3y agoNot quite correct. It's useful to have some remote parts of humanity which could be relatively safe when other parts are busy making threats to each other. Earth still has some remote places - ask any doomsday prepper - but Moon and Mars will certainly add to the list.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- joering2 3y agoSo your assumption is everyone going to Moon or Mars is a saint. And if so - who set the standard? Pope? President? And then what do we do if they become not-so-saint? Drag them back to Earth? The whole idea that some sort of better type humans will travel to another planet is frankly ridiculous. We don't learn from our own mistakes - see WW1, WW2, current state of affairs. If anything, we would most likely destroy Mars and Moon much faster than how we wronged Planet Earth.
- avmich 3y ago
- mannyv 3y agoIf you're going to throw a tank of propellant into space, why not just throw a tank that can be swapped in? That bypasses the whole "refueling" problem.
- andruby 3y agoWhat do you mean “swapped in”? A large part of the propellant is used by the time the tank is up in space. The plan is to transfer the remaining (10%?) of fuel.
- wilg 3y agoBecause the tanks are structural parts of the rocket to save weight, and saving weight is a huge part of getting the performance you want. Also would probably be just about as hard to swap tanks.
- ianschmitz 3y agoSmarter Every Day on YouTube recently spoke at the American Astronautical Society about this flight plan. I found it quite interesting how different it is compared to the way we used to go to the moon decades ago. He challenges the complexity of the new flight plan, including the refuelling step. It’s a longer episode but well worth the watch if you enjoy the channel and are excited about returning to the moon. https://youtu.be/OoJsPvmFixU?si=qcg_BX2GeZm4u1GG https://youtu.be/OoJsPvmFixU?si=qcg_BX2GeZm4u1GG
- mlindner 3y agoThe Smarter Every Day video unfortunately is not an authoritative video on Artemis and misses the point on several parts. It's largely a rehashing of very old arguments that basically views Apollo as somehow the height of technology.
- TMWNN 3y ago>It's largely a rehashing of very old arguments that basically views Apollo as somehow the height of technology. While NASA Administrator, Michael Griffin wrote in 2007 that the shuttle program had been a colossal mistake and that Apollo-Saturn-Skylab should have continued <http://aviationweek.typepad.com/space/2007/03/human_space_exp.html http://aviationweek.typepad.com/space/2007/03/human_space_ex...>: >Let’s assume that we had kept flying with the systems we had at the time, that we had continued to execute two manned Apollo lunar missions every year, as was done in 1971-72. This would have cost about $4.8 billion annually in Fiscal 2000 dollars. >Further, let us assume that we had established a continuing program of space station activities in Earth orbit, built on the Apollo CSM, Saturn I-B, and Skylab systems. Four crew rotation launches per year, plus a new Skylab cluster every five years to augment or replace existing modules, would have cost about $1.5 billion/year. This entire program of six manned flights per year, two of them to the Moon, would have cost about $6.3 billion annually in Fiscal 2000 dollars. The average annual NASA budget in the 15 difficult years from 1974-88 was $10.5 billion; with 60% of it allocated to human spaceflight, there would have been sufficient funding to continue a stable program of lunar exploration as well as the development of Earth orbital infrastructure. I suggest that this would have been a better strategic alternative than the choices that were in fact made, almost 40 years ago.