Every single current effort for a Mars journey is poorly planned PR nonsense.
We’re putting the cart before the horse. We should not be wasting this much resources & effort into human spaceflight beyond the moon. We should be working to capture mineral rich asteroids, bring them into a Lagrange point, and start working on autonomous mining/refining/manufacturing from the asteroids.
This is key to human colonization of the solar system. Trying to launch everything we’ll need from out of the gravity well is stupid. Once we have autonomous space manufacturing perfected, we can have massive spacecraft delivered to earth, and all we need launch is the personnel and their food (with autonomous farming, we could grow the food long before human crew arrival). We can also have bases built at our destination point long before any humans arrive.
There is no economically viable space mining scenario now. Someday with a large free fall population there might be, with CHON mining first, but even that is completely untested technology built on massive assumptions.
I wish it were different, I really do, since we may run out of easily available resources here and lose the ability to get out there.
Speaking as a metallurgical engineer with experience in mining. There is no resource out there that we can’t mine on Earth for a bazillion dollars (approx.) less.
On the Mars side of things, I like Aldrin’s cycler idea for a practical pipeline to Mars, but I’m not an expert on that. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_cycler
‘The thing we haven’t invented yet isn’t economically viable yet.’ Yeah, no shit.
I guess let’s just keep polluting our planet, because it’s cheaper.
For FAR less than trying to mine in space we can develop emissionless refining methods and less destructive mining on Earth. I’d purpose that path as more realistic.
I worked at an emissionless copper refinery back in the 80s. You know why we still emit sulphur dioxide during copper refining? Because this company shut it down because it was not economically viable with a copper price below like $1.50 a pound. There is just no way space mining is an answer in the short or medium term. You are taking orders of magnitudes of difference in cost, if it is even possible at all.
And it may not be.
One of the many reasons mining is so comparatively cheap on Earth is because the planet has kindly concentrated interesting minerals for us. This does not happen for most asteroids, they are undifferentiated. Earth may have a smaller proportion of some element than an asteroid on average, but due to any of a number of gravity and atmospheric driven processes we have learned to find areas where it is so concentrated it is worthwhile to pick it up from the ground. Due to these processes we can find gold ores with 1 gram of gold per ton and that is economical. You would have to find some way to refine an entire asteroid to extract what is valuable. No gold veins there.
And you have to think about how you are going to get it here to where we can use it. What impact do you think it will make to the environment to deorbit a years worth of whatever metal? Do the calculations yourself to understand the amount of heat. It would be a constant addition of heat to the atmosphere for any realistic technology that, at scale, could be as bad or worse than HCGW.
Friend, I am on your side here, but if there’s is not an economic incentive to do something, it is not going to happen. It will be hard enough to require the additional cost of using known technology here on Earth that would make the use and reuse of these materials sustainable. We should focus our mineral efforts there, not space.
If we colonize the Moon or Mars, mining there for local purposes could well be viable, but economically even less viable to send that to Earth.
We’re not talking about materials for use on earth. We’re talking about using those materials in space, and not needing launch everything up the gravity well for use up there.
All right, let’s talk about that. This is long because I want to convey WHY what you are thinking would be impossible on orbit. This is a process I am an expert in so I can walk you through it, but the same level of complexity exists for virtually any process of manufacture. People not in an industry vastly underestimate that complexity.
First, there is a bit of chicken and egg. We won’t need a lot of materials on orbit until we have a lot of people on orbit, but we can’t get a lot of people on orbit until we have a lot is material on orbit. But I actually think that is a less important issue that we can imagine might be overcome.
What materials do we use in the vacuum of space? Steel is terrible. It has a low strength to weight ratio and its coefficient of thermal expansion is high and it embrittles when it gets cold.
Aluminum (the industry I started in) is a great material for use in space. And it often comes up in space mining discussions since it is a very abundant element in the universe.
It is also very abundant on Earth. Pick up a rock and it probably has aluminum in it.
So why didn’t it come into use until the 20th century?
Aluminum is highly reactive, and it is really hard to separate from most minerals. Today, we use vast amounts of electricity run through carbon electrodes to rip aluminum ions off alumina in molten salt. Now electricity is easy enough to make in space, so we could imagine a supply of that. Same with heat. Carbon is much harder to come by, but we could against imagine ways to do that.
We start to run into trouble when we consider the extremely powerful magnetic field that is created. It is so high that you can’t bring a watch close to the cells without messing it up, and you certainly can’t use a computer nearby. Of course we have ways around that on Earth, but you can imagine this is exponentially more dangerous at a space station refinery. Molten salts, massive magnets, fried computers, vacuum of space, not a good combo.
But humans are clever, so let’s say we figure a way to do all this somehow and have molten aluminum ready to cast. Now we run into the real fundamental problems.
Once you have molten aluminum you have to alloy it. Pure aluminum is about as soft as gold. Depending on the alloy, you will need copper, magnesium, silicon, manganese, and a few others. These will need to be obtained on orbit also, and in highly pure forms. Each of them will have similar but unique issues as I am describing for aluminum. (This by itself is an almost impossible hurdle if you imagine the massive infrastructure needed before you can even cast you first alloyed ingot.) You also need vast amounts of either chlorine gas or some noble gas for pulling hydrogen out of the molten aluminum.
Then you have to cast it. Casting requires removing an enormous amount of heat very quickly. On Earth we use vast amounts of water to do that. We could imagine we grabbed a comet or something and refined the water from it (additional infrastructure) and we will soon need more. If you are thinking that getting rid of heat in a vacuum is easy and we can find a way to do it quickly without water, think again. Heat dissipation is a major problem in spacecraft design.
Ok, solving that we run into the next problem. The thermodynamics of cooling an ingot mean that you have big crystals inside the ingot that you need to dissolve. We preheat the ingot, but now we need to work it to the size we want it. Here, we do that with a gigantic roller. That roller uses a huge amount of organic lubricant, as well as monumental amounts of steel, copper, as well as gold, silicon, etc. We need to have made all that on orbit. And more power.
Hand waving that, now we have wrought aluminum. For some alloys you need to work it more, so you need more rollers, for other types you need to heat it up again to dissolve the alloying elements and spray it with more water to cool it down very quickly. Once you do that you build up residual stresses that warp the plate and makes precision machining impossible. So now you need stretchers to stretch the plates. Those use either huge pneumatic or hydraulic systems to generate immense forces, up to 14 million pounds. You can imagine some catastrophic failures there.
Hand waving that aside, now you have a plate of aluminum. You need to machine it into shapes. Again, we need the infrastructure to get the materials needed to make and then build precision CNC machines and to keep them running with their lubricants, maintenance, etc.
And now we get to the most fundamental problem. The only realistic way to make aluminum is the process I have described, and all that depends on starting with alumina. But we don’t mine alumina. Even though aluminum the element is common, we need to find a much rarer ore named bauxite to start the process. The only place to find bauxite is in the tropics in soils that have been highly leached by long exposure to rain. There is not likely to be bauxite in asteroids.
All of this process is even more complicated with titanium. And it’s ore is rutile, often found in rare beach sands.
I can imagine ways around some of these issues, and I’m sure you can too. But ALL of them? And getting funding for overcoming all of them? And we need to overcome all of them before the first pound of metal is even produced. Unless technology has an enormous science fiction level breakthrough, no.
And keep in mind this is just one part of the infrastructure. Someone else who is an expert in motor design, power generation, or whatever else would spin just as complicated a story in their area.
And again, I am on your side on this. The risk that we squander easily accessible materials on Earth and lock ourselves out of space is my long term fear. But in my opinion, asteroid mining is absolutely not where we start, and may not ever be viable for metals. We have to get better at using and reusing what is cheap and available now to have a hope of starting the generations long project of getting access to more materials than we have on Earth, probably from other planets or maybe dwarf planets.
If you made a Factorio mod, I might learn metallurgy…
Metallurgy is pretty neat stuff I think.
Solid points, the whole in-flight refueling process is still completely untested. Many people are probably still under the impression that Starship could fly around the moon, return and land on just its original fuel load. The rant doesn’t elaborate on why rocket reusability in general is a bad idea though - Falcon is a proven reusable vehicle that has reduced launch costs by an order of magnitude. Maybe a better system design for Starship (I hate that name, it’s not a fucking "star"ship) would have been as a launch vehicle for something like a VASIMR or other more advanced low-fuel engine for the interplanetary portion of a mission.
Starship (I hate that name, it’s not a fucking "star"ship)
Same. Mars Colonial Transporter, Interplanetary Transport System, and Big F****n Rocket were more appropriate names.
something like a VASIMR or other more advanced low-fuel engine
I’d love to see some more advanced engines, but I think that the capability to reset the rocket equation in LEO has merit.
LEO reset does have merit, it just never gets away from the fundamental problem of lifting fuel into orbit.
I would really prefer a space travel dev approach that doesn’t prioritize getting humans somewhere as the immediate goal. We already know we can shoot people to the moon and land them. We can use LEO to study problems of interplanetary travel such as prolonged weightlessness and confinement. I think we should be sending robots to the moon and Mars to mine and refine local material, print permanent structures, pressurize them and grow food in them. Then send people once they can just show up and live in them. Mere survival shouldn’t be their main task.
I mean SpaceX is only about 5 years and $5 billion behind in their timeline and budget to go to the moon. So, Starship doesn’t seem to be a serious vehicle.
People love bringing up that Starship was supposed to be doing round trips to the Moon and Mars by now, but when has anything space ever been on budget, in time, and working perfectly on the first try? Every new launch vehicle takes longer and more money than initial optimistic predictions state. Damn near every probe and telescope is years over deadlines and often a significant percentage of first estimates over budget.
The problem isn’t so much new vehicle takes time, it’s the bullshit spacex fanboys spout about every other rocket company for doing the same thing.
The difference is in scale. For the cost of the SLS program, which is likely to be scrapped next year, you could fund the entirety of SpaceX to this point in history. It’s also in success rate, SpaceX within the next five years will have more successful launches than any other space company or organization. They’re already more prolific than any conpetitor with a viable launch vehicle, except Russia.
i mean…going to the moon be expensive
the u.s. spent about 96 billion on launch vehicles alone so getting stretching those 5 billion as far they did is pretty impressive in comparison!
sure, it’s taking longer than musk claimed, but pretty much everyone else said from the very beginning that musk’s timeline is unrealistic…
god i hate that idiot…spaceX could be so much better at what it does without him…
it’s very goofy to see the difference in attitude for any post involving obviously spacex things between lemmy and normal spaceflight communities lmao
Some people still think musk has any decision making authority in SpaceX.
He’s being generous by assuming 100% fuel transfer and no boil off.
I’m sure that leaking methane into the upper atmosphere will have only beneficial affects to our climate.
oh they’ll be way past the upper atmosphere when transferring fuel
Enough that it decomposes before reaching the lower atmosphere?
Spaceflight has to be a miniscule amount of pollution compared to the rest of human activity but it is important to understand what weird effects there might be of introducing it at different altitudes. Though starship could well enable some clean up of LEO, which would be nice.
my point was that there is a high chance it just won’t ever reach that part of the atmosphere
Why not? Where does it end up? I was asking if it decomposes into hydrogen and carbon dioxide due to UV exposure or something. Is that what you’re saying?
Except for that whole ‘atmosphere extends 100,000 miles past the moon’ bit that was recently acknowledged, but I do get what you mean. ;)
yeah well good luck trying to draw a definitive boundary for any phenomenon and you’ll realize shit get complicated fast
I don’t get why the other rocket companies are not doing reuse at this point. Its like most car companies now have electric offerings.
I don’t think the legacy launch industry expected Falcon 9 to succeed, and they were caught off guard. ULA have no plans for booster reuse, and Arianespace’s timeline stretches into the 2030s.
There are some other companies developing reusable rockets. Blue Origin could launch New Glenn within in the next month, Rocket Lab are testing Neutron hardware, and there are a couple of reusable Chinese rockets in development as well.
Most of these are still only aiming for booster reuse. Stoke Space’s Nova is the only other fully reusable rocket design which comes to mind.
Well, he’s not wrong technically, but the context feels like it’s obviously missing. We have no Saturn V vehicles anymore, nor can we build them again. Starship might require that many launches to get to TLI, but with reusability, it probably can. Not to mention that the cost will come down a bit. So it can at least do it soon.
I’m sure others have more coherent and thought out rebuttals.
why can’t we build them again? were the blueprints and knowledge lost? deliberately destroyed? genuine question
The production lines are shut down and any custom tooling has had its materials reclaimed to make other things. The institutional knowledge, the little bits that never got written down in the blueprints or manufacturing instructions, it’s all gone. The people who worked on that rocket and its components are dead or have been working on something else for the last 50 years. How well would you remember some little tidbit of information that you last needed half a lifetime ago?
Because tech evolved, we could do better now.
Because a lot of “Released Engineering Documents” were just engineering notebooks, and each vehicle was different, even the parts that were supposed to be the same. There was a lot of “repair” versus “rework” disposition, and a “Just make it work; it only needs to work once” culture.
Basically, because it was a race against the Russians, and the Russians were winning.
huh, impressive that we did a (relatively) slapdash job of it and still pulled it off. Thanks for clarifying.
It’s downright fucking nuts that it all worked and I’m astonished we didn’t leave any astronauts on the moon, and Apollo 13 crew made it back.
Apollo 13 is a helluva movie that really exposes how razor-thin everything was.
because they were insanely expensive
Because the nazis America brought in to build them are all dead.
https://slate.com/technology/2023/08/nasa-nazi-history-von-braun.html
Relevant xkcd https://xkcd.com/984/
Some say our attitude should be one of gratitude, like the widows and orphans of old London Town who owe their large pensions to Wernher von Braun.
"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That’s not my department, " says Wernher von Braun.
deleted by creator
Because it is based on obsolete technology. You wouldn’t want to build a flight computer with hard-wired (as in literal wires) software, would you? A lot of it would also have to be reverse engineered, to the point where you might as well build a new vehicle.
You wouldn’t want to build a flight computer with hard-wired (as in literal wires) software
We can use an FPGA for that
The software was the thing that was in the wires, not I/O.
The wires would be replaced by FLASH memory.
Wouldn’t they use a MROM or something instead, because flash memory can be quite volatile in the extreme conditions?
Ignoring the onvious fact that Starship has been designed from the beginning for going to Mars and SLS only to go to the Moon…
Didn’t even the first Starship generation theoretically have a higher payload capacity than the SLS Block 2? And that doesn’t even include the further enhancements to the ship design and Raptor updates since.
Could you explain to us how a vehicle capable of getting payload to Mars would not be capable of putting the same or even a greater payload on the moon? What is the obvious difference in design?
As far as I understand it, getting to Mars is harder, requiring more energy to get there, more energy to slow down and having an atmosphere to content with. Sure aerobraking is a thing, but in the big picture having to deal with an atmosphere makes things harder and not easier.
delta v isn’t really a issue if you have orbital refueling and frequent+cheap flights figured out (as long as a full tank can complete a trans Martian injection and orbital capture at mars) , so I’d say they’re both similarly difficult:
on Mars you have to deal with the atmosphere, higher gravity, etc
on the moon you have to deal with the dusty surface, so you have issues with landing gear and landing engines kicking up dust
I saw a graph of our local gravity wells, the moon and Mars are surprisingly similar. The moon has many extra challenges that Mars does not. Propulsively landing on a dust pile is trickier than slowing down with aerobraking.
And to land on Mars you need both, ideally. The athmosphere is too thin to rely on just aerobreaking and the other would use much more propulsion.
Didn’t even the first Starship generation theoretically have a higher payload capacity than the SLS Block 2?
No? SLS block 2 is 130 tons to LEO. Starship “block 1” did “about 50 tons” according to one of Musk’s update videos with SpaceX, promising Starship 2 would do 100 tons.
After years of saying Starship can do 100 tons to LEO… 'Block 1’s actual proven payload capacity is ‘a banana’… not 50 tons.
Starship has never launched any actual payload to orbit.
Anyway, onto ‘Block 2’, that’ll be able to do what ‘Block 1’ was aupposed to do, even though none of the contracts Musk’s signed to develop Starship have any mention of different Blocks… but its ok because Block 3 will do 150 tons!
Just like how Hyperloop is an idea that makes any sense and will work.
Just like how FSD is will be complete and ready in 2017.
Just like how Solar Roof tiles are totally real and not completely fake.
Just like how Tesla cars will be able to fly with monopropellant thrusters.
Just like how Elon is a free speech absolutist except when people mock or disagree with him.
As with basically all of Musk’s promises to shareholders and aspirations presented as facts at publicized events since about 2014… what Musk says is all almost entirely bullshit, and anyone would be a fool to take him at his word.
but its ok because Block 3 will do 150 tons!
When we were on the “4 ships to Mars in 2024” promises, it was 150 tons for the first edition
And knowing that everything Musk says has turned out to be total BS, who knows what the actual number is. So far no Starship has been to LEO and hasn’t carried any payload. Sure the last one carried a banana and technically made it to orbital speeds before plunging back into the atmosphere. That’s a long way from actually doing the thing and putting 50 tons into LEO.
Wait, are you saying we won’t have 4 starships on Mars before 2024 is over?
I intentionally picked the most generous interpretation, and even that isn’t great
Its current design is very much not designed to go to mars. Right now its designed as a test bed SSTO, thats it.
please properly censor their name, you can see their name by just upping the brightness of the image.
That was Berger’s doing, not mine :)
Even if it were properly censored, it would not be difficult to find, and people have already done so.
Is it true that starship will have less payload weight to LEO than all other SpaceX rockets?
I don’t think so.
Even Starship v1 (which have already ceased production) had an estimated payload to LEO comparable to a reusable Falcon Heavy (~50 tonnes). Starship v2 (scheduled to launch in January) has a projected payload to LEO around 100 tonnes, and v3 will be higher still.
Okay then why did they only launch a banana as cargo? I thought the EV was a standard test payload
Standard for what? The first Dragon payload was a wheel of cheese.
It’s just something silly they wanted to do. You can’t seriously think the max payload capacity of starship to almost-LEO is one single banana.
Like heavy then, why did they not use an actual test payload before now already being done with starship v1? Hypothetical payload to orbit doesnt count if you never done it 🤷♂️
Why would they need to prove anything? SpaceX knows how much the vehicle can lift. They will be their own first customers with Starlink when they finally go into orbit. The re-entry and recovery systems are much more important to SpaceX and since they haven’t inserted into a full orbit yet, what would it even prove? The haters are wrong on one more weird conspiracy?
