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[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

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yeah, and I'm assuming that every rocket will come down in a different condition and fucked up in a slightly different way. unless their rocket is relatively easy to repair, or particularly robust. The one thing that they will see a lot of is charred rockets, so they'll develop a very good idea of what damage reentry and landing does to the rocket. You'd have to assume that they would be more likely to use it as a testbed for making the next rocket a bit more resilient from the start rather than completely overhaul the current type.

[Evariste Euler Gauss]

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Can anyone recommend a book about the moon landing missions? I'm looking for something with a reasonably good level of detail about the engineering challenges and how they were met as well as personal stuff about the astronauts and the political and institutional background. An Apollo mission equivalent of Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff would be good, for example.

[Gangster Octopus]

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The Awesome Berbaslug!!! wrote: There's no great trick to making rocket engines. It's mostly about plumbing, welding, and making really good pumps.

It's not brain surgery...

[Stumpy Pepys]

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The Awesome Berbaslug!!! wrote: There's no great trick to making rocket engines. It's mostly about plumbing, welding, and making really good pumps.

Sentences like that show how much Berbaslug has devoted his life to engineering.

[Mitch]

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Moonshot by Dan Parry might be the book for you EEG. It's specifically about the Apollo 11 mission, with chapters alternating between the next stage of the mission (in real time, as it were), and chapters explaining the technology and previous missions that got them to that point.

It's really good, and leaves you with the impression that Michael Collins is the coolest of the three by far!

[Evariste Euler Gauss]

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Many thanks to RC and to Mitch for the book advice, applause to GO for the brain surgery gag and lol at SP's post.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

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hah, In fairness, that sentence is supposed to mean that after 70 years of making rockets, most of the principles are understood, to the practical point where it's mostly a matter of quality of manufacture, and reliability of the components. It's part of the broader point that these commercial space companies are able to use pre-existing technology, combined with modern manafacturing and design methods, and the possibility of mass production, to suddenly make this a realistic proposition.

And literally yesterday as I was writing all those comments, it appears as though The last Dragon 9 blew up on the launch pad, It seems that NASA are not happy with Space-X's idea of fuelling up the spacecraft with the astronauts on board. I wonder will this push their lander to mars back by two years?

[Ginger Yellow]

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There was basically zero chance of the Mars mission happening on Musk's timeline, even without SpaceX's recent explosions. In order to hit it, they couldn't miss a single window, and in the meantime they have to design, build and test an entirely new launch vehicle, a manned capsule, a fuel transporter, a habitat and a fuel extractor/refinery, as well as all the other bits and bobs (EVA suits? Rovers? Radiation shielding?). All this in six years from a company which has yet to do even an unmanned orbital test of its existing manned capsule.

I admire what Musk has achieved at SpaceX a lot, but the Mars thing is an advertising pitch, it's not a realistic plan in the timeframes Musk has been talking about.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

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heh, on the one hand you're landing on mars in 8 years. On the other hand you're apparently spending only 5% of your budget on going to mars, and you only started testing the new raptor engine three months ago. Hmm. Which half of that speaks louder do you think? . And making wild promises that you actually eventually intent to at least partially deliver on probably makes you atticus Finch in the US nowadays. It's a certain amount of spin, and a certain amount of trying to force the agenda

But if this is all talk right now, the big milestone for them is the launch of their shuttle to mars in 2018, or as now seems likely 2020 (If they don't rearrange their schedule) If they can land something on mars, using retro rockets, then simply landing people on the surface really is only a matter of building more powerful rocket engines, so you can launch a much bigger shuttle. And by that point they 'll be another 2 years into testing the Much more powerful Raptor engine, and they may be able to give a far more realistic date for building the big rocket. Suddenly it becomes very real.

The big fly in the ointment for them is that if the last engine was about coming along and perfecting and refining existing technology and optimizing it for mass production, this new Rocket is almost entirely new, and the only other two engines of this type were only tested once. So everything they are doing now is for the first time, and that will mean delays and expense. But that is surmountable, if you are a highly profitable business, with a lot of potential govt support. (musk refers to the engine as the single biggest challenge in building the whole thing, because so much of it is new, and he was apparently surprised that it didn't blow up during the test.)

But once they eventually get the engine right, the rest of the steps to building a huge rocket are comparatively straightforward, (though obviously still rather complicated) and largely a repetition of what they have done before. (Wrap a skin around two huge fueltanks in a really strong frame) A huge rocket capable of launching a big ship to the mars, will simply be a matter of time. Not because Mars will be an inevitability, but because a fucking huge rocket that size, that could be reused even a couple of times, would be an enormously useful thing for the US govt to have access to, and would make Space-X an absolute fortune in the space trucking business.

If they were to stop developing anything new, or reusing a single rocket, they could simply make a fortune by just ironing out the problems they currently have, and manufacturing Falcon 9 rockets and working through their orderbook of 70 launches, which they say is worth over $10 billion. (It can only be a matter of time before the Russians start blowing up their rockets to protect their dominant position in the commercial space launch business.)

but the driving force behind building a more powerful engine could on the one hand be the result of their overwhelming desire to go to mars, but if your engine is three times as powerful, you only need a third as many engines to put the same payload in space. Space-x need to build 27 engines for a falcon heavy, and have to land three different things in order to reuse them. if they could get away with building only 9 raptor engines, they could build them 3 times as fast, and each heavy rocket would only cost a third as much. and you'd only have to land one thing. That's what is going to drive them over the line, sooner or later.

I have worries about the implications of this sort of thing, but what makes this different to every other era of space exploration is that people think that you could actually make money out of space itself, rather than just seeing Space as a reason for the US govt to create another federal means for the Military Industrial complex to fuck the American people.

And I think that is the key thing to consider about this whole project. Elon Musk isn't just trying to be the Bianconi of the Space trucking business, he's also trying to become the Henry ford of Electric self-driving cars, and the Thomas Edison of solar energy and power storage. These are all things that will be crucial to the success of any mars mission, but will also benefit greatly from being involved Then you take a quick look at the list of venture capitalists that are shareholders in Space-X. I wonder how far through their portfolios would you have to look to find a whole string of Start-up companies working in 3-d Printing, Hi-tech fabrics, other aspects of material science, who will all pop up at the appropriate time and say "You'll never believe what we've been working on." with quite advanced products appropriate to a mission to mars, or be in prime position to receive contracts if the Mars thing gets going in any real way.

The whole thing makes a lot more sense if you think of it as a bunch of shadowy billionaires, who are trying to start a venture capital Apollo mission to help them monopolize a series of emerging industries and technologies. The Apollo missions spilled over into all sorts of things, creating whole new industries and sending us down all sorts of promising technological routes through the magic of positive externalities.

These lads behind space-X think that if the they can capture enough of the Scientific externalities falling out of such a project then they will be rich beyond their wildest imaginations. The more of the mission they are responsible for providing, the better a deal they can strike on dividing up Mars. The Space-x shareholders list is the venture capital equivalent of that Drug kingpin symposium that Stringer bell organizes in season 2 of the wire. This is the sort of 'enlightened self interest' that moves mountains.

So you can quickly see why landing the shuttle on Mars would be such a big deal for them in advancing the overarching mission. By Landing a small shuttle, you are proving that you can land a ship on mars, in a controlled gentle fashion, hopefully at a point of your choosing. Your idea is sound. You just need a bigger spaceship. to go with the huge rocket you are building. Even as it stands, you have a vehicle that can land something heavier than a curiosity rover, for a fraction of the $1.8 billion it cost to put curiosity on mars without breaking it.

That's when you go to the Various global space agencies, and say to them "We can fuck around building one off vehicles to land a couple of experiments on mars at a time. Or since we're building the engines anyway, you can spend the same money developing a cargo version of our mars ship and we can land 400 tonnes of stuff all at once, and also have a spaceship that you only have to put a cabin in, to go to mars." That way they get to do a meaningful amount of research on mars, and everything they do counts directly towards going there. From Building the space ship, to acting as a test bed for everything that you will need to colonize mars.

That's when things can start to happen for them. Obviously the more of it they can manage off their own bat, the stronger their hand will be. But as you point out a lot of things have to go right to get anywhere near that point.

The first thing they have to do is fix the problem that blew up their last space ship. Then They have to get the falcon heavy to work. They need to do this before they can launch their shuttle to mars. That needs to land safely to be the thing that launches their next phase, rather than a crushing PR nightmare. They need to get to the point where they can reliably land their rockets. They also need to learn everything they can about the strains on rockets doing this sort of thing, so they can avoid the same problems on the new rocket and design it to be more robust.

They need to develop their new engine, they need to figure out how to handle the new fuel, they need to put the new engine in a rocket and fly it in space a lot. Then they need to use everything they've learned to then build an enormous rocket, which will be subject to truly enormous stresses. They need to build it in such a way that they can land it, and re-use it as quickly as possible, because even Sending a cargo ship to mars is going to require six rocket launches, and five tanker flights.

And either they're going to be able to recover and relaunch a rocket almost instantly, or they're going to need a lot of rockets. The little video they had illustrating how it was all going to work, had the rocket launching the spaceship into space, then landing on the launch pad, taking on a tanker and blasting off again. That struck me as the single most implausible part of the whole thing.

That's a hell of a lot of needles to thread. But ultimately I have more faith in the ability of Greedy rich men pursuing unimaginable wealth, to get something done, than in Humanity coming together in a spirit of international co-operation and pooling their resources to colonize mars. Right now it's a lot easier to believe in the existence of sociopath billionaires than in utopian futures. (Not that Musk is necessarily a sociopath, but Peter Thiel might well be.)

[Gerontophile]

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I enjoyed that, TAB.

Or you know, Stark.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

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Hah, Mars would want to massively improve, and earth would want to get pretty fucking grim for Life on mars to be an improvement for Billionaires. all these people will be long dead by the time it is anything other than sitting in a bathysphere level awful.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

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So the TV series ended last night. I don't think I'm ruining anything by telling you, that they wanted to get it out there good and early that there are going to be a lot of challenges, and a lot of people are going to die. but right at the end, just as they are about to pull the plug ..... The Thinly disguised Elon Musk figure basically nearly kills them all by trying to move too quickly and seems worryingly comfortable with the idea of people dying (which I thought was an interesting portrayal)

Essentially a programme about a successful mission that went very smoothly would be incredibly boring, so the Rocket doesn't really work properly on entry to the martian atmosphere, and the heroic captain has to go and replace a malfunctioning computer board, but doesn't get back to his seat before re-entry and g-forces throw him around like a rag doll. The Captain regains consciousness and says he's fine, and you see him ominously cough blood into his hand.....

They land a long way from their stuff, and they all have to get in the big rover they brought with them. and drive 80 km to a workshop. Along the way the rover breaks down, and they have to walk the rest of the day before they freeze and run out of oxygen. The Captain takes a turn for the worse and has to go on their wheelbarrow. They get to a workshop, the captain dies, the improvised electrics in the overcrowded workshop goes on fire. So they now have no time to find somewhere to set up their base camp, so there's a dramatic race against time to find a lava tube with water, to set up base camp in, otherwise they will have to set up on the surface, and the habitat won't last, and the mission will be cancelled. Given that this is only episode 3, you can imagine that they find it.

Episode Four is about the new arrivals who are there to expand the base. They don't respect the dangers of Mars and try to expand too fast, and they try and upgrade the power systems before the stormy season. So you can guess what happens next. They're stuck on reserve power for two months. The botanist they've brought out to get the food growing side of it gradually unravels as the powercuts kill off most of his work, and he decides to go for a walk outside, killing half the people in the base. Everyone is going to pull out in the final episode when....

The whole thing is intercut with a documentary type thing about the history of space travel and where we are at the moment. A few things leap out. Robert Zubrin probably does more harm than good to any plan to go to mars. he's clearly nuts. He may be right, but he's disturbing. They all keep hammering on about the sense of betrayal as a result of America stopping at the moon and not going on to mars. Particularly since Wehrner Von Braun had built a fucking massive rocket far bigger than was needed to go to the moon.

The thing that strikes me about this is that given that a plan to go to mars now faces enormous technical hurdles that we're not sure about overcoming over the next 10 years, when we we will have the advantage of 50 years advances in well... everything. How the fuck were they going to go to Mars in the 1970's? Were we going to survive through the power of Brown furniture and polyester?

Another thing that is weird about watching so many engineers talking is that they seem to believe that everything is just a matter of establishing the parameters of a problem, and then solving it. Given that that is what they do for a living, I suppose you can understand it. But basically the vibe is that we can already build basically everything you need on mars, we just need to find out more about mars so we can figure out how to fine tune the design.

I suppose when you think about it, they might have a point. Once you get there Mars is a quite a lot like Earth, it's just cold, radioactive, has minimal pressure, and gravity and it's very dusty. We can make things that can resist cold, radiation and dust, and pressure and gravity are grand too. We just need to find out just how cold, radioactive and dusty. and then make it light and power efficient and super fucking reliable.

The rovers they sent up in 2004 were only supposed to last 3 months. One lasted 6 years, and the other is still pottering around up there like Wall-E without the cockroach. So it would seem that we were able to make stuff that could survive up there over ten years ago. There is a 12 year old solar panel pottering around up there. there is a 12 year old lithium ion battery with it. In many instances It's really just a question of finding out more about what mars is like and adapting earth technology a bit.

The last curiosity rover had all sorts of experiments to fill in gaps in our knowledge about all sorts of things. It's been sending back surface radiation measurements for the last four years having recorded all the radiation it encountered on the journey. It was primarily sent up to find out more about the geology of Mars, and what is there, so you can figure out how to use it.

The curiosity 2 rover that they are sending up in 2020 is going to have a load of more experiments. They're sending up a weather station, a helicopter drone, ground penetrating radar, and a scale model of a machine that makes oxygen from carbon dioxide along with all sorts of stuff to analyse the geology with a greater degree of precision. The Space-X shuttle that they hope to send in 2018 can carry a tonne of stuff, and that will probably have a load of stuff on it for testing. It would be a surprise if it didn't contain a version of the sabatier machine they are going to use to create methane and oxygen.

This is going to fill in a lot more of the gaps in knowledge that they need to have to design stuff for mars, and then to be able to replicate Martian conditions on earth to test this equipment to death, before you send it to mars for a real test. Based on the information sent back from curiosity, MIT were able to work out that the best way to power a mars colony using existing technology was to bring up a load of 100m rolls of flat film solar cells, and stretch them out on the ground, and bring a bunch of batteries. Apparently that beats bringing a nuclear plant and we can already build robots that can set it up.

It's the sort of thing that you could easily stick on a cargo ship and send up 2 years before a bunch of colonists. The thing is that it's worth remembering that NASA has been thinking about this sort of thing for ages. They reckon that this yoke would already work on the moon, never mind mars, but they need better batteries. they just need something big enough to transport it to mars.

All in all, a rather odd series that seemed to work quite hard at pointing out that there will be women in space. Women hold most of the important positions in the show, after the male heroic captain dies. Also there will be people from all round the world. Also that it will be an international effort. Certainly footage from Space-X of them responding to the landing of the rocket would suggest that they don't have a problem with hijabs.

There was loads of wild chat about terraforming, and stuff about human life, but it was only in the accompanying documentary that they raised the ethical questions about arriving on mars, finding a primitive form of life, and then completely changing its environment. Then there was a big of chat about obama saying that people who mine metal on mars will be able to keep it, which seems a bit of a direct assualt on the international treaty covering space. Basically, are we just going to mars to fuck it up? (I think the answer is probably yes, because that's what we do.)

[San Bernardhinault]

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The Awesome Berbaslug!!! wrote:

The thing that strikes me about this is that given that a plan to go to mars now faces enormous technical hurdles that we're not sure about overcoming over the next 10 years, when we we will have the advantage of 50 years advances in well... everything. How the fuck were they going to go to Mars in the 1970's? Were we going to survive through the power of Brown furniture and polyester?

The reason it would have worked in the 70s goes back to your point about the Elon Musk figure's willingness to tolerate risk.

I rewatched The Right Stuff a couple of days ago, after John Glenn's death, and it was a reminder of how incredibly risky the whole proposition was, and how willing to accept the 10% odds of getting killed that the test pilots were (whether flying planes or being Spam in a Can on top of a Mercury rocket). And the public, too, understood the risk and didn't freak out.

At the back end of the Apollo program, I think the people running it still assumed that the political will remained and that people would just deal with the bad publicity from failures. If the same attitude to risk that was around on Mercury was maintained through a Mars Shot in the 70s, along with the political will to fund it, they'd probably have made it.

The political will died, though, which meant funding faded, and nobody was willing to accept the consequences of decisions that would probably result in some astronaut deaths. The near meltdown at NASA after the Challenger explosion suggests that they were probably right - the public was also much less tolerant of risk.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

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I rewatched The Right Stuff a couple of days ago, after John Glenn's death, and it was a reminder of how incredibly risky the whole proposition was, and how willing to accept the 10% odds of getting killed that the test pilots were (whether flying planes or being Spam in a Can on top of a Mercury rocket). And the public, too, understood the risk and didn't freak out.

well it was a lot safer than fighting in WWII or Korea. and I don't understand why Americans were prepared to tolerate a higher death rate among thunderchief pilots than astronauts? There is literally no-one on earth more aware of the risks involved than the deliriously happy fucker up there on the moon, playing golf and taking photos of us, and eyeing his lunar lander with the informed skepticism of a man with an advanced engineering degree who knows how it was built.

I mean I thought that a big part of why we thought that the Astronauts were heroes was because they knew the risk of terrible death but did it anyway? Doesn't that imply a realization that heroes are there to do dangerous shit, and if they survive we celebrate them as living gods, and if they die, we commemorate their bravery and their sacrifice and their name lives on. But you don't stop.

Every interview with astronauts, and even their families on the subject is exactly the same. They completely understand all the risks involved and are prepared to do it anyway. This is an important part of astronaut selection or training, as you don't want them freaking out like Father Ted after he fixes the fuel leak.

The Issue of funding is an interesting one. Rocket launches are expensive, and shiny and eye catching, and the price tags are large. But compared to the overall size of the economy the entire apollo program was really tiny. I mean fucking minuscule. The whole thing cost $25 billion at the time spread over 11 years. to put that into context, the GDP of America in 1969 was a trillion dollars. In 1966 the budget of Nasa was 0.5% of GDP. that's the highest it has ever been. right now it's 0.1% of GDP, or $18.5 billion. That's the sort of money that the US govt finds down the back of a sofa. It's entirely a matter of political will, and Space really is very low on the list of priorities. I reckon that NASA might have disappeared if the Military didn't need someone to launch their spy satellites

I think a huge part of it was that The US needed all the money they could get their hands on because they urgently needed to bomb a number of south east asians back into the stone age. And they needed to divert all of their finest scientific minds to the task of building a long term replacement for the aging and primitive b-52....

But there's also the frivolous aspect of the whole thing Planting a couple of flags on the moon, taking a few pictures and collecting a few rocks really doesn't seem like very much return for all the money that was spent. I think this is a lot of the problem that NASA had. Even though this is a false Binary. The choice isn't between money for Nasa or money for Nell. It's a choice between Nasa or Nam.

But I think the real problem is complexity. Going to the moon for a visit, was the equivalent of a kid taking the stabilizers off their bike for the first time, the next step would be like entering the tour de France. The Saturn V was an awe inspiring thing. But It was quite expensive, very difficult to make at the time, and capable of throwing a lunar lander sized object at the moon. but While 130 tonnes to low earth orbit was a huge advance on the past, That's not really enough to do very much in space, particularly when it costs the equivalent of about a billion dollars to launch one.

That's part of the reason why they were going to build the cheap and reusable Space shuttle, to drive down the cost of going to space, and to go up 50 times a year. Well The good news was that they were able to extend the shuttle programme to twice its original length, because the shuttle flew about a tenth as often as it was supposed to, because after every mission, it took 10,000 people 9 months to get the fucking thing ready for relaunch. That's way more people than were used to build the great pyramid Btw, and the Shuttle programme lasted longer. The whole programme cost $200 bn in today's money, over 30 years, and there were 4.5 launches a year, for thirty years, working out at a cost of $1.5 billion.

I think the problem here is not that that is a lot of money, it's that the shuttle did so little for the money that it cost. Most of the cost of the Hubble telescope programme is having to use the fucking shuttle to fix it.

Essentially the problem with doing anything in space is fundamentally limited by the cost and load capacity of the space trucking side of things. The development of a commercial space sector over the last 10 years has driven down the cost of launching things radically. The US decided around 2010 to spend $50 billion to build five new versions of the saturn five and a spaceship that can go around the moon. The first one is planned for launch in 2018. Space X are about to start testing a rocket that can launch half as much for $90 million a pop, and can launch quite large satellites while keeping enough fuel to land. The Rocket is essentially obsolete before it is built.

I think the time has come for Nasa to get out of the business of designing and building incredibly expensive, mediocre rockets. There are a couple of things needed for a new age of space exploration. The first Is a fucking huge Rocket that can ferry much larger things into space very cheaply. That is a prerequisite for doing anything in space, so you don't simply piss away your entire budget on transport. You need an engine to give you a means of getting around in space, and you need exciting goals that can be achieved at a bit of a stretch, without costing all that much.

That's what Musk Is getting ready for. He's confident that in three or four years he'll have a massively powerful new engine, that will radically increase the profitability of his primary space trucking business. He plans to use the engine to build a rocket 3.5 times as powerful as saturn V that can return to the landing site, and require minimal repairwork before it's launched again. the same engine can ferry you to mars, and come back. It may soon be cheaper to land 500 tonnes of people and cargo on Mars, than send the Curiosity rover to the surface of Mars. ($2.5 billion) It's a question of building support for it over time.

[San Bernardhinault]

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You've misunderstood my point about risk - the astronauts, and people who want to be astronauts, knew the risk, know the risk, are willing to accept the risk.

The people who're afraid of risk are the general public and politicians in particular who're scared of blowback if a mission fails. And the various parts of the hierarchy at NASA who're scared of getting fired if they're found to be in charge of part of a space flight that goes wrong.

This leads to a lot of over-engineering of rockets which has led to them being slower and more expensive to develop. Not because of the attitude to risk from air force pilots recruited to NASA, but attitude to risk from NASA directors and congressional budget offices and from a public who freaked out when Challenger exploded.

If we actually want to get to Mars in a reasonable time-frame and at a reasonable cost, we're going to have to change that attitude.

I don't disagree with anything else you've said, though.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

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Ah, yeah, that's a great point. I was only thinking about politicians being scared of having to announce that the shuttle had exploded again. And now that you mention it, I watched a documentary about the Curiosity Rover and there was a few people talking about how careers were on the line, particularly after the last one didn't work out so well, which when you put it like that makes an awful lot of sense.

Imagine the pressure attached to a project where you have to spend at least half a billion before you've left earth's gravity. then you're effectively throwing a pebble millions of miles across the solar system at hypersonic speeds, and hoping it drops a rover on the lunar surface from a height of about five feet. Particularly when you won't know if it was successful for 10 or 15 minutes. The stress and pressure attached to that must be enormous. Particularly when so much is outside your direct control.

There's also a look that comes into these people's faces when they talk about the various rovers, and the problems they had starting one. There was another interesting insight into the problems faced with dealing with mars. The Mars day is slightly longer than earth, so the people monitoring the Rovers find themselves coming into work forty minutes later every day, which is fine at the start, but within a a fortnight, you're starting work nine hours later so it's really awkward for people with families.

Once you remember that that person is in charge of a mission that has eaten up 10% of the budget over the last couple of years, and it could be 8 years before you get another shot then it becomes easy to understand. I think it's easy to understand how Space-X could be relatively blase about a lot of their early rockets not working out very well. The rockets were cheap and disposable. The monetary cost of each failure was relatively low, and every rocket that blew up taught them a lot more than every one that worked out fine.

But I think a big organizational stressor that leads to the head of the mission being the equivalent of an ancient gaelic where things are sweet as long as the harvest was good, but if things go wrong your nipples get cut off and you're ritually slaughtered to appease the gods. (BTW 6'6"!!!!) And that's that there's little opportunity for organic advancement in an organization like NASA, because there are so few missions, and they are so relatively limited in Scope.

Things will undoubtedly become a lot more uptight and serious for Space-x once they have to start ferrying real live humans.

[evilC]

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NASA shares some pretties for Christmas:

http://nasa.tumblr.com/post/154896844449/holiday-lights-from-the-universe

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

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So Space-X are launching their rocket again after the last disaster at about 6 o'clock today. It turns out that this sort of thing is pretty important to them, because the WSJ Released a report showing their finances in the lead up to 2015 (if there's anyone who has a subscription that wouldn't mind a bit of sneaky paywall busting, that would be amazing)

Essentially they were turning a small profit for what it's worth, until the first rocket blew up, and then they lost $260 million in 2015 on a turnover over about $1 billion. Now I don't know how important that is, as presumably this profit or loss is slightly separate to all the money they are spending on research. one thing for sure is that making a loss on the business side of things is certainly going to increase the rate at which they burn through their cash.

The Second thing in that report appears to be that in a couple of years time Space-X is going to be primarily a global satellite internet service, with a sideline in going to mars. That's going to require an awful lot of rocket launches, on top of their order book, and would make them their own best customer. But it's the sort of thing that if you could pull off, it would make you extraordinarily rich.

Aside from the possibilities in making money from launching satellites for other people, or servicing the ISS,, or eventually going to Mars, the opportunity to establish an effective global monopoly in satellite internet is a lucrative enough prize to ensure that they keep going through all the explosions. But it's the increase in the number of launches that is staggering. They've only ever managed 8 in one year, and only ever managed one a month, but they want to launch 27 this year, building up to one a week two years later. that's er, optimistic. particularly since an explosion makes everything stop for months on end, and requires changes to all the rockets.

But Something else though that could be a problem for them is that NASA has a problem with the way that they plan to send humans into space. Ever since Apollo 1 NASA fuels up the rocket, then puts the astronauts on top, then launches. Space-X are using much colder fuel, so they want to load up the fuel, then put the astronauts on board, then add in the superchilled liquid oxygen just before launch.

This could be a massive problem for Space-X if they can't convince NASA that their way is safe enough to use. a lot of their ability to land the boosters is reliant on using extremely cold fuel, because you can pack a lot more in the same space so you have more left over to land the booster. So that could be a real problem for them because landing the rocket is a really important part of all of their plans. Then again, just how much does Nasa want to have to keep using russian rockets to go to the ISS?

[Evariste Euler Gauss]

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Did anyone else see the Horizon documentary repeated a week or so (originally broadcast in 2015) about space junk? Never mind trips to Mars, it'll be pretty difficult just orbiting the earth before long as the problem (and hence the risk level) grows inexorably. Main point: ever growing number of small-scale man made litter in orbit, and even very small objects (well under 1cm diameter) are going to do spacewalking astronauts a lot of collision damage if you're both doing 17,000 mph but in different directions. And, leaving spacewalkers aside, the ISS itself could get taken out by anything much bigger than 1cm - and we're only able to track objects > 10cm. It was not an astronaut recruitment programme for sure.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Anyone for an astronomy thread?

oooh wow. Yeah that seems to come up a lot in any programme about trying to travel in space. Space junk and micrometeoroids behave in much the same way. They are talking about send up special satellites with huge sails, to start gradually cleaning some of this up, because as you said it is going to cause real problems over time.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Anyone for an astronomy thread?

Fucking hell, that was amazing to watch. I particularly like the camera on the side of the rocket showing you the whole way down. and the thing they land on is so fucking tiny. I feel like my parents seeing their first lightbulb.

Here are the last four minutes of the flight

[hobbes]

Anyone for an astronomy thread?

Even a paint flake moving at orbital velocity becomes something you don't want any part of.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Anyone for an astronomy thread?

ouch. Yeah, space junk and micrometeroids are travelling at about seven times the speed of a bullet, and if you're coming the other way, the speeds are additive. so it's a pretty horrible prospect.

[Various Artist]

Anyone for an astronomy thread?

The Awesome Berbaslug!!! wrote: Fucking hell, that was amazing to watch. I particularly like the camera on the side of the rocket showing you the whole way down. and the thing they land on is so fucking tiny. I feel like my parents seeing their first lightbulb.
Here are the last four minutes of the flight

That's absolutely brilliant Berba. A rocket's-eye view of reentry – and yes, what an absurdly small target to hit when being dropped from space at thousands of miles per hour. Thanks for posting it.

[evilC]

Anyone for an astronomy thread?

Woo-hoo! We made this!

(That is to say, the University Of Surrey's 'Surrey Space Centre' did. As a deskbound grunt in the library, I didn't contribute directly, you understand!)

I hope that isn't too off-topic.