Business, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

Elon Strikes Back

79 Comments

It will be quite amusing if Duffy has goaded him into beating SLS/Orion to the Moon.

I’m glad that he’s realized it was politically stupid to say that the Moon “is a distraction.”

[Update a while later]

79 thoughts on “Elon Strikes Back”

    1. That was my initial thought too. But I have come to believe that that explanation gives Duffy way too much credit. The practical effect will be the same – SpaceX upshifting to Ludicrous Speed and building a complete lunar logistics architecture on its own. But I think Duffy’s little tantrum was motivated more by his uncritical acceptance of conventional DC “wisdom” about the PRC and resultant unwarranted panic about how failing to Beat the Chinese[tm] would look on his resume.

        2. People with common sense realize that, but the world is filled with people lacking that supposedly “common” quality.

      2. There is a logic chain where Failing to Beat the Chinese could cause problems.

        – both the US and China are going there to put in a permanent settlement
        – there are resources on Luna that could allow in-situ extraction. Probably water is the thing; it’s heavy to ship, and a settlement needs lots.
        – these resources make the difference between being able to put a permanent settlement there and having to forever ship those resources in, which makes settlement a long term non-starter
        – the resources are rare, and only found in certain small areas
        – the one who gets there first can and will prevent the other from also putting in a settlement. By force.
        – this doesn’t end up in a war back on Earth.

        It’s a long chain, and I’m not convinced that some of these links are true.

        1. That is certainly a possible scenario. How likely it could prove to be is another matter.

          I am a lunar “water” skeptic. I suspect whatever is found in the permanently shaded craters – even if it is technically composed of hydrogen and oxygen – will not be water but hydroxyls. And I don’t expect there to be enough to provide meaningful supply for even a pup-tent-class lunar base.

          If that proves true, then he who has the biggest and cheapest large-scale lunar logistics capability will dominate – order-of-arrival notwithstanding, though first will still be better than second. Said victor will be the first to get smelting going on the Moon and to benefit from the oxygen produced as a byproduct. Importing only hydrogen will prove much cheaper than importing water.

          1. Same deal with comets – rocks with hydroxyl on the surface from interaction with the solar wind, not ice-balls.

          2. If there’s no water available on the Moon then I think it unlikely it will be possible to maintain a settlement there for any lengthy period.

            How much recycling can you do of water to avoid shipping more? How much of your capacity is going to be water as opposed to anything else?

            Of course, this will be even more true of the Chinese. At a certain point, things that boost national pride give way to things that boost national survival, or should.

          3. There’s no natively-available water on the ISS either and we just clocked 25 years of continuous human habitation there. And yet fresh clothes – which, once worn, are trashed – and food exceed water in the tabulation of mass shipped to ISS on resupply missions. Water is probably the most easily recyclable material.

            If NASA had ever invested in development of zero-G laundry equipment, it could have shipped a bit more water to ISS and a lot fewer clothes. Zero-G and low-G laundry gear will just be one more in a long list of things NASA will have left it to SpaceX to provide at the end of the day.

            On the Moon, in any event, there actually is a tiny bit of water in the regolith. As greater and greater quantities of regolith are processed in lunar smelters, this water can be captured for use even if the polar craters come up pretty much dry.

            And, as with ISS, water can be shipped in to cover initial requirements, then supplemented, over time, to cover increasing requirements and inevitable small losses.

            There may prove to be things that limit the extent of lunar settlement, but lack of water isn’t going to be one of them.

    1. Do you have a link to share?

      Kind of an amusing concept “excluding” SpaceX from exploring Ceres. If Elon sees any point in doing so, SpaceX will go to Ceres. Might be an interesting project to undertake once the Mars thing is well enough along. It would actually make reasonable sense to mount such an effort from Mars rather than from Earth anyway.

        1. Gotcha. Thing is, Elon’s not a cat. He won’t chase after just any random laser pointer spot on the floor.

          2. A Mars lander Starship will need flaps and TPS but might well crib those “high-pockets” landing thrusters from lunar HLS. Lunar HLS will, evidently, have 26 of these, providing a much more reliable descent than landers with only one or a few engines. Might need to boost the thrust of these for Mars application owing to the higher gravity there, but the Mars atmosphere also allows for better cooling of these thrusters in operation.

  3. I really hope they switch to horizontal landing, if nothing else for the sake of sanity.

    Landing on one Raptor is going to be tricky, as a Raptor 3 at 40% throttle still might be more of a slam landing, depending on the landing weight of the ship. That means they have to kill the engine as the ship touches down, before they know if it’s going to start tipping over. If it is tipping, they’ll need to have a second engine pre-chilled and spooling up or they’re not going to have an abort option.

    And then there’s the problem of the giant external elevator, along with a giant ladder in case the elevator jams.

    1. Based on the renders that accompanied SpaceX’s latest update, it looks as though the plan is still to land using the ring of “high-pockets” thrusters with the Raptors shutting down after managing most of the powered descent.

      I don’t think the elevator is really a problem. SpaceX has been testing it out for at lest two years. The only way it would jam is if there was a hard enough landing to tweak the whole ship. It that happens, a stuck elevator is the least of your concerns.

      1. I forgot about those. I think I try to forget about most of their design.

        The current renders more resemble penthouse apartments. I’m nto sure the interior designers are running their concepts past any engineers. The big windows continue to be featured, even though they’re a catastrophic failure mode, a large weight component, a structural weakness, and serve no purpose.

        The whole concept just makes no sense to me.

        2. But it makes sense to Elon. He’s got more than a bit of P.T. Barnum about him as well as Delos D. Harriman. Big windows with Gee Whiz views from on-high are salable. There are a great many architectural features on cruise ships one does not find on battleships and for similar reasons. Freighter HLSes won’t have the windows, but the people-carriers will.

          1. They’ll have a few windows, perhaps quite a few as long as they’re fairly small. Looking at the renders, the image in the upper right looks to have a clear window size of about 24 x 26 inches. My big space window design spreadsheet, based on the ISS Cupola windows, says they’ll weigh 180 lbs each, including the frame and mounts, so 1800 lbs for all ten. They’d probably have to have slightly wider frame sections, though.

            Window weight per square foot of clear area scales linearly with the dimensions, so a window twice as wide and twice as tall is also twice as heavy per square foot, which means eight times heavier instead of four times heavier.

            *long boring digression into ISS cupola windows and the formulas for them omitted*

          2. The 10 windows above the cargo/elevator door in the newest renders look rather bigger than 24 x 26 inches. The whole vehicle has a diameter of about 30 feet, so a circumference of about 100. The ten windows look to wrap around about 1/4 of that, so 2-foot widths seem about right, but that would make them more like 4-feet tall, given the apparent proportions.

            That’s about twice your areal estimate so, based on your reported calcs and scale factors, about 7,200 lbs. for the whole array.

            From that, one would have to subtract the mass of the stainless steel structure that would occupy that space absent any windows at all. Assuming that structure would be strictly 4 mm-thick stainless of an alloy close to 304 in composition, that seems to work out to about 500 pounds for a net of 6,700 pounds for the windows. Any assumed stringers along the interior would reduce that number further – maybe a couple of hundred more pounds.

            3.25 tons doesn’t seem at all unreasonable a mass cost for the “Gee Whiz!” factor it buys. YMMV of course.

          3. Well, the windows would weigh about as much as the Apollo LEM’s ascent module. ^_^

            Maybe the mission plan would read “Day 3: Just sit and stare out the glorious windows”, but I kind of doubt it.

            What they really need instead is an airlock that opens onto a balcony. Space helmets have a much better view with vastly less weight.

          4. The HLS Starship design does include two airlocks, but no balconies. I suspect the airlocks are probably Shuttle-style, debouching into the cargo bay. The elevator, though, is certainly more than equivalent to a balcony so those spacesuit visor views should be impressive while riding down and up.

          5. Another aspect is the affect windows have on re-usability. Corning says their shuttle windows had to be thoroughly inspected after every flight, and the outer thermal pane was frequently replaced.

            The doesn’t mesh well with rabid re-usability, and of course twice as many windows means twice as many inspections and replacements per flight.

          6. It’s unsurprising that Shuttle windows needed careful inspection and periodic replacement. Even being on the upper face of the orbiters, they were repeatedly subjected to Earth re-entry plasma.

            HLS Starship windows will never be subjected to such. Compared to repeated re-entries through Earth’s atmosphere, a single ascent to LEO is a nothingburger in terms of thermal challenge.

            HLS Starships, once having made their initial crossings from LEO to cis-lunar space, will spend their working lives just shuttling between lunar orbit and the lunar surface. Almost anything else on an HLS Starship seems likely to give out before the windows.

          7. The Aries 1B in 2001: ASO had windows, but they could have just as easily been replaced with flat screens. IMO.

            In fact, except when rendezvous and docking with the space station presumably, the pilots windows were largely worthless.

          8. But the HLS might have to cope with other ships landing somewhat nearby, accelerating dust particles to potentially reach lunar orbit. Mounting the thrusters high on the ship will help reduce that quite a lot, and avoid digging exhaust craters, a subject now pretty well studied by Phil Metzger.

            On a more positive note, the sheer size and payload capacity of Starship means they should be able to include a small area with good radiation shielding.

          9. Well, the HLS Starship’s high-mounted landing engines are intended to obviate that problem anent other HLS Starships landing near earlier ones. Perhaps an early project for crews delivered to the lunar surface by HLS Starships should be to build some nice, impermeable landing pads for later arrivals – like Blue Origin’s Mk. 2 – that have their main engines down low.

        3. They have mass margin to spare, putting two or four astronauts into a ship designed for dozens. I’m not seeing solar panels in the renders, so they might even be devoting mass to full battery power. (Not an engineer so maybe I’m mistaken.)

    2. I do think that there needs to be a backup for that elevator. I don’t think it needs to be a ladder though. At 1/6 G, a rope would be fine.

      The problem is designing and certifying the rope. Nasa could do it, if we’ve got a few spare years and billions. Or SpaceX could just send somebody to Walmart for a packaged coils of rope.

      1. It’s probably more complicated than that. Most plastics don’t do well in vacuum.
        But not much more complicated. There’s lots of stuff that has been developed for vacuum work over the years.

        1. 1/4 inch steel wire rope has a safe load rating of 1,100 lb, and weighs 0.11 lb/ft. If the elevator height was 300 feet, that makes a safe carry load of 1,100 – 33 = 1,067 lb on Earth, or 6,400 lb on the Moon. Temperature will, of course, change that, but not by much. And one wouldn’t use just one rope for the elevator.

    3. SpaceX has been using 3 raptor engines for final descent and landing of the Ship for every test flight. Things are slightly more complicated for Booster, but I believe they actually have enough throttlability to hover, not slam. They already have that part figured out.

      1. The Moon’s gravity is only 1/6th that of the Earth. I doubt they can throttle the Raptors to thrust low enough to land on the Moon. Even if the could, that would erode the landing surface, making it even harder to prevent Ship from tipping over.

        Their rendering shows a ring of thrusters high on the landing vehicle. They can be properly sized for a lunar landing and are high enough to minimize surface erosion.

    4. Not a big fan of the elevator option either. If you are going with nose base thrusters why not just make that mechanism your primary engine and move the plumbing forward a bit as well. If you can maintain stability (operating in a vacuum after all), freeing the lower half for cargo for roll-on / roll-off. I suppose it becomes a question of maintaining the proper Center of Gravity for thrust vectoring? Center of Pressure isn’t the issue.

      I suspect we will see roll-off in some subsequent cargo variant anyway. It’s just way more efficient.

    5. So you’re going to stick more engines on one side of the ship, that can only be used for landing and liftoff?
      They would require a shroud for launch, since SpaceX is not currently making any in space.
      Roughly twice the piping, and reliable controls to switch from one set to the other.
      All this, so you can maybe save a little bit on stability controls?

      I suspect he’s already explored it and dismissed it. Remember his attempts at using parachutes for booster recovery? Considering we’ve never even seen an attempt at belly landing, the numbers are likely even less promising than for that.

      1. The landing engines are mounted inside the hull, just like the SuperDraco engines on the Drago, so no shroud necessary. This is all worked out in detail. Internet critics are far behind the curve, as always.

        Huh, spellcheck suggests SuperDraco == “superracist.” Bastards.

    6. I really hope they switch to horizontal landing,

      I don’t think there’s much value to that. On Earth, it’s simple to come up with ways to kill horizontal motion due to the atmosphere (providing atmospheric braking and lift). On the Moon, if you’re not killing most of your velocity (like you would with a vertical landing), then you’re coming in at hundreds of meters per second (up to perhaps a couple of km/s if you’re coming in on a faster than escape velocity trajectory).

      Too low with respect to the Moon’s limb, and you’re another crater with impact debris raining all over your landing site. And what’s slowing you down? Capturing a fast moving object is a much harder problem than launching a fast moving object.

    1. I used those all the time, plus all kinds of other ascenders.

      But it seems silly to me to build a ship that can get you 99.99999% of the way to the moon, and then you have to rappel and ascend on a rope because they couldn’t figure out how to simply land like a normal cargo vehicle, with a nice loading ramp that lowers like the back of a C-130.

      1. I don’t see the current arrangement as a real problem.

        Some of the early renders of HLS showed three wedge-shaped cargo volumes between the Rvac engines at the vehicle’s base. Those might still be included. Not exactly Herc-like, but still close to the ground.

        If it becomes desirable to launch really long and heavy stuff to the Moon that can’t be sensibly designed in smaller bolt-together chunks, I am sure SpaceX will be able to figure out a way to do that. Maybe that way will even include “sideways” landing and a ramp.

        1. Well, I think rotating a spacecraft by 90 degrees in space can be done with a simple command input to the flight control system and a couple of RCS thruster firings.

          To me, that is simpler than adding a giant elevator to the side of a giant rocketship that’s probably not far from tipping over anyway.

          And of course a vertical Starship has no prayer of getting any radiation shielding added so it can become a permanent lunar habitat.

          1. If, as will be the case, the power of the Raptors will be needed to handle most of the descent, then that flip maneuver would need to be made smartly and fairly close to the ground, not at leisure in orbit before starting descent. Hardly a showstopper given the standard terminal descent profile of Starships returning to Earth from LEO, but an unnecessary complication on the Moon.

            Any HLS Starships ever slated for conversion to long-term hab space on the surface could be tipped onto their sides using winches anchored to the surface and cables used to both pull and belay the ship as it is rotated. After that, it could be covered in regolith using lunar-rated bulldozers.

            That won’t be possible in the very earliest going, but, then, it doesn’t have to be. I suspect the earliest regolith-covered habs will likely be Sierra Space or LockMart inflatables of more modest size.

            If one waits until lunar smelting and rolling of metal sheet is a thing, even HLS Starships left standing vertical could be converted to long-term hab space by simply covering them with easily-fabricated conformal metal boxes filled with regolith and lifted into place by lunar-rated cranes.

  8. Would the NASA bureaucrats find a way to prevent Elon from going to the Moon? Refuse launch authorizations, or denying human-rating the lander/booster/refueling combo?

  9. NASA isn’t in charge of launch authorisations and I doubt Elon will be interested in NASA’s opinions on human rating for his private missions.

    1. I was thinking their bureaucracy has some overlap with FAA and other bureaus that affect space flight, and if they said “no” would the FAA or some other agency consider their input.

  10. I think that there are a couple of misunderstandings here.

    Elon is NOT likely to be saying that Starship HLS will be ready before SLS and Orion are ready and therefore that is the reason why Starship will do it all. SLS and Orion have already done Artemis 1 and will be doing Artemis 2 before Starship is prepared to fulfill the HLS lander leg of Artemis 3.

    Rather, I believe that what Elon is saying is that, when Starship HLS is ready to take crew from NRHO to the lunar surface and back then it will also be able to take crew from LEO to NRHO. And crew can be safely launched in Dragon to LEO and/or Starship will have launched Starlinks so many times that crew will be able to safely go from Earth to LEO in Starship. IOW, by the time of Artemis 3, it will be obvious that SpaceX can do everything that SLS and Orion can do.

    Second, look it up. What Elon was reacting to when he posted that “The Moon is a distraction” was a fella who advocated that people need to start mining the Moon for propellant to sell to SpaceX as they go to Mars. Elon obviously understands total delta-V and so correctly responded to that specific assertion by saying that propellant from the Moon for Mars missions is a distraction. Just go from LEO to TMI without stopping at EML1 to get lunar-derived propellant. Elon has never wavered that “we” need to have a large government, research base on the Moon.

  11. Leaving aside the issue of how “ready” SLS-Orion would be for Artemis 3 if the crew of Artemis 2 is lost to either suffocation, post-TLI, or to incineration upon re-entry, there is no misunderstanding here. Elon is simply saying HLS Starship will be ready by the time an Artemis 3 SLS-Orion stack – and Axiom’s suits – can be and that no other entity can credibly provide an alternative lander on that schedule.

    Along with, I think, everyone else here, I’m on that same page and think that date will be sometime in 2028 – in plenty of time to Beat the Chinese[tm] too. I also expect SpaceX to have an alternative suit ready by that date in case Axiom looks to be failing to make a 2028 availability.

    Elon has also made statements that are hard to interpret any other way than that he also now plans to have a Starship-based alternative to SLS-Orion ready to go at that same point – that would be your second suggested possible scenario.

    I regard that scenario as now being, by far, the most likely myself. If Artemis 2 proves a disaster, of course, this scenario instantly becomes a slam dunk.

    As always, I see no role for Dragon in any lunar manned mission.

  12. People are freaking out over nothing. I can understand why SpaceX would be offended and rush out some PR but has anything really changed with what is going on and the pace of development?

    SpaceX remains the best choice, even if recompeting the contract allowed for others to participate in the effort.

    Things only appear slow right now but soon, the launch rate will approach the manufacturing rate and the SpaceX juggernaut will be moving faster than people expected. This situation will, of course, be ignored in the future.

    Duffy goosing SpaceX is a good thing. It might provide a little extra motivation to a highly motivated company that is likely maxed out on internal sources of motivation. Is Duffy just a retard who happened to do something right or did he just get lucky? I think there is some intent to his actions and one not be a rocket surgeon to be able to provide some motivation to a group of humans.

    A small shift in mentality isn’t likely to alter timelines much but it is also similar to how Olympic events are wont by fractions of a second.

    1. Agreed. The main change to the status quo ante will be that Elon will now also be, for sure, working on an SLS-Orion-displacer version of Starship. Given what was already in-progress anent tankers, depots, etc. – and what has evidently also been done for HLS, including an under-construction flight-capable passenger section of same – The SLS-Orion-slayer will be pretty much a five-finger exercise.

      SpaceX now likely will find ways to move still faster. Any aspect of the effort that is not already on a 3-shifts-per-day, 24-7-365 schedule soon will be, for example.

      And I gotta think there’s gonna be – if there wasn’t already – a SpaceX Moonsuit effort as insurance against a too-late debut of the Axiom garment.

      SpaceX was always going to get to a point where it could do the entire lunar logistics job on strictly its own resources. All Duffy’s little jab has done is serve to make that day arrive sooner than it otherwise might have.

      In assessing Duffy’s motivations, I was initially prepared to see his slap at SpaceX as some 4-D chess psy-op but have subsequently come to conclude that your lucky retard notion is far closer to the truth. Duffy is going to get what he wants – a path to Beat the Chinese[tm] – but he’s going to get it at the cost of royally buggering the legacy aerospace whiners he seems to have thought he was going to benefit.

    2. I largely agree with you. I think that, in the last half of 2026 it will be apparent that Starship HLS is successfully mastering the key milestones such that an Artemis 3 in 2028 using Starship HLS is feasible.

      1. Quite so. By the end of 2026 I expect to see all of the on-orbit refilling boxes having been checked, the rest of the test article for the first unmanned test of HLS Starship nearly complete or even undergoing ground tests, a full depot ship in LEO awaiting the arrival of the HLS Starship test article, Starbase Pad 1 entirely rebuilt and back in service, Starbase and KSC Gigabays complete and in use, KSC Starfactory well along in construction and already in partial use, at least one Starship pad complex at SLC-37 complete or nearly so and at least three or four loads of Starlink V3s on-orbit. Pad 2 at Starbase should, by then, have handled appreciably more launches in 2026 than Pad 1 did in its 2.5 years of operation. Ditto the LC-39A Starship pad at KSC.

    3. I wonder how much of “recompeting the contract” will consist of NASA staffers hoping for a Boeing/Lockheed/ULA position later, awarding money to those companies.

      To *not* produce anything. Like they have *not* produced Orion as a safe vehicle capable of its ostensible mission.

      1. Always a consideration to be sure. But this really is looking to be the Last Hurrah of the Old Guard. As their current cost-plus gravy trains stop running and NewSpace outfits win all of the fixed-price contracts going forward, I foresee massive downsizing of legacy contractor space divisions. There won’t be any cushy sinecures to be had.

      2. If those people are looking for a “Boeing/Lockheed/ULA position” then they are still steeped in the old way of doing things and are not needed by SpaceX or any other all-go organization.

        If those people were really interested in working for a fast, agile corporation then they’d join SpaceX or some other.

        1. For people of genuine ability, such as Kathy Lueders and Bill Gerstenmaier, that’s exactly what happened. Both were offered real jobs with a real company doing real things after their NASA retirements and took them.

          That’s not what the career time-servers and apple-polishers at NASA are looking for, post-NASA-retirement. They didn’t work any too hard while at NASA, so exerting themselves for real, post-NASA, is emphatically not part of their desired plans. They all want jobs where the duties are minimal and the pay is high – Executive Vice President in Charge of Playing Golf with Congresscritters is the business card they aspire to in their Golden Years.

    4. I wonder how much “recompeting the contract” will consist of NASA staffers hoping for a Boeing/Lockheed/ULA position later, awarding money to those companies.

      To *not* produce anything. Like they have *not* produced Orion as a safe vehicle capable of its ostensible mission.

      1. I’m guessing it would take any of the legacy primes at least until 2028 just to build the PowerPoint pitch deck for any alternative lander project.

        These are massively unserious people and need to be kept as far away as possible from any serious work.

  13. Interesting how those seats and windows together remind me of a very different Orion than NASA’s…but then, the human mind does tend to make something of the faintest resemblances. Especially mine.

    1. Charles, your comment in an off-hand way reminded me of earlier conceptual designs of the Apollo LEM. Which also had both seats and lots of windows.

    2. Yes, there is a certain resemblance, though also a sizable difference in scale. And Starship HLS lacks battlewagon-class gun turrets too, which I recall being a design feature of the earliest Orion concepts.

      Something for Elon to see to if the PRC surprises me and actually lasts long enough to get any of its nationals to the Moon. Elon, I think, is fated to become more and more Tony Stark as well as Delos D. Harriman.

  14. Does Lockheed’s NERVA play any role in any of this? In the same vein, why does Elon wear a “Nuke Mars” shirt?

  16. More on Bill Gates (according to Elon Musk):

    “Elon Musk Says Bill Gates Is ‘Not Strong’ In Science, Recalling Visit To Tesla Factory Where He Dismissed Long-Range Semitrucks As ‘Impossible'”

    “He came to visit me at the Tesla Gigafactory in Austin and was telling me that it’s impossible to have a long-range semi truck,” Musk said. He pointed out that such vehicles were already in operation, with companies like PepsiCo using them. However, Gates was adamant that a long-range semi-truck was impossible.

    “You’d think he’d be really quite…strong in the sciences. but actually my at least direct conversations with him have…he is not strong in the sciences,” Musk said.

    Musk told Gates that he seemed to disagree with the battery pack’s watt-hours per kilogram, suggesting that Gates might believe Tesla could not achieve the required energy density or that the truck’s watt-hours per mile were too high, which together would result in a lower range.

    Musk then questioned Gates, “And so which one of those numbers do you think we have wrong? And what numbers do you think are correct? However, the Microsoft co-founder reportedly “did not know” the answers.”

    https://finance.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-says-bill-gates-003105025.html

    1. “Everyone is ignorant, only on different subjects.”
      – Will Rogers

      People can be quite intelligent in one subject and completely ignorant on just about everything else. The problem is too few people lack the humility to admit the magnitude of their ignorance. A humble person admits that there are so many things they don’t know, and that list actually gets bigger much faster than they can learn new things.

    2. Reminds one of Michael Bloomberg’s cringey remarks about the simplicity of agriculture. There are certain people who think that having become rich indicates that they are also smarter than everyone who isn’t. Even by that standard, though, Elon is five times as smart as Bill Gates or Michael Bloomberg and twice as smart as Jeff Bezos.

  17. “….. There are certain people who think that having become rich indicates that they are also smarter than everyone who isn’t.”

    …or having a PhD indicates that they are also smarter than everyone who doesn’t.

    1. Yeah. I believed that too until I went away to college and actually met people with PhDs. With a few notable exceptions, not an impressive bunch.

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