5 thoughts on “There Is Another Way To Space”

  1. From those sketches I calculated a ROIC of 6.8% on the full settlement of Mars, can someone check my numbers.

    I went into that video thinking that human spaceflight was a big waste of time and money, boy am I embarrassed. I need to learn to draw.

  2. The video explains the propellant depot idea quite well. It even gives some hints at actual practical applications. However it does not explain the advantages of economies of scale and mass manufacturing good enough. Still I think it is a good intro to the scales involved into such a program.

    Now as for the NASA article it has several points which are clearly nonsense. For one his claim that the SSME is not easy to reuse on sea landings. Well you simply solve that by not doing sea landings. The Shuttle landed on a runway. A VTVL vehicle landing on a prepared pad has much the same reusability characteristics.
    If the cost depends on flight rate they could simply show a graph detailing costs vs the number of launches instead of giving a single number. Or detail operating costs by splitting the fixed costs from the variable costs.
    Proving on-orbit assembly could be done was one of the main goals of the ISS. The fact that it is out there is a testament that it can be done. Even using the highly manual approach to in-orbit construction NASA employed.

  3. Boy, that second article is like a beginner-difficulty practice-exercise for Fisking drills, isn’t it?

    Aside from that, the section below calls into question NASA’s competency at even analyzing costs when they’re actively running a program for decades, much less trying to project costs on something they haven’t even built yet:

    The space shuttle’s solid rocket boosters were retrievable and reusuable, but Dumbacher said eliminating those features on SLS allows NASA to “eliminate the cost associated with the recovery of the boosters, the cost of getting the hardware back to (Kennedy Space Center) to look at, the cost of looking at the hardware, and the cost of cleaning out the hardware and reusing it.

    If SRB re-use was cheaper during the Shuttle program, then they’re ignoring that in their current analysis. It it wasn’t cheaper, then they went ahead and spent several decades re-using them anyway.

    The whole interview reminded me of the fake George Lucas documentaries filled with lines like “Then I realized we don’t need any scripts – because we have CGI, and stuff.” Cost estimates? Who needs those?

  4. “The video explains the propellant depot idea quite well. It even gives some hints at actual practical applications. However it does not explain the advantages of economies of scale and mass manufacturing good enough. Still I think it is a good intro to the scales involved into such a program.”

    It nice someone is providing some explanation of gas stations.
    But a very critical part missing is that someone [and it should be NASA]
    needs to explore the Moon. Explore the Moon with idea of finding minable
    lunar water.
    Because right now we don’t know if there is minable depots on the moon. If we have clue about this, we could arguing where there are the best locations to mine lunar water, and have information in which make these arguments.
    So NASA needs to explore the moon down a “resolution” of 1 square km
    and be able to say something about some 1 square km of lunar estate- like, this area probably has 2-3% more concentration of lunar water as compared other places we have explored- so these areas might be the best locations to mine lunar water.
    And it even possible that this NASA exploration could end up being more or less correct.
    Right now we vague ideas of lunar water being in region hundred of square km of area, and we need more precision and some idea of where the better locations might be.

    If there is 10% water extractable from a meter depth of lunar area which 1 square km in area. That is 100,000 tons of lunar water if mined. That is a lot rocket fuel. It’s more rocket fuel than any NASA lunar base and Mars bases would need in decades of time.
    So, it would be likely that if some lunar water mining were to begin, there mining area could about the size of football field for the next 10 years of operation.
    But this is a guess based on not having enough exploration. It could be that there highly concentrated water in smallish “mud puddles” and and mining could be over much large area. Rather than being consistent “water ore” could patchy.
    We can only imagine how this lunar water will be mine, if it can even be profitably mined.
    So rather organize the fleet to go mine something, let’s start with exploring the Moon, and once explored, make the decisions about whether to mine it.

    1. Oh but we do have a fairly good idea of the concentrations of minerals in the Moon thanks to the Clementine Mission:
      http://www.lunasociety.org/atlas/iron_map.shtml

      Of course that needs to be followed up with an on-site inspection of the resources and their ease of extraction but the rough concentrations along the lunar surface are known.

Comments are closed.