Prime 1701 is to scale.
Kelvin 1701 is a somewhat crazy 725m in length. Even the Sovereign (1701-E) class in Prime was only 685m in length.
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Space X Announces BFR - Travel anywhere on earth in under an hour - Mars in 2022
- Thread starter mcfrank
- Start date
Prime 1701 is to scale.
Kelvin 1701 is a somewhat crazy 725m in length. Even the Sovereign (1701-E) class in Prime was only 685m in length.
Only in JJs head. There's scenes with people next to her, and there's no way that's her scale. Unless NuTreks future include Giants.
CyclopsRock
Member
It's only a "waste of time" if you think other solar systems are inherently more desirable to go to. We might need something other than chemical rockets to get to another solar system, but it seems silly to dismiss anything short of that as "just a waste of everyone's time".
weremichael
Member
I'm assuming the poster was talking about the environmental impact of rocket fuel in the upper atmosphere. Here's a 2009 article from Slate that talks about ozone depletion.http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/the_green_lantern/2009/11/dirty_rockets.html If rocket travel becomes commercially viable like conventional air travel, then I can see this becoming an environmental disaster. I'll keep it in perspective though, as we're causing the next mass extinction event on this planet. Shooting rockets into space so the wealthy can travel quickly from here to there isn't as large a deal as overpopulation.
Not sure how relevant that will be. SpaceX is moving to use methane+oxygen, which hasn't really been done before. I don't see many details in that article, but the study was probably looking more at the effects of kerosene+oxygen and solid propellants that are used for most current launches.
weremichael
Member
I wouldn't pretend to understand the chemistry of atmospheric research, but I'm guessing that the methane oxygen propellant still would be detrimental to the atmosphere since the pollution will be deposited into the upper atmosphere.
Linkstrikesback
Member
Manned missions to other planets are currently a waste of time though. And probably life actually. There's nothing worthwhile that would require humans that can't be done with a well designed rover, and frankly at this point in time, are probably easier to do with a rover given it's much easier to keep one of them alive than a human.
At the moment, the only real reason to send someone to another planet in our solar system is to fill someones ego, whether that be the astronauts, the people in a country who want to say they did it first, or whomever. Simply sticking a handful of astronauts on a chemical rocket while also dropping research in to stuff to keep them alive like radiation shielding as the person I quoted suggested is an absurd suggestion. That, among a lot of other NASA inventions have plenty of use outside of spacecraft. Telling NASA to stop inventing things would be a bit daft, for all of humankind.
Waiting another 50+ years for the technology to mature to a point where it's actually worth the trips isn't going to do any harm, mars isn't going anywhere.
I'm not sure I totally agree...
Granted, numbers are correct. Soyuz also have ~98% success rate.
But when you look at missions with humans and casualties, the number of death during spaceflights is remarkably small... In the last half century, there's only three events:
- 3 deaths in a Soyuz accident at the beginning of the 70s
- the two Shuttle accidents
Beside that, I think there's only two deaths, during training/testing.
And when you look into it, both Shuttle accidents are human bad decisions:
- for Challenger, MANY people said it was dangerous to launch it during cold time, which was below the safety margins, unless I'm mistaken
- for Columbia, unless I'm mistaken, they suspected a piece of the thermal defense was missing... I believe they could have checked before trying a reentry (I think the issue was rather "what to do if the shuttle can't come back?")
Seems quite an impressive security result to me for such an early and crude (you sit on a giant controlled bomb) to me, especially when you think it could have been better if they had been careful.
Well, Methane/Lox still produce carbon dioxyde and water, even if the conversion is perfect. Both have a climate effect, and carbon dioxyde is quoted in the article.
Also, unless I'm mistaken, water in high atmosphere produce HO°, which is one of the main ways to destroy ozone. Any methane leak will also produce HO° by oxydizing there. And I'm pretty sure you'll get additional HO° by the incomplete conversion of the thruster.
So yes, Methane/LOx seems as much a threat to both climate and ozone if the number of launches were going to increase a lot, if the current impact estimation from the article is correct.
I quite agree (as much as I would love a manned mission)... though I think trying something more challenging like manned missions could increase the chances of interesting inventions (like the ones you were discussing). And also, the idea of a manned mission could have a positive impact on people mind, and that gives plently of economical results.
I mean, if winning the world cup can boost the economical performance of a country as much as 0.7%, I would expect something more epic would be even more efficient...
Thatonemoor
Member
Not gonna pretend I know the science behind this but to all the people on here that do I heard that doing this is a good way of getting lots of people sick and/or dead because of g forces. That right?
N7 MRP Weasel
Banned
I'd be down to be part of the first wave to mars... I volunteer to stay there and possibly die there.
Assuming they need all sorts of people from doctors to all ranges of agriculture folks, I'm pretty good in my field id like to go! I'd do it for free honestly.
All i want is my own little space, and an internet connection and ill be good
Assuming they need all sorts of people from doctors to all ranges of agriculture folks, I'm pretty good in my field id like to go! I'd do it for free honestly.
All i want is my own little space, and an internet connection and ill be good
You mean for normal people travelling by rocket?
With the lighter payload, you could have a lower acceleration. Soyouz-like rockets have an acceleration similar to dragsters (4G), except more progressive. People in good health can support this, but it's still inconfortable. But if they reduce it a bit, it should be OK.
Thanks. Always thought it was so much larger. We are already making beast ships twice as large. Now we just need to learn how to make them in space.
Well, if you have a hundred flights with the BFR each day with two of them blowing up, it's getting hard to sell.
The numbers are low, yeah. But the number of astronauts and flights are also low. If you do the math you have a 1.5% fatality rate as an astronaut. NASA themselves put the figure at around 1%. That doesn't seem high but means that every 1 in 100 spacecraft would explode on exit or reentry, with around 100 people on board. For a commercial enterprise, that's totally unacceptable.
As for whether the accidents were human caused: of course they were. A perfectly designed and flown rocket will of course perform perfectly. But the point is that rockets are so complex, and there's so much to go wrong, it's difficult to have them preform perfectly in the first place.
NASA does A LOT of things, I am sure you have to know this... You saying they should throw away many projects which innovate instead of just increasing their budget enough to do big projects? lol
I can't really imagine people getting comfortable with flying in a rocket so soon, but going around the world in 30 minutes sure sounds nice.
The idea of sub orbital flight itself isn't exactly new, so I wonder what makes this more efficient than a plane.
Edit: it apparently needs only a rather small, starting/landing platform, so I guess that's already one advantage.
The idea of sub orbital flight itself isn't exactly new, so I wonder what makes this more efficient than a plane.
Edit: it apparently needs only a rather small, starting/landing platform, so I guess that's already one advantage.
What technology are you waiting on?
In general, there isn't any major technological hurdle to starting space development. The major barrier is cost, not lack of capability. Everything SpaceX has done has primarily been to find a cheaper/more efficient method to do things we can already do. If the will was there, people could have been living in space right now.
Now, I generally agree with you that sending people to Mars isn't the best starting point. Mankind's priority should be establishing an industrial base on the Moon first. That would be safer and more productive.
However, we are not waiting on any new technology to make that feasible. Radiation shielding isn't a complex problem, it is just a matter of scale. We don't need to wait 50 years, we could build some amazing things in space in less than a decade if people commited to a large-scale effort.
The main problem holding the development of space back is the general lack of interest, brought about by people foolishly writing off space as being devoid of anything useful.
You'd think the BFR name would be something Armadillo Aerospace would use...
Also the forces involved in a rocket launch are extreme, a single loose panel has destroyed a whole rocket before and that's with freshly built rockets. A full launch and reentry cycle is going to cause a lot of wear and tear, the space shuttles had large chunks replaced after every mission. Any bit of shoddy maintenance can make the whole rocket explode. If these rockets are so gentle that they don't get half wrecked by a regular launch then more power to them. We'll see.
Also the forces involved in a rocket launch are extreme, a single loose panel has destroyed a whole rocket before and that's with freshly built rockets. A full launch and reentry cycle is going to cause a lot of wear and tear, the space shuttles had large chunks replaced after every mission. Any bit of shoddy maintenance can make the whole rocket explode. If these rockets are so gentle that they don't get half wrecked by a regular launch then more power to them. We'll see.
eyeball_kid
Member
As Elon said in his speech, they've had 16 successful launch-and-returns in a row of the Falcon 9 now. If they can continue this pace of making their launch-and-return system look mundane, I think that would do a lot to ease people's fears. I'm sure people were fairly skeptical about passenger planes in the dawn of air flight.
But as others have said, getting the BFR to the safety level of modern passenger planes is going to be the real test. The first fiery explosion and they could be out of the air travel business.
I too would be a bit worried about the environmental impact if this becomes wildly successful. If let's say they scale up to 50 rockets doing constant flights, what's the impact of all those rocket burns? Surely Elon has thought about this given his environmental focus with Tesla, but he didn't address the issue at all.
Just no... and there is a reason NASA's shit is expensive, same as the military.
I assume the rocket would be using LOX/RP-1 (highly refined kerosene for rockets)? LOX/H2 would be clean (as it produces merely water vapor).
Unknown Soldier
Member
SpaceX can do what NASA does for 1/10th the cost. What does that say to you?
It says, congratz, you managed to do what the governments of the Soviet Union and U.S been doing since 1950s at a better cost in 2017. Competition is what lowers price, not private companies itself. If you are the only one in the game of space racing because most others dropped out, the people you buy supplies from are likely to charge you a lot of money.
Government run healthcare and many other industries are cheaper than private insurance in most scenarios.
RainbowIslands
Member
Good luck. It takes light 3 ~ 22 minutes to get from mars to earth, so your Internet will take at least that long to load. Plus our sun/moon might get in the way at times. If you mean the Mars Internet, You'll have to set it up yourself
Not to mention the storms and radiation/ health risks. :S
Lox-methane, for this new engine
perfectchaos007
Member
I'll go to Mars. I'll bring religion to the planet.
CyclopsRock
Member
I think it will - there's a symbiotic relationship between the tools we have and the need for those tools. In LEO, SpaceX have lowered the cost of putting payloads into orbit sufficiently that there are now customers putting stuff up there that wouldn't have been able to justify the cost previously. There's a way for them to get up there now, so the market is actually expanding.
You have almost the inverse problem if you don't have a "mission" - Why would the technology develop over the next 50 years to help manned space travel if no one's going into space?
As for the virtue of manned space flight in general, Musk's whole vision involves a colony of self-sufficient people, separate from Earth. Naturally this does require people and at the risk of stating the obvious, the goal of having people living off-Earth has to start somewhere. Mars seems like the obvious place, due to its relative proximity to Earth, it having more or less everything we need for the maintenance of life and the production of rocket fuel etc. Again, I think if we wait until all the technology advances to the point that it's ready, we'll never do it. There will always be something else we can have.
I don't think this is true, at least in a democracy. The Apollo missions in the 60's were a success because a) they had a fuck load of money thrown at them and b) there was a single, concise goal (after the achievement of which ,the money hoses turned off). Re: the first one, the money is the reason why NASA ends up sourcing bits and pieces from all over the US, because that's how you get senators to sign off on the cost - to ensure that all the jobs aren't just going to Florida, Texas and California. Secondly, the mission needs to stay the same for a long enough time (point B above) for it to actually come to fruition, which it often doesn't. The SLS itself is a bastardisation of the Space Shuttle launch system and even that's taken over a decade to get exactly no where. Unless you live in a country where the government is a continuous, unmoving presence, these changes in mission parameters and requirements and budget changes etc are a fact of life.
None of that's true for SpaceX, who don't even have publicly traded shares (or Blue Origin etc). If they have a goal then funding it is harder than the government (because, unlike the government, they need to have a commercial outcome) but if they are able to fund it, they're not accountable to the whims of an electorate or a change in legislators in DC. If Musk wants to spend 10 years perfecting a rocket, he can. If he wants to have all this production be done in a single factory in Hawthorne, they can. If they want to bring the production of everything in house, they can. These are all things that can make their production far more efficient than that of a public space programme by virtue of it being a private company that have nothing to do with competition.