Space travel is getting interesting again

[Crezth]

I know, but I am explaining the rationale behind having them and the effect it would have on developing the space market.

It will be easier if you just name a few reasons why you think such stations/operations must always be prohibitively expensive.

Probably because the technology to maintain them would be expensive by itself, to say nothing of the quality manpower necessary to operate them and the extremely low error tolerances necessary to make them profitable. All space stuff that has to *do* stuff in space is expensive. Satellites are the cheapest of space stuff but they don't generally have to *do* much. The stations themselves would have a large R&D overhead and then a heavy cost up front. There's no way around that, especially if they're meant to have a human crew.

 

[Winner]

Refuelling can be completely automatic/autonomous. That in itself would extend the lifetime of many satellites. Repairing is a bit more complicated, but the availability of such a service would likely help enforce a unified set of standards in satellite making that would make them more easily serviceable.

I thought you'd hit me with equations showing that changing orbital planes is too delta-v intensive or something

 

[Crezth]

Refuelling can be completely automatic/autonomous. That in itself would extend the lifetime of many satellites. Repairing is a bit more complicated, but the availability of such a service would likely help enforce a unified set of standards in satellite making that would make them more easily serviceable.

This is all true, but we're still a ways off from that. It will and would still be many millions of dollars in terms of cost.

I thought you'd hit me with equations showing that changing orbital planes is too delta-v intensive or something

Haha, no, I'm a nice engineer.

 

[Winner]

This is all true, but we're still a ways off from that. It will and would still be many millions of dollars in terms of cost.

I don't think so. We'll see a lot of stuff happening in LEO in the next two decades.

I am just afraid that's all we'll see.

 

[Crezth]

I don't think so. We'll see a lot of stuff happening in LEO in the next two decades.

I think if it does develop in any major way as you allege, it'll be unprecedented for the level of interest this generation has shown in space. Nevertheless, the cost will ~always~ be high. There's simply no way it can't be. Barring, you know, mass production or scientific miracle.

 

[PlutonianEmpire]

How 'bout combining science with the paranormal, like ESP or psychicism or something?

Might make things a bit more interesting, and it might reveal a new path for technology that we haven't seen before.

 

[pi-r8]

I don't think so. We'll see a lot of stuff happening in LEO in the next two decades.

I am just afraid that's all we'll see.

I agree with this. And, actually I'm OK with that state of affairs.

The main problem with space travel is that there's just no place to go. We could maybe, at massive cost, send a manned mission to mars. Let's say we do- what are they going to do there? Plant a flag, photograph their bootprint, and play golf just like we did on the moon? They could collect rock samples, but our robot probes have already done that quite well.

With LEO, (which arguably shouldn't even count as outer space) there's clear economic and military reasons for going there. But everywhere in our solar system is so utterly desolate and hostile to life that there's no point in going there. "We'll do it just because we can" isn't really a good enough reason. Let's wait until we've figured out why we want to go.

 

[innonimatu]

I don't think so. We'll see a lot of stuff happening in LEO in the next two decades.

I am just afraid that's all we'll see.

Yeah, and that stuff will be mostly space debris collisions, the way things are going!

 

[Singularity]

I think China has the potential to force space into the headlines again. Europe and America isn't just going to sit idly by watching China taking all of the glory.

As a hopeless space romantic I cheer that competition onwards with every fibre of my being And with enough public interest we should see a consolidation of privately owned ventures profiting from it and may even outlast the clash of governmental and inter-governmental agency's interest in space.

 

[Terxpahseyton]

Let's wait until we've figured out why we want to go.

To create useful technology on the way? Sort of special subsidy for technological development. But with the bonus of being awesome!

 

[Old Hippy]

Let's wait until we've figured out why we want to go.

Spoiler :

When compared to the earth the moon has a tremendous amount of helium 3," said Lawrence Taylor, a director of the US Planetary Geosciences Institute, Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences.

"When helium 3 combines with deuterium (an isotope of hydrogen) the fusion reaction proceeds at a very high temperature and it can produce awesome amounts of energy," Taylor told AFP.

"Just 25 tonnes of helium, which can be transported on a space shuttle, is enough to provide electricity for the US for one full year," said Taylor, who is in the north Indian city of Udaipur for a global conference on moon exploration.

Helium 3 is deposited on the lunar surface by solar winds and would have to be extracted from moon soil and rocks.

To extract helium 3 gas the rocks have to be heated above 1,400 degs Fdegs C). Some 200 million tonnes of lunar soil would produce one tonne of helium, Taylor said, noting that only 10 kilos of Helium 3 are available on earth.

its a long shot idea, but without trade the is no reason to go

 

[pi-r8]

Spoiler :

When compared to the earth the moon has a tremendous amount of helium 3," said Lawrence Taylor, a director of the US Planetary Geosciences Institute, Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences.

"When helium 3 combines with deuterium (an isotope of hydrogen) the fusion reaction proceeds at a very high temperature and it can produce awesome amounts of energy," Taylor told AFP.

"Just 25 tonnes of helium, which can be transported on a space shuttle, is enough to provide electricity for the US for one full year," said Taylor, who is in the north Indian city of Udaipur for a global conference on moon exploration.

Helium 3 is deposited on the lunar surface by solar winds and would have to be extracted from moon soil and rocks.

To extract helium 3 gas the rocks have to be heated above 1,400 degs Fdegs C). Some 200 million tonnes of lunar soil would produce one tonne of helium, Taylor said, noting that only 10 kilos of Helium 3 are available on earth.

its a long shot idea, but without trade the is no reason to go

Even if we did have working fusion reactors, and could get to the moon for free, helium-3 from the moon would still be more expensive than coal:

Finally, folks speak of the helium-3 (³He) resource on the Moon at a trace concentration of about 10 parts per billion by mass. Such fuel could be useful in fusion reactors of the future. I will not address this option here, except to compare the energy density to that of fossil fuels. One gram of lunar soil has about 10−8 g of ³He, or about 3×10−9 moles, becoming 2×1015 particles. Reacting with deuterium, this process releases 18.6 MeV of energy, becoming 1.4 kcal/g. Compare this to coal at 4–7 kcal/g, oil at 10 kcal/g, and natural gas (methane) at 13 kcal/g. The energy density is not ridiculously small, but the resource is very diffuse, expensive to collect and deliver, and with no current application for its use. That’s why I’ll say no more here.

 

[pi-r8]

To create useful technology on the way? Sort of special subsidy for technological development. But with the bonus of being awesome!

Well, if you're arguing for a general across-the-board increase in scientific funding then, yes I'd agree. But to make a manned, interplanetary space mission would require giving all of that funding to the space program, and it's hard to see why we should do that. The apollo missions led to huge advances in missile technology, which is just what the government wanted, but there's nothing comparable now that need to be developed in space.

 

[Winner]

I think if it does develop in any major way as you allege, it'll be unprecedented for the level of interest this generation has shown in space. Nevertheless, the cost will ~always~ be high. There's simply no way it can't be. Barring, you know, mass production or scientific miracle.

The high prices we see today (even though they're going down, don't forget it used to be something like $10-20,000 per kilo to LEO just a decade or two ago) make no sense. I recommend reading "LEO on the cheap" - it's from 1994, but it's a pretty good analysis of why the costs of sending stuff to space are so high. It turns out it has little to do with technical issues, but rather administrative, bureaucratic, organizational, and managerial constraints. And this was written nearly 20 years ago, so it doesn't take into account recent advances in fields related to rocketry.

So no, the cost won't always be high, at least not as ridiculously high as it is today. It will of course always be relatively more expensive than taking a flight to Tokyo, simply because the energies involved in achieving a stable orbit are higher, but there is no real justification for the astronomically high prices we're dealing with today.

The main problem with space travel is that there's just no place to go.

I could write down a pretty long list of places in this Solar System that are worthy of visiting, so this statement sound... absurd to me, no offence. When people say that, I imagine the mediaeval man looking at the ocean, thinking that it leads nowhere and that his world is all there is. I know it's not your case, but still, the association is quite strong.

With LEO, (which arguably shouldn't even count as outer space) there's clear economic and military reasons for going there. But everywhere in our solar system is so utterly desolate and hostile to life that there's no point in going there. "We'll do it just because we can" isn't really a good enough reason. Let's wait until we've figured out why we want to go.

Again, I can list plenty of reasons why we should go. Curiosity (aka scientific inquiry) is one of them.

Mars itself is so insanely interesting world that no expense would be wasted in getting us a research base there.

 

[pi-r8]

I could write down a pretty long list of places in this Solar System that are worthy of visiting, so this statement sound... absurd to me, no offence. When people say that, I imagine the mediaeval man looking at the ocean, thinking that it leads nowhere and that his world is all there is. I know it's not your case, but still, the association is quite strong.



Again, I can list plenty of reasons why we should go. Curiosity (aka scientific inquiry) is one of them.

Mars itself is so insanely interesting world that no expense would be wasted in getting us a research base there.

I agree there's interesting science experiments that can be done in the Solar System. But, they can be done much better by robots, since they can stay indefinitely without having to worry about food, gravity, radiation, or psychological stress. Most of the plans for manned missions have been, basically, to limit their time on the surface as much as possible so that they won't die.

I know a lot of people just really want to see a human walk on another planet. And, that's OK I guess, so long as we realize that it's purely a vanity project.

 

[El_Machinae]

Yeah, I think it's essential that we just recognise that it's a vanity project and a step-wise quest for human advancement into the cosmos. There's a long-term, multi-generation goal that needs momentum, and there're short-term feel-good projects.

It's not efficient science, not like robot probes are. I think what's needed is a consensus that a portion of the space budget will be spent on the quest and some will be spent on questions. If 50% is spent on manned flight, and 50% is spent on science, then we'll get progress in both arenas. It needs a hard ratio, because we'll always be tempted to steal from Space Paul to pay for Science Peter.

IMO, the spending on the manned portion should be 'enough' to get regular milestones. Something 'cool' every fifteen or twenty years, funded by governments. IF private industry finds utility for people-in-space, then we'll get the normal leapfrog we've seen elsewhere in development.

This is most already the case, but we are few in number and underfunded in the aggregate.

Your point that tourism is providing the profit motive as it stands right now is a fair point, but relies too heavily on what is, essentially, a niche market.

Yes, I know it's a niche market. But I just cannot think of any other. Either space fans can try to shuffle money/attention into that niche market or they can help ignore that niche market and allow it to wither. Ideally, while shuffling attention to the niche market, we SHOULD be thinking of alternate markets, but there's no reason we cannot do both.

Apply for contests that have 'flights' as a prize, buy the books of the people proposing ideas (Mars colonies, space elevators, etc), pay attention when space projects start and when they get sponsors.

If we're not willing to spend $50 of our own money (annually), we cannot really expect other people to spend their $50 (in taxes)

 

[Winner]

I agree there's interesting science experiments that can be done in the Solar System. But, they can be done much better by robots, since they can stay indefinitely without having to worry about food, gravity, radiation, or psychological stress.

No. Robots do a specific task for which they're designed, nothing more, nothing less. A single human geologist with a set of tools could do more in a week than the two Mars rovers accomplished in years. We only use robots because currently that's the best we can do with the pathetic budgets that are allocated to space exploration/science.

Most of the plans for manned missions have been, basically, to limit their time on the surface as much as possible so that they won't die.

That's simply not true. Recent thinking about how to do a Mars mission includes a long surface stay on Mars, because anything else would be folly. The short surface stay thinking was dominant in the past, because back then the reason why to go to Mars was chiefly "to beat the Soviets/Americans" (depending on who made these plans).

A small manned research base similar to those we have in Antarctica here on Earth would be a huge step forward - and it would hardly cost more than, say, the Iraq war. I dare to say it would also do more good for humanity in the long term.

I know a lot of people just really want to see a human walk on another planet. And, that's OK I guess, so long as we realize that it's purely a vanity project.

So what? Human history is basically a set of one vanity project following another. It's how we operate. I'd much rather have "send humans to another planet" as our vanity project than "spend billions of dollars in a presidential campaign" or "subsidize our farmers with hundreds of billions of euros" or "build artificial islands in Dubai" or "drop bombs on a random middle eastern country".

But that's just me, you see, I am vain that way.

 

[Crezth]

The high prices we see today (even though they're going down, don't forget it used to be something like $10-20,000 per kilo to LEO just a decade or two ago) make no sense. I recommend reading "LEO on the cheap" - it's from 1994, but it's a pretty good analysis of why the costs of sending stuff to space are so high. It turns out it has little to do with technical issues, but rather administrative, bureaucratic, organizational, and managerial constraints. And this was written nearly 20 years ago, so it doesn't take into account recent advances in fields related to rocketry.

So no, the cost won't always be high, at least not as ridiculously high as it is today. It will of course always be relatively more expensive than taking a flight to Tokyo, simply because the energies involved in achieving a stable orbit are higher, but there is no real justification for the astronomically high prices we're dealing with today.

I am highly skeptical that the costs are not tied in large part to technical issues. And if some of the "people"-related issues are the pay of the related experts, then I can think of no reason why that should be cut when their work is abnormally difficult to replace. I'll check out that book, though.

 

[peter grimes]

How 'bout combining science with the paranormal, like ESP or psychicism or something?

The only problem being, there's zero evidence of anything like ESP or psychism [whatever that is] existing. If you think you have some evidence of it, then you should get in touch with James Randi and claim the $1,000,000 prize. Nobody's done it yet....

 

[GamezRule]

I thought there was a small space tourism industry? Or was that Russia?