Yeah...and piracy and conflict diamonds are just a myth and never happened in history!! Fairy tales like the flood and gorgons!!*seriously, if your plan for an investor is - if i just go into an undefended territory that has no space army or space police or clear laws and take some stuff... and no one is going to stop me! - you'll get kicked out of his office faster. Places that are without an effective formal state, do form a sort of property rights, or turf defended at the the point of a gun. See the Mexican Cartels for reference.
Quote from: Darkseraph on 09/17/2014 01:22 pmYeah...and piracy and conflict diamonds are just a myth and never happened in history!! Fairy tales like the flood and gorgons!!*seriously, if your plan for an investor is - if i just go into an undefended territory that has no space army or space police or clear laws and take some stuff... and no one is going to stop me! - you'll get kicked out of his office faster. Places that are without an effective formal state, do form a sort of property rights, or turf defended at the the point of a gun. See the Mexican Cartels for reference.Seriously you're really overthinking the issue at hand there Darkseraph It's not going to be the "wild-west" up there no matter how much some people want it to be. The simple act of suviving and extracting resources is going to be challenge enough. There won't be any battles between wild-cat miners over a platinuim asteroid for a very long time if ever because the "resources" matter and not the "Land" itself. About the only conflict the BFR/MCT is going to enable is dueling lawers over points of space law. Property "rights" are a chimera and myth that people keep grabbing onto in the hopes that "real-estate" speculation could boot-strap a space economy while never leaving Earth. It's a dead end better off forgotten to deal with the reality of the situation and left to history and on Earth. Out in space you own what you build, what you mine, and what you harvest under the current law. I never understand why people think its required you make someone "pay" for the privilages they already have by requireing they also "own" some abstract of "property" rather than the reality they already own...Randy
Oh I know it won't be a wild west nor would i desire it to be. I just think Dudley example is absurd, that a company will go up there just to take stuff, and its plan is...eh no one will stop it (nation states, other companies, the US congress) That's not a good plan. Bob Bigelow doesn't think that's a great idea, and wants a regime enacted that would provide clarity and protection of the property rights of companies in space. By the time it becomes relevant (ie they find something profitable to do in space with energy and material there), a regime will be put in place to make sure countries or companies don't steal from each other or create other sorts of problems. Human history until very recently was just various armed groups stealing from each other with very little growth. There are precedents for it already though in things that aren't even material, but need to be coordinated to avoid chaos. For example electromagnetic spectrum allocation, as well as orbital slots in GSO.But I suppose this conversation is drifting a bit...
Quote from: Darkseraph on 09/17/2014 02:02 pm...But I suppose this conversation is drifting a bit...A "bit"? On NSF? Threads NEVER drift here! What are you implying? Randy
...But I suppose this conversation is drifting a bit...
Now back on topic! Out of curiosity, does anyone know if a ~300 t to LEO methalox monster would have the capacity to put an orbiter around Pluto? I've always wondered if that was within the realm of possibility.
A ~300 ton BFR would probably not be used to lift 70-100 ton BA-2100's. The BA-2100 is a Powerpoint-stage concept based on Bigelow's research into the largest feasible private-sector rocket. A rocket 4x as large, with a 15m payload fairing, would engender a new design, likely a design with ~10x as much habitable volume.
Quote from: Burninate on 09/14/2014 05:04 pmA ~300 ton BFR would probably not be used to lift 70-100 ton BA-2100's. The BA-2100 is a Powerpoint-stage concept based on Bigelow's research into the largest feasible private-sector rocket. A rocket 4x as large, with a 15m payload fairing, would engender a new design, likely a design with ~10x as much habitable volume.That's engineering for performance instead of cost. If the 70-100 ton station is what the mission requires, and the reusable BFR gets it into orbit cheaply, who cares? If you decide to ship a product cross country by FedEx, do you redesign it so that you use up every spare cubic inch inside the truck?No. It'll be SpaceX's problem to try and pack the BFR full. But the customer should design to the mission, not the launcher. And what will bring down launch costs, especially for a reusable launcher, is using the same design to handle a large range of payloads.
Exploring the solar system is great, but there's not nearly as much money in it as in launching communications satellites. And it would be really nice if BFR could pay back its own development costs even without some entity other than SpaceX deciding to go to Mars, or being dependent on NASA's robotic exploration program.So I'm wondering, how much would the fully reusable BFR be able to lift to GEO? I'm thinking that going only to GTO like Ariane 5 won't work too well with more than two satellites to drop off. So instead, I'd think that BFR would launch its second stage including the payloads into an orbit just below GEO, and then just drop off the satellites one by one as it passes the correct orbital slot. After dropping off all payloads, the second stage would deorbit and be reused. Provided of course that it has a useful amount of payload for such a mission...Has that been modelled yet? If not, would it be possible to do that, Hyperion5 and Dmitri? I think it would help us assess how feasible BFR is financially.
exploration by SpaceX itself wouldn't pay
Quote from: Darkseraph on 09/21/2014 04:46 pmexploration by SpaceX itself wouldn't payNot necessarily true. Entertainment is big business. Successful feature films, for instance, routinely produce over $1 billion in revenue. And once people find a franchise they like, they keep coming back to it. Game of Thrones somehow makes money spending upwards of $50 million to film each episode.Where NASA has fallen flat in generating widespread public interest since Apollo is that the public wants to watch exploration, not science or practice.Take the moon, for instance. It's not just a place, it's a whole planet full of places to explore, but you've got to travel over the planet to explore them. A duplication of the Apollo program might meet with public yawns, but a reality show about prospecting on the moon could be the hit of the century.Even unmanned probes can provide quality entertainment if they're doing something genuinely new (the first lander on Mars to take pictures of the landing area and scoop dust samples was big news to the public, the first rover on Mars to take pictures around the landing area and scoop dust samples was small news, a somewhat larger rover on Mars to take pictures near the landing area and scoop dust samples was non-news), if you have good cameras on them, and if you dig up enough human drama with clips from the control room and the people who built the thing, and good editing. When something dramatic happens, you need to capture it on camera. It's not enough to just know that it happened from instrument readings. And you need to seek out the most visually impressive vistas, not just get a good enough picture to be able to analyse what's in it.For exploration as entertainment, it's much better to aim for amazing things and fail dramatically sometimes than it is to progress by conservative little steps. A dramatic failure is still drama.Context matters, too. People sitting in a room in space is a lot less interesting if that room isn't hurtling toward Mars for the first time.
Quote from: Lourens on 09/21/2014 04:33 pmExploring the solar system is great, but there's not nearly as much money in it as in launching communications satellites. And it would be really nice if BFR could pay back its own development costs even without some entity other than SpaceX deciding to go to Mars, or being dependent on NASA's robotic exploration program.So I'm wondering, how much would the fully reusable BFR be able to lift to GEO? I'm thinking that going only to GTO like Ariane 5 won't work too well with more than two satellites to drop off. So instead, I'd think that BFR would launch its second stage including the payloads into an orbit just below GEO, and then just drop off the satellites one by one as it passes the correct orbital slot. After dropping off all payloads, the second stage would deorbit and be reused. Provided of course that it has a useful amount of payload for such a mission...Not technically true. I mean exploration by SpaceX itself wouldn't pay, but launching exploration missions is lucrative, even more so than launching commercial commsats. Operators of commsats make a lot of money, but not SpaceX doing the launches. And it has to price itself at the moment lower than competition because it has less of a track record. SpaceX going to the point of suing the Airforce over the block buy shows just how important government missions are to it.
Exploring the solar system is great, but there's not nearly as much money in it as in launching communications satellites. And it would be really nice if BFR could pay back its own development costs even without some entity other than SpaceX deciding to go to Mars, or being dependent on NASA's robotic exploration program.So I'm wondering, how much would the fully reusable BFR be able to lift to GEO? I'm thinking that going only to GTO like Ariane 5 won't work too well with more than two satellites to drop off. So instead, I'd think that BFR would launch its second stage including the payloads into an orbit just below GEO, and then just drop off the satellites one by one as it passes the correct orbital slot. After dropping off all payloads, the second stage would deorbit and be reused. Provided of course that it has a useful amount of payload for such a mission...
Why would exploration missions be more lucrative than comsats? They'd pay the same price for the same rocket. But there are many more comsats than exploration missions, so total revenue would be higher for comsats.
The Air Force block buy doesn't include exploration missions, those are GPS satellites, spy satellites and military comsats. Maybe BFR could deploy a bunch of spy satellites into polar SSO in one mission in the same way as I suggested above. And the spy satellites could include much bigger optics.
So, the magnitude of the delta v to stop is enormous (from memory, it's close to 10 km/s for NH).
Not necessarily true. Entertainment is big business. Successful feature films, for instance, routinely produce over $1 billion in revenue. And once people find a franchise they like, they keep coming back to it. Game of Thrones somehow makes money spending upwards of $50 million to film each episode.Where NASA has fallen flat in generating widespread public interest since Apollo is that the public wants to watch exploration, not science or practice.
Take the moon, for instance. It's not just a place, it's a whole planet full of places to explore, but you've got to travel over the planet to explore them. A duplication of the Apollo program might meet with public yawns, but a reality show about prospecting on the moon could be the hit of the century.
But the Moon is not interesting to most people.
No documentary has pulled in as much as a Transformers movie, even two of the highest grossing documentaries of all time, that were about space didn't go anywhere near a 5th of that revenue.