Author Topic: Alternative missions for BFR & MCT  (Read 41942 times)

Offline RanulfC

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Re: Alternative missions for BFR & MCT
« Reply #40 on: 09/17/2014 01:42 pm »
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.

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
From The Amazing Catstronaut on the Black Arrow LV:
British physics, old chap. It's undignified to belch flames and effluvia all over the pad, what. A true gentlemen's orbital conveyance lifts itself into the air unostentatiously, with the minimum of spectacle and a modicum of grace. Not like our American cousins' launch vehicles, eh?

Offline Dudely

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Re: Alternative missions for BFR & MCT
« Reply #41 on: 09/17/2014 02:01 pm »
Yes, I wish I had never said "property rights". A more accurate term would be "the ability to generate wealth from physical objects in space".

Mark my words: The MOMENT someone proves that they can generate wealth using far-flung space-based resources "property rights" will be developed for them, however unnecessary and useless we think they may be.

The fact I said the words "property rights are developed" is less important than the meaning behind it- exploitation of objects in space, starting with NEOs.

Offline Darkseraph

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Re: Alternative missions for BFR & MCT
« Reply #42 on: 09/17/2014 02:02 pm »
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.

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...
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." R.P.Feynman

Offline RanulfC

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Re: Alternative missions for BFR & MCT
« Reply #43 on: 09/17/2014 02:11 pm »
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...

A "bit"? On NSF? Threads NEVER drift here! What are you implying? :)

Randy
« Last Edit: 09/17/2014 02:12 pm by RanulfC »
From The Amazing Catstronaut on the Black Arrow LV:
British physics, old chap. It's undignified to belch flames and effluvia all over the pad, what. A true gentlemen's orbital conveyance lifts itself into the air unostentatiously, with the minimum of spectacle and a modicum of grace. Not like our American cousins' launch vehicles, eh?

Offline Hyperion5

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Re: Alternative missions for BFR & MCT
« Reply #44 on: 09/17/2014 03:27 pm »
...
But I suppose this conversation is drifting a bit...

A "bit"? On NSF? Threads NEVER drift here! What are you implying? :)

Randy

He could be implying that two nice blokes in NSF just went and ran over my thread's nice front lawn with a tank and left a big, muddy dirt track behind them.  ;)  Also tragically, it seems that I must always assume someone I don't know on NSF is a guy, as we have a serious issue with having enough female members.  Apologies if you are not a male, Darkseraph, but this site is far too overrun by guys right now. 
---

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. 

Offline simonbp

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Re: Alternative missions for BFR & MCT
« Reply #45 on: 09/17/2014 03:45 pm »
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. 

Yes.

But the question you should ask is "How long would it take to get there?" The problem with taking a New Horizons-like trajectory to Pluto is that the spacecraft's velocity vector is almost perpendicular to Pluto's heliocentric velocity vector. So, the magnitude of the delta v to stop is enormous (from memory, it's close to 10 km/s for NH). To get around that with standard rockets, you really need to approach Pluto on a non-escape trajectory, bound heliocentric orbit with an aphelion at Pluto. That's great, but it would take around 70 years to reach Pluto. Not so great.

Non-chemical rockets are the real answer, and a nuclear reactor-ion engine system is the most plausible Pluto orbiter that could reach the destination before everyone on the mission team dies of old age. But nuclear-electric is a whole different can of worms to a super-large rocket.

Offline Norm38

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Re: Alternative missions for BFR & MCT
« Reply #46 on: 09/17/2014 04:27 pm »
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.

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.

Offline Hyperion5

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Re: Alternative missions for BFR & MCT
« Reply #47 on: 09/21/2014 05:15 am »
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.

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.

One such payload among many could be a Neptune orbiter.  However it occurs to me that this would be a low priority for NASA.  If NASA did have access to such an LV, what would be the top priorities?  I'm going to take a guess it would be Mars, Europa and Titan.  But you can do some of those missions without such a large LV.  So what missions, specifically, would require this monster?  A big Titan orbiter/lander mission? 

Offline Lourens

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Re: Alternative missions for BFR & MCT
« Reply #48 on: 09/21/2014 04:33 pm »
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.

Offline Darkseraph

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Re: Alternative missions for BFR & MCT
« Reply #49 on: 09/21/2014 04:46 pm »
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.
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.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." R.P.Feynman

Offline Patchouli

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Re: Alternative missions for BFR & MCT
« Reply #50 on: 09/21/2014 05:00 pm »
I think lifting and returning materials for space based industry could be a good alternative mission for BFR.
http://www.spaceislandgroup.com/manufacturing.html


There's the protein crystals and impossible alloys but also some existing processes could be made more efficient such as growing the silicon ingots in microgravity might improve semiconductor yields.

Before saying it'll still be too expensive Intel spent over five billion on their latest fab a couple of BFR flights a year would be a drop in the bucket for them.
« Last Edit: 09/21/2014 05:08 pm by Patchouli »

Offline Nindalf

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Re: Alternative missions for BFR & MCT
« Reply #51 on: 09/21/2014 06:07 pm »
exploration by SpaceX itself wouldn't pay
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.

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.

Offline Darkseraph

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Re: Alternative missions for BFR & MCT
« Reply #52 on: 09/21/2014 06:50 pm »
exploration by SpaceX itself wouldn't pay
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.

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.

Oh Keith Cowing was on that band wagon a while back, that Avatar pulled in over a billion, therefore the public are interested in Space Exploration....total b.s. If Pandora was a real planet-moon, that was accessible to our technology full of real breathing blue people and killer animals, maybe it would be interesting for viewers. But the Moon is not interesting to most people. It's lifeless rock, that looks very similar in every location to the average non-paul spudis person. The amount of people that would be entertained by that is very small. People would rather see astronauts fake go to the Moon with killer robots, as in Transformers 3...than watch an actual documentary about people going to the Moon. 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. Gravity did well at the box office, but it's because it has a human drama element and is exciting. I loved it. But its total fiction, and with $100 million budget, a lot cheaper to do than even the cheapest commericial crew mission possible in this decade. If they filmed a mission to Mars or the Moon or wherever, I'd watch it. Most other people would yawn though, and that's the reality.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." R.P.Feynman

Offline Lobo

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Re: Alternative missions for BFR & MCT
« Reply #53 on: 09/22/2014 09:47 pm »
A few Alternative missions I could think of:

1)  Planetary probes with large stores of propellant so they can brake into orbits of far away planets and do various orbital maneuvers during extended missions.  With enough LV capability at an affordable enough cost, New Horizons could have had enough propellant on board to brake in orbit around Pluto do a much more thorough and extended mission there rather than a brief fly by.

2)  Planetary probes with more direct trajectories and shorter transit times.

3)  Manned lunar missions.

4)  Large diameter space telescopes. 

5)  Upper end payloads to GTO.   Assuming a reusable upper stage, it could afford the mass penalty of deliverying a payload to GTO and then coming back to Earth and landing for reuse.  While it would seem like overkill to to send a D4H class payload to GTO with such a large LV, if both stages can be quickly and feasibly reused, then there is very little cost to doing it other than fuel vs. a smaller LV.  These could be payloads that would require an FH to expend the central core and upper stage to loft (current larger NRO payloads), or all three cores and upper stage (possible future larger birds).  Dual payloads would be obviously easily done as well, if there were two playloads going to similar enough trajectories.

6)  Manned Venus flyby.

7)  Large expendable space stations like BA-2100.  They'd go up with a finite life, serve their duration, and be dorbited and replaced rather than doing more elaborate in-space repairs like the ISS.  This would also allow a sort of production line to make them, rather than being complete 1-off special builds like Skylab or ISS.  Something more like a large version of the Soviet Salyut program, where there was a comming module that would have a finite life and then be replaced.  With something like the ISS, it's so complex and expensive, if it were to have a major failure and need to be abandon, it cannot be replaced.  This would be a far lower cost program with periodic replacement, and full or near full surface integration and little or no in-space assembly. 
For example, let's say a BA-2100 cost $1.5B each.  And let's say conservatively, that BFR cost NASA (or whomever) $500M to launch.  And let's say that BA2100 would last 5 years and then need to be replaced.
Assuming the ISS cost $100B to construct including the launches to get all the components in space (I've heard that number, unsure if it's completely accurate or not), the ISS would need to stay up and functional for 250 years to break even vs. sending a new BA-2100 up every 5 years...assuming those prices.
If you assume the ISS was half that, $50B to finish, then it would only need to be up for 125 years to break even. 
Even if a BA-2100 cost $2B or $3B each, were still talking a much lower cost over time than the ISS.

Anyway, those are some speculative possible BFR missions, if it's price turned out to actually be "relatively" low cost.

Offline StealerofSuns

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Re: Alternative missions for BFR & MCT
« Reply #54 on: 09/22/2014 11:17 pm »
Our remote descendants, safely arrayed on many worlds throughout the Solar System and beyond, will be unified by their common heritage, by their regard for their home planet, and by the knowledge that, whatever other life may be, the only humans in all the Universe come from Earth. -Sagan

Offline GregA

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Re: Alternative missions for BFR & MCT
« Reply #55 on: 09/22/2014 11:21 pm »
If the power-that-be wanted to cancel the SLS, but save face, is there any aspect of the SLS they could argue was money well spent for use by the BFR? I believe the answer is "not at all! Different propellant, different sizes, different stage breakdowns".... trying to get multiple different part sources to work cohesively together would be unnecessary and painful.

Nevertheless, they found a way of keeping the shuttle boosters in the SLS program.

Of course, even if NASA tried to adjust their SLS program to build an alternative second stage for the BFR (instead of MCT), SpaceX might have some major issues with it! Better for NASA to follow their principle of using commercial options when available and not building their own...

Offline Lourens

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Re: Alternative missions for BFR & MCT
« Reply #56 on: 09/22/2014 11:22 pm »
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...
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.

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.

Offline RanulfC

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Re: Alternative missions for BFR & MCT
« Reply #57 on: 09/23/2014 06:57 pm »
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.

Your basic assumptions miss a major point though: The BFR/MCT system in and of itself allows a MUCH higher flight rate avialable for such "exploration" missions at a much lower price. Note also that "industry" thinking along these lines has indicated that IF such a high payload to LEO/GTO/GEO was available that the "standard" comm-sat would become obsolete and that larger, modular platforms in GEO would be much more cost and operationally effective. Meaning there would be far fewer "comm-sat" launches but more "component" launches and maintenance and operations launchs as well. And that in and of itself is "supposed" to lead to more space industrialization AND the R&D and explortation required to support that. In the end (as the "plan" goes at any rate :) ) we're supposed to see the "comm-satellite" market disappear into a general "infratructural" industry base and expansion, exploration, exploitation hugely increase to "keep up" with that expansion.

Quote
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.

Ahh but you're "assuming" that nothing really changes given the much greater access granted by the BFR and the like :)

Randy
From The Amazing Catstronaut on the Black Arrow LV:
British physics, old chap. It's undignified to belch flames and effluvia all over the pad, what. A true gentlemen's orbital conveyance lifts itself into the air unostentatiously, with the minimum of spectacle and a modicum of grace. Not like our American cousins' launch vehicles, eh?

Offline Vultur

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Re: Alternative missions for BFR & MCT
« Reply #58 on: 09/24/2014 04:24 am »
So, the magnitude of the delta v to stop is enormous (from memory, it's close to 10 km/s for NH).

Well, that's about like Earth launch to orbit. And we can do that with chemical rockets. So maybe it could be done with a very large initial mass & a small orbiter. Or am I missing something?

Offline Vultur

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Re: Alternative missions for BFR & MCT
« Reply #59 on: 09/24/2014 04:27 am »
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.

Quote
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.

I think this makes a lot of sense. Maybe not as a sole source of funding - might not be enough for that (but with lower launch costs maybe...) but it could make back a significant proportion, if handled right (IE not like the NASA TV channel!)

EDIT:
But the Moon is not interesting to most people.

Possibly not, but you don't need "most" people. The population with TVs, computers etc. is huge - even a small proportion is a lot. (Does any TV show/movie/etc in this age of many entertainment options actually get watched by most people?)


Quote
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.

Yeah, but is that because of content, or presentation? And was the distribution/advertising/etc as big?

If you're going to make this work it needs to be multimedia, heavily advertised, lots of spinoffs (apps, games, merchandise, books).. everyone needs to know it's out there.
« Last Edit: 09/24/2014 04:32 am by Vultur »

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