It's interesting that the Bezos "factory" plan and the Musk settlement plan suffer from opposite problems. Bezos offers a cash flow (it's the reason it's there in the first place) but no option to expand to permanence. Has anyone moved to live on an abandoned oil rig (serious questions. sounds possible if you wanted to. but..) ? How self sufficient are they? How much money does it take to live there per month? while Musk's plan has a vision, but otherwise no real reason to stay other than the vision.
Quote from: Coastal Ron on 11/16/2016 09:17 pmNot really. The modern form of humans have been around for about 200,000 years, and the Earth has been around for 4.5 billions years.So from that standpoint a century or two is not very long at all.There are various scenarios for trouble with Earth. Some can arise with very little warning and very few options to do anything about them. Some require such concerted action by so many that they are virtually impossible to stop. In that case a few centuries is too long.
Not really. The modern form of humans have been around for about 200,000 years, and the Earth has been around for 4.5 billions years.So from that standpoint a century or two is not very long at all.
QuoteYou are taking a very narrow view of what Musk's goal is. In order to be successfully multi-planetary we don't have to rely on just Mars, or just Earth's Moon. We just can't rely on Earth being around. So a Mars population might have to rely on supplies from outside of Mars in order to survive on it's own, and that's OK.Well AFAIK only Musk has been talking about settlement IE people, eventually whole families living on another body in the solar system and not returning. By definition everyone else is talking "bases" or "factories."
You are taking a very narrow view of what Musk's goal is. In order to be successfully multi-planetary we don't have to rely on just Mars, or just Earth's Moon. We just can't rely on Earth being around. So a Mars population might have to rely on supplies from outside of Mars in order to survive on it's own, and that's OK.
From our experience of Arctic and Antarctic bases none of those would survive without constant replenishment from more temperate areas.
Yes it would be wonderful if enough settlements were established throughout the solar system that their resources were diverse enough to set up inter-settlement trade but there is no evidence for anyone planning that on anything like the scale needed.
Neither Musk nor Bezos are doing what they are doing because they feel catastrophe is imminent, so stop creating artificial schedules and need dates just to make things look bad.
Bezos and Musk are talking about high level goals, so of course they are not detailing every single movement of a human. And they would admit that they don't really know how everything will roll out.For instance, in order to have factories in space it might turn out that we'll have colonies in space too (likely aboard artificial gravity stations). Now Bezos doesn't talk about that, but he hasn't ruled it out either.
By law both the Arctic and Antarctic are only for scientific use, not industrial or private industry. So drawing conclusions about a future on Mars based on our experiences here on Earth is fraught with bad analogies.
Yet with only the high level plans of Bezos and Musk you are making assumptions about what the details would be about their plans - even though you have not spoken with them.
If asked, I think both Bezos and Musk would not rule out anything at this point, since they are both knowledgeable enough about history to know that the future can unfold in surprising ways. Meaning it's too early to rule out anything...
I'd like to make one general point.Every time someone speculates about the future plans of Blue or SX or someone else and they add additional things to those plans that represents something else that has to happen for that plan to go ahead as you would want it.I suggest that anyone doing so should consider the probability that the thing you want to happen will actually happen.
For instance (and OT for this thread) I'd like Bezos to implement this idea as a pair of captured NEO's which spin at either end of longish line to give reasonable gravity and plenty of work space and ultimately plenty of living room. The start of a O'Neillian space settlement.... [snip]But IRL the odds on bet is it will be a set of modules bought up from Earth as a mini station with zero g throughout, possibly from Bigelow, as they seem to give the best volume for launch mass. "But that's so crude, so lacking in vision" some might say.
I just ask whenever someone comes up with some neat idea (like using an in space power reactor) they consider the cost and risk that will add to the original plan. You may have just turned a viable $500m project into a $10.5Bn unviable project.
I think most of us do, to some degree, but since there is no standard for calculating the unknown future, it would be hard to judge how well anyone is calculating probabilities.
I'm pretty sure most people that have a realistic idea about how things COULD unfold in the future (which I count myself part of) would NOT say it's crude or lacking in vision.
In fact I would say what Jeff Bezos wants is what we would call "vision", but "how" it gets done is details. But you could have someone that focuses just on artificial gravity, and what their solution would be could be "visionary", yet how the bathrooms work on such a rotating station would just be "details". So there is a hierarchy.
Sorry, but you are attempting to throttle enthusiasm, and that doesn't sit well with people, especially when no one knows what will happen in the future.
You could just ignore those that you feel are clearly speculating irrationally? Might make your life easier...
Step 1: a cheap $/kg SHLV vehicle to transport bulk, people and other things to LEO, etc.Step 2: what makes business sense when using #1.The business cases that could show up in step 2 is an open question because until you have #1 the evaluation as to what makes business sense is unknown.
Reread the OP. TL:DR Build it and they will come. A million people at 6 passengers a time on 1 vehicle is 16 666 flights. At 1 flight a day from 1 pad that's 457 years. With 10 vehicles from 10 launch pads and 5 flights per day/pad (IE pad refurb in < 5 hrs) you can do it in less than 1 year. That's 24/7/365 operation. Better make sure those pads don't have any close neighbours.
NG would be capable of 20-30 passengers. ITS 200-300, New Armstrong 100+?. Still going to take a few 1000 launches.
Then again, modern air travel has reached ~100k airline flights worldwide every single day.
assuming there is an economic motivation to do it.
Flipping it the other way around, it "only" requires a launch cadence on the order of one a day.
As far as why a large SHLV is better vs a small LV is the mechanics of launch costs. There are many items that have fixed costs no matter the LV size. And other items that are almost so trivial in costs related to size they do not affect the end costs. But a semi-reusable LV that lowers the cost factor relative to size makes the fixed values more significant. Such that using larger LVs will lower the $/kg without having to work hard at lowering the costs. Other items also are incentives for going large and that is the cube rate for volume vs the square rate for costs of LVs. Volume controls the relative LV performance. Meaning with all other things equal a larger LV (up to a point for the manufacturing limits not requiring different methods) a larger LV will offer significantly lower $/kg prices than smaller LVs.
Quote from: oldAtlas_Eguy on 12/04/2016 04:32 pmAs far as why a large SHLV is better vs a small LV is the mechanics of launch costs. There are many items that have fixed costs no matter the LV size. And other items that are almost so trivial in costs related to size they do not affect the end costs. But a semi-reusable LV that lowers the cost factor relative to size makes the fixed values more significant. Such that using larger LVs will lower the $/kg without having to work hard at lowering the costs. Other items also are incentives for going large and that is the cube rate for volume vs the square rate for costs of LVs. Volume controls the relative LV performance. Meaning with all other things equal a larger LV (up to a point for the manufacturing limits not requiring different methods) a larger LV will offer significantly lower $/kg prices than smaller LVs.As Jess Sponable noted during the DC-X project you need to be very careful with how cost scales with the square or the cube of length (in any direction). Larger surface area gives a bigger TPS but can also give lower per unit mass, hence higher entry and easier TPS requirements. Lowering the $/lb was basically the Saturn V approach and the SLS approach. I'd agree scaling up is not as tough as some think, as long as you're below the intrinsic size limits of the mfg hardware but you still end up with a big absolute launch price instead. A vehicle putting 16 tonnes into LEO for 62m. A vehicle that can put 160 tonnes into orbit for $160m is 1/3 the cost per Kg if fully used. Otherwise it's about 3x the cost for the same 16 tonne payload. True, things like range costs and GNC are about the same regardless of what TSTO is sitting on a pad.