I am really hoping everything goes well in this mission; we are so close to being able to send astronauts into space through commercial companies. Space X is doing things cheaper and faster than any government has. These commercial companies are going to revolutionize spaceflight.
While they are doing all of this they need to develop their heavy lift rocket as fast as possible with the goal of landing a man on mars within 10 years. Elon Musk himself said a few days ago that we need to go to mars and it is possible for them to do this "as early as 2018". The reason for the quick timeline is because funding and political slaughter for space programs is more likely to happen as time goes on and as new presidents come in or some new economic trouble happens.
Following the success of the ISS, going to Mars should be an international endavour. It needs to be a goal not for one country, but the whole human race to become a multi-planetary species and go to Mars.
You know, SpaceX has made such a huge difference to launch costs, that it is imaginable that the US could do a solo Mars mission. To give a real-world example (well, sort of):
Juno was recently launched aboard an Atlas V, which launches for roughly the same price as the Falcon Heavy will in a year or so's time. Juno gets placed into an orbit that will take it out beyond Mars' orbit, before returning to the Earth for a gravity-assist flyby. The flyby is necessary to double the payload that they could otherwise send to Jupiter.
Falcon Heavy can left 3 times the payload of an Atlas V, so Juno could have increased in size, and avoided the 2 and a half years it will take to execute the Earth flyby manoeuvre, all for the same price. Alternatively, a spacecraft 3 times the weight of Juno (which weighed in at 8000 pounds / 3500Kg) could be sent direct to Mars.
What could you do with all of that? Well, the Mars Direct mission requires about 140 000kg, to be assembled in orbit. That's about 14 Falcon Heavy launches, which has a total price tag of about US$1.4 billion. Of course, on top of that there are in-orbit assembly costs, and the costs of the actual Mars-bound hardware, - which would roughly double the price tag to US$3 billion. Without Falcon Heavy, that mission cost is doubled to US$ 6 billion.
I wonder what Juno would have looked like if it had three times the payload to play with...
One thing that is too common in these aerospace related budget estimates is that they go up. I am trying not to be pessimistic, but I have a feeling that their launch costs might go up a little bit. Even if it does it, their prices would still be groundbreaking nonetheless. I bought Dr. Zubrin's book on mars direct (its great!) and lets say that somehow the cost to send three spacecraft with the capability to come back (including development costs) is $10 billion (which I am pretty sure is a super under estimate but the spacex way might say otherwise). To put that into perspective google could have funded a full fledged manned mars mission and still save $2 billion to spare by not buying motorola...
But this is definitely possible even with nasa's reduced budget now that the shuttle is retired.
NASA will keep the money. If NASA was actually a space program you'd probably be right. But it's not - it's a jobs program. Did you ever wonder why "mission control" is in Houston instead of the cape, or why SRBs, which could have been much safer transported by ship, were built in land-locked Utah?
Austerity? They planned to reduce the deficit by 10% in ten years and only 1% next year. Call me when they touch the debt. As it is they are still spending extravagantly.
I didn't say anything about the debt ceiling deal.
edit: Pointing out that NASA is not likely to keep the funding is not the same as bringing up politics. Pointing out the likely factions responsible for it would be bringing up politics, but I didn't. Because it would be better suited for a whole new submission, not a long tree here.
It seems like there might be an exciting "Moore's Law" like rubicon that will be crossed in space exploration. Eventually spacecraft launched later, for cheaper, start arriving before their predecessors.
Plays a big role in the final battles of Ender's Game. It's not quite to the point where the newer ships arrive before the older ones, but the attack is planned so the ships arrive at similar times IIRC.
Ah yes, I got sidetracked halfway through writing that :) What I was thinking (as opposed to writing) was that Falcon could launch 10 000kg to Mars orbit, being three times more than what an Atlas V could launch on Juno's orbit, which actually goes beyond Mars.
So yes, three launches, not 14, making the total cost for Mars Direct less than US$2 billion. But I made the same mistake for Atlas calculations, so it still ends up costing 3 times as much in launch costs...
Oops, sorry, I read too quickly and thought you meant 140 t to LEO per launch, and three launches for the full mission.
(I also had NASA's DRM 5 in my head, which requires three deliveries of roughly that size per mission, rather than Mars Direct which requires two.)
The international endeavour won't happen for a while due to government regulations dating back to Cold War [0]. An open space community decided to split into two space groups, USA and Non-USA [1].
Thanks for the heads up, I wasn't aware of that. Guess I need to become a US citizen, then...
On a sidenote, why is that the case? Sure, SpaceX is a US-based company, but why does that mean that they can't hire non-US citizens with visas etc? What export regulations are they - and come to think of it, what are they exporting?
Many space technologies are listed as munitions in the US, and revealing information about those technologies to foreigners counts as export. There are exceptions, and you can get export licenses (companies routinely do), but hiring non-Americans would be a pain—American employees wouldn't be able to share much information with them!
p.s. Under ITAR, all you need is a green card. I don't know if that's good enough for SpaceX—they might be under other restrictions than ITAR, too.
Exporting is loosely-defined here. It means that they can't show export-controlled data (ie: some parts of rocket / missile technology) to foreign nationals. Just showing the document inside a US company to a non-US person is classified as "exporting".
Those $150m are for bringing up the same payload to the ISS as Dragon can, right? In 2007 Nasa signed a $719m contract with Roscosmos for 15 seats and 5.6 tons of cargo. 5.6 tons are three Progress flights (2.350kg per mission) and one Dragon flight (6.000kg per mission). We don’t really know what part of those $719m is for cargo but $150m seems about right to me. Those $150m would pay for three and not just one Progress flight.
It’s quite amazing, really. The Dragon spacecraft is much more awesome than Progress. It can get more than double the payload to the ISS. More importantly, though, Dragon can bring half of that back to earth. There is no spacecraft that can currently do that. The Space Shuttle could but not anymore and Soyuz is pretty much only good for bringing back people and not cargo.
And it’s still comparable in cost or cheaper than Progress (which is a truly mature and tested spacecraft)? That’s quite astonishing.
Next to the fact that NASA would rather give money to a US company, which will invest part of it to develop cheaper and more capable rockets, than to Russia, these SpaceX costs are likely to be significantly cheaper than Soyuz.
In 2007, NASA got a deal for $719 million for 5.6 tons and 15 seats. Seats on Soyuz now cost ~$60 million a piece, or $900 million just for 15 seats. The price for cargo then probably also increased.
And competition also means that the Russians can’t mark up their flights quite as much. Currently they are the only ones doing it, Nasa depends on them. That’s obviously not a nice situation to be in.
Interesting that I never seem to hear anyone complain about privatizing spaceflight. (Caveat: Our rockets, etc., were always built by defense/aerospace contractors, AFAIK.) Halliburton, Blackwater, etc., are bad privatizations, but SpaceX is good.
That said, SpaceX is doing exciting things more affordably than we did them before, so it’s hardly puzzling.
Mercenaries have been associated with some bad things in the past - including the past of the United States - and so they are generally not seen as a good thing.
Private transportation systems are not really equivalent.
Moreover, privatization in and of itself is very often an excuse to throw money to cronies - certainly the case with Blackwater in particular; a mercenary costs hundreds of thousands a year to replace $30K or so in support costs for a regular military person. Just calling something "privatization" is usually enough for knee-jerk libertarians to assume it's saving you money - when it's just another item in the ol' kleptocracy toolkit.
Privatization as a concept also takes a hit from the bone-stupid idea of privatizing Social Security - which is just another way of passing risk on to the little guy while making sure our friends in the financial industry get to buy bigger yachts.
Privatization in the space industry really does save money - but much, much more importantly, it's the logical next step in making sure space technology gets viable. Long past time to get the free market involved there.
1: The real kind, where the government simply stops doing an activity (or does it too ineffectively) and a market appears out of opportunity - like SpaceX. Libertarians like this because it makes the government smaller.
2: The fake kind, where a government decides that something it does should now be done by a private entity under contract. Blackwater is one example, most privatized railways are another. These seem to port the annoying bits from government (the private operator is accountable to the government, not the "customer", and there is still no competition) and while the typically predictable cost is good for budgeting, the real benefit is too often in keeping politicians' fingers out of day-to-day operations. Most libertarians would prefer you'd just get the governments hands out of the operation altogether.
I'm interested to hear where you get $30K in support costs for a regular service member. Very rough calculations indicate at least $100,000 per person based solely on the "military personnel" (payroll, perhaps food etc.?), of $154 billion. That's not even touching the $283 billion in operations and maintenance.
I'm just going on take-home pay, tacitly assuming that the infrastructure required to support a person is roughly equivalent. And honestly, Blackwater's infrastructure also probably cost more, but I was just looking at salary. Mercenaries are expensive.
It is an interesting (and also important) line. Generally, it is services that fall under the category of "public good" that are provided by government (in a capitalist nation anyway). These are things that, by their nature, a) must be afforded to everyone for them to be effective, and/or b) for which there is no (or little) commercial incentive to produce.
...
You know, I was going to write a lengthy explanation of what that means for your examples, but I'm late for work, and it's on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good
But suffice to say, there's no natural monopoly in space flight, and they're getting paid (by both the private and public sector) for their services, so space flight isn't a public good (anymore at least).
Really? Have you been living under a rock? EVERYONE is complaining about privatizing spaceflight. Congressmen, 24-hour news hosts, op-ed writers... there is (sadly) a concerted effort out there to kill this privatization effort.
I know this isn't exactly relevant, but I don't get to say this enough: someone needs to get cracking on this whole "tertaforming Mars and Venus" thing. Maybe that's where some of NASA's focus can be in the future as private enterprise picks up space travel.
We already know how to build colonies, even if we haven't done it on another planet. Turning a subway or megamall design into a Martian colony is an engineering problem. Terraforming is a fundamental science problem. We're still a long way from cracking it.
It's more than just an engineering problem. It's also an economics problem. What is going to pay for that settlement? Are there enough mineral resources on Mars to justify the cost? Or will it be paid at taxpayer expense, for no significant benefit over unmanned missions or brief manned missions to Mars?
So yes, it is easier to build a settlement than to terraform, but I don't think you could justify the cost to build a self-sufficient settlement. Heck, if we start running out of land to settle on on Earth, there's always the sea to settle, which requires many of the same engineering considerations to settle but at much lower cost to get us there and do trade with the rest of the planet. I suspect we'll be seeing either underwater or raft-based settlements long before we see settlements on Mars.
A lot of people would like to live on Mars, given the chance. Meanwhile, people are growing richer and technology is advancing. It's fairly likely that at some point there will be a point where people can pay their own way to creating a Martian colony.
A lot of people might like the idea of living on Mars when there is absolutely no risk of that actually happening. But
really there is not much point in living on Mars for extended periods of time, there's very little that humans could do that machines couldn't do as well and a lot cheaper. Combine that pointlessness with what would in practice be an an isolated, risky and uncomfortable life, and I suspect that the pool shrinks down dramatically.
Terraforming Venus you'd need to figure out how to make a planet rotate 1000km/hr faster. Terraforming Mars you'd need to add mass equal to another planet at least the same size.
But as jsnell said below this:
A lot of people might like the idea of living on Mars when there is absolutely no risk of that actually happening.
While I think that we're still a good ways from pushing this planet to it's limit (at assuming renewable energies come online quickly enough to mitigate population growth), eventually we'll want more room. And living in contained units (underwater, in space, or on other planets, ) doesn't seem like a worthwhile solution. So we're either talking population control or making more livable space. Surely, a thousand years into the future, we don't want to only have one livable planet to our race. And (maybe I'm wrong but,) terraforming what we have seems more likely that traveling to other Earth-like planets.
I'm not crazy enough to think that this is something we can overcome easily, or during my lifetime, but I think it's more of a "if we don't get started now, when?" type issue.
There are plenty of scrappy competitors out there, but they're generally a bit farther behind than SpaceX. SpaceX chose to use the most straightforward rocket design conceivable and develop it as cost effectively as possible. So far that strategy is working very well. Other companies have chosen to pursue other designs, generally more reusable in nature. They also don't have the cash that SpaceX does, slowing their progress a bit. In a few years we may start to see their work come to light.
While they are doing all of this they need to develop their heavy lift rocket as fast as possible with the goal of landing a man on mars within 10 years. Elon Musk himself said a few days ago that we need to go to mars and it is possible for them to do this "as early as 2018". The reason for the quick timeline is because funding and political slaughter for space programs is more likely to happen as time goes on and as new presidents come in or some new economic trouble happens.
Following the success of the ISS, going to Mars should be an international endavour. It needs to be a goal not for one country, but the whole human race to become a multi-planetary species and go to Mars.