For those who don’t know, BFR is Big Falcon Rocket being constructed by SpaceX, I believe that it will be the equivalent of the 747 was in the aerospace industry, a craft which will usher cheap space transportation and will be the template for many variants of spacecraft in the future.
The only issue I have is that there does not seem to be much detail about the cockpit or the cabins which will be constructed for the ship.
What are your guys thoughts?
I bet $100 that internally at SpaceX, BFR stands for: Big Fucking Rocket, and “Falcon” was substituted at the insistence of the PR/Legal department.
I’ll be more impressed once they actually stand one up and fire it. It’s not going to be the 747 equivalent for human spaceflight because there is currently no massive demand for human spaceflight. The 474 was addressing passenger and (mainly) cargo demands that existed and could be forecast to exist into the future. There’s no equivalent in human spaceflight; there’s no there to go to.
As for a cargo equivalent, orbital hardware is getting smaller. So really why do you need the extra capacity?
Economies of scale? Scaled up the BFR is projected to be cheaper than the Falcon 9 in delivering cargo to orbit.
For manned missions, and the large amount of cargo they would require.
I think Elon is a bit fixated on re-doing the Saturn V, and might not realize just how much opportunity is there with the Falcon Heavy, which already works and uses an already fairly well-tested platform. FH can’t lift as much as a BFR, but it has the advantage of already existing. I think SpaceX is also putting far too much faith in a single-lift paradigm for interplanetary travel. I think a much more plausible scenario is constructing a ship in orbit from many smaller launches (most probably unmanned) and then sending it off to the moon or Mars. You could do this right now with a series of Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launches, and maybe a Soyuz to get astronauts there. (Will a Dragon 2 capsule fit on a Soyuz? I dunno.)
“cheap” is relative. rough estimate says a B747 costs about $25,000 per hour of flight. so, $350,000 to operate a 14 hour flight to Japan. Estimates for SpaceX’s cost to launch a Falcon 9 are about $36 million. So already two orders of magnitude higher. That 747 flight to Japan would cost me about $1,500. not sure I have $150,000 kicking around to take a space flight.
The existence of a capability can *create *demand for it, even if it takes time. The ability to send humans with a useful amount of payload to Mars reduces the projected future costs and risks of doing it, and that moves the breakeven point down to where people can consider it who might not have otherwise.
For LEO, the ability to launch a huger payload makes huger payloads practical, opening up design spaces that hadn’t been considered before. That creates demand too.
Plus large payloads for sending equipment for establishing a base is more economical in reducing the necessity of an increasing amount of flights.
Sure, but contrariwise new technologies often languish because although they are technically feasible nobody can figure out a profitable business plan for them.
Is there any chance the BFR would make space-based solar power economically viable?
Which creates a very interesting question in my mind.
A Falcon 9 can carry a single GPS satellite, costing in the range of $500 million, to orbit at a price of around $80 million or so, with a ~95% confidence that it will get there. A BFR might (just for the sake of argument) be able to carry four GPS satellites, costing in the range of $2 billion, for probably a similar price, with a ~95% change they will all get there.
But the risk of an F9 blowing up, at first glance, may be favorable to a BFR blowing up. The Government may actually prefer spending $320 million to get four satellites to orbit, rather than save $240 million and risk four satellites being lost.
I’m sure smarter people than I have taken a look at this, and I’d be curious as to what their analysis would show.
On the other hand, there are no numbers of Falcon 9 launches that can build my mini-Death Star, so only BFR launches can do it, so in that respect, heavy lifters at much less cost is extremely intriguing. But I wouldn’t jump to the conclusion that we can yet treat rockets like shipping containers, where we always want to fill them to the brim no matter what, otherwise we are wasting money.
I can confirm that, no bet needed.
One potential practical application for the BFR is actual antipodal/suborbital transport; fly from LAX to Sydney in half an hour, and so forth. The problem with that is there is no particular need for that kind of rapid transport even at the optimistically-projected price point it offers. One can hypothesize individual needs for such rapid transit but in practice the only organizations willing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars per person to get people around the world at such short notice are militaries and particularly rapid response units and special operations forces. Even wealthy business executives are not going to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars per person per flight to get from here to there even if the risk were comparable to an airliner. And of course this is notwithstanding the potential range hazards it would present to people on the ground should it fly out of control or lose power; when an executive jet or airliner loses power, a skilled pilot can deadstick it to a survivable landing; when a large rocket loses power, it falls to the ground and turns into a mass of scrap metal and burning fuel.
Color me dubious about the cost point they expect to operate at, too. While it is technically feasible to reduce costs in the order of magnitude range by increasing bulk lifting capability and minimizing the labor and effort into refurbishment and ground launch opeations, the real cost savings comes from the high volume of demand, and right now there isn’t any great demand for high flight volumes of large bulk cargos. This could change if there were a permanent human presence in space much greater than the ISS or a need for very rapid suborbital transport, but there are a number of practical reasons to find this unlikely not the least of which is the knowledge of space physiology gained from the ISS which indicates that long duration space habitation is even more problematic than originally thought (and some amount of evidence that even the shorter durations for the Apollo lunar missions may have had long term detrimental health effects on astronauts).
Many orbital spacecraft are tending to get smaller as a function of both improvements in sensor and computer technology and an increased demand for Earth surveillance and communication functions that can be provided from LEO. There will still be a need for large telecom birds, surveillance satellites, and orbital observatories that cannot be performed by spacecraft in the smallsat or smaller category, but there is again no particular demand for high volume transportation of bulk mass. There are certain innovations such as on-orbit servicing, refurbishment, and salvaging operations that could increase the demand for high volume ground-to-orbit transportation but having looked at the numbers repeatedly for the past several years I’m not seeing a business case for the weekly or more frequent flights which would be required to justify the BFR capability. Still, having such a capability if it can operate at the advertised price point may foster new demand or even new industries, but that is a chicken-and-egg bet focused on the chicken rather than making eggs.
As I think most people know, the BRF, which was originally designated the “Mars Colonial Transporter”, is really an exercise in the fantastical (some would say “fanatical”) ambition of Elon Musk to colonize and retire on Mars in the new guise of some practical business case to attract investors who are largely smart enough to know that there is no realistic profit to be made in any attempt to colonize Mars, and as most people who have knowledge in proposing and planning human missions to Mars, getting from Earth to Mars orbit is about the least challenging apsect of that endeavor. While I would like to see a superheavy lift capability and what it might bring for space industries, I don’t labor under any illusion that the BFR is the magical technology that suddenly opens up the cosmos to human interplanetary habitation notwithstanding all of the other issues to be addressed in adapting human physiology to Mars or another planet.
Space based solar power for ground consumptioon was essentially an idea promoted by Gerald K. O’Neill and his followers in order to justify constructing large habitats at the L-4 and L-5 Earth-Moon libration points, using large solar collectors and converting the energy to beamed power which could be transmitted through Earth’s atmosphere in the microwave window frequences with only small losses. There was never a real business case for it and it frankly makes no sense unless the colonies are already self-sustaining since the Earth is constantly impinged by vast amounts of solar energy in the visual spectrum which can be readily converted to heat or electricity. Space-based beamed power might make sense in being able to provide high beamed power to small satellites via a remote station, thereby removing the necessity for onboard power or sun-facing solar arrays, but again, the business case for this sufficient to justify large orbiting habitats doesn’t exist unless it is essentially free to begin with. In fact, space habitation and large installations really only make sense if they can be sustained by space-based material and energy resources; having to lift material and especially consumables from Earth, even at the advertised cost point of the BFR, is just not any more feasible than shipping your laundry to New Zealand to be washed and pressed.
Setting aside any question about reliability, GPS satellites all have to go to separate orbits with different azimuths in order for the constellation to provide worldwide coverage. Just getting a bunch of satellites into any given orbit is not sufficient; they need to be put into the right azimuth and other orbital arguments, and that requires nearly half the energy in the trajectory, hence the need for individual launchs at different times and in different launch azimuths. So you can’t just look at payload capability and assume that any particular launcher can carry an arbitrary number of spacecraft; you also have to look at the specifics of the orbit and mission requirements.
Stranger
someone pay the man his 100 bucks.
Logging off now. Seems unlikely I’ll be right twice in one day.
If the BFR is the 747 of spaceflight, what was the 707 of spaceflight? The DC-8 of spaceflight? The 247, the DC2, the Comet? What was the M-2 of spaceflight?
The 747 didn’t invent commercial air travel. It was just another step in a process that had been underway for decades. Where is the equivalent amount of commercial spaceflight?
FWIW, I would answer that the space shuttle was the Comet of spaceflight. Both were the first of their kind (also the last, in the case of the shuttle), and as a result, posed corresponding risks. Both encountered multiple fatal accidents due to design issues inherent in brand new designs doing something that had never been done before, and doing it repeatedly and often. There’s a lesson there somewhere. A lot of important learning came from the Comet, but a dear price was paid for it.
True, the Saturn V was also a brand new design, but it flew just 7 manned missions. The shuttle tried to fly 135, and only 133 safely returned.
I would agree that there currently isn’t a demand for such a large scale rocket, however, echoing earlier responses, a large scale rocket can create a market all on its own, due to bringing about a confidence in companies knowing that they have a reliable vehicle which can bring 150 tonnes to orbit on a regular basis for a reasonable price.
For the time being I agree that Earth to Earth via rocket is impractible due to the noise rockets generate alone.
Except nobody is even speculatively looking at a need to carry 150 tons of material to orbit on anything like a frequent enough basis to make it worthwhile. The only endeavors that would seem to require this ability are either permanent human habitation or a significant volume of manufacturing, and why many of people have advocated for both there has never been a sound business case for what could be done in space that wouldn’t be more cheaply done on Earth. (Most of the materials and process based justifications fro the ‘Eighties and ‘Nineties such as growing large single metallic crystals have been accomplished in terrestrial gravity via process improvements.) And the case for space tourism makes almost no sense; even at a few tens of thousands of dollars a ticket, there is a very limited and for the most part not repeat audience to support it.
The real need for space industry development is an infrastructure to support extraction and use of spase-based resources so that materials do not have to be hauled up from Earth and a heavy lift capability would certainly support that before it reached a threshold to bootstrap itself but aside from a few nascent and sparsely funded programs to explore near Earth asteroid mining there just isn’t a groundswell of demand for super-heavy lift rockets in the foreseeable future. The biggest potential demand would occur if NASA and ESA were to receive large increases in funding or (for NASA) to redirect unfocused efforts in human spaceflight into interplanetary exploration and space-based monitoring which I personally think would be a great use of space science funding but for which there appears to be no real support.
Noise from launches isn’t an issue per se as most existing launch facilitie are located in fairly remote locations such as Cape Canaveral, Vandenberg, Wallops Island, Kodiak Island, Kourou, Baikonur, Tanegashima, et cetera. (The locating of SpaceX private commercial launch facility at Boca Checa near Brownsville, TX is still a puzzler to me for a number of reasons but it makes sense to someone.) However, commercial travel to inland locations is much more problematic, not just from a noise standpoint but also to ground hazard, especially since the impact zone from an uncontrolled rocket vehicle isn’t a narrow flight corridor but potentially a large ovaloid region for dozens or even hundreds of kilometers around the landing zone.
Stranger
Oh, yes, of course. :smack:
I think people are focusing too much on the 150 tons. The real innovation is the per-flight cost: around $5M. That would be amazing even if the payload were 20 t.
Clearly, to achieve this they need full reusability on both stages. The stages also need to have enough design margin such that they they don’t need a full inspection after every flight. It also needs enough redundancy that there’s very little chance of ever losing a stage.
It appears that the combination of methane propellant, high-performance full-flow staged combustion engines, and carbon fiber gives them that margin. They can afford (mass-wise) to have redundant engines and enough propellant reserve to handle wide variations in the flight envelope. The sheer size also gives them margin: mass growth isn’t always proportional to size, so the bigger you are, the better you can absorb missing the mass targets.
They also need enough margin to always land back the launch site; the slowness and cost of barge landing is incompatible with low-overhead reusability.
If they can pull off anything even approaching this per-flight cost, there’s no reason for any other rocket company to exist. That they can loft 150 t is essentially a bonus.