I think you’re in the wrong thread, Magiver. We’re talking about SpaceX here.
One of SpaceX’s big investors is Steve Jurvetson, who also happens to be one of Elon’s Burning Man buddies. He doesn’t give the tiniest shit if Musk tokes.
As for the presentation:
The passenger is Yusaku Maezawa, who is some Japanese billionaire I haven’t heard of. He apparently wants to do a big art project, and take perhaps a dozen other passengers with him.
The price was not disclosed, though Musk said it was a “meaningful” amount. I’m guessing the mid-hundred-millions. $500M, maybe.
Estimated BFR development cost is $5B, though Musk said it was very uncertain and that could be anywhere from $2B to $10B.
Musk basically said that the design was chosen for “aesthetic” reasons, though I have a hard time believing this was the only factor. Maybe it was the deciding vote on otherwise tied designs, but he didn’t go into further details here.
The new engine configuration is to reduce development costs. Apparently there will be just one engine type–no specialized vacuum engine. This obviously reduces efficiency, but maybe the difference is marginal. The rectangular blocks surrounding the engines are apparently cargo containers.
The forward wings/fins are apparently a type of canard to help with reentry stability. Nothing too shocking there. The upper main fin has no aerodynamic purpose; it’s just there for the third landing leg.
Target flight date is 2023, though it was acknowledged that this has great uncertainly as well. Musk said that this was an “everything goes right” date and shouldn’t be taken as gospel.
Couple more things:
They’ve completed the first airframe segment on their giant carbon-fiber mandrel. 9 m diameter, and looks to be at least as long as that. I think this is the biggest carbon fiber structure in aerospace right now.
There was a video of the Raptor engine and it was implied that this was the full-size version, but not stated for sure. Targeting 200 t thrust, 300 bar chamber pressure. IIRC, they’re back up to the 2016 chamber pressures, after announcing in 2017 that the first engines would be 200 bar. Maybe they regained some confidence in their design?
Looking into things a bit more–it was definitely the full-size Raptor that was shown in the video. There’s a handrail in the video that can be used for scale, and the nozzle is a bit over a meter in diameter, which is what we’d expect from a full-size model.
Eliminating the vacuum model is a nice bit of risk-reduction. That can always be added later as a performance improvement, and in the meantime the sea level version operating in a vacuum still has better performance than the Merlin 1D-Vac (356 s Isp vs. 348 s). It helps that the chamber pressure is so high–there’s a decreasing benefit as you increase the expansion ratio further and further. The sea-level Raptor only loses 6% from not having the big nozzle; the Merlin loses 11%.
Hopefully this at least somewhat balances the risk increase from the 3-fin BFS design. It does seem like it has some control advantages over the 2017 design but that the development will be more difficult.
Not sure exactly what to call the new control surfaces. They’re a bit like the body flap on the Shuttle in that they don’t provide lift, since they’re in stall the whole time, but they nevertheless provide attitude control. Someone on the NASASpaceFlight forums came up with the cute term “brakerons”, since they’re a lot like a controllable air brake. Through differential control they should allow full yaw, pitch, and roll capability.
One slightly odd thing about the presentation. The delta-V from LEO for a lunar free return trajectory is just under 4 km/s. Assuming the ship weighs 85 t and no cargo, that implies a starting mass of 268 t. That’s more propellant than can be taken up in one trip. But the trip timeline they showed doesn’t include any on-orbit refueling.
The main possibility I can think of is that the BFS they plan on using is extremely stripped down. Most of the interior volume can be stripped out, with just enough facilities for a dozen people. So maybe more like a tanker. For a week trip, they don’t need any fancy life support systems, just some chemical systems for the atmosphere and open loop water/toilet systems. If they can get the mass down to 50-ish tons, they can make it work without a refueling.
That is a remarkably content-free presentation, particularly given the length of it. The concept of this “BFS” seems even more half-baked than Musk himself.
I hope that the BFR becomes a reality at some point (although I remain dubious of the projected schedule and cost estimates) because a super-heavy lift capability is a necessary component of building a future space infrastructure and more extensive planetary exploration, but from what is presented in this video there is zero evidence of actual feasibility or any technical details beyond artistic concepts and vague hand-waving.
Stranger
The presentation was largely an announcement of the identity and motivation of the paying passenger. That we got any technical details at all was a nice bonus. Being a standard PR event instead of a presentation at a technical conference, the attendee questions were also largely inane. That’s all expected given the nature of the announcement.
That said, your claim that this was hand-waving is absurd. We got a video of the full-size Raptor–only the third full-flow staged combustion engine to make it to a test stand, the second FFSC engine to make it beyond component testing, and the one and only LOX/anything FFSC to have even been built. The only two remotely comparable engines were the RD-270 (never made it to production, N2O4/UDMH prop), and the Integrated Powerhead Demonstrator (just a demonstrator; never a full engine). The Raptor is easily the most advanced rocket engine ever built (the SSME was probably more complex, though that is not exactly a boon).
Previously, we’d already seen a full-size BFS tank, which apparently went through pressure testing successfully. Same 9 m diameter as the current design. And we saw pictures of a BFB tank segment from their new carbon-fiber mandrel. It remains to be seen if the results pass further testing, but they are obviously making concrete forward progress.
I’m all too happy to talk about further BFR details, though maybe we should take it to this thread. Though I’m not particularly interested if you’re going to spend your time taking potshots at Musk or complaining that a PR event wasn’t as technical as you’d like. There is quite a bit of information out there, from the IAC 2017 event and elsewhere, and a lot that’s inferred based on fine details from slides and videos. The basic physics all holds up, and significant portions of the engineering have been proven as well (like booster reentry and landing). There are obviously still unknowns.
I wish there was even 1/10 as much concrete info out there for Blue Origin’s upcoming vehicles, or from ULA’s Vulcan, or really any other vehicles in development.
There was plenty of handwaving in Musk’s claims that the vehicle would be able to “take 100 tons to the surface of Mars” and that it would be able to transport “…from Mars, to the asteroid belt, to the moons of Jupiter…all the way to the outer solar system…” without any substance to those claims whatsoever. Yes, this was a promotional event to “introduce” their first “private astronaut”, not a presentation to a technical audience, but as someone who in the aerospace industry who has worked on various studies and concepts for both crewed and uncrewed space exploration, I find those claims to be specious by inspection. Even assuming the vehicle has the propulsive capability necessary to perform the advertised landing and ascent maneuvers, there are so many other systems and capabilities required for crewed interplanetary flight which are not consistent with the “conceptual design” of this vehicle at all, from power and heat transfer systems to habitation, communications, et cetera. And as experience with the International Space Station as demonstrated, you can’t just glom these capabilities on and expect them to be reliable without a lot of work up front.
If by “taking potshots at Musk” you mean being critical of whimsical ideas with little substance and his obviously misrepeated-from-source explanations for how systems on the vehicle work, then not, I’m not going to stop voicing what I consider to be poorly conceived or understood claims because I have little patience for fools and even less for those who credulously perpetuate them with no consideration for whether they actually make sense. There are a lot of technically smart people at SpaceX who have made the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy vehicles successful, but Musk is not among them regardless of how much he tries to promote himself as eminently knowledgeable about propulsion and launch systems. He is, at best, a “visionary” concerned as much about aesthetics and the Rule of Cool as technical viability, and whose ideas have to be wrangled in by experienced people into something more workable, and at worst just a huckster pitching half-baked ideas that lack validation.
Stranger
We need to separate out a few of these claims because they each have their own technological dependencies–something that has been clear from past presentations.
Exploration beyond the Earth-Moon system requires orbital refueling. It’s a non-trivial problem, but it’s known what needs to be solved there. There’s nothing that violates the laws of physics. Even the basic engineering questions are not too difficult–solving it is more a problem of building a system that works with their particular design without massing too much. Once they solve that problem, they have an 85 t vehicle in LEO with roughly 1200 t of propellant. It’s easy to work out from there which planets are available.
The more distant bodies require propellant depots–again, something they’ve been clear about. No, they haven’t provided details of how this would work. It’s obviously a very long-range vision here; significantly farther out than even their Mars plans. It’s ridiculous to lump this in with their more immediate plans and call the whole thing hand-waving.
More immediately, we have the lunar mission. It does not seem to require any orbital refueling. The difficult part, as I see it, is the lifting-body reentry profile for the BFS. I’d consider the Raptor the other long pole here, but that apparently is coming along quite nicely, and so IMHO the BFB with its Falcon 9-like reentry is more or less a solved problem. The BFS can probably learn some lessons from the Shuttle reentry, also being a lifting body, except that the BFS has to transition to a vertical descent near the end. So they have their work cut out for them in this regard, and they will probably run into some “unknown unknowns” that delay the project.
Yes, there are plenty of additional problems that need to be solved before there are long-term Mars missions. That’s why SpaceX will play around in the Earth-Moon system for a while, and send cargo-only vehicles to Mars first. The BFS has a huge cargo volume and mass capability. There’s plenty of margin for support systems. Sure, 100 colonists at a time is hugely optimistic, but again even SpaceX isn’t claiming that for the first crewed flights.
In short, you seem to be grouping all of SpaceX’s claims together, from near-term and fairly specific to far-term and “visionary”, and judging them all based on the most distant ones. Personally, I think the BFR will be an incredible success even if it never leaves Earth orbit and only gets within an order of magnitude of its cost predictions. I give SpaceX very good odds of achieving at least that.
Just got back from the SAOCOM 1A mission at Vandenberg AFB. Holy shit that was incredible. Easily in the top few man-made spectacles I’ve ever seen.
The basic launch was cool–I’d never seen a night launch before. Even from 8ish miles away, it’s far brighter than anything else in the night sky (far more than a full moon, had there been one). It’s also a point source so it gives everything shadows.
But what came next was even more incredible–because it was just after sunset, it was dark out, but daytime a few tens of kilometers up. So the plume was well-illuminated by the sun, and made for an amazing roiling cloud of exhaust gases–and within it, the first stage booster pulsing its RCS thrusters to position itself.
I took a video, but it doesn’t come close to doing it justice (plus it’s crappy and pretty out of focus). It was way more colorful and detailed in person.
Not long after was the first stage landing, which I also hadn’t seen before in person (first time for a return-to-landing-site landing at Vandenberg). Pretty badass, especially the sonic booms. Another crappy video. This time, it’s the audio that doesn’t give the sonic booms justice.
I liked the city lights sliding past the bottom of the booster on the way back–and of course, the light show in the sky.
Living in New England, the only thing in OUR sky for the next six months will be clouds. And snow.
I watched the launch last night on SpaceX’s feed. Amazing visuals!
Dr. Strangelove,
Where, precisely, did you watch the launch from, if you don’t mind me asking. Is the location open to the general public? How crowded? Where did you park? etc.
Looks like Ocean Avenue outside of Lompoc to me. That’s where I ran into our esteemed Doctor a few launches ago.
Lompoc is the the nearest town to Vandenberg, so aside from the people lucky enough to be on base (not the general public), we were all somewhere in the vicinity. In the past, I’ve driven down to W Ocean avenue, and then walked a bit to this location. That’s about 4 miles from the launch site and as close as the public can get. This time, it was far more crowded and it was obvious that I’d have problems getting there, so instead I parked here. Despite appearances, it was a great location, and unlike W Ocean, I could actually see the tip of the rocket poke above the hill. There’s no way to get a fully unblocked view since the pad is behind a hill and it’s only on-base back there. But aside from that my view was completely unblocked. It was a little farther away but the sharp crackling of the launch and the sonic booms on landing were still quite loud.
Everyone was just parked somewhere on the side of the road. Easily thousands of cars. Other launches were not nearly this crowded, though it’s always been hundreds of cars. This one was special, being just after sunset and the first RTLS at Vandenberg.
‘Borrowing’ your idea for next time. I watched from the roof of my house in Santa Barbara. A nice light show, but nothing like the impact of being that close. But on the other hand, I had beer and food on the grill, so the convenience factor was high.
Yeah, I think this may be my location for next time as well. You don’t lose much by being a tad farther away (after all, when it’s tens of kilometers up, a few kilometers of lateral distance is nothing). Easier getting out, too.
I really should have planned things better but it turned out ok in the end. I only gave myself an hour of extra time, and 40 min of that was eaten up in traffic. If Falcon Heavy ever flies out of Vandy, I’ll give myself an extra day :).
Saw it last night as I was coming out of a restaurant. Folks were standing around and traffic was literally stopped as people asked WTF was going on. UFO?? It was very cool, and I was lucky I just happened to catch it.
First video I’ve seen that really does the launch justice (the really amazing part if you can’t be bothered to watch the first couple minutes). Anyone got an 8K monitor?
Astonishingly astronomical looking. The human race, making its own nebulae!
(The second stage after separation also looks like a comet.)
And now, Mr. Steven is moving to the east coast to snag payload farings.