Why has no other country put a man on the moon?

Great Debates
81

“The Singularity” has been occuring for about the last two hundred years, since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution (and there is a good argument that it began with the invention of the Gutenberg press and movable type, which actually sets the start date at almost six hudnred years ago). Technology will certainly move apace, and it is possible that fundamental discoveries into new areas of applied science (such as direct control of nuclear forces or the ability to draw upon potential energy stored within the plenum of spacetime) will result in sweeping changes to human civilization and society just as electricity and long distance communications has for us today. But most of the innovations we enjoy today were not unimagined as of 1918; the electronic computer, the global information network, projected energy devices, rockets and space travel, et cetera were all foreseen by sufficiently open-minded people then even if the specific details of implementation were not predicted.

Whether humanity elects to inhabit interplanetary space is less about technology, however, than the drive and financial incentive to do so. There is certainly some amount of drive, albeit often as much political as for some altruistic desire to preserve and protect the species. The fiscal return on investment, on the other hand, is less clear when it comes to anything in space beyond Earth orbit, because despite the wealth of materials in space the cost threshold is very, very high, and regardless of how many people are willing to accept personal risk and even guaranteed damage from the space environment, at the end of the day someone has to foot the bill.

Automation, and particular forms of automation that allow a bootstrapping of technologies such that they can be partially or fully self-sustaining without a constant stream of resources from Earth, is the only practical route to large scale expansion into space. But we’re going to need that same automation for a whole host of other things here on Earth as well, from taking care of an aging global population to compensating for the effects of global climate change and social disruption as conventional systems manufacturing, resource extraction, and agriculture become difficult to maintain. So the same automation technologies that help sustain the systems of civilization on Earth can also be applied to space exploration (along with enabling propulsion and energy technologies) to make it someday feasible to sustain a human presence in space.

Stranger

82

I think it’s important to establish the basic parameter of cost of space launch. If Elon Musk’s BFR and/or Jeff Bezos’ New Armstrong rocket deliver the promise of full reusability with rapid turnaround and minimal refurbishment, We could be talking about costs on the order of maybe $100 per kilo to LEO, and $300 per kilo to lunar orbit, and the BFR/Starship can deliver 100 tons at a time.

At those prices, you can put a human in LEO for $5000. You could put a car-sized robotic rover on the moon for about a million bucks in launch costs.

Those prices are such a step change from what we’ve been used to that if it happens all of our previous thinking about how to approach space needs to be thrown out. These prices are low enough that we can re-think the entire way we engineer space probes and landers and such. Instead of taking a decade to precisely engineer every little detail for minimum risk, low launch prices would allow more of a model where we build fast and iterate after failures.

Trying a high concept design with a high risk/reward ratio may not be reasonable when each attempt costs $200 million dollars just to launch and takes a decade to prepare. But if you can launch a 1000 kilo satellite or lander into space for $100,000, and reusable rockets means there are many more flights snd shorter booking times, you can design through iteration. More importantly, instead of the industry being owned by a handful of giant aerospace firms you could have a more entrepreneurial market with hundreds or thiusands of players - and that’s when you get rapid innovation.

If we get to the point where rockets are launching every day and thousands of experimental vehicles/satellites/probes are being developed by hundreds of companies, we will have set the stage for rapid innovation - and undoubtedly new uses for space we can’t even imagine today.

83

Although Musk boasted about orders of magnitude reductions in launch costs early on, no one has put forward a plausible case for getting to that cost/mass factor, and SpaceX has retreated to offering a very modest discount for flying on a reused first stage for the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy. The assumption that reusing hardware, even with only a small amount of refurbishment and inspection, results in heavily reduced payload costs is not in and of itself validated without looking at the overall system costs of launch and I have yet to see anything from SpaceX (or other launch providers) demonstrating those reductions even for uncrewed vehicles, much less those carrying passengers into orbit or beyond. The actual invested cost in hardware is only a fraction of total launch costs, and the real reductions have to come from streamlining and automating inspections, integration and verification testing, ground support and payload processing, et cetera to the maximum extent possible.

In short, I’ll believe in $100/kg to LEO when I actually see it happen. Even $500/kg to LEO would be extremely impressive, and SpaceX isn’t anywhere near that price point.

Stranger

84

The Falcon 9 is not a great example, as it only reuses the first stage, and then not always. I believe the first stage is worth about $30 million, so if they realized a cost savings of 80% on that, that’s only $24 million of a $90 million launch price in savings. And 80% right now is probably too high - maybe way too high. So yeah, not a huge game changer so far.

However… Most of these flights have been with block 4 boosters, which require more refurbishment and could only fly twice. You wouldn’t expect much savings - they were better looked at as development boosters to perfect the design for turnaround and reusability.

Let’s assume block 5 boosters manage the 10 flights before major refurbishment. Let’s say it costs them $5 million to refurb them, transport them, and re-mount them. It may be more or less than that, buit at least that’s a reasonable goal.

I think it’s unreasonable to say that they haven’t proven cost savings yet. The Falcon Heavy is available in two prices - fully expendable for $150 million, or 90% capacity for $90 million. In that configuration they reuse three boosters. So it sure looks like reusing three boosters saves SpaceX 60 million dollars, or $20 million per booster. That seems like a reasonable number. But that number could easily come down further if SpaceX builds an inventory of reusable boosters and finishes amortizing their development and construction costs.

If you apply that to a fully reusable system like BFR, the cost savings are even greater.

I agree that we aren’t going to see super low prices for some time. For one thing, SpaceX is already the lowest cost launch service, so they have no incentive to lower costs further rather than increase per-launch profit. But once other vendors start flying reusable rockets and competing with SpaceX in price, those prices could easily come down further. And at lower prices, you have more launches, which allows for more iterative development and streamlining of refurbishment/launch procedures.

I’m pretty sure Musk’s estimate of $100/kilo to LEO is just the raw launch cost, and wouldn’t include things like the cost of money, return on investment/profit, Prep costs for payloads and all that. So we likely won’t hope to see costs on that order until there is a robust, mature reusable launch industry with many players, and probably not until enough launches have happened that investment costs are recouped and all that. Probably at least 10-20 years from now, and maybe more.

But the writing is on the wall - if you are a launch provider and you aren’t working on reusable rockets, you’re going to have your lunch eaten within a decade or so. So far, the half-assed measures other vendors are trying to take, such as parachuting engines back to the ground, are way too little and too late. I don’t see huge aerospace conglomerates competing with fast-moving startup companies willing to take big risks and iterate designs fast.

It’s going to take a while, but cheap launch seems a good enough bet that we should be thinking in those terms when talking about what is or isn’t feasible in space exploration, colonization, etc.

85

One area where I think Musk is completely nuts is the idea of starting a self-sustaining colony on Mars any time soon. And by ‘soon’ I mean probably for a hundred years or more.

Self-sufficient is different. Self-sufficient just means that a colony can provide for its own food and air and other consumables. That might be possible, given regular supply flights to replace broken equipment and rotate out people and such. Self-sustaining means that if civilization on Earth was destroyed, the Mars colony could continue indefinitely. That requires a complete industrial infrastructure capable of making everything people would need to live and thrive in an extremely hostile environment. As a guess, you would need at least a million people, assuming we have 3D printers and other advanced manufacturing techniques. If you were trying to do it with traditional technologies, probably a hundred times that many. And until that colony WAS sustainable, imagine the financial load on the Earth to maintain a logistical train of ships to Mars capable of supplying millions of people. Unless Mars has something extremely valuable to exchange for that effort, it will simply never happen.

So in our lifetimes, any ‘colony’ on Mars is likely to be a small ‘outpost’ type place existing on thin margins and requiring constant resupply from Earth. I doubt we’d even sustain that once the novelty wore off.

86

SpaceX is a privately held company that has not published any breakdown of costs woth any detail to assess the costs of manufacture versus operating and facility costs, or indeed, if they are operating at a loss. I have looked in detail at the costs of conventional heavy launch systems, which despite the whole “NewSpace is different!” crowd gomthrough essentially the same processes and use comparable systems for integration & test, and once you account for the costs of independent verification & validation or mission assurance and the hefty overhead above profit that organizations like the United Launch Alliance apply to their government contracts, there just isn’t enough cost in the actual hardware (versus the per launch costs which are labor intensive and the ‘fixed’ costs of ground support and range systems which have to be scaled up to the desired launch rate) unless it is able to meet a rate that is in the many dozens.

NASA did a study back in the early ‘Seventies on reusability and determined that getting a breakeven on cost for a reusable vehicle would require many tens of flights, and then Orbital Sciences did a comparable study in the late ‘Eighties that was completely independent and came to nearly exactly the same conclusion. Other studies on cost reduction for expendable vehicles (e.g. “Big Dumb Booster” concepts) indicate that while making the hardware cheaper to manufacture (e.g. holding “shipbuilding” type tolerances rather than those associated with aerospace manufacturing) is of some modest benefit, the real cost reductions in are the labor of integration and launch costs.

Stranger

87

Which is ridiculous. The Moon is a least in orbit around Earth. Mars is another smallish rock without a magnetic field, and it’s colder, more distant, and with a deadly poison atmosphere.

…

I mean, yes, Mars is wonderful. It’s the future of capitalism, and the perfect place for all the billionaires to build Galt’s Gulch. Tomorrow.

88

Correct. Whichever country makes it to the moon next won’t be forgotten, moreover, they will be respected or feared. One day it could spark a space race.

A military Moon base would be the ultimate as it would be very difficult to attack and detect a launching. Escaping the Moon’s gravity with a missile is easy, and we already know how to shield a warhead re-entering the earth’s atmosphere.

The trip to the moon took three days. The United States went there with technology from the 1960s. Today, you’d figure the radiation shielding and rocket technology would be better, making the trip a bit shorter and safer.

There is a portion of people who think we never went to the moon. They are wrong, but at the same time there is so much to learn, and perhaps some of it was withheld from the general public. NASA’s explanation of losing the moon videotapes was something I never bought. What we see today is the broadcast from network TV mostly.

89

While there have been some modest increases in the understanding of what materials work best in shielding against solar charged particle radiation, the reality is that a great thickness of shielding is necessary to protect inhabitants from solar energetic particles. The energy required to develop a powerful enough magnetic field to deflect SEPs is beyond what we can currently deploy in space, and lifting hundreds od tons of shielding necessary to protect a spacecraft significantly larger than the Apollo capsule is just beyond single launch capability. We have no means of protecting the crew from very high energy cosmic radiation other than many meters of shielding, preferably high absorption cross-section than can interact with the secondary radiation from spallation.

Chemical rocket propulsion technology has advanced only incrementally since the ‘Sixties, and there are fundamental limits to how much more efficacy can be gained from any thermochemical propulsion system. Nuclear thermal, nuclear electric, and solar electric propulsion all offer substantial improvements in specific impulse, but thus far none of these technologies has been developed to the point of providing sufficient thrust for even a small crewed vehicle. A trip trip to the Moon today would take essentially the same amount of time (on a pseudo-Hohmann transfer) and would be subject to the same risks as with Apollo.

Stranger

90

That is disappointing to read as the 1960’s were a long time ago. Might a magnetic rail gun on a launching pad in space produce faster speeds?

The Van Allen radiation belt is a real SOB.

According to the 2002 Guinness World Records, Apollo 10 set the record for the highest speed attained by a manned vehicle: 39,897 km/h (11.08 km/s or 24,791 mph) on May 26, 1969, during the return from the Moon.

91

If they can’t get to the moon, they sure as hell can’t get to Mars. Getting humans to Mars and back will be a couple orders of magnitude more difficult, dangerous, and expensive than the moon.

92

No argument there, but how many unmanned exploration vehicles can we land on Mars for the price tag of one manned mission?