Flyaway said:Quite a few of the questions in the Q & A were pretty dire.
As a Douglas Adams fan like the idea of him calling the first ship Heart of Gold.
blackstar said:Only requires a reusable rocket over three times bigger than a Saturn V, with 42 engines in the first stage.
Seems totally reasonable.
sferrin said:Flyaway said:Quite a few of the questions in the Q & A were pretty dire.
As a Douglas Adams fan like the idea of him calling the first ship Heart of Gold.
Dire?
Michel Van said:Oh i yeah the current reaction at ULA, ArianeSpace and NASA...
I
TomS said:Honestly, I doubt those folks much care, except maybe NASA. They know that the ITS, successful or not, is not relevant for commercial space launch services. Demand for launches in the existing weight classes isn't going to dry up just because SpaceX can lob 400 tons at Mars every so often. Heck, this probably helps ULA and Ariane because SpaceX engineering talent that could be refining a next gen Falcon Heavy successor will instead be designing the non-commercial ITS.
Michel Van said:About to use the Booster as suborbital Intercontinental cargo flights (ROMBUS)
TomS said:The idea of landing the booster back on the launch pad and recycling it within 24 hours (implied) seems pretty incredible. As in, I don't think that's a credible approach. They're nowhere close to that level of precision in their landings yet.
flanker said:TomS said:The idea of landing the booster back on the launch pad and recycling it within 24 hours (implied) seems pretty incredible. As in, I don't think that's a credible approach. They're nowhere close to that level of precision in their landings yet.
Okei, so in vacuum your points would be correct and fair. But you are ignoring two major things;
1; History.
2; As Elon often says, one doesn't know one is on an exponential curve until one zooms out.
TomS said:Assuming they can achieve the required precision, perhaps the solution is to use a set of mobile pads similar to the Crawler-Transporters at KSC now but designed to work as part of the launch/land system. Launch from one such pad, then land on another one a half-mile or so away (or whatever your safe distance looks like). Then swap the crawlers, bringing the one with the recovered booster back to the launch site while the one that just launched the booster moves over to the recovery site for the next landing. A similar vehicle can bring the next spacecraft payload to the launch site from a safe distance as well.
flanker said:Don't underestimate just how rapidly they are developing technology.
blackstar said:flanker said:Don't underestimate just how rapidly they are developing technology.
And don't over-hype it either: Falcon Heavy was supposed to fly in 2012.
flanker said:Sure, if one ignores the reason for the delays time after time. FH in 2012 is not the same FH in 2016. Between then and now they have been through 3 major versions of Falcon 9 with one more coming up next year. So if anything - you just proved my point.
Full size engine, just without the extended bell if a flight article. Raptor is actually quite compact.fredymac said:Raptor engine test at McGregor site. I think this is a subscale demonstrator and that the full size version is to be tested at Nasa Stennis.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7kqFt3nID4
ADVANCEDBOY said:There is no existing expertise to land a man on the Moon let alone on Mars no matter how much I would like to be wrong.
JeffB said:I still don't understand the attraction of going to Mars[/qote]
I don't understand the appeal of living in Los Angeles, Manhattan, Tokyo or London, but a lot of people do.
The infrastructure required to support them would be massive and the likelihood of disaster would be significant.
That's why cowards would be ill-advised to go.
This whole drive for Mars strikes me as a rather poorly thought out flag-planting exercise.
What's wrong with planting flags, if you plants homes and farms and businesses right next to 'em?
We still need to build a significant level of capability in the near-Earth region before we start seriously thinking about moving hundreds of people to Mars.
Why? What infrastructure could you build in LEO or GEO that would greatly enhance transport to Mars?
It's every bit as dangerous to live on as the moon is except its 10x further away from support and in a gravity well that's about 10x deeper to boot.
You say that like it's a bad thing. Getting the hell away from the control of Earth has a whole lot of appeal. At some point the population and infrastructure of Mars would be self-sustaining... whether that's 1000 people or 10,000, who knows; but the moon will always be an outpost of Earth until people start shovign around tens-of-kilometer scale carbon asteroids and water comets.
Orionblamblam said:I don't understand the appeal of living in Los Angeles, Manhattan, Tokyo or London, but a lot of people do.JeffB said:I still don't understand the attraction of going to Mars
The infrastructure required to support them would be massive and the likelihood of disaster would be significant.
That's why cowards would be ill-advised to go.
This whole drive for Mars strikes me as a rather poorly thought out flag-planting exercise.
What's wrong with planting flags, if you plants homes and farms and businesses right next to 'em?
We still need to build a significant level of capability in the near-Earth region before we start seriously thinking about moving hundreds of people to Mars.
Why? What infrastructure could you build in LEO or GEO that would greatly enhance transport to Mars?
It's every bit as dangerous to live on as the moon is except its 10x further away from support and in a gravity well that's about 10x deeper to boot.
You say that like it's a bad thing. Getting the hell away from the control of Earth has a whole lot of appeal. At some point the population and infrastructure of Mars would be self-sustaining... whether that's 1000 people or 10,000, who knows; but the moon will always be an outpost of Earth until people start shovign around tens-of-kilometer scale carbon asteroids and water comets.
Soyuz-U has had 784 flights of which 764 were successful; the entire R-7 family has 1,859 flights of which 1,744 are successful. Now granted, by aircraft standards that's still only just out of testing, and that's the only launcher that has come close to mass production, but it has been achieved.DrRansom said:The problem with the plan, as far as is presented, is that the operational design represents a huge risk. Musk requires the ITS have reliability on the order of modern day transport aircraft. That reliability can only be ensured after a huge number of flight tests. For the 787, Wikipedia says that the flight test program involved 1,700 flights.
No rocket system has flown a fraction of that number of flights. Saturn V flow ~1% of the 787 test flights. The space shuttle flew <10% of the total number of 787 test flights.
DrRansom said:The problem with the plan, as far as is presented, is that the operational design represents a huge risk.
DrRansom said:Musk requires the ITS have reliability on the order of modern day transport aircraft. That reliability can only be ensured after a huge number of flight tests. For the 787, Wikipedia says that the flight test program involved 1,700 flights.
DrRansom said:No rocket system has flown a fraction of that number of flights. Saturn V flow ~1% of the 787 test flights. The space shuttle flew <10% of the total number of 787 test flights.
DrRansom said:Unless Musk can magically assure reliability or ensure several hundred flights of the largest rocket booster ever, he cannot achieve the per-flight reliability he requires.
DrRansom said:Which brings us to the next logistical problem. The ITS will represent a mammoth pre-flight and launch risk. It'll have explosive power on the order of a tactical nuke. How does Musk even begin a flight test program with that rocket? He has to ensure system reliability to a high level before he can even begin flights, because of the risk the rocket poses.
DrRansom said:I don't think his architecture is remotely feasible, because it requires a reliability level never yet seen on a space launch system.
blackstar said:flanker said:Sure, if one ignores the reason for the delays time after time. FH in 2012 is not the same FH in 2016. Between then and now they have been through 3 major versions of Falcon 9 with one more coming up next year. So if anything - you just proved my point.
Now you're being silly.
Missing deadlines is not a good thing, no matter what the excuse.
Byeman said:ADVANCEDBOY said:There is no existing expertise to land a man on the Moon let alone on Mars no matter how much I would like to be wrong.
Nonsense. You are wrong. It exists. Landing on a planet is easy and has been done many times.
sferrin said:DrRansom said:I don't think his architecture is remotely feasible, because it requires a reliability level never yet seen on a space launch system.
And never will be as long as the mentality of "we can't move until there is zero risk" exists.
Elon says that this is the plan if the refueling process is quick, like a couple weeks or less. If it takes a lot longer, then the spacecraft will be launched first without people, and then whenever it’s all refueled and ready to go, a spacecraft carrying just people will be launched and it will deliver the crew to the spacecraft for an Earth orbit rendezvous.
RLBH said:Soyuz-U has had 784 flights of which 764 were successful; the entire R-7 family has 1,859 flights of which 1,744 are successful. Now granted, by aircraft standards that's still only just out of testing, and that's the only launcher that has come close to mass production, but it has been achieved.