Mark Whittington continues in his foolish mischaracterization of the Deep Space option. We can touch to our hearts’ content. And once (in the process of “touching”) we start to develop the resources of the asteroids and Martian moons, we’ll be able to affordably descend into the gravity wells. In particular, there is no basis for this statement whatsoever:
The development of ships capable of crossing interplanetary distances will likely remain in the purview of governments for the foreseeable future. There would be little if any hope of such space craft being developed commercially in the near term, especially if landing on the Moon and Mars were to be deferred indefinitely. Without actual places to go, the market for commercial space flight would be limited to low Earth orbit and, perhaps, Earth approaching asteroids.
People want to go to the moon. People want to go to Mars. Elon Musk wants to go to Mars. That’s why he started his company. Bob Bigelow wants to go to the moon. Once access to orbit becomes affordable, he will. Once they, and Jeff Bezos, and others, are halfway to anywhere, they’re not going to wait for NASA to send someone before they do. To think that they would is to completely misunderstand their motivations and plans.
We used to hear that private companies wouldn’t/couldn’t build orbital rockets. I guess that’s a prima facie case now so we can move on to “ships capable of crossing interplanetary distances” can’t possibly be built by private funds.
Sounds like the privateers have moved the ball forward.
Taking the “foreseeable future” to be the next 20 years, what are the chances (0 – no chance, 1 – certain) that Elon Musk will set foot on Mars in that period?
I would guess 0.1 assuming that Musk is willing to spend his last dime in the attempt and is willing to make a one way trip.
What does everyone else think?
If Polywell pans out, everything changes and Elon can put a Hilton on Mars.
Taking the “foreseeable future” to be the next 20 years, what are the chances (0 – no chance, 1 – certain) that Elon Musk will set foot on Mars in that period?
I have no idea, but if he doesn’t do it, it won’t be because he was waiting for NASA to do it.
1e-9
i.e. no way in 20 years. No way he will do a one way trip while he is still alive. Perhaps he could if we are talking about a space burial kind of thing where the travel mass is also much smaller.
If one reads about past Mars exploration proposals, unless you have a nuclear reactor or do ISRU, the mission is horrendously expensive. The spaceship is pretty huge and complex. If you do a lot of ISRU and have a lot of pit stops along the way it may be manageable. I just do not see that happening in only 20 years. I mean, SpaceX was funded in 2002 and they still are flying Falcon 1s, the tourism market is still undeveloped, etc. I would take a generation just to get to the necessary launch vehicles, but the infrastructure will probably take longer than that.
I think it will be Bezos that does it first. His plan does not seem to need external capitalization.
Jim:
Yeah, but Bezos hasn’t demonstrated any of the necessary technologies to do it either.
It is far easier to build a space vehicle than to build a launch vehicle.
He isn’t demonstrating much at all. Everything that can be found out about them suggests they have a step-by-step plan that seems to be keyed to what Bezos wants to allocate annually over a long-term basis. That is a freedom that few if any rocket engineers have ever enjoyed. My guess is they have a lot of concurrent development going on that will not be demonstrated until it needs to be.
It is far easier to build a space vehicle than to build a launch vehicle.
Yes, that’s something that many people (including Mark) don’t seem to understand. Once we solve the launch problem, we’re actually much more than halfway to anywhere.
I’ll be the first to raise a glass and toast Elon Musk or any other free human being who sets foot on Mars. But I suspect that the first person on Mars as well as the first person back to the Moon will be a employee of some government.
Rand’s suggestion that once we have CATS that getting to the Moon and Mars is just easy is a mind blowing statement to make. Problems of cosmic background radiation, long term exposure to micro G, and just building a sensible transportation technology are going to be very challenging and very expensive.
So how hard would it be to build some kind of lunar flyby vehicle out of a Bigelow Sundancer and Dragon modules?
I ask that question in all seriousness since I’m not an engineer…but it doesn’t sound like that much of a stretch if something like a Centaur upper stage could be used for TLI/TEI. Assuming that, would the big hurdle become reentry velocity? For that matter, if the propulsion module’s robust enough, you wouldn’t want to throw away that Sundancer anyway…park it back in LEO and reenter at 17,000 mph instead of 24,000, right? Guess that puts us back into the propellant depot problem…
It seems reasonable to me that if people with means are already willing to spend $20 mil for a Soyuz ride to ISS, they’d be even more willing to spend at least that much to spend a day in lunar orbit.
I know I would, given that kind of money.
Rand’s suggestion that once we have CATS that getting to the Moon and Mars is just easy is a mind blowing statement to make.
Which is one of the reasons that I didn’t make it. Once again, you have trouble comprehending English.
So how hard would it be to build some kind of lunar flyby vehicle out of a Bigelow Sundancer and Dragon modules?
I’m sure that Bob and Elon have discussed exactly that.
If Polywell pans out, everything changes and Elon can put a Hilton on Mars.
Polywell has a fine future as a bit of pop cultural quasi-science. As an actual means of producing net energy, or powering a spacecraft, don’t hold your breath.
Paul,
What’s your source of skepticism with respect to Polywell? From what I’ve been able to dig up, it seems much more than “pop cultural quasi-science?” i.e. there appears to be real hardware, real experimentation, and real funding going on.
Taking the “foreseeable future” to be the next 20 years, what are the chances (0 – no chance, 1 – certain) that Elon Musk will set foot on Mars in that period?
I’d like to answer the question: 20years any non-gov’t funded person on Mars.
.001
In 20 years, things quite extraordinary by today’s standards can be common. Example: in 1989 would you believe that today there is a simple consumer mobile wireless hand held device that displays realtime weather, traffic and location info; street level maps for anywhere in world, an entire instantly search-able encyclopedia, full size video to any movie trailer, or user created video, oh and voice communications with anyone else … etc. etc.
Do I think that such an amazing level of advancement will happen in space travel — depends on how things work out. The key driver is IF market driven economics is allow to function AND if there is sufficient demand. 20 years is certainly enough time to scale up and improve the tech we’ve been using for 30 years to land on Mars.
LEO is halfway to anywhere is an expression of the energy budget. I agree with Rand that orbit is much greater than 50% of the way anywhere in terms of demonstrated technology. Privateers haven’t quite made it to orbit yet, but once they do Luna and Mars won’t be far in the future.
And Rand Simberg continues in his foolish linking to Mark Whittington! 🙂
Besides Polywell, there’s also VASMIR to consider. You don’t need fusion to get to Mars (or even further out) with a VASMIR propelled craft – plain old-fashioned nuclear will do you just fine. Polywell (or one of the darker horses) would just be gravy.
Also, if you can do ISRU on NEAs I don’t see why ISRU on a Martian moon or asteroid would be any harder.
Whether it happens in 20 years is chancy, but I’d say 30 years is a safe bet.
Let’s put some numbers of Mark’s statements. Given “limited [access] to low Earth orbit and, perhaps, Earth approaching asteroids,” how hard would it be for private enterprise to develop a lunar lander?
Back in the 1990’s, Johnson Space Center proposed an architecture called “Human Lunar Return.”
The plan called for a series of x-projects to develop a propellant depot, a lunar orbit stage, a new spacesuit, an open-cockpit lunar lander, and an inflatable habitat. Instead of building a superheavy lifter, HLR relied on Shuttle, Proton, and the X-38 Crew Rescue Vehicle then under development.
JSC estimated that HLR would cost $2.5 billion through the first lunar landing, which would occur about 5 years after project start.
If the propellant depot, transfer stage, spacesuit, etc. were already developed for asteroid missions, that would leave only the lunar lander, which was only a fraction of that $2.5 billion.
I’m sure Mark will now tell us that Johnson Space Center is part of the “Internet Rocket Club” and should not be taken seriously.
I mean, SpaceX was funded in 2002 and they still are flying Falcon 1s…
In all fairness to SpaceX, they’ve had all of, what, two? successful orbital missions on that Falcon 1 system, and I was under the impression that Falcon 9 is supposed to have first launch before the end of the year.
In all fairness to Godzilla though – it has been 7 years since they got started. If Musk hadn’t hade a huge fortune online, he’d hardly still be in a position to make a small fortune in space if he’d had to take 7 years to build up SpaceX from scratch.
Without actual places to go, the market for commercial space flight would be limited to low Earth orbit and, perhaps, Earth approaching asteroids.
Not that there’s any reason to believe this is true, but even if that were, would it really be so awful?
With routine, low-cost access to orbit and to the asteroids, we could build large space stations, solar power satellites (should they prove desireable), military satellites armored with asteroid material, etc. We could have thousands of people living in Earth orbit and many more travelling there for work or recreation. We would also have rapid suborbital transport for military and commercial purposes. And, of course, the means to defend the Earth from asteroid impacts and global extinction events
That doesn’t sound like the worst possible future to me. Why does Mark react to it like it’s the equivalent of having terminal cancer?
And Rand Simberg continues in his foolish linking to Mark Whittington!
I didn’t link his blog.
Brock,
Polywell (hopefuly) lets you build a highly robust RLV. Vasimir would be great for an in-space propulsion system coupled to a sucessfully Polywell reactor but it will not allow you to build what I once heard described as “The arc-jet from Hell” to get you to LEO.
Not to mention that if we go with the deep space option, by the time we are doing it, Jeff Bezos might be quite ready to provide us with an effective, low-cost, lunar lander.
What’s your source of skepticism with respect to Polywell? From what I’ve been able to dig up, it seems much more than “pop cultural quasi-science?” i.e. there appears to be real hardware, real experimentation, and real funding going on.
The concept contains a huge amount of handwaving, and appears to have multiple grave problems. The proponents have not justified optimism in the face of these problems in the peer reviewed literature. The reactions of the optimists appear to me to be almost cult-like in nature, with Bussard the (now dead) revered personality.
Among the grave problems of the concept: plasma leakage from the “whiffleball” would be enormous, non-maxwellian ion distributions could not be maintained, asymmetries in the wall fields would quickly destroy ion focusing to the center, and energy flow from hot ions to cold electrons would be unacceptably high.
Last I heard, they passed their peer-review and were moving on to the next level.
Besides Polywell, there’s also VASMIR to consider.
VASMIR is fine … if you have a power source for it. The higher the specific impulse of the rocket, the more power you need for a given thrust, and the higher the specific power (power/mass) you power system must have before the reactor (or solar arrays) swamps the mass savings of propellant. In many cases, there is an optimum Isp beyond which system mass will go up as you Isp increases.
The breathless boosters of VASMIR conveniently omit that their system requires major advances in space reactors, in order to get to Mars quickly.
Last I heard, they passed their peer-review and were moving on to the next level.
They were reviewed by the people who funded them, right? We don’t know what that review consisted of, or what the actual results were. For all we know, they passed some easy milestones that mean nothing.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/06/iec-fusion-wb7-wb8-and-wb9-information.html
Talk Polywell and IECFusiontech have uncovered details of the WB-8 contract [pdf]. Those details can give us some insight into how WB-7 has gone.
The WB8 design shall use circular coils around each main face cusp axis. The device shall use emitter electron gun arrays and an ion beam drive. The machine will be operated in magnetic fields with pulsed currents. WB8 shall be operated at a magnetic field strength of approximately 0.8 Tesla, which represents an increase of 8 times the magnetic field strength of previous WB machines. Improvements over previous WB machines in WB confinement, ion energy and fusion reactivity are expected as a result of these changes to WB machine design.
AS M Simon explains
An increase of field strength by a factor of 8 means – if the scaling laws hold a factor of about 4,000 increase in power out. If WB-7 was similar to WB-6 it means an increase from 3 neutrons a shot to 12,000. A real countable number i.e the error bars will be much lower. A count of 3 can actually be considered a count of 3 +/-2. That is a big error bar. For 12,000 the error bar is on the order of +/-100 about 1%. That makes improvements or degradations of 5% easily detectable. Where as in the first situation (WB-6/7) changes that doubled or halved the output rate would be hard to detect.
WB 8.1 : Testing Aneutronic proton/boron 11
Enhanced Ion Drive with PB11 (proton/boron 11): Based on the results of WB8 testing, and the availability of government funds the contractor shall develop a WB machine (WB8.1) which incorporates the knowledge and improvements gained in WB8. It is expected that higher ion drive capabilities will be added, and that a “PB11” reaction will be demonstrated. The contractor shall investigate and validate the plasma scaling laws with respect to B-field, voltage and reactor size. The contractor shall investigate the feasibility of a neutron-free fusion power reaction using a polywell WB machine. It is anticipated that improvements in WB confinement, ion energy, and fusion reactivity will be demonstrated in WB8.1. Improvements over the WB8 predictive, computational model are expected, which should yield a better understanding of the WB fusion reaction thus allowing optimization of the WB machine.
The contractor shall deliver a report detailing the results of the experimental testing of WB8.1. The report shall address the conceptual requirements for a polywell fusion reactor capable of generating approximately 100 milliwatts.
From M Simon:
At 100 milliwatts for a follow on reactor they are starting to get into the power range. If they can get that kind of power with .3 m diameter. coils and .8 T fields, then a reactor with 3 m coils and 10 T fields should produce about 2.5 Mega Watts if the scaling laws hold.
Wow, my bad. I didn’t even click through, so I guess what they say about ‘assumption’ is true – about me anyway, not you.
Dear God though – you mean someone else actually gave that guy a platform to spout from? Shame that.
Yeah, because the US Navy is known for its easy milestones that mean nothing.
It looks to me like they are accomplishing real milestones. If you’re willing to take a look with an open mind, there’s good info here: http://iecfusiontech.blogspot.com/
A SpaceX Falcon 9 Heavy with a Raptor LH2/LOX upper-stage can launch 20-tons directly to Mars which is enough for a 1-way 1-man mission to land on the planet Mars. I think that Elon Musk has already discussed this in the past.
A single person flying 1-way to Mars on a 180-day journey could probably fly in comfort on a 10-ton spaceship that looks like the Bigelow 6-man SunDancer space station, and could land on the Martian surface on a separate vehicle that resembles the recently successful Mars Polar Lander.
A 1-way ticket to land on Mars for 1-person would probably cost under $300-Million, and have a 50/50 chance of being successful within the next 5 years if the $300 Million in funding were available. There are a lot of people and organizations that can afford this.
Regarding Polywell, it is easy to find the lead experimenter, Richard Nebel’s, statement about progress so far. He’s actually got a real day job he can go back to too so I suspect if he thought there was no hope he’d give up. So far he says they can’t see any show stoppers. He emphasized that this didn’t mean it would work but is happy with the progress so far. It’s far too soon to write this off.
I sometimes wonder if Rand regularly ‘rebuts’ Mark Wittington’s statements because as someone with poor communication skills Mark makes a useful strawman. That way legitimate challenges (for instance, asking for numbers that prove his contentions) to his arguments on cost can be ignored and buried with new posts that challenge Barrelfish like Mark.
I sometimes wonder if Rand regularly ‘rebuts’ Mark Wittington’s statements because as someone with poor communication skills Mark makes a useful strawman. That way legitimate challenges (for instance, asking for numbers that prove his contentions) to his arguments on cost can be ignored and buried with new posts that challenge Barrelfish like Mark.
Wonder no more. I don’t.
I have to wonder if Mark’s misunderstanding of the “flexible path” option is deliberate. If you look at, for example, page 29 of the final public meeting charts at:
http://www.nasa.gov/ppt/378555main_02%20-%20Sally%20Charts%20v11.ppt
You see the lander being worked on and human lunar return in 2029. If you take the same budget and the same ISS assumptions (page 19), the current program gets you back to the moon in 2030. But “flexible path” also gives us missions to the NEO’s, lagrange points, habitat modules for long duration spaceflight, and all the things we need for a Phobos mission.
What’s not to like?
“Without actual places to go, the market for commercial space flight would be limited to low Earth orbit and, perhaps, Earth approaching asteroids.”
One of the nice advantages of the Deep Space option(s) is that it can be broken down into small steps that can fit within politically reasonable budgets and schedules. Steps could include LEO, GEO, E-M Lagrangian points, Lunar orbit, E-S Lagrangian points, NEOs, and finally Mars orbit and moons or Venus orbit. NASA could hand over earlier steps to commercial space as it goes outward.
Also, I wouldn’t overlook the satellite servicing potential at Lagrangian points. Satellite servicing is one of the big selling points of those particular steps. Would Lagrangian point satellite servicing capability using at least some commercial services (as seems possible given the HSF options) translate into a cost-effective commercial capability to do satellite servicing in Earth orbit, where perhaps a constellation of satellites could use the same type of servicing?
Quote: “Dear God though – you mean someone else actually gave that guy a platform to spout from? Shame that.”
After poking around Examiner’s website, it appears to be a web version of the local/suburban-newspaper-type pub. Considering our present subject, this quote from their “Write for Us!” section is cute:
“Examiner.com has the world’s largest team of vetted and dedicated subject-matter writers, known as Examiners, who are credible, knowledgeable and passionate contributors from all walks of life. They are musicians, magazine writers, entrepreneurs, PhDs, college students, stay-at-home parents, seasoned journalists, retirees, etc.”
And this:
“Examiners create unique and original content to entertain, inform and inspire readers on thousands of subjects every day. Unlike most other online writing platforms, Examiner.com is not a blogging site; rather, our Examiners are local insiders and influencers who provide reliable intelligence and resources on local and category-specific topics.”
Would be very interesting to see their vetting process. Maybe I’ll throw my own CV in there…
If Polywell pans out, everything changes and Elon can put a Hilton on Mars.
Elon Musk wouldn’t be putting any Hiltons up anywhere. I’m thinking it would probably be Paris Hilton doing that.
I would put my money on LockMart, Orbital or ULA way before Elon or Jeff. Seems these big established commercial companies are getting the attention of the Augustine panel not SpaceX etc… Most likely a consortium of these and even perhaps smaller companies will be the first to put footprints down on the moon. One thing for sure NASA won’t be footing the bill. I can see the moon happening in 20 years. Mars is a whole different ball game. My guess a China lead multi national government/commercial consortium will be first to mars. By 2020 or sooner the US government will have collapsed from runaway government deficit spending. Perhaps some of our commercial companies will have moved enough assets abroad by then and will survive to carry on. China will have emerged as the new world superpower. China is going to eat our lunch financially and rise to power on top of our ashes on our very own soil.
I would put my money on LockMart, Orbital or ULA way before Elon or Jeff. Seems these big established commercial companies are getting the attention of the Augustine panel not SpaceX etc… Most likely a consortium of these and even perhaps smaller companies will be the first to put footprints down on the moon. One thing for sure NASA won’t be footing the bill.
If NASA (or someone else, and no one other than NASA can afford their prices) isn’t footing the bill, then those three companies won’t be doing it. Their shareholders would never allow it. They are not entrepreneurs.
I know Ed, that was just a bit of artistic liscense.
Last I heard, Old Man Hilton was almost cutting her out of the will so I doubt it’s the bimbo.