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Rocket men
Look, I'm a child of the 60's when the Space Race was HOT. I grew up watching the Gemini missions fold into the Apollo missions, moon landings and Skylab. I can't help but keep on eye on the three rocket men; Branson, Bezos and Musk. The recent flights of the first two billionaires has left me... disappointed.
Branson's space plane is innovative and looks as handsome as he is... but does his system _scale_? I mean, it would be great to hop aboard a larger version of Virgin Galactic and fly to the space station a la "2001 a Space Oddessy" but I can't see his system scaling much beyond his little hopper plane.
As for Bezos - his cute little rocket seems to work well but again... does it _scale_? He preaches about sending all our heavily polluting industries up into space but this isn't a new idea - it's been around since the 1970s. So where are the workers going to stay? I'm sure working in one of his orbiting factories will be as enjoyable as working at an Amazon warehouse. And I'm sure the delivery from space will be quite exciting especially if you like your items flaming.
As for putting giant solar collectors into orbit... won't it be easier and cheaper just to deploy them closer to the places where power is needed? You know... ON THE GROUND?
And finally we come to Elon. I have to hand it to him... Musk puts on a good show. Moving fast and breaking things in rocketry leads to big explosions which are entertaining as long as no one gets hurt. And I have to admit that (unlike most of his other business adventures) he has delivered. His rockets has sent both satellites and people _in orbit_. Not sub-orbital - but fully into space. If you want to go to space you have to send _tonnage_ and lots of it. But putting 10s of thousands of satellites up in low earth orbit to deliver Internet? And have the satellites burn up and need replacing every 5 years? I don't think you need to do much math to realize that fiber optic lines that need installed once will be a better and cheaper system in the long run.
As for living in space or on Mars... we still don't have enough data on our long term survival in either. Building an L5 station would be a safer option to work out *how* to survive in deep space. Mars is a long ways away. Our tinker toy probes are doing okay there but they are expendable. They don't need food and water and oxygen to survive - people do. These items are a little sparse on the red planet.
You want to save planet Earth? Great! Stop running away from it! Maybe we can leave this planet at some future date and there's nothing wrong with planning and doing the research that will make that possible and safe... but seriously, most of the solutions to our problems are ground based - not space based.
-m
Branson's space plane is innovative and looks as handsome as he is... but does his system _scale_? I mean, it would be great to hop aboard a larger version of Virgin Galactic and fly to the space station a la "2001 a Space Oddessy" but I can't see his system scaling much beyond his little hopper plane.
As for Bezos - his cute little rocket seems to work well but again... does it _scale_? He preaches about sending all our heavily polluting industries up into space but this isn't a new idea - it's been around since the 1970s. So where are the workers going to stay? I'm sure working in one of his orbiting factories will be as enjoyable as working at an Amazon warehouse. And I'm sure the delivery from space will be quite exciting especially if you like your items flaming.
As for putting giant solar collectors into orbit... won't it be easier and cheaper just to deploy them closer to the places where power is needed? You know... ON THE GROUND?
And finally we come to Elon. I have to hand it to him... Musk puts on a good show. Moving fast and breaking things in rocketry leads to big explosions which are entertaining as long as no one gets hurt. And I have to admit that (unlike most of his other business adventures) he has delivered. His rockets has sent both satellites and people _in orbit_. Not sub-orbital - but fully into space. If you want to go to space you have to send _tonnage_ and lots of it. But putting 10s of thousands of satellites up in low earth orbit to deliver Internet? And have the satellites burn up and need replacing every 5 years? I don't think you need to do much math to realize that fiber optic lines that need installed once will be a better and cheaper system in the long run.
As for living in space or on Mars... we still don't have enough data on our long term survival in either. Building an L5 station would be a safer option to work out *how* to survive in deep space. Mars is a long ways away. Our tinker toy probes are doing okay there but they are expendable. They don't need food and water and oxygen to survive - people do. These items are a little sparse on the red planet.
You want to save planet Earth? Great! Stop running away from it! Maybe we can leave this planet at some future date and there's nothing wrong with planning and doing the research that will make that possible and safe... but seriously, most of the solutions to our problems are ground based - not space based.
-m
no subject
Any I.T guy can tell you, having off-site back-ups is a bloody good idea... the moon and mars are the most readily available places to do that for civilisation. [far from ideal however, but what choice is there?]
Space X has blown up a few rockets... but a lot less than NASA did in the beginning. It's rocket science, it ain't easy, and they are trying to do stuff that no-one's done before. The first reusable, tail landing rocket, the biggest rocket to date (that's also reusable), and so on... and they are doing it on a time scale that would cause those early engineers to faint!
I think the idea of orbital factories is good one, in conjunction with asteroid mining and fully automated production. But manned factories? Nope, that way lies disaster and tragedy.
As for the orbital internet... economies of scale apply. Make a few thousand of anything on a regular basis, and the per unit cost plummets. Plus, once they've stopped building it, and only need to launch the occasional replacement, Space X has all that spare launch capacity that other people will pay to use. Additional revenue stream you know...
While it would be a lot easier to build the giant solar farms on the ground... the problem then becomes distribution, and the fact that no-one wants them near where they live. I mean, from a collection stand-point, the ideal solution would be to cover a few hundred square miles of desert on the equator.. but the transmission losses would be significant, the logistics of getting supplies out there to build them would hideous [worse than into space!] and the best places to build huge solar farms tend to be politically unstable if not downright explosive!
It's actually easier to build them in orbit, and the transmission losses are off-set by the gains in efficiency.... still a PITA to build them though, turns out you need a lot of really big reusable rockets to ship stuff to orbit...
no subject
Fully automated factories? Yeah.... no. Computers and robotics are good at automating a lot of tasks but they still need to be looked after. I know. I've worked with 'automation' in broadcasting. It needs constant attention. And if your systems are in orbit - or even farther out to mine the asteroids - those service calls to replace a failing cable or reboot the system are going to be killer. Finally... the delivery of finished goods could be... errr... problematic?
We don't need to build massive solar farms in the desert when the roofs of hospitals, factories and schools are flat and available. NIMBY can be cured with education. Hopefully.
Sure, economy of scale with bring down the cost of Internet satellite swarms... but it's already rather crowded up there. I'm not sure what the effects of dozens of satellites a year burning up in our atmosphere are going to be but it can't be good.
Space station? Good idea! Moon base? Good idea! We need to learn how to live and thrive in space _at scale_ before trying to colonize a planet as far away and as dead as Mars. Terrestrial Internet? Use fiber optic cable.
-m