Thursday, November 17, 2022

Artemis/Orion: Pow! Zoom! To the Moon!

Congratulations to NASA for this week's successful SLS launch.  It is (for now at least) the most powerful rocket in history.  The Orion capsule is now on its way to the Moon which is pretty cool.

But you have to think that SpaceX is the future.  Casey Handmer describes just what a game changer the Starship rocket is:

Starship matters. It’s not just a really big rocket, like any other rocket on steroids. It’s a continuing and dedicated attempt to achieve the “Holy Grail” of rocketry, a fully and rapidly reusable orbital class rocket that can be mass manufactured. It is intended to enable a conveyor belt logistical capacity to Low Earth Orbit (LEO) comparable to the Berlin Airlift. That is, Starship is a powerful logistical system that puts launch below the API.

Starship is designed to be able to launch bulk cargo into LEO in >100 T chunks for <$10m per launch, and up to thousands of launches per year. By refilling in LEO, a fully loaded deep space Starship can transport >100 T of bulk cargo anywhere in the solar system, including the surface of the Moon or Mars, for <$100m per Starship. Starship is intended to be able to transport a million tonnes of cargo to the surface of Mars in just ten launch windows, in addition to serving other incidental destinations, such as maintaining the Starlink constellation or building a big base at the Lunar south pole.

SLS has a different motivation.  The return to the Moon is a Prestige Project (not to mention a way to funnel Federal money to favored suppliers).  That road is a dead end.  I posted this years back, before SpaceX was really on the radar.  Looking at what they are doing, they look very much like Columbus.

(Originally posted Monday, July 20, 2009)

Jack Kennedy's Treasure Fleet

I was 11 years old, and it was late. We simply weren't allowed to stay up that late - after 11:00. But this was no normal day. We all huddled around that old Black-and-White television set, watching a terrible picture that showed the first man on the moon. Dad was in Paris finishing his PhD research, and watched it projected on a huge screen at the Place de la Concorde. This was maybe the last time that an American's money was no good in Paris.

We haven't been back, since Gene Cernan climbed back aboard the LEM in December, 1972. Some folks think this is a crying shame. I used to be one of them. Now I recognize that there could not have been any other outcome. We've seen this before.

Between 1405 and 1433, the Chinese Ming dynasty sent a series of exploration voyages to southeast Asia, India, and even Africa. While the Portuguese under Prince Henry struggled down the western coast of Africa in their tiny caravels, huge Chinese treasure ships sailed to Calicut and Mogadishu.

And then they were gone, as if they had never existed. Why?

The historian David Landes spends considerable time on this question in his indispensable The Wealth And Poverty Of Nations. The Chinese voyages differed in one critical way from those of Diaz and Columbus: the Chinese voyages were motivated by a desire to glorify the Middle Kingdom, while the European ones were motivated by the desire for filthy lucre:
In the 1430s a new emperor reigned in Peking, one who "knew not Joseph." A new, Confucian crowd completed for influence, mandarins who scorned and distrusted commerce (for them, the only true source of wealth was agriculture) and detested the eunuchs who had planned and carried out the great voyages. For some decades, the two groups vied for influence, the balance shifting now one way, not the other. But fiscality and the higher Chinese morality were on the Confucian side. The maritime campaign had strained the empire's finances and weakened its authority over a population bled white by taxes and corvee levies.

[snip]

So, after some decades of tugging and hauling, of alternating celebration and commemoration on the one hand, of contumely and repudiation on the other, the decision was taken not only to cease from maritime exploration but to erase the very memory of what had gone before lest later generations be tempted to renew the folly.

[snip]

At the same time, [the Chinese] desire to overawe meant that costs far exceeded returns. These voyages reeked of extravagance. Whereas the first profits (the first whiff of pepper) and the promise of even greater ones to come were a powerful incentive to Western venturers, in China the pecuniary calculus said no.

[snip]

The vulnerability of the program - here today, gone tomorrow - was reinforced by its official character. In Europe, the opportunity of private initiative that characterized even such royal projects as the search for a sea route to the Indies was a source of participatory funding and an assurance of rationality. Nothing like that in China, where the Confucian state abhorred merchantile success.
So why did we leave the Moon, never to return? Why is NASA wandering in the wilderness? Let's update Landes, shall we? In Europe America, the opportunity of private initiative that characterized even such royal Government projects as the search for a sea route to the Indies low-cost way to orbit was a source of participatory funding and an assurance of rationality. OK, then.

The heroism of the Astronaut corps doesn't change the fact that NASA will not - and can not - ever do what Columbus did. If they want to make a difference, to make it possible for people to live in Space, they should declare that they will purchase X kilograms of orbital launch delivery at $Y per kilo, and get out of the way. Unlike the X-Prize and Spaceship-One, NASA's pecuniary calculus will always be a football game, played between the Johnson Center Eunuchs and the HHS Mandarins.

But hey, this is all crazy talk, right? I mean, NASA would never skew things because of politics, right? Right?

 

8 comments:

  1. NASA should be completely defunded.
    Anything necessary and/or useful handed over to the Air Farce.
    Any bureaucracy that has time for Muslim outreach, Diversity officers, and climate change analysts is a waste of effort, far beyond salvation.

    The country would be far better off overall if we simply handed that saved money to the shiftless bums to buy dope and booze.

    They'd die off faster.
    Win-win.

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  2. So, we have sent Artemis/Orion off around the moon, taking the long way there and back. Today's early morning coffee got me to thinking: When we start flinging real people off to the moon and beyond, how many of those "expeditions" will have to be actively enroute, there and back, in order to keep the first intrepid explorers from being, well, terminally abandoned, waiting for the next grocery delivery?

    I'm sure Learned Minds are discussing this even at this moment, but we have to ask ourselves, what if the politicians forget to fund the follow-up flights while we still have crews on the moon or on the way?

    Think I'm just playing with the dust bunnies here? Would YOU trust your life to the whims of politicians?

    Just why are we going back to the moon, anyway? Or Mars? Or elsewhere? Are there PROFITABLE reasons for us to go or is this just an excuse to spend tax money? If we find things worth having, how are we going to get them back here where we need or can use them?

    This is just another government spending circus, and NASA is the clowns.

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  3. No, NASA should not be disbanded. They should, however, return back to their primary mission of expanding aerospace boundaries and testing.

    They should not be a jobs and welfare program for every congresscritter and their constituents.

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  4. NASA did the contracting thing before. Low bid was the Russians. Perhaps it will be different this time given the expansion of private sector space programs here but the Democrats seem determined to destroy the most effective on. So it would appear that the Mandarins will win again.

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  5. The answer to the question of why the Portuguese succeeded and the Chinese did not is, in my very humble opinion, specifically because of the difference in size of those ships, and what those differences represented as a practical matter.

    The cost. The upkeep. The manpower required to field a fleet of wooden ships so comically large was likewise comical, if not for the fact that it was financially ruinous.

    Economies of scale swing both ways.

    The Portuguese did what they did with cost and efficiency in the front of their minds. The Chinese did what they did specifically to flaunt the massive cost and lack of efficiency. The Portuguese's effort was a business venture. The Chinese's effort was a vanity project.

    One survived because it worked. The other died because it worked, too, just perhaps not as intended. The message had been sent, in the minds of the chinese PTB, and so the effort was no longer necessary.

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  6. Murphy;

    There is no economic way in which we can profitably mine outer space. Even if we managed to get an asteroid into "near earth" orbit, the materials in that asteroid couldn't be mined in such a way that we'd make a profit off of them, ever.

    At least not without some pretty serious quantum leaps forward in our ability to go to space, and return.

    So, to answer your question, we're not mining anything on the moon. We're going there for scientific exploration, and for the same reason we've always attempted to colonize places we had no business attempting to colonize - because it's there, and we love us a challenge.

    You can be the judge of whether that's a good enough reason or not.

    But mining for resources to bring back to earth isn't a thing.

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  7. "NASA would never skew things..." Well, I watched the all-female team of announcers, led (of course!) by a black female, do the pre-launch bloviation. The return to the moon will be all about the first woman (irony? These people cannot even define the word "woman"!) AND the first POC on the moon! It will be so great! It will be an affirmation of diversity! It will make us all feel so good! I also saw the after-launch speech by the big boss of the launch team, a (you guessed!) woman!! It's a wonder the damn thing flew.

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  8. "Because it's there" has always been a driver. As for covering costs, start selling moon rocks for $10M a pop. There are plenty of billionaires with money they can't spend fast enough.

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