Dragon manned mission scheduled for May 2018

>doesn't really sound like a very sustainable business model
You don't need a "sustainable business model" to follow up a multi-billion-dollar deal. Getting billions of dollars is worth doing even as a one-shot.

>the NASA budget, which isn't very big to begin with
It's bigger than the launch industry.

...

This has been claimed. The timing of the claim makes me slightly suspicious. We'll see.

>There's two Pioneers who are graciously donating $140 million to orbit the moon next year.

Fixed that for you.

Is the space age finally happening?

I feel like my entire life I've seen designs and stories about the exciting new spaceship that never actually got made

>I feel like my entire life I've seen designs and stories about the exciting new spaceship that never actually got made

If you are old enough to recall it, the moment when you realized that the name "Enterprise" was given to a shuttle that would never go into orbit was the moment when you realized the world was trying to tell you something.

nasa gets 20 billion a year
Thats plenty of money to live on for SpaceX

>The main problem I'm seeing here is that all of the contracts they have don't require manned flights.
They can't satisfy their existing launch contracts yet, until they do they can't be taking on new contracts/missions

>I don't really see any economic benefit for getting people into space.
Meanwhile the single largest reasonpeople fly in planes is tourissm

The space age has always been happening, it's just that NASA has been on hiatus since 2013 because they fucked up the shuttle replacement schedule. But now everything has come together, as now NASA has multiple private vendors (ULA, SpaceX, BO) to do LEO missions while they themselves focus on manned exploration. Even better, we're now seriously looking a Republican dominant government for the next twenty or so years, meaning funding will be more stable and reliable.

But it's still slow to spin up. Even if NASA manages manned landings during Trump's term, Pence will be the President overseeing the really big things like a the ISS replacement, a Lunar fuel refinery, Venus flyby, and Martian landing. NASA still needs another decade to develop things like landers, ground hab modules (and support equipment), nuclear reactors, and most importantly more powerful engines. This is where VASMIR research is showing a lot of promise.

>NASA has been on hiatus since 2013
I feel like NASA has more or less been on hiatus since 1972

>we put an RC car on Mars
And I fucking love it but come on senpai

>NASA has been on hiatus since 2013 because they fucked up the shuttle replacement schedule.

Some would argue the fuck-up goes back further than that, to when the fucked up the Apollo replacement schedule with the huge diversion that was STS.

>I feel like NASA has more or less been on hiatus since 1972

That's because you don't appreciate how important it was to do joint missions with the Soviet Union in the late 70s, and the creation of the ISS in 2000. From a pure politics angle both those things were massive successes and people felt good about them. It's only now in 2017 are people tired of just "cooperation" and want something more tangible. It says more about the times we live in than anything else.

>>we put an RC car on Mars
>And I fucking love it but come on senpai

If NASA can land a rover on Mars, they can land a rocket. NASA has done this five times now so they have a lot of data on how to do Mars landings without fucking it up (unlike the ESA, whose lander crash landed last year). It's certainly not sexy or fun but real data was generated. Although this reinforces my first point: NASA has landed five things on Mars now most people want them to expand and do bigger things.

And again, there's VASMIR research which itself could make a Mars mission financially feasible sooner rather than later.

>BO

Oooh, what vehicles do they have?

don't they own the dream chaser?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream_Chaser

no

>If NASA can land a rover on Mars, they can land a rocket.
JPL wouldn't be building a manned lander, though. Their manned program people aren't accustomed to developing new things and achieving new results. No one currently working there has had a job like that.

NASA's not this tight-knit group, it's a sprawling assemblage of smaller organizations that don't like or trust each other very much.

only because they are too lazy to develop the tech

Skylon is the future

Yes hence why having more lander landings is important.

Skylon is expensive and not operable before mid/end 2020s. It's only going to LEO.

The apollo program itself was a pointless boondoggle
Footprints and flags on the moon

It was successful, but still pointless, and at the end of it they scrapped everything

>VASIMR
>more powerful

Don't make me laugh, power is energy over time not specific impulse you nigger.

VASIMR is a meme anyway.

>VASMIR research which itself could make a Mars mission financially feasible sooner rather than later

Having more efficient propulsion does not imply a cheaper ride. Reusable rockets are the future of economic space ventures, and they'll do it without SEP, because the efficiency of chemical is just fine and dandy if you can apply it correctly using a vehicle designed for that purpose.

>implying this is any better or safer

Sierra Nevada does Dreamchaser.

Blue Origin has New Shepard currently and are working on New Glenn for the 2020's.

>NASA's not this tight-knit group, it's a sprawling assemblage of smaller organizations that don't like or trust each other very much.

this this this this this.

Anyone who thinks NASA is a unified organization all on the same page that wants to come together to accomplish great things needs to read about The 90 Day Report, and notice that every single department of NASA shoehorned in their own pet technology/project and ended up producing the worst plan to go to Mars, ever.

Robert Zubrin please go.

>Skylon is the future

Only if we can figure out the materials technology, and only if the space market expands by the time it's built to have a need for a human transport vehicle able to carry dozens of people at a time into LEO, which will be all Skylon is realistically going to be good for.

When it comes to cargo, Skylon gets BTFO by reusable booster launch vehicles.

People talk about the shuttle like the problem was safety, but that was far from the main problem.

1) they insisted on flying it manned every time, even for satellite launches, so they couldn't try things out without risking human life,
2) it had a low flight rate, so it took decades to get through what would have been only a preliminary test flight program for an aircraft,
3) it was completely uneconomical to fly, so flying it meant not much money for more development,
4) the vehicles were too expensive to construct, so even if they took the crew out, they couldn't do any destructive or risky testing,
5) there was no subscale model to base it on, and no plan to build a better one based on the experienced gathered, they built the first model big and just kept on using it.

ITS addresses all of those issues.

>no wings

Automatically better. Also, no extremely fragile TPS, no large cryogenic tank mounted next to that fragile TPS that sheds foam on ascent, no solid boosters, reusable first stage, and enough cargo capacity to lift the equivalent mass of three entire space shuttles full of cargo in reusable mode. You'd probably have to crush them into bricks in order to fit them though.

>they insisted on flying it manned every time

There was a conscious decision during development to have a manual switch be flipped in order to lower the landing gear after a mission. This was literally the only thing that humans needed to be on board to do, the Shuttle flew itself from launch to approach and during the landing, but had no autopilot control of the landing gear.

That's bullshit, it was piloted for the landing.

>no abort system
>has to land perfectly or everybody dies
>if a landing engine fails, everybody dies
>if any of the 51 engines on the rocket fails, everybody dies
>if both the solar panels don't deploy, everybody dies

>no abort system

Neither did Shuttle, that's one point in which they score the same. Except, ITS doesn't have any solids that can't be shut down, and the ship itself has enough thrust to fly itself back to the pad and land if the Booster were to fail.

>has to land perfectly or everybody dies

Same with Shuttle/Apollo/747/Literally any vehicle involving a landing sequence.

>if a landing engine fails, everybody dies
>engines cannot be made reliable or have the ability to reliably start up

Falcon 9 first stage center engine fires 4 times during a mission at multiple throttle settings and in different ambient atmospheric pressures. SpaceX hasn't had any core be lost because the center engine failed to start up, even long before they ever actually landed the thing.

>if any of the 51 engines on the rocket fails, everybody dies

The whole point of having so many engines is engine-out capability dumbass, along with the ability to use them for landing.

>if both the solar panels don't deploy, everybody dies

At least ITS has panels, Shuttle couldn't remain in orbit for more than 14 days before its fuel cells would run out.
Also there's no reason to think that solar panel unfolding isn't reliable and won't be reliable in the future.

I mean, remember when they were developing it, this was the 1970s. The design proposal was accepted in 1972, the year that the Intel 8008 was released, and it was originally scheduled to launch in 1977, the year that the Apple II was released (although the schedule slipped to 1981).

So they were barely in the era of microprocessors. The shuttle's flight computer even used core memory (little magnet rings wrapped with wire for each bit). They didn't have a lot to work with to automate landings.

It was a rational decision at the time to require a human pilot for landings, although they should have upgraded quickly.

>Neither did Shuttle
at the very least, they could have bailed out post-reentry if a landing were impossible
>and the ship itself has enough thrust to fly itself back to the pad and land if the Booster were to fail.
no it doesn't
its twr is barely >1 using all 9 engines
>Same with Shuttle/Apollo/747/Literally any vehicle involving a landing sequence.
vertical landings have been done SpaceX hasn't had any core be lost because the center engine failed to start up
merlin is only reliable because it is incredibly simple
>The whole point of having so many engines is engine-out capability dumbass
a failure of any raptor would destroy the entire rocket, thanks to extreme chamber pressures in the engine
>Also there's no reason to think that solar panel unfolding isn't reliable and won't be reliable in the future.
multiple progress&soyuz missions have failed/been aborted due to solar panel problems

>its twr is barely >1 using all 9 engines

That's enough to cancel horizontal velocity and hover while burning off fuel mass until enough margin is available that it can land. It's more feasible than the Shuttle option, which was to hope the SRB's don't blow until they burn out, then spin the orbiter+tank around and cancel velocity, then descend and glide to a runway.

>vertical landings have been done a failure of any raptor would destroy the entire rocket, thanks to extreme chamber pressures in the engine

No, a flak jacket to isolate shrapnel and a computer to monitor the engine as it runs to fast detect anomalies would be sufficient to protect the vehicle's other engines and superstructure. SSME ran at high chamber pressures (though not Raptor level pressures exactly) and was able to shut down the engine before performance anomalies became explosive failures.

>multiple progress&soyuz missions have failed/been aborted due to solar panel problems

Multiple Russian rockets&spacecraft have failed because of poor quality control and operator error (guy killed a proton launch because he installed an accelerometer upside down).

>That's enough to cancel horizontal velocity and hover while burning off fuel mass until enough margin is available that it can land.
not possible
imagine a failure 1 second after liftoff
>What are helicopters, harrier jets
have it's reliable because it is well designed to be reliable
nope
it's gas generator rather than staged combustion
completely different ballgame
>a flak jacket to isolate shrapnel
are you retarded?
>Multiple Russian rockets&spacecraft have failed because of poor quality control
just like spacex rockets

The shuttle was a glider, and a shitty brick of a glider at that. The reliability of aircraft landings depends on being able to make second and third tries.

>merlin is only reliable because it is incredibly simple
Merlin's not all that simple. It's regeneratively cooled, restartable, and throttleable, with four fluids (helium, TEA-TEB, kerosene, and oxygen). Raptor has some simplicity advantages from the full-flow design, since two fully separate turbopumps mean no shaft seals between the fuel and oxygen pumps, and it all runs on two fluids (methane and oxygen).

Raptor is certainly designed to be more reliable and longer-lasting than Merlin.

>a failure of any raptor would destroy the entire rocket, thanks to extreme chamber pressures in the engine
Combustion chamber explosion is only one failure mode, and it's pretty unlikely in an extensively-tested reusable engine. The SSMEs had very high chamber pressures too, but they never had one straight-up explode.

>Merlin's not all that simple
it's literally the simplest liquid engine used in the launch industry today

>The SSMEs had very high chamber pressures too, but they never had one straight-up explode
raptor flights should exceed ssme flights in only 8 missions
there's plenty of opportunity for these shitboxes to go wrong
also consider that the raptor chamber pressure (design goal) is 25% higher than the next highest chamber pressure in a rocket engine ever

>>Merlin's not all that simple
>it's literally the simplest liquid engine used in the launch industry today
No, it's not simpler than hypergolic engines.

Anyway, it's a very high performance engine. Extremely high thrust-to-weight.

>raptor flights should exceed ssme flights in only 8 missions
>there's plenty of opportunity for these shitboxes to go wrong
Exactly. And they're going to start out flying unmanned (in fact, after finishing ground testing, they're going to start suborbital and work their way up). That's how they'll work the bugs out quickly.

With the rapid-turnaround reusable ITS, Raptor flights can exceed SSME flights in a week.

>imagine a failure 1 second after liftoff

In that case it's probably inescapable. That being said, the whole point of the ITS is to be so reliable that failures like this essentially never happen, just like how modern airliners accept the risk that there is a tiny chance that they are going to crash a plane today and kill several hundred people. You can't make any system of transport 100% safe, so you may as well focus on just making it safe enough then move on.

>have it's gas generator rather than staged combustion
>all gas generator engines have always been reliable
>and no staged combustion engines are ever reliable

Raptor is a FFSC engine by the way, which is actually easier on the turbopumps and is more reliable than regular staged combustion despite being more complex.

>>a flak jacket to isolate shrapnel
>are you retarded?

Are you? Falcon 9 already does this. It's the same technology used for airliner jet engines. Higher chamber pressure means a thicker jacket.

>just like spacex rockets

CRS7 was caused by poor quality control in a factory ran by a contractor supplying struts. SpaceX had been doing batch tests to verify quality, but after the incident the went back and tested every strut and found about 1 in 10 failed at well below their spec. Now SpaceX no longer uses that supplier and tests every strut.

Amos-6 was not caused by a quality control issue.

No Dragon has had a failure to deploy solar panels or other failure caused by quality control.

>these shitboxes

I can't tell if you're a Lockheed/Boeing shill or a BO shill

>Anyway, it's a very high performance engine. Extremely high thrust-to-weight.

Merlin has the highest Isp ever achieved in a gas-generator RP-1 engine. Isp becomes exponentially harder to increase for any given combustion cycle, so it's safe to say Merlin 1D is a high performance and advanced engine, even if it is a gas generator.

Even the capability of multiple restarts during flight makes it advanced, the SSME for all the praise it gets couldn't and can't do that.

>it's not simpler than hypergolic engines
I wasn't aware that kerosene melted skin upon contact.

>Jet turbines are just as complex if not more complex than rocket engines.
kek
you have a genuine mental illness

You know, though, for all the talk about ITS not having an abort option, it's not unthinkable that they'd build one that carries a cluster of Crew Dragons (possibly under blow-off panels) for Earth-LEO passenger shuttling.

300 tonnes to LEO. If a loaded Dragon is 10 tonnes, 15 Dragons carrying 7 passengers each would be enough for 100 passengers while using only half of the capacity. With 17 Dragons, they could have an attendant in each one to take care of the passengers, and they'd still have plenty of leftover capacity for the support structure and a common inner space which could be accessed once in orbit to make the transfer to a station or Mars-bound ship.

>it's not unthinkable that they'd build one that carries a cluster of Crew Dragons (possibly under blow-off panels) for Earth-LEO passenger shuttling.
what do you mean "it's not unthinkable"?
it's literally the most retarded idea I've ever heard

protip: ITS will never carry payloads to orbit
only the ship and tanker

Okay, so we've established that you're using your own personal made-up concept of "simple" which will be arbtrarily reinvented on any challenge to ensure that Merlin remains the "simplest".

Now please go be garbage somewhere else.

>propellant type is not a factor and shouldn't be considered

>ITS is terrible it doesn't even have abort capability
>>hey, they could put the passengers in escape pods with abort capability, in fact they're already building something that would work fine for that
>literally the most retarded idea I've ever heard

>protip: ITS will never carry payloads to orbit
>only the ship and tanker
Of course it'll carry whatever SpaceX can make money carrying. Why would you even imagine that it would be limited to the variants they've shown so far?

>they could put the passengers in escape pods with abort capability
>(possibly under blow-off panels)

What the propellant does to human skin is certainly not a factor in how complex or simple the engine is.

It's generally agreed in the industry that hypergolic-propellant engines are simpler and easier to make reliable.

If you've got something to say about that, say it plainly so we can all have a good laugh at the childish stupidity of it.

I'm not going to play "guess what I was implying" whack-a-mole.

Rocket engines are hard because you have to balance all the thermodynamics and flow rates and so forth.

Jet engines are hard because you have to get the right compression ratios and rpms and be able to run everything as hot as possible without melting your blades.

They're different problems, but a rocket engine is easier than a jet engine in some ways and vice-versa. In a jet engine it's way easier to get more efficient, but you won't ever achieve the TWR of a rocket, and you can't run as hot as you'd like to. Likewise in a rocket your combustion chamber pressure and temperature can be insane because you're pumping your fuel as coolant so the heat flux isn't that big a deal, but you have to design your fuel injector to prevent the flame from spinning and destroying your nozzle, as well as make sure you're actually flowing enough coolant over the combustion chamber and nozzle,etc. In both cases producing a reliable machine is difficult.

So do you want to add any substance you this discussion or are you just going to keep making assertions?

see

Okay, so you have no point.

the simple fact that they don't require oxidizer, let alone cryogenic or hypergolic propellants, makes them simpler by default, let alone all of the thermo issues

>>it's not simpler than hypergolic engines
>I wasn't aware that kerosene melted skin upon contact

I wasn't aware that fuel toxicity has any bearing on how simple or complex an engine can be.
A pressure fed engine is simpler than a GG. A GG using a third fuel to provide the gas (for example the hydrogen peroxide used to power the Soyuz rockets' first stages) is simpler than a GG that uses the same propellant mixture to drive the turbine as is used in the engine itself. Now there are even rocket engines that use electric motors to turn the pumps instead of a gas generator.

Care to point out just one (1) engine on the launch market today that is simpler than merlin?

I'll wait

A person who makes such a retarded statement as
>it's not unthinkable that they'd build one that carries a cluster of Crew Dragons (possibly under blow-off panels) for Earth-LEO passenger shuttling
doesn't have thoughts worthy of any consideration

>they don't require oxidizer

Yes, they do, they just have to intake the air in front of them and highly compress it using hundreds of machined turbine blades spinning at thousands of rpm to do it. Jet engines easily have more parts than the vast majority of rocket engines, and many of those parts (namely the bits spinning around inside the combustion chamber of the jet engine) have to deal with operating at higher temperatures than what rocket engine parts have to withstand, because all the really hot parts of a rocket engine are cooled by the fuel being pumped around.

All solids

All pressure fed engines, upper or lower stages

>the simple fact that they don't require oxidizer, let alone cryogenic or hypergolic propellants, makes them simpler by default
Ultimate brainlet. By default? Maybe in an "all other things being equal" sense, but all other things aren't equal.

Neither crygogenic nor hypergolic propellants are necessary for rockets (and you're really, really stupid if you think hypergols make an engine more complex). For instance, you could use NTO/kerosene (and no, NTO isn't hypergolic with kerosene), or H2O2/kerosene, or N2O/propane, or even ammonium nitrate slurry / alcohol. Nor is any turbomachinery whatsoever necessary. You can have pressure-fed rockets, or pistonless pumps (staged pressure-fed). The turbopumps that do get used in rockets can work under lower temperature conditions than jet engines designed to squeeze out as much fuel economy as possible by running as hot as the turbine can be made to take.

Much more engineering effort goes into designing a market-competitive jet engine than a rocket engine, because it's a harder problem.

Yeah, you obviously can't defend your position at all.

Not sure what you're trying to prove here.
>jet engines are complicated!
what an incredibly profound statement.

The engines that SpaceX, Blue Origin, and NPO Energomash are working on today are an order of magnitude more complicated than the most complicated turbofan jet engine.

still waiting on examples
and soilds are not "liquid" as framed in

Could an airplane store hypergolics in its wing fuel tanks?

You never made your case in the first place that Merlin is simpler than other engines.

I already pointed out some of its complexities: throttleable, restartable, regeneratively cooled, non-hypergolic.

But sure, here's a plainly simpler engine:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vikas_engine

>Starliner
>first flight June 2018
>second flight is manned a scant three months later
you couldn't fucking pay me to go up on that

At least Dragon 2 has a six month period between first flight and manned, and uses components from the prior one.

SpaceX is more likely to have two launch failures before their first crew mission than they are to launch crew in 2018.

>SpaceX would do it much faster otherwise
They wouldn't be doing it at all, as they would be down $2.6 billion in funding.

>orbit the moon
They will not be "orbiting" the moon; and they certainly won't be pioneers since the the first people to visit the moon did so nearly 50 years ago.

>nasa gets 20 billion a year
>Thats plenty of money to live on for SpaceX
NASA wouldn't be given even 5% of that money by congress if it was all "going to spacex"

source

SpaceX missions between now and first crewed mission: about 25
SpaceX chance of launch failure: 10%
Chance of getting through 25 missions without launch failure: 7.2%

>The engines that SpaceX, Blue Origin, and NPO Energomash are working on today are an order of magnitude more complicated than the most complicated turbofan jet engine.

Really, these rocket engines are 10x more complicated than the most complicated turbofan engine? Amazing, how did you come to that conclusion? Did you carefully analyze jet engine designs while applying a fair assessment of complexity then apply the same assessment to current rocket engines and find that they are that much more complex?

Or are your completely talking out of your ass right now?

...

kek

you are clearly a butthurt GE employee or some shit

what are you going to do when Elon's engineering team finishes their little Mars project and comes swooping in to put you out of the job with their VTVL aircraft?

No, they'd have proceeded with it regardless. There are other customers, and investors, and the development cost would be much lower without having to satisfy NASA bureaucrats. They'd probably launch around the same time, too. Without the NASA contract, the bottleneck would be having a mature launch vehicle with flights to spare.

It's not like NASA handed them $2.6 billion up front. So far, they've probably only seen a couple hundred million. There's no guarantee they'll get the full $2.6 billion either, that's the maximum contract value if NASA exercises every option with an additional cost.

Most of it is for crew rotation flights, with new Dragons on new Falcon 9s. Private customers will likely fly on reused Dragons and reused-booster Falcon 9s.

This engine is plainly simpler than Merlin, made by ISRO, currently flies on the GSLV.

If it weren't for NASA funding, they would be desperately trying to make money with falcon-5 right now or just out of business altogether.

A hyperbolic orbit is technically an orbit :^)

yeah but it's just a high earth orbit

The ITS will be able to transfer payloads between ships in orbit, it will OBVIOUSLY be able to carry payloads then release them in GTO or LEO or w/e

For an abort system they could just shove 100 super draco's into an ITS if they really wanted to.

>The ITS will be able to transfer payloads between ships in orbit
?
You mean fuel?

> it will OBVIOUSLY be able to carry payloads then release them in GTO or LEO or w/e
How do you conclude this?
SpaceX is developing a spaceship, not a proper upper stage.

>For an abort system they could just shove 100 super draco's into an ITS if they really wanted to.
but they won't
the writing is on the wall
Any ITS "fan" has no right to criticize the shuttle.

Not once the spacecraft is passing deep within the Moon's Hill sphere. During that phase of flight it's on a hyperbolic trajectory, during all other times it is on a highly eccentric Earth orbit.

I don't think the ITS will have an abort system.
I also don't think that is a bad thing.
Case in point, no commercial airliner has an abort system, at most they have a few little bits of hardware to assist passengers leaving the plane after an emergency landing.

It's actually not looping around the moon though. With an apogee of 400,000 miles, it will pass by the moon just once and keep on going for some time.

I'm sure your opinion will swiftly change when SpaceX's failure rate is realized in ITS and they crater 100+ people on the surface of Mars every ten flights.

The ITS won't have an abort system, but the vehicle itself won't have to deal with any of the glaring design flaws the Shuttle did, namely the solid boosters and the extremely fragile heat shield system.

The only thing that would force an ITS abort would be severe engine anomalies. Considering that SpaceX already understands this and is working to make Raptor the most reliable large rocket engine in the world, I don't see this as a problem.

>the vehicle itself won't have to deal with any of the glaring design flaws the Shuttle did
see

I know, that's what makes it a hyperbolic trajectory. It's still well within the Moon's sphere of influence at the time though so the spacecraft will technically be orbiting the moon, even if it is orbiting on an escape trajectory and doesn't slow down into an elliptical orbit or otherwise.

I'm not saying they will go around the Moon, more accurately they will pass next to it, but will be under the influence of its gravity far more than the Earth's and thus be 'orbiting' the Moon.

That apoapsis of 400,000 miles is around the Earth, around the Moon they will pass as close as a few dozens of miles, having first gone past the Moon's altitude, then fallen back to intercept it, then being flung away again, coasting to an apoapsis high above the Earth then falling back on their elliptical orbit to hit the upper atmosphere.