SpaceX BFR design

Here is the concept for the new SpaceX BFR space transport system.

What is good about this design scheme ?
What is not so good about this design scheme ?
Is it too big, too small, or just right ?

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BFR... BFG... Big Fucking Rocket?

Big Falcon Rocket.

I'm trying to imagine a feasible number of people that they could fit into it to do their NY to LA flights. Not only would you have to land far outside the cities due to safety, but you would either be paying an insane amount or be packed in like sardines for what would likely not be an all the comfortable ride. The super elite seem far more likely to do Virgin Galactic fun trips and then take their private jets or first class flights. Seems like most of Elon Musk's ideas - shitty pipe dreams that are easily 10+ yrs out engineering wise and likely won't be implemented by his companies.

Why are they using methane ?

I know it says on their but I doubt those would be the final specs, you don't need common areas for the short flights and they likely have a different intention in mind. There's also more bs about refueling in space - also years out.

Liquid hydrogen is a motherfucker

user brings up a very good point that seems to be over looked in the global travel situation. I haven't jumped an ocean since I came to the US but i remember customs and boarding being a horrible time, I cant imagine security wouldn't be an enormous issue.
Ergonomically it is not the best idea.

I'm sure the earth to earth bfr is just to build hype, since it probably won't be practical for a very long time. By the time the BFR has even a tenth of the safety record that a plane does there will probably be quiet supersonic travel available.
Especially since the BFR travel model relies to much on a wheel and spoke form of travel rather than the point to point that air travel is becoming today

The commuter flights were just a "what if?" scenario at the end. The realistic goal is launching satellites for less.

That paper rocket won't take of the launch pad before the 2040's. And that's with sensible downgrades and if things go well.

If you are looking for Saturn V successor and one that will take us BEO then that is the SLS.

>more bs about refueling in space - also years out.
Refueling in space, between two vehicles each designed to support it, is pretty trivial. It just hasn't made sense due to the extreme cost of orbital launch.

>I'm sure the earth to earth bfr is just to build hype
SpaceX wants to raise money to fund development of BFR. They will likely need at least $5 billion for it.

They don't have to beat conventional air travel, they just have to cut out a niche. Let's say they can provide the ride for $5,000 per passenger, and sell the ticket for $10,000. And let's say they operate two routes: New York to La Rochelle, and San Francisco to Tokyo.

Can they sell a million rides to recoup this investment? Note that they don't need a million individual riders. A hundred thousand who each fly five round trips would also do it. It can be any mix of: people who prefer the shorter flight, thrill-seekers, spaceflight enthusiasts, and conspicuous consumers.

I think it's quite likely that they can. This is the most plausible near-term private revenue source likely to justify the investment. They can't count on NASA and DOD money, or huge profits from their satellite internet venture.

>The realistic goal is launching satellites for less.
There's no way to justify spending billions for that. Not with Falcon 9/Heavy. It would only save them a few tens of millions per year, serving the satellite launch market.

You have a good sense of humor.

I like it, especially the shuttle.

With one refuel in Earth orbit, it can land on the Moon and back to Earth orbit.

That's pretty good capability.

The rocket is...nice. You could use it to loft one hell of an ICBM and warhead.

i see what you did there

The booster may be reuseable, but with 31
engines and associated systems, it seems like it may need a lot of work between flights.

>Refueling in space, between two vehicles each designed to support it, is pretty trivial
Except has never been done, or at least not on a regular basis with used hardware, as this scheme proposes.

What are the reentry issues ?.
Does the upper stage have a zillion space--shuttle-like tiles ?

I guess they'll use a skip-glide approach (the Mars approach is pretty damn elaborate, and it does have winglets), so to really cut down on the extended heat duration.

I'm sure they've figured out a coating that'd work just fine for a gentle approach.

Do you think it will be able to withstand the heat of re-entry into earths atmosphere multiple times without being refurbished to fit the "rapid and reusable" approach they seem to be going for?

This feels like a big blocker for me, but who knows maybe the next version of Falcon 9 will prove it's possible.

>to loft one hell of an ICBM and warhead

That should allow for a 700-800 megaton warhead.

Nice.

There is no escape tower for the passengers.
What happens on a launch pad fueling/ explosion accident ?

They seem to think that it can, at least with minimal servicing between flights.

It should be possible, especially when you've got a lot of weight to work with due to the massive rocket. They could go with titanium and some type of heat resistance paint.

Shuttle used aluminum and the tiles to save weight.

Titanium and some sort of surface coating that you can reapply would be far stronger.

>Titanium and some sort of surface coating that you can reapply would be far stronger.

with enough ISP you wouldn't need to aerobrake.

just sayin.

Yes.

>30-60mins of being somewhat uncomfortable instead of 16 hours of being stuck on an airplane

I'd take the 30-60mins.

>nasa
>doing anything
kek

>shitty pipe dreams that are easily 10+ yrs out engineering wise and likely won't be implemented by his companies.

Yeah user just like electric cars that people actually want and reusable rockets, 10+ years out engineering wise and not implemented by his companies.

how many times has such a setup worked versus not worked...

So would I. If they can get an East Coast USA to Hawaii route, I'd take that every weekend.

Where is the passenger escape system on jet airliners? Nowhere, because airliners are reliable enough to justify that risk. SpaceX is targeting a reliability for BFR on par with a jet airliner, so the same thing applies.

>rocket
>ever being reliable as modern plane
I'd say its possible as earlier passenger planes which were still quite used despite potential of aerial disassembly.
The first disaster will be a shitstorm though no mater how many lives are lost.

> how many times has such a setup worked versus not worked...
In the past ? Before the Shuttle ?
I dunno.
But the Orion system seems up to the task.

It's SpaceX's joke, not mine.

Self driving cars - Waymo
Electric Cars - not an original idea. I wouldn't even call it an apple tier idea because the hype around Teslas is nowhere close to making people want something like an iPhone.
Reusable boosters - also not original, done since space shuttle missions. Landing them upright is new, but the concept not at all.
Boring company and electromagnetic transport are way far out.

>has never been done
That doesn't mean it's hard. The hardest part by far is the rendezvous and docking, and that was mature almost immediately after the dawn of spaceflight.

Once docked, they simply have to open the valves and settle the propellant by accelerating slightly with thrusters. It'll flow by "gravity".

Since they're using oxygen and methane, purging the lines is a simple matter of opening valves and exposing them to vacuum. There'll be no residue.

you're only flying to any point on earth in under and hour by rocket if you're a nuclear warhead

In the entire history of spaceflight, only once has a launch escape system been used for its intended purpose and worked. On another occasion, the launch escape system caused a pad explosion and killed several ground crew. Other times, complications or malfunctions of LESes have caused launch failure.

In terms of human life, they've been a wash, and they've been very costly in effort, money, and lost missions.

Spacex uses PICAx, a self healing material-way more durable than the space shuttle tiles.

spacex.com/news/2013/04/04/pica-heat-shield

How do people not understand yet that Elon is a grade A autist/sociopath who doesn't care about human lifes? When one of his customers got killed by the Tesla Autopilot he tweeted
something in the sense of "nice, now we can improve our auto-pilot even more".

>They don't have to beat conventional air travel, they just have to cut out a niche. Let's say they can provide the ride for $5,000 per passenger, and sell the ticket for $10,000. And let's say they operate two routes: New York to La Rochelle, and San Francisco to Tokyo.

5.000$ per passenger would mean they can cut the launch costs by >99% (currently 5.000$ is approx what it costs them to transport 1kg into LEO).

Nearly as impulse dense as kerosine without coking problems in regen channels and can be used without helium system.Also 5-10x cheaper than kerosine

New Glenn will be the last nail in SLS coffin it outperforms block2 with distributed launch.
BFR will be few years late but by the time it launches (mid 2020s) SLS will look like a damn A4 by comparison

Imagine this thing having a malfunction and killing 120 high level scientists, engineers, all astronauts. That'd be a wrap for SpaceX. They would be so irreversibly fucked as a company.

>implying they'll actually build this
>implying the BFR isn't investor b8

who knows. i only doubt that this won't have some major malfunction. it's too big and will be too new when they try to do this. all of the regulatory bullshit that will be involved with taking 120 astronauts to mars, can you even imagine how long that shit will take to deal with and plan out and debate? I doubt this will happen in like 2022 or whenever the date was.

IIRC he only said he will fly to Mars in 2022, not a crewed mission.

Earlier this year he already said the Falcon Heavy is stuck in development and they are going to need several failed launches to work several problems through. E.g. he literally said he believes the Falcon Heavy in Novembre will explode. They also ditched propulsive landing and are going now with conventional parachute-landing instead for their Dragon 2.

I think Musk's real plan is to make the Falcon Heavy reliably work until the mid 2020s, and everything else he says is just publicity. The Falcon Heavy is powerful enough for a crewed Mars mission, which would then come in the end of the 2020s.

...

>Veeky Forumsenshits always talking about killing people

lmao you nerds are still salty over high school?

BFR crewed flights to Mars by 2027 is another entire "what if" scenario. I don't get why Musk would even promise this when the red tape involved alone would prevent him from doing so. Then there is the matter of actually finding 200+ people who want to pay money to spend 2-4 years on Mars.

Honestly I read the BFR thing as almost entirely bunk because of the ridiculousness of his suggestions. If he REALLY wants to put people on Mars he should be aiming to build the first roads, fuel tanks, fuel refineries and landing pads on Mars - not a cheap venture but one which makes an eventual Martian spaceport possible.

>Where is the passenger escape system on jet airliners? Nowhere...
Not true.
Haven't you seen people sliding down the inflatable slides to egress during an emergency ?

yeah, the crewed mission is 2024

You do realize that the life supporting infrastructure for every single person is in the tons? You need a place to sleep, a greenhouse, soil, solar plants, etc. Let's say ever person needs 10 tons of supply+infrastructure to survive for several years, which is very, very generous, than one BFR can transport 4 settlers (assuming they actually achieve 40 tons payload to Mars).

i'd bet like $10,000 that won't happen

yeah i'd trust my life to that

But if you're rich you're not stuck on a plane, you're enjoying your luxurious private jet.

what are the wings for?

But would/could you also take the extra zeroes on the ticket price?

>Earlier this year he already said the Falcon Heavy is stuck in development and they are going to need several failed launches to work several problems through. E.g. he literally said he believes the Falcon Heavy in Novembre will explode.
Oh, bullshit. He was just doing expectation management. He wants a successful launch to be seen as a great achievement, and a failure to be seen as an unimportant development step. That tells you nothing of his actual opinion of what will happen.

>They also ditched propulsive landing and are going now with conventional parachute-landing instead for their Dragon 2.
They shifted those resources to upper stage recovery, which they'll be starting next year. They don't see Dragon 2 as important anymore, since they expect to have BFR flying in just a few years.

The way these things work, a little capsule like Dragon is full of expensive miniaturized systems, while a large vehicle like BFR can use relatively economical large-scale systems. So while an expendable F9 upper stage and semi-reusable Dragon with 10 cubic meters of habitable space and a ton or two of capacity might cost SpaceX $30-40 million together to construct after a development effort (with booster) of ~$2 billion, the fully and rapidly reusable BFR spaceship with 800 cubic meters of habitable space and a hundred tons of capacity might cost SpaceX only $100-200 million to construct after a development effort (with booster) of ~$5 billion.

The complexity doesn't really go up as you make it bigger, and it's the complexity that's expensive.

>spaceflight will be as reliable as passenger airline travel
y hello there :)

>one BFR can transport 4 settlers (assuming they actually achieve 40 tons payload to Mars).
You're starting out by assuming that it has one quarter the payload it's planned to. They're supposed to refuel in orbit, not launch directly from Earth to Mars. The LEO-to-Mars constraint is looser than the Earth-to-LEO constraint, so unless they're doing orbital cargo/passenger transfer (as opposed to merely refuelling), it should be 150 tons to Mars.

They've said before that there will be separate cargo shipments and passenger trips.

>You need a place to sleep, a greenhouse, soil, solar plants, etc.
That can all be manufactured on Mars from native materials. The proportion of materials to people should drop off over time as local industry develops.

The shuttle was a new type of vehicle and only flew 135 times, manned every time. It was never reasonable to suppose it was safe. You always end up learning how not to crash by crashing.

The odds of dying in an airliner crash by flying once is one in tens of millions. It took them hundreds of millions of flights to get there.

The shuttle was never a design that could have been used for millions of flights like BFR is. BFR's designed to simply be refuelled and reflown, like an airliner, so it's possible to accumulate enough flight experience to grow confident that failures will be very rare.

The tricky part is going to be finding a way to pay for flying it the first ten thousand times. By then, they should have the probability of failure down to an acceptable level (though probably not as good as airliners, which are far safer than they need to be).

How does the fuel for the first rocket get up to it to be refueled in orbit? You realize that the cost is essentially doubled right? Not to even say that Mars flights have rather specific launch windows to make them energy efficient orbital transfers.
On orbit refueling works best if you have the infrastructure. A space elevator, a station that generates fuel, etc. That infrastructure needs to be created before on orbit refueling becomes truly viable.
Not quite sure where you're getting this "designed to be flown millions of times" idea. No hardware that's going into space is designed to fail after x years or y flights. It may only be guaranteed to be safely operational for a couple years, but that's far from them sticking timed kill switches in their hardware. The hardware and structure will be the point of failure, after far less than a million flights components will be replaced, structure fixed until it is a Theseus' ship. Costs will be lower, but will never acheive airplane levels of reusability because the loads are greater, the environment more severe, etc.
Also, it was completely reasonable to suppose the shuttle was safe, risk assessments were completed, designs were reviewed and iterated upon, and it was deemed safe for travel, just like how every orbital launch vehicle is now. There's a difference between design and flight heritage that I think you're getting too, and I agree with you that getting any design from TRL levels of 4-5 to 9 are difficult. It's something we've faced before and can face again.

How many 9-11s would a BFR be if hijacked and flown into the Freedom Tower?

original 12m diameter ITS would have had the interior volume of 20 737s.

holding 100 people for a several month trip to mars. plus cargo they would need for at least 2 years and 4 month return trip to earth.

so a one hour flight would just mean seats, barf bags, flight suits and life support. so you could fly 1000 people at a time.

If the payload bay is 825m^2 you could probably fit around 2-3 787 cabins in there. I think the number might be more like 700.

>How does the fuel for the first rocket get up to it to be refueled in orbit?
?
Try watching the presentation to get the basics huh?

Read through the rest, I state how. Then try thinking. You don't just launch more rockets to refuel rockets. It doesn't immensely cut costs. You need to build space infrastructure. Also in general try making an argument and not just latching onto one sentence, or I'll just go ahead and assume you are unable to argue any of the rest and are therefore unintelligent.

>You don't just launch more rockets to refuel rockets. It doesn't immensely cut costs.
It does if they're highly reusable, and the tanker rocket is only going to Earth orbit, while the one being refuelled is leaving for several years.

The tanker upper stage is estimated to be good for a hundred launches, while the booster is supposed to be good for a thousand. The cost of flying them will be down near the cost of the propellants, so the orbital refuelling practically is free, relative to the cost of the Mars vehicle.

>On orbit refueling works best if you have the infrastructure.
This system is the infrastructure.

>A space elevator, a station that generates fuel, etc.
The station adds nothing, and a space elevator would be more expensive and less energy efficient than highly reusable rockets. These are bad ideas.

>Not quite sure where you're getting this "designed to be flown millions of times" idea.
Not the individual rockets, dim bulb. This is the first type of orbital launch vehicle that's designed to support a sustained high flight rate. And I never said what you put in the quotes. My only mention of "millions" was talking about airliners.

>100 people for a several month trip to mars. plus cargo they would need for at least 2 years and 4 month return trip to earth.
They might crowd 100 people in for the trip to Mars (although that's the same figure they gave for ITS, when it was twice the size of BFR), but not with all the cargo they'll need to survive on Mars.

The first trip will probably send more like 10 or 20 people, with supplies, headed to meet at least 200 tons of landed equipment, and accompanied by at least two more cargo BFRs. They'll have 450+ tons of equipment and supplies to set up a base, a landing pad, a power plant, a water mining operation, a propellant production plant, and a launchpad.

If they can't do it in that time, then in 2 years, there'll be another load, and probably more people to help.

>the tanker rocket is only going to Earth orbit
Is there something not shown (OP pic) here ?
A special upper stage fuel/ refueling module that uses the same booster ?

There are three versions of the upper stage planned so far: the passenger ship (with a large, habitable pressurized volume in the front half, and things like windows and airlocks), the fuel tanker (with propellant tanks extending all the way to the nose of the vehicle), and the satellite carrier (with a large, unpressurized volume in the front half, and a huge door so it opens wide for payload deployment).

Presumably, there will be subvariants of the passenger ship, such as a pressurized cargo ship with no windows or life support, and a short-ride version with a large number of seats rather than cabins, stores, utilities, and common areas.

>the fuel tanker (with propellant tanks extending all the way to the nose of the vehicle),
It says the spacecraft holds 1100 tons of propellant or 2.2 million lbs, and that the basic system payload is 300,000 lbs, so that's like 7 launches to fully fuel the spacecraft in LEO ?

Yeah, that's about right. However, it may be more if they're fuelling it in an elliptical orbit, so it can take a larger payload or have more delta-v.

So 8 to 10 total launches to get around 100 people one way to a mars outpost with reuseable hardware. That actually doesn't seem too bad, especially if the ship can transport the people in relative comfort and safety.

This rocket also went from paper to launch in five years. So it IS possible, you faggot.

Would you please fucking do you assigned reading before raising objections in class that where already covered in the readings.

Woah!

Could be used as a payload launcher for planetary defense and asteroid deflection.