New Mars Forums

Anyone remember this?

Yes, it's a 1985 vision of the journey to Mars; complete with three venus swing-by landers, two comm sats, two aeroplane probes and an unspecified number of hard-landers and penetrators. All put together at NASA's power-tower space station.

Launched on five Soviet G1s, six ESA Ariane VIIs, and twenty-eight uprated space shuttles; because as we all know, the shuttle turned out to be much cheaper than all the others.

It's computers incidentally use 64-bit parallel processing with 10MB of ROM, 30Mb of RAM, and, apparently, an early DVD drive. Mission administration provided by the UN Mars Exploration Authority

Why post this here? Why not? It's all very silly! :laugh:

It's all from a book called the Mars One Crew Manual, which though dated does contain a little useful inforation, as well as a few very nice pullout maps. Also useful as a diplomacy tool. If you ever think another person is proposing a really stupid way to go to mars just remember this post. Whatever method they propose, it can't be worse than this one!

ANTIcarrot.

ISBN: 0-345-31881-1

There's just that pesky little problem about radioactive exhaust...

Plus such a ship would be somewhat difficult to stick in a museum after it had reached the end of its operational life.

ANTIcarrot.

Asteroid or Luna mining is practical IF it's still very expensive to ship things up from Earth, and there are already other industries in space or you intend to use te full capacity of such a venture in another project. This would be like building a concrete factory in the middle of nowhere (very unprofitable) in order to build a dam close by (more profitable than shipping it in from 'civilisation'.)

With a reduction of launch costs to $500/kg or so (or less!) solar power becomes practical. (How much do Americans pay per kW??) IF there are no severe technical problems with moving the power down to Earth. At present there are no known problems with that.

As to thinking outside the box... I fear that even if you cut off a skeptic's head and carried it outside it would keep it's eyes closed to avoid seeing anything that could upset it's carefully preserved opinions.

ANTIcarrot.

Are there any applications for scram-jets IN the martian atmosphere? Can't think of any, but flying probes have been proposed before and silly questions sometimes have fun/useful answers.

ANTIcarrot.

Very true. The problem starts though when 'all the states working together' becomes 'all the states want a piece of the pie'. One of the bigger reasons (though not the only one) that NASA couldn't persue the CD-X/Y programme is because it would have involved giving all the money to one company and one state. This was completely unacceptable to everyone else, and so a very promising project was terminated.

Similarly in the early stages of the Eurofighter the Germans reasonably demanded a big share - and got the flight control software. Unfortunately they had no experience in that area and didn't do too well as a result. A couple of years later and things were reorganised according to capacity & experience (as done with Airbus) rather than by order of who would winge the loudest.

Since then both the EU & US are experimenting with new management policies. If the US manages to solve the problems of waste first - then great, and they could have a man on mars by 2020. If an ESA/RSA partnership does it first though, then all the money in the world won't help NASA keep up.

May the least incompetent organisation win.

ANTIcarrot.

What about the impact of a loss of skills? In an optimised four person exploration crew, aren't they going to be rather screwed if they lose a quarter of their expertise?

What about landing and take-offs? If you need two crew and one spare for a safe take-off, then you're cutting it fine to go down to the surface.

Finally what about the psychology of the crew? In the past they've all died together. How would they cope with the loss when they're a few billion miles from the nearest human being, and thirty mm away from the lethal harshness of space?

It's all very well saying, people die, get on with it. And I agree to a large extent. But there are other trade offs to consider.

ANTIcarrot.

According to Bigalow:
US space valve: $100,000
EU space value: $5,000

Big budget doesn't count for much if you're paying 20 times the going rate. If the EU shops around, or buys Russian, they could still achieve more than NASA. Especially if it stops trying to carbon copy NASA. (Shuttle/Hermes etc) Or if it simple doesn't charge itself $10B to administer a $5B project - like NASA sometimes does.

ANTIcarrot.

In otherwords Russia has levels of control and efficiency in thier budget that NASA and Congress can only dream of!  Not all organisations use diamond tipped drill bits to mill wind-tunnel models out of solid lumps of advanced titanium alloy.

ANTIcarrot.

JimM:

I thought one of the lessons from the shuttle was that not spending the money up front can screw you later on? The second sentence works both ways.

Maybe. BDBs may have practical upper limits on thier size and cost/kg that aren't immediately apparent. It's important to get the cost down before you start serious construction. Whatever system could best do that.

Which would be the point: The moment they do this they stop being a bunch of kooks burning their money and become a real electricity company with an economical product they can sell. It's a matter of showmanship.

Lars_J:

Perhaps you missed the bit where we talked about spending up to $40B bringing the costs down...

You suppose wrong. This is a situation more like the C-5 Galaxy, the Super Guppy, or the Beluga transport aircraft. Each was built for a specific customer for a specific purpose. It's not 'build it and they will come' but 'build it because you already have a customer lined up who's specifically *asking* you to build it and has already given you a down payment'.

ANTIcarrot.

I used $40B as that's a big enough sum to satisfy most peopel that it's doable. I don't think a well managed development would actually cost that.

Personally I'd run it as a competition: company to win gets $40B cash, plus whatever profits they can get out of the $500/kg. EG: If they manage to get it down to $250/kg they pocket the difference. Arrangement will last until the launch of 4 SPSs or 200,000tons, at which point contract will be changed. If launch company offers costs substantially lower than $500/kg an extended contract may be offered. And no damn shuttles!

Should be enough insentive there for a company (any company) to really want to get the costs down.

Your point about the channel tunnel is well made. However after the tunnel many companies woudl not want to take another such gamble, especially now. And oil companies would not want to be seen as rats deserting a sinking ship, least it affect their share prices. It's possible though.

But I imagine industry would be more agreeable with one or more governments standing by as garantors.

ANTIcarrot.

Quote 
>>3000 tons into LEO for the cost of one shuttle trip?
>Well, what can I say? I know Shuttle is expensive,
>but $1.8 billion per trip? Who's kidding who now?

£3M/10tons = $300/kg.
3000tons = 300 launches = $900M.
Current estimates for shuttle launches are hovering at just over $1B. Check you maths please, particularly if you're going to be condescending afterwards.

>>Under $1000/kg?
>$660/kg, actually.

So, as I said, under $1000/kg. And again, check your maths.

>But of course then you have to add profit, insurance (on the
> vehicle itself, not the other things), ground handling
> facilites, etc. So maybe you could sell at about twice
> $660/kg....

You said $3M per flight. At a vehicle cost of $150M and 100 flights costs rise to $450/kg. (But hey, if they're giving them away, why not just pick up half a dozen and screw insurance?) Ground handling is included by definition in the $3M per flight.

Profit need not be added at this stage. If a company makes a delivery to your door, they make a profit not on the delivery but what they are selling you. The delivery is done at cost.

On this we agree. One possible solution to this would be government built SPS systems.

Mass: 50,000tons
Power generated at ground station: 5GW
Launch costs: $15B
Insurance costs: $7.5B
Construction cost*: $8B
Ground station: $2B
My last bill: 7p/kwh = 12c/kwh
Energy generated = 43.83 billion kwh
Income generated per SPS-year: $5.26B
Total income (ten years): $52.6B

*Construction cost based upon two Nimitz class aircraft which equate the mass but which are much more complex. Assume assembly of components in space that are prefabricated on earth.

So that's a good $15B 'profit' for one SPS system. If government built, no money need be borrowed, so no pesky investment. If 12c is too high a price (and it's at least in part a product of the current high exchange rate) sell it at a lower cost or sell it in other countries! If one country stops buying, aim at another! (Try 'moving' any other type of power station!)

There are profitable things you can do in space, and launch systems like the theoretical one you have described will be the thing that will make them practical. Once started, the market will already exist, and new launchers can be developed for it. After that it should  be reasonably self sustaining.

Hence I find your view that no one would want a $300/kg launch system to be entirely unsubstantiated.

And one last point: Even if you are right JimM, and the first spaceline is sued out of existence, then the R&D costs will get completely written off before the new owners get ahold of it - which would lead to a knock on effect on launch costs. So if it happens it may well  reduce the cost of launch rather than increase it.

ANTIcarrot.

I'd agree about the 'narrow definition of profit' bit. SPS construction *would* be profitable, but building the first one would cost somewhere in the reigon of $75B. Building 4 would cost $120B total, and they would pay for themselves after 24 SPS-years of operation. With an average SPS life of ten years, the four of then would produce $80B profit. After that an SPS would cost $25B and generate roughly the same amount of gross profit.

So yes, it can be 'profitable', but the sums involved are way outside the range of current industry. The government could, with some commercial participation. And IMHO, it's a better way to spend money than $300B for mars, or $70B for Iraq, or $60B for the F22 for that matter.

ANTIcarrot.