Science and Society

I love PayPal.

By the way per Wikipedia, he's 37, originally from South Africa, left home at 17 for college in Canada then Wharton. "He headed toward the US, saying: "It is where great things are possible. I am nauseatingly pro-American." "His undergraduate degrees behind him, Musk then considered three areas he wanted to get into that were "important problems", as he said later, "One was the Internet, one was clean energy, and one was space."[1]" Love it when brilliance and determination meet opportunity.

I have a feeling that true space progress in the begining, will be done by private enterprises, not government. There's not enough drive in government to do it. But if busineses find a way to make money off of it, they'll do it. I hope he makes it.

Lawrence, I think true space progress has already been initiated by govts. NASA has some brilliant scientists, who have done outstanding work i.e. Hubble, the Mars Rovers, etc. etc. etc., but govt has a flaw. Funds have to be voted, parties change. It's easier, I imagine, to get a bridge built to nowhere, in the Congressional budget, than it is to requisition funds for a working space toilet. Private firms will fill the gaps that govts invariably leave.

BTW, if we're dumping the shuttle why not leave them up there. Attach them as ready made modules, or put them in a high storage altitude for retrofit and later use.

It's not that launching a rocket is so hard: we've been doing it for 50 years. It's just that it's not that easy. SpaceX's rocket is a pretty straightforward design. If anyone were to take conventional rocket design and use modern components, you'd get something not much different from SpaceX's Falcon. The Falcon failures have NOT been in any fancy, hi-tech parts. All three failures have been very mundane in nature. The Air Force maintains its launch reliability record through incredibly rigorous analysis and testing. That costs money. The types of failures SpaceX is experiencing suggests they're not putting enough money into analysis and testing. If they put enough into those areas, they would have a more consistently successful launch record, but then their costs would skyrocket. Bottom line: reliability costs money. If you're going to participate in human spaceflight, do you want to fly on the rocket built by the lowest bidder, built privately, with little or no oversight?

You know Keith, that is an excellent idea. The two remaining shuttles could be used as life boats in case of an emergancy. I don't think the astronauts have any way of reaching saffety in the event something horrible happens. And in the event that you have some damage to the shuttle, well, it's not a big deal, as the likelyhood of it being used to get the station crew home would be small, in reletive terms of course. Besides, it's better to have a broken lifeboat that you can possibly fix, than to not have a lifeboat at all.

Also, another use for the shuttles could be a ferry. We build a station in orbit of our moon, and to get people back and forth, we use the shuttles. The only thing that needs to be done is a.) build the lunar orbiting station, b.) get a continuous supply of fuel for the shuttles c.) find rich people who want to visit the moon d.) get a company to place people in Earth orbit for transfer from lauch vehicle to shuttle. With the large cargo hold of the shuttle, you can easily convert a small portion of that space into passanger space, and the rest for fuel storage. I'm guessing you don't need a huge amount of fuel to get to the moon. One well timed and aimed burn could get us there, then a second to get us into orbit, a third to to get home, and a fourth to enter Earth orbit. Then the minor course changes and dockings. The Apollo crews did it on a small amount of fuel, they even landed and took off from the moon on the available fuel they had. Plus, you may not need to use all the main engines on the shuttles either. It very well could be quite the way to get people back and fourth. Cheaper than designing and building another craft to do it.

From the name of the link that connected me to this article I thought you were going to try to explain to the layman how difficult it is to build a rocket engine: The levels of energy in your typical rocket combustion are 10,000 times higher than those in a jet turbine. The form of a rocket exhaust is basically a horn, with megawatts worth of acoustic energy that can bend thick metal. The launch company has to secure an insurance that costs about one third of the value of the payload... vibration, radiation, pressure changes, and so on. I am all for entrepreneurs revitalizing the Space Exploration effort, but they must present a business case that convinces LM, Boeing, NG, to put up their own money and stop waiting for the Government.

Ilyon, actually the international space station always has a soyuz space craft docked to it that residents can use as a life boat. Also using the space shuttle to go to the moon has been proposed, however the costs of operation would in the long run end up much higher than using a new space craft such as the CEV. Compared to the CEV the shuttle would need a lot more fuel to reach the moon and maintenance costs would be considerably higher.

Sorry Ilyon, I was actually directing that at Lawrence.