Russian Space Program: News & Discussion #3

kvs wrote:

limb wrote:

kvs wrote:People need to try harder when pimping wonder "tech".   If someone is going to waste resources lofting rocket fuel to 60 km,
assuming a reusable first stage, then may as well use the fuel to propel jet engines on the way down.    By contrast a
glider does not need to waste payload to loft fuel for the return trip.    The US Space Shuttle was a glider and I don't
recall people bitching about it being inferior and should be replaced by some vertical lander.

All this vertical landing BS showed up thanks to Elon Musk the shyster.   Now you know why snake oil was so popular back
in the day.   A shyster can sell the fantasy delusion and basically create a cult following.

Nodoby bitches about the space shuttle? have you not seen the space tech channels like Scott Manley shitting on it for years for being an example of "government innefficiency" and touting "the free market", tech startups and ofc elon chungus as the solution against inferior state controlled NASA products.

You are making a non sequitur observation and for now I will pretend you are not a troll.
I am clearly talking about the functionality of the Space Shuttle and not its price tag.   Show
me any example of bitching about the Space Shuttle where its functionality is attacked and
people pimp vertical landing as a superior alternative.

limb wrote:Spacex also advertises that it uses a lot of cost cutting measures, which alays remain unspecified.

GarryB wrote:The whole concept of the US space shuttle was to save money by being able to build a number of shuttles and to the reuse them over and over and over so the longer you had them and the more often you used them the cheaper they would be.

The US space shuttle is not a glider by definition... it carries enormous engines that burn the enormous volume of fuel stored in the main central external tank.

Once in orbit the main engines becomes 10 tons of dead weight, and the cost of refurbishing them for the next flight and checking all the heat tiles and other bits and bobs is what made the shuttle so expensive.

The shuttle essentially had a bring back payload weight of 10 tons.

Nomad5891 wrote:You guys seem kinda critical towards SpaceX, which I dont understand very well.
I dont care about Musk, what I do see however is that since SpaceX joined the game all the players, Russia included started moving again. Before them no business was touching space as it was deemed risky and not profitable. Today we have plenty of companies with pockets full of cash investing in space exploration, space technology, space mining and eventually human colonies on other planets. Which I think is great.

China too, has made great advancement in this field. I am really excited to see what else they have planned for the following year. Actually I would love to see a joint Russian-Chineese space agency or even better, a planetary one, but I guess we as species are just too far yeat from such utopia.

Arrow wrote:Fusion reactors are probably a very distant future. For this, the D + T reaction requires the production of tritium from lithium. Lithium is a very valuable element for batteries, among others. And his resources are not that much. I think it would be much better to develop traditional claim-based nuclear power. Modern fast reactors can replicate fuel from U-238 or Tor 232. These are incredibly huge resources. In addition, they can "burn" a large proportion of nuclear waste. Discharge-based reactors can range from very small, compact to large. Thermonuclear only possibly large dimensions. The yield of the synthesis reaction alone is only about 4 times greater than fission reactions.

Big_Gazza wrote:
We need to identify asteroids that have useful concentrations of the valuable materials for which we have great need.  Not sure what that might be however, and i'd suggest that it makes more sense to extract rare materials from oceanic seawater rather than trying to prospect orbiting rocks out past Mars.

GarryB wrote:

The point is that even in the Oort cloud the distances are enormous and while there are much bigger objects there they are even further apart and it is rather too cold to run on solar power there... the sun would be just a really bright star from inside the Oort cloud.

Big_Gazza wrote:

Singular_Transform wrote:There are asteroids out there that composed from pure, high quality iron-nickel alloy.

16 Psyche is a 220 km diameter iron-nickel piece.

Yes, but so what?  I'll repeat my previous position - the cost of recovering asteroidal materials and returning them to Earth for use is astronomically high and the intrinsic value of the recovered materials is far too miniscule to justify the expenditure. My example of NASA spending $800M to recover ~1kg of samples from Bennu is a great illustration of this fact.

Advocates of asteroid mining attempt to counter this by saying that the metals can be used in-situ rather than returning to Earth (or near-earth orbital facilities) but this argument falls flat as they can never adequately explain what off-world activities this is supposed to support, and again, what these activities will produce to justify the stupendous costs.

This is reality, not a computer game like NMS where the player shoots beam weapons at an absurdly condensed debris field and commercial quantities of valuable materals miraculously appear in the ships cargo hold...  

Isos wrote:Hopefully they don't detect an asteroide full of oil. Those US assholes would attract it directly on us and destroy the earth.