Space X announces 42-engine reusable rocket

[jimmy olsen]

Watched a bunch of videos and read a lot of articles about this recently and got all excited all over again!

Epic video of Musk's Mars plans. This is a Warner Von Braun level of egomaniacal mad rocket science!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qo78R_yYFA

They've already built the fuel tank


They've already tested an engine
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7kqFt3nID4

Musk's Mars moment: Audacity, madness, brilliance—or maybe all three
Ars dissects the feasibility of SpaceX's plan to colonize Mars in the coming decades.

ERIC BERGER - 9/28/2016, 11:13 PM


Elon Musk finally did it. Fourteen years after founding SpaceX, and nine months after promising to reveal details about his plans to colonize Mars, the tech mogul made good on that promise Tuesday afternoon in Guadalajara, Mexico. Over the course of a 90-minute speech Musk, always a dreamer, shared his biggest and most ambitious dream with the world—how to colonize Mars and make humanity a multiplanetary species.

And what mighty ambitions they are. The Interplanetary Transport System he unveiled could carry 100 people at a time to Mars. Contrast that to the Apollo program, which carried just two astronauts at a time to the surface of the nearby Moon, and only for brief sojourns. Moreover, Musk's rocket that would lift all of those people and propellant into orbit would be nearly four times as powerful as the mighty Saturn V booster. Musk envisions a self-sustaining Mars colony with at least a million residents by the end of the century.

Beyond this, what really stood out about Musk's speech on Tuesday was the naked baring of his soul. Considering his mannerisms, passion, and the utter seriousness of his convictions, it felt at times like the man's entire life had led him to that particular stage. It took courage to make the speech, to propose the greatest space adventure of all time. His ideas, his architecture for getting it done—they're all out there now for anyone to criticize, second guess, and doubt.

It is not everyday that one of the world's notables, a true difference-maker, so completely eschews caution and reveals his deepest ambitions like Musk did with the Interplanetary Transport System. So let us look at those ambitions—the man laid bare, the space hardware he dreams of building—and then consider the feasibility of all this. Because what really matters is whether any of this fantastical stuff can actually happen.

The hardware

During his talk, Musk outlined an extremely large new rocket, with a primary structure made from carbon-fiber composites that are lighter and stronger than the aluminum and other metals used in traditional rockets. A staggering 42 Raptor engines, burning liquid oxygen and densified liquid methane, would power the Interplanetary Transport System (ITS) booster to orbit. "It's a lot of engines," Musk acknowledged. Presumably the software to integrate all of that power has come a long way since the Soviets tried their 30-engine N1 rocket in the late 60s and early 70s. All four N1 launches were failures.

The expendable variant of the ITS rocket would have an unprecedented lift capacity of 550 metric tons to low Earth orbit (LEO), which is roughly equivalent to 50 full-size yellow school buses. The most powerful rocket flying today, the Delta IV heavy, has a payload-to-LEO capacity of only about 28 metric tons; the most powerful rocket ever to successfully fly, the Saturn V, could haul 140 metric tons to LEO. Musk's plan relies on a reusable variant of the the ITS rocket (300 tons to orbit), sending it up and landing it back at the launch pad. After accelerating to a staging velocity of 8,650km/h, the booster would use 7 percent of its propellant for a return trip.

The ITS spaceship would stand 50 meters tall (the Apollo capsule was a mere 3 meters high) atop its rocket, with a maximum diameter of 17 meters. Instead of departing Earth orbit at 4.5km/s, its six Raptor engines optimized for the vacuum of space would accelerate it to 6 km/s, cutting the journey to Mars from six months to about three. After launching and being fueled on orbit, the ITS could deliver 450 tons to the surface of Mars. The largest payload NASA—or anyone—has ever safely landed on the Martian surface is the Curiosity rover, which weighs less than a single ton.

There are more details in the presentation SpaceX has posted on its Web site. Suffice it to say the company has proposed building breathtaking space machines orders of magnitude greater than NASA or anyone else has ever constructed. These are truly audacious space-faring vessels, designed to go where no one has gone before. They are almost unbelievable.

Really, Elon?

Understandably, one might dismiss Elon Musk as a crank, a once-promising visionary slowly degenerating into a Howard Hughes-like madness. A million people on cold, dead Mars? Humans haven't even been to the Moon, which is right next door to Earth, in nearly half a century.

However, SpaceX has made some demonstrable technical progress. Engines represent the bedrock of any rocket, and SpaceX has already built a full-scale version of its Raptor engine, which it tested this month in Texas. The Raptor is approximately the same size as the company's Merlin 1-D engine, but has three times the thrust due to its capability to withstand higher pressures.

Additionally, in one of the real "wow" moments of of Tuesday's talk, Elon showed several photos of an ITS liquid oxygen tank, made of carbon fiber composites to withstand high pressures. This is real hardware, equivalent in scale to the tankage NASA is building for its SLS rocket, and offers some insight into the company's plans.

It seems clear that SpaceX will build as much Mars hardware as it can afford, in hopes of showing the aerospace community and space agencies around the world that it is serious about this venture, and has the technical chops to pull it off. "As we show this is possible, that this dream is real, I think the support will snowball over time," Musk said during his presentation.

Costs and timelines

Musk also spent some time Tuesday discussing costs. Eventually, he said, SpaceX would like to bring down the per-person cost to Mars to $200,000, about the same price as a middle-class home in America (at least, the parts of America with sane real estate markets). At this cost, he believes, enough people will be able to afford a trip to Mars to find permanent new homes there. The ride, he said, would be enjoyable enough. Passengers would have access to a restaurant, zero-g games, movies, cabins, and more. "It will be really fun to go," he quipped. "You'll have a great time."

But Musk cannot simply will such a transport system into existence. He estimated it would take about $10 billion in development costs to produce the first rocket, spacecraft, and other components of the ITS needed to safely bring the first astronauts to the surface of Mars. (This seems shockingly low, and based upon several interviews with industry officials the real costs are probably at least two to three times greater than this).

For now, SpaceX is investing only a "few tens of millions of dollars" annually into the ITS, Musk said, or about five percent of the company's capacity. After SpaceX finalizes its Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon 2 spacecraft in the next couple of years, Musk said the company would devote more resources to the ITS. He said that by the end of the decade SpaceX might be able to spend about $300 million annually on the Mars launcher and spacecraft.

Technically, Musk believes it is feasible to launch the initial ITS mission to Mars in 2024, just eight years from now, and reach the Martian surface by 2025. "That's optimistic," he admitted during a teleconference with reporters after his speech. "I would describe that as an aspiration. But if it did go later, I don't think it would go a lot later than that." That will necessitate significant capital.

The budget shortfall

Elon Musk cannot afford the plan by himself. During his presentation he showed a slide that jokingly suggested the company had some strategies to raise funds for the ITS, including "steal underpants" and "Kickstarter." The reality is that SpaceX will need to raise billions, and probably tens of billions of dollars, to bring about this venture. The company's own revenues, now or in the foreseeable future, will not come close to supporting Mars colonization.

Indeed, Musk suggested the plan would probably need to come about through a public-private partnership, which essentially means that he would conceive of the plans, and his company would build the space hardware, but a government would pay. This is because there is no near-term profit in developing a Mars colony. It would only be be brought about through public financing, or less likely, philanthropic means.

The backing government need not be the United States. It could be a European country. Or an Asian nation. Or perhaps even Middle Eastern states rich with oil money and willing to bankroll an extension of their culture to a new planet. Musk said he deliberately chose the International Astronautical Congress as his forum because this was a worldwide endeavor. "I wanted to come and describe this to the world," Musk said. "To encourage companies and organizations around the world to do something perhaps like this. That's why I wanted to do it at IAC. To get the community in general to think about going to Mars."

But first, undoubtedly, Musk will look to NASA as a potential partner. For most of the last decade NASA has been his steady financial backer, providing the majority of his company's revenues. It is thanks to multibillion dollar contracts from the space agency to deliver cargo (and eventually astronauts) to the International Space Station that Musk has been able to spend funds on the Raptor engine, and invest in Mars-related technology like supersonic retropropulsion. "In the future there may be a NASA contract," he said of the ITS. "There may not. If there is a NASA contract it would be a good thing. If not, that's not a good thing."

Whither NASA?

Let's be painfully honest: Musk's announcement is a potential embarrassment to the space agency. By the time NASA launches a handful of astronauts in the early 2020s on its own new vehicles, the space agency will have spent about $30 billion on the Space Launch System rocket and Orion crew capsule. And for what? A crewed flight around the Moon and back. According to Musk's timeline and stated budget, for about $10 billion, he could send humans all the way to the surface of Mars in the same time frame. So why would NASA spend so much cash for an hors d'oeuvre when it could get a seven-course meal for one-third the price?

Musk walked into a dangerous minefield on Tuesday, and he knows it. NASA has been his meal ticket with its launch contracts, and will remain so for some time. But now having expressed ambitions beyond low-Earth orbit, SpaceX is competing with NASA, with the agency's own hardware and its much promoted "Journey to Mars." These government programs stand in the way of spending federal dollars on ITS.

So while the founder of SpaceX praised NASA for its support of his company, Musk also subtly undermined the agency's Space Launch System rocket. NASA has said its SLS rocket will slash several years off the transit time for scientific spacecraft to Europa and other moons of interest in the outer solar system. Showing a picture of the ITS on Europa, Musk said Tuesday, "It would be really great to do a mission to Europa, particularly."

And asked where he would construct his massive rocket and spacecraft, Musk said he could see building and testing the systems at locations in Louisiana and Mississippi, the same places where NASA is currently working on its Space Launch System. The unsaid implication from Musk for NASA seemed clear: Why bother spending your billions to build the expensive SLS rocket, when I can build you a launcher many times more powerful, for less money, and keep people employed at some of your facilities?


Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos has tangled with Elon Musk on Twitter and in the court room over space achievements and sea-based landings. His company will likely become a direct competitor to SpaceX for government launch contracts.  Win McNamee/Getty Images

Tory Bruno, chief executive officer of United Launch Alliance, urged the Department of Defense to reconsider SpaceX's safety record after the recent Falcon 9 accident. His company has been under intense pressure because its rockets have much higher launch costs than the Falcon 9.  Drew Angerer/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Lori Garver, a deputy administrator of NASA earlier this decade, was a staunch supporter of SpaceX. She has since left NASA, but might return as an influential space policy leader in a Hillary Clinton administration.  NASA

SpaceX is also up against the old guard of the aerospace industry, whom are all involved in the Space Launch System. Here, from left, are NASA's Bill Gerstenmaier, Charlie Precourt, Vice President and General Manager, ATK Space Launch Division; John Elbon, Vice President and General Manager, Boeing Space Exploration; Julie Van Kleek, Vice President, space programs, Aerojet Rocketdyne; and Jim Crocker, Vice President and General Manager, civil space, Lockheed Martin Space Systems.  NASA

So far, at least, the current NASA leadership isn't interested. Earlier this month, in a clear reference to SpaceX, NASA administrator Charles Bolden said he wasn't a "big fan" of private companies building heavy lift launch vehicles that could take humans into deep space. That was for NASA to do.

Congress staunchly supports NASA in this view. Key members in the House and Senate have gone out of their way to stress the importance of the Space Launch System and Orion vehicles, plussing up budgets each year and demonstrating this is where they want the government's space dollars to go. There seems to be very little appetite in Washington D.C. to divert money away from the blessed plan, and its lucrative cost-plus contracts for traditional aerospace contractors like Boeing and Lockheed Martin. Congress also seems dubious about promises from Musk. And why not? They have those big contractors, and their lobbyists, constantly in their ears telling them how Musk will fail.

Credibility

During his speech Musk did not once mention the recent loss of his Falcon 9 rocket, which lies at the core of everything SpaceX wants to do right now. This booster delivers commercial satellites and cargo to orbit. It will fly astronauts into orbit in a couple of years. It is the basis of proving the reusability of orbital launch systems. So if there is no Falcon 9, there is no business. And there have been two Falcon 9 failures in 15 months, including a catastrophic ground test accident at the beginning of September that led to the total loss of the rocket and its Israeli satellite payload.

Musk was asked about the investigation into this second accident when he met with reporters later on Tuesday. The inquiry into the root cause of the recent failure was a "most vexing and difficult thing," Musk said. "We have eliminated all of the obvious possibilities for what occurred there. What remains are the less probable answers."

But despite the uncertainty about the loss of the Falcon 9 rocket during fuel loading operations, Musk said it represented just a "small thing" on a long road. Moreover he blamed the press for its focus on the failure. "If something happens to SpaceX it gets 100 times the press than if another rocket fails," he said. "Maybe 1,000 times."

It is probably more accurate to say that SpaceX garners an outsized amount of attention because it does the fantastic and the unprecedented—like fly large rockets into space, and then have them make spectacular, fiery landings on small barges in the middle of the ocean. It has a flamboyant chief executive who dares mighty things. When the company fails at what is perceived as a relatively straightforward task, like delivering a payload into orbit, the failure raises questions about the credibility of enacting a vision to deliver humongous payloads to the surface of Mars.

This is not the mere speculation of a reporter at Ars Technica. It is a message that comes through in discussions with very senior engineers at NASA, astronauts, and private industry officials who closely follow happenings at SpaceX and have watched the company successfully disrupt the global launch business.

But Elon Musk is a charismatic leader who, for better or worse, is driven by his own vision. He cannot help himself by grabbing for what is unimaginable to most of us. This single-minded drive to continue innovating, and continue pushing boundaries, may ultimately blow up his company. Or, one day, it may lead to the founding of Musk City on Mars.

The vision

Perhaps the biggest contribution from Tuesday's speech will come from Musk's clarion call to make humanity a multiplanetary species. In a particularly poetic moment, Musk expressed the need for "ensuring that the lamp of consciousness is not extinguished." What would happen if we fail to act upon his vision, or something like it, to have humans settle other worlds? "We're confined to one planet until an extinction event," he said.

Here, Musk differs markedly from NASA and the US government. For the agency, spaceflight can be measured a series of discrete goals. In the 1960s that meant a sequenced build-up of flights each building on the last, from Mercury to prove humans could survive in space, to Gemini to prove out rendezvous and long-duration flight, and culminating in a half-dozen Apollo missions to the surface of the Moon. Now NASA would like to begin with a few brave astronauts on the surface of Mars beginning in the late 2030s. It is about going, doing, proving, and then coming back. For Musk, though, it is about releasing the masses into space, and letting them create a new life in space.

That is the ethos espoused by Musk and the "new space" movement. They seek not to explore space to plant flags, but rather to open up new frontiers and provide humanity a backup plan. "This is different from Apollo. This is really about minimizing existential risk and having a tremendous sense of adventure," Musk said.

Although Musk has certainly become by far the most visible proponent of the "settlement" of space, others have come before him, such as the physicist Gerard O'Neill in the 1970s. Another scientist, Princeton astrobiologist Christopher Chyba, more recently said, "Humanity should become a space-faring civilization, and if that is not the point of human spaceflight, what the hell are we doing?"

Yet on Tuesday Elon Musk brought the "settlement" conversation out of the halls of space conferences and among the space Twitterati, and into the broader public consciousness. His plans for Mars became international news. The question now becomes whether the public shrugs this off, or if his message gains traction in the months and years ahead. Was it a moment, or a movement?

Tuesday's speech marked only the opening salvo in Musk's evangelism about the colonization of Mars. His search for a deep-pocketed backer now begins in earnest. For him, personally, and his company, this represents a huge gamble. By putting his entire vision out for the world to see, Musk has emboldened his doubters. Opponents will use details to undermine him. Certainly, they will mock his concept of using a booster with 42 engines. And Musk may just be OK with that. SpaceX has always been a longshot, Musk confided, sharing a delightfully awkward photo from 2002, when the company began. He had only given SpaceX about a 10 percent chance of "doing anything." Today they've upended the global launch business.

Musk's greatest attribute in an era of space timidity and a stagnated launch industry is probably this: he was never afraid to fail. In what may be his most revealing comment of all on Tuesday, he said, "I just kind of felt that if there wasn't some new entrant into the space arena with a strong ideological motivation, then it didn't seem like we were on a trajectory to ever be a spacefaring nation, and be out among the stars."

Musk decided fourteen years ago to see if he could do something about that. On Tuesday, he finally let it all hang out. This audacious plan might be madness, or brilliance—or both.

Musk is not the only one going full bore into space. Jeff Bezos, currently the world's 3rd richest man and worth a staggering $72 billion, recently released an only slightly less ambitious plan.


https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/09/did-the-fourth-richest-human-just-tease-plans-to-colonize-the-moon/

Why Bezos' rocket is unprecedented—and worth taking seriously
Why Blue Origin's crazy big rocket might fly, and what it means for spaceflight.

ERIC BERGER - 9/13/2016, 8:57 AM

We can say this much for Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com and Blue Origin—he does not lack ambition. First Bezos founded an online bookstore that became the largest retailer in the western world, and now he plans to self-fund a New Glenn rocket that is nearly as tall as the Saturn V launch vehicle and more than half as powerful.

As wild as Bezos' idea sounds, Blue Origin might be able to get the job done. And if Bezos and Blue Origin can fly their massive orbital rocket in the next three to four years, it would be a remarkable, unprecedented achievement in a number of ways that could radically remake spaceflight.

Proof of concept

First, a few words about why this might really be viable. It is true that all Blue Origin has flown so far is a propulsion module, powered by a single BE-3 engine, and a capsule on a suborbital flight. The company's New Shepard spacecraft is designed to carry six passengers on 10- to 15-minute hops up to about 100km before bringing them back down to Earth. This is not dissimilar to the first Mercury flights in the early 1960s, hence the moniker New Shepard, named after pioneering astronaut Alan Shepard.

But as simple as the New Shepard system appears, everything in it is designed to scale into New Glenn. The rockets are shaped similarly. The BE-4 engine is a progression from the reusable BE-3 engine. Both New Shepard and New Glenn are designed to have a flight life of at least 25 missions. And here's the crazy thing about Bezos—he thinks the bigger New Glenn rocket will be easier to land.

"The reason I like vertical landing is because it scales so well," he explained earlier this year. "New Shepard is about 80 feet tall. It's the shortest vehicle we will ever make. It gets easier to land the vehicles the bigger they get. It's the inverted pendulum problem. It's easier to balance bigger things. I like those architectures. Parachutes have the opposite problem; as things get bigger, it's very difficult. You can't build a parachute 1,000 feet in diameter. Even wings, they scale pretty well to a certain size, but they end up being a lot of dead weight to carry."

The bottom line: New Shepard may be small, but because Blue Origin has launched and landed the same rocket four times now, there is reason to believe an orbital rocket based upon the same concepts writ large just might work. New Shepard is the test bed, the proof of concept. So far it has worked nearly flawlessly.

Self-funded

Bezos is worth in excess of $60 billion, which makes him the third or fourth richest person in the world, depending upon the value of Amazon's stock. Although he has not publicly disclosed his investment in Blue Origin since 2014, it likely now exceeds $1 billion. That small (for someone with his resources) investment has funded the company for 16 years and led to the development of four generations of engines, including the BE-4. Its impressive 550,000 pounds of thrust power the orbital rocket.

SpaceX and Elon Musk deserve credit for shaking up the aerospace industry with lower-cost rockets and reusability, but SpaceX has not been largely self-funded. A majority of its revenues have come from NASA. Multibillion dollar contracts have allowed SpaceX to develop the workhorse Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon capsule. Blue Origin, on the other hand, has received a scant $25.7 million from NASA as part of the early stages of the commercial crew program.

Bezos is under no pressure from investors to rush development, and he is under no pressure from customers to promise a certain delivery date. The success of his vehicle is neither reliant on winning a contract from NASA nor a subcontract from one of the big aerospace companies like Lockheed Martin or Boeing. New Glenn is solely dependent upon the ambition of Bezos and his willingness to fund the project, which seems ample.

"I'm perfectly willing to fund this for as long as is required," he said earlier this year. "There are way easier ways to make money. You don't go through the list of best risk-return possibilities and find spaceflight. That's not it. The reason you do this is because you're a missionary for this. You're passionate about it."

Ambitions

Rumors circulate of Bezos stepping back from his chief executive role at Amazon. He wants to spend more than the one day a week he works on Blue Origin. This indicates his passion in the future will be focused on spaceflight rather than commerce. He has always been fascinated by space travel, of course. Now he has the money to fulfill those interests.

Bezos reiterated Blue Origin's goal in an e-mail today: "Our vision is millions of people living and working in space." And although he may have started small with his proof-of-concept vehicle, New Shepard, the scope of New Glenn reveals that Bezos is really, really serious about spaceflight. For his orbital rocket, he could have chosen a launch vehicle based on one or two BE-4 engines, which would have been powerful enough to launch satellites into low-Earth orbit. This would have marked an incremental step toward bigger ambitions. Instead, he went for seven engines and 3.85 million pounds of thrust, nearly twice as powerful as any rocket flying today. Put another way, Blue Origin wants to go from a small, suborbital rocket to one that stands four times as tall and possesses 35 times the thrust. That is quite a leap.

Beyond an orbital rocket, when I had a chance to speak with Bezos earlier this year, he did not specify a plan about how millions of people will live and work in space once they get there. But it's clear he believes they will have to live off the land, be it the Moon, asteroids, or worlds beyond. "I think we have a lot of time to figure that out," Bezos said. "My view is you make plans for the near future, and you develop scenarios for the longer term, because so many things will change between now and then it doesn't make sense to make detailed plans for things like how you're going to do harvesting of resources from near-Earth objects. You want to think about those things, you want to develop scenarios, but you don't need to go all the way to a planning stage."

"Near-Earth objects" is an interesting choice of words. We can further glean some of his intentions from the name for the next rocket beyond New Glenn, which will be called New Armstrong. If New Shepard's namesake Alan Shepard made America's first suborbital flight and John Glenn made the first orbital flight, well, we all know what Neil Armstrong did. On Monday morning, will the fourth richest person in the world tease plans to mine or perhaps even colonize the Moon?

All available evidence suggests he is serious. We watch eagerly to see whether he succeeds.

[grumbler]

That's from last September, Tim.

[Eddie Teach]

It's still pretty cool.

[Berkut]

If we are still working up to Saturn V size and power, it seems pretty disappointing.

I mean, I would think modern technology would mean Saturn V capability would be much easier to get to and surpass...

[jimmy olsen]

That's from last September, Tim.

I said

Watched a bunch of videos and read a lot of articles about this recently and got all excited all over again!

If we are still working up to Saturn V size and power, it seems pretty disappointing.

I mean, I would think modern technology would mean Saturn V capability would be much easier to get to and surpass...

Space X's Falcon Heavy and Blue Origin's New Glenn while only having half the capacity of the Saturn V are much cheaper than previous launch systems, and the fact that they are reusable will cut costs further still.

Musk's Interplanetary Transport System (and presumably Blue Origin's New Armstrong) would blow the Saturn  V out of the water.

In expendable mode it is designed to lift 550 metric tons of vs 140 for the Saturn V to LEO. For perspective the International Space Station masses 450 tons.

It's designed to deliver 450 tons to Mars. The Curiosity probe masses less than a ton and it's the largest thing ever delivered to Mars.

This is designed to deliver a 100 men to Mars. Apollo delivered two men to the Moon. The Apollo capsule was three meters long. The ITS ship is 50 meters long.

The New Horizon probe that flew by Pluto was the fastest thing ever launched by man at 36,000 mph. The ITS is designed to travel at 62,000 mph.

Apollo cost 4% of US GDP to pull off. Space X and Blue Horizon's programs are being supported by vastly less than that.

[grumbler]

If we are still working up to Saturn V size and power, it seems pretty disappointing.

I mean, I would think modern technology would mean Saturn V capability would be much easier to get to and surpass...

There haven't been payloads worth spending the money on to exceed Saturn V lift capability.  It is rather interesting that the US still hasn't been able to build a rocket engine that can compete effectively with the Russian rocket motors, and that it was only a year ago that a rocket engine was even tested that was more powerful for the weight than the NK-33 last manufactured in the Soviet Union in 1972.

[grumbler]

I said

Watched a bunch of videos and read a lot of articles about this recently and got all excited all over again!

I cannot wait for you to breathlessly announce that the South Carolina militia has fired on Fort Sumpter!!!111oneoneone 

[Berkut]

If we are still working up to Saturn V size and power, it seems pretty disappointing.

I mean, I would think modern technology would mean Saturn V capability would be much easier to get to and surpass...

There haven't been payloads worth spending the money on to exceed Saturn V lift capability.  It is rather interesting that the US still hasn't been able to build a rocket engine that can compete effectively with the Russian rocket motors, and that it was only a year ago that a rocket engine was even tested that was more powerful for the weight than the NK-33 last manufactured in the Soviet Union in 1972.

Indeed. I wonder if that is simply because the Soviets just weren't all that worried about safety, or complexity for that matter.

I suspect that most US rockets were relatively over-engineered compared to their Soviet counter parts....and when it comes to something like building the most efficient possible rocket from a thrust/weight standpoint, simplicity and size might be the way to go...

[jimmy olsen]

If we are still working up to Saturn V size and power, it seems pretty disappointing.

I mean, I would think modern technology would mean Saturn V capability would be much easier to get to and surpass...

There haven't been payloads worth spending the money on to exceed Saturn V lift capability.  It is rather interesting that the US still hasn't been able to build a rocket engine that can compete effectively with the Russian rocket motors, and that it was only a year ago that a rocket engine was even tested that was more powerful for the weight than the NK-33 last manufactured in the Soviet Union in 1972.

Indeed. I wonder if that is simply because the Soviets just weren't all that worried about safety, or complexity for that matter.

I suspect that most US rockets were relatively over-engineered compared to their Soviet counter parts....and when it comes to something like building the most efficient possible rocket from a thrust/weight standpoint, simplicity and size might be the way to go...

Size isn't that important.

Space X's new Raptor engines are the same size as the previous Merlin engines, but they're using methane fuel under high pressure and are three times as powerful.

[crazy canuck]

Did you think something like the discrediting of earthly empires would stop humanity's eternal need to colonize? Hell no. Watch out universe.

But who would want to live there? I get why people would want to be the first to go there, the desire to explore, etc, but to actually colonize it and have people live there permanently? I don't see it.

When a call went out for volunteers a large number applied. 

[grumbler]

Indeed. I wonder if that is simply because the Soviets just weren't all that worried about safety, or complexity for that matter.

I suspect that most US rockets were relatively over-engineered compared to their Soviet counter parts....and when it comes to something like building the most efficient possible rocket from a thrust/weight standpoint, simplicity and size might be the way to go...

It also had to do with the fact that the Soviets had better metallurgy than anyone since then, so could make rockets using techniques not seen since the 1970s.  Modern Russia has the knowledge but not the quality control.

[Berkut]

Huh. Better metallurgy? Really? As in "We can make materials stronger/lighter than you can" kind of thing?

What an odd thing to be better at - it would seem like a pretty easy thing for the US to figure out...

[grumbler]

Huh. Better metallurgy? Really? As in "We can make materials stronger/lighter than you can" kind of thing?

What an odd thing to be better at - it would seem like a pretty easy thing for the US to figure out...

The process apparently required expensive-to-maintain equipment and environments, which is why the Soviets built a lot more engines than they needed and stored several hundred of them - because they knew couldn't maintain the capability and that they'd never invest in such an expensive process again.  Forty-five years later, we still haven't used up all of those engines.  It is an odd story, in many ways, and I might be misremembering parts of it, but the gist is correct.

[jimmy olsen]

I find that hard to believe. Materials science has made great strides in the last feew decades. Do you have a link or a cite for that?

[jimmy olsen]

Sweet! 

http://money.cnn.com/2017/02/27/technology/spacex-moon-tourism/

SpaceX to fly two space tourists around the moon in 2018

by Matt McFarland   @mattmcfarland
February 27, 2017: 4:44 PM ET

Two thrill seekers are paying SpaceX to make a trip around the moon next year.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk announced Monday afternoon that the space tourists had already placed a significant deposit for the trip. The travelers will undergo fitness tests and begin training later this year.

"Like the Apollo astronauts before them, these individuals will travel into space carrying the hopes and dreams of all humankind, driven by the universal human spirit of exploration," SpaceX said in a blog post.

For takeoff, SpaceX will use the same launch pad near Cape Canaveral, Florida, that was used for the Apollo programs missions. No humans have traveled past low Earth orbit since the final Apollo mission in 1972. (Low-earth orbit is essentially the first rung on the ladder in being to space. It's also where some satellites that circle the Earth reside.)

The company doesn't expect this to be a one-time mission. SpaceX said that other people have expressed strong interest in making the trip. The names of the first two travelers have not been released. They are likely paying millions for the adventure.

For comparison, space tourists have previously paid the Russia government upwards of $20 million for a trip to the International Space Station. NASA has paid the Russians $80 million a seat to send astronauts to the space station. SpaceX has not revealed the price of the roughly week-long trip.

SpaceX is putting forward an aggressive timeline for the mission, which will rely on a rocket and spacecraft that have not flown yet. The Falcon Heavy rocket is expected to make a test flight this summer. And the Crew Dragon spacecraft, which will hold the two tourists, will complete a demo mission later this year.

"Next year is going to be a big year for carrying people to the space station and hopefully beyond," Musk said in a conference call with reporters.