The fact that CERN is so much cheaper and easier to operate is one big reason why it is superior. That's the only sense in which I am comparing apples to lemons.
The fact CERN works on something different alltogether in a completely different environment with completely different requirements renders invalid the comparison, because it isn't a comparison. Might as well compare ISS to a naval shipyard.
Also, while I often cut out bloat myself, you can't cut out my asking for an example of any major breakthrough from space research, since that's central to the debate.
I answer to what I can, I don't like climbing mirrors for the hell of it. I'm more knowledgeable in the engineering parts of the matter.
Anyway, since none attempted, I'll try with what I remember.
From probes we got a ton of info about climate models used to predict weather on Earth, especially by looking at Venus.
A lot of new materials and tech were developed for use in space and then found use on the ground in other ways.
Here to read more.
And of course, being science a bitch, you don't really know what is beyond the corner until you go and look beyond the corner, so unless someone takes up and goes there we will never know what we could learn from space.
That the ISS is a kind of weird underperforming thing... heh, that's what happens when you have engineers fighting with idiot Senators that want to divert that money to pork-barreling or into defence toys.
Even to get Shuttle to replace Saturns (that were going to be axed due to costs) they had to spew bullshit about low costs. It's a high cost, but not as high as developing F-22 or another imba military toy with debatable uses.
Or a(nother) tax cut to the rich.
It's because you need to buy 500t of solid propellant. Building solid propellant isn't super complex it's just expensive to procure such large quantities. We say a lot of simple things aren't rocket science, well, nor is rocket science.
This is wrong. Solids are cheaper than liquids at the same mass, but they suck big way on performance (they have lots of thrust but no endurance, good to get out of atmosphere FAST, but useless to achieve orbital speed and not come down again in a few minutes) and are used only in boosters.
Which are rare in rocketry nowadays anyway because we can do better,
Soyuz uses
lox/kerosene, which is 0.50 per kg for kerosene and 0.22 per kg for lox (liquid oxigen) (figures converted in modern dollars).
Soyuz needs around 162,086 Kg of fuel (sum of total mass of each stage minus the empty mass of each stage), and since I don't give a shit about calculating the right % of lox and kerosene for the sake of this post, I'll assume that it's all kerosene since it costs more.
81'043 $. Yes, less than 100 thousand bucks for 162 tons of fuel. It is a lot for an average joe, but on a vehicle that states a launch cost between 50 and 60 millions, it's within rounding error.
Proton is another fun specimen, and is in a bigger league. No solids, but it uses
this fuel which is chemical stuff, not simple lox/kerosene. Costs are around 7.77 $ per kg if you do it with 1960 tech and environmental safety regulations or 65 $ per kg if you do it with modern US environmental safety regulations (Russia does not give a shit about such regulations so it's closer if not
lower to the 1960 no-regulation figure).
So, Proton burns 641,975 kg of that mixture per launch (calculated the same as above). Costs are around 4'988'145 $.
Anyway a Proton costs around 85-100 millions apiece to the customer. Even shaving 4-6 millions from that isn't a major cut.
And please note that bulk of US-made rockets even if using lox/lh2 which cost less than this (9.8 $ per kg) manage to cost twice or more (apart from SpaceX ones). Even the whole space shuttle's main tank (the orange thing) contained only 7-ish million $ worth of fuel. Even if we magically cut that to 0, the total cost of the program does not change. And any account you can find will say that if it did more launches per year it would have costed
less. Must be a conspiracy of the lox/lh2 producing companies
.
Feel free to use Astronautix to do some calcs on your own. That's the best site to get numbers about rocketry.
Well we're half in agreement. The whole manned space program is irrelevant, but at least moon landings give good bragging rights.
Going somewhere just to plant flags means that once you did it, everything is "done" and stuff is dismantled and placed in museums. Great use of taxpayer money, placing flags on space rocks and filling museums of dead machines. Because life is all about saying "im better than you, so fuck off".
The ISS is costing a fraction of Apollo Program and even if it is not operating at anywhere near 30% of its theoretical usefullness it's still doing some science while Apollo was just a pissing contest.
Putting a satellite into LEO is responsible for almost the entire delta V requirement. For that matter getting to LEO is more than half the delta v requirement of the moon landing. Refueling things in orbit only makes sense if you want to go somewhere much further away (in delta V terms) than orbit
You are forgetting the delta-v cost to place stuff in a specific orbit. Anyway, this is mainly a matter of cost, as rocket cost does not scale linearly with size. Adding 1 km/s of delta-v on top adds a significant cost.
If you can refuel in orbit, you could go to the moon again with an exact copy of a full Apollo-mission saturn V without the first two stages (only used to lift stuff in LEO). Within a year with three separate commercial rocket launches and less than 250 millions of launch costs (costs of re-developing and making again stuff you are sending to the moon aside, of course).
A couple Protons for the fuel and the empty vehicle (or a bunch of cheaper Zenits) and a Soyuz for the capsule with the people on it. Compare this to the costs of a single saturn V launch and laugh.
With US-made stuff the price is around double, still far better than the single-BIG-one solution.
Anyway, since none in the commercial sector is really giving a fuck about going to the moon eve at these prices, but there is a market for placing sats in specific orbits, let's do a better example of what I was talking about.
A Proton has 21 tons of payload to LEO, and it costs 85-100 millions a pop.
The same Proton can bring
only 4.5 tons to GTO that is
not GEO. From that to GEO (and its specific orbit) the customer has to add a tug that shrinks the actual payload below half of that, around 2 tons on average.
What does that mean? 20-ish tons of payload are used up by additional non-cryogenic fuel and the tug.
If you can carry cryogenic up with cheaper crappy rockets AND you have a cryogenic-fuel tug already in orbit, you can change things.
Protons use crappier fuel, that in space has ISP of 333 seconds, but you can do without, and use lox/Lh2 which has ISP of 451 seconds and save 35% of fuel mass so that's only 13 tons of fuel you need up there.
You can launch that up with a Zenit for 40-ish millions a pop. And have the satellite of the customer launched up to LEO with say 1/3 of the cost of a single Soyuz rocket launch (as it is now launching 3 different sats at the same time to LEO, the costs of a single launch are shared), or around 16 millions.
Total launch cost up to this point: 56 millions.
So to make it look more competitive than a single Proton you need to ask less than 30-35 millions for the reusable space tug and the reusable (or not, it's just a dumb tank after all) propellant depot.
I think it's doable man, it's just a friggin modified upper stage and it is reusable.
This setup can also go to a satellite and move it around to repurpose it, or if you add a decent toolbox can do some repairs, by cannibalizing equipment from old and obsolete sats already there.
DARPA is for example is researching how to do this with its
Phoenix project.
there is no practical use for this, which is why these depots don't exist.
The main reason why orbital depots don't exist yet is:
-they are at the moment developing ways to mate spacecraft in a less idiotic way than slamming on each other like back in the day, for example extending a retractable beam and catching the other craft and then reel it in, similar to the ISS and its Canadarm, but less mass and energy required. This works in vomit-comet small-scale tests, and bigger prototypes are on their way.
-the cash available to do so is relatively limited so the progress is relatively slow. If you look at the fast progress done in the Space race days, that's only because the two biggest superpowers were dumping completely ridiculous amounts of money in the effort.
Still, NASA did send up
a refueling experiment to the ISS (was supposed to test the difficulty of refueling satellites and other stuff that was not really designed to be refueled but is at the moment up there) with the latest Shuttle launch and all went very well, but I can understand that it didn't make headlines.
And again if you look at the stuff made by the
ULA (joint venture of Lockeed and Boeing, not a bunch of hippies), you find
scientific/engineering papers that describe depots like this "The advantages of these depots are enormous and they provide unmatched performance and reliability benefits once the technology is matured." Who is the second writer? the manager of Advanced Projects in the ULA, the man whose job is to keep them improving.
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