Strictly considering low earth orbit, one needs to accelerate a payload to 25,000 km/h and like 500km above the ground. This is not computation or atmospheric flight. There’s no shortcut, no engineering to work out, the physics dictates this is a hard problem. Solutions:
You go up with a chemical rocket, where almost all the launch mass is fuel. To get the ratio in your head, think the liquid in a coke can vs the can that holds it… that’s the mass/fuel ratio we’re dealing with, and tricks like hybrid engines or booster returns barely soften the MASSIVE cost for even the tiniest things you send up.
You assist it from the ground. “Gun” launches, as some are developing (and that I’m quite enthusiastic about), can’t launch humans. Stratolaunches (from planes) only get you partway there, more like a booster.
You go nuclear. This is the only way to increase energy density vs. chemical rockets enough to make a difference. Needless to say, there are significant environmental/safety concerns when doing this on the ground, and I’m as pro-nuclear as anyone you’ll find. Check out Atomic Rockets for more on this, with concrete theoretical designs that are still batshit crazy: https://projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/engineintro.php
You develop a space elevator or some analogue. No commercial launch research is even pretending to develop this, and it would require massive materials science breakthroughs.
…That’s it. That’s how you get to space. This isn’t a “Wright Brothers vs modern jets” thing, that kind of cost optimization is just not physically possible. And whenever Musk lies through his teeth about practically colonizing Mars, people need to understand that…
Either something like that, or somekind of… craft that has both a RAMJet and also some kind of rocket propulsion… that or a SCRAMJet that actually works… could maybe help get us to, or toward, at least an SSTO craft, or system.
Hah, or we can go full conspiracy theorist and find and publicize the anti gravity field generator equipped TR 3B in Hangar 18 or whatever, haha.
It flash freezes air to liquid using a mad heat exchanger, until the atmosphere is thin enough to warrant switching to liquid oxygen. It’s better than what you describe, as it saves a tone of weight over separate jets and rockets! It was tested, and seems to work!
…But out timeline sucks, hence it was canceled in 2024 :(
Aerospike engines are awesome, but I’m skeptical of the X-33 TBH. It would’ve been cool if it had worked out.
Where you should be looking now is the “gun launch” startups. Once that’s figured out, it’s so much cheaper to launch “sturdy” payloads that way. Nuclear upper stages are a good option, too (with fission fragment drives being my personal favorite: https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/enginelist2.php#fissionfragment)
I’m going to approach this from the perspective of someone playing Kerbal Space Program. Early on in the career mode, you need money to build new rockets, gather science, and develop new designs that take you further into space. Without early on tourists, you’re sunk. They provide a lot of the hype and money so you can research/get to that next phase.
Real life is different, I get it. I doubt these celebrities paid much if anything. It’s just rich people doing rich people stuff.
Play Kerbal Space Program Realism Overhaul if you want a … much closer to ‘real’ taste of how much more complicated and difficult an orbital flight is than a subortial flight, a lunar flight is than an orbital flight, an extraplanetary flight is than a lunar flight.
I’m not sure if it is still the unofficial motto of the mod… but it used to be ‘if you cannot figure out how to install this mod, you will not be capable of playing it anyway’, or something to that effect.
Yeah, low volume space tourism is fine. Bezos and such are funding quite a bit.
What I was getting at is the meme that “mass” space flight (much less interplanetary colonization) is in any way practical. It is not. It will not be, at least not until civilization is more along the lines of Orion’s Arm or similar sci-fi. KSP is a fantastic illustration of that, as (even with a much smaller planet than Earth) one pays for every ounce that has to move in space.
Per the point above, setting development/equipment costs aside, it would be like needing an oil tanker of fuel to bring back a small mass of ore.
…Can you do it? Sure. It’s already been done for scientific return missions, and that makes total sense.
…Is it economical? Hell no. Mining the ocean floor, a volcano, or under the antarctic ice sheet would be orders of magnitude cheaper, much less just prospecting new suface deposits.
Planes have a fucking destination and are designed to move volumes of people from A to B, and still can’t compete with rail over 1000km distances (see: France).
Video games were designed to be replayable and accessible to the masses, running on the common hardware at the time.
I don’t think there’s really any evidence of that.
I’m sure they were mindful of the potential applications, in the same way that we’re mindful of the potential for orbital solar arrays and asteroid mining.
Planes now: a huge waste of resources because people believe they’re entitled to traveling around the globe
How about we don’t repeat the same mistake with space travel?
Edit: always funny to see that progressives aren’t ready to question their first world privilege to travel around the globe to go meet people that will never be able to afford to do the same thing
I mean, people should get to experience the wonders of the world around them.
“Sorry, due to the circumstances of your birth beyond your control you only get to experience corn fields and the local grainary. If your parents had more opportunities maybe you would have been born where there’s cultural artifacts to experience, diversity and education, but you don’t and never will” is a pretty bleak standard.
What if instead of focusing on the people who want to see the world we focus on the people who made it so you can’t do so by train or boat?
Being able to go spend a week 5000km away from home at a moment’s notice wasn’t a thing 100 years ago, it’s a privilege, not a right and it’s an extremely wasteful privilege that can be afforded by a small minority of the world’s population. What you’re saying to ridicule what I said is exactly how the vast majority of the world will live their lives.
Exposure to other cultures is extremely important for building a just society. We have other options to make it more sustainable.
Edit: We’ve always been a mobile species. Sedentary lifestyles are extremely new to us, we are meant to travel and meet others. It’s healthy. Otherwise populations get isolated and weird.
We’ve always been mobile but we’ve never been that mobile. Traveling thousands of km was a commitment that would take people’s months if not years and, again, only an extremely small minority would travel that much in their lifetime, most people never traveled more than tens of km away from home.
Most people lost several children in infancy as well. Appealing to how things were to justify how they should be falls flat.
Why should we return to a world where the people you know as a child are the only ones you ever meet? Why is that better?
We were once less mobile. We also decided that was awful and have consistently found ways to be more mobile. If we’re looking to history, we’d be forgiven for taking the lesson as “always find a way to go further, faster”. Hell, we invented water vessels so we could travel more than a few hours from drinking water. It used to be that people didn’t rip apart the earth to get metal and lay pipes, they just never went more than a few hours from a water source.
The concept of moving water to the people was then an unimaginable luxury and privilege available only to a small minority.
So what if it’s new? Medicine that we now consider a basic necessity is newer than airplanes, and a significant portion of the world lives without it.
Something beneficial not being available to everyone isn’t an argument to ensure no one has it.
I wasn’t ridiculing your position, I was accurately stating how bleak it is. That you acknowledged that it was accurate but thought it was “ridicule” maybe says something about the position.
Very few things are a “right”, and being a privilege doesn’t make something bad, it just means that it’s good and others don’t have it.
Society advanced as we work to extend privileges to everyone, and it advanced faster when we take stock of the privileges we’ve developed and find ways to provide them better.
Air and car travel are resource intensive and dirty ways to travel. Instead of denying people the wonders of the world, we should find ways to provide better solutions to the problem of travel, and leave the intensive solution to cases where it’s speed is needed.
Instead of being mad at the family taking a plane to a beach vacation, be mad at the system that made taking the train more expensive.
We should work to enrich the quality of people’s lives, not just leave huge deaths of people behind because it’s expensive or inconvenient to do otherwise.
Want to enrich the quality of life of people? Stop wasting resources to travel the world, reduce your environmental impact so the people you plan on visiting can keep on living where their currently live.
So I should drive a huge diesel truck without a catalytic converter because if I don’t do everything possible I might as well do nothing? Traveling the world is a luxury, get over it.
No, you should sell your phone, computer and car because if you’re that angry about people partaking in luxuries with an environmental impactcand you don’t think “less impactful alternatives” are better than entirely forgoing the luxury, then it’s hypocritical of you to do anything but walk or bike and eschew optional things with environmental impact.
It’s quite specifically that you’ve been saying that other people should do without rather than doing better, so… You first. You have legs. You can bike. Our ancestors got along with less, so you can sell your car. You don’t need a phone. It’s a luxury you can live without, so sell yours and get over it.
Why? Our ancestors never worried about environmental impact, and it’s clear that the only thing that matters is what we used to do.
Our ancestors used to find themselves in an environment that wasn’t good and they’d walk to somewhere that was. Or starve.
Or we could, instead of shitting on people who want to see the world and and enjoy the abilities we’ve developed to do so, shit on the people who made the “not terrible” ways of doing that impossible.
How far is traveling? What means do you find acceptable? And until when do you mean?
Do I need to wait until I have access to a totally renewable train to go to the nice beach that’s a 90 minute drive away? What about the 25 minute drive to the flooded salt quarry that gives everyone a rash due to the stunning population of migratory waterfowl? The 15 minute drive to the park on the river with a vaguely unsettling murk to the water?
I think there’s a solution in taxing the heavy users while not punishing people who only fly every 1~3 years. This specifically needs to start with the abuse of private planes with ridiculously high carbon use per capita.
In the end those heavy users represent nothing compared to the planes used by regular tourists. On an individual basis then sure, they’re worse, but that’s like saying African countries need to stop using old cars because they don’t have modern emission equipment while you’re stuck in traffic in LA in your 2020 Honda Civic.
Traveling thousands of miles for a few days of vacation isn’t a right, it’s a privilege that people are abusing. People act like they can’t live without it but it’s a small minority of people who will take a plane in their lifetime.
Emissions at altitude are worse than the same emissions at ground level and planes don’t have any filtering equipment.
Their fuel economy per passenger isn’t that great either, two passengers in a small car burn less gas per km than if they were using the biggest plane full of passengers to travel the same distance. Four passengers in a V8 SUV are more fuel efficient than an A380 filled with passengers.
Using that excuse we’ll never do anything about all the shit that has a huge environmental impact because the cost of it won’t be felt until decades later anyway.
“Those poor countries depend on the tourism that leads to climate change that will make their territory uninhabitable! Worth it!”
Look at the earliest airplanes. Little things made out of cotton and balsa that couldn’t outrace a strong horse.
Look at the earliest video games.
edit = I’m not a Bezos fanboy, but if we’re going to have space travel there are going to be stunts, just like there were back in barnstormer days.
Space travel is not the same.
Strictly considering low earth orbit, one needs to accelerate a payload to 25,000 km/h and like 500km above the ground. This is not computation or atmospheric flight. There’s no shortcut, no engineering to work out, the physics dictates this is a hard problem. Solutions:
You go up with a chemical rocket, where almost all the launch mass is fuel. To get the ratio in your head, think the liquid in a coke can vs the can that holds it… that’s the mass/fuel ratio we’re dealing with, and tricks like hybrid engines or booster returns barely soften the MASSIVE cost for even the tiniest things you send up.
You assist it from the ground. “Gun” launches, as some are developing (and that I’m quite enthusiastic about), can’t launch humans. Stratolaunches (from planes) only get you partway there, more like a booster.
You go nuclear. This is the only way to increase energy density vs. chemical rockets enough to make a difference. Needless to say, there are significant environmental/safety concerns when doing this on the ground, and I’m as pro-nuclear as anyone you’ll find. Check out Atomic Rockets for more on this, with concrete theoretical designs that are still batshit crazy: https://projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/engineintro.php
You develop a space elevator or some analogue. No commercial launch research is even pretending to develop this, and it would require massive materials science breakthroughs.
…That’s it. That’s how you get to space. This isn’t a “Wright Brothers vs modern jets” thing, that kind of cost optimization is just not physically possible. And whenever Musk lies through his teeth about practically colonizing Mars, people need to understand that…
Oh how I wish the X-33 / VentureStar had actually worked out…
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/VentureStar
Either something like that, or somekind of… craft that has both a RAMJet and also some kind of rocket propulsion… that or a SCRAMJet that actually works… could maybe help get us to, or toward, at least an SSTO craft, or system.
Hah, or we can go full conspiracy theorist and find and publicize the anti gravity field generator equipped TR 3B in Hangar 18 or whatever, haha.
You’re looking for the SABRE hybrid engine! It’s super cool: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SABRE_(rocket_engine)
It flash freezes air to liquid using a mad heat exchanger, until the atmosphere is thin enough to warrant switching to liquid oxygen. It’s better than what you describe, as it saves a tone of weight over separate jets and rockets! It was tested, and seems to work!
…But out timeline sucks, hence it was canceled in 2024 :(
https://www.flightglobal.com/aerospace/reaction-engines-to-close-as-cutting-edge-sabre-fails-to-advance/160565.article
Aerospike engines are awesome, but I’m skeptical of the X-33 TBH. It would’ve been cool if it had worked out.
Where you should be looking now is the “gun launch” startups. Once that’s figured out, it’s so much cheaper to launch “sturdy” payloads that way. Nuclear upper stages are a good option, too (with fission fragment drives being my personal favorite: https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/enginelist2.php#fissionfragment)
I’m going to approach this from the perspective of someone playing Kerbal Space Program. Early on in the career mode, you need money to build new rockets, gather science, and develop new designs that take you further into space. Without early on tourists, you’re sunk. They provide a lot of the hype and money so you can research/get to that next phase.
Real life is different, I get it. I doubt these celebrities paid much if anything. It’s just rich people doing rich people stuff.
Play Kerbal Space Program Realism Overhaul if you want a … much closer to ‘real’ taste of how much more complicated and difficult an orbital flight is than a subortial flight, a lunar flight is than an orbital flight, an extraplanetary flight is than a lunar flight.
I’m not sure if it is still the unofficial motto of the mod… but it used to be ‘if you cannot figure out how to install this mod, you will not be capable of playing it anyway’, or something to that effect.
Yeah, low volume space tourism is fine. Bezos and such are funding quite a bit.
What I was getting at is the meme that “mass” space flight (much less interplanetary colonization) is in any way practical. It is not. It will not be, at least not until civilization is more along the lines of Orion’s Arm or similar sci-fi. KSP is a fantastic illustration of that, as (even with a much smaller planet than Earth) one pays for every ounce that has to move in space.
So, you’ve never heard of asteroid mining?
And remember, there was a time when “Around The World In Eighty Days” was science fiction.
Per the point above, setting development/equipment costs aside, it would be like needing an oil tanker of fuel to bring back a small mass of ore.
…Can you do it? Sure. It’s already been done for scientific return missions, and that makes total sense.
…Is it economical? Hell no. Mining the ocean floor, a volcano, or under the antarctic ice sheet would be orders of magnitude cheaper, much less just prospecting new suface deposits.
Planes have a fucking destination and are designed to move volumes of people from A to B, and still can’t compete with rail over 1000km distances (see: France).
Video games were designed to be replayable and accessible to the masses, running on the common hardware at the time.
The Wright brothers didn’t have a fucking destination they were just trying to fly.
They were trying to invent a device of practical utility that could carry passengers and payloads, not to empower the eccentric elite
I don’t think there’s really any evidence of that.
I’m sure they were mindful of the potential applications, in the same way that we’re mindful of the potential for orbital solar arrays and asteroid mining.
You want to build a train from Japan to San Francisco? Bring back ocean liners like the Titanic?
I said 1000km - that’s short to mid-haul
Planes now: a huge waste of resources because people believe they’re entitled to traveling around the globe
How about we don’t repeat the same mistake with space travel?
Edit: always funny to see that progressives aren’t ready to question their first world privilege to travel around the globe to go meet people that will never be able to afford to do the same thing
I mean, people should get to experience the wonders of the world around them.
“Sorry, due to the circumstances of your birth beyond your control you only get to experience corn fields and the local grainary. If your parents had more opportunities maybe you would have been born where there’s cultural artifacts to experience, diversity and education, but you don’t and never will” is a pretty bleak standard.
What if instead of focusing on the people who want to see the world we focus on the people who made it so you can’t do so by train or boat?
Being able to go spend a week 5000km away from home at a moment’s notice wasn’t a thing 100 years ago, it’s a privilege, not a right and it’s an extremely wasteful privilege that can be afforded by a small minority of the world’s population. What you’re saying to ridicule what I said is exactly how the vast majority of the world will live their lives.
Exposure to other cultures is extremely important for building a just society. We have other options to make it more sustainable.
Edit: We’ve always been a mobile species. Sedentary lifestyles are extremely new to us, we are meant to travel and meet others. It’s healthy. Otherwise populations get isolated and weird.
Bingo, we don’t need everyone to go see with their own eyes the famine happening in a country for it to become something people care about.
You’re intentionally missing the point entirely.
We’ve always been mobile but we’ve never been that mobile. Traveling thousands of km was a commitment that would take people’s months if not years and, again, only an extremely small minority would travel that much in their lifetime, most people never traveled more than tens of km away from home.
Most people lost several children in infancy as well. Appealing to how things were to justify how they should be falls flat.
Why should we return to a world where the people you know as a child are the only ones you ever meet? Why is that better?
We were once less mobile. We also decided that was awful and have consistently found ways to be more mobile. If we’re looking to history, we’d be forgiven for taking the lesson as “always find a way to go further, faster”. Hell, we invented water vessels so we could travel more than a few hours from drinking water. It used to be that people didn’t rip apart the earth to get metal and lay pipes, they just never went more than a few hours from a water source.
The concept of moving water to the people was then an unimaginable luxury and privilege available only to a small minority.
That is not accurate.
So what if it’s new? Medicine that we now consider a basic necessity is newer than airplanes, and a significant portion of the world lives without it.
Something beneficial not being available to everyone isn’t an argument to ensure no one has it.
I wasn’t ridiculing your position, I was accurately stating how bleak it is. That you acknowledged that it was accurate but thought it was “ridicule” maybe says something about the position.
Very few things are a “right”, and being a privilege doesn’t make something bad, it just means that it’s good and others don’t have it.
Society advanced as we work to extend privileges to everyone, and it advanced faster when we take stock of the privileges we’ve developed and find ways to provide them better.
Air and car travel are resource intensive and dirty ways to travel. Instead of denying people the wonders of the world, we should find ways to provide better solutions to the problem of travel, and leave the intensive solution to cases where it’s speed is needed.
Instead of being mad at the family taking a plane to a beach vacation, be mad at the system that made taking the train more expensive.
We should work to enrich the quality of people’s lives, not just leave huge deaths of people behind because it’s expensive or inconvenient to do otherwise.
Want to enrich the quality of life of people? Stop wasting resources to travel the world, reduce your environmental impact so the people you plan on visiting can keep on living where their currently live.
Are you going to give your phone away and live without?
So I should drive a huge diesel truck without a catalytic converter because if I don’t do everything possible I might as well do nothing? Traveling the world is a luxury, get over it.
So, people should stop emigrating? Flying to Puerto Rico to see their families?
No, you should sell your phone, computer and car because if you’re that angry about people partaking in luxuries with an environmental impactcand you don’t think “less impactful alternatives” are better than entirely forgoing the luxury, then it’s hypocritical of you to do anything but walk or bike and eschew optional things with environmental impact.
It’s quite specifically that you’ve been saying that other people should do without rather than doing better, so… You first. You have legs. You can bike. Our ancestors got along with less, so you can sell your car. You don’t need a phone. It’s a luxury you can live without, so sell yours and get over it.
Why? Our ancestors never worried about environmental impact, and it’s clear that the only thing that matters is what we used to do.
Our ancestors used to find themselves in an environment that wasn’t good and they’d walk to somewhere that was. Or starve.
Or we could, instead of shitting on people who want to see the world and and enjoy the abilities we’ve developed to do so, shit on the people who made the “not terrible” ways of doing that impossible.
Ok, so you’ll agree that in the meantime people need to stop traveling then? Right? RIGHT?
How far is traveling? What means do you find acceptable? And until when do you mean?
Do I need to wait until I have access to a totally renewable train to go to the nice beach that’s a 90 minute drive away? What about the 25 minute drive to the flooded salt quarry that gives everyone a rash due to the stunning population of migratory waterfowl? The 15 minute drive to the park on the river with a vaguely unsettling murk to the water?
I think there’s a solution in taxing the heavy users while not punishing people who only fly every 1~3 years. This specifically needs to start with the abuse of private planes with ridiculously high carbon use per capita.
In the end those heavy users represent nothing compared to the planes used by regular tourists. On an individual basis then sure, they’re worse, but that’s like saying African countries need to stop using old cars because they don’t have modern emission equipment while you’re stuck in traffic in LA in your 2020 Honda Civic.
Traveling thousands of miles for a few days of vacation isn’t a right, it’s a privilege that people are abusing. People act like they can’t live without it but it’s a small minority of people who will take a plane in their lifetime.
Emissions at altitude are worse than the same emissions at ground level and planes don’t have any filtering equipment.
Their fuel economy per passenger isn’t that great either, two passengers in a small car burn less gas per km than if they were using the biggest plane full of passengers to travel the same distance. Four passengers in a V8 SUV are more fuel efficient than an A380 filled with passengers.
You do realize that tourism is a big part of a lot of ‘third world’ countries economy?
Stopping or restricting air travel means that the poorest places would lose a big part of their income.
Using that excuse we’ll never do anything about all the shit that has a huge environmental impact because the cost of it won’t be felt until decades later anyway.
“Those poor countries depend on the tourism that leads to climate change that will make their territory uninhabitable! Worth it!”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen-powered_aircraft
The hydrogen dream is a load of bs.