Musk: Come ride my Big F**king Rocket to Mars Elon Musk thinks he can get humans onto Mars within the next seven years. On Friday, he told the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Adelaide, Australia, how he intends to do it. Key to Musk's plans is the BFR (aka a Big Fucking Rocket), a 106-metre (348-foot) tall beast slightly shorter than the Saturn V, and 9 …
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Skylon would use liquid hydrogen and air up to mach 5.4 then switch to liquid oxygen to LEO. Payload of 17T to LEO (F9 is 22T) or 10T to ISS (F9/Dragon is 6T) with anticipated launch cost of $10M. The long range aircraft variant (A2) only goes up to mach 5ish, so flight time is nearer 4½ hours. A2 has a fuel efficient subsonic mode allowing takeoff and landing at existing airports.
The advanced technology for Skylon/A2 requires large investment over a long time period. Skylon has only attracted a tiny fraction of the required funding and A2 has not been funded at all.
The other good comparison is Sea Dragon. Reusable LOX/RP-1 first stage, launch cost looks like half the price of a Falcon 9 but inflation would have doubled it a few times since 1962. 550T to LEO is almost 4x BFR. Sea dragon would have been a VBFR made of cheap thick steel, towed out to sea by a nuclear powered aircraft carrier which would break sea water into hydrogen and oxygen for stage 2. Stage 1's unpowered "landing" (huge splash) would have been spectacular.
The advanced technology for Skylon/A2 requires large investment over a long time period.
Using the £7bn mentioned on Wikipedia, that would be about half the money being frittered on the UK smart metering programme. Or a quarter of the cost of a new power station in Somerset. Or less than 10% of the cost of the ridiculous HS2. Or half of one year's waste by the British government on "foreign aid". Or less than the cost of the failed NHS records project. Or about three year's "average" waste and inefficiency by the MoD in cancellations, failures and overspends.
The money's clearly there, what is needed is a British government with vision, spine, technical competence. Those sadly won't be arriving any time soon, given the collection of wankstains sitting on both sides of both houses of Westminster.
@Ledswinger hard to disagree with you, but I think you will concede that any such effort would not, and should not, end with a single project. Hence money on, for example, space programme, would by necessity have to be also committed in the long term. It is much easier for political classes to blow this sort of money on ad-hoc bungs, failures and waste, as there will be very little backlash if they do their usual, that is U-turn.
but I think you will concede that any such effort would not, and should not, end with a single project
I do concede that. But if they committed say an additional £2bn a year, then as and when Skylon (or whatever) became a reality, the nation could keep that up. No shortage of follow on projects elsewhere - look at Crossrail - we spent £15 billion to speed middle class Thames Valley commuters to their over-paid City jobs. And now that's nearing completion, they are talking about Crossrail 2, a £16bn+ boondoggle that essentially duplicates the existing Thameslink services.
If the idiots can justify that, and still find £13bn every year to give away to other countries for little or no return, then £2bn is peanuts. Or they could get a grip and fund it from stamping out benefit fraud (£1.6bn+ annually) or tax and VAT fraud of about £15bn (that's not including the US tech tax dodgers).
The UK can easily afford an effective space programme. We're already seeing tax and spending levels that could deliver one, but our lazy, feckless, ignorant, dishonest political classes are so beholden to the Canutian fight against climate change, and so disinterested in this country and its people that all that money is just pissed up the wall.
The problem about government funding is that Reaction Engines have explicitly said they are very reluctant to accept it.
The story is that during the HOTOL debacle the government came in and said they would fund it if they (British Aerospace and the designers) signed a confidentiality clause. This was duly done and the first tranche of money arrived, for feasibility studies etc. These studies were successful (yes there were problems but nothing insurmountable), however the government turned around and said, sorry we don't want to fund it any further.
British Aerospace said ok can we go out to the market and get funding, to which the government said "No you have signed a confidentiality clause you cannot release any details of what has been developed and you cannot develop it further"
This has meant that Reaction Engines had to go back to the drawing board and completely design the SABRE engines from the ground up, so as not to violate the governments rulings.
You can understand why they don't want to get involved with the dead hand of government again
You can understand why they don't want to get involved with the dead hand of government again
Of course. But in my imaginary universe of a competent government and competent civil service, they'd be paying the full bill, rather than a bit of crappy seed funding followed dog-in-the-manger stupidity.
The MPs and civil servants who've fucked up UK technology, aerospace and manufacturing for years deserve to have their fingers broken one by one. Maybe BEIS could offer seed funding through TechUK to support a competition for an automated means of breaking fingers?
ITC cancelled the second season plans.
Unwilling to let the UFO 2 pre-production work go to waste, Anderson offered ITC a new series idea, unrelated to UFO, in which the Moon would be blown out of Earth orbit taking the Moonbase survivors with it.
Icon obviously because September 13th.
UFO was both genius and unbelievably f***ing miserable. Every episode starts with a funky and swinging Barry Gray theme tune with lots of exciting visuals, purple wigs, silver minidresses etc. Followed by death, destruction, and SHADO just narrowly averting disaster again. Even the end credits seemed kind of bleak.
In fact, the only optimistic thing about it was the idea that governments would spend all that money trying to protect us from aliens. We know now that they'd be far more likely to lease them landing rights provided they kept their organ harvesting within some kind of prearranged boundaries.
"150 tons or 100 people" equating to 1.5 tons per person. Projecting people will weigh this much in 2024 should alarm the health services. I figure it is time to eliminate non-beer carbonated drink consumption so they can transport 150 people as a result of the 33% savings in fuel per 2024 person. Note: 2024 pounds is slightly more than an ton but rockets usually respect rounding when budgets are involved.
New York to London by rocket? Ok it's a short flight time, but the journey time will be terrible. First get to the boat. Then motor out to the rocket. Then put on a spacesuit. Then get in the rocket, shut the door. Then complete all the pre launch checks. Then whooosh bang up into the sky and back down again. And then the reverse process. I reckon the whole thing could be slower than flying.
Concorde was very fast of course, but one of the lesser known aspects of Concorde travel was the ground arrangements. They had a dedicated 10 minute check in (none of this 3 hours early nonsense. Though of course they had a lovely lounge if one wished to arrive early). They had dedicated baggage, customs and immigration queues on arrival. Saved about 3 hours airport time off the journey too. So whilst Concorde itself saved about 3 hours, the overall service loped another 3 ish hours off the time too, or about 6 hours quicker.
BA were (still are) running a similar service from London City. Ok it was subsonic, but overall still 3, 4 hours quicker than an ordinary flight from London Heathrow (City airport is very handily placed). The new C series from Bombardier is very interesting because it can manage London City to New York without having to refuel at Shanon in Ireland on the way, saving another hour or so.
I reckon Musk's half hour rocket would take a ton of time...
Today cattle are required to spend three hours laughing at the insane prices in the airport Mall.As you say, in the past 10 minute check-in worked. Security, baggage handling, customs and immigration can all happen on the boats. (The boats are required. BFR is far too loud to get near a city). Getting into an EVA suit is difficult and time consuming. Getting into a Dragon flight suit is much easier, but decompression would mean you could barely move until pressure is restored. Soyuz crew flew without flight suits (until a crew died from decompression). I expect BFR passengers will not wear flight suits.
I can easily imagine half an hour added to each side of the journey. Getting 1000 people from the ship to a BFR will take time, but one of the advantages of Concorde was you could do about twice as many flights per aircraft because the journey time was short. That goes x5 for BFR.
BFRs hanging around while 1000 people climb the stairs in the strong back is not going to be cost effective. No doubt Musk will come up with something quicker.
"BFR is far too loud to get near a city"
Taking a boat or whatever to get to a place where a _minimum_ 24 hours of being airborne (usually more like 2 days end to end) can be whittled down to less than 4 hours is a win for me, even if the whole trip is 12 hours door to door.
Setting aside my own scepticism for just a moment...
Slower than flying depends very much on the corridor. London to North America takes 8 to 12 hours and to south-east Asia takes 12 to 14 hours. London to south-east Australia can't even be done in a single hop, but when it can it's expected to take 20 hours to Sydney.
Tanking before passengers have boarded may well take some bravery from legislators, operators and passengers alike, but a lot of the other pre-flight checks don't require passengers to be around. That's going to take some interesting work on the sequencing, I suspect.
How long the boat journey takes depends on how far out to sea it is. That's quite an unknown at the moment.
I think it's fair to say that personal spacesuits for each passenger aren't likely to be terribly useful; if the craft has lost cabin pressure at any point in its journey, I'd expect a raft of other individually catastrophic (and terminal) failures to also have occurred! However, the spacesuits used by national space agencies are as complicated as they are because they are required do a lot more (and for much longer) than would be required of these ones.
I enjoyed the video because it shows they're thinking about crazy things. I just love the madness of some of these ideas and I don't mind at all that they will likely never happen.
"How long the boat journey takes depends on how far out to sea it is. That's quite an unknown at the moment."
Most waterways anywhere within easy ride of London are pretty congested already. IIRC, Spaceport UK is pencilled in for Prestwick in Scotland, so that'll be at least 30 years before HS4 (5? 6?) reaches there and may require a stop at passport control.
"none of this 3 hours early nonsense"
for the very wealthy, who can afford chartered flights, the check-in process would be considerably faster. first, you're going to use a 'branch' air terminal. In San Diego, for example, that would be the commuter terminal, which only services smaller planes that do short commercial flights (like from San Diego to L.A., or San Diego to Monterey or some other 'whistle stop' airport), as well as CHARTERED planes. And a small private airport (which just has private and chartered planes) would be even easier to do check-in at.
So when you consider the TSA-caused slowdowns of normal "coach" flyers, the really really rich ALREADY have their "separate and UNequal" system locked-in. For them, it's still "fun to fly".
but since rockets to mars (or suborbital earth city to city) would ONLY have the super-rich affording the cost of a ticket, then I suppose whatever check-in process THEY go through could be a 'new experience' of sorts.
Aside: I once got us a business upgrade form Boston to Dublin* so I was able to use the fast check-in lane and fast security lane. But, because we were so early there weren't any significant lines for check-in or security so it didn't save us any time.
* Good timing because it made the 3 hour delay due to a mismatch between fuel readings a _lot_ more bearable. Still missed the connecting flight though.
If this is going to end up as the only SpaceX booster, it changes a huge amount. The sub-orbital hops depend on very high reliability. The price per person suggests an astonishingly low price to LEO. Is it too big a system for the LEO market? At the price, you don't need to use the full payload to undercut everything else in the launch business.
Airliner-class reliability is maybe the biggest change. I don't have solid figures for Concorde, but 4 flights a day for 27 years and 3 major incidents suggests better than 1 in 10,000 as a working figure. For spaceflight that is an incredible target. I have probably under-guessed the total number of Concorde flights.
Can the new Raptor Methane-LOX engine work out as part of a Falcon replacement without the BFR-scale system? A Falcon-level booster using the Raptor might be an option, but it would look like a failure. It might turn out to be a neccessary intermediate. Remember, the Falcon has had several step improvements, such as engine details and super-cooled LOX to increase density.
I think there's a lot of advertising hype here, but the lead times in the whole industry are so long that Elon Musk has to get the basic ideas out in the open well in advance. It's "we're going to do this, start thinking about how you can use this." It might be getting satellite designers to think how they could put multiple big satellites on a booster. Do you have to trade-off between diameter and length to put three Falcon 9 payloads on the BFR? Falcon 9 fairings are already a bigger diameter than the booster: it might not be a good idea to keep doing that.
But will it work? That is the key.
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