All SpaceX rocket development decisions are to accelerate the earliest completion of the SpaceX BFR.
SpaceX will no longer divert resources to make the Falcon 9 second stage reusable. The second stage modification for a mini-BFR will enable low-cost testing of the BFR upper stage.
SpaceX will shift all development resources towards the BFR by the end of 2019. SpaceX is currently spending on the crewed Dragon.
Btw, SpaceX is no longer planning to upgrade Falcon 9 second stage for reusability. Accelerating BFR instead. New design is very exciting! Delightfully counter-intuitive.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 17, 2018
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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I don’t doubt that people would want to stick their noses out and look around. But from that perspective the picture window sucks. In space you’d need to shut off every light in a large volume to see out unobstructed. You’d only be using it on Mars, and once on Mars you’d be too busy for rubbernecking.
Just have a window blister someplace where people can go and shut a curtain behind them.
No, because he’s planing on *colonizing* Mars, not exploring it for science. There’s no bloody way you colonize a planet while leaving it unaltered.
I think he’ll dump them. I think regular hull with a giant digital screen makes more sense than windows. There is hardly ever anything to see out the windows but giant digital display could zoom in on targets. If you want a good view put on a space suit and stick your head outside.
Sounds like a LEO Party Yacht.
In all fairness they have been talking about LEO refueling since day 1.
Ok now is Mr Musk going to sterilize his big spaceship so he doesn’t contaminate Mars?
(what every contractor working on SLS is thinking)
Regrettably NASA has no say in scrubbing SLS. Its a congressional beast.
Hmm needs more picture.
Yes and planes have crashed due to to window fatigue.
By the square meter windows are much heavier than Aluminum or Composites or most any other airtight material.
So yeah the windows are a vanity thing- the granite countertops of spaceship designs.
Tandy?
But isn’t the reason that space hardware is so expensive at least 50% because it is so optimized to be very, very light? (The other 50% is temperature extremes and vacuum.)
So, 18 tonnes of NASA class equipment is super expensive. 18 tonnes of what would be 6 tonnes if NASA made it would be much less expensive.
This would be a good choice for a trip out to capture and return a “smallish” S-type asteroid. Plenty of fuel; empty cargo bay.
And, Musk likes to sell weird things. I suspect there’s a huge market for things like “astro-jewelry” or an Inception (the movie) type spinning top made from “space metal.”
Also, because, gold.
Tiles, panels, you say tomato… They’re rectilinear blocks that are much thinner in one dimension than the other two.
I’m an engineer, I’m not really into “romantic appeal” when it comes to machinery. I don’t doubt that aluminum oxynitride would be up to the job, but every added joint is an added opportunity for structural failure.
I expect they are bolted on panels not glued on tiles.
The problem is that the price of space hardware is pretty strongly correlated with its dry mass. It’s not that 18 tonnes couldn’t be used; it’s that 18 tonnes of stuff will be really, really expensive.
Yeah, you’d be hard put to convince me picture windows on a space ship are a good idea.
But you do need the FAA’s approval to launch people. NASA just sets the standard for “man-rated” space vehicles. The FAA approves launches using NASA standards. For the moment, liability issues are moot due to legislation relaxing standards to encourage commercial companies to launch people to “space” (Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin, etc.). Once that legislation sunsets (theoretically when the “space” vehicles and the technology to make them, mature into dependable, reliable, safe machines), the FAA will be much stricter about passenger space vehicle standards, as they are now about passenger aircraft. Note: NASA and the US military have their own standards for aircraft and certification, they just dovetail them into the FAA standards so there aren’t issues with ATC, operating in civilian airspace, and airports, etc.
Do they? They appear to me to show panels of PICA-X.
Why all those windows?
I find it hard to believe someone like Musk who likes to optimize things would cover a large part of the design with windows. Surely they must be decorative or solar panels or something.
High res cams and internal monitors would be much more efficient. Perhaps one or two small optical view ports for redundancy.
Fair enough. Change to “5) That long pointy-spaceship tail-down landing that looks like something out of a 50’s sci-fi movie is actually useful on the Moon.”
The other thing here: Minimum, single-engine, non-redundant thrust for a Raptor throttled down to 20% is about 367 kN. To hover (not hover-slam) on the Moon, that requires a BFS mass of 226 tonnes. BFS needs about 132 tonnes of prop to return to Earth, and an 85 tonne dry mass means that BFS must have at least 9 tonnes of payload to land. If you want two-engine redundancy, you need 18 tonnes.
That’s not a big deal for regular resupply missions to a lunar base, but it’s actually a lot of stuff to carry if you’re just landing an exploration crew. Of course, you can always ballast the BFS with more prop than it needs, but that means you likely have more refueling launches to do in LEO or HEEO, which implies more expense per mission.
BFS to the Moon isn’t exactly a square peg in a round hole, but it’s at least a low-eccentricity elliptical peg with a major axis just slightly longer than the round hole’s diameter.
I agree with you on how production will roll over to BFR, but the issue is about timing. If there weren’t a deadline on the FCC license (i.e., you have to launch and operate half of your constellation within 6 years of the license date, and all of it within 9 years, or have the license frozen at whatever you have launched when you miss the deadline), I’m sure that they’d wait for BFR to come online, go through all the rigamarole needed to build a BFR pad at Canaveral, and everything would be fine.
But they can’t do that. There simply isn’t enough time. The range capacity won’t be there in time. BFR is unlikely to be ready soon enough to make a big dent before the deadline. And building a pad on the Cape is a lot different than building one where there’s no range run by the Air Force. There are regulatory hoops, and they take time.
I also agree with you that, going forward, BFR makes lots of sense as a way to replace Starlink birds. But again, that doesn’t help with the performance requirements built into the license.
As long as they don’t take NASA money, it will take a fraction of the time that is necessary when NASA is in the game.
They don’t need NASA’s approval to fly people. When they are routinely doing so, NASA can either continue to pay many times the BFR/BFS costs to fly their astronauts on Crew Dragons or Starliners or buy a ticket. Their choice. I doubt even if BFR/BFS takes all of the NASA crew business that that business will ever be as large as its commercial crew business. By the time NASA joins the game, it will already be well afoot.
Note that they will never “finish” the Starlink network. With a planned 5-7 year lifetime, they will need to replenish around 2,000 satellites every year ad-infinitum.
Or use ballistic capture orbit to Mars – that would be pretty close to matching the deltaV available, though maybe not for actual soft landing, and not matching a human mission’s orbit.
I really don’t think that BFR fills the bill for Starlink, for several reasons:
1) You can’t launch to Starlink’s inclinations from Boca Chica. Doing so requires overflying the US from about the TX-LA border up to Boston.
2) If you launch to 26 degrees (pretty much the only inclination you can get to from BC), then the plane change up to 54 degrees costs something like 3550 m/s in delta-v.
3) If you’re going to carry enough birds to make the BFR’s scale work for you, you also have to plane change to different ascending nodes, which costs about 790 m/s for each new ascending node.
4) When you add all of these delta-v requirements up, populating two of the new 54 degree x 550 km orbital planes (each of which has 66 birds in it, so 132 on the BFR, which will be something like 71 tonnes) from a BC launch actually costs 4 launches, 3 of which refuel the payload BFS on-orbit. That puts you back at an effective rate of 33 birds per launch, which is pretty much what you can get out of an F9 with a stretched fairing.
Just to be clear: If by “satellite launch version”, you mean a launcher that can populate even tiny payloads direct to GEO, BFR/BFS can’t do that. With the SL Raptors on the BFS, I can’t even get a 0 payload to GTO and still get the BFS back for re-use, although it’s close.
Of course, SpaceX could have a bus stage that fits in the BFS fairing and moves huge payloads to GEO. But BFS just has too much dry mass to do the job on its own.
This is a very, very strange vehicle: It’s great for interplanetary stuff with the refueling capability, but it’s pretty much useless for anything that requires getting further than LEO on one tank of gas.
The tanker is just a BFS with no payload; It will have about 100 t of prop left in the tanks when it makes orbit. The key isn’t developing the tanker, it’s developing the on-orbit rendezvous, capture, and refueling technology. All of those things exist in other forms, but they need to be honed into an operational, reliable system. It’s not a huge deal.
It is crazy to believe that they will land anything on Mars before 2028. It is not only the BFR which is far from being ready, it is also the refueling in space and the landing gear and capabilities on Mars. A very toll order.
So it may make more sense to develop the tanker first. Should be somewhat simpler to design and build, it can still test reuse and refueling (with 2 tankers), and it removes the demands of human-rating while still working out such basics. Then one refueled tanker could go to Mars and land.
Yep. It’s the first instance of the old vision of refueling in orbit plus other one: fully reusable rockets.
Orbital depots and refueling are known to enable trips to any destination in the Solar System and beyond, delta-V wise.
BFR is made since its inception with the idea of taking as much payload to LEO as possible, to carry a much cargo to its faraway destination as possible, or as much fuel as possible for the orbiting ships waiting for it.
I’m sure they could make a more GEO amenable second stage, with significantly less payload, but that would be against the idea of having a jack of all trades, high volume reusable platform for any destination. They want production in series and make many rockets. Besides they have F9 and FH for serving that market in the meantime.
The leap of faith here is assuming reuse will pan out, allowing to refuel the orbiting ships for less than it would take to launch a expendable rocket.
I’m sure many scientists would be screaming for some of their instruments to be onboard, had the first BFS to land on Mars be going there empty.
Besides it makes no sense sending a rocket unless you want to use it later. So, better put some supplies in there and enable it to function as a lifeboat or refuge.
Nonsense. The BFR family is designed for crew rating from the start, and will to go by NASA’s current overall test of 7 successful missions, be built with crew rating from the beginning.
He called the sky diver configuration counter-intuitive, at the time of reveal. So there’s some chance that this is more of that.
I think this is because NASA stated they will scrub SLS if SpaceX and B.O can provide reliable heavy/super heavy rockets.
Looks like SpaceX is going for the “kill”.
At a guess, SpaceX will test reuse of a first BFR spaceship several times, then launch that ship to Mars (as they iterate to an improved version). Just getting there with room temperature air still inside would be something. I doubt they’ll refuel it in Earth orbit – just sending it with no payload to make a first Mars aerobraking test easier – possibly with enough fuel to attempt landing.
If he pulls that off then I doubt it will be more than another spaceman in a roadster stunt. To get the BFR and BFS to the point that they are man rated will be a long time consuming task.
Yes I believe I said NASA’s “current” test. To make Boeing/SLS look better, they may double that later…
That seems like a strange complaint to make; “You could use the BFR to land an exploration crew, but only if you brought some cargo, too.”
I’m sure an exploration crew could use some cargo, even if you were using the BFR as their home base while exploring. A rover or two, for instance. A drilling rig to take deep samples. A ballistic hopper to extend exploration range.
I suspect an exploration crew would have no trouble at all coming up with 18 tons of useful cargo.
As long as the smaller guys are methalox, and as long as they’re somehow qualified to use the docking and refueling mechanism that the BFS uses, maybe. But note that there is no “depot” in the SpaceX architecture. There are launch-on-demand BFSes with some extra prop in the tanks. That’s it.
Could SpaceX develop the equivalent of a UPS truck? Sure. But the period of greatest opportunity is at the beginning of a lunar campaign, and there is an opportunity for ACES or a Blue Origin system to sneak in with a more cost-effective system if they’re smart.
I fully expect ULA to blow this opportunity, but I’d lay at least even odds that BO will wind up doing something that will make SpaceX scramble to make BFR address whatever clever thing Jeff and His Friends come up with.
About 29:45 into his 9/29/17 “Making Life Multiplanetary” speech, Elon introduced the satellite mission first in describing the BFS. He followed with the ISS mission, Moon, and Mars. I felt this order represented development order.
Likely before the BFR/BFS development is complete, the Falcon 9 build-ahead phase should complete. The intent of that was to build up an inventory of Falcon 9s to use until customers are confident in the BFR/BFS system. After the build-ahead, Falcon 9 production stops and shifts to more BFR/BFS production. BFR/BFS is fully intended to replace all use of Falcon 9 because it can launch for a fraction of Falcon 9’s launch price, not just per pound, but per launch. Carrying a Falcon 9-sized payload on BFR/BFS would seem like overkill, but should be much cheaper.
I do not expect Boca Chica to remain the only launch site for long. They obviously feel that launch facility cost will not be extreme if they believe they can eventually use it to compete in long distance air travel.
I don’t know how they will address the issues you point out. Some of them are addressable with launch site changes. Perhaps the satellite launch version will carry more fuel and limit its payload capacity to something closer to the Falcon 9. The extra reusability would still make it much cheaper to use than the Falcon 9.
Because the Starlink constellation has to be fully replaced every 5-7 years, Starlink will represent a massive ongoing launch demand of around 2,000 satellites a year once fully deployed and will be around long after the Falcon 9 is retired. Surely they plan to be able to launch their own satellites.
It does likely have tiles, but of PICA (Phenolic Impregnated Carbon Ablator), like the Dragon capsule.
According to SpaceX, while they’re ablative, they do it slowly enough to be reused many times before needing replacement.
Probably because the illustrations appear to show tiles.
“5) That tail-down landing is actually useful on the Moon. ”
The Apollo project used tail-down landings on the moon. Unless the meaning is more subtle than I presume.
Why do people keep on thinking it has ceramic tiles?
it has ceramic tiles?
Pretty much agree with what you’ve got here, but there are several leaps of faith:
1) That re-use actually pans out.
2) That launch costs are low enough that increasing them by 2x-10x for missions that need deep refueling makes those missions still economically viable.
3) That launch tempo is high enough that deep refueling missions will work without too much boil-off.
4) That the demand for missions requiring a lot of refueling is high enough to justify the super-heavy lift to LEO.
5) That tail-down landing is actually useful on the Moon.
If the answer to any of these turns out to be negative, then there’s a lot of room in the market for somebody to come in with a much smaller system that can both service the GEO market and the deep-space market. Something like New Glenn, for example.
Presumed, but not yet developed. Most of the pieces parts sorta-kind exist, but there’s work to be done:
1) Timely, efficient rendezvous is pretty much a done deal, because ISS crew ops require fairly short duration flights. But it’s especially important when you’re managing cryogenic propellants near Earth, which throws off a lot of infrared radiation.
2) The ISS usually uses berthing, but hard-docking is sometimes used, and was of course extensively used by Apollo. The missing ingredient here is that nobody has ever attempted docking engine-bell-to-engine-bell. The consequences of a mishap are pretty disastrous–so disastrous that I wouldn’t be surprised if SpaceX decides to do something different.
3) Storable propellants get transferred all the time on the ISS, with well-understood ullage control. But nobody’s ever done it with cryogenic prop.
This isn’t the end of the world, but it’s definitely work that has to be done.
Sure. It looks like a BFR.
Though complicated by a large bay door, I’d bet the satellite launch version of BFS is the priority. SpaceX has a need to launch 1000s of satellites for its Starlink constellation in a very short time that forces a rate of over 1000 satellites a year in order to retain their FCC licenses. The savings of doing the later stages of this with BFR/BFS instead of the much less cost-effective Falcon 9 could pay for a lot of the BFR/BFS development costs.
Once they have demonstrated in-orbit propellant transfer and storage, they could supply a depot and fuel up smaller missions to other places. You don’t *have* to send an 1100 ton BFS when a smaller stage will do, just like you don’t *have* to send a tractor trailer for every shipment. Sometimes a UPS truck will do.
For now, they want an SLS-killer, to get those juicy government contracts, and something to finish the Starlink network, and capture a big chunk of the ISP market. Those will supply enough revenue to fund going to Mars.
I believe microgravity propellant transfer has always been presumed for the BFR family.
So far the BFS is the escape system when in boost.
Even the Adelaide version of the BFR/BFS only has about 3750 m/s of delta-v from LEO when launched empty. Typical Mars transfers require about 4300 m/s, plus whatever it takes to land after aerobraking.
The Dear Moon version of the BFR/BFS has even less delta-v available. They have to develop on-orbit refueling to do pretty much anything with the BFS. It can’t even make it to GEO as-is.
It’s a weird platform.
Musk has this amazing way of disproving his critics.
What Cummings says about electric trucks, for instance,
is one of the latest.
But… having said this, I feel Musk ambitions for Mars
might prove a little premature.
Long run, for sure. But short term plans? Can’t see it.
I hope he proves me wrong.
I don’t doubt that people would want to stick their noses out and look around. But from that perspective the picture window sucks. In space you’d need to shut off every light in a large volume to see out unobstructed. You’d only be using it on Mars, and once on Mars you’d be too busy for rubbernecking.
Just have a window blister someplace where people can go and shut a curtain behind them.
No, because he’s planing on *colonizing* Mars, not exploring it for science. There’s no bloody way you colonize a planet while leaving it unaltered.
I think he’ll dump them. I think regular hull with a giant digital screen makes more sense than windows. There is hardly ever anything to see out the windows but giant digital display could zoom in on targets. If you want a good view put on a space suit and stick your head outside.
Sounds like a LEO Party Yacht.
In all fairness they have been talking about LEO refueling since day 1.
Ok now is Mr Musk going to sterilize his big spaceship so he doesn’t contaminate Mars?
(what every contractor working on SLS is thinking)
Regrettably NASA has no say in scrubbing SLS. Its a congressional beast.
Hmm needs more picture.
Yes and planes have crashed due to to window fatigue.
By the square meter windows are much heavier than Aluminum or Composites or most any other airtight material.
So yeah the windows are a vanity thing- the granite countertops of spaceship designs.
Tandy?
But isn’t the reason that space hardware is so expensive at least 50% because it is so optimized to be very, very light? (The other 50% is temperature extremes and vacuum.)
So, 18 tonnes of NASA class equipment is super expensive. 18 tonnes of what would be 6 tonnes if NASA made it would be much less expensive.
This would be a good choice for a trip out to capture and return a “smallish” S-type asteroid. Plenty of fuel; empty cargo bay.
And, Musk likes to sell weird things. I suspect there’s a huge market for things like “astro-jewelry” or an Inception (the movie) type spinning top made from “space metal.”
Also, because, gold.
Tiles, panels, you say tomato… They’re rectilinear blocks that are much thinner in one dimension than the other two.
I’m an engineer, I’m not really into “romantic appeal” when it comes to machinery. I don’t doubt that aluminum oxynitride would be up to the job, but every added joint is an added opportunity for structural failure.
I expect they are bolted on panels not glued on tiles.
The problem is that the price of space hardware is pretty strongly correlated with its dry mass. It’s not that 18 tonnes couldn’t be used; it’s that 18 tonnes of stuff will be really, really expensive.
Yeah, you’d be hard put to convince me picture windows on a space ship are a good idea.
But you do need the FAA’s approval to launch people. NASA just sets the standard for “man-rated” space vehicles. The FAA approves launches using NASA standards. For the moment, liability issues are moot due to legislation relaxing standards to encourage commercial companies to launch people to “space” (Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin, etc.). Once that legislation sunsets (theoretically when the “space” vehicles and the technology to make them, mature into dependable, reliable, safe machines), the FAA will be much stricter about passenger space vehicle standards, as they are now about passenger aircraft. Note: NASA and the US military have their own standards for aircraft and certification, they just dovetail them into the FAA standards so there aren’t issues with ATC, operating in civilian airspace, and airports, etc.
Yes I believe I said NASA’s “current” test. To make Boeing/SLS look better, they may double that later…
Do they? They appear to me to show panels of PICA-X.
Why all those windows?
I find it hard to believe someone like Musk who likes to optimize things would cover a large part of the design with windows. Surely they must be decorative or solar panels or something.
High res cams and internal monitors would be much more efficient. Perhaps one or two small optical view ports for redundancy.
That seems like a strange complaint to make; “You could use the BFR to land an exploration crew, but only if you brought some cargo, too.”
I’m sure an exploration crew could use some cargo, even if you were using the BFR as their home base while exploring. A rover or two, for instance. A drilling rig to take deep samples. A ballistic hopper to extend exploration range.
I suspect an exploration crew would have no trouble at all coming up with 18 tons of useful cargo.
As long as the smaller guys are methalox, and as long as they’re somehow qualified to use the docking and refueling mechanism that the BFS uses, maybe. But note that there is no “depot” in the SpaceX architecture. There are launch-on-demand BFSes with some extra prop in the tanks. That’s it.
Could SpaceX develop the equivalent of a UPS truck? Sure. But the period of greatest opportunity is at the beginning of a lunar campaign, and there is an opportunity for ACES or a Blue Origin system to sneak in with a more cost-effective system if they’re smart.
I fully expect ULA to blow this opportunity, but I’d lay at least even odds that BO will wind up doing something that will make SpaceX scramble to make BFR address whatever clever thing Jeff and His Friends come up with.
Fair enough. Change to “5) That long pointy-spaceship tail-down landing that looks like something out of a 50’s sci-fi movie is actually useful on the Moon.”
The other thing here: Minimum, single-engine, non-redundant thrust for a Raptor throttled down to 20% is about 367 kN. To hover (not hover-slam) on the Moon, that requires a BFS mass of 226 tonnes. BFS needs about 132 tonnes of prop to return to Earth, and an 85 tonne dry mass means that BFS must have at least 9 tonnes of payload to land. If you want two-engine redundancy, you need 18 tonnes.
That’s not a big deal for regular resupply missions to a lunar base, but it’s actually a lot of stuff to carry if you’re just landing an exploration crew. Of course, you can always ballast the BFS with more prop than it needs, but that means you likely have more refueling launches to do in LEO or HEEO, which implies more expense per mission.
BFS to the Moon isn’t exactly a square peg in a round hole, but it’s at least a low-eccentricity elliptical peg with a major axis just slightly longer than the round hole’s diameter.
I agree with you on how production will roll over to BFR, but the issue is about timing. If there weren’t a deadline on the FCC license (i.e., you have to launch and operate half of your constellation within 6 years of the license date, and all of it within 9 years, or have the license frozen at whatever you have launched when you miss the deadline), I’m sure that they’d wait for BFR to come online, go through all the rigamarole needed to build a BFR pad at Canaveral, and everything would be fine.
But they can’t do that. There simply isn’t enough time. The range capacity won’t be there in time. BFR is unlikely to be ready soon enough to make a big dent before the deadline. And building a pad on the Cape is a lot different than building one where there’s no range run by the Air Force. There are regulatory hoops, and they take time.
I also agree with you that, going forward, BFR makes lots of sense as a way to replace Starlink birds. But again, that doesn’t help with the performance requirements built into the license.
As long as they don’t take NASA money, it will take a fraction of the time that is necessary when NASA is in the game.
They don’t need NASA’s approval to fly people. When they are routinely doing so, NASA can either continue to pay many times the BFR/BFS costs to fly their astronauts on Crew Dragons or Starliners or buy a ticket. Their choice. I doubt even if BFR/BFS takes all of the NASA crew business that that business will ever be as large as its commercial crew business. By the time NASA joins the game, it will already be well afoot.
Note that they will never “finish” the Starlink network. With a planned 5-7 year lifetime, they will need to replenish around 2,000 satellites every year ad-infinitum.
About 29:45 into his 9/29/17 “Making Life Multiplanetary” speech, Elon introduced the satellite mission first in describing the BFS. He followed with the ISS mission, Moon, and Mars. I felt this order represented development order.
Likely before the BFR/BFS development is complete, the Falcon 9 build-ahead phase should complete. The intent of that was to build up an inventory of Falcon 9s to use until customers are confident in the BFR/BFS system. After the build-ahead, Falcon 9 production stops and shifts to more BFR/BFS production. BFR/BFS is fully intended to replace all use of Falcon 9 because it can launch for a fraction of Falcon 9’s launch price, not just per pound, but per launch. Carrying a Falcon 9-sized payload on BFR/BFS would seem like overkill, but should be much cheaper.
I do not expect Boca Chica to remain the only launch site for long. They obviously feel that launch facility cost will not be extreme if they believe they can eventually use it to compete in long distance air travel.
I don’t know how they will address the issues you point out. Some of them are addressable with launch site changes. Perhaps the satellite launch version will carry more fuel and limit its payload capacity to something closer to the Falcon 9. The extra reusability would still make it much cheaper to use than the Falcon 9.
Because the Starlink constellation has to be fully replaced every 5-7 years, Starlink will represent a massive ongoing launch demand of around 2,000 satellites a year once fully deployed and will be around long after the Falcon 9 is retired. Surely they plan to be able to launch their own satellites.
Or use ballistic capture orbit to Mars – that would be pretty close to matching the deltaV available, though maybe not for actual soft landing, and not matching a human mission’s orbit.
It does likely have tiles, but of PICA (Phenolic Impregnated Carbon Ablator), like the Dragon capsule.
According to SpaceX, while they’re ablative, they do it slowly enough to be reused many times before needing replacement.
Probably because the illustrations appear to show tiles.
“5) That tail-down landing is actually useful on the Moon. ”
The Apollo project used tail-down landings on the moon. Unless the meaning is more subtle than I presume.
Why do people keep on thinking it has ceramic tiles?
I really don’t think that BFR fills the bill for Starlink, for several reasons:
1) You can’t launch to Starlink’s inclinations from Boca Chica. Doing so requires overflying the US from about the TX-LA border up to Boston.
2) If you launch to 26 degrees (pretty much the only inclination you can get to from BC), then the plane change up to 54 degrees costs something like 3550 m/s in delta-v.
3) If you’re going to carry enough birds to make the BFR’s scale work for you, you also have to plane change to different ascending nodes, which costs about 790 m/s for each new ascending node.
4) When you add all of these delta-v requirements up, populating two of the new 54 degree x 550 km orbital planes (each of which has 66 birds in it, so 132 on the BFR, which will be something like 71 tonnes) from a BC launch actually costs 4 launches, 3 of which refuel the payload BFS on-orbit. That puts you back at an effective rate of 33 birds per launch, which is pretty much what you can get out of an F9 with a stretched fairing.
Just to be clear: If by “satellite launch version”, you mean a launcher that can populate even tiny payloads direct to GEO, BFR/BFS can’t do that. With the SL Raptors on the BFS, I can’t even get a 0 payload to GTO and still get the BFS back for re-use, although it’s close.
Of course, SpaceX could have a bus stage that fits in the BFS fairing and moves huge payloads to GEO. But BFS just has too much dry mass to do the job on its own.
This is a very, very strange vehicle: It’s great for interplanetary stuff with the refueling capability, but it’s pretty much useless for anything that requires getting further than LEO on one tank of gas.
it has ceramic tiles?
Pretty much agree with what you’ve got here, but there are several leaps of faith:
1) That re-use actually pans out.
2) That launch costs are low enough that increasing them by 2x-10x for missions that need deep refueling makes those missions still economically viable.
3) That launch tempo is high enough that deep refueling missions will work without too much boil-off.
4) That the demand for missions requiring a lot of refueling is high enough to justify the super-heavy lift to LEO.
5) That tail-down landing is actually useful on the Moon.
If the answer to any of these turns out to be negative, then there’s a lot of room in the market for somebody to come in with a much smaller system that can both service the GEO market and the deep-space market. Something like New Glenn, for example.
Presumed, but not yet developed. Most of the pieces parts sorta-kind exist, but there’s work to be done:
1) Timely, efficient rendezvous is pretty much a done deal, because ISS crew ops require fairly short duration flights. But it’s especially important when you’re managing cryogenic propellants near Earth, which throws off a lot of infrared radiation.
2) The ISS usually uses berthing, but hard-docking is sometimes used, and was of course extensively used by Apollo. The missing ingredient here is that nobody has ever attempted docking engine-bell-to-engine-bell. The consequences of a mishap are pretty disastrous–so disastrous that I wouldn’t be surprised if SpaceX decides to do something different.
3) Storable propellants get transferred all the time on the ISS, with well-understood ullage control. But nobody’s ever done it with cryogenic prop.
This isn’t the end of the world, but it’s definitely work that has to be done.
The tanker is just a BFS with no payload; It will have about 100 t of prop left in the tanks when it makes orbit. The key isn’t developing the tanker, it’s developing the on-orbit rendezvous, capture, and refueling technology. All of those things exist in other forms, but they need to be honed into an operational, reliable system. It’s not a huge deal.
It is crazy to believe that they will land anything on Mars before 2028. It is not only the BFR which is far from being ready, it is also the refueling in space and the landing gear and capabilities on Mars. A very toll order.
Sure. It looks like a BFR.
Musk has this amazing way of disproving his critics.
What Cummings says about electric trucks, for instance,
is one of the latest.
But… having said this, I feel Musk ambitions for Mars
might prove a little premature.
Long run, for sure. But short term plans? Can’t see it.
I hope he proves me wrong.
Though complicated by a large bay door, I’d bet the satellite launch version of BFS is the priority. SpaceX has a need to launch 1000s of satellites for its Starlink constellation in a very short time that forces a rate of over 1000 satellites a year in order to retain their FCC licenses. The savings of doing the later stages of this with BFR/BFS instead of the much less cost-effective Falcon 9 could pay for a lot of the BFR/BFS development costs.
Once they have demonstrated in-orbit propellant transfer and storage, they could supply a depot and fuel up smaller missions to other places. You don’t *have* to send an 1100 ton BFS when a smaller stage will do, just like you don’t *have* to send a tractor trailer for every shipment. Sometimes a UPS truck will do.
For now, they want an SLS-killer, to get those juicy government contracts, and something to finish the Starlink network, and capture a big chunk of the ISP market. Those will supply enough revenue to fund going to Mars.
So it may make more sense to develop the tanker first. Should be somewhat simpler to design and build, it can still test reuse and refueling (with 2 tankers), and it removes the demands of human-rating while still working out such basics. Then one refueled tanker could go to Mars and land.
Yep. It’s the first instance of the old vision of refueling in orbit plus other one: fully reusable rockets.
Orbital depots and refueling are known to enable trips to any destination in the Solar System and beyond, delta-V wise.
BFR is made since its inception with the idea of taking as much payload to LEO as possible, to carry a much cargo to its faraway destination as possible, or as much fuel as possible for the orbiting ships waiting for it.
I’m sure they could make a more GEO amenable second stage, with significantly less payload, but that would be against the idea of having a jack of all trades, high volume reusable platform for any destination. They want production in series and make many rockets. Besides they have F9 and FH for serving that market in the meantime.
The leap of faith here is assuming reuse will pan out, allowing to refuel the orbiting ships for less than it would take to launch a expendable rocket.
I’m sure many scientists would be screaming for some of their instruments to be onboard, had the first BFS to land on Mars be going there empty.
Besides it makes no sense sending a rocket unless you want to use it later. So, better put some supplies in there and enable it to function as a lifeboat or refuge.
Nonsense. The BFR family is designed for crew rating from the start, and will to go by NASA’s current overall test of 7 successful missions, be built with crew rating from the beginning.
I believe microgravity propellant transfer has always been presumed for the BFR family.
So far the BFS is the escape system when in boost.
He called the sky diver configuration counter-intuitive, at the time of reveal. So there’s some chance that this is more of that.
Even the Adelaide version of the BFR/BFS only has about 3750 m/s of delta-v from LEO when launched empty. Typical Mars transfers require about 4300 m/s, plus whatever it takes to land after aerobraking.
The Dear Moon version of the BFR/BFS has even less delta-v available. They have to develop on-orbit refueling to do pretty much anything with the BFS. It can’t even make it to GEO as-is.
It’s a weird platform.
I think this is because NASA stated they will scrub SLS if SpaceX and B.O can provide reliable heavy/super heavy rockets.
Looks like SpaceX is going for the “kill”.
At a guess, SpaceX will test reuse of a first BFR spaceship several times, then launch that ship to Mars (as they iterate to an improved version). Just getting there with room temperature air still inside would be something. I doubt they’ll refuel it in Earth orbit – just sending it with no payload to make a first Mars aerobraking test easier – possibly with enough fuel to attempt landing.
If he pulls that off then I doubt it will be more than another spaceman in a roadster stunt. To get the BFR and BFS to the point that they are man rated will be a long time consuming task.