Having these billionaires willing to throw money at competitive space flight is pretty great - I'm sure positive effects on commercial space exploration and global internet access will inevitably follow.
I'm intrigued that they plan to go from New Shepard straight to a rocket that's bigger than Falcon 9 (3.85m pounds thrust for New Shepard vs. latest Full Thrust version of Falcon 9 at 1.71m pounds). I was under the impression that New Shepard wasn't as serious as Falcon 1 (.e.g not capable of reaching orbit) and that SpaceX spent quite a number of years moving from pre-Falcon 1 to the regular launch successes of Falcon 9.
Maybe someone who knows more about this can explain - are the technical challenges involved less associated with pure size and more to do with design/fabrication processes etc.?
Now i'm just an excited but casual bystander in all of this, so don't take anything i say as anything more than rumour. That being said...
I read that Blue Origin (specifically Bezos) has a lot more funding to throw at this problem than SpaceX did/does (IIRC Bezos has something like 6x the net worth of Musk. That alone might not say much, but it's obvious that if push comes to shove, Bezos can throw more money at the problem). And if you look at some of the numbers (not sure if they are completely "confirmed" yet), New Glenn still won't quite have the lifting power of Falcon Heavy (despite it's larger size).
Also, if you look at the timeline of Falcon 9 (Funded in 2006, first launched in 2010), Blue Origin's looks very similar, so it's not exactly impossible.
To me it just looks like they are going in a different direction. SpaceX wanted to get to reusability with an orbital rocket first, then scale up. Blue Origin is nailing down the extreme reusability in sub-orbital land for now, and will apply that to an orbital rocket. And the simpler design (one massive booster VS 3 separate stage-1 boosters) seems like a simpler plan (i'm not trying to imply in any way that any of this is easy, it's still rocket science!)
It's looking like we are going to have another space race in the next decade. And I can't wait!
Bezos has more wealth than Musk, but SpaceX has paying customers. I believe Musk has said that they have about $10 billion committed from customers already. That generates cashflow, plus gives them a good story to tell when they pitch seek outside investors.
While not in the same realm, Blue Origin is hoping to start making some money via "space tourism" very soon.
They also make money via manufacturing for other companies. IIRC the engine for New Glenn is going to be used in an upcoming ULA rocket.
It's very early for them, and it's clear that SpaceX has a good decade or so on them, but it's exciting to have the possibility of real competition in this area again.
> While not in the same realm, Blue Origin is hoping to start making some money via "space tourism" very soon.
How realistic is this hope? Do they have an assembly line for a fleet of them and are these anywhere close to being certified for travel by the general public?
New Glenn still won't quite have the lifting power of Falcon Heavy (despite it's larger size).
If that's true then perhaps they are going the route outlined in The Rocket Company -- Fuel is cheap, so make a really freakin huge rocket that holds a freakin huge amount of fuel and go ahead and send up a relatively small payload, so long as they have true re-usability.
(complete speculation here with nothing to back it up).
That's what i'd bet they are going for. Every launch (even GTO launches) will be RTLS. Plenty of fuel on board to avoid the suicide-burns that SpaceX is doing, lots left over to give some wiggle room in case corrections are needed.
If they can maintain the same level of reusability that New Shepard is expected/hoped to have (basically rivaling that of airplanes), then the additional cost of the rocket itself can be amortized over many many launches.
SpaceX does suicide burns because of engine throttling issues; that's a separate issue from margin, and a separate issue from landing on a barge vs landing on land. It remains to be seen which of these are dangerous enough that you don't want to do them with a rocket you want to land many times.
There's also the aspect of the density of the fuel. Blue Origin may be going with a less dense option and dealing with the overhead of a larger rocket to see payoffs elsewhere, e.g. fuel cost, technical difficulty of fueling the vehicle, flexibility with launch schedules, and so on.
No, you pay with weight. Just using more fuel means your efficiency may(!) go down, with an ultimately worse outcome. But I'm lacking info on the design vs. other designs, so that general rule might be couterbalanced by other gains.
Their sub-orbital rocket "New Shepard" has launched and landed 4 times (i think, could be 3 times), with very minimal refurb in between each launch so far.
So from that perspective, very reusable.
But that's also a sub-orbital rocket. It's only a little bigger than SpaceX's landing legs without a payload[0]. So it might not be the most accurate comparison. Also, they have yet to launch anything else. So it's clearly still early for them as a company.
An airplane isn't a rocket. New Origins is clearly a rocket, not an airplane. Your comment is waaaaaaay off base. The most salient difference here is that a rocket propels itself forward by using the exhaust gases from burning its fuel as the reaction mass, whereas an airplane uses surrounding air as its reaction mass. New Shepherd can generate thrust just fine in a vacuum (because it's a rocket), whereas an airplane isn't going anywhere.
> There are probably two orders of magnitude in complexity between making a reusable sub-orbital, and a reusable orbital rocket.
Hardly. They've already built all of the necessary control systems, and had multiple successful test flights. Now they just need to scale them up. Admittedly this is not trivial, and I'd put SpaceX as far ahead for this reason alone, but it's definitely not an order of magnitude more difficult, probably just around twice as difficult. And nowhere close to two orders of magnitude!
My point is that scaling up from sub-orbital to orbital is extremely hard. It's not that far removed from going from airplane to rocket, in terms of complexity.
You're going from having a top speed of Mach 3 to a speed of Mach 27 (Stage separation and max Q at Mach 6 and 5). You're shaving every conceivable weight-adder. You're dealing with a rocket the size of a skyscraper, which crumples in on itself when not filled with fuel.
This isn't AWS, where you scale your app by spinning up a couple new nodes. The difference from a suborbital hop to orbit is increasing your delta-v budget nine-fold.
Wait, Blue Origin has already built all the necessary control systems for flight regimes that their existing rocket can't reach? Hypersonic retroburns are not much like ballistic trajectories that barely touch the edge of space.
Yes, but an airplane is fundamentally different. This is a VTVL system. Aside from an obvious size and complexity difference, the launching and landing parts are very similar in suborbital and orbital land (for the most liberal use of the words "very similar"). Hell, if you want to argue semantics, Falcon-9's Stage-1 never gets to orbital velocities. So it's really just that "turning around" part that is the major difference (obviously a massive part, and again, i'm not trying to imply that ANY of this is easy in any way!)
Nobody is saying that they will make a bigger New Shepard with no changes and call it a day. But the knowledge they are learning through the suborbital rockets is going to be useful going forward. And they have a lot of time to learn and experiment here, they are looking at a first launch in the next 4 years (no mention of landing), and they have been developing the engine for this new rocket for a few years already.
They've been developing the BE-4 engine for five years already, and the current plan is for that to be the first stage engine on the next ULA launcher. By the time they get round to launching the New Glenn, the BE-4 that it will use on the first stage will have already been tested courtesy of ULA. If I understand correctly, the second stage engines will be a development of what they're currently using on New Shepherd. This means they'll have already done much of the testing and development in other launch systems, so perhaps the step to a heavy-lift launcher is not quite so outrageous as it might first seem. Still, a lot can go wrong that isn't related to the engines, as SpaceX has discovered.
They are doing it 10 years later, so probably computer simulations are going to simplify the job more for them than they did for SpaceX.
Also Bezos has more cash and less dependent on external funding or public opinion - if several of his rockets blow up in a row it won't stop him, and he can proceed quicker.
Also, New Shepard uses hydrolox. That is harder than Falcon's kerolox. Not to say New Shepard is more comples than Falcon 1 - they are very different vehicles hard to directly compare - but it's definitely not a toy.
Within my lifetime, I hope to see: private spaceflight a reasonable option for a middle class person, resources mined from asteroids, construction in orbit, and a human walk on Mars. I want to know what's in the oceans of Europa, and I want to see detailed images from all the celestial bodies of our solar system.
I think there's a reasonable chance of all of those happening, and it feels incredible to see companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin building the foundation of commercial spaceflight. Good luck to both as they continue to grow and iterate on their journeys to other worlds.
You're much more likely to see famine, mass migration, and global war than any of those things. The only engineering problem currently worthy of a moonshot-level effort is putting all the carbon back into the ground. If we don't do that, none of those other things you mentioned are going to happen.
I didn't mean to suggest that we should do those things to the exclusion of solving the problems we have at home. Yes, we absolutely need to address the way that we manage our own planet, but my hope is that by addressing one we help further the other.
It is insane how some people believe technology will fix everything. As you say, it will most likely be business as usual until industrial civilization collapses.
Given the extreme scale of the climate change issue and the lack of any significant action for decades - a lack of action that is, mostly, still a fact - one could argue that technology (massive scale geoengineering) is the only option left to deal with it. Maybe that wasn't the case 30 years ago, but it likely is now.
We would never have been able to mess up the atmosphere so much without industrial technology and now it is likely in my opinion that we will never be able to fix it without that same level of technology. At least if we want to avoid megadeaths-scale disaster (and even then, it's a very long shot and I doubt we will manage it).
Technology definitely can't fix everything. However, most of the problems we had 1,000, 500, 100, and 50 years ago have been fixed or severely mitigated by technology. While collapse is a possibility, I don't think it's an eventuality.
I think putting carbon in the ground is the wrong approach. We need to take it out the the air, yes. But then we should build things out of it. Replace steel and concrete with carbon. Imagine a rocket made out of 90% air harvested materials.
It doesn't make a difference to the amount of energy required. The scale of the problem is the integral of all human energy consumption over all time. We need to reverse it, and the reverse process will require much more energy than was released by the forward process, and we need to do in a few years what was done over 200 years. Whether we put it into the ground or into carbon ingots is immaterial.
Rather than asteroid mining, what I want in my lifetime is an end to mining, period, an end to exploitative adventurism, an end to expanding our rapaciousness across the cosmos. I want the development of organic, sustainable technologies that don't depend on endless inputs. I want people to love the beauty on this planet before lusting to see another.
We should do both. There are a lot of avenues to research and grow our knowledge. Ideally, the lessons we learn in building a sustainable colony offworld lead to increases in sustainability here on Earth. And what we learn about managing ecosystems here leads to respectful treatment of offworld systems from the start.
>The update to US law explicitly allows "US citizens to engage in the commercial exploration and exploitation of 'space resources' [including ... water and minerals]."
The idea of ruining or polluting space is ridiculous. Space is already one of the least hospitable places imaginable, in most of it's forms. What's wrong with exploiting dead space rocks for the sake of all life?
I see the beauty in my state, but still want to visit other states. I see the beauty in my country, but still want to visit other countries. Not sure why this thought should end at our atmosphere.
Also, the only thing that will end mining on this planet is if all humans are dead. Until the Zharnog Mining Fleet from Seeplebop 14 strip mines the entire planet, that is.
80.1 Ah, for a small country with a small population! Though there are highly efficient mechanical contrivances, the people have no use for them. Let them mind death and refrain from migrating to distant places.
80.2 Boats and carriages, weapons and armour there may still be, but there are no occasions for using or displaying them.
80.3 Let the people revert to communication by knotting cords. See to it that they are contented with their food, pleased with their clothing, satisfied with their houses, and inured to their simple way of living.
80.4 Though there may be another country in the neighbourhood so close that they are within sight of each other and the crowing of cocks and barking of dogs in one place can be heard in the other, yet there is no traffic between them, and throughout their lives the two peoples have nothing to do with each other.
>Also, the only thing that will end mining on this planet is if all humans are dead.
No, we just need to stop depending on metals and fossil fuels, both of which are possible and desirable. We've already come close to achieving the latter; the work of this century will be doing the former. Unless we waste all of our time trying to get into space, that useless, airless desert.
Hey, if you can find some with radio or miles-distant electrical or optical signalling features, go for it.
Until then, I'm going to want at least a few crust-extracted materials to keep the Internet operational so we can even have this conversation from casually-anonymous points on the globe.
I have very little doubt we'll be printing long wires using just carbon in the next few decades. Until then, sure, let's use crust-extracted materials, but the advantages to making them obsolete are enormous and available.
I wasn't trying to imply it's impossible, and I agree it's a worthy goal, but I am curious as to some real ideas that would replace our current setup. Doesn't a typical smartphone use dozens of rare metals? People aren't going to give that up for the environment or they would have already, sadly.
How do you suppose we can gain access to organic computing and manufacturing without going through intermediate, less precise step that requires fuels and metals to compensate for the lack of molecular-level finesse?
> organic, sustainable technologies that don't depend on endless inputs
The reason we have good things is because we have relatively unlimited energy and raw material goods. It's not like we have some "magic" cave men didn't.
Wait, you don't think splitting the atom, or even using advanced geospatial imaging to locate and extract oil deposits from miles underground, qualifies as "magic" that cave men didn't have?
Closed loops are possible. Your carbon inputs and outputs are relatively meager; you are a machine with a small cost in energy and entropy, easily paid. Etc. for our dependencies (buildings, cars, etc.). The big advantage humans have over nature is we don't have to rely on ecosystems to supply our energy budgets; we can generate power directly from the sun, or from atoms, or a dozen other ways.
> Wait, you don't think splitting the atom, or even using advanced geospatial imaging to locate and extract oil deposits from miles underground, qualifies as "magic" that cave men didn't have?
Involves mining. I'm just saying that you can't have humanity camp out in a forest forever and have a 21st century quality of life.
Unfortunate that this comment is being downvoted to oblivion; it's a valid conjecture, and not one I've seen. Something similar that gets little or no attention is: humanities influence on species of the planet, from out right genocide and extinctions, to eugenics. There's an extreme formulation of environmentalism one could derive from David Brins Uplift stories; that the most moral thing we can do for the Potential sentient species on the planet that have not arisen yet (or maybe they have) is to get ourselves off of the planet entirely, and let nature takes its course.
Err, what? No, I want advanced carbon-based technologies. You know, what trees do - make things out of carbon, nitrogen, etc., and fucking amazing biochemistry.
That 'hit' is equivalent to reducing the carrying capacity of the planet by ~5 billion humans or using 50% of the ice free land mass for agriculture to support them.
Again, only if you believe there is no alternative to using the Haber process to make nitrogen inputs for agriculture to provide humans with food. If, like me, you believe that the Haber process was invented at the turn of the previous century, and it's time for us to grow up and master biochemistry, then the "hit" is entirely avoidable.
Your goal is to replace mining. If we had free energy (let's say "zero point energy"), then we could stop using natural gas and get the H2 needed for the Haber process directly from electricity. There would be no need to replace the Haber process.
But we don't have enough excess power for this to be economical.
The thing about 100 years of history is there's also 100 years of optimization, and 100 years to find something better. And there are many proposals of methods which are better in the lab. Just not at industrial scales that can feed a planet.
Nor is it for lack of trying. There are economic and personal incentives for anyone who can radically improve our understanding - to "grow up" as you so crudely put it. It's a certain Nobel Prize, following in Haber's footsteps. Yes, we know it can be done since bacteria have figured out how to fix soils at STP.
(To correct a point you made earlier, nitrogen fixation is certainly NOT part of the biochemical repertoire of any tree or plant.)
But as I pointed out, ammonia synthesis is only one of several very large industrial processes we use for food production. In addition to phosphates and potash, a lot of crop land is zinc deficient or in other micronutrients. Neither plants nor bacteria have figured out how to replenish those chemicals on their own or through bacteria, and depend instead on glaciers, erosion and volcanoes.
While we mine rock to make fertilizers more quickly.
It is not so easy to get rid of mining and feed the world's billions. There is obviously much profit to be had in finding something renewable which is also cheaper than mining. Most of Australia's farmers, for one, want to replenish the nutrient-poor, ancient soils under their crops.
Honestly, the universe would easily be able to sustain our rapaciousness if we had the tech to actually go and claim it. I actually really like Bezos' idea of moving all industries off-planet.
You might try reading more science fiction -- not only did it explore "Bezos' idea" long before he ever said it, it also has plenty of fun outcomes for how the universe can't sustain our rapaciousness.
I'm mystified by how many comments in this thread are of this form, unable to imagine that technology in the future might differ from what we currently employ.
We are in the middle of a project, right now, to make natural gas and coal obsolete. This shouldn't even require any imagination to conceive. Yet, still, you chastise me for doing so?
Recall, we're imagining the future, not regurgitating the present.
I've read a number of stories on this announcement now, 7 BE-4 engines[1]? If wikipedia is accurate[2] that suggests seven BE-4's produce 16,800 kN vs 7,605 kN from nine Merlin engines[3]. Twice the thrust should be interesting to watch. Also the comment about LNG not resulting in soot (carbon deposits) is interesting as it speaks to the re-usability aspects. All of the landed F9 boosters are covered in soot.
And the last interesting question will be how dynamic is the throttle capability. I am amazed at the 'net 0' games that SpaceX has to play to bring the booster to a net zero vertical velocity with an engine that can't reduce its throttle low enough to operate in a mode that produces less thrust than the mass of the booster and remaining fuel. 10% of a BE-4 is like 100% of a Merlin 1D.
All that sums up to a new entry in the field that has chosen many different options, hence it will provide a lot of new information about choices that work or don't work well. Can't wait to see it flying!
The only thing that got launched here is a bunch of pictures.
SpaceX is years ahead of Blue Origin at this point, and rather than aiming for a rocket larger than a Falcon Heavy / Delta IV heavy as a 'starter' (which of course is excellent PR and makes Blue Origin right away a manufacturer of larger rockets than SpaceX in the eyes of some) maybe they should go for something a bit less ambitious to lob into orbit, failure is a lot cheaper on a smaller scale, and in the beginning there most likely will be failures.
I think what everyone's missing is that this is entirely about economics. SpaceX only had the previous generation expendable rockets for competition and were cost constrained so went for a low cost rocket system and a tripling-up strategy for Falcon Heavy. Bezos knows SpaceX exists and knows what their rocket's characteristics are. A smaller launcher would compete directly with Falcon 9, better to leave that market to them, so he's scaling up to crate a more efficient large launcher. It may not quite have the capacity of FH, but should be significantly cheaper per pound to orbit.
Also Bezos doesn't give a fig about Mars, so his design doesn't have any compromises BFR might have in terms of size, propellant choice, etc to be a custom launcher for MCT. Musk had no real existing benchmarks to compete against when setting SpaceX's strategy because he was leaving everyone else face down in the dust. Bezos has SpaceX as a benchmark so he's building a strategy asymmetric to theirs to carve out his own niche and beat SpaceX in that sector of the market. Also if SpaceX cost efficiencies create an expanded market for access to space, a larger vehicle will become more viable in that environment than it might be now. Bezos is aiming for where the puck is headed, not where it is now.
Methane rockets are bigger than kerosene rockets, that's a problem and not an advantage. Good thing most launches can be served with a factory at the Cape.
Second, there's (so far) only a modest market for heavier launches, and it's unlikely that a low-volume big launcher is significantly cheaper than FH, which has more parts but they're higher volume. So it's not necessarily any easier to enter the market there than it is to enter the market with F9-sized payloads.
Third, nobody knows what the BFR will be, and yet it may fly before New Glenn.
Truely, when billionaires compete, we all win! :-)
Bezos doesn't really talk about launching lots of small satellites. He talks about heavy industry in space. That will require launching large payloads. I'm not saying his strategy is right or wrong, just that his strategy appears to follow from his objectives.
I mostly agree with you. However, I should point out that there is a less ambitious project already, Vulcan [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulcan_(rocket)], which at least in its current incarnation is a joint project between ULA and Blue Origin. Vulcan is officially a ULA project, but as long as they're planning to use Blue Origin engines, I think you can make a credible argument that it's substantially a Blue Origin project too.
Blue Origin is supplying a rocket engine for Vulcan. ULA currently buys rocket engines from Aerojet Rocketdyne and the Russians for their existing Delta and Atlas rockets. You can argue all you like, but ULA is driving the bus, and Blue Origin's contribution and responsibility is limited. That's even more true now that Blue Origin has announced that they plan on competing with ULA.
I don't think there's any part of engineering a rocket that's easy, but I am under the impression that the rocket engines are generally regarded as the hardest part.
Of course the true veterans would probably tell you that the economics of the launch business is actually the hardest part, but since we're talking about Jeff Bezos here, the normal economic rules probably don't apply.
Cost is likely not as a big an issue for Bezos as it is for Musk. They could blow up a bunch of rockets every year and still not hurt for cash. This gives them quite a bit of advantage.
I think BO are going to nail down re-usability first and then work on increasing their payload capacity.
Look at all the PR for SLS (Senate Launch System) too. Between SLS, Falcon Heavy and New Glenn, it's a veritable virtual space race. Can't wait to how the Kerbals will respond...:)
> In a statement on Monday, the Amazon boss said: "Our vision is millions of people living and working in space, and New Glenn is a very important step."
Serious question because I don't know - seems like it would introduce a lot of overhead into daily life having to support that much life "out there". What's the value prop? Why would I want to live in space (aside from it being cool)?
It's the frontier. There's money to be made, there's incredibly quantities of resources out there -- kilometer wide balls of platinum, chunks of iron larger than the sum of what humanity has mined to date.
Managed well, a huge pool of resources that would obviate some of the need for us to destroy our own planet to get at resources.
I disagree. If your goal is to collect metals only for the purposes of returning to earth, then perhaps you are right in the short term. However, if those materials are used off-planet (or on-site) for the further production, it makes a LOT of sense. Once the foundation of production is in place, mining and building <more spacecraft, Mars habitats, ...> becomes almost exponentially more efficient to do off of Earth (especially factoring in time requirements). Beyond that, there is a good chance that future technologies will require 'rare-earth' and other precious metals that exceed quantities that could ever possibly be extracted here at any cost.
That's a closed loop. Mining asteroids is extremely valuable because getting stuff into space is very hard. Making it cheaper to put more raw materials into space will have the effect of... Making it cheaper to put more raw materials into space.
How do we profit off of this? Manufacturing?
I understand why you would want to build a widget factory in China, but what possible goods could we produce on Mars, that wouldn't be easier to produce on Earth?
I understand the situation of rare-metal shortage, but many of them are rare because extracting them requires uneconomical amounts of energy. Mining them from space (And good luck finding an asteroid with more then traces of Gallium) would still require uneconomical amounts of energy.
> I understand why you would want to build a widget factory in China, but what possible goods could we produce on Mars, that wouldn't be easier to produce on Earth?
On Mars? Probably none. In LEO? That might be a different topic. In general, you don't want to move up the gravity well if you can avoid it.
A naive person in me hopes that as space manufacturing becomes an option, the terrestrial manufacturing costs will rise significantly as people will no longer be willing to tolerate the abuse of humans and ecosystem alike that today's manufacturing is.
What the Wright brothers did also made no economic sense in the context of cargo planes and airlines.
Innovation is not just about making completely new things possible, it's also about improving the things you can do, making them cheaper: Making it so that you can do them in a way that does make economic sense.
This is just the first step of several. The first step is worth doing, even if you won't cross the finish line while doing it.
This stuff makes economic sense to retrieve at certain costs of space launch. As well as manufacturing some stuff (like optical fibers) in space, producing energy, sending nuclear waste there etc
While I agree that a major strike would be horrifically catastrophic, I think it's easy to underestimate the platform for life that exists on the Earth. Unless the biosphere is entirely wiped clean, it's always going to be easier for us to persist on Earth than in space, because this is where we evolved.
We don't understand our global ecosystem well at all. Think about one tiny aspect of human life--the gut bacteria. We are starting to learn that it is important, but we don't really know for sure where it comes from, what it does for us, and how changes in its makeup affect us. The Earth is TEEMING with bacteria, most of it unknown and unstudied. We have no idea what the long-term effects would be of removing ourselves from that permanently.
And if you can think of any risk to the Earth, it's greatly magnified for a spaceship. A comet might hit the Earth? Well even a small meteor will wreck a spacecraft. And there are a lot more of the small ones, and they are harder to see and track.
In the very long run, I hope we do figure all this stuff out and become a space-faring civilization. But in the short run there probably needs to be other reasons to try living out in space.
The two that I can think of are tourism and energy research. Tourism is a huge business and if you can imagine a luxury hotel in low earth orbit, well, it will need a staff and logistical support. As launch costs go down, this might start to make business sense.
For energy research, a multi-terawatt solar array in zero gravity might let you do all sorts of interesting things with exotic materials and high energies, like work on manufacturing antimatter.
I totally agree that most catastrophes (including anthropogenic ones like global thermonuclear war, unstoppable climate change, etc.) would be extremely unlikely to destroy all life on Earth. But destroying humanity would take quite a bit less, so I am willing to entertain arguments for colonizing the inner solar system.
I love end of world books, and I had only read one Stephenson book before, the Cryptonomicon. I was not ready. Eventually I thought, "okay, this must be almost over and can't get much worse."
I wouldn't say it's terrible. Instead I'd say it was deeply flawed and I found it profoundly disappointing.
SPOILERS HEREWITH
Also, big brain dump.
The fundamental premise makes no sense --- the amount of energy needed to blow up the moon in the way described is about 10^29 joules, if you do the maths, and even the sun takes six minutes to release that amount of energy. It's not survivable to be in the same solar system as that, and I'd be unhappy about being in the next solar system; I'd expect some high-fraction-of-the-speed-of-light fragments coming along fairly soon. The first question any sensible physicist is going to ask after seeing the moon explode into fragments like that is 'why hasn't half the Earth been vaporised?'
(Not to mention that there's no mention as to what the fragments of the moon are orbiting around.)
The research is poor. When the Hard Rain comes, anything in low orbit is going to be toast, because all the bolides are going to have to pass through there to reach the Earth. They literally build the Cloud Ark in the worst possible place. (Why not boost each piece out to geostationary orbit, or better, the same orbit as the Moon but on the opposite side of the Earth? Any fragments you meet there will have very low relative velocity, so you can assemble the habitat there in safety.) Likewise, the entire concept of the Cloud Ark can't work --- it relies on burning thruster fuel all the time, and there is no way to replace this. It's fundamentally unsustainable.
(Also, it suffers badly from Darlings: this is when an author discovers a Cool Thing, and is determined to use it whereever possible. In Seveneyes' case, it's whips. When an editor tells you, kill your darlings, this is what they mean. Unless it's important to the plot, this sort of thing is simply an indulgence and should be removed.)
The plot is... very telegraphed. Very, very telegraphed. He made such a big thing of the mines and the submarines that it was painfully obvious they were going to important later. Indeed, in the last section I found myself saying, "yes, all right, the people from the mines are coming up, JUST GET ON WITH IT AND MEET THEM". And then when the ex-President shows up at the very last moment before the Earth gets destroyed, the entire remainder of the first-section plot flashed before my eyes, and it wasn't a good sight. (Particularly after the promising beginning when he opted out of political soap-operaing entirely.)
Then there's the weird tonal shift half-way through the book, when the cannibals appear. At that point, there is no possible way any of them can survive; they simply don't have the population any more to maintain the skills to run the equipment. As Stephenson says, they live in a high-tech incubator; they need people, lots of people, because they need knowledge to make everything run. With only a double-digit population they might as just give up and die. Instead we take a hard left into some weird metaphysical area, and then whats-her-name gets her magic gene machine out and... I don't know; I had no idea what he was trying to do here.
Then there's the last section, set in the far future. We get a bit of closure from finally seeing the other end of the submarine and mine plots (yeah, and what happened to all the other submarines? And all the other mines? Oh, and his explanation of why the mines couldn't expand doesn't make sense either), but it opens up lots of other plot threads, and seems strangely disconnected from the rest of the book.
As you can tell, I feel quite strongly about Seveneyes; parts of it are really excellent, especially the first third; so much so that discovering that the whole thing was just sort of... incoherent and rambling... came as a horrible disappointment. I don't know what the book is trying to say, or even if it's trying to say anything at all.
Oh, well. I'll just have to go reread Anathem now.
Also, it suffers badly from Darlings: this is when an author discovers a Cool Thing, and is determined to use it whereever possible.
Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch meant something else when he said "Murder your darlings" in a lecture -- later published in 1914 as "On Style" [0], the final chapter of his book, "On the Art of Writing".
He states that style is not about "extraneous Ornament" and gives an example. And at the end of that paragraph he goes on to say:
...and if you here require a practical rule of me, I will present you with this: ‘Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.’
In the c2 wiki entry for "Kill your darlings" [1], the point is made that this can apply to programmers too:
In software design, when you find yourself feeling particularly proud of a neat little bit of design or code, stop and ask yourself how someone who didn't give birth to it will regard it. If it turns out to be overwrought or too slick for the need, you should probably kill your darling and replace it with an ordinary solution that others can actually use, and not just marvel at.
(Also, the word "glitter" is used a bit later there to describe the stuff that a writer should get rid of, which is wonderful, since it evokes the (relevant!) saying, "all that glitters is not gold" -- and because the point is made that glitter can be distracting to the reader, who is not as maternally invested in it as the writer.)
The c2 wiki page also mentions Samuel Johnson's related phrase: "Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out."
For some more concrete reading, try The High Frontier by Gerard O'Neill[1]. He makes the opposite case; arguing that orbital habitats could have a net positive economic return in fairly short order.
The same question I have for SpaceX's goal of moving to Mars:
Who'd go?
People compare it to the colonization of America, but there are a few fundamental differences:
1. Who are the pioneers. The early settlers in America were the low class or religious fanatics (think ISIS style). Many couldn't afford their own ticket, made it to America to get a piece of land (translate: basic economic opportunity), which was unavailable in England.
Who'd go to Mars? You'd have to send the best and brightest. There'll be plenty of robotic help, but with Mission Control half an hour away (with periodic week long breaks with no mission control), they're on their own. An Oxygen leak? Fix it yourself or everyone dies.
Oh. and no StackOverflow for help.
How much will you have to offer these people. The first batch will go for the principle or fame (the first colonists on Mars FTW!!). What about the thousandth?
2. For that matter, how will you ship infrastructure there? In the 1600s, all you needed were some "surgeons", blacksmiths and you're done and ready.
Nowadays, you'd need hospitals, operating rooms, ER, experts, dentists, metallurgists, teachers, professors, colleges...
Oh, and if you're a top notch scientist, won't you want to keep up with what's going on? No scientific conferences/conventions on Mars.
3. Who keeps the loot. Seeing how Tesla's slowly moving everything to a "rental" model, how will "property" exist on Mars? If someone disobeys "God Elon", will he be thrown out into the wild? Or will he threaten to not send basic raw materials until the colony behaves?
I can see that as interesting. Cut the interaction between humans and the biosphere, make them live closer to constant solar power, let the biosphere regenerate and produce better and fewer nutrient that we cannot recycle in the sky...
I'd like to think that one of the ways we can address the urgency of global warming is to move our manufacturing industries into space, and re-vitalize Earth as a new garden planet. Like, I know its just sci-fi, but I could imagine that no manufacturing at all ever needs to be done down here - we can do it all on an Asteroid - and live in a garden of eden, receiving our latest toys directly from orbit. I imagine a day when I order my Amazon/Apple/Tesla product by satellite, and it slowly flies itself down into the atmosphere and delivers itself to me...
Growing up, I'd see the cost of "$10k/pound" quoted everywhere as the cost of getting things into orbit. With the rise of commercial spaceflight and inflation, how has this number changed?
Musk's rockets while landing, haven't been mass re-used yet. So SpaceX hasn't adjusted it's pricing.
Bezos's rockets while landing/re-launching aren't putting cargo in orbit. So they have no KG/$$ to obit prices.
Everyone else is just doing single use disposable still. Likely we could see prices start to fall within maybe 3-5 years once re-usability is proved out and pricing adjusted.
Additionally, the Heavy could drop it to $1,600/kg.
This does not take into consideration any of the reusability so SpaceX has lowered the cost an order of magnitude already.
Our mascot is the tortoise. We paint one on our vehicles after each successful flight. Our motto is "Gradatim Ferociter" - step by step, ferociously. We believe "slow is smooth and smooth is fast." In the long run, deliberate and methodical wins the day, and you do things quickest by never skipping steps. This step-by-step approach is a powerful enabler of boldness and a critical ingredient in achieving the audacious. We're excited to give you a preview of our next step. One we've been working on for four years. Meet New Glenn:
Off-topic, thanks to that meme going around about adjective order in English: Doesn't the order of the adjectives sound wrong? Am I missing something to explain why it's "big next rocket" instead of "next big rocket"?
> Doesn't the order of the adjectives sound wrong?
Yes.
> Am I missing something to explain why it's "big next rocket" instead of "next big rocket"?
Well, if you are looking at the meme, which is incomplete, yes. And even most of the more complete descriptions of English adjective order I can find are missing this. But there is a category (I'd call it sequence) that comes before any of the listed categories, that includes things like "first", "next", "last", etc.
I love this, it seems like we've been pushing the frontier of the very large and the very small in the last few years (space scale and molecular scale), and I can't wait to see what come out of it.
Exciting times. I used to feel a bit disappointed when I read about all the New World explorations going on back in the 1400s. But now it's starting up all over!
I'm intrigued that they plan to go from New Shepard straight to a rocket that's bigger than Falcon 9 (3.85m pounds thrust for New Shepard vs. latest Full Thrust version of Falcon 9 at 1.71m pounds). I was under the impression that New Shepard wasn't as serious as Falcon 1 (.e.g not capable of reaching orbit) and that SpaceX spent quite a number of years moving from pre-Falcon 1 to the regular launch successes of Falcon 9.
Maybe someone who knows more about this can explain - are the technical challenges involved less associated with pure size and more to do with design/fabrication processes etc.?