The Astronomy Thread

Mudcrush Durtfeet

Mudcrush Durtfeet

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"In 2019, Ars Technica reported that it could cost over $2 billion to launch the rocket once in a given year. In March 2022, it emerged it could cost up to $4.1 billion.

In November 2019, Musk claimed a Starship launch could cost just $2 million a turn, thanks to effieicny savings that come from reusing a rocket."

A 2000:1 price difference. Lol.

www.inverse.com

SLS vs. Starship: How NASA and Elon Musk's giant rocketships compare

NASA wants to launch its Space Launch System on a trip to the Moon. Here's how the agency's giant rocket compares with SpaceX's giant Starship rocket, which Elon Musk wants to use to go to Mars and beyond.
www.inverse.com www.inverse.com
 
Tripamang

Tripamang

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Mudcrush Durtfeet said:
"In 2019, Ars Technica reported that it could cost over $2 billion to launch the rocket once in a given year. In March 2022, it emerged it could cost up to $4.1 billion.

In November 2019, Musk claimed a Starship launch could cost just $2 million a turn, thanks to effieicny savings that come from reusing a rocket."

A 2000:1 price difference. Lol.

www.inverse.com

SLS vs. Starship: How NASA and Elon Musk's giant rocketships compare

NASA wants to launch its Space Launch System on a trip to the Moon. Here's how the agency's giant rocket compares with SpaceX's giant Starship rocket, which Elon Musk wants to use to go to Mars and beyond.
www.inverse.com www.inverse.com
Click to expand...
Throw away starship and just consider currently available tech, 4.1 billion is same cost as 27 falcon heavy launches at 150 million per launch but we'll be generous and round it down to 25 launches. That gets you 64 tons to LEO per falcon heavy launch and if you were you assemble your ship in space you'd have 1,600 tons of payload you could build with. Best case scenario with an SLS you're getting 130T to orbit with a Block 2 but it's more like 95T... for 4.1 billion.

America you're getting fleeced really really badly.
 
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Ukerric

Ukerric

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Tripamang said:
Throw away starship and just consider currently available tech, 4.1 billion is same cost as 27 falcon heavy launches at 150 million per launch but we'll be generous and round it down to 25 launches. That gets you 64 tons to LEO per falcon heavy launch and if you were you assemble your ship in space you'd have 1,600 tons of payload you could build with. Best case scenario with an SLS you're getting 130T to orbit with a Block 2 but it's more like 95T... for 4.1 billion.

America you're getting fleeced really really badly.
Click to expand...
That's a commercial price. NASA adds enough red tape, meetings and custom requirements to its launches that you can probably add 20-40% to the price.

Still a bargain, though.
 
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Tripamang

Tripamang

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Ukerric said:
That's a commercial price. NASA adds enough red tape, meetings and custom requirements to its launches that you can probably add 20-40% to the price.

Still a bargain, though.
Click to expand...
I think the NASA budget once Starship starts flying is going to be very interesting. It's going to be real hard to justify a lot of these long term slow moving projects with all these complex expensive weight trade offs. The cost to fly is so expensive that everything has to be perfect right now but when you're flying for under 10 million it gives you room to be more iterative and accept failure because it's 10's of millions instead of billions for failures. There is a real opportunity here to do riskier missions that produce science faster longer term though if the prices come down enough maybe we don't need NASA anymore and universities/private enterprise can do the work with commercial companies competing to provide the data at the lowest cost.
 
Ukerric

Ukerric

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Tripamang said:
It's going to be real hard to justify a lot of these long term slow moving projects with all these complex expensive weight trade offs.
Click to expand...
Hard to justify? To whom?

None of these committee members are ever called to account for how they spend money. I mean, they can always claim that they're spending it on their own states, which mollifies their own voter base, no matter how much they swindle the other states for it.
 
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meStevo

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Ukerric said:
Hard to justify? To whom?

None of these committee members are ever called to account for how they spend money. I mean, they can always claim that they're spending it on their own states, which mollifies their own voter base, no matter how much they swindle the other states for it.
Click to expand...
To peers, lawmakers and the community at the initial stages. People are spending their whole career on projects like Artemis (in 2 years this project will enter year THIRTY) because it includes the development of the launch vehicle and everything over a period of decades.

If/when Starship starts reliably flying, the calculus for everything changes, quickly. Projects like Artemis are going to be comical in hindsight (as they are now in many respects). All that budget and effort can go elsewhere. With Starship in service nobody's going to propose multi-decade projects requiring the reinventions of vehicles, as Tripamang Tripamang said, that type of thing would be really hard to justify.
 
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Mudcrush Durtfeet

Mudcrush Durtfeet

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This whole SLS / Artemis project is just one gigantic boondoggle designed to funnel money to old space companies. It is my hope that if Starship pans out it will (somehow) cause the abandonment of SLS. I suspect NASA _won't_ retain the budget it currently gets if old space isn't getting the money, but with cheap access to space, we'll get more space exploration than otherwise, even if not government funded.
 
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meStevo

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'the telescope is performing than models said it would'


1647446652251.png



Dr. Becky talks a little bit about it, that the resolution of the focused telescope is .0000194 degrees. Spitzer is 0.0015.

 
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Brahma

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meStevo said:
Dr. Becky talks a little bit about it, that the resolution of the focused telescope is .0000194 degrees. Spitzer is 0.0015.
Click to expand...
This thing is able to see 20X (off the top of my head), smaller object than the Spitzer? HOLY FUCK!!!
 
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Cybsled

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Gravity lens could be used with our own sun as well - in theory, if you placed the telescope in just the right spot at the right distance, you could potentially be able to directly image an exoplanet in another star system
 
BrutulTM

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Sadly when you pick two it's like you're picking 2 guys to dunk a basketball and Spacex is Lebron James, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic are two 5' 3" pimply 14 year olds and NASA is a 600 lb bedridden guy with a plan for a complex hydraulic system to lift his bed up to the hoop which should be finished in 8-12 years.
 
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meStevo

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Thanks to gravitational lensing, Hubble has observed the light from a star believed to be 12.8 billion light years away.

Record Broken: Hubble Spots Farthest Star Ever Seen - NASA Science

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has established an extraordinary new benchmark: detecting the light of a star that existed within the first billion years after the universe’s birth in the big bang – the farthest individual star ever seen to date.
www.nasa.gov www.nasa.gov

The newly detected star is so far away that its light has taken 12.9 billion years to reach Earth, appearing to us as it did when the universe was only 7 percent of its current age, at redshift 6.2. The smallest objects previously seen at such a great distance are clusters of stars, embedded inside early galaxies.​

1648659308825.png


 
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