To infinity and beyond
Say what? The Guardian:
Elon Musk has unveiled a SpaceX spacecraft designed to carry crew and cargo to the moon, Mars or anywhere else in the solar system and land back on Earth perpendicularly.
What are they talking about? SpaceX has as of now designed a spacecraft that can carry crew anywhere in the solar system? That’s nonsense.
In a live-streamed speech from SpaceX’s launch facility near the southern tip of Texas, Musk said on Saturday that the space venture’s Starship is expected to take off for the first time in about one or two months and reach 19,800 meters (65,000ft) before returning to Earth and landing.
So they’re working on being able to reach 65,000 feet and return. That’s not exactly the same as carrying a crew to Pluto.
Reporting on the realities of space flight can be wildly misleading.
I can’t parse that sentence to be true. I believe changing the “and” to an “or” would make it true. It could carry crew to the moon, or cargo to anywhere else in the solar system. It should be able to carry larger payloads and move them faster than previous rocket designs. But that’s not nearly enough.
Being able to send 150 tons to Pluto in 8 years, as claimed, still seems insufficient to contemplate a manned mission, let alone one that doesn’t kill everybody. A livable spaceship, plus enough food and air for a sixteen-year round trip? The ISS is projected to weigh around 450 tons when complete, typically holds three to six people and is resupplied every ninety days. The weight of just the food for a crew of four for sixteen years would be around 64 tons.
And can anybody actually live in space for sixteen years? The max on the ISS was little more than a year.. Would the crew die of cancer first, or side effects of lack of gravity? Would the return flight carry only a bunch of extremely brittle, slightly radioactive corpses?
Let’s not be too cynical about this. The Guardian is talking nonsense. On the other hand it’s only sensible to take any new spaceship design for short flights before attempting anything more ambitious. I give Musk a great deal of credit for being the first to recover the entire first stage of a satellite launcher and re-use it repeatedly. He has Russia, China and Europe playing catch-up.
It’s not cynical to object to complete bullshit. Sending “crew” to Pluto is not a realistic goal and it’s absurd for the Guardian to report it that way. (I agree about the recovery triumph. I posted video of it here when it happened.)
And David, pretty much everything and anything that comes out of Musk’s mouth is bullshit. I guess he does deserve ‘credit’ for getting people to give him huge sums of money for stupid projects. I’m not saying Space X is stupid project, although Musk has constantly three-ringed-circused it right from the start promising far more than SpaceX could ever deliver. It’s pretty much the same story across the rest of his businesses, and those are just the ones that have the slightest chance of viability.
I suspect what they mean is something more like “Elon Musk has unveiled a SpaceX spacecraft which he claims will eventually be able to carry crew and cargo to the moon, Mars or anywhere else in the solar system and land back on Earth perpendicularly, you know, when designing and testing is complete sometime in the next few decades.”
That, or they’ve truly become deluded by Musk’s hyperbole.
But if that’s what they mean then why the hell did they write the first sentence that way? Surely journalists are supposed to be more capable than that.
As for calling out complete bullshit, I think that’s important. Most of my students believe this stuff. They are not science majors, they are not experts, and they have no clue what it would really mean to move all the people and stuff to the moon to try to terraform the moon, let alone Mars or Pluto. They don’t worry as much about earth’s environment, because they believe we won’t need Earth much longer. I have a science faculty young friend that believes it, as well. The news reporting it this way does not help.
The modern rules of journalism:
1. Statements of the scientific community, no matter how broadly held, thoroughly researched, reviewed, and published in peer-reviewed journals, must be given the “views on the shape of the Earth differ” treatment, as long as one Republican politician, talk show host, or fossil fuel company CEO says “nuh-uh!”
2. Claims of Silicon Valley tech executives shall be reported without any examination of their truth.
For all the bullshit hyperbole, it’s worth remembering that landing a craft the way SpaceX does was long considered confined to the realm of science fiction.
Is this cargo going to the Moon and Mars being landed on the surface, or put into orbit around the target bodies? I know there’s hope of synthesizing fuel on Mars, but that’s not likely to happen on the moon. Going to the lunar surface with all the fuel you need to get back to Earth and land there safely is hideously expensive, gravitationally. That’s why NASA chose Lunar Orbit Rendezvous instead of Earth Orbit Rendezvous or, Direct Ascent to get Apollo to the Moon by the end of the decade; it allowed them to do a landing with one launch of a Saturn V instead of two for EOR, or one launch of an even more monstrous booster that would have taken much longer to develop. Even still, the Lunar Module had to be built as not much more than a bubble of tinfoil big enough for crew, engines and fuel; and it got left behind for the trip home.
I guess, theoretically, if it can fly out of earth’s gravity well that by a biiiiig stretch of imagination one could imagine it making its way to Pluto. Any crew on it would long since be dead by the time it got there, though. So I guess SpaceX has designed a sort of theoretical robot-driven space hearse.
A rover or similar has already made it to Pluto, but adding “crew and cargo” is a whooooooole other thing.