I know everyone keeps saying this, but the fact that this type of thing is happening and it has almost become boring is just fantastic! We are on the cusp of the most ground breaking time in the space industry. I cannot wait to see what happens next. Space-X makes me wish I was 18 again so I could change my field of work.
Jerry Pournelle wrote once in frustration "I knew I'd be alive to see the first man walk on the moon, but I never imagined I'd be alive to see the last!"
Astronaut. Back when I was at a point to choose a career to get me into space the only choice was "join the military, get flight status, apply to NASA."
SpaceX can launch its own rockets into space, so they could conceivably launch their own crews. Certainly the 'space tourist' business from Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic have employees as 'operators' for the equipment, they just have less capable equipment.
The fact that SpaceX exists and is competing in the crew option means that "Dragon Pilot for SpaceX" can be a thing. Before now, that was just science fiction.
One positive note for astronaut wannabees - the average astronaut age is relatively high, mid 30s is the average and 40s is not uncommon. You have plenty of time to build up a respectable science career and get fit!
Although all astronauts have stellar (ha) resumes, most are not test pilots. Mission specialists come from all areas of science: the current cohort include a marine biologist, geologist, oceanographer and a ton of aero/astro engineers
Then you remember that you're also competing with Jonny Kim:
> The California native trained and operated as a Navy SEAL, completing more than 100 combat operations and earning a Silver Star and Bronze Star with Combat “V”. Afterward, he went on to complete a degree in Mathematics at the University of San Diego and a Doctorate of Medicine at Harvard Medical School.
"astronaut" as a singular vocation that takes years of training is a dead end profession. Future spacecraft will be automated passenger vehicles with WiFi and movies.
I think as far as SpaceX is concerned you'd merely by the the life guard and maybe tour guide, not the pilot; their vessels' pilots are automatic to save on cost.
Every single manned space flight since the beginning in the 1960s has been more or less automated. Some early landings and dockings were flown manually but even those are mostly automated now.
It's not really a cost saving measure, it's just that machines are much more capable of performing the precision maneuvers it takes to fly spacecraft under normal conditions.
Write code that autonomously pilots our vehicles in space, simulates countless flight scenarios, translates petabytes of data, performs computational fluid dynamics, and more.
Hardware Engineering
Nearly every board and box that controls, communicates, actuates, or powers our avionics is built in-house employing the same iterative approach used in the commercial industries.
Structures Engineering
Our goal is to have the most mass-efficient primary and secondary structures possible while exceeding all factors of safety.
Propulsion Engineering
With Merlin, Draco, and Kestrel as flight-proven examples along with Super Draco and Raptor in development, you will not find a more robust engine development program in the world.
Launch & Test
We have built some of the most efficient launch facilities and a test facility in Texas that exceeds one engine test per day.
just get these from spacex careers
changing career is out of the question for me.this is sad i am in my thirty plus and my life is over?
Stories like this remind me that we are standing at a key decision point for human presence in space. At the culmination of the commercial resupply and commercial crew contracts that NASA has been fundinf there will be several privately held entities that have the capacity to send people and pressurized cargo to and from low earth orbit. Now will be the first time that all of us space dreamers will have the opportunity to see if capitalism can find a reason to send humans into space. Very exciting, but its going to be a time to either put up or shut up.
I think the up-down space industry is not necessarily where the future lies. Fighting gravity wells is a huge and someday not terribly useful expense. Bootstrapping an end-to-end mine-to-manufacture space industry is probably where we'll be in the much longer term.
Right now we have to haul 100% of our mass into orbit. But what if we derived that mass from sources that weren't at the bottom of a huge gravity well? If we can shift most of that mass to those sources, convert the raw materials to finished goods and start to construct habitats in space, we can move that 100% up/down to just us and a few things we can't space-derive.
Building out that manufacturing and supply line is where the future really is and it will allow us to handle component assembly on scales far outside of the reach of any space-launch system no matter how cheap. Moving a million tons of steel and composite from one point in space to another is just a matter of delta-V to get it going and to get it to stop moving. Getting it up from the ground may be an impossible endeavor.
The entire ISS weighs only 450 tons. But an Aircraft Carrier weighs 100,000+ tons. Even with a 90% launch cost reduction, it's impossible to build Carrier-sized habitats without breaking national economies.
How does this get funded? Also not sure, but I have a sense that there's enough rich people who wouldn't mind living in orbit and dropping down to any point on the planet in about an hour if their physical presence is required and getting back "home" a couple hours later. But with enough industry, a contract signing ceremony to build a factory in France could simply be shifted to an intra-orbital flight to an orbital factory for a tiny fraction of that cost and time.
There's potential efficiencies in space. And a lot of very valuable R&D waiting to happen to make it work. And I think that R&D hill is where the medium-term money is.
The 100k ton carrier is possibly not needed up there, why would we need that? Let's build 10 ISS, that's 4500 tons, putting materials up there would cost $495.000.000, a minor project budget in military speak :) With 10 ISS material you could build a nice doughnut shape station we pictured in the 70's.
Aircraft carriers, while we think of them as huge ships, aren't really all that large if you want to spend a lifetime on board one. Habitats have to be huge in order to not make the inhabitants bored out of their minds.
To put it into perspective, a 100,000 ton carrier houses around 5,000 people in tight quarters (the flight deck is just under 5 acres). and needs constant tending and provisioning for supplies. As an analogy to a space habitat they also make a kind of sense since they also have to house flying craft. There are only about a dozen carriers in the world at this size...or about a million tons.
Hollowed out asteroids with internal habitation spaces on the order of hundreds of internal cubic km would probably provide enough diversity to keep generations reasonably happy. The hollowing out process could supply raw material to space-based factories that would then build more habitat things and inter-habitat ships. Capture a couple comets and you have water, oxygen and other things. A small asteroid, something like 243 Ida has a total volume of over 25,000 km^3. Even if a couple km of shell were left, we're talking millions of tons of raw material.
> Spinning up Ceres to provide internal gravity ...
Spinning a rock can be done over long periods of time. In The Expanse, it was a decades-long project, that earned the Tycho Corporation some serious engineering cred.
Your 10-ISS-doughnut habitat would be a nice objet d'art, but what happens next? It can't pull more stations up after it.
Thinking for long-term space habitation requires projects that make human space presence self sustaining, at least in some sense or other. That's the point of space-based manufacturing and huge habitats; the more industrial power we have in space, the cheaper all future space missions become. At some point, they might become as cheap as terrestrial projects- then we'll have colonized space in a meaningful sense.
>The entire ISS weighs only 450 tons. But an Aircraft Carrier weighs 100,000+ tons. Even with a 90% launch cost reduction, it's impossible to build Carrier-sized habitats without breaking national economies.
What makes space expensive is the one-off nature of the launches. If you really wanted to build an aircraft carrier in space you could take advantage of economies of scale not previously available. It wouldn't break a national economy. Not the US economy, anyway.
Nitpick, but your space station isn't going to have walls that are several inches of steel and several inches more of Kevlar composite, so for an equivalent size, it would be much much lighter. Agreed with your main point that we need to start manufacturing in space to get to very large scale habitats, though.
Did anyone notice that SpaceX launch streams stopped showing on HN's frontpage? That's a testament to their work; we all treat both their launches and landings as normal now.
Red Dragon is cancelled, but watch Elon's update[1] on September 29th for the Mars plan. There should be a good discussion thread on reddit.com/r/spacex/ if you don't want to watch the Livestream.
Currently? No, they've got no vessel that could do this.
In the future? Sure, they could, but it's kinda silly to use NASA's resources on shuttling cargo to/from low Earth orbit. That can and should be a routine thing that we offload to commercial entities, so NASA can focus on the risky, not-profitable, big-picture stuff.
NASA definitely moved fast for Apollo, but I wouldn't call it lean.
I think its biggest problem is that it's such a political animal. They can't just do things in the obvious and straightforward way. The work has to be spread around so that each congressman's district can get a piece of the pie.
> Maybe, it acquired too many leeches feeding from it to move fast and lean since the Moon landings times?
Yes, that's one part - but the "real" reason is risk aversity. Basically, as long as there was the UdSSR to beat in a space race, the American public was 100% behind NASA - no matter how much (money and lives) it'd cost. When the Soviets were beat square, there was nothing worth the "risk" so everything had to be done by the books, with certifications and all that other bureaucratic nonsense.
NASA's focus is not so much the engineering of repeatable launches. NASA's focus is the deep science of next-gen space travel and utility, solar system exploration, etc. There was a Reddit AMA recently where a NASA director said they're happy to help SpaceX innovate in rocket engineering and reducing launch cost, because that's not where NASA wants to focus.
