Sea dragon would still be expendable. The reason space is so expensive is because we throw away tens to hundreds of millions of dollars of aerospace equipment every launch. The fuel cost of a $60m Falcon 9 flight is $200k.

SpaceX BFR will lift 150 tonnes to LEO, not too far off the 500 tonnes of the sea dragon. Blue Origins next LV after New Glenn is New Armstrong, which is rumored to be a multi-hundred tonne beast. By 2030 SpaceX will probably be making an even bigger BFR. The age of space industrialization will be upon us...

Blue origin has zero credibility until they actually put a piece of hardware in orbit. They sure love their hype though.

It's my understanding that SpaceX plans to start building the BFR in 2nd quarter of 2018.  Is that still their target?

Personally, I think Musk's idea to use the BFR for commercial Earth transportation "rocket" flights is a bit ambitious.  The idea of boarding a rocket to "save time" over a commercial airline is a bit, well, ....stupid.   Rockets are incredibly dangerous.  When something goes wrong with a BFR, it'll probably be accompanied by a BFB (Big Fucking Boom).

While that risk might be acceptable to go into space, it's probably not acceptable to make the Monday morning business meeting in Tokyo.  Can you imagine the insurance cost companies will have pay out to put executive officers on one.   In my humble opinion, the BFR will need profitable commercial applications other than international transportation. I mean,thrill seekers might do it, but I can't see packing the family on one just to go on a weekend vacation in Asia.   ...I hope I'm wrong.  I hope the launch system is so reliable it can compete with the safety record of commercial airlines.   I just don't think it will.

In any case, I hope they can build the thing, and I hope Musk's Mars ambitions are achieved.   I really do.

Point to point on BFR is going to be the last thing it does after its been in service for a while a well proven, if ever. It's more of a 'see it can do this too' thing to show the versatility of the system.

BFR will be designed first and foremost for lifting large amounts of payload to space for cheap. With orbital refueling it can lift payloads to Mars, the moon, or the asteroid belt as well.

Back to the fun.

I think that the small metal spaceship to adjoining stars is not a good basket to place our bets in for the reasons stated above.

Larger nuclear propelled craft seem to be more viable if you read the links posted. The ability to accelerate to a meaningful speed is desirable but the trade off is time. If you can build a multi-generation sustainable ship you have that. Low acceleration over the distances being considered still add up. Fusion is a reality. Water is up there waiting to be used. In a little over a hundred years we will have another favorable alignment of the planets to help escape the solar system. If you work backwards from that point we have a lot to do to be ready in time.

The step that is most important now is establishing manufacturing capacity and energy production off earth. That step will allow many more advancements to come. This would likely need to be mostly robotic and automated in order to maximize efficiency. I also think that modifications to the human body will be a necessity and paramount to long term space exploration.

Said no other member of any other species on earth or elsewhere EVER.

Well, that's kinda my take on the whole thing.  The Concorde failed financially; I can't really see taking a ballistic trajectory into space, and having to go thru re-entry, just to save a few hours over what already didn't work in the marketplace.

Que?  What are you talking about?  Is Alpha Centauri going to be closer to our solar system?

But you have to have reasons for a heavy lifter.  You have to have applications.  As I said in an earlier post, the Sea Dragon program was killed, not for engineering reasons, but because we simply didn't have any need to for that much launch capacity.   Unless we start to build something really big in orbit, like another space station, there just isn't that much commerical or governmental business for the BFR.   Not right now.  And that's a problem.

Musk has the challenge of financing his ambitious missions to Mars, he needs economic resources.  So right now, he needs something for the BFR to do.  Before he can use it to go to Mars.   That's why he came up with the rocketliner idea.  At least that's what he said in his presentation last year.   He needs the BFR to earn some money.

Amen, brutha.  If we had a self-sustaining mining colony on the moon, filling tanks with helium 3, with digital records of ALL the accumulated knowledge of mankind, I'd feel MUCH better.

My understanding of the failure of the space shuttle (I could be wrong, I am not a rocket surgeon, nor did I stay at a Holiday Inn last night ) was that they tried to do too much.  The dream team of rocket surgeons is to have a big, dumb, unmanned brute rocket that blasts megatons of cargo up into space... coupled with a small, HIGHLY reliable, safe(er) rocket that takes the humans up into space.  If the unmanned brute rocket blows up, oh well: no biggie.  Just some cargo lost.  The problem was that they tried to combine both functions into one, so that they had to make a big cargo ship, that also complied with ALL the human-life-sustaining, OSHA-style regs.

Not really.

The problem with the shuttle architecture (as heavy lift) was the shuttle. You had to orbit and de-orbit the giant flying brick along with every payload, and then rebuild the silly thing and put on new boosters and tank before every flight.

SpaceX landing and re-using it's first falcon booster was the biggest event in space travel since we landed on the moon. With the falcon architecture everything is reusable and nothing unnecessary goes any farther than necessary. The ideal situation is being able to repurpose second stages in orbit, but reuse is almost as good.

Bulk cost to orbit on BFR should be about 1% of what it was on the shuttle if the platform is used for the same amount of time.

Yeaaahhh, that just seems like a bad move on his part to me.  He's actually a successful businessman, and I'm not, so I have to grant him kudos right there; with that said, who the flock approved this idea?!?  The BFR is a tractor-trailer into space: it should be treated as such (ISS lobster-and-steak dinners for everyone! ).  If he wants a QE2 luxury cruise ship liner into space, he should make one.  COMPLETELY different missions.

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It’s called the “Grand Tour.” Jeremy Clarkson was still a teenager when the Voyager missions were made possible by the gravity assist from the positions of the planets. You can read about it here.

*Snort!*  Have any dolphins ever created a paranoid robot?  Or a race of creatures that WANT to be eaten?  Or poetry so bad it's physically painful?  Your honor, I rest my case.

Let’s hope the “god” running our simulation is going to purchase the “universe” expansion pack

The universe might be probably is stranger than any of us can imagine.   With that said, we have to move forward, no?

Absolutely! I love the idea of hollowing out Ceres and spinning it to make gravity. Solves two problems right there. Radiation shielding and bone-eye deterioration from microgravity. The teams inside Ceres can mine the asteroids using AI and might be close enough for telepresence operations.

I’m no physics expert, but wouldn’t it be possible and more cost effective to bring a shell of a craft up to high velocity and make it permanently slingshot between earth and mars. This shell would have small thrusters and a thick layer water jacket as a radiation shield. No aluminum of course because we all know what happens in deep space with aluminum and high speed radiation particles. Then have the light weight human transports launch from an orbital depot, accelerate, put on the shell like a jacket for the trip, then undock and brake at mars. They could also top off the consumables for the shell ship. I don’t know, just spitballing.

This was posted here a few years ago. Turn your sound off. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bU1QPtOZQZU

Perhaps the universe is littered with corpses of one planet civilizations.

If we find a place with life, and just show up in lifeboats, aren't we just like shithole migrants flooding into the western developed world?

NO  We're American and they aren't.

....hopefully, more like Vikings.  

that's good enough for me.

Drake equation.

Either we’re really rare, or we’re really early and arrived on the scene much sooner than most other intelligent races will. Both of those are kind of special.

+1

I liked their snarky quip at SpaceX after SpaceX landed a rocket, as if they were cooler for doing it first.

No, Blue Origin, you fired a rocket straight up and then landed it, which is useful as a tech demonstrator only. SpaceX put cargo in orbit and then landed the booster. THAT is a game changer.

I agree earth's a shit hole, lets bail on this rock before the dolphins do

This.  We cannot be wrong; we're 'Murkins.

Or, we're really, really late, and when we get to the stars, we'll find alot of dead civilizations, and realize we missed the most awesome fukkin' party evar.

I'm actually on the Yes side, but I'm going to play devil's advocate here.

You asked for explanations for why we shouldn't spread out into space. But you aren't demanding the same standard of reasons for the "should" side of the argument.

Why should we bother? This planet is perfectly capable of sustaining us, and doing so with a very good quality of life, pretty much indefinitely.
We can figure out ways of protecting ourselves from asteroids.
We can figure out how to play nice enough with eachother that we only ever have small proxy wars and never go nuclear.
The planet provides enough renewable and recyclable resources to satisfy everything we could possibly need and most of what we'll ever want.
We can figure out how to handle overpopulation, and it doesn't have to involve eugenics or some other highly unethical options.

The only reason we will ever really NEED to move is when the sun starts to expand into a red giant, and that's about five billion years away.

Aside from the excitement and spirit of adventure, aside from wanting to make our wildest sci-fi space cowboy fantasies into reality, aside from looking for resources that we may want but don't really need, why bother? What's the point?

Don't discount the "because it was there" factor; that has led to MANY epic tales!!!

Serially, laws of probabilities.  For sure, right now, we don't really have the means to deflect a decent-sized asteroid (twin-towers size).  And that's EVEN assuming we'll see it in time.  Then, what if it's planetoid-sized?  We sure don't have the means to move that.  Howzabout a sun, or a black hole passing thru, just to up the ante even more?  Oooh, and let's not forget mega-plagues!

There are a thousand and one scenarios for why we need to spread out a bit.  A thriving Mars colony would be nice, please.  Thank you.

You can hardly move off this planet and you want to go to the stars.  Colonize the solar system first, if you can, and then get back to me.

Orion is piddly crap.  Harness fusion for a bit of the required energy.

But sorry, this isn't science fiction, you're never getting past general relativity.

So you like the stars.  Which one and what when get there?

If something as large and noticeable as a sun or black hole was on a collision course with us, or even a close call with our solar system, NASA would probably have noticed it. I did a quick google search and some astronomers used data from ESA satellites to predict the trajectory of about 50,000 nearby stars. The closest call they found was going to pass by about 0.2 lightyears from us, 500,000 years from now.

I suppose there are rogue planets that we might not see until it's too late. But that's astronomically (hehe) unlikely.

And yet, there's still the possibility that we are in a binary star system.   That our Sun has a smaller, darker, sibling orbiting somewhere out there.  Space.com link that we haven't found yet.   My point here is we can track certain objects very well.   Others, like planets, brown dwarfs, and other relatively dark objects we can't.

It wouldn't take a star, black hole, or rogue planet hitting us directly, just passing close enough to disturb the Oort cloud might be enough to send a planet killers our way.

It's a low-probability, high-consequence event.   Many people daily carry firearms because of threat of low-probability, high-consequence events.

Yeah, we're awesome.

Daedalus or Orion.......or even a Bussard ram scoop

We know a lot of life arose here on Earth, and we postulate that life can and does arise if given a chance.

We've found life in some pretty inhospitable places here on Earth, like in a frozen lake in antarctica, in acidic volcanic geysers, and at the bottom of ocean under tremendous pressure.   The galaxy may be teaming with life, but intellegence might be exceptionally rare.   A happy, unnecessary, accident, that only occurs a handful of times, spread out over vast timespans, in a galaxy the size of the milky way.  Life's lottery winners.

At present, we could be it, in the Milky Way.  Maybe there was another one 500 million years ago, that's died off, and maybe another in 100 million years will discover how to make fire.  We don't know, what we don't know.

Why do it?  Because we can.  Because we're curious creatures.  Also it seems to a be the natural drive of all species of life to expand and spread out.  We're compelled by our biology to compete, survive, and reproduce.  That's the rule of all life we know.

We need to keep going.

Hell yeah!

Die you fucking Gungan!

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OK; let's play "what if".  Suppose a (relatively) small sun is just cartwheelin' along, whistlin' down the garden path, not headin' anywhere in particular; it's possible enough, there's certainly enough of them out there, and it's not like they're anchored down.  It's on a direct collision course with us; NASA sees it in plenty of time, say, a decade or two before it hits.

So, what are we gonna do about it?

We can't move it; it's far too massive.  Our sun is fucking tiny in astronomical terms:



And yet there is no power we have that could move our sun so much as an inch.  Gonna land a big-ass rocket on it & roar away until you deflect it?  How are you going to land on plasma?  Gonna blow all our mega-nukes next to it, and blast it out of its collision course?  All the nukes mankind has ever made don't amount to even so much as a popcorn fart compared to the concentrated fury of Hell blasting out of our sun every second.  I believe this is just your average solar flare, nothing at all unusual:



We could dump all the nukes we have into our sun, and it wouldn't even so much as belch.  I honestly do not think people grasp the size and overwhelming power of these things; there is NOTHING we have that would be even so much as a pimple on the backside of even a tiny little star like ours.  And there are millions of stars our there.

Summary: you're not moving that.  You just aren't.  And two decades would not be nearly enough time to move even a significant fraction of one percent of our species off this planet.  We need an off-earth colony, and we need to start working on this, now.  

In your scenario nothing in our solar system would be safe. How do you suggest we get to another star system without invoking scifi technology?

I agree, but as long as the Free Shit Army and the various shithole countries suck up so much of the world's wealth, we will never be able to mount a serious effort.

You are 110% correct.  Just trying to give people some concept of the scale of the forces here, and the importance of us getting to work on this problem RIGHT!  FUKKIN!  NAOW!!!!  Because there is shit-ALL we could do in the event of a real "extinction-level" event.  There are a RANGE of things that could hit us, from a "tiny, insignificant" chunk of rock "just" the size of Texas, to a small(ish) star or black hole that would "only" wipe out this arm of our Milky Way galaxy.  We, of the human race, REALLY need to start thinking cosmically!!!

"Marty, you're just not thinking forth-dimensionally!"



Serially, we are in the middle of a firing range, and we are facing everything from bullets, to artillery, to thermonuclear weapons, all at once. Yes, ideally, we'd have interSTELLAR travel; but, let's face it, we don't have that technology... YET.  What we HAVE demonstrated, repeatedly, is that we have interPLANETARY travel; we've put men on the moon, robots on Mars, and I think we've even sent some probe or something out of our own solar system...

Really, as others have said, baby steps.  If we could do the "baby step" of us establishing a meaningful human breeding colony fifty feet below the surface of Mars, or below one of the moons of Jupiter, I'd feel ALOT better.

And yet, for right now, America doesn't even have a space program.

I like both of those ideas.  I'm sure there are quite a few things that could advance the effort that haven't been thought of yet.  It'll take a ton of outside the box thinking to expand out into the solar system in a meaningful way.

And to add to that--- NASA isn't even certain there isn't a "Planet 9"/"Planet X" orbiting our system.

https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/planetx

If such a planetary body exists, it would seem logical that any number of life extinguishing objects could end up being deflected our way via Oort cloud disturbances.

If you want to give yourself some perspective on risk, the next time you are in a low light pollution area, look up and start counting 1 Mississippi, 2 Mississippi... It won’t take many before you see meteors, A few minutes at the most. Yes it’s neat to see the little fireball dying in the air. What I have also seen is a little line that illuminates for a tiny fraction of a second. That was a small object going unusually fast. Everything is out there. The larger they are the rarer they are. The faster they are the less mass they need to have an disparate effect on an object they impact. The exact same physics that work for the 5.56 round apply to planets. One of the videos I looked at examined the effect of a 30 meter diamond ball impacting earth at various speeds, fractions of the speed of light. Those are extremely unlikely to be a problem for us but being small and fast we’d have no chance to see something like that coming. And what if we did? As previously pointed out, there is a small window of opportunity and a small range of object types we could hope to affect.

No offense but this is hilariously naive.

Here is a story to give a little perspective with a very non-alarmist slant to avoid panicking the turtles crossing the highway. Wait till one gets really close.

As far as what do we do to acquire science fiction hyperdrive spaceships to go warp speed to the star of our choice, that is ignoring the answer to the real question “what can we do with what we have?” The link I posted to the Grand Tour is opportunity. The timing is what it is-a window of opportunity a doable time in the future. When you plan from A to Z, launching large amounts equipment into orbit, going to work on an asteroid, building a ship, sending it on its way using the planetary alignment to launch ourselves out of the Solar System in the direction of likely habitable zone planets we have already discovered. It will take hundreds of years to make the journey with what we have now. But show me where the science breaks down? The only “blue sky” we are looking at is fusion technology isn’t mature enough to be useful. Yet.

What we are lacking is the motive, and that will be found when somebody wants us to pay 1% tax on tea or we read the Zimmerman telegram or someone sinks a passenger ship or puts a beeping satellite over our heads or flies airplanes into our buildings. Whatever it is, it has to be the kind of thing people the likes of TetonCounty get.

What kind of impact on Americans did funding the space race have? It was nothing like past war efforts and I am quite confident it wouldn’t have any more than that when we get to work in space again.

Well said.

Something really big, and really fast hitting us is a low probability, high consequence event.   Actually for the human race it's a fatal event.  Because we don't do anything long-term.   We only react to problems.   If we sit around waiting for Captain Kirk to show up with the Enterprise, before we move off this planet, we're doomed.   By the time we know something is heading our way, it will be too late.  Kiss your species goodbye.

I hope that Elon Musk's dreams are realized.   I hope the BFR works and is a success.   I hope he actually does manage bootstrapping a colony on Mars.    That would be a good first step for humanity.

When our son was born a couple years ago, I was telling my wife, half-jokingly, that he and his friends would be going for a weekend camping trip to Mars when he got older.