Can you really get to the moon with just $90M? My impression is that SpaceX is just about the cheapest launch provider currently available, and they charge something like $50-60M to get to orbit. And then you need to do all the tech required to land on the lunar surface as well.
Do they anticipate getting additional funding or decreasing costs?
They're the cheapest (probably) per kilogram; but if you're willing to settle for smaller payloads, you can get to orbit for quite a lot cheaper. For example, the European Vega will get you 2.5T to LEO for under $40M. Half your budget on launch costs isn't bad.
I would imagine the initial funding does not include the cost of the rocket. The risk of this effort is not in the trans-lunar stage. Reliable solutions for that can be purchased off the shelf. A seed-stage company needs to prove out the custom tech required for its own application, then if there's a business case what they're doing in the first place they can go raise additional funding at a higher valuation to cover the cost of launch. No reason to suffer many times more dilution on that now.
Slightly longer answer, space technology is really far behind. Look into the RD-180 and RD-170. You might be surprised that a lot of newer engine designs are only slight modifications of these. The 180 and 170 were also used for a long time. Engine design is a very costly process.
That launch cost is going to be the majority of the mission cost. I'm not familiar with Ispace's lander and vehicle, but you can build those for fairly cheap, in comparison. Since it looks like they are going for an X-Prize, I expect that they don't plan to stay there long. This means that they can get away with only slightly rad hardening devices. Sure, if there's a solar event, they are toast, but in their time window, that's just bad luck.
Somewhat related, EEVBlog has a few videos [1][2][3][4] on the Google Lunar X-Prize where he talks to a guy from Audi's team. He mentions there that they do not use space grade electronics. This is actually fairly common for nano sats (like Planet Labs). GEO is where you REALLY need things to last a long time and satellite prices skyrocket.
They plan on being a secondary payload. Secondary payloads don't have to buy an entire rocket flight. As an example, SpaceIL (one of the other Xprize competitors) recently explained how they plan on getting to the Moon:
> "SpaceIL has a contract with Spaceflight Industries to launch the lander as a secondary payload on a SpaceX Falcon 9 mission whose primary payload is a commercial communications satellite. That satellite, which he declined to identify, will be deployed in a supersynchronous transfer orbit, whose apogee is above the altitude of geostationary orbit. The lander will then use its propulsion system to fly to the moon and land there."
The cost for being a secondary payload can be much cheaper than an entire rocket, and much cheaper than other smaller launch vehicles like Soyuz and Vega.
Is this an Onion piece? Or something from the Beaverton?
They want to land on the moon... To set up a billboard? And here I thought that the Silicon Valley model of startups making money by advertising other startups that make money by advertising other startups was insane.
Oh... They want to start a space economy. That's great, but there is no mention of what will that space economy do. They will maybe consider mining water, for a potential future human settlement that will... Do what? They will put up a billboard, to advertise... To whom?
First, we should accelerate building better robots to do the work of humans, then send thousands throughout the solar system. This will be cheaper and faster than manned space flight...
Anyway, I went through this a few years ago on HN after the Virgin Galactic accident. People argued that it was only a minor setback. Any setback that involves humans costs a lot of money and time.
Robots don't get anywhere near the effectiveness of boots on the ground, even with the most advanced robotic explorers we have today. All of the science done by the Martian rovers could have been done by a human geologist in a few hours work (except the traversal itself, so let's add a day's hike on top of a few hours lab work). And the robots are only really able to inspect the stuff that happens to be exposed on the ground around them and easily reached by limited robotic manipulators.
Sending humans to Mars for even a 30-day mission would be orders of magnitude more science return than the entire robotic exploration program to date.
And that's without considering relativity time-lag. There's serious consideration of an orbital precursor mission to Mars that would put robotic handlers in Martian orbit, or a free-return trajectory near Mars, without a lander, to do little more than remote control a couple of Curiosity-style rovers that accompany them (and maybe visit one or both low-gravity martian moons). It's anticipated that the time-lag reduction alone could vastly increase the amount of science that could be done on a robotic mission before the nuclear batteries die or servos get clogged with dust.
And of course all the robotic arguments are predicated on basic science being the only reason to go in the first place. In reality, most of the people interested in Mars and space exploration generally want people to permanently settle in space. I actually don't give a damn whether there was once life on Mars.. but there damn well better be human societies there within my lifetime.
Curiosity cost us about $2 billion and it has some of the most state of the art systems on board. Among these was its drill, which was supposed to provide some of the most important science from the mission. And as my use of past tense probably belies, it broke after 15 activations. [1] Redundancies and the best NASA has on it notwithstanding, it remains broken. They've now, a year later, developed a high risk idea to try to get some drilling done. We'll see how that works out. This would have been something a human on site could have repaired in relatively short order.
The point is that robotics and other technologies are advancing extremely rapidly, but they're still not anywhere even remotely close to being able to compare to humans in general purpose functionality - let alone improvisation. Don't forget that those amazing videos of Atlas are the result of countless takes and on-site specialization. This [2] article describes the results of the most recent DARPA Robotics Challenge which featured all the big names, including Atlas. The competition included tasks like walking, opening a door, and climbing up stairs. The most ostensibly difficult would be navigating a specially modified vehicle after having humans carefully place and suspend their robot inside it. And the developers all knew ahead of time exactly what the tasks would be and the circumstance, except for one surprise task which ended up being pulling a lever. The long and short is that it was a disaster. Quoting the article:
"If there's a single lesson from the [DARPA Robotics Challenge], it's that humanoid robots are falling robots. Also, that the road to humanoids that aren't so clumsy will be long, and strewn with shattered components. If DARPA doesn't hold another version of the DRC, then the first one will have been little more than a grim status update, and a self-contained failure, for the few of us that realized it happened."
The point here is that we are a long ways away from robots that can remotely compare to humans for general purpose tasks. The timeline for getting to the Moon and even to Mars on the other hand is very near future.
--
Beyond all this, space exploration is not just about science. Did you know China put a probe on the moon in 2013? Technically it was a rover, but back to those robotics problems - it became a probe. It was the first time anything had soft landed on the moon since 1976. If you did know this you're probably already a huge enthusiast in the field because the world collectively yawned, even though it made some groundbreaking discoveries including discovering the moon's geographic makeup was far different than we thought. That discovery is playing no minor role in driving the recent moon race.
But people want to see and discover space themselves. And there are lots of people willing to pay lots of money for the privilege. Two individuals have already purchased a Moon flyby from SpaceX - scheduled for next year. And even though a flyby is nothing compared to a soft landing, that will not be met with a yawn. Action requires money. Money requires public drive. Public drive requires manned operations.
[+] [-] sushibowl|8 years ago|reply
Do they anticipate getting additional funding or decreasing costs?
[+] [-] azernik|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pikchurn|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] godelski|8 years ago|reply
Slightly longer answer, space technology is really far behind. Look into the RD-180 and RD-170. You might be surprised that a lot of newer engine designs are only slight modifications of these. The 180 and 170 were also used for a long time. Engine design is a very costly process.
That launch cost is going to be the majority of the mission cost. I'm not familiar with Ispace's lander and vehicle, but you can build those for fairly cheap, in comparison. Since it looks like they are going for an X-Prize, I expect that they don't plan to stay there long. This means that they can get away with only slightly rad hardening devices. Sure, if there's a solar event, they are toast, but in their time window, that's just bad luck.
Somewhat related, EEVBlog has a few videos [1][2][3][4] on the Google Lunar X-Prize where he talks to a guy from Audi's team. He mentions there that they do not use space grade electronics. This is actually fairly common for nano sats (like Planet Labs). GEO is where you REALLY need things to last a long time and satellite prices skyrocket.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7NoK2fiUD4
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADJwChUtdDQ
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJLOZDPTp3I
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JwNmdV2QPs
[+] [-] greglindahl|8 years ago|reply
http://spacenews.com/spaceil-making-final-fundraising-push-f...
> "SpaceIL has a contract with Spaceflight Industries to launch the lander as a secondary payload on a SpaceX Falcon 9 mission whose primary payload is a commercial communications satellite. That satellite, which he declined to identify, will be deployed in a supersynchronous transfer orbit, whose apogee is above the altitude of geostationary orbit. The lander will then use its propulsion system to fly to the moon and land there."
The cost for being a secondary payload can be much cheaper than an entire rocket, and much cheaper than other smaller launch vehicles like Soyuz and Vega.
[+] [-] melling|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marze|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] QAPereo|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vkou|8 years ago|reply
They want to land on the moon... To set up a billboard? And here I thought that the Silicon Valley model of startups making money by advertising other startups that make money by advertising other startups was insane.
Oh... They want to start a space economy. That's great, but there is no mention of what will that space economy do. They will maybe consider mining water, for a potential future human settlement that will... Do what? They will put up a billboard, to advertise... To whom?
[+] [-] dplgk|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] melling|8 years ago|reply
Anyway, I went through this a few years ago on HN after the Virgin Galactic accident. People argued that it was only a minor setback. Any setback that involves humans costs a lot of money and time.
[+] [-] pikchurn|8 years ago|reply
Sending humans to Mars for even a 30-day mission would be orders of magnitude more science return than the entire robotic exploration program to date.
And that's without considering relativity time-lag. There's serious consideration of an orbital precursor mission to Mars that would put robotic handlers in Martian orbit, or a free-return trajectory near Mars, without a lander, to do little more than remote control a couple of Curiosity-style rovers that accompany them (and maybe visit one or both low-gravity martian moons). It's anticipated that the time-lag reduction alone could vastly increase the amount of science that could be done on a robotic mission before the nuclear batteries die or servos get clogged with dust.
And of course all the robotic arguments are predicated on basic science being the only reason to go in the first place. In reality, most of the people interested in Mars and space exploration generally want people to permanently settle in space. I actually don't give a damn whether there was once life on Mars.. but there damn well better be human societies there within my lifetime.
[+] [-] Bob2019|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] indubitable|8 years ago|reply
The point is that robotics and other technologies are advancing extremely rapidly, but they're still not anywhere even remotely close to being able to compare to humans in general purpose functionality - let alone improvisation. Don't forget that those amazing videos of Atlas are the result of countless takes and on-site specialization. This [2] article describes the results of the most recent DARPA Robotics Challenge which featured all the big names, including Atlas. The competition included tasks like walking, opening a door, and climbing up stairs. The most ostensibly difficult would be navigating a specially modified vehicle after having humans carefully place and suspend their robot inside it. And the developers all knew ahead of time exactly what the tasks would be and the circumstance, except for one surprise task which ended up being pulling a lever. The long and short is that it was a disaster. Quoting the article:
"If there's a single lesson from the [DARPA Robotics Challenge], it's that humanoid robots are falling robots. Also, that the road to humanoids that aren't so clumsy will be long, and strewn with shattered components. If DARPA doesn't hold another version of the DRC, then the first one will have been little more than a grim status update, and a self-contained failure, for the few of us that realized it happened."
The point here is that we are a long ways away from robots that can remotely compare to humans for general purpose tasks. The timeline for getting to the Moon and even to Mars on the other hand is very near future.
--
Beyond all this, space exploration is not just about science. Did you know China put a probe on the moon in 2013? Technically it was a rover, but back to those robotics problems - it became a probe. It was the first time anything had soft landed on the moon since 1976. If you did know this you're probably already a huge enthusiast in the field because the world collectively yawned, even though it made some groundbreaking discoveries including discovering the moon's geographic makeup was far different than we thought. That discovery is playing no minor role in driving the recent moon race.
But people want to see and discover space themselves. And there are lots of people willing to pay lots of money for the privilege. Two individuals have already purchased a Moon flyby from SpaceX - scheduled for next year. And even though a flyby is nothing compared to a soft landing, that will not be met with a yawn. Action requires money. Money requires public drive. Public drive requires manned operations.
[1] - http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2017/0906-cu...
[2] - https://www.popsci.com/darpa-robotics-challenge-was-bust-why...
[+] [-] philyalater|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] casualtech|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quadrature|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sleepychu|8 years ago|reply