>“Ceres is a lot closer and it’s a lot easier to get to than these moons in the outer solar system,” Raymond says. “So it is a very enticing target.
Many of us know we won't live long enough to see the results of any sort of mission to Europa or Titan meant to detect life in their deep, liquid oceans (if these oceans in fact exist, if we ever get there and are able to drill to them). Not only is Ceres much closer, but if this article is accurate, access to the subsurface ocean could be quite close to the surface. Here's hoping it comes to fruition.
Over the next 2 years, I expect SpaceX to send a lot of probes out.
First, mass to orbit is super cheap now. Second, part of the whole R&D for Mars will be to try a variety of long range engine types and configs, and they love to iterate fast and play.
So I expect probes sent in Mars' direction, but also elsewhere to explore. And I cannot stress this enough, they are clearly capable engineers, but these probes don't need 10 years of development and hyper engineering, because cost to orbit is meaningless.
A probe fails? Who cares! You sent 5 different designs, and can just send more anyhow.
NASA was concerned about cost to orbit, but also perception. A lost probe would be a "waste to taxpayers", and just getting launch windows was a chore. I remember some probes had to wait years for space on the shuttle, so constrained was lift frequency.
But SpaceX is OK with blowing stuff up during tests, with learning as they go. So I imagine 2 years max, they'll be spewing satellites all over the place, without a concern if they fail early, or even make it.
Yet some will. Many will.
And you can bet some will head to asteroids.
Note: at this point someone usually chimes in with how hostile space is, and cheap probes won't work, and yada yada.
I didn't say cheap. Cheap implies skimping out on part quality or construction. You don't need to do that, as the parts are not remotely expensive compared to R&D, dev time and custom build work. In fact if one removes R&D, part cost isn't noticeable.
This means that scale is cheap. Building 1000 probes is almost the same cost as 1. And launch is now super cheap.
Access to Space is on the verge of when airplanes became unremarkable.
You can already see this with all the various lunar landers - quite a crash fest so far, but thenlatest iteration already performs better than the previous one. Can't really imagone similar progress with modern it-must-work-first-time NASA. :)
SpaceX rockets are not optimized for probes, for the higher speeds needed to toss stuff at interplanetary speeds. Sure, they can haul more to orbit and a customer could stack an additional stage, but that is very expensive compared to rockets with established cryogenic/efficient/faster upper stages. SpaceX is optimized for what it is doing (LEO/GEO) and, despite the presentations, shows little engineering interest in exploration beyond the moon.
The tech to keep your eye on is orbital refueling. If someone can finally crack that, all bets of this sort are off. While I'd love to see a nuclear rocket or something, even just the energy advantage of being able to refuel in orbit rewrites all our intuitions about time and expense of exploring the Solar System. We are so bound by having to launch things as single bundles of stuff from the ground... the rocket equation does not like that.
>> even just the energy advantage of being able to refuel in orbit rewrites all our intuitions about time and expense of exploring the Solar System.
Except that it doesn't. Refueling in LEO only helps if your gas station is in the same orbital inclination you need for your target. As each interplanetary launch will be via a different orbital plane/inclination, there is little use for generic infrastructure. Just using a bigger one-time rocket will be more efficient than trying to refuel and then boost interplanetary from an inappropriate orbital plane.
Now in higher orbits refueling can start to make sense as inclination becomes less of a handicap, but boosting from a higher orbit is less efficient than from a lower (oberth). A single larger rocket will still be the way to go.
If you're launching the fuel for the purpose of extending the range of a probe, well, of course you'll put it in the right place.
There's no point of conceiving of a world where we can afford to launch fuel but still have to treat every single launch as exceedingly precious and expensive such that we can only afford to set up One Fuel Depot in space, the way we have One Space Station. Either this gets cheap enough that SpaceX basically has a "launch + more fuel launch(es)" as a standard package or it never happens at all, there isn't much in between.
To get to the moon SpaceX needs to go beyond LEO. You cannot say in one breath that non-leo isn't their wheelhouse, then in another say it is.
Further, my post mentions new propulsion designs.
You're also 1980s thinking launches are expensive. They're cheap, and mass to orbit is cheap, and going to get much cheaper.
We all need to understand the change that is coming. Getting to space is being removed as a barrier. Think about projects where mass to orbit cost is unimportant, or think of projects where many launches is not a concern.
Think of 1000 super light, highly disposable attempts to make tiny sensor platforms which can endure distance, environment, and time.
Keep in mind losing 1/2 of them, even all is just fine, if you gleam valuable data to iterate and move down a path of low cost, tiny workable design.
It's not 1980. Cost to space is cheap. We now need to work on cost to planets, and even other solar systems.
We need to test engine designs, new methods of hardening platforms, all with low cost, simple designs.
And to others, yes, space is hostile. So? That's why we're iterating on a fix.
>> Keep in mind losing 1/2 of them, even all is just fine,
The cost difference between a spacecraft with a 50% failure rate and one with a 1% failure rate is basically not a thing. If you are at 50% success then you are already doing 99% of the job correctly. It is comparable to professional sports. If your NFL team wins a game or two during a season, you must be doing 99% of things right.
>> It's not 1980. Cost to space is cheap.
The cost for an interplanetary shot hasn't changed all that much recently. The SpaceX stuff is efficient to LEO/GEO and the moon... at a stretch. (Even the moon would require a variety of new refueling techs.)
What high flight rate would enable is testing in situ rather than expensively preventing possible failures at the design stage. That is, expend effort on the things that actually fail, rather than things that might fail. It also enables production of the probes on an assembly line.
An assembly line of probes would be amazing. Many have said we should built a dozen copies of Kepler space telescope to then detect millions of planets. Sadly, that just isn't what the scientific community wants. Each probe is bespoke. Some parts are standardized but the actual instruments tend to be designed for one specific mission. As for testing in leo, that isn't as useful as one would think. Space in LEO is very different in terms of temperature/light/radiation. LEO orbit is much warmer and dynamic (rapid orbits) than say deep space on the way to Jupiter. So it is better to test sensors on the ground in conditions that better match those where the probe is actually going. LEO is a good vacuum, but most probes wouldn't feel any difference between real space and a vacuum chamber on earth.
I wonder if we can come up with an experiment that requires a ton of identical probes as a middle ground. Like, can we make an astronomical interferometer telescope out of thousands of probes? Maybe? As someone who doesn’t understand space or astronomical interferometers, that sounds cool as heck.
I hope SpaceX does as you say and starts sending a lot of probes, but a lot really depends on the whims of Elon. There isn't really a strong business case for scattering probes around the solar system. Starlink makes money. Selling launch capabilities to NASA makes money. Doing basic science? Establishing a Mars colony? Those sound more like the kind of thing that isn't going to happen unless Elon insists they do it, and it seems like maybe he's not as interested in space exploration these days as he is in trying to get Donald Trump elected to another term.
What happened to asteroid mining? I wonder if positive ID of a solid gold/platinum rock would spur more missions that way. The issue is it's not easy to get that material back down.
Even silver, palladium, or cobalt in significant quantities could be sufficient motivation if the craft to harness the rock is cheap enough to make, launch, and operate. SpaceX is just the kind of company that would be able to do such a thing were anyone to do it. I bring up these other metals just to point out that while Gold or Platinum is what we always think of, industrial metals would also work to motivate.
Back before there were so many hecto-billionaires (fifteen now, according to Forbes), I remember seeing a throwaway quote somewhere to the effect that the first trillionaire would be the first person to economically mine asteroids.
It made me wonder, because it seems like even if someone had easy access to $100 trillion worth of platinum, they would no longer have $100 trillion worth of platinum. How much can you benefit from scarcity when you are also obliterating it?
It's also mildly entertaining to consider that while the quote I mentioned was intended to express the idea that asteroid mining would make someone a trillionaire, it might have been prophetic yet gotten things exactly backwards. With Bezos and Musk both having space programs, it seems plausible that compound interest could bring us to a future where the first trillionaire becomes the first asteroid miner instead of the other way around.
> How much can you benefit from scarcity when you are also obliterating it?
If you're just selling the minerals that might be the case. If you also have a vertically integrated company that produces things that use a lot of minerals (batteries), you might just be able to use all these things yourself, and sell them for more than the base cost of the material.
> How much can you benefit from scarcity when you are also obliterating it?
The same way that DeBeers did.
Plus, you could also buy up the manufacturers that actually use this. Platinum price drops, but you're also benefitting from getting it at-cost as you literally drop-ship it to your factory producing catalytic converters and microchips.
Sure you can do that, but the desire for catalytic converters is pretty static. They aren't a luxury good like diamond jewelry. You don't have the option of making them scarce and desirable.
> It made me wonder, because it seems like even if someone had easy access to $100 trillion worth of platinum, they would no longer have $100 trillion worth of platinum. How much can you benefit from scarcity when you are also obliterating it?
You can't (for practical reasons) instantly drop all of it on the market at once. As you increase production, terrestrial mines may decide to shut down based on price fluxations or increases in difficulty of mining the last remaining deposits. World governments might prefer to keep terrestrial mines as reserves for national security reasons and import space sourced materials when economically feasible.
Short the commodity market before your plans become known. Essentially selling the new metal at the old price. Your profit then depends on the depth of the futures market at various terms in the future.
Secondly, don't bring the resource back to Earth. Take it to the Moon, Mars, or orbital manufacturing facilities, to be used in further space exploration/colonization.
I went through that thought exercise a few years ago, and decided the metals might end up worth more as weapons.
If you maneuver a big asteroid into Earth orbit, you can always just drop chunks of it on the heads of people you don’t like. Basically “rods from God”, but using mass that’s already in space. I wrote a book using that as the premise.
Platinum prices going to zero wouldn't destroy the economy, just platinum mines.
The estimate I've seen for the total amount of gold humans have ever dug up is an approximately 20m³ cube. Wiki says gold has a density of 19.283 g/cm³. If I'm doing my math right, that means we've dug up 154,264,000 kg of gold. If you value that at the current price of $85,000/kg, we've got $13 trillion of gold.
Compare that with the guesses they were making about the "value" of a single metallic asteroid, 16 Psyche, of $10 quintillion[0]. Coming into contact with the New World let pre-industrial civilizations 2x or 3x the resources they could access, while the boost from asteroid mining could give us six or more orders of magnitude. That 20m³ could be collected and put in a museum.
It will depend on the level of competition in the launch market. If there's another reusable launcher (Blue Origin, say) then SpaceX will be constrained to not mark up the price too much and prices will be closer to costs, and anyone will be able to benefit from the cost reduction that allows large projects like this.
> maybe he's not as interested in space exploration these days as he is in trying to get Donald Trump elected to another term.
I think he's been pretty transparent that his recent interest in politics is downstream of his belief that Tesla and SpaceX will (continue to) be constrained by political action by one side more than the other.
I think its entirely possible that he's an old man settling into a 'shakes fist at clouds' mindset and justifying supporting it by telling himself its the right business move.
In reality I think he's a narcissist who is getting addicted to the limelight and this is just another stunt to get people to talk about him. I don't think its a business decision.
The problem with this is that presently it takes years for a probe to reach the destination. So one cannot do a quick try-observe-tinker loop. Granted with cheaper access to orbit the time can be reduced by using more fuel, but still space is huge.
Many of us know we won't live long enough to see the results of any sort of mission to Europa or Titan meant to detect life in their deep, liquid oceans (if these oceans in fact exist, if we ever get there and are able to drill to them). Not only is Ceres much closer, but if this article is accurate, access to the subsurface ocean could be quite close to the surface. Here's hoping it comes to fruition.