Airbus to build 'first interplanetary cargo ship'

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-53575353

by pseudolus • 6 years ago

199 213 6 years ago

jiofih3• 6 years ago

SpaceX Starship is planned for 2024, and with a cargo capacity in the hundreds of tons. Even if it gets delayed by four or five years it will be able to bring back samples before this is is even launched. NASA’s plans seem very slow in comparison.

kiba2• 6 years ago

NASA funds SpaceX though.

treeman792• 6 years ago

For big projects, a sound tactic is to spend a small portion on a cheap alternative implementation. Sometimes the smaller team will be far more successful. Better focus, a competitive drive to prove worth, etc.

Unlimited budget is sometimes a hindrance.

yohannparis• 6 years ago

Not as much as you think: ~32% Source: https://www.spacexstats.xyz/#payloads-customers

kerkeslager4• 6 years ago

Marketing materials aren't plans.

Musk has made a strategy of "overpromise, maybe deliver", rebranded as "vision" or "ambitious goals". Some of what his companies have delivered is impressive, but you never know what they're going to actually deliver until there are at least working prototypes.

ben_w8• 6 years ago

Yeah, but that’s true for all space companies. The surprising thing about SpaceX is that SpaceX delivers more than other corporations which promise less than SpaceX promises.

kspacewalk2• 6 years ago

Marketing materials aren't plans.

That's right, they aren't. Which is why it's mighty brave of the BBC to call it "first interplanetary cargo ship". We'll see who gets there first.

nscalf2• 6 years ago

I that this has historically been the case, but I think there has been a lot more delivery in recent years. The estimates from Musk seem to be less off, and I think a massive part of that is that the ramp up to this point was all predicated on original design of parts. They design and build >90% of the parts in the space ships. I think now that they have a catalogue of parts they don't have to build from scratch, their design/development cycles for new products are much faster and predictable.

This same thing goes for Tesla, I don't think Musk & co. get enough credit for building everything from scratch.

qayxc4• 6 years ago

Keep in mind that the first Starship cannot return anything to Earth, due to the lack of fuel.

The first Starship that might be able to return anything wouldn't be able to launch before 2026 either, so...

ben_w8• 6 years ago

Are they not even planning to at least try and send a fuel factory on the first Mars launch?

itsoktocry3• 6 years ago

SpaceX Starship is planned for 2024, and with a cargo capacity in the hundreds of tons.

And Full-Self-Driving will be available in the summer of 2015, and a cross country autonomous drive will happen in 2017, and this year we'll have 1,000,000 autonomous Robotaxis on the streets. Let's go!

valuearb12• 6 years ago

And Falcon 9 is nearing its 100th flight, and has made first stage recovery normal, and a Starship prototype has already flown with the new engine. Based on SpaceX typical cadence, full Starship prototypes will fly this year and achieve orbit next year. That’s three years to work out the kinks for the first Mars attempts.

thinkcontext3• 6 years ago

Though I would very much like to see Starship succeed, it must be understood just how risky a project it is. Just having the rocket be able to work in Earth orbit is a risky proposition, given its novel design and materials challenges. Add to that the many novel challenges returning Starship would entail, refueling in space, landing and taking off from Mars, setting up multi megawatts of solar, mining, methane production, etc.

Consider that Falcon Heavy was something like 5 years late. That was doing something that had been done before, strapping rockets together to make a Heavy version. Starship is many times more ambitious, with any of the challenges I raised above likely to hit multi-year delays.

valuearb12• 6 years ago

FH was done on a shoestring budget for a small market and nearly canceled when it became clear Starship was the better path.

But I agree with you that Starship has some challenges, specifically proving it can handle re-entry, be easily refurbed between launches, and be easily refueled in low earth orbit.

But Super Heavy is just a bigger Falcon 9, using the same landing technology. Even if a Starship Reusability falls short, it’s very clear that the combo is going to put bigger payloads than the the SLS into orbit at 1/20th the cost.

tomp• 6 years ago

That was doing something that had been done before, strapping rockets together to make a Heavy version.

That’s a common misconception - in fact, even SpaceX itself made this mistake! Musk said that making Heavy was almost as complex as designing a whole new rocket; which is also why they went with new next time (Starship) instead of incremental (Super Extra Heavy).

ballooney• 6 years ago

I've been on this website long enough to remember when everyone was saying 'of course manually-driven cars will be the exception by 2020', and believing Elon Musk's timescales has taken over as the new naive credulity of the HNer.

wahern• 6 years ago

Who actually believes Musk's timescales? Musk's overly optimistic yet technically plausible timescales seem to be part of the reason why his ventures are so successful. With the right culture and team members, it drives people toward the finish line. The challenge and constant pace of progress is motivating. With the wrong culture and team members (most companies, most people) it leads to crash & burn. Musk's exhausting personality is precisely what makes it all work.

pansa2• 6 years ago

"This is not just twice as difficult as any typical Mars mission; it's twice squared"

So, four times as difficult?

cynicalreason2• 6 years ago

it was a test .. you're hired

_petronius• 6 years ago

Or maybe (2n)2 as difficult?

ben_w8• 6 years ago

Fun fact I realised only recently: 2 ∘ 2 = 4 for any operator ∘ in the Ackermann sequence other than the zeroth (successor) operator.

2+2 = 2×2 = 2² = … = 4

At least, unless I messed up my proof. My highest qualification is two A-levels in maths and half of brilliant.org…

https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2020/07/27/hᵤ2-2-4-for...

sandworm1015• 6 years ago

> So, four times as difficult?

Or, by "twice squared" they mean to say "It has been squared ... twice". That would be 16x, which is probably more in line with the total deltaV requirements.

jmkerr• 6 years ago

Did you just linearize squaring?

OJFord• 6 years ago

Or (twice as difficult)^2 which is 4x for difficulty 1, but in general 4(prior difficulty squared)x as difficult.

the_duke• 6 years ago

Well, if the original difficulty is 1, and we square it twice, that is 1^2^2, which ... is still 1.

nothis• 6 years ago

Even in the most obnoxiously nerdy interpretation, it would be (2*n)^2, not 2^2.

BurningFrog2• 6 years ago

I see the urge to avid the tired cliche of "exponential", but being creative has risks.

Ericson2314• 6 years ago

twice = (* 2) squared = (^ 2)

twice . squared = (* 2) . (^ 2)

(difficult * 2)^2

stormdennis• 6 years ago

Mmm, easier than I thought so.

TheOtherHobbes• 6 years ago

Pretty sure it's just a metaphor, and not literal rocket surgery.

klyrs• 6 years ago

Squared twice?

  x -> x^2^2 = x^4

Doubled and squared?

  x -> (2x)^2 = 4x^2

Difficulty factor of 2 is squared?

  x -> (2^2)x = 4x

Or was that squared twice?

  x -> (2^2^2)x = 16x

All of these functions agree at x = 0, so can we conclude that it's gonna be way easy??

Lesson: don't handwave your math when you're talking to lay journalists, because nerds are gonna read it and be horrified.

lhorie• 6 years ago

compile error: figure of speech is not a number

zpeti• 6 years ago

Why don’t they just give the money to spacex? This is such typical French/eu behaviour. Let’s build something that already exists, for 10x the price, 10 years late, so that we can create jobs and have our own... Except the market viability is close to 0.

how about using that money for something that’s actually innovative? Or perhaps charge less tax so people can decide on their own what’s worthwhile.

cynicalreason2• 6 years ago

competition is good, it's better than piling all the money in one place.

kiba2• 6 years ago

Is it really competition when nobody is trying?

Jabbles• 6 years ago

"The joint American-European project is expected to cost billions and take just over a decade to implement."

This doesn't exist. It's never been done before. If SpaceX does it before Airbus and brings back literal tons of mars rock then great, but it's not certain when that will be possible.

Market viability isn't an appropriate metric for scientific research.

ragebol2• 6 years ago

Let’s build something that already exists

What already exists that can do what this is built to do?

ever12• 6 years ago

On the contrary, it would be foolish of the EU to be so dependent on a foreign company, dependent on a foreign law on a subject as strategic as space. It is a crucial choice that, as a EU citizen, I applaud.

growlist5• 6 years ago

It's not beyond the realms of possibility that around the same time as the sample returns to Earth, the US could have geologists' boots on the ground on Mars doing actual geology in situ, courtesy of SpaceX/Starship. Kind of puts this effort in perspective.

They should be going all out for reusability, but instead they chose the oldspace pork approach. I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

ben_w8• 6 years ago

While I absolutely agree that SpaceX is way ahead of anyone else, and I am very enthusiastic about SpaceX in general, SpaceX is a US corporation, and it is a really bad idea for any other economy or military to allow the USA to have a monopoly on space tech.

Space has enough strategic advantages that the economic reasoning of comparative advantage, while still true in itself, simply isn’t the most important concern.

lumberjack• 6 years ago

I don't want my tax money to go fund SpaceX. SpaceX is American and all their capabilities are practically owned by American entities. Europeans like me cannot even work for SpaceX, so unless we have our own parallel programs we would just have no capability at all in this space.

growlist5• 6 years ago

If ESA were building reusable rockets and not instead persisting with a pork-driven employment programme that happens to have a side effect of producing rockets, I'd agree with you. Until then ESA deserve to be hammered with criticism - and especially by those whose tax money etc. is being spent on an approach that is hurtling towards obsolescence.

rsynnott13• 6 years ago

Nothing like this currently exists. The closest would probably be Phobos-Grunt, but that, er, didn’t work.

shantara• 6 years ago

You can look at the UK as an example of what happens when a country abandons its own space program and decides to buy launches in the US instead.

simion314• 6 years ago

US and EU have already a "trade war/tariffs", so it is really stupid to give money to US to build their space industry so in future some weird dispute can cause $EU to lose access to space or over pay. There are also good engineers in EU that would need jobs, maybe they can create better stuff if they compete with SpaceX or create something different that can dominate a niche.

i bet US would have loved Airbus do not exists so Boeing made more money.

For strategic industry you don't want to minimize your dependency on external factors, some natural disaster happens and you no longer have food to feed your citizens or no longer have medicine or your software will refuse to run etc.

lt_kernelpanic• 6 years ago

Question for the experts: what are the tests and analysis that we cannot do via a rover-based lab and hence need to send the samples to Earth? Asking out of curiosity (pun not intended!).

Something1234• 6 years ago

Not an expert, but the test chambers on a rover can't be cleaned easily or without a massive amount of complexity. They are also fairly limited and very limited use. While a sample collected and sent back can be split and used in many ways.

ClumsyPilot4• 6 years ago

I am no expert, but I can imagine there are many kinds of laboratory equipment that is way too heavy to pit on a rover, perhaps mass spectrometers, etc.

Biological wxperiments is a big one. There is kind of outstanding question of perclorates in martian soil and its toxicity to earth organisms, plants, etc.

ta8594505930• 6 years ago

The mars rover does have a spectrometer. It's called ChemCam [1], it uses a laser to vaporize a small amount of matter and them captures the spectrographs of the resulting plasma with a camera. That doesn't take away from your point, but it is a cool piece of equipment.

[1] https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/spacecraft/instruments/chemcam/

mabbo• 6 years ago

Simple answer from a space nerd: Rovers are small, light, and have very little energy. So what we can't do is anything that requires a large or heavy device or anything that requires significant energy. They break/fail. They take forever to make happen.

Want to burn 20kg of soil to see if there's any trace of specific elements? You'll need a furnace. Those are both heavy and high-energy. You could do a smaller scale test on a rover of 2g perhaps, but what if the traces are very, very small? Plus, whatever analysis tools you would use now have to also be extremely small and light, which means less capabilities.

Also, rovers have limited size: we can only do a small number of tests per rover because the rover's utility belt of tools is only so large. If your experiment is really easy to do but it's not a high enough priority, it won't happen.

Lastly, rovers die. You might spend 5 years building a tool, 2 years sending it on the next rover to Mars, only to have it crash or die before it's time to run your experiment.

But if we sent 300kg of soil back from Mars, we could do every test we can think of, carefully, with the best tools humanity can make and as much energy as we need.

Edit: +1 to what Something1234 said too! You can't clean out apparatuses easily after an experiment!

jessriedel• 6 years ago

I think the GP wanted to know what the actual tests an analyses are.

freeopinion2• 6 years ago

Anything that requires significant energy

So instead of sending a rover with 4x or 10x energy, the answer is a mission that requires enough energy to launch the samples all the way back to Earth? This makes me smile.

I do agree though. We can expend 1000x the energy of the return trip once the samples are back on earth. And we also have the luxury of unlimited time to invent new tests and new tech to apply to whatever is left of the samples.

valuearb12• 6 years ago

These are all reasons why sending humans is so important. They will explore more of Mars in a week than rivers have in 50 years. They will arrive with a testing lab and do all sorts of tests immediately.

If Starship meets its performance targets, it’s first missions will bring hundreds of scientists to a Mars, with thousands of tons of equipment and supplies. In-orbit and in-situ refueling are game changing technologies that will literally reduce the cost of deep space manned missions by a thousandfold.

emilfihlman• 6 years ago

Space technology actually does drive technology miniaturisation!

sandworm1015• 6 years ago

Better question: What will we learn that we cannot learn from all the Martian rocks we already have on earth.

There have been plenty or Martian meteors found in Antarctica, and no doubt many more if we redoubled our efforts to find them. Many once claimed to have found evidence of life in these rocks already. Some of us are even old enough to remember President Clinton's speech on the subject. (That isn't a deepfake video. The US president really did talk about the discovery of life on mars.)

ceejayoz3• 6 years ago

Better question: What will we learn that we cannot learn from all the Martian rocks we already have on earth.

These particular samples will be from the present-day surface, with known geographic (aerographic?) origin, not affected by potentially millions of years of interplanetary travel, and not contaminated by sitting around on Earth for who knows how long.

dylan6042• 6 years ago

I love how they borrowed and repurposed that speech in Contact.

hoorayimhelping2• 6 years ago

There is a big, big difference between, "we found a rock on earth that is probably from Mars that was blasted here some time in the past," and, "we went to a specific area of Mars and got a rock and brought it back." Not least of which is the intrinsic value and aspirational nature of us actually fetching things from other planets ourselves, with intent and purpose, rather than luckily stumbling upon some.

valuearb12• 6 years ago

Great, get me some samples from the bottom of Valles Marineris, preferably from the dry river beds.

hoorayimhelping2• 6 years ago

Looking at a rock with our own eyes, and feeling it with our own senses can provide context and meaning that a robot might have trouble conveying.

valuearb12• 6 years ago

Having humans on Mars means we can find the best sample rocks in a tiny fraction of the time, and test them right there.

Apofis• 6 years ago

Can't we just shoot a orbital space laser at mars then from mars orbit? If we're already sending a very heavy craft that way... should be able to do spectral analysis from space.

ncmncm• 6 years ago

Excellent question. Obviously there are lots of things they couldn't afford to get into a lander. Question is what could they have put into a lander, for much less than $billions, that they still haven't?

Like, a microscope?

Aeolun5• 6 years ago

10 years to implement? Aren’t we supposed to have a starship in orbit of Mars by that time?

ClumsyPilot4• 6 years ago

Thats in Elon time, I would not bet my house on starship being in orbit by 2030.

Secondly, there is need to independant access to space free of US technology export rules and foreign policy and sanctions.

US administration has forbidden NASA collaboration with China, and as a result they built a separate space station, and are having a separate moon-capable rocket. And i would bet my house that they will get to the moon, CCP seems to plan in 20 years+ horizons, not elevtuom cycles. Perks of being a dictatorship and all that.

lrnStats2• 6 years ago

Orbit isn't hard. The hard part is landing something that can later return to space.

That said, you can't trust anything Elon says.

ClumsyPilot4• 6 years ago

I am very haply to see the idea of electric propultion tug finally commited to implementation. This has a lot more utility than delivering samples from Mars - in principle there is a lot of equipment that could use rugging between , and Mars.

I hope this becomes a configurable platform for future missions, nur just a one-off experiment.

Tepix2• 6 years ago

It will be interesting to see what the situation will be like when this spaceship is ready. By that time we should have Starship and New Glenn flying regularly. Even New Armstrong could be close to ready by then.

_Microft4• 6 years ago

New Glenn is not that different from Falcon 9 regarding reusability as they will have to expend the upper stage and fairings every single launch.

hinkley5• 6 years ago

Didn’t they just recover both fairings on the last launch?

I don’t know how you want to work the math, but it is probably best to think of it in a fractional way. Between accidents and wear do they manage better than 4 launches in average? They just managed 6 for one lower stage, with tighter turnaround time. We don’t know how much of that rocket was reused. So we might be talking about expending 20% of a lower stage per launch, and some higher ratio of upper stages.

bufferoverflow• 6 years ago

The joint American-European project is expected to cost billions and take just over a decade to implement.

I'm 99% sure that if SpaceX's starship takes off, it will fly to Mars and back within a few years.

But still, competition is good.

rsynnott13• 6 years ago

I don't think even Musk, master of the dubious marketing promise, has claimed that; the first ones would be one-way jobs AIUI.

raverbashing• 6 years ago

Correct, only the crew mission would return, the rest would be several one-way cargo missions

throw12346512343• 6 years ago

I don't think you can call him Musk "master of the dubious marketing promise" anymore now that Tesla is meeting production goals, SpaceX is landing boosters, re-supplying the ISS, and has brought astronauts to the ISS.

His promises are far more reliable than most at this point.

itsoktocry3• 6 years ago

I'm 99% sure that if SpaceX's starship takes off, it will fly to Mars and back within a few years.

Define "a few years" and I'll bet you it won't, with whatever odds you want.

Robotbeat6• 6 years ago

2031 is when the Sample Return Mission is supposed to return the samples back to Earth. Keep in mind slips happen in ALL sorts of space projects, not just SpaceX. I’ll take your bet.

I want 2:1 odds:

SpaceX returns a vehicle from Mars by the end of 2035 (UTC), and before the NASA-ESA sample return mission has returned its samples. I’ll buy you a beer/beverage (value not to exceed $10) if you win, and you’ll buy me 2 beers/beverages (value not to exceed $20 total) if I win.

pharke2• 6 years ago

I think 10 (+/- 2) years is a fair estimate but I would start counting from when Starship reaches orbit. It would be close enough to their historical development timeline of the Falcon which went from Falcon 1 reaching orbit in 2008 to a crewed Falcon 9 mission to the ISS in 2020, with a propulsive landing of the first stage to boot. I would expect a number of missions within that timeframe that could possibly satisfy the condition of "fly to Mars and back" but I think they will be able to do a full surface of Earth to surface of Mars and back to surface of Earth crewed mission at the end of that period. Call me an optimist but I'm pretty sure that's what they're aiming for.

BurningFrog2• 6 years ago

is expected to cost billions

I'm annoyed by this innumerical journalistic habit where imprecise large numbers are only given as "millions", "billions" or "trillions".

esperent• 6 years ago

A decade long development for a never before attempted interstellar cargo ship... I'm sure that "billions" is as precise as anyone can be about the cost right now.

gspr• 6 years ago

I agree about general journalistic innumeracy, but in this case it may well be the best estimate available. It's no different from the order of magnitude estimates highly numerate people make for good reason all the time.

antonvs2• 6 years ago

I'm 99% sure that if SpaceX's starship takes off, it will fly to Mars and back within a few years.

I'm 99% sure that's wrong.

ape4• 6 years ago

The article mentions a "football sized package". Hope there is no confusion between American and European football.

twic• 6 years ago

Or perhaps they mean table football?

dylan6042• 6 years ago

Good gawd, that would be more [sad|funny] than the mm/inch confusion. Can the rover use it's hands or not? Better hope they use American version of Instant Replay than the pathetic VAR implementation as well.

Someone2• 6 years ago

Reading https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Human_and_Robotic_Ex..., they mean “basketball size”. It seems the BBC thinks their readers do not know how large those are.

capableweb• 6 years ago

Or maybe BBC thinks it's readers are more familiar with the size of a football (as in soccer, of course) than the size of a basketball (although they are the same, but someone who doesn't know the size of a basketball wouldn't, of course)

bryanlarsen3• 6 years ago

If NASA really wanted to answer the 'life on Mars' question, Perseverance would have included a microscope. AFAICT, the reason it doesn't is because nobody wants to stake their reputation on the hypothesis.

lrnStats2• 6 years ago

Really? What's wrong with admitting you were wrong, and that was a discovery in its own?

I recently made an error regarding essential amino acids, and it only improved the quality of suggested foods. Everyone wins.

(Although you still get a few internet haters)

bryanlarsen3• 6 years ago

Yes, that's the way science should be done. But look at the number of negative result papers that get published, et cetera. How much push does a negative result give your career vs a positive one? Who's interested in spending ten years of their career pushing a test for a hypothesis that most people (and likely themselves) think is negative? And of course the microscope cannot prove the negative hypothesis, nor does it really help the negative hypothesis much.

mhh__• 6 years ago

What hypothesis?

If you found life on Mars you're going to be rendered immortal as long as knowledge survived. No one is refusing out of pride.

bryanlarsen3• 6 years ago

Gilbert Levin might disagree.

habosa• 6 years ago

Remember when Uber’s business got a little shaky so they started making a bunch of noise about a flying taxi project that would launch soon and be cheaper than a car?

Well this smells like that. Airbus knows that orders for commercial airplanes may be low for years as we work through the fallout of this virus. So time to go to space to give the investors something to think about.

arkitaip• 6 years ago

Did you read the article? They are creating a satellite, ERO, set to launch 2026 for an actual mission.

rsynnott13• 6 years ago

Eh? Airbus has always been a large contractor for ESA; they make a lot of ESA probes and are a stakeholder in Arianespace, which makes the launchers. This is pretty normal for them.

gostsamo• 6 years ago

So many people who wonder about the exact cost and do not read the article to the end... And this is the ESA bet against SpaceX btw. http://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Space_Transportation/ESA...

mud_dauber• 6 years ago

I want to see it named "Nostromo". Or the "Ripley".

adrianmonk• 6 years ago

Are they going to have to change their name to Vacuumbus?

Although, it is a cargo ship, so maybe Vacuumtruck would be more accurate.

knodi123• 6 years ago

It doesn't exactly roll trippingly off the tongue, does it?

ragebol2• 6 years ago

Spacebus is better. Better hop on the Spacebus!

woodandsteel• 6 years ago

Interesting, but the SpaceX Starship/Falcon Heavy, which will start flying in a few years, will be able to do this a thousand times better.

Airbus to build 'first interplanetary cargo ship'

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