Why is the taxpayer required to pay for space tech from the 1950s?

>what we are shown and the height of technology might not be the same thing.

Unfortunately I do not believe this. Boeing and SpaceX have received billions to develop space capsules. Designs for winged spacecraft were shot down by politicians and NASA years ago, even though they were proposed.

shot down officially, embraced unofficially by cost effective black budget programs hhhmmmmmmmmmm????

aerospike engines could do it
or something like the british skylon design for an air breathing hybrid rocket jet engine wingled ssto vehicle, though the bfr might be more cost effective even from what ive read. so rockets arent obsolete yet when they can be reused.

It's flat.

>Why are we so stuck with space tech instead of developing other ways of getting to orbit?
Why don't you study aerospace and find out.

the us taxpayer is being fucked by boeing only. its a government monopoly that wastes 90% of what it spends

spacex is fucking their game up by offering products at 1/100th of the price, not being paid for by the US taxpayer. if nasa wants to use spacex to launch something, then spacex saves the us taxpayer a ton of money.

also the bfr will have 7 times the payload of the venturestar and im not sure how much larger winged designs can get. the venture star was already going to be pretty big. winged designs seem best for passenger transport to and from low earth orbit using standard airports if anything.

We designed a rocket called Sea Dragon 50 years ago that can get you $100/kg launch costs.

For comparison, a really nice first class airline ticket is $100/kg. Cost the same amount to get to space as it does to fly overseas in style. Cheap as fuck.

Only expensive rockets are built because there is too much wealth in space. If you were allowed to go there, you might end up free. Can't have that.

unironically this.

the digits mirror the fact that this is the truth. SpaceX is so cheap that Russia can't compete for international launches anymore, after a few more years the Soyuz will only be flying Russian government payloads.

>1000kg

>luxury airlines weigh you pre flight
>but not southwest

This is not 1960's tech.

According to NASA the Apollo hardware back then would not be able to pass their safety standards.

MHD?

Tell us about your secret tech.

>taxpayers
>spaceX
>a private company
This board needs to be deleted desu. I'm sure more than half of people here didn't even go to college and are dumb retarded angry wagecucks like OP

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NERVA

they also get money through nasa

which makes sense, spacex will save them money overall so

>Why don't you study aerospace and find out.

I have degrees in mechanical engineering and a master in dynamic system modelling. I am very interested in space tech, even though I do not work in this area. And even without any background, I could have just followed the NASA private spaceflight programs and which designs were proposed by which companies.

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What’s your point? The crew capable version of Dragon has newrly exclusively funded through milestone payments of a NASA program costing 1.5bn for SpaceX alone.

Do you have any idea how inexpensive that is, relatively speaking, for the full development of a rocket and a manned capsule to mount to it?

The state is the only customer Spaxe X is ever going to have who will pay to send people in space, so yeah, at the end, the taxpayer is paying for it.

There are probably very good space vehicles in existence but you and I will die never knowing they existed.

The rockets we use are a good conventional way of putting satellites in orbit which is the only demand right now. If another space race happens (to Mars?) then that will change.

It's not the same though

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You dense motherfucker
>youtube.com/watch?v=2hcM5hqQ45s
>youtube.com/watch?v=a62_n1zo4I0

The 1.5 bn is just to convert the Dragon to a crew capable one and modify Falcon 9 as well as an emergency escape system and 3 test missions.

Falcon 9 and Dragon have been developed before with different funds (also with NASA and DoD money).

It is cheap in overall American terms compared to programs like Orion, but it is expensive and long winded still in my view.

I guess amphibians cannot into extrapolation.

Whatever you say Achmed
>"According to NASA's own independently verified numbers, SpaceX’s development costs of both the Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 rockets were estimated at approximately US$390 million in total."
>arstechnica.com/science/2017/07/spacex-urges-lawmakers-to-commercialize-deep-space-exploration/

>There are probably very good space vehicles in existence but you and I will die never knowing they existed.

You can track things like screwdrivers in orbit from Earth. Privately. Why would you think there is some giant worldwide conspiracy involving private citizens, China, Russia etc. which all for some reason keep “good space vehicles” a secret while then pouring billions in 1950s tech for open programs with Boeing and SpaceX?

Musk truly is the white man's hero
In an age of digital degeneracy, one man dared to dream. On man dared to act. A white man succeeded.

pseudo-science

Have nothing to say, Omar? You've been BTFO, the entire development cost for the rocket itself cost only a third of the launch cost of a Space Shuttle.

Explain to me how Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 have been developed with 400 million dollars when SpaceX has 8,000 employees now and had 4,000 employees a few years ago and Falcon 9 is constantly developed and they burn several billion dollars a year?

Also, Falcon 1? That was over 15 years ago. The costs of crewed private spacecraft is public by the way

xxxxxxxx

However, the NASA study also looked at the development costs of much more comparable vehicles to Orion, which are being created for the Commercial Crew Program. SpaceX is creating a crewed version of its Dragon capsule, while Boeing is developing an entirely new vehicle called the CST-100 Starliner to ferry astronauts to and from the space station. Neither of those vehicles are complete yet, but the crewed Dragon is projected to cost NASA $2.2 billion, while Starliner will cost $3.27 billion. That’s still mighty cheap compared to Orion. And the operational costs tell the same story: the price tag to launch a crewed Dragon, excluding the cost of the rocket, is estimated to be around $308 million for NASA, with the Starliner costing $418 million. Comparatively, Orion will cost nearly $1 billion to fly each time.

theverge.com/2017/11/10/16623752/nasa-commercial-cargo-crew-spacex-orbital-atk-boeing-orion

I already responded. No need to start with insults, especially if you have no idea what you are talking about.

damn.. i dont know how i feel about the haphazardly applied kapton tape..

the bfr is the future of human space travel and that is what will build a presence on mars. also the blue orgin new glenn, though they have more of a focus on building up a human presence in orbit and space in general rather then mars. these are large reusable rocket systems, vastly more cost efficient then anything going today.

and everything else is just a side show, the indian and chinese space penis programs and other government space programs will prove flaccid in competition with private space programs. they will launch some more rockets and satellites and probes and do the status quo thing for a while and who cares.

nasa will do who knows what, hopefully not blow their whole wad on 70s era disposable rocket tech. they will guide the american private space efforts and ride along with them when their own sls proves a waste of money.

so a mars city and a lunar base and some private space stations with the bfr and the new glenn. and thats the near future in our lifetimes of space.

Why would a large rocket like the BFR which does not yet exist be fhe future of human space travel? This feels like someone saying in 1503 we just need to create a really large wooden ship and that this ship will be the future of humanity... even though we today have airplanes going all over the world.

Falcon 1 counts because the Merlin engine was the first-stage engine on that rocket, and got carried over onto the Falcon 9. They would want to know internal details from SpaceX on development costs to have a full picture on what it actually took to develop the Falcon 9.
That excerpt still proves my point, that SpaceX is wildly cheaper than its competitors, so cheap that you can better compare it to the cost of older NASA launches rather than development projects.
That aside, you don't format your posts like a regular. I wonder where you're really posting from, I doubt it's to be expected for Germans to suddenly start posting divisive threads just because the US demanded your government live up to its obligations.

>same type
brainlet detected

guaranteed government contracts = taxpayer money

space is expensive to do missions and shit

it's also infinitely more expensive to test out and try new shit

so just stick to the really expensive shit you know.

Record this word:
>Squirrel
vocaroo.com/

Creativity and moral virtue peaked, the last dregs were raptured away by 2000. People remain but the spark is gone.

but the reusable heavy rockets are the next paradigm shift in human spaceflight. after that the next paradigm shift of massive progress will be a faster engine for interplanetary travel. some kind of ion engine like vasimr probably.

aerospike engines once mastered and integrated into resuable rocket systems should massively boost payload capacity in multistage systems by increasing efficiency. and also allowing for more single stage to orbit systems. so thats another big shift for the next gen of heavy lifters after the bfr and similar designs.

and then the paradigm shift after that will be another even faster interplanetary engine or two. fusion energy plants. and alternatives to rockets like space elevators and such on the gravity well side.

beyond that who can say. and these projections dont account for any decades long classified programs we dont know about

Aerospace fag here, SSTOs would have been a great replacement for the shuttle program (like what was being developed), but budgetary restrictions killed it. Rockets are still very useful in a time when we’re looking to go interplanetary. Good luck using your winged SSTO spacecraft to get you back from the moon or mars. Also, the claim that it is basically 60’s tech is incredibly ignorant and not even worth responding to in a serious way, especially by someone claiming to has a masters in engineering.

>That excerpt still proves my point, that SpaceX is wildly cheaper than its competitors

A crewed Soyuz launch is about 150 million (including the rocket). There is no other competitor as no other crewed capabilty exists in this world except Long March/ Shenzhou and that doesn’t fly except every few years.

Also, I won’t respond to you any more, you have no idea what you are talking about and when confronted with facts such as the program cost to NASA I provided to you, you ignore these facts and then somehow suggest conspiracy theories about how I “format my posts”.

Wing designs are the most retarded idea ever.

What is wrong with the characterization of the CST-100 and Dragon being of the same type as Soyuz, Voshkod, Shenzhou, Apollo, Gemini, Mercury?

Why? Please explain why reuseable spaceplane designs are “retarded”. Thanks.

Why don't you create your own worth while space program?

And we don't give a fuck what a manned Soyuz costs IRL because the Russians make us pay way more for it anyway. In aggregate, Falcon 9's are cheaper to fly when you average their unmanned and manned flights. If this wasn't so, Russia would not be lamenting that they're up shit creek in terms of rocket tech.
Plus, the frequency of your flag in the past week, the general trends of your thread types, and your newfag formatting tells me that I shouldn't refer to you as Hans or Muhammad, but I should ask how many people in your office have unnaturally dyed hair.

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because its got a big payload and high cost efficiency because its reusable and so big. 300,000 pounds to orbit. land it again and refuel it, refuel it in space with another bfr. its the next step forward.

what do you want? a winged design with an aerospike engine like the venturestar? single stage to orbit. well, that might also be a good idea, but the bfr meanwhile will still have higher payload capacity unless you build an impractically large winged craft. and the bfr is being built now.

the basic design of the bfr will have improving versions of the years. maybe intgrate aerospikes or just bigger engines i dunno. but the core concept there of the bfr, a large reusable rocket. thats the near future and ive explained my reasoning there you go

Because usually vehicles are designed to make use of the medium that it operates in. wings in a vacuum don't do anything but add useless weight to the vehicle, because theres no air in space.

They are retarded because they add complexity. Wings are only really useful if you can use them going up AND coming down, otherwise they're another thing that can fail and kill everyone aboard.

What's with the irregular parts of the capsule that look damaged?

winged ssto is still a good idea that has its place

but as the heavy lifter for interplanetary missions they just wont have the payload capacity

winged ssto will be good for passenger and supply missions to low earth orbit stations and assets. and then eventually in space constructed interpanetary ships will take them from there to mars etc.

but the heavy lifters are going to be reusable large rockets until we have a space elevator or something.

winged ssto will only start to partially replace heavy lift rockets when we have more capacity to assemble large structures in orbit. until then we still need to assemble large things on land and launch it all at once.

the only similarity is heat shield location and shape, otherwise it's new tech
youtube.com/watch?v=07Pm8ZY0XJI

Bingo, Skylon and similar craft are great passenger craft. They put their passengers through much more gentle g-loads going up and coming down, but mostly on the return side.
>youtube.com/watch?v=muPNlnm_i44

The point I was making is that airbreathing tech could very well be the future of orbital spaceflight, space capsules on rockers is clearly not ever going to be cheap enough to increase numbers of people to orbit. But we aren’t even looking at e.g. ramjet tech.

Orbital vehicles which are supposed to got to LEO may be in orbit quite some time, but there is no dynamics there (if they would be changing orbits all the time, I would agree that wings are excess weight which are a hindrence). But if we talk about getting to and from a specific orbit only, airbreathing tech including wings for lift beats rockets in every metric by two magnitudes. The problem is ramjet tech is just not researched enough in actual plane tech even though we researched it in the past and it works.

And my question was why we stopped researching tech which could be a breakthrough in orbital spaceflight... while we put billions into tech we know cannot be a breakthrough.

i know right
>whats new about it
uh, it can fucking land itself and be reused

I don't know why we cannot just send some machine that will make copies of itself using materials that exist on the moon or mars.

Even the simpler cargo dragons are being reused. That's the first vehicle with that feature since the Shuttle flew.

1. there no runways on other planets or moons and also no atmospheric density that would render wings even remotely useful
2. no landings on water
3. useless weight
4. quite literally a design from the 50s (ironic since that is what OP complained about)
5. laughable ratio of $/kg to orbit due to wing weight

The only way is SSTO with a vehicle that can land vertically

I doubt that direcf Earth to escape orbit injection will ever be a flight profile we will use for actual missions. Human extra-LEO spaceflight really is a two step process to solve - Earth to orbit (cargo and humans separately if necessary), orbital construction and then orbital to orbital from there e.g. Earth orbit to Mars orbit using in space propulsion, most likely using electrical propulsion rather than chemical propulsion.

that tape looks like shit smeared on the side

Soyuz capsules have been stripped and reused as well. Has been the case since the 1950s. Dragons have to be refurbished as well for reflights. How is that not the same tech?

The Dragon uses heatshield plus parachutes to land, just as Soyuz by the way.

>I doubt that direcf Earth to escape orbit injection will ever be a flight profile we will use for actual missions.
For someone who claims to know a lot about rockets, you seem to have missed the memo that NERVA is back on the table. 2x-6x the ISP of chemical rockets, my bluehair of indeterminate nationality.

yeah but why nerva when vasimr is on the table, 3 to 4 months to mars with nerva, 39 days with vaismr

but then again nerva works. tested and known to work. vasimr is still in the experimental stages

NERVA works in-atmosphere, that's why. Sure, you'll want VASIMR for flight in-vacuum, but NERVA makes it that much more efficient to reach orbit in the first place.

SpaceX gets some business from launching private satellites.

My point was that we won’t have actual real missions within our solar system based on isps of 2x to 6x of chemical propulsion. We will be looking of isps of 5,000 to 50,000 instead which gets us to a completely different mindset - that is we aren’t thinking in terms of propellant mass any more, but the limitations are around your power source.

As to NERVA, an isp of 850sec is just not good enough as in space propulsion. Better than 350secs for standard chemical propulsion, but I still don’t see the point. Propellant will still be the major constrained for missions making interplanetary space flight programs inflexible and expensive. We need to keep propellant expense under 10 percent of the spacecraft for round trips. That will get us to sustainable interplanetary architectures.

Some? They're on track to get half of all launches worldwide.

I said I won’t respond to you any more, because you have no clue about spaceflight. I make an exception to point out NERVA’s isp in atmosphere is 380sec. Draw your own conclusions if you can (which I doubt you can).

nerva is nuclear though so will they ever use it in atmosphere? maybe for an upper stage

>How is that not the same tech?
The soyuz capsule itself isn't reused, the internals are stripped and refitted for starters. The internals on Dragon are far more advanced.

>The model T had a 4 cylinder engine, how is that not the same tech as a modern car

I essentially feel this way:

youtube.com/watch?v=PtBy_ppG4hY

NASA was really just a way to hone and develop our ICBM missile technology under the guise of exploration. Nowadays they provide cover for our spying.

That was the best they got to by 1972. The reason they're going back to it is we have ceramics that are way, way more heat resistant now and we can run the reactors hotter than they ever imagined in the original project. 2x was the old figure, 6x is the new ceiling. That's almost enough to make something the size of the SpaceX interplanetary cruise stage a single stage to the moon.

The new NERVA is fully encapsulated. In the 60's and 70's they had to run coolant right over the fuel to get enough heat transfer, our new materials permit safe atmospheric use.

But NASA is gonna pay for it anyway, that's Congress's will. SpaceX saves them a shit ton over Boeing and ULA though.

the bfr can do it all
heavy shit to orbit
a trip direct to mars or wherever with a refueling in orbit

and that will be good enough for now, thats the near future of spaceflight. the heavy reusable rocket.

after that, some kind of interplantary engine and then the heavy lift rockets will switch roles to supplying and assembling the interplantary ships in orbit.

that is interesting

It will make superheavy launchers much more compact in terms of height, which means they will be able to be launched in much worse weather. Tall, thin rockets are very susceptible to damage from wind shear, but something shorter and squatter could launch in the middle of a rainstorm and not care.

Commercial launches or all launches?

Because SpaceX isn’t anywhere close to either of those and non-commercial launches are pretty much all locked in due to national interests (being Russian launches for Russia, Chinese launches for China, European/Russian launches for Europe, Japanese launches for Japan and US launches for the US). Commercial launches are still below the rates we had in the 1990s. Total launches worldwide in 2017 was 90, thereof 2/3rds non-commerical (i.e. military, space programs etc.). Mid-term projections are for around 100-120 launches globally by 2025 - granted around 25 percent of those will be US military / NASA / US taxpayer funded launches according to current projections.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_in_spaceflight

or there will be no assembling in orbit and the heavy left rockets will just launch craft with the new interplanetary engines (vasimr etc) directly. or both

>The soyuz capsule itself isn't reused, the internals are stripped and refitted for starters.

The frame itself isn’t what is the cost driver for Soyuz, the internal tech is.

can they be used for returning the rocket to earth? for a resuable design? do they have that kind of control?

Last year it was half of all American launches, commercial and government. I doubt it will fulfill half of all government launches worldwide unless the US steps up government launches in a big way, but it will fill out half of all commercial launches in the near future.
The linchpin for that is their reusability means they can offer faster launch slots to companies willing to fly on a booster that's already been around the block. The financial benefit of jumping to the front of the line on what might be a riskier launch is enormous, so virtually everyone takes the offer when presented it.

So are you honestly trying to say the internals are "the same tech"? That's as stupid as saying
>We had quaternions and Rodrigues parameters in the 1800's, why has flight control and modeling stalled out?

There's no reason you couldn't develop NERVA for reuse. In fact, I doubt you want to have single-use in mind for a first stage equipped with nuclear engines.

The point remains, the global launch markef is finite and filled with government launches locked into national launchers. Which means SpaceX will not take half of global launched any time soon as Russian military sats or Chinese government payloads won’t be launched on SpaceX rockets.

In any event, my point in my OP remains, why is the US taxpayer paying 2bn to SpaceX to develop a crew capable space capsule and 3.5bn to Boeing for their crew capable space capsule (while also paying 20bn for the Orion crew space capsules...) while paying close to 0 to other orbital launch system research such as air breathing ram jet tech or orbital airship tech?

I rather have a billion spent on tech that could result in sustainable orbital spaceflight even if that tech is uncertain to work out than billions on old tech which we know won’t help us advance as a people.