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NASA’s Artemis II Crew Launches to the Moon (Official Broadcast) (plus.nasa.gov)
submitted 7 months ago by to c/science@lemmy.world
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[–] 14 points 7 months ago (15 children)

That is simply never going to happen. The hardware to get 4 people to the moon and back costs about 5 billion dollars, to say nothing of the additional supporting costs.

The cheapest you could take a round-trip to Antarctica is somewhere in the neighborhood of $6,000..

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  • [–] 12 points 7 months ago (5 children)

    Right now, yes. If it was as commoditized as putting satellites into orbit is now, the price would be orders of magnitude lower.

    But yeah the investment to get to that point would be immense and take decades.

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  • [–] -4 points 7 months ago (4 children)

    Why. Why do we need to go to the moon. To build a Subway Sandwich shop?

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  • [–] 6 points 7 months ago

    It takes a lot less to launch a rocket from the lunar surface to anywhere in the solar system than from earth. If we ever get manufacturing working on or around the moon then it opens up a lot of possibilities for larger payloads. This means we can send more further and it makes the whole process cheaper.

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  • [–] 13 points 7 months ago (7 children)

    It's expensive, but not nearly that expensive. Starship has charged $90m so far. That's including a healthy profit I'm sure. SLS is ridiculous in how much it's cost. It's not a good comparison for how much it would cost if this were a normal occurrence.

    Starship is certainly far more expensive than it would be too, because there's a lot of technology that has to be developed, and that R&D has to be paid for. The more launches there are, the more spread out that cost becomes, and the cheaper a launch costs.

    That's the unmanned cost, but manned should be similar eventually, and potentially cheaper if it's common enough. It's a crew size of 2-4, so it's 22.5m/person. Still far more than Antarctica, but essentially zero compared to the cost you gave.

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  • [–] 4 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    If starship works, it’ll be great.

    Right now starship has delivered precisely 0 grams of anything to any orbital level.

    The commercial moon trip that was planned for that Chinese billionaire was canceled due to a lack of confidence and nasa has reopened the lunar lander contract because of how far behind starship is.

    The entire design paradigm of starship as a lunar vehicle is also highly dubious. Requiring double digit launches of refueling tankers, that have never been tested or demonstrated as possible, just to get to the moon is not exactly cheap or low risk. If we’re generous and say that launching anything to LEO on starship costs the same as a falcon 9 launch(74 million), and it will take the 16 refueling launches to get to the moon that NASA conservatively estimates, and there’s no boil off of fuel between refueling launches or scheduling delays requiring extra launches due to boil off, then the total cost of a moon mission with starship is now 1.18 billion dollars. The SLS, Frankenstein creation that it is, costs roughly 2.4 billion for a launch. SLS is double the cost on paper, yes. However there is a few massive points in its favor: it has flown twice without blowing up unexpectedly, it does not require over a dozen launches of other rockets to do its only job, and it has actually delivered a payload to the moon. Starship right now can claim none of these things.

    Even if starship just becomes a heavy launch to LEO vehicles, it currently has no way to deploy any meaningful cargo to Leo besides fucking starlink satellites. So it can’t even be used to construct the lunar gateway or an orbital tug.

    Please stop huffing Elon’s vaporware.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

    I had assumed the propellant would be a single additional launch, but this Wikipedia article says 10. $1B+ to leave LEO definitely makes the narrative that Starship is going to revolutionize space travel sound like a load of bullshit, unless there are realistic plans I am not aware of to reduce the number of launches significantly.

    Edit:

    This article has more details. It takes 7.5 tanker launches to fill a Starship, but Elon insists 4 should be enough for the Moon, whereas NASA estimates up to 16 due to boil off.

    It really sounds like Elon has been overselling the value of Starship, but the saddest part is that other reusable rockets in development will likely have the same problem.

    Edit 2:

    Even if starship just becomes a heavy launch to LEO vehicles

    This seems plausible, whereas Starship shuttling between Earth and Mars to “build a colony” does not. More like Starship is a shuttle to LEO and then something like the Hermes spacecraft in The Martian that remains in space and uses ion drive would be what actually transfers humans to Mars orbit, with perhaps Starship also doing the shuttling between the surface and low orbit. It seems we are a really long way off from what The Martian depicts, though it’s possible the first human may step foot on Mars in the next couple decades.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago

    Starship has charged $90m so far. That's including a healthy profit I'm sure.

    SpaceX has a contract with Voyager Technologies for a 2029 launch at $90m. I would read that in the opposite direction as you, where you assume that it's costing SpaceX less than what they're charging. That's far enough away that I'm not sure they're going to be able to keep that price or be certain that they can actually launch on time or make a profit at that price.

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  • [–] 0 points 7 months ago (3 children)

    Starship barely makes orbit.

    Holy shit the techbro Kool aid is potent here.

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  • [–] 8 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    While I dislike the "techbro god" owner of SpaceX as much as the next guy, completely dismissing what they're doing is dumb af.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago

    I don't like the guy. I'm just pointing out the expected costs. I don't care what the current status of the ship is. The point is the price that was given was ridiculous compared to what it even should be now, let alone an alternate version where it's common.

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