An interview with Robert Zubrin about Mars

 A fascinating interview with Robert Zubrin.  The most interesting bits are about how frontier societies drive technological innovation.  Also, about why the USA is English-speaking not French (I didn't see that coming!)

Moxie makes oxygen on Mars

From The Guardian

An instrument the size of a lunchbox has been successfully generating breathable oxygen on Mars, doing the work of a small tree.

Since February last year the Mars oxygen in-situ resource utilisation experiment, or Moxie, has been successfully making oxygen from the red planet’s carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere.

Researchers suggest a scaled-up version of Moxie could be sent to Mars, to continuously produce oxygen at the rate of several hundred trees, ahead of humans going to the planet.

Moxie touched down on the Martian surface as part of NASA’s Perseverance rover mission.

In a study researchers report that by the end of 2021 Moxie was able to produce oxygen on seven experimental runs, in a variety of atmospheric conditions, including during the day and night, and through different Martian seasons.

In each run it reached its goal of producing 6g of oxygen per hour – similar to the rate of a modest tree on Earth.

It is hoped that at full capacity the system could generate enough oxygen to sustain humans once they arrive on Mars, and fuel a rocket to return humans to Earth.

Moxie deputy principal investigator Jeffrey Hoffman, a professor of the practice in Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, said: “This is the first demonstration of actually using resources on the surface of another planetary body, and transforming them chemically into something that would be useful for a human mission.”

The current version of the instrument is small by design in order to fit aboard the Perseverance rover, and is built to run for short periods. A full-scale oxygen factory would include larger units that would ideally run continuously.

So far, Moxie has shown that it can make oxygen at almost any time of the Martian day and year.

Michael Hecht, principal investigator of the Moxie mission at MIT’s Haystack Observatory, said: “The only thing we have not demonstrated is running at dawn or dusk, when the temperature is changing substantially.

“We do have an ace up our sleeve that will let us do that, and once we test that in the lab, we can reach that last milestone to show we can really run any time.”

If the system can operate successfully despite repeatedly turning on and off, this would suggest a full-scale system, designed to run continuously, could do so for thousands of hours.

Hoffman said: “To support a human mission to Mars, we have to bring a lot of stuff from Earth, like computers, spacesuits, and habitats.

“But dumb old oxygen? If you can make it there, go for it – you’re way ahead of the game.”

The findings are published in the journal Science Advances.

Since 'Moxie' is producing oxygen from carbon dioxide, could it be used to reduce CO2 in our own atmosphere? 

Micro nuclear reactors

I've already talked  about the small nuclear reactors NASA has developed for use in space and on Mars, called KRUSTY.  These will produce 1 kW of power, with the scaled-up version producing 10 kW.   I've also mentioned small modular reactors, here.

Ex-SpaceX engineers are developing a micro, portable nuclear reactor that can produce 1 MW of electricity, 100 times more than the scaled up version of NASA's KRUSTY nuclear reactor, designed to portable on the back of a lorry and with safety features allegedly making it much safer than the behemoths that catastrophically melted down at Chernobyl and Fukushima.  Since the company is still in the process of acquiring patents, there aren't many details.  

For me, one of the interesting aspects of this development is that SpaceX seems to have a division designing small nuclear reactors for use on Mars.  And on Starship?  No wonder SpaceX's latest video update about Starship shows it journeying to Mars without deploying solar panels!  

Using helium as a coolant certainly reduces the risk of explosions.  No mention of how nuclear waste is to be disposed of, though.

It's intriguing to see lots of private sector companies producing new designs for nuclear fission reactors.  The old super large designs seem to have got stuck in an expensive cul-de-sac.  Nuclear reactors will be very useful right here on Earth, if they can be made cheap enough and safe enough, as a complement to renewables in our electricity grids.  Lots of competing designs and companies might get us there quicker than large government bureaucracies, with both nuclear fission and fusion.

From New Atlas

California company Radiant has secured funding to develop a compact, portable, "low-cost" one-megawatt nuclear micro-reactor that fits in a shipping container, powers about 1,000 homes and uses a helium coolant instead of water.

Founded by ex-SpaceX engineers, who decided the Mars colony power sources they were researching would make a bigger impact closer to home, Radiant has pulled in US$1.2 million from angel investors to continue work on its reactors, which are specifically designed to be highly portable, quick to deploy and effective wherever they're deployed; remote communities and disaster areas are early targets.

The military is another key market here; a few of these could power an entire military base in a remote area for four to eight years before expending its "advanced particle fuel," eliminating not just the emissions of the current diesel generators, but also the need to constantly bring in trucks full of fuel for this purpose.

Those trucks will still have to run – up until the point where the military ditches diesel in all its vehicles – but they'll be much less frequent, reducing a significant risk for transport personnel.

Radiant says its fuel "does not melt down, and withstands higher temperatures when compared to traditional nuclear fuels." Using helium as the coolant "greatly reduces corrosion, boiling and contamination risks," and the company says it's received provisional patents for ideas it's developed around refueling the reactors and efficiently transporting heat out of the reactor core.

Radiant joins a number of companies now working on compact nuclear reactors, and a smaller number focusing specifically on portable units, which would include the floating barges proposed for mass-manufacture by Seaborg. It'll be a while before we see one up and running, but a clean, convenient, low-cost, long-life alternative to diesel generators would be very welcome.

 

Lake mead drops to record low

 Via Ty Buchanan

From EarthObservatory

But, guys, hey ..... there's no such thing as climate change!  

Musk's comments on in-orbit refuelling of Starship

Starship continues to develop, and its design just keeps on being tweaked.  For flights to the Moon or to Mars, Starship will have to be refuelled in orbit.  When Starship (then the BFR) was first mooted by SpaceX decades ago, refuelling was going to be "belly-to-belly" as it were, with the tanker lying adjacent to the Starship to refuel.  Actually, that "decades ago" is just a dig at SLS, NASA's incredibly expensive and horribly delayed rocket which is supposed to get us to the Moon.  In fact, SpaceX started development of Starship, then called BFR, just 5 years ago, in 2016.  After the initial plans, SpaceX then switched to what is inelegantly described as "butt-to-butt" fuel transfers.  But experience has shown that this is too dangerous, with extraneous fuel lines next to rocket engines just too unsafe.  So we're back to "belly-to-belly" refuelling.

This all came out when Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos's pet project, chucked a wobbly about SpaceX being awarded  part of the Artemis Moon landing project.   This report is from Teslarati.

After a much-anticipated GAO denial of Blue Origin and Dynetics protests over NASA’s decision to solely award SpaceX a contract to turn Starship into a crewed Moon lander, an in-depth (but heavily redacted) document explaining that decision was released on August 10th.

Aside from ruthlessly tearing both companies’ protests limb from limb, the US Government Accountability Office’s decision also offered a surprising amount of insight into SpaceX’s HLS Starship proposal. One of those details in particular seemed to strike an irrational nerve in the online spaceflight community. Specifically, in its decision, GAO happened to reveal that SpaceX had proposed a mission profile that would require as many as 16 launches to fully fuel a Starship Lander and stage the spacecraft in an unusual lunar orbit.

After around 24 hours of chaos, confusion, and misplaced panic, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk finally weighed in on the GAO document’s moderately surprising indication that each Starship Moon landing would require sixteen SpaceX launches.

Confirming many expectations, SpaceX’s solution to sending an entire single-stage Starship to the Moon, landing it on the lunar surface, and returning it to a lunar orbit (and maybe even Earth) goes as follows.

First, SpaceX will launch a custom variant of Starship that was redacted in the GAO decision document but confirmed by NASA to be a propellant storage (or depot) ship last year. Second, after the depot Starship is in a stable orbit, SpaceX’s NASA HLS proposal reportedly states that the company would begin a series of 14 tanker launches spread over almost six months – each of which would dock with the depot and gradually fill its tanks.

Third, once the depot ship is topped off, the actual Starship Moon lander would launch, dock with the depot, and be fully fueled. Finally, the fueled lander would fire up its Raptor engines and head to the Moon, where it would enter a near-rectilinear halo orbit (NRHO) – a weird high-altitude, elliptical orbit only necessary because NASA’s Orion spacecraft and SLS rocket are too underpowered to reach a more normal, functional orbit around the Moon.

After reaching NRHO, Starship would dock with Orion (or vice versa), receive its Artemis astronauts, land on the Moon for several days, and launch back to NRHO to return those astronauts to Orion. After its main mission is complete, it remains to be seen if Starship will have enough propellant left over to return to some kind of Earth orbit, where it could potentially be refueled and reused on future missions to the lunar surface.

In response to GAO revealing that SpaceX proposed as many as 16 launches – including 14 refuelings – spaced ~12 days apart for every Starship Moon lander mission, Musk says that a need for “16 flights is extremely unlikely.” Instead, assuming each Starship tanker is able to deliver a full 150 tons of payload (propellant) into orbit after a few years of design maturation, Musk believes that it’s unlikely to take more than eight tanker launches to refuel the depot ship – or a total of ten launches including the depot and lander. 

[Musk added, in a tweet (how else): 

"Without flaps & heat shield, Starship is much lighter. Lunar landing legs don’t add much (1/6 gravity). May only need 1/2 full, ie 4 tanker flights.  However, even if it were 16 flights with docking, this is not a problem. SpaceX did more than 16 orbital flights in first half of 2021 & has docked with Station (much harder than docking with our own ship) over 20 times."]

But, as Musk notes, so long as Starship gets anywhere close to its design objectives, it would be a non-issue even if each Starship Moon lander mission somehow required 16 launches. A step further, assuming that SpaceX proposed 16 launches per mission out of an abundance of conservatism, it’s fair to assume that a 12-day gap between tanker launches is also an extremely conservative worst-case scenario. Per Musk and SpaceX, Starship’s design goals call for multiple reuses of ships and boosters per day. Even if SpaceX falls a full magnitude short of those ambitious goals, Starship tankers should feasibly be able to launch every few days or maybe every week.

But thanks to SpaceX’s relatively conservative proposal, the company now knows that NASA is more than happy with Starship even if it falls something like 50% short of its payload performance goals and two magnitudes short of its reusability goals.

 

Starship refuelling in orbit.
Render by Erc X

As an aide-mémoire, here is my Mars timetable.

Oceans primed for peak hurricane season

 From NASA's Earth Observatory

Heading into the peak of hurricane season, the seas around North and Central America are primed to fuel storm development and intensification in the Atlantic and Eastern Pacific. While sea surface temperatures are just one factor influencing the development of hurricanes, they are a fair predictor of the readiness of the ocean to sustain them.

The map above shows sea surface temperatures (SSTs) as measured on August 11, 2021, by a combination of satellite and ocean instruments. Meteorologists generally agree that SSTs above 27.8° Celsius (82° Fahrenheit) intensify and sustain hurricanes, cyclones, and typhoons. Surface waters above that threshold are represented in red on the map. Note the finger of warm water—the Gulf Stream—running parallel to the U.S. East Coast.

The data for the map come from the Multiscale Ultrahigh Resolution sea surface temperature analysis, produced at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. It is based on observations from several satellite instruments, including the NASA Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer-EOS (AMSRE), the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on the NASA Aqua and Terra platforms, the U.S. Navy microwave WindSat radiometer, the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) on several NOAA satellites, and from in situ observations from NOAA.

The 2021 hurricane season started quickly. In May, Tropical Storm Andres became the earliest named storm—winds of 39 miles per hour or greater—on record in the Eastern Pacific. To date, eleven tropical storms have developed in the basin, including four hurricanes.

In the Atlantic, five named storms formed between May 19 and July 9, with Hurricane Elsa becoming the earliest fifth named storm on record. After Elsa, the Atlantic remained quiet until Tropical Storm Fred emerged on August 11. The storm lost some strength while passing near Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba, but it is forecasted to regain tropical storm force before making landfall in Florida over the weekend. Forecasters warned citizens about the potential for heavy rainfall.

In its mid-season update on August 4, scientists from the NOAA Climate Prediction Center forecasted 15 to 21 named storms in the Atlantic in 2021, including 7 to 10 hurricanes, of which 3 to 5 could become major hurricanes. They noted: “Atlantic sea surface temperatures are not expected to be as warm as they were during the record-breaking 2020 season; however, reduced vertical wind shear and an enhanced west Africa monsoon all contribute to the current conditions that can increase seasonal hurricane activity.”

SpaceX to save NASA billions

 From Teslerati

In a move that’s likely to save the US taxpayer several billion dollars over the next few years, NASA has carefully extricated a mission to [Europa,]one of Jupiter’s ocean moons, from the claws of its own Space Launch System (SLS) rocket.

Known as Europa Clipper, the six metric ton (~13,300 lb) spacecraft will instead launch on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket for less than $180M. Had Falcon Heavy not been ready or NASA shied away from the challenge of switching launch vehicles, sending the ~$4.25 billion orbiter to Jupiter could have easily added more than $3 billion to the mission’s total cost. Instead, Europa Clipper will be able to launch one or two years earlier than SLS would have been ready and at a cost that’s practically a rounding error relative to the alternative.

Measuring approximately 3100 km (~1940 mi) in diameter, Europa is approximately 10% smaller and 30% less massive than Earth’s Moon. Both are similar balls of rock with solid metallic cores. However, based on observations taken over decades by spacecraft and Earth-based telescopes, odds are good that Europa also has a vast liquid water ocean insulated by 10-30 km (6-20 mi) of ice so cold that it’s as hard as granite.

Scientists estimate that Europa’s saltwater ocean is dozens to 100+ km (~62 mi) deep, covers the moon’s entire surface, and holds more water than all of Earth’s oceans combined. Signs of a liquid ocean under Europa’s crust (and the crust of numerous other outer solar system moons, as it would turn out) were especially surprising because of the implication that those moons possessed vast heat sources. In the case of Europa, it’s believed that Jupiter’s immense gravitational pull and the moon’s close orbit are balanced in such a way that Europa is heated as those tidal forces violently stretch and squeeze its interior.

In an orbit 30% lower than Europa, tidal heating is so aggressive that the moon Io is littered with titanic volcanoes and lava lakes more than 200 km (~120 mi) across – so large that waves have been spotted on its surface with Earth-based telescopes. In short, because Europa appears to be in the right place to have enough – but not too much – tidal heating, it’s believed to be one of the best potential harbors of extraterrestrial life and Europa Clipper’s primary purpose is to pursue that potential astrobiological treasure trove.

Europa Clipper’s history is a truly bizarre one. Championed almost singlehandedly by fundamentalist Christian and former Republican Representative John Culberson, it’s almost certain that the mission would have never come together and never secured enough funding to proceed. Culberson’s singular goal: determine if humanity is (or is not) alone in the universe. If life can independently evolve twice in the same average solar system, the logic goes, it would practically guarantee that life will be omnipresent anywhere we look.

Culberson’s original vision was an orbiter (Clipper) that would effectively scout Europa for a lander that would follow just a few years later. Incredibly, he appears to have all but guaranteed that Europa Clipper will launch. However, he lost a reelection bid in 2018, casting the lander component into limbo before proper funding or commitments could be ascertained. It now seems likely that the future of Europa Lander will depend almost entirely on what Clipper does (or doesn’t) find.

Europa Clipper is now scheduled to launch on an expendable Falcon Heavy rocket no earlier than a two-week window set to open in October 2024. As part of the politicking to secure the billions of dollars needed to fund the mission, Culberson originally shackled Europa Clipper to NASA’s SLS rocket – now half a decade behind schedule and set to cost more than $23 billion before its first launch. However, it appears that SLS is so mismanaged and uncharacterized that even its infamously zealous, pork-motivated Congressional cheerleaders weren’t willing to put up a public fight to retain the SLS rocket’s only confirmed non-human payload.

Ultimately, on launch alone, Falcon Heavy’s Europa Clipper launch will likely save taxpayers more than $2 billion – the likely minimum cost of a single SLS Cargo launch. Due to issues with the rocket, Ars Technica also reports that Europa Clipper and SLS would have required at least $1 billion in modifications and upgrades to safely fly, meaning that choosing SpaceX will likely end up saving NASA more than $3 billion – equivalent to almost three-quarters of the entire Europa Clipper mission’s price tag.

Of course, by 2024 Starship will prolly be operating, but Falcon Heavy is proven technology, whereas Starship has yet to make it to orbit.

NASA chooses Starship for moon mission

 I suppose most of us are asking 'what took them so long?'  Though to be fair, it was possible until recently to wonder whether Starship would in fact work.  

From Teslarati

In one of the biggest NASA contracting surprises in years, the space agency has chosen SpaceX – and only SpaceX – to return humans to the surface of the Moon with its next-generation Starship rocket.

The Washington Post’s Christian Davenport broke the news a few hours before NASA’s scheduled announcement and teleconference, revealing that SpaceX beat out Dynetics and a Blue Origin-led “National Team” for a sole-source contract to build, launch, and land a custom version of Starship on the Moon for $2.89 billion. If that uncrewed testing is successful, SpaceX and Starship will be tasked with landing the first astronauts on the Moon in half a century as early as the in the mid-2020s.

While a Human Landing System (HLS) announcement was fully planned and expected to happen this month, virtually everyone following the process believed that NASA would continue to lean on the rationale behind selecting multiple providers for its Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) and Commercial Crew (CCP) programs. Having multiple distinct providers, spacecraft, and rockets available to accomplish the same tasks fundamentally insulates NASA (and the International Space Station that depends on those programs) from losing the ability to transport crew or cargo in the event that any one provider is delayed or suffers a major failure.

With a goal as complex as landing humans back on the Moon for the first time since the 1970s, redundancy and multiple distinct solutions would obviously be even more desirable. Entirely contrary to expectations, NASA instead announced that it had exclusively contracted with SpaceX alone for next phase of HLS development. Though SpaceX may have been the only competitor already testing something approximating real integrated flight hardware, NASA’s decision to sole-source HLS to Starship represents a significant gamble.

Simultaneously, though, the move is also extraordinarily pragmatic and indicates that one or several major decision-makers at NASA have taken less positive lessons from its commercial cargo and crew programs to heart. Crucially, over the first several years of the Commercial Crew Program (CCP), Congress systematically underfunded the development of two commercial crew spacecraft – one from Boeing and the other from SpaceX. As a direct result, the launch debuts of both spacecraft were delayed by several years, forcing NASA to continue relying on Russian Soyuz launches well into the 2020s to get its astronauts to the ISS.

Additionally, SpaceX – an unequivocal underdog and newbie next to Boeing in the mid-2010s – has drastically outperformed its traditional aerospace counterpart, beating Boeing to the punch and launching astronauts first. Boeing’s Starliner is now at least 18 months behind Crew Dragon despite costing almost 60% more.

2020 temperature tied record

 From ClimateCrocks

Temperatures last year tied the modern record, climate scientists reported today. Overall, the planet was about 1.25°C warmer than in preindustrial times, according to jointly reported assessments from NASA, the U.K. Met Office, and other institutions.

The annual update of global surface temperatures—an average of readings from thousands of weather stations and ocean probes—shows 2020 essentially tied records set in 2016. But the years were nothing alike. Temperatures in 2016 were boosted by a strong El Niño, a weather pattern that warms the globe by blocking the rise of cold deep waters in the eastern Pacific Ocean. Last year, however, the Pacific entered La Niña, which has a cooling effect. That La Niña didn’t provide more relief is an unwelcome surprise, says Nerilie Abram, a climate scientist at Australian National University. “It makes me worried about how quickly the global warming trend is growing.”

The past 6 years are the six warmest on record, but the warming of the atmosphere is unsteady because of its chaotic nature. The ocean, which absorbs more than 90% of the heat from global warming, displays a steadier trend, and here, too, 2020 was a record year. The upper levels of the ocean contained 20 zettajoules (1021joules) more heat than in 2019, and the rise was double the typical annual increase, scientists reported yesterday in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences. The subtropical Atlantic Ocean was particularly hot, fueling a record outbreak of hurricanes, says Lijing Cheng, a climate scientist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’s Institute of Atmospheric Physics who led the work.

This heat, monitored down to 2000 meters by a fleet of 4000 robotic probes, is spreading deeper into the ocean while also migrating toward the poles. An extreme heat wave struck the northern Pacific, killing marine life. For the first time, warm Atlantic waters were seen penetrating into the Arctic Ocean, melting sea ice from below and driving its extent nearly to a record low. The warming ocean and melting ice sheets are raising sea levels by 4.8 millimeters per year, and the rate is accelerating.

[Read more here]

Starship's Moon variant

When Elon Musk introduced the whole idea of a giant rocket capable of reaching Mars, the Moon, and most places in the solar system, he pointed out that it would simplify matters as well as save money if SpaceX had just one rocket which would be able to do point-to-point suborbital flights on Earth as well as journeys to Mars, the Moon and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn.  Almost immediately, this idealistic proposition had to be amended: there were going to be passenger (crew), fuel and cargo version of the BFS/Starship.  But the basic design would be the same.

At the same time, NASA expressed no interest in Starship, even though if Musk's cost predictions were correct, it would cost a hundredth of SLS, the NASA flagship rocket, which has been 20 years in the making, still hasn't flown, and will cost $1.5-$2.5 billion per launch.  That's partly politics—Congress has voted the money for the SLS because several states benefit from that expenditure, and it won't be voting money for Starship precisely because it will cost so much less.  But it's also prudence.  What if Starship doesn't work?  So to keep its options open, NASA has supported several suppliers for each of its main human space flight initiatives, and has pretended not to notice Starship.  Which is quite hard, really.

Now a variant of the Starship has been accepted as a candidate for ferrying astronauts from the lunar orbiter to the surface of the Moon as part of NASA's Artemis mission.  Starship is way too large for this.  Frankly, Starship could do the whole mission from the surface of Earth to the surface of the Moon and back, at a fraction of the cost.  But this way, NASA gets a look-in at Starship's development in the hope that it can slip Starship into place as a substitute for SLS, and SpaceX gets funding for Starship's development.  So we're getting a fourth variant of Starship, one that can land on the Moon, but can't land on Earth, as it will have no "fins".  Hmm.

Here's Teslarati's take on this:

SpaceX’s newly-announced Moon Starship is a fairly radical departure from the Mars-focused, fully-reusable vehicle the company has been pursuing for years. Unintuitively, that may be the perfect half-step towards truly reusable Mars rockets.

With a substantial amount of money [$135 million—Musk has said that each Starship could cost as little as $5 million, excluding development costs]now on the table for SpaceX to begin initial work on its Moon Starship, it’s worth analyzing just how different it is from the Starship the company is working on today.

SpaceX appears to have returned to a fully-painted vehicle for unknown reasons. [The] white paint is likely motivated by the fact that proposed NASA Moon landers must  be able to sit on the surface of the Moon after landing for at least several days, with longer stays being even better. For Starship, this means that the vehicle must likely be able to keep its cryogenic liquid methane and oxygen propellant from warming up and turning into gas, thus preventing it from igniting its main Raptor engines. White paint is at least a bit more reflective (and thus insulating) compared to Starship’s shiny steel hull but it could also hint at the use of more extensive insulation then sealed off with paint.

While visible in a render of the craft after landing on the Moon, a separate render just before touchdown fully revealed not only the addition of large vacuum-optimized retrothrusters – but a major strategic shift in how Lunar Starship will attempt to land on the Moon.

It appears that SpaceX does not plan on landing Lunar Starship on the Moon under the power of its main Raptor engines. Instead, three triple-thruster clusters – likely relying on the same methane and oxygen propellant as Raptor – will fire up shortly before touchdown to gently land Starship on the Moon. This approach has significant benefits: the Moon’s gravity is so low (~1/6th of Earth’s) that using even just one engine as powerful as Raptor to land would be incredibly difficult – a single engine could theoretically lift a fully-fueled Starship thanks to low lunar gravity.

Additionally, powerful Raptor engines – even if they could be used to land – would likely dig huge craters in the Moon’s powder-like surface during a landing burn, making it more difficult astronauts to leave the ship to explore their surroundings. However, it also means that SpaceX must design and certify an entirely new kind of vacuum-optimized rocket engine – likely using gas propellant and fed by high-pressure tanks – for an extremely critical part of operations.
 Beyond new thrusters, a radically different landing strategy, and a painted (and possibly insulated) steel hull, Lunar Starship also features what looks like the tip of a Crew Dragon spacecraft in place of its nose, likely including Draco thrusters and a docking port. SpaceX has also copied the concept of Crew Dragon’s trunk section, installing a curved solar array that wraps around a large portion of Starship’s conical nose. Lunar Starship also offers what looks like the first official glimpse into a new style of Starship landing legs, prototypes of which are already installed on Starship SN4.

Additionally, SpaceX has chosen to entirely exclude a windward heat shield from Lunar Starship, as NASA’s plan is (rather painfully) to launch astronauts to the Moon with SLS and carry them to lunar orbit and back to Earth on Orion. Starship also appears to be missing its complex and extensive habitation module and massive gallery window. All that absent hardware is almost certainly meant to dramatically simplify Starship to the point that even NASA would consider funding its development. Incredibly, that strategy appears to have worked and it’s possible that we could see Lunar Starships flying to the Moon as early as 2022.

While a stop at the Moon is decidedly one-way and requires a bit of a one-off Starship variant, what SpaceX has really done is found a way to get NASA to help fund the development of its fully-reusable next-generation launch system. Even if NASA’s Artemis program dies, flounders, or goes nowhere, SpaceX will likely still benefit significantly, much in the same way that NASA’s assistance developing Cargo Dragon and Falcon 9 was a huge boon for the company.

[Read more here.  Lightly edited for clarity]

New vs old Starship concepts
Note three oval openings of the triple thrusters half way up the body,
as well as the cargo bay and the lift.

Starship landing on the Moon using three sets of triple thrusters,
high up on the body.

Finally: an uneventful Starship test!

Pressure test SN2
Source: Boca Chica Gal/NASA Space Flight via Teslarati

We all know Musk's methods by now:  test beyond breaking point, then improve, and test again, iteratively, until you get something that works.  Well, the latest Starship pressure test was 100% successful.  In fact, even better, the pressure test was conducted while the methalox tanks were being pushed up by a hydraulic jack to simulate the pressure caused by firing one raptor engine, thus showing it can handle the double stresses of rocket launch and overpressurised tanks.

Teslarati comments:

According to Elon Musk, SpaceX has successfully completed its latest Starship prototype test in a uniquely uneventful fashion, great news for the next-generation rocket’s next steps and first flight tests.

The SpaceX CEO revealed the news some 12 hours after the company wrapped up the Starship tank test at its Boca Chica, Texas facilities. Another excellent example of SpaceX’s preferred process of agile development, the test followed just nine days after the Starship SN01 prototype’s first cryogenic test unexpectedly unearthed a design flaw. SpaceX analyzed the results of Starship SN01’s unintentional launch debut and drew up plans to rapidly repurpose a Starship tank initially destined for the SN02 prototype.

By using existing hardware to test an upgraded iteration of the part that destroyed Starship SN01, SpaceX has now effectively retired the risk posed by that prior failure less than two weeks after it occurred. Elon Musk specifically noted that the former SN02 engine section “passed cryo pressure & engine thrust loads,” confirming that there was more to the exceptionally uneventful evening of March 8th than met the eye. While putting on much less of a show for local observers, this particular boring test is a great sign for the next few steps of SpaceX’s Starship development program.

Musk’s description of the test suggests that SpaceX’s intention with the SN02 test tank – built in just two weeks – was to stress it up to (and likely beyond) the pressures and mechanical stresses Starship engine sections will need to survive in flight. In simpler terms, they likely tried to burst the tank by pressurizing it with liquid nitrogen, a supercool cryogenic fluid. It’s unclear exactly how far SpaceX pushed the tank, but it’s safe to say that it went at least as high as past test tanks, meaning 7-8.5 bar or 100-125 psi. At a bare minimum, a test that failed to reach Starship’s minimum flight pressure of 6 bar (90 psi) would be of dubious value for the actual orbital ship.

A step further, SpaceX installed a hydraulic jack underneath the test tank in a bid to simulate the stresses it would experience with a single Raptor engine. Capable of producing approximately 150-200 tons (1500-2000 kN) of thrust, even Raptor is relatively minor compared to the Starship tank’s likely ~500 metric ton (1.1 million lb) mass. Still, the fact that the SN02 test tank survived the combination of a highly pressurized tank and the simulated thrust of a Raptor engine suggests that SpaceX is now ready for a more successful repeat of Starship SN01 testing.

[Read more here]

Just a reminder: SN2's tank and hull structure was constructed in just 9 days.  SpaceX is obviously rapidly building up to its interim target of one Starship per week.  Responding to a question on Twitter, "What's the path forward now? Static fire with SN3 and hop with SN4?," Musk replied, "Static fire & short flights with SN3, longer flights with SN4, but spooling up the whole Starship/Raptor production line is really what matters."  A production line which aims to produce 50 Starships a year at a cost of just $5 million each.  The low cost is only possible through using an assembly line.

What will all those Starships be used for?   Originally, when Starship (then the BFS) was first proposed, Musk said that 6 ships would be needed for the first expedition to Mars.  But if the new stainless steel Starship costs just $5 million, about one tenth of the cost of a carbon-fibre composite BFS, 60 ships could be sent for the same cost (there's additional fuel cost, but it is small in the context of the capital costs.)  Even if these Starships are just used once, to fly to Mars, the total capital cost would be just $250 million.  Of course, there will also be the Super Heavy first stages, but they will be fully re-usable, so fewer of them will be needed.  (NASA's current plans to get to Mars estimate cost at $100 BILLION.  For 5 people.)

In addition, there is the point-to-point market for suborbital travel on Earth.  Most places on Earth will be about an hour apart by suborbital SpaceX Starship shuttle.  Since spaceports won't be built close to cities, because of the noise and fears about rocket ship safety, the city-centre to city-centre trips will take, say, three or four hours.  But it currently takes 14 hours to fly from New York to Beijing, 22 hours to fly to Sydney (the Australian one, not the Canadian!)   There's surely a huge market for intercontinental shuttle flights.

But wait!  Those are not all the potential markets.  Cheap launch to LEO (low Earth orbit) will mean for more space activity.  It used to cost $22,000 to lift  a single kilogram into LEO.  With the Starship/Super Heavy combo, that cost will fall to $20/kg, or lower.  Space tourism will become a thing.   And the cost won't be prohibitive.  Lifting a 100 kg person with 100 kg of food/luggage into orbit will cost just $4000.  Even with a 100% profit margin, that's still withing the range of anyone who now pays for intercontinental business class flights.  There will be millions who would like to take a "spacecation".  There will be rotating space stations for longer stays, financially feasible because of the low cost of lifting material into orbit.  And such low launch costs mean that a Moon base, or many Moon bases, will happen too.  Oh, and don't forget Starlink, SpaceX's global high speed internet service.

Just as after WW2, when air travel plunged in cost and rose in quality, leading to an explosion of passenger air traffic, so will space travel when Starship is operating.  Starship will make its own market.  Every one of the Starships SpaceX produces will be needed.   In fact, there prolly won't be enough of them!

Will SpaceX go bankrupt?

Starship Mk1 at Boca Chica, next to SpaceX's first rocket, the Falcon 1

Suppose, just suppose, the new stainless steel Starship doesn't work.  Maybe it  breaks up on re-entry, because it's a monocoque construction and needs interior ribs.  Maybe putting ribs in it will make it too heavy.  Maybe the welded joins aren't strong enough to withstand the pressure differential between the fuel tanks and space.  Maybe, it's a ship which is going into production long before it's needed.  (Though, frankly, I think, if it works, it will leads to a massive increase in space launches, because it'll be so cheap.)  Maybe the heat shield tiles peel off like they did on the Space Shuttle.  Maybe switching to stainless steel from carbon fibre composite was a serious mistake and SpaceX will have to start from scratch again.

Now I'm not saying I believe all this.  But just suppose Starship is a failure. What would happen to SpaceX?  Well, Musk is on record as saying that SpaceX is devoting less than 5% of its resources to Starship/Super Heavy.  Its Falcon 9 launches are profitable.  Thanks to re-usability, it could cut its charges and still make a profit.  It would survive.  It would be a bitter disappointment to SpaceX and to Musk and to all us Mars tragics, but SpaceX isn't betting the company on Starship.  In fact, because stainless steel is so much cheaper than carbon fibre, to the extent that perhaps Starship could be built for under $10 million, it was a bigger bet before. 

So that's the downside: less than the cost of a single Falcon 9 ($60 million) wasted if Starship fails.

The upside is that Starship works. 

In the pictures from Boca Chica, Starship looks like something out of a SF story.  But the first planes built weren't the smooth, shiny monsters they are today.  You could see where the aluminium had been beaten and nailed into shape.  You could see the rivets.  Yet aircraft went from things covered with painted canvas to the Airbus A380 or the Boeing 787, from contraptions that were dangerous and expensive to safe and cheap.  The chances are that Starship will work.  My doubts about the monocoque construction are the doubts of a non-engineer.  Musk and his team of engineers know what they're doing.  The proof of that is Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, Dragon and (shortly) Crew Dragon.

The other risk is that there is no market, that this mammoth machine is just too grand for the limited demand for launches.  But the demand for launches is limited by cost.  If the cost of lifting a tonne to LEO (low Earth orbit) falls one hundred fold, as it will if Starship is successful, the demand will explode.  If nothing else, Starship will be able to take people up into orbit for a week's "spacecation", and do it profitably.  A bit of a come down from starting a Mars colony, but nevertheless, survival.

And if Starship is safe, and works, and is re-usable, it will be irresistibly cheap to NASA and ESA and anybody who wants to get to Mars and the Moon.  NASA/ESA/Roscosmos will simply buy berths and cargo space on Starship to start their own national bases on the Moon and Mars.  The first bases will be scientific, but they will develop into refuelling stations, to fuel the ships that will travel to mine the asteroids.  There will be space stations orbiting around Mars, and ships heading out to or back from the asteroid belt will refuel there.  There will be space stations orbiting the Earth, and space manufacturing will start. 

The upside is huge.  Right now, Musk says that SpaceX will just build the ships to get us to Mars and the Moon.  After that, it's up to everyone else to get things working.  But SpaceX will have improved or developed technologies such as life support systems, food growing, extracting CO2 from the air (which will work just as well here as on Mars, and which is desperately needed on Earth), spacesuits, Martian/Lunar powerplants.  These will be sellable.  And the logic of gravity wells suggests that the Mars-Earth spaceships will be built in orbit, docked at a space station, then will travel from Mars to Earth and back without ever entering an atmosphere.  The Starship shuttle will lift passengers and cargo and fuel from Earth or Mars to the space stations, and then the SpaceX spaceliner will carry passengers in luxury from the space stations orbiting round one world to space stations orbiting the other.  In all these endeavours, SpaceX will be the market leader.  It will have learnt how to build in space, to work in space, to travel across space, and that will be hugely profitable.

So there it is.  SpaceX isn't betting the shop, as Tesla did with the Model 3.  For just 5% of its resources, it is building the base for a massive expansion of space-related business over the next 20 years.  That seems like excellent odds.  SpaceX won't go bankrupt, it'll thrive.

Living on Mars -- III

Mars with and without a dust storm

I talked here about the problems of living on Mars (temperature, air pressure, UV radiation, cosmic rays, toxic "soil") and about a solution to some of those problems (silicon aerogel, to raise temperatures and reduce UV radiation).  Now we come to the next big issue: energy.

With an glass/silicon aerogel/perspex dome cover, domes on Mars (at least between latitudes 40 N and S)  would be passively heated.  But it is very likely that heating will be required in winter, especially in the southern winter, when Mars is at its furthest from the sun (Mars has a more eccentric orbit than Earth).

That won't be the only need for energy by the first settlers, though.  A big need will be to manufacture fuel for return trips to Earth.   This will involve splitting water mined on Mars into hydrogen and oxygen, then harvesting CO₂ from the atmosphere.  A mixture of the CO₂ and H₂ is then passed at pressure and high temperature over a catalyst and this process (called the Sabatier process or reaction) produces methane.  More competent mathematicians than I have calculated that this will need 17MWh of electricity per tonne of fuel.  [But see below for an update—Robert Zubrin, the scientist who originally suggested propellant manufacture on Mars, has calculated it at 12 MWh/tonne.  About 70% my original information] Let's say each Starship requires 1100 tonnes or so of fuel (the Mars Colonial Transporter, the bigger first version of Starship, needed that), and there are 600 days between landing and relaunch.  That will require 31 MWh [22 on Zubrin's figures] of electricity per day, just to refuel a single Starship.

Average electricity demand in the US is around 12,000 kWh/person/year.  Assuming usage on Mars will be the same, for a colony of 100, that would mean 3.3 MWh of electricity per day.  Only, usage is likely to be higher on Mars than Earth.  If we use the higher consumption data for cold places on Earth (50,000 kWh/person/year for Iceland, 35,000 for Lichtenstein, 24,000 for Norway, 15,000 for Canada and Finland) then we're talking perhaps 10 MWh/day for the whole colony.   We will need electricity to heat domes, to control the air inside the domes (removing CO2 for example), to run rovers, to grow food, to light domes, etc.  So we'll need total output of 44 MWh [32 on Zubrin's calcs] per day—three-quarters of that for fuel production.

So where is this electricity going to come from?

Let's start with nuclear.   It's out of the question to build a large-scale nuclear reactor on Mars.  But NASA has been working on a smaller, simpler, safer reactor, designed specifically for use on spacecraft and on Mars and the Moon.  It's called KRUSTY (Kilopower Reactor Using Stirling Technology), and here's a video which gives a brief explanation of it.  A reactor 10 times larger is planned.  This will produce 10kW of electricity,  will weigh 1500 kg and will contain 44 kg of  U-235.  So each day, one of these reactors would produce 245 kWh of output.  We'd need 180 [130 on Zubrin's data] of the 10 kW kilopower reactors to produce enough electricity for the colony as well as refuelling one Starship.  They'd weigh 270 tonnes [195 tonnes Zubrin].  Just delivering them to Mars would require 3 Starships [2, Zubrin], assuming on current plans 100 tonnes of cargo per ship.

OK, what about wind?  You'd think that with the air pressure on Mars, just 0.6% of Earth's, wind turbines would be useless.  This informative video from Scott Manley shows how wind turbines on Mars could actually work quite well, despite the low atmospheric pressure.  For a start, don't confuse air pressure with air density.  Now on Earth, these two are related.  However, the air on Mars is denser than on Earth at the same pressure because it's 95% CO₂ and because it's much much colder.  This boosts the impact of air density on the output of a wind turbine by about 100% relative to Earth.

Also, average wind speeds on Mars at the Viking 2 lander site were 15 mph (just under 7 metres/second).  In the US, average wind speeds are between 6 and 12 mph, but of course, wind turbines tend to be sited where winds are stronger.  So, back-of the-envelope, 50% of Earth's wind capacity.   Small wind turbines will weigh something like 300kg, but more productive wind turbines are proportionately less heavy, because the power produced is proportional to the square of the blade radius. Let's assume one with a 10 m rotor diameter, twice the size of the rotors discussed in the link.  This will increase the electricity output four fold, but will weigh, say, 600 kgs.   Such a wind  turbine would produce half (on average) of a 10 kW Kilopower reactor at 1/3rd the weight, so we'd need two Starships to provide all the wind turbines you'd need for your  colony on Mars plus fuel production for the return home.  But—and this is key—it will be easy to manufacture small wind turbines on Mars, unlike (at least for the first decade) nuclear and solar generators.

Just as on Earth, the wind won't blow all the time, so you'll need complementary power source—solar.  Thin-film solar is less efficient than conventional solar cells, but they're 100 times lighter, and can be rolled up for transport.  Because Mars is further from the sun than Earth, solar panels there will be 40% less productive than on Earth.  At the equator on Earth (Singapore) 10 kW of solar panels will produce 12,600 kWh per year, or 34.5 kWh/day.  Reduce that by 60% at the Martian equator, and output of 10 kW of conventional solar panels would be 14 kWh/day per 10 kW of panels.  You'd need 32000 kW [23000, Zubrin] of panels.  One kW of solar panels would cover 2.75 metres.  So you'd need 12,000 square metres of panels on Mars to power the colony.  And if you use thin-film solar, some 25% more.  15,000 square metres.  Imagine a metre-wide strip of thin-film panel.  You'd need 15,000 metres in rolls.  15 kms!  It might be much the lightest generation source, but it will surely take up a lot of space inside a  Starship.  Solar output would be almost completely reduced to zero during Mars's periodic dust storms.  The good news is that wind speeds treble during the dust storms, so just as on Earth, wind is highly complementary to solar.

A couple of conclusions:

• It would make sense for all three generation sources to be used.  The nuclear would provide "baseload", i.e., for all the demand for electricity excluding fuel manufacture.  The first priority is maintaining life.   So the first colony would need 60 10 kW Kilopower reactors, enough to heat, grow food, light, air and water purification, rovers, etc.
• 120 10-metre diameter wind turbines, which would on average provide about the same power.  Any surplus energy would be used to make methane and oxygen.
• 15,000 kw of thin-film solar panels.  Again, the electricity they generate will go towards making methane.
• The cargo demands for all these generators, space and weight suggest to me that more than the planned 4 cargo ships will be needed to start colonisation.  Just for electricity generators, five Starships will be needed, one for nuclear, two each for wind and solar.  [Possibly just 3 using Zubrin's estimate]  It won't be a problem once the Mars-Earth trade route is established, because the cost of sending cargoes to Mars will fall precipitously.  As I guess here, the cost of delivering 1 tonne from Earth to Mars will prolly fall to $20K  by the third or fourth expedition, since re-usability is key.  It's only a serious problem for the first expedition. At each subsequent expedition, more wind turbines/solar panels/kilopower reactors will be brought.
• Reducing the number of people doesn't make much difference, since three-quarters of the electricity is needed for propellant manufacture.   The only way to cut the energy needs is to remove the option to return after 2 years, and stretch it out to 4 or 6 years.  Hmmm.  Or, more plausibly, we send ten Starships on the first crewed expedition, two crewed and eight cargo.  But only one will return to Earth (based on my calculations above), so re-usability is in effect reduced, raising costs.  It'll be different after the second expedition, because then there'll be enough electricity generation capacity to make fuel to send two Starships back, and the number will increase with each expedition to Mars.  
• On these numbers, it will take 10 expeditions of 10 Starships at a time for enough fuel to be available to send them all home.   That's 20 years.  
• Even if some of the Starships are in effect not re-usable (because there isn't enough propellant to fly them back to Earth), the cost will still be far below NASA's estimate of $150 billion for a crew of 5.  At $100 million per Starship**, 10 Starships to get the colony started would cost $1 billion, even if they were never used again—and they'd provide shelter to the first colonists while ground-based shelter was built.  Thus the cost will be $1 billion initially, then $500 million per year (Mars is in opposition to Earth only every 2 years)
• If Starship works, NASA will surely ditch SLS and use the $1.5-$2 billion per launch, never mind the $10 billion plus development cost, to send 200 people every 2 years for a permanent Mars base.

As usual, anyone who knows more about this than me, or who spots flaws in my calculations or analyses, is invited to comment below.

See also:

Living on Mars -- I

Living on Mars -- II

Update:

Robert Zubrin (the guy who first suggested we manufacture methane on Mars to reduce the crippling fuel burden involved in bringing it from the Earth) has estimated the energy cost of producing methane in this tweet:

In other words, my calculations are too pessimistic.  Reduce them by 30% to get a more accurate measure.  Just so y'all know.

—————————

**  [Update 27/04/2020] Musk has stated that he's aiming for a total capital cost per Starship of under $5 million, and a cost per launch below $2 million (including the cost of Super Heavy), with a payload of 150 tonnes.  Each launch will use $800 K of fuel.   To get Starship from LEO  to Mars will mean it has to be refuelled in orbit, and that will require 6 launches per flight to Mars, costing say $16 million per Starship to Mars, or $21 million if we add in the capital cost, since the first ships won't be returning.  That means the initial expedition of 10 ships will cost $210 million.  64 cents per inhabitant of the USA.  And a berth on a flight could cost as little as  $210K per ticket.  One tonne to Mars would cost $140 K.  Subsequent flights will be cheaper, because Starship will rapidly get more efficient as SpaceX learns while doing, just as Falcon 9 got better, and because some Starships will return.  Costs per passenger or per tonne are likely to halve over the first 10 years.   SLS, meanwhile, will cost $1.5-$2.5 BILLION per launch.

Convincing NASA

SpaceX's Starship on the Moon and Mars

Musk is interviewed by Jeffrey Kluger of Time Magazine.  It's well worth reading the whole interview, but I'll reproduce just part of it here.

JK: It could not have been easy getting a home-brew space mission and rocket company off the ground. How did you begin?

EM: I went to Russia a couple of times because I couldn’t afford the American rockets. They were too expensive. Russia was decommissioning a whole bunch of ICBMs [intercontinental ballistic missiles]. So in 2001 and early 2002 I went to Russia to try to buy some decommissioned ICBMs, which sounds crazy, but you know, they’re gonna throw them away anyway. But they kept raising the price on me.

I also came to realize that even if we doubled NASA’s budget, unless NASA had good options for rocket contractors, they would still not make progress ’cause it would just be more expendable rockets and we’d be at risk of a flags-and-footprints outcome for Mars, which is still better than not going there at all, but not as good as having a base on Mars, a base on the Moon, and ultimately a self sustaining city on Mars. And so I was like ‘okay I gotta try building a rocket company here.’

I thought this was almost certain to fail. In fact, I would not let anyone invest in the company in the beginning. Not because I thought it would turn out well, but because I thought it would fail.

JK: If the Elon Musk of 2019 could talk to Wernher Von Braun, Chris Craft, Gene Kranz and all of the heroes of the 1960s—if you had one piece of advice to give them whether it was technological, spiritual, salesmanship, long-term vision, what would it be?

EM: Well, Wernher Von Braun really knew what he was doing. His plans were for reusability. But those plans were stymied. It doesn’t matter how you skin the cat, you just have to get reusability done. It’s so insane the way rockets work today. It would be like if you got a plane and the way you get to your destination is you bail out with a parachute over the city in question and your plane crash lands somewhere. That’s how rockets work today—with the exception of Falcon 9. This is completely bonkers.

In order for us to be a multi-planet species we must solve full reusability of rockets. In the absence of that…. It would as though if in the old days if ships were not reusable. The cost of an ocean voyage would be tremendous. And you’d need to have a second ship towed behind you for the return journey. Or you can imagine if airplanes were not reusable, nobody would fly, you know, because airliner costs a couple hundred million dollars.

So this is why full and rapid reusability is the holy grail of access to space and is a fundamental step towards it—without which we cannot become a multi planet species. We cannot have a base on the moon or a city on Mars without full and rapid reusability. This is why we’ve been working so hard towards reusability at SpaceX.

JK: If you had to bet your house on it, when would you say the next boot prints show up on the moon?

Well, this is gonna sound pretty crazy, but I think we could land on the moon in less than two years. Certainly with an uncrewed vehicle I believe we could land on the moon in two years. So then maybe within a year or two of that we could be sending crew. I would say four years at the outside.

JK: And when you say, “We,” do you mean the U.S. or you mean SpaceX?

I’m not sure. If it were to take longer to convince NASA and the authorities that we can do it versus just doing it, then we might just do it. It may literally be easier to just land Starship on the moon than try to convince NASA that we can.

Obviously this is a decision that’s out of my hands. But the sheer amount of effort required to convince a large number of skeptical engineers at NASA that we can do it is very high. And not unreasonably so, ’cause they’re like, “Uh, come on. How could this possibly work?” The skepticism…you know, they’d have good reasons for it. But the for sure way to end the skepticism is just do it.

Instead of going with the Falcon rockets and Dragon spacecraft you’ve got and saying, “Let’s get ourselves to the moon in three years,” you’re going an even more ambitious step further with, the Super Heavy and Starship. Why do that? Why not say, “We can go now”?

Well, I think we could do a repeat of Apollo 11 and a few small missions—you know, send people back to the moon. But the remake’s never as good as the original.

We really wanna have a vehicle capable of sending enough payload to the moon or Mars, such that we could have a full lunar base. A permanently occupied lunar base would be incredible. Like we’ve got a permanently occupied base in Antarctica. And it’d be absolutely way cooler to have a science base on the moon.

So that’s why we’re trying to build it as fast as possible. You know, I think it’s generally a good idea for a company that is building technology to try to make its own products redundant as quickly as possible. It’s slightly discomforting because we’ve put so much work into Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy and Dragon. But actually the thing we should aspire to do is to render them redundant as quickly as possible. And we’ll put them in the museum.

[Read more here]

I don't doubt that when SpaceX gets Starship to work, i.e., to get to orbit and return from it without disintegrating, then it will start buying berths on the Moon and Mars expeditions.  It would be silly not to.  Musk has already pointed to how much cheaper the steel Starship will be compared to the one which was to be made of carbon fibre composites, and suggested that it will cost less to build than the Falcon 9.  And if it is re-usable as well, the cost of launching 1 kilo into LEO will drop 500 fold.  Probably the first crew and passengers going to Mars will all be engineers, doctors, scientists and technicians, and most of them will be from NASA. 

But until then, NASA will prolly not give SpaceX much dosh, because politics.  As Teslarati puts it:

Although minor progress has been made in the last six or so months, NASA headquarters – for the most part – still effectively operates as if SpaceX’s next-generation launch vehicle plans do not exist, all while the agency is seriously considering other similarly unproven rockets with years of development remaining. In light of this frustrating inconsistency, Musk has taken to publicly acknowledging that developing, building, and launching Starship completely internally may be an easier (and faster) fight to win than attempting to convince NASA to assist in Starship development or even just be willing to use it as a launch option.

NASA assistance or support could come in any number of forms, ranging from a cost-sharing development contract, a developmental launch contract like the US Air Force’s STP-2 Falcon Heavy mission, or something as basic as publicly expressing support for the SpaceX program and a willingness to launch NASA payloads on it down the road. For now, the closest SpaceX has gotten to public NASA interest in and acknowledgment of Starship is an official Starship render posted by the Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC).

In a sign of just how unengaged NASA is, the closest SpaceX’s Starship/Super Heavy vehicle has gotten to an acknowledgment from NASA headquarters is quite literally having an outdated BFR render subtly included in a few slideshows and documents published less than two months ago (late May 2019).

Ave atque vale, Opportunity

Opportunity rover's last message from Mars was data that equates to, my battery's low and it's getting dark.

Cartoon by HuntyDraws

See more moving tributes here.

2019 could be hottest year yet

From RobertScribbler:

2018 is now on track to be the fourth hottest year behind 2016 (#1), 2017 (#2), and 2015 (#3). As a result, every year of the past four years represents the hottest years ever recorded since consistent measurements began more than a century ago.

According to every major climate monitoring agency, the uncontested driver of this warming trend is an ongoing and growing fossil fuel based greenhouse gas emission. During 2018, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels rose to an average near 410 parts per million and carbon dioxide equivalents, a measure taking into account all greenhouse gasses, hit near 495 parts per million. This level of heat trapping gasses is unprecedented for at least the past 18 million years and will result in significant continued warming if they remain or keep rising.

Looking forward, an emerging El Nino combined with these high and rising levels of heat trapping gasses has the potential to produce record global temperatures during 2019. According to NOAA, sea surface temperatures in the Equatorial Pacific are presently in the El Nino range and the climate monitor is predicting a 90 percent chance of official El Nino formation during the winter of 2018 with a 60 percent chance for its continuance during spring.

El Nino is the hot end of the natural variability scale. When combined with rising atmospheric greenhouse gasses trapping more heat in the Earth system, it has tended to produce record hot or near record hot years. 2016 saw a very strong El Nino along with a major new global temperature milestone in the range of 1.21 C above 1880s averages. Though the 2019 El Nino is predicted to be milder than the 2016 event, high and rising greenhouse gasses means that a new record could be breached with temperatures likely to hit a range between 1.17 C and 1.3 C.

With present temperatures now well outside the typical range for the past 10,000 years following the last ice age, each additional 0.1 C of warming is likely to bring additional impacts on top of the more severe weather, worsening fires, rising seas, and ocean health impacts we have already seen. It is thus the case that the age of human caused climate change is upon us and that escalating climate action is needed to prevent a quick ramp to catastrophic events.

[Read more here]

I am reasonably confident that the continued cost declines in wind, solar, and batteries will make a switch to renewables so attractive in electricity generation and transport that we will start to rapidly green our economies from 2020 onwards.   But the opposition of fossil fuel interests to this shift will only intensify as the powerful market forces attracting us to renewables become more obvious and harder and harder to deny.  Even as the public accepts more and more that global temperatures are rising and that something must be done about it, politicians in the pay of fossil fuel will try hard to prevent real change, and the politics will only get more toxic.  We must not let our guard down, not until world carbon emissions reach zero.

Source :NASA GISS

P.S.:  I know the statisticians will disagree, but it does look to me as if the rise in global temperatures is accelerating.  If 2019 is a record year, that will only confirm this truly terrifying possibility.

3rd warmest July on record

From Stefan Rahmstorf:

Just out: NASA global temperature for July. It was the 3rd warmest July on record after 2016 and 2017. Since July is the warmest month of the year, the past July was one of the warmest recorded months ever. Likely among the warmest months since the Eemian 120,000 years ago.

Note how after the last major El Niño in 1998, global temperatures fell back almost to where they were in 1997.  After the latest El Niño in 2016, global temperatures have hardly declined.  Terrifying.