The most advanced private space company at the present time

Discussion in 'Tech Discussion' started by lord95, Aug 27, 2021.

  1. lord95

    lord95 Member

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    Nowadays, private space company really succeeded and manufactures pretty good technology and space vehicle. What do you think is the most advanced private space company ( except Space X ) at the present time?
     
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  2. MangoGuy

    MangoGuy Rambling Mango

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    There are different types. Stuff like SpaceX and Blue Origin look to develop their products fully internally and are thus advanced in that regards. There are others which are happy just making certain parts and modules and satellites.
     
  3. lnv

    lnv ✪ Well-Known Hypocrite

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    Uhm, isn't Orbital/Northrop and ULA pretty much the ONLY other space companies? (The ones who actually made it to space). So that isn't really much of a question at this point...

    Though if you include the small launchers, I guess that would add Rocket Lab?
     
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  4. lord95

    lord95 Member

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    I`d like to say a few words about Blue Origin. It is a great private space company. This company may be going slower than SpaceX, but its success to failure ratio is unmatched. Of course, it`s not so advanced like Space X and does not so well in the space exploration area but still, Blue Origin has great spacecrafts and concepts that worth attention.

    Also, I`d like to mention Boeing. This space aerospace manufactures engines for some spacecrafts and this company had to take part in the Artemis mission together with Space X and NASA
     
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  5. vancenick

    vancenick Well-Known Member

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    Pizza Hit cause the delivered pizza to the ISS lol jk they were only included in the launch did not send it themselves
     
  6. TamaSaga

    TamaSaga Well-Known Member

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    Whatever is owned by actual non-earth origin aliens. Did MIB name drop a few?
     
  7. Cutter Masterson

    Cutter Masterson Well-Known Super-Soldier

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    Sorry. I’m a fan of Tesla. So Space X all the way
     
  8. MangoGuy

    MangoGuy Rambling Mango

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    MIB doesn't really count as a private agency.
     
  9. TamaSaga

    TamaSaga Well-Known Member

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    True, but it maintains a registry of alien visitors. Surely an alien or two has started a space company with some secret sauce.
     
  10. Nightow1

    Nightow1 Well-Known Member

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    Robert Space Industries. So high tech most of it isn't even in existence yet. lol.
     
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  11. phobos

    phobos Well-Known Member

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    what exactly are you looking for ? companies into rockets, transport vehicles, satelites, exploration, colonization, components, concepts/patents, tourism, ... ? buildings parts like cameras or other sensors might be technological more advanced than building the rockets thought you might not call it a space company
     
  12. coyoteelabs

    coyoteelabs Well-Known Member

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    I would say Relativity Space have a good shot at the no.1 spot. They are the only ones 3D printing the entire rocket, including the engine

     
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  13. lord95

    lord95 Member

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    Last of all, there are many small space agencies and less famous than Blue Origin or Space X. For example, one small but promising space company from Scotland. This company is named Skyrora and it has already made a lot of interesting space technologies like 3d printing technology used in manufacturing spacecrafts and rocket fuel remade from plastic.
     
  14. Wing0

    Wing0 Well-Known Member

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    I too was a fan of Elon Musk... until his Space X company announced plans to launch 5G low-orbit satellites.
     
  15. Jeebus

    Jeebus Well-Known Member

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    Rocketry is cool, but it's a technological dead-end. Rockets haven't changed much since the 1960's. The main issue is the energy density of rocket fuels. Reusable parts and more efficient manufacturing will improve costs, but without more energy dense rocket fuel, we've come about as far as we can with rocketry.

    In another thread, @xiazixin mentioned using rail guns to get people to space. I did some calculations on it, and it's totally feasible to do, and would cost a fraction as much as using a rocket to get to orbit. Imagine a 1000 km long hyperloop that can accelerate a cargo or passenger shuttle to orbital velocity from the ground. It looks like there are already a couple companies that are researching how to make that possible, one of which is StarTram.

    Look outside the realm of rocketry if you want to find the most advanced technologies to get us to space.
     
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  16. lnv

    lnv ✪ Well-Known Hypocrite

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    What's wrong with low-orbit 5G satellites? It is pretty much the cheapest way to get global internet that can end up saving millions if not billions of lives in the long run.

    Rocketry isn't a technological dead end. I mean sure, in the long run everything is a technological dead end. And the technology has improved tremendously since the 1960s. That is like saying computers haven't improved since the 1960s.

    Cost is pretty much the single most important thing there is. The more financially affordable something is, the more accessible it is. The real reason why we haven't done much since getting to the moon is precisely that, the astronomical cost. And there is plenty of room for improvements as far as cost goes.

    The only time energy density becomes a bottleneck really is when we need to get past relying on gravity catapults. But there is really nothing wrong with relying on them, even more so if we fill in the gaps with technologies like Solar Sails. And development of base stations along the route

    I'm actually a big fan of the startram and have been pushing for it for over a decade over rocketry, that said, being realistic, getting an infrastructure project done is almost impossible. Also, the startram also doesn't need to be 1000km. Even the Gen 1.5 that is 170 miles would be plenty.

    That is why reusable rockets are the way to go for now, make space marketable enough that we seriously consider building infrastructure. Cause no company can build something like that due to all the approvals one needs and the high upfront cost. Which means government has to build it or assist in it. And NASA doesn't launch enough stuff to warrant it. So you first need to create a commercial space industry where something like that makes sense.
     
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  17. Jeebus

    Jeebus Well-Known Member

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    Rocketry can be modeled by a simple equation, Tsiolkovsky’s rocket equation. There are 2 basic parts to the equation: how efficiently you can send energy out of the back end of the rocket and how heavy the rocket is. The first part of the equation, specific impulse, has been largely stagnant since RP-1 was developed in the late-50's. RP-1 is similar to kerosene, and it's still used in many rockets today, including SpaceX's Falcon rockets. The second part of the equation, weight, is also dependent on how energy dense your fuel is. The less energy dense the fuel, the higher the ratio of fuel and rocket to payload you're going to get. As the ratio gets higher, you need exponentially more fuel to reach escape velocity. The vast majority of rockets are 85-90% fuel by mass. Most of the remaining mass is used by the rockets themselves, plumbing, and structural elements to hold the whole thing together. The payload is generally less than 5% of the mass of the rocket. With such a poor payload to rocket ratio, it's not feasible to reduce the cost much more than it has already been reduced without finding a better fuel.

    By almost any metric you use, computing today is at least 5 orders of magnitude more efficient than in the 60's. The cost per kg of payload into LEO has only decreased by about one order of magnitude in the last 40 years, much of that in the last 5 years thanks to SpaceX finally finding a way to get a reusable first stage that's cheap to refurbish. Most of the other efficiencies have been in improving ground operations and decreasing the weight of the rockets themselves. Reusable components, more efficient manufacturing with lighter materials, and more efficient ground operations can only help so much. The elephant in the room is the mass of fuel needed to reach escape velocity, and the propellants we use haven't changed much in over 60 years.

    Reusable rockets are about as cheap as they'll ever be. The cost savings per kg diminish for each additional launch a reusable component can withstand. Ground operations are about as cheap as they can be. Reducing the weight of the rocket itself is literally worth the weight reduction in gold, but compared to the mass of the fuel, the rocket itself doesn't weigh much. The fuel for rockets hasn't improved in 60 years. So, I stand by my argument that rocketry is very near its zenith.

    To reduce costs by another order of magnitude, we have to start thinking about what we're going to use to supplant rockets. My money is on space railguns, but there are plenty of other incredible technologies on the horizon that could also get us there.

    The Gen 1.5 system requires over half the acceleration to reach escape velocity to come from another source. NASA has set a safe limit for sustained g-force exposure for astronauts to around 4g. 4g is about 39.2266 m/s. Accelerating at that speed, you'd need a 1599 km track to reach escape velocity from sea level, not accounting for atmospheric drag. The formula to calculate that doesn't take into account other efficiencies, like optimizing your angle of ascent. As such, StarTram's estimate of 1,000-1,500 km for Gen 2 seems reasonable to me. If you're curious about the math, PM me. It's not relevant to the topic at-hand.

    If your goal isn't to get humans to orbit, but to get a satellite into orbit, you can massively increase the acceleration, and inversely decrease the length of StarTram's track to below even what the Gen 1.5 calls for.

    Getting outside the atmosphere and into the necessary trajectory for escape or orbit is what takes a majority of the fuel. The bottleneck for rocketry has always been the amount of propellant you need to get to that point. Once you're in space and on your chosen trajectory, you can use any means of propulsion you want: solar sail, ion drive, nukes, etc.
     
    Last edited: Sep 6, 2021
  18. lnv

    lnv ✪ Well-Known Hypocrite

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    And computers to this day still use the same silicon that is used since the 1960s. Your point? While SpaceX is also moving away from RP1 to methane. But that is not the point, you are missing the big picture. And that despite the fuel making up the majority of the weight, it is actually the CHEAPEST part of the rocket.

    Even the mass of fuel has had some improvements with more efficient engines and denser LOX (due to better refrigeration and storage techniques).

    But yes, computers obviously improved much faster, and a lot of that has to do with it becoming consumer affordable. As economies of scale improves, prices drop.

    Part of the reason there is no point is the high cost outweighs the benefits. It's like a lot of people get confused what peak oil within a few decades meant, it wasn't talking about running out of oil in a few decades. It was talking about running out of "economic oil". If oil costs $1000 per gallon, it becomes pointless. The moon for example has Helium-3 which has some value, but useless if the cost to launch is so much.

    Asteroid mining also has value, all platinum on earth originated from asteroids. But the high launch costs make it uneconomic. As launch costs continue to decrease, so will more things become economic. The same way how we got around peak oil, new technology like fracking made it possible to get oil where it was not economical before.

    I also disagree about other planets not capable of being habitable without support from earth, what do you base this on exactly?

    But this bottleneck isn't exactly a problem for decades to come. Because even with rocket technology, you can still launch things cheap enough that people can afford it to some extent.

    The 1.5 system calls for placing a track on a mountain and launching at around 3g. Sure, you would need other forms of propulsion(engines or a Momentum Exchange Tether) to make up the last leg, but that is fine. The smaller sized track and lower upfront cost makes it far more realistic of a project.

    Reusable rockets are nowhere close to how cheap they can be. Far from it. For one, the biggest maintenance item for current reusable rockets is you gotta disassemble and clean the engines from all the soot. Just the move from RP1 to methane would reduce the costs significantly for re-usability.

    Ground operations costs are also nowhere as cheap as they can be. Currently, during a launch window, only 1 rocket is launched. This has a high fixed cost. Now what if you launch larger rockets or more than 1 within a launch window? And if you launch from a platform in the ocean or a good positioned island, you can pretty much eliminate the need for launch windows. (you can also launch closer to the equator)

    Then there is the fact that reusability isn't fully taken advantage of yet. One of the Falcon rockets has hit 10x reusability. But not all of them have been. And it takes time for a company to gather enough data to safely say how much times on average it can be reused and calculate and adequate price.

    And of course the current cost right now includes R&D costs which gets amortized over time.

    Lastly, there is the fixed platform costs. Which get more economic the more something is used.

    Rockets will not be as cheap as the startram in the long run, BUT they can most definitely easily get to 1 magnitude more cheaper.

    The Starship is aiming for 2 million per launch, with 900k of it being fuel. If it can launch 150 metric tons to LEO, that would be $13.33/kg. Of course if it reaches that point in reality is to be seen, but the point is we have plenty of room to drop prices of launches with rockets.
     
    Last edited: Sep 6, 2021
  19. Wing0

    Wing0 Well-Known Member

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    1. they cause Light pollution, when observing the stars/planets from Earth.
    2. they cause Microwave pollution...
      1. slowly microwave the Earth's ecosystem, killing one creature at a time.
      2. slowly microwave H2O, heating up the Earth, contributing to global warming.
    Rocketry progression stopped when NASA decided to decommission space shuttles, in 2004.
    The future of outer space is probably Nuclear Fusion powered flying saucers.
    Combustible-fuel Rockets as we know them, have hit a dead end.
     
    Last edited: Sep 6, 2021
  20. lnv

    lnv ✪ Well-Known Hypocrite

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    1. With the new sunshades, the amount of light they release is pretty small, not to mention, we are long overdue for more telescopes in space
    2. That is pretty much statistically insignificant...

    Compared to something that can save millions if not billions of lives, is any of that really that big of a deal?

    The spaceshuttle was one the worst thing that has ever happened to NASA, so not sure why you think it stopped with it being decommissioned.