The United States keeps investing heavily into NASA as a way to deal with environmental issues?

Exactly right. (I wish I'd said that.:oops: ) The first one is probably hideously expensive, but once the infrastructure is built, the cost goes down. How much did the Saturn V boosters cost each? How much more would it have been if there'd only been one? And how much less if there'd been hundreds? (Leave off launch cost, which is a separate problem.)

How much of the process can be automated? Both for building the "yard" & building the habitat? I'll bet it's a fair amount. That also brings cost down.

I've seen a proposal to use giant 3-D printers to blt Mars habitats; no reason it can't work in L4/L5... And it's totally automated. Based on "contour crafting" (?), which is already being used to build things.
You simply have no idea about the cost of the initial infrastructure. Seriously, we tend to see 'simple proposals' for complex projects which are just the result of people not knowing the actual difficulties of a field. Case in point: Lockheed claiming that it can do in half a dozen years a trailer-sized thermonuclear fusion generator while the entirety of the planet's specialists of the field are working for decades to make a prototype the size of a town. To the surprise of noone, that LM project got redesigned, reworked every time they understood a bit more how complex the endeavour is, until they stopped altogether talking about it in the hopes of no longer looking like fools.

Automating and optimizing production only makes you go so far, it doesn't make the crazy affordable or realistic.
I don't think most workers would be on site. Many would be planetside operating remotely using the same technology proposed for lunar/NEO mining, which would be a mature technology to anyone thinking of building an O'Neill cylinder (which itself would be simply a bigger version of habitats which would already exist and no doubt house the workers which need to be on-site). There wouldn't be more than a 1.5 second lag or so in communications which combined with some sort of AI for simple corrections should be sufficient. This simplifies construction and would get you down to the range of hundreds of billions. Using the example of the Palm Islands, its the difference between if someone had tried to build them a century ago versus today.
... have you ever worked in any industry that requires critical standards of safety? You are just here maximizing the points of potential failure while minimizing the failsafes and verification protocols on an infrastructure made of millions of critical points of failure where a few of them being messed up would kill tens of thousands at least.

If you are working in a car or an aerospace company, please tell me which one it is so I make sure to NEVER put my life in your products' hands, because your ideas remind me a lot of the NASA officials' in the lead-up to the Challenger disaster. Except that you want to push even more failure points.
 
You simply have no idea about the cost of the initial infrastructure. Seriously, we tend to see 'simple proposals' for complex projects which are just the result of people not knowing the actual difficulties of a field. Case in point: Lockheed claiming that it can do in half a dozen years a trailer-sized thermonuclear fusion generator while the entirety of the planet's specialists of the field are working for decades to make a prototype the size of a town. To the surprise of noone, that LM project got redesigned, reworked every time they understood a bit more how complex the endeavour is, until they stopped altogether talking about it in the hopes of no longer looking like fools.
This is a bit rich considering that actual aerospace engineers generally don't seem to agree (when they think about it at all, since as I said building an O'Neill cylinder is decades away at a minimum) that building up the infrastructure to build an O'Neill cylinder would actually cost multiple times the global GDP. At least, in all of my reading I've never heard of anyone until you claiming anything like your numbers. Who exactly is the one who simply has no idea here?

In any case, that point that I was making and @phx1138 was responding to was that you seem to be costing based on gross overestimates of how much capability the infrastructure needs to have, and that it's incredibly premature to be making any kind of cost estimates anyway. It's like trying to figure out what a jet airliner would cost in 1910--we might be able to see that it's technically possible, but so much is going to change before it's remotely practical that any numbers we come up with now are completely worthless. Setting up the infrastructure and building large space habitats won't be cheap by all but the broadest possible standards, but that's about all we can say with any degree of confidence.

... have you ever worked in any industry that requires critical standards of safety? You are just here maximizing the points of potential failure while minimizing the failsafes and verification protocols on an infrastructure made of millions of critical points of failure where a few of them being messed up would kill tens of thousands at least.

If you are working in a car or an aerospace company, please tell me which one it is so I make sure to NEVER put my life in your products' hands.
But this mode of operation is actually quite common in aerospace and many other fields? Oil companies, for example, now rather routinely use exactly this kind of remote operation to inspect underwater infrastructure, which (much like space) is expensive to put people in. A certain amount of research is also ongoing into developing automated or teleoperated servicing robots to inspect and maintain satellites, too, although so far the "throw it away" approach is far more popular. And this does include the ISS, actually, although the amount of automation there is still small and experimental. Still, it's fairly clear that the name of the game in space operations, especially in the future, is doing as much as possible from the ground, with humans-in-space relegated to precisely those tasks which require humans. (This tends to reduce demand for O'Neill cylinders, of course)
 
you seem to be costing based on gross overestimates of how much capability the infrastructure needs to have
I'd agree with most of your post, & thx for saying it.

Actually, it looks like a belief the infrastructure needs to be rebuilt every time. I might accept US$600 billion for the first O'Neill hab; after that, with a "shipyard" complete & operating in L4/L5, the next one shouldn't cost anything like so much.

I don't understand why using telefactors "introduces failure". So, too, 3-D printing. It's not like the work won't be inspected.:rolleyes:
 
This is a bit rich considering that actual aerospace engineers generally don't seem to agree (when they think about it at all, since as I said building an O'Neill cylinder is decades away at a minimum) that building up the infrastructure to build an O'Neill cylinder would actually cost multiple times the global GDP. At least, in all of my reading I've never heard of anyone until you claiming anything like your numbers. Who exactly is the one who simply has no idea here?
I ain't the one negating all the complexities of space engineering by saying "automatization".
But this mode of operation is actually quite common in aerospace and many other fields? Oil companies, for example, now rather routinely use exactly this kind of remote operation to inspect underwater infrastructure, which (much like space) is expensive to put people in. A certain amount of research is also ongoing into developing automated or teleoperated servicing robots to inspect and maintain satellites, too, although so far the "throw it away" approach is far more popular. And this does include the ISS, actually, although the amount of automation there is still small and experimental. Still, it's fairly clear that the name of the game in space operations, especially in the future, is doing as much as possible from the ground, with humans-in-space relegated to precisely those tasks which require humans. (This tends to reduce demand for O'Neill cylinders, of course)
Fun fact, all these elements you describe do not require human habitat levels of reliability, and have issues at a frequency that is totally unacceptable for any infrastructure where human lives would require perfect working for decades. Our robots tend to have issues, to fail and so on rarely but still regularly enough that sending people into space is an extremely complex endeavour requiring years of training for the involved people so that they can fix issues that are unlikely to happen but could kill everyone involved if they did happen. Space habitats would hold tens or hundreds of thousands of people in a massively hostile environment: requiring anything less than perfection and going "lowest bidder" to send the stuff into space and cut corners by teleoperation is a recipe for disaster of massive proportions. Like way too many industrial accidents, might I say.

You talk about oil companies? Imagine for an instant that each large accident involving them killed 100,000 civilians, regular accidents killing only hundreds or maybe thousands of people.

Yeah, space is annoying like that. It's not friendly, it's not fun, it's out there wanting to kill you for any mistake.
 
cut corners by teleoperation is a recipe for disaster
Your saying it doesn't make it true. How, exactly, does use of remote operated vehicles reduce human involvement in making sure things are safe? Not "robots": telefactors.
Imagine for an instant that each large accident involving them killed 100,000 civilians
And you seem to presume that every tiny flaw in the structure must lead to a catastrophic failure. They wouldn't be building a gigantic Thresher, where any cracked weld leads to implosion. The very size of the structure mitigates against exactly that.

This is more like, what happens if Queen Mary sails with clogged toilets.

You appear to be equating use of telefactors to construct with sheer stupidity in design.

And ignoring the issues of why it must cost so much to do to begin with.
 
... have you ever worked in any industry that requires critical standards of safety? You are just here maximizing the points of potential failure while minimizing the failsafes and verification protocols on an infrastructure made of millions of critical points of failure where a few of them being messed up would kill tens of thousands at least.

If you are working in a car or an aerospace company, please tell me which one it is so I make sure to NEVER put my life in your products' hands, because your ideas remind me a lot of the NASA officials' in the lead-up to the Challenger disaster. Except that you want to push even more failure points.
How is remote operation going to kill tens of thousands of people in some accident? Especially since by the time there actually are tens of thousands of people there, the entire thing would long since be inspected to rigorous standards. Having 99% of the workforce off-site doesn't mean the remaining 1% isn't doing their job.
 
And you seem to presume that every tiny flaw in the structure must lead to a catastrophic failure. They wouldn't be building a gigantic Thresher, where any cracked weld leads to implosion. The very size of the structure mitigates against exactly that.

This is more like, what happens if Queen Mary sails with clogged toilets.

You appear to be equating use of telefactors to construct with sheer stupidity in design.

And ignoring the issues of why it must cost so much to do to begin with.
You don't need design stupidity to have critical accidents, but when you work on something infinitely more complex than a mere nuclear submarine (which is already absurdly complex), handwaving the requirement for careful in situ checks is suicidal, at best.
How is remote operation going to kill tens of thousands of people in some accident? Especially since by the time there actually are tens of thousands of people there, the entire thing would long since be inspected to rigorous standards. Having 99% of the workforce off-site doesn't mean the remaining 1% isn't doing their job.
It just means you just ignore the safety requirements for the structure you argue to build. You want to handwave the costs when building something that combines all the worst aspects of a submarine, of large civilian nuclear powerplants, space stations, urban engineering and antarctic settlements (and a few more issues) in a single place, using nothing more than cool buzzwords.

FFS, the ISS, which is a small structure with low endurance, barely 300 km away from Earth and holding less than a dozen insanely trained people for a year with the option to safely evacuate at any given moment, had a cost of 150 billion dollars. That you guys are seriously arguing it would be barely more expensive to set up a structure built hundreds of thousands of km away from Earth to do colossal industrial endeavours supposed to host tens of thousands or more of non-expert people for decades away from any planetary support is Sealion in terms of delusion. It's the Frisian Islands all over again, when some people just handwave the issues that are making everyone else cringe in terms of complexity.

physicists.png


Don't be that guy.
 
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You don't need design stupidity to have critical accidents, but when you work on something infinitely more complex than a mere nuclear submarine (which is exactly absurdly complex), handwaving the requirement for careful in situ checks is suicidal, at best.

It just means you just ignore the safety requirements for the structure you argue to build. You want to handwave the costs when building something that combines all the worst aspects of a submarine, of large civilian nuclear powerplants, space stations, urban engineering and antarctic settlements (and a few more issues) in a single place, using nothing more than cool buzzwords.

FFS, the ISS, which is a small structure with low endurance, barely 300 km away from Earth and holding less than a dozen insanely trained people for a year with the option to safely evacuate at any given moment, had a cost of 150 billion dollars. That you guys are seriously arguing it would be barely more expensive to set up a structure built hundreds of thousands of km away from Earth to do colossal industrial endeavours supposed to host tens of thousands or more of non-expert people for decades away from any planetary support is Sealion in terms of delusion. It's the Frisian Islands all over again, when some people just handwave the issues that are making everyone else cringe in terms of complexity.

physicists.png


Don't be that guy.
You'd be absolutely correct if my point was that we could building one right this second. Except it's not. Comparing the ISS to an O'Neill cylinder is ridiculous. It's apples and oranges. Yes, both are fruits but that's where the similarities end. Your argument is akin to a person in 1819 saying that building the Crystal Cathedral in Orange County, California is impossible and always will be because medieval cathedrals took ages to build, and California is a hostile and remote wasteland. It does not take into account the fact that economic and technological factors might not be the same in the future and that nobody is building a floating city in space until they have the actual demand to build one. When they do, they obviously won't have these issues because they've long since been worked out. Or maybe like someone a century criticizing the idea of a massive airliner like the Airbus A380.

Either way, you're attacking the concept from a completely faulty starting ground. Maybe instead we should back up a few moments and you can explain to me why the prerequisites for building an O'Neill cylinder--smaller rotating habitats, mining and processing materials in space, etc.--are impossible. Otherwise it's not much different than a man in 1857 saying the idea of spaceflight by 1957 is 100% impossible.
 
You don't need design stupidity to have critical accidents, but when you work on something infinitely more complex than a mere nuclear submarine (which is exactly absurdly complex), handwaving the requirement for careful in situ checks is suicidal, at best.

It just means you just ignore the safety requirements for the structure you argue to build. You want to handwave the costs when building something that combines all the worst aspects of a submarine, of large civilian nuclear powerplants, space stations, urban engineering and antarctic settlements (and a few more issues) in a single place, using nothing more than cool buzzwords.

FFS, the ISS, which is a small structure with low endurance, barely 300 km away from Earth and holding less than a dozen insanely trained people for a year with the option to safely evacuate at any given moment, had a cost of 150 billion dollars. That you guys are seriously arguing it would be barely more expensive to set up a structure built hundreds of thousands of km away from Earth to do colossal industrial endeavours
Honest to God, will you try reading what I actually wrote?:rolleyes:

I never once said inspections should be ignored, only that the actual work didn't need people in space. By what reasoning do you insist it must? (Your opinion alone, it appears. GM, Ford, Chrysler, Toyota, & Honda, to name just a few, seem to disagree, since they use robots pretty nicely to build complex structures--& that's robots, not telefactors, a distinction you still don't seem to get.:rolleyes:)

I never once said I wanted to handwave costs, only that I simply don't believe every single one is going to be that costly. (You appear to think "mass production" is impossible. Tell it to Kaiser Shipbuilding.)

And I never once said everything should be launched from Earth. In fact, I expressly said it shouldn't be. How much of the $150 billion cost of ISS is because it was?

Sheesh.
 
I never once said inspections should be ignored, only that the actual work didn't need people in space. By what reasoning do you insist it must? (Your opinion alone, it appears. GM, Ford, Chrysler, Toyota, & Honda, to name just a few, seem to disagree, since they use robots pretty nicely to build complex structures--& that's robots, not telefactors, a distinction you still don't seem to get.:rolleyes:)
You really seem to not understand the distinction between the quality requirement of a car and of a frakking space station with nuclear reactors.
I never once said I wanted to handwave costs, only that I simply don't believe every single one is going to be that costly. (You appear to think "mass production" is impossible. Tell it to Kaiser Shipbuilding.)
Mass production doesn't make things cheap. Just cheaper, but cheaper than unbelievably expensive still remains mind-boggingly expensive.
And I never once said everything should be launched from Earth. In fact, I expressly said it shouldn't be. How much of the $150 billion cost of ISS is because it was?
And you want to launch much, much more complex industrial structures from Earth in order to actually build stuff in space. And we go back to my point.
Either way, you're attacking the concept from a completely faulty starting ground. Maybe instead we should back up a few moments and you can explain to me why the prerequisites for building an O'Neill cylinder--smaller rotating habitats, mining and processing materials in space, etc.--are impossible. Otherwise it's not much different than a man in 1857 saying the idea of spaceflight by 1957 is 100% impossible.
Where did I said it was impossible? I said it would be absurdly expensive, and much moreso than just 4 or 5 times the cost of the ISS based on just a couple of buzzwords.
 
Building space stuff actually isnt that expensive. Design and testing, thats expensive.
Building it with good enough reliability to allow human beings to live in it for a decent amount of time? It makes things quite more expensive, and the cost increases as the expertise of said human beings get lower, the distance to Earth and/or rescue gets higher and the time to spend gets longer, as you need to have a reliability that is exceptionally high. Commsats aren't human-rated crafts.
 
You really seem to not understand the distinction between the quality requirement of a car and of a frakking space station with nuclear reactors.

Mass production doesn't make things cheap. Just cheaper, but cheaper than unbelievably expensive still remains mind-boggingly expensive.

And you want to launch much, much more complex industrial structures from Earth in order to actually build stuff in space. And we go back to my point.

Where did I said it was impossible? I said it would be absurdly expensive, and much moreso than just 4 or 5 times the cost of the ISS based on just a couple of buzzwords.
Way to change the subject again.:rolleyes:

You said $500-600 billion each. How, exactly, does that happen, if the industrial structure to build them only has to be launched once? You've conceded "mass production" makes things cheaper, & that was, you'll note, the point I was making to begin with, yet you've chosen to ignore it.

Where, ever, did I even hint at "nuclear reactors"?

Where, ever, did I even hint at not inspecting structure, which fact you're now conveniently ignoring?

And, BTW, I never actually said the "industrial structure" should be launched from space. (You did.) How much of it can be built in situ from asteroidal materials? With only tools launched from earth? (And only once, don't forget.:rolleyes:)

You also didn't say "more than 5 times the cost of ISS", you said every single one of them would cost that much more, despite having infrastructure in place to build more than one. So you've contradicted yourself again.
 

Ian_W

Banned
Building it with good enough reliability to allow human beings to live in it for a decent amount of time? It makes things quite more expensive, and the cost increases as the expertise of said human beings get lower, the distance to Earth and/or rescue gets higher and the time to spend gets longer, as you need to have a reliability that is exceptionally high. Commsats aren't human-rated crafts.

However, when you spend that much money to try and get that reliability so high, you end up with so few units that you don't get the reliability you're looking for.

This isn't an issue when Congress is funding you to put particular jobs in particular districts, but it also doesn't get you to a working space program.

NASA brought in Human Rating in 1992, yeah ? And in the 25 or so years since, NASA has taken humans out of low earth orbit how many times ? And Im pretty sure the ISS wouldn't have been built just by NASA - it's got too much cheap and cheerful Soviet rocket tech in it.
 
Way to change the subject again.:rolleyes:

You said $500-600 billion each. How, exactly, does that happen, if the industrial structure to build them only has to be launched once? You've conceded "mass production" makes things cheaper, & that was, you'll note, the point I was making to begin with, yet you've chosen to ignore it.

Where, ever, did I even hint at "nuclear reactors"?

Where, ever, did I even hint at not inspecting structure, which fact you're now conveniently ignoring?

And, BTW, I never actually said the "industrial structure" should be launched from space. (You did.) How much of it can be built in situ from asteroidal materials? With only tools launched from earth? (And only once, don't forget.:rolleyes:)

You also didn't say "more than 5 times the cost of ISS", you said every single one of them would cost that much more, despite having infrastructure in place to build more than one. So you've contradicted yourself again.
Yeah, OK, so now, your only argument is some sort of magical "mass production" stuff that is cheap, doesn't involve any material other than asteroids and that can somehow turn itself into robotic remote shipyards for human-rated megastructures. I don't know why I keep arguing with you, when you are basically going all "magic will solve every engineering issue" and complain when I point out that you ignore so many things in your posts, arguing that you didn't talk about these... when it's my entire bloody point that you deliberately ignore every complexity to push your simplistic vision of things, just like someone arguing that Sealion could work with a handful of river barges.

So, yeah, at this point, you're arguing for Sealion being easy and complaining when other people bring stuff like "Royal Navy", saying that you never talked about it and therefore we shouldn't.
However, when you spend that much money to try and get that reliability so high, you end up with so few units that you don't get the reliability you're looking for.

This isn't an issue when Congress is funding you to put particular jobs in particular districts, but it also doesn't get you to a working space program.

NASA brought in Human Rating in 1992, yeah ? And in the 25 or so years since, NASA has taken humans out of low earth orbit how many times ? And Im pretty sure the ISS wouldn't have been built just by NASA - it's got too much cheap and cheerful Soviet rocket tech in it.
Right, so reliability is now a political stuff that isn't necessary compared to mass production? As for the ISS, most of it was launched by space shuttles trips, because it was the only big enough launcher for many of the modules. A launcher which had an effective reliability quite too low in the end, considering that almost 30 percent of its fleet turned into fireballs with their crew.

Because space is hard.
 

Ian_W

Banned
Right, so reliability is now a political stuff that isn't necessary compared to mass production? As for the ISS, most of it was launched by space shuttles trips, because it was the only big enough launcher for many of the modules. A launcher which had an effective reliability quite too low in the end, considering that almost 30 percent of its fleet turned into fireballs with their crew.

Because space is hard.

Mmmmm. It's not so much reliability is political, but the funding of the various NASA centers is not seemingly related to getting humans out of low earth orbit.

Have a look at the risks NASA ran with, say, Gemini.

Now, look at the post-1992 Human Rating era.

Hmmm.

It's almost like the perfect is the enemy of the good.
 
Mmmmm. It's not so much reliability is political, but the funding of the various NASA centers is not seemingly related to getting humans out of low earth orbit.

Have a look at the risks NASA ran with, say, Gemini.

Now, look at the post-1992 Human Rating era.

Hmmm.

It's almost like the perfect is the enemy of the good.
Mainly because sending humans out of low earth orbit is... unnecessary at the time being. It's way too expensive for what it brings. If we want to do scientific exploration, remote probes are much more effective than human beings. And colonies are pretty much a colossal waste of resources given the environmental crisis we have now: it would be orders of magnitude more efficient to design and build arcologies on Earth to protect the populations against climate change issues. If you want some space industry, it'll most be for feeding Earth industries with raw materials and the handful of products that could only be built in zero-g environments.

When I look at the space cadets talking about sending people in space colonies or for long term on the Moon, on Mars, I have never found any realistic argument explaining why we should do it, except maybe for:

1) the prestige of it;
2) protection against a colossal planet-killing catastrophe.

You won't send our overpopulation into space, it's not the 1600s anymore, and space isn't the Wild West.
 
Yeah, OK, so now, your only argument is some sort of magical "mass production" stuff that is cheap, doesn't involve any material other than asteroids and that can somehow turn itself into robotic remote shipyards for human-rated megastructures.
Where, exactly, did I ever once say the material would
"turn itself" into anything? Jeez.

You're the one that offered the example of ISS, which was not built in space & did not use in situ materials, yet you still argue a structure that does must be even more expensive.

You're the one that mentioned "nuclear reactors" & "extraordinary complexity", & you seem to believe that's the only way to run a habitat like it--& that, as a result, it must be launched from earth. I reject both propositions. Yet, because I disagree, I must be ignoring the complexity.

Where, exactly, did I say "reliability is now a political stuff that isn't necessary"? You're the one that claimed it demanded human workers (not just inspection) on site. I disagree. I never once said I disagreed with on site inspection. Yet because I disagree with any part of your point of view, I must be ignoring it. Jeez.

Yeah, change the subject again, & claim I'm ignoring your arguments. You're right, it is futile arguing with you.
 

Ian_W

Banned
Mainly because sending humans out of low earth orbit is... unnecessary at the time being. It's way too expensive for what it brings.

If I was an unkind man, I'd suggest your main reason for supporting NASA's program-killing pursuit of safety perfection is simply to support the destruction of human spaceflight that it ensures.
 
If I was an unkind man, I'd suggest your main reason for supporting NASA's program-killing pursuit of safety perfection is simply to support the destruction of human spaceflight that it ensures.
The fuck? Perfection is the bloody minimum when you send high-level specialists in missions where anything less than perfection turns these high-level specialists into expanding cloud of steam and burning debris. If you want to have 1,7 % chance of dying in an activity (2 catastrophic failures out of 135 space shuttle flights), you have to seriously justify it, because otherwise, it's absolutely unacceptable. A critical mission to prevent mass fatalities through other means? Yes, 1,7 % chance of total party kill is acceptable. Some really high value scientific and engineering missions? Same, we can consider it. But to do something less efficiently than the alternative and getting such a massive fatality rate for no other reason than "Colonies IIIIIIIN SPAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACE!" is stupid, period.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/564717/airline-industry-passenger-traffic-globally/

Imagine for an instant that the airline industry was as dangerous as space travel to low-orbit (which is the safest space travel because you are in easy range of emergency resupply or can evacuate any spacecraft that goes awry). Hell, I'll be generous, imagine if the airline industry was TEN TIMES more secure than space travel to low orbit. We'd get 4,588,000 dead passengers this year. Is it an acceptable outcome? No, it isn't, and when the 737 MAX had issues that catastrophically affected a couple of flights despite hundreds if not thousands or tens of thousands of successful flights, the plane was grounded all over the planet, because responsible people don't play with the safety of millions.

Cutting down costs like crazy and being inspired by the consumer product industry to work in the space industry, with the goal of applying it to something massively more complex than the most complex space programs ever envisioned? And wanting to apply that to millions of civilians? It's mass murder through criminal levels of disregard for human life.

Space is not the adventure shown in sci-fi. It's an environment that WILL kill you for the slightest mistake. Those who go up there tend to be selected through insane competitive exams they do after having gone through a dozen years of college education, and then go through years of additional training in order to be in the pool, let alone launched. There's a reason for it.
 
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