Or, by "twice squared" they mean to say "It has been squared ... twice". That would be 16x, which is probably more in line with the total deltaV requirements.
Question for the experts: what are the tests and analysis that we cannot do via a rover-based lab and hence need to send the samples to Earth? Asking out of curiosity (pun not intended!).
Simple answer from a space nerd: Rovers are small, light, and have very little energy. So what we can't do is anything that requires a large or heavy device or anything that requires significant energy. They break/fail. They take forever to make happen.
Want to burn 20kg of soil to see if there's any trace of specific elements? You'll need a furnace. Those are both heavy and high-energy. You could do a smaller scale test on a rover of 2g perhaps, but what if the traces are very, very small? Plus, whatever analysis tools you would use now have to also be extremely small and light, which means less capabilities.
Also, rovers have limited size: we can only do a small number of tests per rover because the rover's utility belt of tools is only so large. If your experiment is really easy to do but it's not a high enough priority, it won't happen.
Lastly, rovers die. You might spend 5 years building a tool, 2 years sending it on the next rover to Mars, only to have it crash or die before it's time to run your experiment.
But if we sent 300kg of soil back from Mars, we could do every test we can think of, carefully, with the best tools humanity can make and as much energy as we need.
Edit: +1 to what Something1234 said too! You can't clean out apparatuses easily after an experiment!
These are all reasons why sending humans is so important. They will explore more of Mars in a week than rivers have in 50 years. They will arrive with a testing lab and do all sorts of tests immediately.
If Starship meets its performance targets, it’s first missions will bring hundreds of scientists to a Mars, with thousands of tons of equipment and supplies. In-orbit and in-situ refueling are game changing technologies that will literally reduce the cost of deep space manned missions by a thousandfold.
So instead of sending a rover with 4x or 10x energy, the answer is a mission that requires enough energy to launch the samples all the way back to Earth? This makes me smile.
I do agree though. We can expend 1000x the energy of the return trip once the samples are back on earth. And we also have the luxury of unlimited time to invent new tests and new tech to apply to whatever is left of the samples.
Not an expert, but the test chambers on a rover can't be cleaned easily or without a massive amount of complexity. They are also fairly limited and very limited use. While a sample collected and sent back can be split and used in many ways.
Better question: What will we learn that we cannot learn from all the Martian rocks we already have on earth.
There have been plenty or Martian meteors found in Antarctica, and no doubt many more if we redoubled our efforts to find them. Many once claimed to have found evidence of life in these rocks already. Some of us are even old enough to remember President Clinton's speech on the subject. (That isn't a deepfake video. The US president really did talk about the discovery of life on mars.)
> Better question: What will we learn that we cannot learn from all the Martian rocks we already have on earth.
These particular samples will be from the present-day surface, with known geographic (aerographic?) origin, not affected by potentially millions of years of interplanetary travel, and not contaminated by sitting around on Earth for who knows how long.
There is a big, big difference between, "we found a rock on earth that is probably from Mars that was blasted here some time in the past," and, "we went to a specific area of Mars and got a rock and brought it back." Not least of which is the intrinsic value and aspirational nature of us actually fetching things from other planets ourselves, with intent and purpose, rather than luckily stumbling upon some.
Excellent question. Obviously there are lots of things they couldn't afford to get into a lander. Question is what could they have put into a lander, for much less than $billions, that they still haven't?
I am no expert, but I can imagine there are many kinds of laboratory equipment that is way too heavy to pit on a rover, perhaps mass spectrometers, etc.
Biological wxperiments is a big one. There is kind of outstanding question of perclorates in martian soil and its toxicity to earth organisms, plants, etc.
The mars rover does have a spectrometer. It's called ChemCam [1], it uses a laser to vaporize a small amount of matter and them captures the spectrographs of the resulting plasma with a camera. That doesn't take away from your point, but it is a cool piece of equipment.
Can't we just shoot a orbital space laser at mars then from mars orbit? If we're already sending a very heavy craft that way... should be able to do spectral analysis from space.
I don't think you can call him Musk "master of the dubious marketing promise" anymore now that Tesla is meeting production goals, SpaceX is landing boosters, re-supplying the ISS, and has brought astronauts to the ISS.
His promises are far more reliable than most at this point.
A decade long development for a never before attempted interstellar cargo ship... I'm sure that "billions" is as precise as anyone can be about the cost right now.
I agree about general journalistic innumeracy, but in this case it may well be the best estimate available. It's no different from the order of magnitude estimates highly numerate people make for good reason all the time.
2031 is when the Sample Return Mission is supposed to return the samples back to Earth. Keep in mind slips happen in ALL sorts of space projects, not just SpaceX. I’ll take your bet.
I want 2:1 odds:
SpaceX returns a vehicle from Mars by the end of 2035 (UTC), and before the NASA-ESA sample return mission has returned its samples. I’ll buy you a beer/beverage (value not to exceed $10) if you win, and you’ll buy me 2 beers/beverages (value not to exceed $20 total) if I win.
I think 10 (+/- 2) years is a fair estimate but I would start counting from when Starship reaches orbit. It would be close enough to their historical development timeline of the Falcon which went from Falcon 1 reaching orbit in 2008 to a crewed Falcon 9 mission to the ISS in 2020, with a propulsive landing of the first stage to boot. I would expect a number of missions within that timeframe that could possibly satisfy the condition of "fly to Mars and back" but I think they will be able to do a full surface of Earth to surface of Mars and back to surface of Earth crewed mission at the end of that period. Call me an optimist but I'm pretty sure that's what they're aiming for.
SpaceX Starship is planned for 2024, and with a cargo capacity in the hundreds of tons. Even if it gets delayed by four or five years it will be able to bring back samples before this is is even launched. NASA’s plans seem very slow in comparison.
Musk has made a strategy of "overpromise, maybe deliver", rebranded as "vision" or "ambitious goals". Some of what his companies have delivered is impressive, but you never know what they're going to actually deliver until there are at least working prototypes.
Yeah, but that’s true for all space companies. The surprising thing about SpaceX is that SpaceX delivers more than other corporations which promise less than SpaceX promises.
I that this has historically been the case, but I think there has been a lot more delivery in recent years. The estimates from Musk seem to be less off, and I think a massive part of that is that the ramp up to this point was all predicated on original design of parts. They design and build >90% of the parts in the space ships. I think now that they have a catalogue of parts they don't have to build from scratch, their design/development cycles for new products are much faster and predictable.
This same thing goes for Tesla, I don't think Musk & co. get enough credit for building everything from scratch.
>SpaceX Starship is planned for 2024, and with a cargo capacity in the hundreds of tons.
And Full-Self-Driving will be available in the summer of 2015, and a cross country autonomous drive will happen in 2017, and this year we'll have 1,000,000 autonomous Robotaxis on the streets. Let's go!
And Falcon 9 is nearing its 100th flight, and has made first stage recovery normal, and a Starship prototype has already flown with the new engine. Based on SpaceX typical cadence, full Starship prototypes will fly this year and achieve orbit next year. That’s three years to work out the kinks for the first Mars attempts.
Though I would very much like to see Starship succeed, it must be understood just how risky a project it is. Just having the rocket be able to work in Earth orbit is a risky proposition, given its novel design and materials challenges. Add to that the many novel challenges returning Starship would entail, refueling in space, landing and taking off from Mars, setting up multi megawatts of solar, mining, methane production, etc.
Consider that Falcon Heavy was something like 5 years late. That was doing something that had been done before, strapping rockets together to make a Heavy version. Starship is many times more ambitious, with any of the challenges I raised above likely to hit multi-year delays.
> That was doing something that had been done before, strapping rockets together to make a Heavy version.
That’s a common misconception - in fact, even SpaceX itself made this mistake! Musk said that making Heavy was almost as complex as designing a whole new rocket; which is also why they went with new next time (Starship) instead of incremental (Super Extra Heavy).
FH was done on a shoestring budget for a small market and nearly canceled when it became clear Starship was the better path.
But I agree with you that Starship has some challenges, specifically proving it can handle re-entry, be easily refurbed between launches, and be easily refueled in low earth orbit.
But Super Heavy is just a bigger Falcon 9, using the same landing technology. Even if a Starship Reusability falls short, it’s very clear that the combo is going to put bigger payloads than the the SLS into orbit at 1/20th the cost.
I've been on this website long enough to remember when everyone was saying 'of course manually-driven cars will be the exception by 2020', and believing Elon Musk's timescales has taken over as the new naive credulity of the HNer.
Who actually believes Musk's timescales? Musk's overly optimistic yet technically plausible timescales seem to be part of the reason why his ventures are so successful. With the right culture and team members, it drives people toward the finish line. The challenge and constant pace of progress is motivating. With the wrong culture and team members (most companies, most people) it leads to crash & burn. Musk's exhausting personality is precisely what makes it all work.
For big projects, a sound tactic is to spend a small portion on a cheap alternative implementation. Sometimes the smaller team will be far more successful. Better focus, a competitive drive to prove worth, etc.
I am very haply to see the idea of electric propultion tug finally commited to implementation. This has a lot more utility than delivering samples from Mars - in principle there is a lot of equipment that could use rugging between , and Mars.
I hope this becomes a configurable platform for future missions, nur just a one-off experiment.
It will be interesting to see what the situation will be like when this spaceship is ready. By that time we should have Starship and New Glenn flying regularly. Even New Armstrong could be close to ready by then.
Didn’t they just recover both fairings on the last launch?
I don’t know how you want to work the math, but it is probably best to think of it in a fractional way. Between accidents and wear do they manage better than 4 launches in average? They just managed 6 for one lower stage, with tighter turnaround time. We don’t know how much of that rocket was reused. So we might be talking about expending 20% of a lower stage per launch, and some higher ratio of upper stages.
Good gawd, that would be more [sad|funny] than the mm/inch confusion. Can the rover use it's hands or not? Better hope they use American version of Instant Replay than the pathetic VAR implementation as well.
Or maybe BBC thinks it's readers are more familiar with the size of a football (as in soccer, of course) than the size of a basketball (although they are the same, but someone who doesn't know the size of a basketball wouldn't, of course)
Readit News
So, four times as difficult?
Lesson: don't handwave your math when you're talking to lay journalists, because nerds are gonna read it and be horrified.
Or, by "twice squared" they mean to say "It has been squared ... twice". That would be 16x, which is probably more in line with the total deltaV requirements.
2+2 = 2×2 = 2² = … = 4
At least, unless I messed up my proof. My highest qualification is two A-levels in maths and half of brilliant.org…
https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2020/07/27/hᵤ2-2-4-for...
twice . squared = (* 2) . (^ 2)
(difficult * 2)^2
Want to burn 20kg of soil to see if there's any trace of specific elements? You'll need a furnace. Those are both heavy and high-energy. You could do a smaller scale test on a rover of 2g perhaps, but what if the traces are very, very small? Plus, whatever analysis tools you would use now have to also be extremely small and light, which means less capabilities.
Also, rovers have limited size: we can only do a small number of tests per rover because the rover's utility belt of tools is only so large. If your experiment is really easy to do but it's not a high enough priority, it won't happen.
Lastly, rovers die. You might spend 5 years building a tool, 2 years sending it on the next rover to Mars, only to have it crash or die before it's time to run your experiment.
But if we sent 300kg of soil back from Mars, we could do every test we can think of, carefully, with the best tools humanity can make and as much energy as we need.
Edit: +1 to what Something1234 said too! You can't clean out apparatuses easily after an experiment!
If Starship meets its performance targets, it’s first missions will bring hundreds of scientists to a Mars, with thousands of tons of equipment and supplies. In-orbit and in-situ refueling are game changing technologies that will literally reduce the cost of deep space manned missions by a thousandfold.
So instead of sending a rover with 4x or 10x energy, the answer is a mission that requires enough energy to launch the samples all the way back to Earth? This makes me smile.
I do agree though. We can expend 1000x the energy of the return trip once the samples are back on earth. And we also have the luxury of unlimited time to invent new tests and new tech to apply to whatever is left of the samples.
There have been plenty or Martian meteors found in Antarctica, and no doubt many more if we redoubled our efforts to find them. Many once claimed to have found evidence of life in these rocks already. Some of us are even old enough to remember President Clinton's speech on the subject. (That isn't a deepfake video. The US president really did talk about the discovery of life on mars.)
These particular samples will be from the present-day surface, with known geographic (aerographic?) origin, not affected by potentially millions of years of interplanetary travel, and not contaminated by sitting around on Earth for who knows how long.
Like, a microscope?
Biological wxperiments is a big one. There is kind of outstanding question of perclorates in martian soil and its toxicity to earth organisms, plants, etc.
[1] https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/spacecraft/instruments/chemcam/
I'm 99% sure that if SpaceX's starship takes off, it will fly to Mars and back within a few years.
But still, competition is good.
His promises are far more reliable than most at this point.
I'm annoyed by this innumerical journalistic habit where imprecise large numbers are only given as "millions", "billions" or "trillions".
Define "a few years" and I'll bet you it won't, with whatever odds you want.
I want 2:1 odds:
SpaceX returns a vehicle from Mars by the end of 2035 (UTC), and before the NASA-ESA sample return mission has returned its samples. I’ll buy you a beer/beverage (value not to exceed $10) if you win, and you’ll buy me 2 beers/beverages (value not to exceed $20 total) if I win.
I'm 99% sure that's wrong.
Musk has made a strategy of "overpromise, maybe deliver", rebranded as "vision" or "ambitious goals". Some of what his companies have delivered is impressive, but you never know what they're going to actually deliver until there are at least working prototypes.
That's right, they aren't. Which is why it's mighty brave of the BBC to call it "first interplanetary cargo ship". We'll see who gets there first.
This same thing goes for Tesla, I don't think Musk & co. get enough credit for building everything from scratch.
And Full-Self-Driving will be available in the summer of 2015, and a cross country autonomous drive will happen in 2017, and this year we'll have 1,000,000 autonomous Robotaxis on the streets. Let's go!
Consider that Falcon Heavy was something like 5 years late. That was doing something that had been done before, strapping rockets together to make a Heavy version. Starship is many times more ambitious, with any of the challenges I raised above likely to hit multi-year delays.
That’s a common misconception - in fact, even SpaceX itself made this mistake! Musk said that making Heavy was almost as complex as designing a whole new rocket; which is also why they went with new next time (Starship) instead of incremental (Super Extra Heavy).
But I agree with you that Starship has some challenges, specifically proving it can handle re-entry, be easily refurbed between launches, and be easily refueled in low earth orbit.
But Super Heavy is just a bigger Falcon 9, using the same landing technology. Even if a Starship Reusability falls short, it’s very clear that the combo is going to put bigger payloads than the the SLS into orbit at 1/20th the cost.
The first Starship that might be able to return anything wouldn't be able to launch before 2026 either, so...
Unlimited budget is sometimes a hindrance.
I hope this becomes a configurable platform for future missions, nur just a one-off experiment.
I don’t know how you want to work the math, but it is probably best to think of it in a fractional way. Between accidents and wear do they manage better than 4 launches in average? They just managed 6 for one lower stage, with tighter turnaround time. We don’t know how much of that rocket was reused. So we might be talking about expending 20% of a lower stage per launch, and some higher ratio of upper stages.
Although, it is a cargo ship, so maybe Vacuumtruck would be more accurate.