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We.
The next talk will be in English,
obviously, and
it will it will be about
a very specific, very
special and very interesting topic.
A Frank Vinales firefighters.
He is a journalist.
He works for William the E, but he's also
a podcaster, and he will explain
to us how we could make
space exploration cheaper
and very interesting topic.
Please give a warm applause to our next
speaker.
OK.
Well, it seems to be on
her, it's not rocket science,
I
actually plan to give this talk without
mentioning rockets, but
then we got some new pictures
and I
ended up deciding
against that.
So just ahead of Christmas.
Space X released new pictures from
the new test spacecraft
and there's
going to be the Starship test spacecraft,
it's very much the same as a
grasshopper that we had in 2012.
So really, don't expect this to be
any more than an ugly test
bed of a rocket that is flying
a bit up and a bit down just to shake
things down and see if the technology
works.
But the interesting
thing was that
they changed the technology they used to
build this
spaceship.
And if you remember
back two
years or something like that, the
Space X presented
a large carbon fiber tank,
a fuel tank that would be
primary structure of the new spacecraft.
And now, he said, Nope,
we're going to make it out of
steel.
Steel is known as a heavy material.
Usually, when you use the air, you have
something like a huge building, maybe
a shape or something like that.
It's not something that you would
use to build something as delicate and
light as the spacecraft and spacecraft.
You usually
use aluminum or
carbon fiber or anything to make things
as light as possible.
And that's
not what they did
here.
Or so it seems.
It seems to be that
not using steel
cannot possibly result in something
like a light spacecraft,
but actually you can use
internal pressure within the tanks
to stabilize it
and at least Elon Musk
said, and I didn't have time to
actually check that because it
was just before Christmas, and
there
was a lot to do in the meantime
that as
high temperatures at least
steel is about
as
as tough as carbon fiber.
And the new spacecraft
of Space X is supposed to
withstand reentry heats
that are quite high and
so steel could actually make sense.
Why am I telling this story?
Because it seems like
steel is
the right choice in this case.
It reminded me of something else.
The X3 went
to a star, and this was supposed
to be the next space shuttle
back in
the 1990s
and early 2000s
kind of
looks like the Space Shuttle was supposed
to be single stage to orbit.
Now there's a lot of things wrong with
this
whole concept, especially because at a
single stage to orbit the
rocket equation does not take
kindly to people trying to put
something from the ground up into orbit.
There are a lot of
rockets that could actually do it.
You could take a rocket and
without any kind of staging, you could
put several tons into a low Earth
orbit.
But it doesn't make sense because you can
put a second stage on top of it and
double or triple the payload
even for low Earth orbit.
And you couldn't reach any
higher orbits with a single
stage spacecraft like this one.
But the reason why this one never
flew.
This was supposed to be a one third
scale model of the real thing
was something else.
And we will
talk about that
after the live quote of Richard Feynman.
Yes. Reality is
an important thing, and
public relations are not quite important
enough to
go beyond the
limits of the laws of nature
and.
Single stage to orbit doesn't quite work.
This demonstrator here
was almost finished.
All the components were there.
And the problem was
with this large
two thing,
that's the hydrogen tank.
These hydrogen tanks, you see, it's
two of two
tanks and there are two sections to
it
with a slope in between.
And it's a very complicated shape, and
you wouldn't use that sort of shape in
a normal tank.
And they decided where there's tanks,
they have to be extremely light because
it's supposed to go to space.
It has to be extremely light to go to
space.
And so they
made it out of carbon fiber
and they ran into trouble.
They couldn't get it right.
They had leaks all the time.
And also
it
was not as light as they thought it would
be because its shape
is complicated
and carbon fibers are actual
fibers, and they are only strong in one
direction, in the direction of the fire,
but not perpendicular to
it. And so they ended
up using a lot more mass than they would
have thought, especially in those slope
areas.
This was so obvious
to the engineers that there was a group
of engineers within the company that
build it, that they
built a second tank and they made it out
of aluminum alloy.
And it was the
tank itself was
heavier
than the carbon fiber tank.
But the
lobes,
they save so much more weight
on the lobes that came out to be
almost the exact same thing.
But that was when the
project was canceled because
essentially it wasn't high tech enough.
They were so concentrated
on using COVID on proving the
principle of
carbon fiber technologies for
for cryo tanks.
That they can the project in
the end, which is quite
a difference compared to Space X,
who just thought,
well, we can make out of steel
and steel works
at least.
Steel is not the first time that
it's being used, in fact,
this is the factory of the
Atlas Rockets, the earliest those rockets
and this is China material
and it actual steel and those
are the balloon tanks.
They're under pressure.
And if you go search on the web,
you can find a nice video how they don't
work.
There's a video where one of those
rockets is upright and it loses pressure
inside and it just collapses like
a tin can without pressure inside
of it.
And.
The way
this is actually a very nice technology,
it's pretty light.
And it has been used again.
It has been used again in the upper stage
descent of a stage, also for the Atlas
rocket, and they
used steel tanks.
This is the the hydrogen steel tank and
this rocket stage is
is extremely light even
for today's standards.
They kept building this stage
since the 1960s and centaur
stages are used to this day, and they
still use steel because
the balloon structure is quite light.
In fact, it's what is today
one of the lightest upper stage as their
own.
I mean, I'm not going to complain too
much about the
but the Ariane five upper stage,
which is a huge compromise
and really inhibits its its performance.
But we have come to that.
It's a very simple material.
It has a lot, has
a great history.
But if you want to build something cheap,
you better build it in large numbers.
Atlas rockets were built in
larger numbers than factory like
that and you can see
yes, they had it
down to a science, to a real factory.
But there's a reason for that, and that
reason is not space exploration.
Atlas rockets where used to go to
space first,
American astronaut
John Glenn, who actually orbited the EV,
went on an Atlas rocket
and.
The actor payload of these
rockets on nuclear bombs,
and that's a large
it's a huge tradition.
Most rockets go into space, usually
had nuclear bombs on top of them.
That's not just true for North Korea,
it's true for
almost any
spacefaring nation that
started out, except for exotics
like maybe New Zealand,
who recently started their own space
program and start building their own
rockets.
They actually just went to space and
never had nuclear bombs on top of them.
But if you replace the nuclear bomb with
the next rocket stage and a
satellite or space probe, you
can get it to orbit.
And essentially what what they
witnessed that did here was to use the
surplus, the production facilities
from the military to build their own
rockets.
And obviously,
they built about 400
400 something rockets of this type,
and they didn't quite meet as many
of those for spaceflight.
Some of them by ActionScript, a lot of
them during the during the shuttle
program.
If you build so many rockets,
you can build them cheaply.
I think the production cost was
already something like six million
dollars, but there's a lot of inflation,
and since that time they were quite cheap
anyway.
And that's because of masters of
mass production.
The problem with mass production is that
especially these days when you have
larger rockets and
we have for the first time since
the since 1990, since the end
of the Cold War, we have launched
worldwide 100 rockets this year.
That is not very suitable for mass
production like this one.
So the alternative
is instead of building
the rockets in
mass production, you can at least build
the most important
and most expensive components
in mass production and
in some some nice examples of those.
Of course, these Soyuz rockets where
they build the
the burning chambers and the nozzles,
which are delicate parts, really
almost every Soyuz rockets.
When you look at it from behind has 20
such such burning chambers
and five sets of turbo
pumps through to deliver the fuel
to them.
And of course, we all know about the
Falcon Heavy 27
engines in the first stage.
Having so many, so
many
small engines means that you can build
one engine every three days or something
like that, and that really cuts down on
production costs,
especially compared to
other rockets that are more current.
Did the same thing.
This is an area for for rocket, which
was back
in its day, the cheapest rocket there
was that really disrupted
the transportation of satellites into
space as much as Space X did
back in the 2000s.
So it's up with the area and
rockets in the area, and rockets really
changed the game there,
and they did it by putting a lot
of identical and small engines.
These are eight Viking engines
in the first stage.
There's one waking engine in the second
stage and there's an upper stage
that is fueled by by
hydrogen and a different rocket
engine.
It's very much the same concept as
Space X used and.
For some reason, they forgot all about
it.
Next, rocket was Ariane
five, Ariane five
consists of
two solid boosters, one
big, one big engine, the Balkan
engine and the large central
stage
and alpha stage
with yet another different engine.
These rockets are
built and launched about six every
year, so every two months
or so you build one engine that's
very different than building one engine
every three days.
And that's what makes it so expensive.
And if you
there are some TV documentaries where
you can see the production
process of these engines
and there's a lot of handwork,
you know, there,
for example, about 500
injection nozzles inside of
the inside of
this inside of this
engine and well, there
are two or three engineers in the room
and one of them is
watching the other one while
he is taking each
injection
nozzle and screwing it into the plate
by hand.
There's not a lot of automation you can
do when you build six of those engines
every year and six of those rockets
every year,
and that's a big
reason why this has become quite
expensive, and it had to be subsidized
its rocket launch of those subsidized
by about 20 million
euros
just to not actually be competitive,
but to be just
just not
quite so expensive that it's worth to
develop a new rocket at least until
Space X came along.
Next, the rocket is going
to be Ariane six, and it's not going
to be that much better,
especially if you if
you have a look, it's going
to be in two different flavors.
The one with just to
two solid boosters Ariane
six, A62 and
the A64 is the big one.
Essentially, it's the same rocket, just
with smaller with smaller,
solid boosters.
But you notice the the actual
payload
on top is Python's.
This one is 10 tons and.
You wouldn't think that somebody
would come up
with this idea and say, Hey, that's a
good idea, because the
distorted markets are the cheap part of
the of the entire rocket.
So by leaving out two of those
solid
rocket boosters, you can reduce the cost
of the of the rocket by about 20 million
euros or something like that.
But you lose
half of the of the payload
while when you have a
big rocket, would you use for
boosters? You can get about twice
the payload for a marginal price
increase.
I've been
told that the A62
will cost about 40 percent less
than the area in
Ariane five rocket, so it's going to be
about 90 to 100
million euros for
a performance similar to
to a Falcon
nine
rocket that is about as expensive
as well 50
or 60 million
euros. It's it's not going
to be very cheap.
And of course, the A64
is going to be 120 130
million euros
and it doesn't
look like this is going to be
a very nice prospect for for being
competitive.
Well, also struck me is
people are actually using this one.
When you have five tonnes of
of payload that you can
bring into space,
but
by just using 20 million euros
or maybe 30 million euros, in addition to
that, you can double it.
That means you're actually wasting a lot
of a lot of payload mass.
That means for very it's
it's pretty expensive to
get in or to get the satellite
into orbit.
But getting five tonnes
more into orbit when there's
the
rocket already going can be quite
cheap and.
Even whenever you use
the the smaller
variant of this rocket means that you're
wasting a lot of money and a lot of
space in your in your rockets.
Not a problem, is
this an outdated graphic, but
the whole production is distributed
all over Europe.
This is actually a point of pride for the
producers.
So you can find,
yeah, every part of it.
So this is the kind engine.
And you can see here where all the
components of the awoken engine are made
is actually no longer current because as
far as I know, the oxygen pump will be
built in, will be built in Germany,
and they traded it for some
plants that were later announced.
Between all this, where
Germany was supposed to build casings
for this motor and so on and so forth.
There's a lot of political
to and fro.
This is in this the case in Europe
between different European countries.
In United States, you have something
similar between the different
states in the US.
And it really increased this
cost. Who would have thought
what kind of engine if you have a problem
with trust?
Well, what could it be?
Well, maybe it's the turbine.
The turbine drives the
pumps 40
for the fuel, the fuel pumps,
the hydrogen pumps and the oxygen pumps.
And so you call up
Sweden. I want to check
your turbine and maybe you
find out. No, it has
nothing to do with the turbine.
It's actually the hydrogen pump.
So you have to call to France.
Or maybe it's the gas generator.
In this case, you're lucky because it's
also in France, but it could be the
oxygen pump and it's not actually
made in Italy anymore.
So you have to call Germany and so
on and so forth.
And that's just for one engine.
And if you have any problem
with this rocket, you're very likely
to have to call another country, another
company in another country and
another country, probably in a different
language.
And yes,
it's it's a bit of a miracle that it
works at all, but it
works.
But it's not cheap
and everybody
in ESA is aware of you.
Talk about that.
If you talk to people who are working
on these rockets.
They know very well they could be much
cheaper than.
Well, let's talk about different rocket.
This is the rocket that was used to
launch
the latest Mars space probe.
This is my insight
and you might think, well, it's a big
rocket, but it's like a really small
space
probe. Surely this must be some figment
of the imagination.
Probably it's much, much bigger.
And the artist made a mistake.
But no,
no, it's really that small.
And it's about, I
think, seven or eight hundred kilograms
and this rocket,
the way it's configured, you could
at least put another 1.5 tonnes
more to Mars.
So there was room,
there was a lot of room to
to occupy this.
And you know, you could you
have 1.5 tons.
So what do you do?
You put a different space probe, maybe
into it
and send it also to Mars because
finally have a chance to get a big chunk
of metal or something to Mars.
Anything you want?
What did NASA's do?
Well, they
sent two small CubeSats to
Mars, and they're quite proud
of it. And I can understand
that, especially the teams that built
those. They are quite proud of it and
quite rightfully so, because it's the
first time that a small cubesat was
sent to Mars so far away
and transmitted data, and
that worked very well.
But what about the other 1.5
tons?
As a matter of fact, you could have put
at least one, maybe two or
even three
additional landers on Mars on the same
rocket.
There's a lot of
waste going on in this space,
and we're not even
talking about the price of this rocket.
Yeah.
You when you have so much mass,
you could
change the way you build
such probes or satellites
because right now, the reason why this
is
800kg is because
when they constructed a space probe, they
tried to save as much weight as possible.
And a lot of
effort is put into every single
satellite, every single space mission to
save weight.
Every kilogram counts or so, it seems.
But if you look at a rocket like this is
point 1.5 tons that are wasted,
essentially.
So what was
your point in saving all of this mass?
There isn't very much to it.
Also, remember that a lot of rockets
are built with
island, not in a maximum
configuration, so you could with very
little extra expense, increase
the payload.
Instead, you could choose
a different concept.
And right now,
there are not many
manufacturers that do this on a large
scale. But there's one manufacturer that
I found that I interviewed
where they do it on a small scale.
This is burn space technologies,
and this is one of the satellites they
built and doesn't show up very nicely
here. Unfortunately,
it's a satellite about this big half
a meter weighs about
70 kilograms,
and they actually
launched one of those already.
And it's a modular system.
It's just a
box.
It's a box with lots of little
components inside of it
that can be put into different places
and.
This means that you waste a lot of
weight,
because when you
construct a satellite, you have to make
sure that all the mass is distributed
equally evenly
and you have to look at
every system that works correctly
with all the other systems.
And as soon as you have to change
something,
you have to start essentially start the
construction all over again because
you now have to shift all
the weight, the whole weight distribution
inside of it.
If you don't want to waste any mass,
what you can do
is you can just put some weights
into the satellite box and
shift them around each
time you have to change a component
and you can do this and they do
it by, for example, taking their
batteries and putting them into a
different spot and the spots is already
designated. It's not.
It's not like this.
It's not so tightly built that
there's no room to put it elsewhere.
They just made room for it.
That means the box is bigger.
That means that the whole the
whole satellite will weigh more
and you will need more mass to achieve
the same, the same goals.
But it
gets cheaper because now
you can have your box and
build it for different configurations
and just quantify it
once. And when you have to change
something,
you change it and you're
not leaving the scope that you qualified
your box for your entire satellite for.
Also, what they do is
they use very simple technology.
When you look at
this, the camera, and it doesn't hold up
very nicely here,
but if you see it in person,
it really
looks like somebody took a
regular photo lands and put it
into a satellite.
And you could be forgiven for thinking
that because that's what they did.
It's a photo lens that's about
this big ten centimeters
across, and it's enough that from
a 500 kilometer high orbit,
you can take pictures with a resolution
of about five meters
in many other satellites.
There are specially built optics just for
this,
but you can use
the commercially available technology,
just like for common
consumer grade camera.
But you have to check that it actually
works in a vacuum because there might be
some sealant, some lubricant or something
like that that evaporates in the vacuum
and way that operates in a vacuum.
Just a little fine mist might
deposit on the lenses and lock them up or
something like that.
And you have to check all that,
but you can make it quite cheap that way.
It is also a very nice piece.
This the Star Trek I used.
Star trackers are essentially cameras
that look at star constellations, and
from these star constellations, you can
tell that where where
your satellite is pointing
and what it essentially is, it's
a
camera and a very small camera at
that. And what they used is
a little board,
and this looks
like the camera board you would have in
one of your smartphones.
And that's because that's what it is.
They essentially use
camera board from a smart from a
smartphone, put a different lens
on top of it.
Um, much better lens,
higher. It gets more light on
the sensor, and
the hardware cost is quite cheap.
It's like few dollars.
The problem here is you have to do all
the engineering, you have to do the
software and
this is what costs the money here.
Another example is reaction
wheels. Reaction wheels are
a wheel that you spin, and because
you spin the wheel in one direction,
the satellite will tend to spin in the
other direction. And that way you
control.
You can control how the satellite is
pointed in space,
and usually you would
take a reaction wheel and
make it so you can.
It works in space, in vacuum.
That's a problem because you have to have
some sort of lubrication
because you have to spin those wheels and
they will touch something and there
should not be too much friction between
it.
Well, on Earth, here
we have solve these problems.
We have a lot of absolutely
fine lubricants that can work for
years on end. No problem,
but in vacuum, it's a different story.
So instead of trying to find a vacuum
capable lubricant
or something like that, they just put
a box around it
wasted another one or two kilograms
of of mass and.
Put an end to it and solve the problem
that way, which is
very elegant and easy solution to a
problem
that you would normally have to solve,
especially when you look at missions like
the Kepler space telescope
recently or the Dawn mission.
They had huge problems because they were
in vacuum and
in vacuum. You don't get
to have the luxury that when you have a
static charge, it eventually dissipates.
You know, you have an electric charge and
because it
conducts electricity
very badly,
but at least a bit eventually,
when you have something that is
electrically charged, it will
it will well dissipate
the charge and we're equalized.
We have it in vacuum.
This doesn't happen, and the only way it
can happen is through discharges.
And it turns out in these ball
bearings that you have a very small
differences between the ball bearings and
the walls of micro
meters. And when you have micrometers,
you can get extremely high field strength
just from small voltages
like one or two votes, difference between
the ball bearings and the center of the
of the wheel.
And you can get arcs and
these arcs canals, the ball bearings
and caused higher friction.
And they found out the hard way
by essentially
essentially screwing up zero emissions
after a couple of years.
And they only found out by
by looking at
when the reaction wheels failed
in space.
And solar storms and the solar
storms consist of charged particles,
and they charged up to the satellite
and cause there's this thing to
happen.
And I really like that
kind of modulated
approach, even though it's much more
expensive, much more expensive in terms
of the mass they will cause, much
less engineering can be qualified much
more easily for
for continued looking
for new missions for reuse.
Finally, I want to talk
about two missions that
really kind of took this approach
from India.
India has
actually a fairly unknown
but quite viable space program.
And what they did, they send
one mission to the Moon and another one
to to Mars.
And what those are is
essentially a satellite that they already
had
like telecommunication satellite, and
they made room for cameras
and other instruments
when they send it to
to the Moon. This work quite well.
They had about
80 kilograms of payload in their
scientific payload.
When they send it to Mars, they had a bit
a somewhat bigger problem.
And the problem was
it takes more energy to get to Mars and
the Indian rockets.
The heavier Indian rockets were not
quite reliable enough when they when
they start to launch this.
And so they had to use the small rocket.
And these satellites were built for a
small rocket, but they were built to go
to a geostationary orbit.
Now, it turns out, and the
geostationary orbit is the orbit that you
use for two satellites
kind of orbit, where the satellite
just stays on one spot in the sky.
No, it turns out any
satellite that can do that that can get
into this kind of orbit
has enough
energy and enough fuel to get to the Moon
or even get to Mars
because it's quite demanding mission.
The problem, then, is only to get into
an orbit around the Moon
or Mars, and
so getting to Mars is not the problem.
Getting into a good orbit around Mars,
that is that was the problem.
And actually,
this is Mangalyaan.
That's the that's the Mars mission
only
has to, I think, 12 kilograms of payload
on onboard because of that
because they really had to use most
of the fuel just to get into any kind of
orbit.
So, OK, I hope
you have some questions
so I can answer them.
You can't.
Yeah, first of all, thank you so much
for this talk.
Hopefully, there's some questions
from the audience.
Please don't be shy.
Yes, this is Don.
Hi, thank you for the talk.
My question would be, you said that mass
production of rocket engines
allows you to cut down costs.
So why did they even use
bigger engines?
The original reason was that
you only have one one engine, so
only one engine can fail.
OK, thank you.
That is essentially that that was the
reasoning they used for a very
long time, and it was supposed to be man
rated, so people were supposed
to go on this.
Of course, it's also women rated.
It's a it's a pretty old concept.
So yeah, they still call it manned
rating,
and they hope to improve the reliability
of the whole system.
But it turns out that
a lot of the a lot of the rockets that
actually used a lot of engines
were just as reliable as
rockets that used just a single engine
and one in one stage.
And Ariane four itself was
a pretty good example for that.
Even though I have had
a lot of I did
a lot of talking to people from East Side
canals and others, and a lot of people
would tell me, Oh, that's you cannot
use nine engines like in Falcon
nine rocket.
That would be too unreliable,
but actually OK.
And the Falcon nine, they had a different
track and they made
sure they could still launch
with or they could have one engine
fail and still continue to continue
to launch.
Unlike Ariane four,
where occasionally they had failures,
I think one or two failures of
engines and that actually aborted the
mission because it wasn't
made for that.
OK, thank you.
Yeah.
Thanks for your question.
Next question of.
And one reminder you can also ask
questions.
Yeah. From the internet if you're
watching the stream, so please contact
our signal engine.
What type of justifications do the space
agencies give for
not filling up the payloads?
Do they risk, you
know, satellites interfering with each
other or anything like that in
in this case,
they didn't give any kind of
justification.
Instead, they launch this from the west
coast of the United States and
said, Look, it's the first
time we launched a rocket from the West
and Interplanetary Space
Probe from the west coast of the United
States.
Of course, they could only do this
because they have had so much performance
margin.
And usually you would go for
the East Coast and launch
the rocket towards the east, which is
along with the rotation of the Earth,
and get an additional
boost of speed just
from the rotation of the Earth.
And they just said, Well, we don't need
that, so we can also launch it from the
West Coast. And now they made a big deal
of. Yeah, it's the first time that we
had an interplanetary mission from the
West Coast, but it's well,
it's quite this ingenious.
Thanks for your question.
Next one.
Yes, thanks for the great talk.
Newman, you were talking about the
problems with friction and lubrication.
And the interesting solution that you
showed near the end of your talk.
I'm curious, what kind of solutions did
they use for friction
other than that other than putting it in
the can that was pressurized?
How do you prevent
the evaporation of the lubricant
or do they use some method that doesn't
use the lubricant?
I think they found lubricants
that were quite well or
I think they're also they're also
ceramic ball bearings
that they are now using.
And they also have the
added advantage that they don't conduct
electricity so they don't get the
charging that led to the failure
of Kepler and dawn.
Ceramic ball bearings don't need to be
lubricated.
I think, and not entirely sure,
but I think they have.
They have vacuum capable application
lubrication.
Thank you.
Thank you for your questions.
I think if no one now is
like jumping up and saying, yes,
I have another one.
OK, then you
would
just be friends and thank you
for your talk. It was incredibly
interesting, obviously awesome
rock and science pictures.
Incredible. Incredible.
Thank you for that.
So give a very warm
round of applause for our speaker.