Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by martyb on Saturday January 22 2022, @04:54AM   Printer-friendly
from the good-and-fast-so-not-cheap dept.

SpaceX signs a deal to rocket military cargo around the world:

The US Air Force is enlisting Elon Musk's help in developing a way to deliver military supplies and humanitarian aid via SpaceX rockets.

The company has signed a contract with the US Department of Defense worth over $102 million to provide point-to-point transit for cargo via space.

[...] The contract, awarded Friday, falls under the Air Force Research Laboratory's rocket cargo program, which aims to take advantage of the falling price of heavy launch capabilities that SpaceX and other companies have brought to the market in recent years.

Program manager Greg Spanjers told SpaceNews earlier this week that the military is "very interested in the ability to deliver the cargo anywhere on Earth to support humanitarian aid and disaster relief."

The contract doesn't specify which SpaceX rocket or vehicle the initiative will utilize. SpaceX has used its Falcon 9 rocket and Falcon Heavy (which is made up of three Falcon 9 boosters) for military missions in the past, but Musk has made clear that he views Starship as the vehicle of the future.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 0, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 22 2022, @05:33AM (6 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 22 2022, @05:33AM (#1214715)

    i wonder how many moab's a starship can deliver?
    maybe, rename it to moahig-ship (mother-of-all-holes-in-(the)-ground-ship)?
    really? going to the stars but taking money from military?

    Starting Score:    0  points
    Moderation   0  
       Flamebait=1, Insightful=1, Total=2
    Extra 'Flamebait' Modifier   0  

    Total Score:   0  
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 22 2022, @07:01AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 22 2022, @07:01AM (#1214732)

    Do Eskimos make icy BMs?

  • (Score: 2) by pvanhoof on Saturday January 22 2022, @10:30AM

    by pvanhoof (4638) on Saturday January 22 2022, @10:30AM (#1214754) Homepage

    Here is a great idea: SpaceX to deliver humanitarian bunker busters on dams that hold back massive amounts of water that would when destroyed flood tens of thousands of people:
    ttps://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/20/us/airstrike-us-isis-dam.html

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Saturday January 22 2022, @10:56AM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Saturday January 22 2022, @10:56AM (#1214756) Journal

    Been under a rock? They have already been taking money from the military. They launched a bunch of payloads for the Air Force and even sued the Air Force to get access to more contracts [industryweek.com] back in 2014.

    As for the payload, it could easily become the delivery system for a 1 gigaton hydrogen bomb. Maybe that can put a dent in an asteroid.

    https://soylentnews.org/~takyon/journal/8477 [soylentnews.org]

    --
    [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Saturday January 22 2022, @01:27PM (1 child)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Saturday January 22 2022, @01:27PM (#1214775) Journal

    going to the stars but taking money from military?

    Is there supposed to be a problem here?

    I'll note that for purposes of delivering ordinance, the SpaceX rocket just isn't that impressive. Sure, you can deliver a decent amount of bang in an hour or two once launched, but the vehicle isn't designed to be launched at a moment's notice. That is, it has to be fueled. Due to LOX (liquid oxygen) boil off, it's very hard to keep fueled. Running out of LOX has scuttled SpaceX launches before. My thinking here is that SpaceX would have to put a rocket on a pad with the explosive payload, and keep sending truck after truck of LOX to the rocket until the target is acquired and the rocket can be launched. It's tremendously expensive and high logistics.

    And the US has long had relatively cheap, ballistic missiles capable of delivering said explosive power anywhere in the world. It's just not worth the price when you can get a plane or cruise missile on target in a moderately longer length of time.

    Here, I don't know that there is a market for emergency supplies due to the restrictions of the Falcon 9 and Superheavy. SpaceX probably could work such emergency flights into their schedule easily enough, but if their launch tempo isn't frequent enough (like a rocket-a-day frequent), then you're still left with a lag that makes it noncompetitive with the usual ways. Really the only thing going in favor of the scheme is that you don't have a launch window any more (though flights can still be scuttled due to bad weather).

    Testing such a system could be done on a Falcon 9 or the like since you're not interested in meeting a schedule at that point. But if you really want such a delivery system, use an existing ICBM or other stable propellant rocket for it. That way, you can have the rocket in a silo ready to go. This starts getting into some MAD problems since the rocket could be interpreted as a nuclear weapon launch, but I think it's not insurmountable.

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Immerman on Saturday January 22 2022, @03:33PM

      by Immerman (3985) on Saturday January 22 2022, @03:33PM (#1214795)

      >Is there supposed to be a problem here?

      Agreed. Military spending has been responsible for developing virtually all our launch technology to this point, its hardly shocking to have them continuing to play a part. And where Starship is concerned they'd be one of a very few customers paying for landing gear development and usage - commercial suborbital flights are likely to all rely on the launch tower catching arms, and a single moon-lander rocket seems to be the only demand from NASA within the next couple decades. They'll need the landing gear well tested for Mars, but currently there doesn't seem to be any considerations given to making that megaproject economically viable.

      The problem with ICBMS for suborbital launches appears at the destination. They're just *really* not designed to survive landfall, or even slow down - in fact, doing so would completely defeat the point.

      I suppose you could potentially just eject the payload with parachutes - but you've still committed to a large explosion somewhere downrange. Plus hypersonic parachutes are a real challenge, and you have no other way to slow down. Not to mention landing via trans-sonic parachute flight is going to introduce *huge* margins of error in the landing zone, which is... suboptimal.

      And then there's the expense - throwing away an ICBM with every deliverly gets expensive fast - Google suggests at least $70 million as a bare minimum per launch for a small fraction of a Starship payload. Considerably more expensive than a Falcon 9 launch, and Starship is supposed to be dramatically cheaper. (I would assume that long-term the "default" plan would be to land at the destination with enough excess fuel to then fly, empty, to the nearest commercial launch tower - with greater payload capacity if refueling at the destination is an option. Judging from the hop tests they should have a pretty impressive range even with only a fraction of a tank.)

  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 22 2022, @06:59PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 22 2022, @06:59PM (#1214841)

    The military already has efficient ways of delivering large quantities of high explosives on demand, even from around the world. What Starship offers is a new tier of rapid response for the supply chain. That is much more valuable than a new weapon. Weapons win battles, but logistics wins wars.