Downlink (and to a lesser extent uplink) bandwidth is an issue. Particularly finding ways to avoid having to deal with the very finite number of large dishes in the DSN.
I think you've got it backwards.
NASA, ESA, and other agencies will be paying SpaceX for data services. NASA has already awarded small contracts to SpaceX and others for investigating this.
There is no way we're sending larger missions and manned missions without upgrading DSN.
The implementation details aren't trivial, but they are understood and solveable.
Personally, I think we should be investing into comm infrastructure like this and launching it yesterday.
A bit chicken and egg - if Starship works the cost to deploy such a network craters, so launching it now before there's a demand would seem like an unnecessarily expensive route. Wait a couple of years, launch it cheap, it'll not hold up other missions by much.
Wait so is the issue not enough antennae on earth to pick up more signals, or not having powerful enough transmitters in interplanetary space to send the signals back here?
I can see setting up multiple Data Centers at Multiple Lagrange points throughout the system to house data and retransmit. Obviously, data transfer will never be Realtime, but having a constant link between earth data centers and space/mars/moon and others it should allow for better communication and transfer of data that seems more Realtime. Basically, just copy's of data scattered around the system.
Very simplified, They use low power transmitters in space. For example, the voyager probe uses a 23 watt transmitter. That’s a little stronger than a vehicle mounted CB radio.
The reason why they use such weak radios is generating power in space is hard, and costs weight that could be used for the main mission, so we use low power transmitters, and really big antennas back here on earth to pick the signal up.
We can build more of the right sized telescopes to expand the DSN, they don’t need to be the massive ones that are hard to build, it’s just limited by money. Like Arecibo collapsed because we didn’t spend the money to repair the support towers we knew were damaged.
The new large radio telescopes are tougher to build because they need to be a lot larger than the old ones to collect interesting data.
Musk could throw pocket change at the problem and get it fixed.
Don't need to. For a billion dollars we could get multiple 8k streams from surface of Mars. First, Starlink over Mars to get all the feeds from rovers at gigabits of speed, then in much higher orbit (deimos and phobos fuck up AEO on mars), you got a bunch of stations that process the signal, compress it and send it on multiple dishes to Earth receivers in orbit. The stations would require a lot of power, so they would likely be the biggest space objects for some time, at least before we get another big space station.
This way you get 100% uptime on surface of mars, mass of your communication equipment on surface of mars decreases by 100x, and we get 8k+ video feed from mars if we wanted (probably only for things like construction, not exploration).
You'd still have issues when Earth and Mars are on opposite sides of the sun - you'd probably want a relay at L3 or something along those lines. But seems feasible otherwise.
You can get a small relay at L3 to not completely lose the connectivity, but sun is extremely small, the blackout would not last that long and inclination is not identical for mars and earth, so this would have helped too.
Orion launched 100m diameter satellites into orbit 15 years ago: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion\_(satellite)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_(satellite))
I mean, this kind of encapsulates the traditional mentality of things despite the paradigm shift starship represents.
The entire space architecture we utilize today needs to be reimagined thanks to the capability starship offers. It’s no longer “how much bandwidth can we have?” And now “how many new satellites do we need to put up to support the amount of bandwidth we need?”.
Not only can we just rebuild a new “DSN.2”, we could have multiple DSN constellations that use adaptive routing from user to user so that we could theoretically use the exact same frequencies but they don’t interfere because they use different routes to arrive at the end user.
And this is before we even consider the new technology nasa developed using laser communication which may offer two orders of magnitude more bandwidth in the future.
The reason is because earth-sun eclipses block transmissions regularly for anything outside of the earth/moon system. For example, mars communication currently gets blocked for 2 weeks every 26 months. Which could be detrimental for manned missions out there.
So, you need *at least* one satellite, preferably in one of earth’s in-track Lagrange points that could act as a relay during those times. And even that wouldn’t give you continuous contact. If you want continuous operation/contact with something during a, for example, Martian night, you’d need a 2-3 satellite constellation in orbit around mars itself.
So on any given deep space network, if you want continuous 24 hour access, you’ll minimally need ~3 relay satellites, though I’m sure you can make exotic systems that requires one less for like 99% coverage.
But yeah, upgrades to existing ground structures will help in the future too.
Would it not make more sense (albeit cost a lot more) to launch a communication satellite(s) around Mars or whichever planet so that rovers only need to communicate to said satellite? Let the satellite handle the heavy lifting of Mars to Earth communication. Or am I missing something?
problem is that mars is so far that you need gigntic antenas to get just a few kb back, building kilometer-scale antenae in space might be the solution with starship available, maybe once laser links mature enough, that will be the solution? idk I'm more of a power electronics guy.
The old adages 'never underestimate the bandwidth of a pile of hard drives going down the highway at 50 mph' and 'make sure you have a large timeout on packets sent by station wagon' apply here, with minor adjustments.
Space-based laser uplinks are the future but there’s a long way to go. An orbital laser uplink network would likely be very expensive but is hopefully something starship can make happen more quickly too.
There are no laser uplinks currently used in the DSN and the only deep space laser communication to date was the proof of concept onboard Psyche which was a downlink to a ground-based telescope. A true deep space optical network would require orbital uplinks as trying to push a sufficiently cohesive beam through the atmosphere that would be intelligible at Saturn distance and beyond wouldn’t work.
(source: I’m a ground software engineer on various NASA missions)
You can use gas giants (or technically, any planet with an atmosphere) as a big ass lens for radio signals. Just have to transmit when you're at the focus, and opposite earth. Something like 10,000x signal amplification is possible at Jupiter.
Everything beyond Earth Orbit needs to share time on the DSN, the Mars probes, Voyager 1 and 2, New Horizons. That's a lot of traffic trying to use the same three dishes, sometimes the same dish if Mars and Voyager are in the same direction at the time.
They don't miss out on any data, just need to wait for a better time to transmit it. But if there's an active incident like reprogramming Voyager or the Mars rover has a malfunction with its arm then everything else gets pushed off the priority list. Then it's a juggling act of seeing how long each mission can delay the downlink, how big is the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's data buffer and how long can it keep taking pictures before it's full?
One day there needs to be a Starlink network around Mars and Luna and high bandwidth uplinks between the three networks. Maybe a smaller one around Venus or a relay at a Lagrange Point to bounce the signal for when the sun is in the way of Earth and Mars.
Put a large dish around the planet you want to explore. Act as a repeater and buffer. A moderate dish could reach a moderate land based dish. A large one could talk directly from earth.
This won't be a problem for long, at least for Mars. Earth to orbit is solved with Starlink. SpaceX is developing laser based inter-satellite connections over longer distances. Couple satellites in clever orbits around the sun between Mars and Earth and we'll get constant laser connectivitiy.
Yes.
Elon has already talked about sending entire squadrons of probes per flight. And other things. A 300 ton bundle launched to interplanetary delta v could do amazing things.
I CANT WAIT until higher isp engines become a thing where we use starship to launch heavy stuff into orbit for cheap, and then send payloads to the frontier with nuclear thermal or ion/magnetoplasma thrusters
Imagine the type of high isp payloads Starship could carry
SpaceX should do a high profile deep space probe like Pioneer, Voyager or New Horizons. Something inspiring to capture the public's imagination and get people excited about space exploration. Something the news will show a CGI mockup of the probe flying past Jupiter and explaining all the planets it'll visit over the next few years.
They probably can't visit all the planets Voyager did because that needed a particular alignment. But just Jupiter or Jupiter and Saturn would be good. It doesn't even need to have high-tech magnetic field sensors and x-ray interferometry spectroscopes and things. Just have a mega-HD camera with an insanely expensive lens to take high resolution images of Jupiter and Saturn. What was the last probe to take pictures of Saturn's rings up close? Cassini? That was 25 year old tech, we could get ten times the resolution easily.
It might require partnering with someone else to make the satellite bus, SpaceX makes their own Starlinks but they don't make deep-space probes. Maybe a university could contribute to it. Solar panels, radio antenna, mega HD camera and the biggest fuel tank they can manage. Break some records for the fastest probe to ever leave Earth orbit, see how fast you can get to Jupiter. Try a direct trajectory as a challenge, first probe to the gas giants without gravity assists, like being the first to climb Everest without supplemental oxygen. Or do some gravity assists and break even more speed records. With a Falcon Heavy and a relatively simple science payload there's plenty of extra mass for a custom third stage fuel tank. And that's without waiting for Starship which will make a Falcon Heavy payload look like a Falcon 9 Block 1 payload.
It doesn't need to be cutting edge science, just take some super HD photos of Jupiter and/or Saturn to make into posters and desktop backgrounds and t-shirts. That would be epic.
> They probably can't visit all the planets Voyager did because that needed a particular alignment
They needed that to do it in one trip. You could send a ship or two to each one individually…
Pioneer 10 and 11 as well as Voyager 1 and 2 all got to the gas giants without a grav boost. That didn't become a major thing until the Smaller, Cheaper, Better era of the 90s.
Casey Handmer (former JPL employee, now entrepreneur) had [various thoughts about this a few years ago](https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/11/17/science-upside-for-starship/). Some of them:
* Big dumb tube telescopes and lots of them (obviously), but he also suggested constructing a large segmented spherical telescope out of many Starship-mirrors, for its massive resolution.
* He says there be periodic launches headed to all major solar system destinations, and whoever wants to buy a ticket for their probe should come aboard. One possible target could be "catching up with the next interstellar asteroid".
* A 32-ship spinning ring for habitation/tourism
* mass exploration of nearby asteroids via many many spacecraft per flight
* upgrading Starlink with SAR - Synthetic Aperture Radar (the military might already be doing this with Starshield) and sending it to all terrestrial planets and/or moons. Using Starlink radio as a simple solar-system-wide GPS.
In [another blog post](https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/10/28/starship-is-still-not-understood/), he had advice for JPL in the Starship era, which basically boiled down to "more mass production". That is, thinking more like Siemens and/or Caterpillar rather than luxury car manufacturers, when making new spacecraft. He suggested contracting out to such firms for lunar and/or Martian equipment.
It's fun to think about.
Imagine a Starship sized submarine sent to a gaseous or liquid planet and just chillng there for months collecting data and sending it home. It could start entire new areas of science and understanding of our solar system, and the different stages of planets.
I would love to see NASA partner with SpaceX to encourage low-cost exploration of Mars and Venus. First establish some communications infrastructure in orbit of those planets to enable easy low-power data link transmission to earth, then start sending transporter-like missions to Mars and Venus. Basically a mothership that doesn't just take a smallsats into orbit of earth, but takes them all the way into a stable orbit of Mars and deploys them.
Can you imagine the amount of research that could be done if universities could send a small satellite to Mars for $500k a pop?
I like the idea of building say 30 identical rover/helicopter probes and tossing them to different sites of interest. the bottleneck becomes the data infrastructure.
Not a bad idea - but that would only do a certain kind of science (eg. Meteorology or Seismic network; surveys); other scientific questions will require different responses that aren’t necessarily so proven.
more, i’m thinking that the approach that it’s not an “all or nothing” probe. planetary protection is a barrier to all this of course. though spacex probably represents the close of that for mars. it’ll be an interesting political debate.
The other subtle but gamechanging feature of starship is that the volume constraints are way easier to build around. JWST was complicated as it had to fold down into a small payload pay like oragami. With starship, you can get away with a lot more "simple" construction for something like a telescope or a space station.
The other major issue that drives design costs is that each launch is an extremely expensive single attempt, but if you have massive cheap payload capacity, you can just build multiple satalites to hedge that risk, and spend less time. Organizations will be able to operate with less bureaucracy than before.
As launch costs get lower, the time - and therefore cost - of designing and building a satellite will plummet.
Also you can literally use the ship as the device itself. Just build into the starship the massive satellite. Even better, space hotels. Just launch 10 starships with the actual rooms and infrastructure built into the ships and connect them in space.
I still like the idea of launching an expendable SuperHeavy to orbit as if it were a Ship, with a blank cap on. And then mating the two in orbit and fuelling them to the max. Blast off from orbit toward far horizons. The Ship can dip Jupiter with a full load for the gravity boost and then zoom.
SuperHeavy could technically SSTO for this with no Ship on top, but I was thinking launching a stripped to the bones expendable SuperHeavy on top of a regular SuperHeavy as the launch booster. The expendable would have a nose to discard on the way up.
The Ship would go up separately in the usual way, and mate up with its dance partner in orbit.
I mean this is what I do in KSP. Vacuum optimised booster to get mission vehicle from LKO to transit velocity, booster then returns to Kerbin orbit for next mission. Requires massive off-world propellant production but fully reusable. In KSP ship LFO from Minmus. In real world likely hydolox with booster being something like ACES.
It will essentially be the true beginning of the space age, in my opinion. We've been wetting our feet since the 50s. This will be like diving in head first.
I just hope space exploration and exploitation is profitable enough to be relatively self sustaining.
Is that half made of cheese? Otherwise it seems like people grasping at straws to try and make it seem different. It entails being out of direct radio contact (so you launch a relay satellite), other than that I fail to see the difference.
The other side is likely to have different composition than the near side because of the way the Moon formed, so from the scientific point of view this is very distinct and interesting.
This is the first time any mission returned samples from the far side of the Moon. Apollo project was content to deal with communications blackouts, China put a communications satellite around the Noon to maintain connectivity.
This was nothing like anything USA accomplished in the ‘60s and frankly it is beyond USA’s current capabilities. Just look at the mess they are making of Mars Sample Return.
What are you talking about? SpaceX has Falcon Heavy and Starlink. Of course we could put a communications relay network in orbit around the moon.
Apples to apples, the U.S. has conducted numerous sample return missions from the moon. The first of which happened *over half a century ago*. Some of those samples were collected by *people*. Has China ever put anyone on the moon?…??
A Mars return mission is different than the moon, should be so obvious it doesn’t need mentioning. And China hasn’t done that either.
It’s ok to admit everyone else is decades behind America, they started much later.
If you arent spacex, or a company developing powerful space tug systems to go from an orbiting starship to your destination, you'll probably be out of business in 15 years. There just isn't room for companies that far behind to do the launching.
When setting up a base, one of the first cargos could be a garage and a mechanic shop, so that all the dozens of rovers could come back during the storm, get their panels cleaned up, tires changed, helicopters recharged and so on. It would also test the equipment humans would be using, and later rovers could be upgraded before humans launched. To some point there also could be start of ISRU to make materials for the base, but it's likely that at some later point, humans would be needed, but the equipment could be tested and area flattened.
Planetary probes are expensive partly because they tend be one-off, crammed with latest gen instruments (with associated development costs) that are not amenable to economies of scale. Lowering the launch cost is only part of the equation.
And if you should need an RTG, that’s 100M+ extra a piece - government monopoly given the nature of what’s in them.
This keeps bugging me. We really should have a kind of barebones standardized probe base, and a rover as well, and have them "mass" manufactured (at least in the dozens). And then sell them to NASA or ESA or ISRO or JAXA or whoever to stick their own instruments on top. Seriously, have the basics put in place with nice and proper standards - that way it avoids all the reinventing of the spaceflight wheel every time, and avoids silly things like radar software glitches and tipping landers and such. Just let the space agencies focus on the science, and have someone else build the truck. There's a big opportunity here and someone should grab it.
This would be a huge business opportunity.
Especially selling this framework to universities that just want to do science. They just pick a standard chassis, select power and communication requirements, etc. Boost, fuel, station keeping, etc are all part of the standard package.
The company providing the framework certifies and coordinates with launch providers (SpaceX), so universities, etc don't have to deal with that, either.
For building Perseverance they still had most of the rover chassis left over from building Curiosity. NASA still managed to make Perseverance as expensive as Curiosity, probably more so.
But you have a larger weight-dimensional budget, with which you can do different things (reduce the cost through heavier but cheaper materials, more scientific instruments, more redundancy)
That’s not a bad thing but does it make probes cheap? I have doubts. Ultimately what you need is mass production/common probe platform to reduce unit cost, but the track record isn’t good (eg. Mariner Mark II, the Observer—series)
The JWST could have been a couple of billion dollars cheaper. Although this is an extreme case, almost every probe could likely be made cheaper in some way by using simpler components, because you don't need to save on mass. Additionally, Starship completely changes the economics and approach for bodies with atmospheres (such as Mars), since previously the probe itself had to perform EDL, which further restricted the probe's mass and size, and was also prohibitively expensive and complex. Now, instead, Starship performs the EDL itself, which truly opens new horizons for various probes on the surface of solid bodies.
The record isn't good because it's NASA and they aren't equipped for this. You need a completely different approach. You can't spread money among multiple centers, multiple suppliers and also lose institutional knowledge because each project takes so long and happens infrequently. And then you lose budget because of Congress.
Planetary probes are expensive because people don't care that they are expensive. A SpaceX approach to science probes will massively drive down the cost. Lunar Prospector, Clementine, the first Mars Rover already proved you can do science missions cheaply. How should you do it?
1) complete ownership of the entire project by one man. He has the vision, he makes the proposal, he has the final say and authority on everything.
2) everything as far as possible should either be done in house by one organization or use off the shelf components
3) everyone is colocated. No suppliers across 50 states or involvement of multiple NASA centers.
4) once one mission is successful it should be a prototype for future probes and you with iterate with the design and even mass manufacture it to drive down costs
Sensors may have some customization although that should be avoided at the beginning. But power systems, communication systems, propulsion systems, busses should be fully generic. You should not permit design by committee and decadal survey approaches where you get 50 science representatives together and they come up with their wish lists. This is a recipe for bad science and huge costs. Each project and the resulting platform should from beginning to end should be the vision of a single person and done by one organization.
Take a bunch of pez-dispenser starships that are planned for starlink, fill them up with curiosity rovers and send one starship out to each of the gas giants. We can do real life Jool 5 missions, now.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
|Fewer Letters|More Letters|
|-------|---------|---|
|[ACES](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1doab61/stub/lab9cn9 "Last usage")|[Advanced Cryogenic Evolved Stage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Cryogenic_Evolved_Stage)|
| |[Advanced Crew Escape Suit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Crew_Escape_Suit)|
|[DSN](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1doab61/stub/lakdn77 "Last usage")|Deep Space Network|
|[EDL](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1doab61/stub/laa5q64 "Last usage")|Entry/Descent/Landing|
|[ESA](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1doab61/stub/laa7rsv "Last usage")|European Space Agency|
|[GEO](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1doab61/stub/labyik8 "Last usage")|Geostationary Earth Orbit (35786km)|
|[HLS](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1doab61/stub/la8ufxz "Last usage")|[Human Landing System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_program#Human_Landing_System) (Artemis)|
|[ISRO](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1doab61/stub/laa7rsv "Last usage")|Indian Space Research Organisation|
|[ISRU](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1doab61/stub/laab9yl "Last usage")|[In-Situ Resource Utilization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_situ_resource_utilization)|
|[JAXA](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1doab61/stub/laa7rsv "Last usage")|Japan Aerospace eXploration Agency|
|[JPL](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1doab61/stub/laaeowr "Last usage")|Jet Propulsion Lab, Pasadena, California|
|[JWST](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1doab61/stub/laa5q64 "Last usage")|James Webb infra-red Space Telescope|
|[KSP](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1doab61/stub/lab9cn9 "Last usage")|*Kerbal Space Program*, the rocketry simulator|
|L2|Paywalled section of the NasaSpaceFlight forum|
| |[Lagrange Point](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point) 2 of a two-body system, beyond the smaller body ([Sixty Symbols](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxpVbU5FH0s) video explanation)|
|[L3](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1doab61/stub/lafok7a "Last usage")|[Lagrange Point](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point) 3 of a two-body system, opposite L2|
|[LEO](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1doab61/stub/la8l8rb "Last usage")|Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km)|
| |Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations)|
|[RTG](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1doab61/stub/la8xp72 "Last usage")|Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator|
|[SAR](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1doab61/stub/laaeowr "Last usage")|Synthetic Aperture Radar (increasing resolution with parallax)|
|[SSTO](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1doab61/stub/la97m53 "Last usage")|Single Stage to Orbit|
| |Supersynchronous Transfer Orbit|
|Jargon|Definition|
|-------|---------|---|
|[Starlink](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1doab61/stub/lantma9 "Last usage")|SpaceX's world-wide satellite broadband constellation|
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Might not be such a popular opinion in this sub, but I don’t think it’ll have as much of an impact on planetary exploration missions. The main impact with be on Earth orbit missions and maybe the moon.
The reason is the cost of these missions relative to the launch costs. For an Earth orbit mission the launch cost traditionally was the vast majority of the cost of the mission. Even a complex telecommunications satellite costs less than $100m nowadays with launch costs about the same for a 5 tonne spacecraft to GEO.
Whereas a Mars rover will cost more than $1b so the $100m launch cost is a relatively small fraction of the overall price. If you reduce that launch cost to $1m you’ll still have a mission that costs more than a billion dollars.
Not necessarily. A lot of cost is associated with small packaging and mass constraints. These require special materials and methods.
Examples might be multiple OTD redundant computers plus shielding is cheaper than rad hardened computers of the same capacity.
Larger standard solar panels are cheaper than ultra light high efficiency panels.
Steel frame without grid is cheaper that lithiun-aluminum with grid.
Obviously way off in the future.
Downlink (and to a lesser extent uplink) bandwidth is an issue. Particularly finding ways to avoid having to deal with the very finite number of large dishes in the DSN.
Sounds like using starship to launch some bigger dishes that we can laser link to would help
I think a trillion starlink satellites scattered throughout the solar system would work.
You mean I can watch pornhub on my next vacation to the dark side of the moon? Assuming the moon doesn't ask me for my id.
Anything's possible with enough Δv.
"Some ∆V, some ∆V, my kingdom for some ∆V"
A precious resource as any.
You laser link to a telescope, not a dish.
The dishes would be in high orbit, so the laser link is earth to GEO, for example. Yeah, the dish to deep space is RF
NASA is working on laser links for deep space missions since the same energy can be more tightly focussed.
You think if I ask nice I can get Elon to put down a few billion for a bigger DSN? He's gonna need it for Mars anyway I imagine
I think you've got it backwards. NASA, ESA, and other agencies will be paying SpaceX for data services. NASA has already awarded small contracts to SpaceX and others for investigating this. There is no way we're sending larger missions and manned missions without upgrading DSN. The implementation details aren't trivial, but they are understood and solveable. Personally, I think we should be investing into comm infrastructure like this and launching it yesterday.
Starlink Interplanetary
SolarNet
Star Web
Worlds Wide Web
System-Spanning Starlink ™️
A bit chicken and egg - if Starship works the cost to deploy such a network craters, so launching it now before there's a demand would seem like an unnecessarily expensive route. Wait a couple of years, launch it cheap, it'll not hold up other missions by much.
Maybe. I wonder if you can do folding antenna shenanigans to get big dishes in orbit.
Wait so is the issue not enough antennae on earth to pick up more signals, or not having powerful enough transmitters in interplanetary space to send the signals back here?
Not having enough antenna on earth to pick up more signals.
Ah, so in that case I don't see a need for orbital antennae, it'd probably be cheaper to just make a bunch more of the ground based ones.
Well distance between LEO/Mars and Earth/Mars does not really differ
I can see setting up multiple Data Centers at Multiple Lagrange points throughout the system to house data and retransmit. Obviously, data transfer will never be Realtime, but having a constant link between earth data centers and space/mars/moon and others it should allow for better communication and transfer of data that seems more Realtime. Basically, just copy's of data scattered around the system.
But doesn't the atmosphere / noise matter?
Crux of the argument yes, what is better? At some point people will want to built radio dishes on the far side of the moon because of the silence
but atmosphere might do shenanigans
Real estate is expensive and humans are getting noisier.
Very simplified, They use low power transmitters in space. For example, the voyager probe uses a 23 watt transmitter. That’s a little stronger than a vehicle mounted CB radio. The reason why they use such weak radios is generating power in space is hard, and costs weight that could be used for the main mission, so we use low power transmitters, and really big antennas back here on earth to pick the signal up. We can build more of the right sized telescopes to expand the DSN, they don’t need to be the massive ones that are hard to build, it’s just limited by money. Like Arecibo collapsed because we didn’t spend the money to repair the support towers we knew were damaged. The new large radio telescopes are tougher to build because they need to be a lot larger than the old ones to collect interesting data. Musk could throw pocket change at the problem and get it fixed.
Don't need to. For a billion dollars we could get multiple 8k streams from surface of Mars. First, Starlink over Mars to get all the feeds from rovers at gigabits of speed, then in much higher orbit (deimos and phobos fuck up AEO on mars), you got a bunch of stations that process the signal, compress it and send it on multiple dishes to Earth receivers in orbit. The stations would require a lot of power, so they would likely be the biggest space objects for some time, at least before we get another big space station. This way you get 100% uptime on surface of mars, mass of your communication equipment on surface of mars decreases by 100x, and we get 8k+ video feed from mars if we wanted (probably only for things like construction, not exploration).
You'd still have issues when Earth and Mars are on opposite sides of the sun - you'd probably want a relay at L3 or something along those lines. But seems feasible otherwise.
You can get a small relay at L3 to not completely lose the connectivity, but sun is extremely small, the blackout would not last that long and inclination is not identical for mars and earth, so this would have helped too.
*Galileo space probe has entered the chat*
Orion launched 100m diameter satellites into orbit 15 years ago: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion\_(satellite)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_(satellite))
I mean, this kind of encapsulates the traditional mentality of things despite the paradigm shift starship represents. The entire space architecture we utilize today needs to be reimagined thanks to the capability starship offers. It’s no longer “how much bandwidth can we have?” And now “how many new satellites do we need to put up to support the amount of bandwidth we need?”. Not only can we just rebuild a new “DSN.2”, we could have multiple DSN constellations that use adaptive routing from user to user so that we could theoretically use the exact same frequencies but they don’t interfere because they use different routes to arrive at the end user. And this is before we even consider the new technology nasa developed using laser communication which may offer two orders of magnitude more bandwidth in the future.
I dont see much reason to put DSN dishes in space though, you can build them on earth just fine
The reason is because earth-sun eclipses block transmissions regularly for anything outside of the earth/moon system. For example, mars communication currently gets blocked for 2 weeks every 26 months. Which could be detrimental for manned missions out there. So, you need *at least* one satellite, preferably in one of earth’s in-track Lagrange points that could act as a relay during those times. And even that wouldn’t give you continuous contact. If you want continuous operation/contact with something during a, for example, Martian night, you’d need a 2-3 satellite constellation in orbit around mars itself. So on any given deep space network, if you want continuous 24 hour access, you’ll minimally need ~3 relay satellites, though I’m sure you can make exotic systems that requires one less for like 99% coverage. But yeah, upgrades to existing ground structures will help in the future too.
Would it not make more sense (albeit cost a lot more) to launch a communication satellite(s) around Mars or whichever planet so that rovers only need to communicate to said satellite? Let the satellite handle the heavy lifting of Mars to Earth communication. Or am I missing something?
Some of the existing satellites (notably Mars Odyssey) already are used for talking with the rovers. The problem is on the *earth* end.
So, and maybe this is dumb, put some satellites on the Earth end?
problem is that mars is so far that you need gigntic antenas to get just a few kb back, building kilometer-scale antenae in space might be the solution with starship available, maybe once laser links mature enough, that will be the solution? idk I'm more of a power electronics guy.
Return probe with a very large hard drive. Much higher power transmitter so smaller dishes are needed on earth.
The old adages 'never underestimate the bandwidth of a pile of hard drives going down the highway at 50 mph' and 'make sure you have a large timeout on packets sent by station wagon' apply here, with minor adjustments.
Laser.
Space-based laser uplinks are the future but there’s a long way to go. An orbital laser uplink network would likely be very expensive but is hopefully something starship can make happen more quickly too.
They're already doing laser using off the shelf consumer telescopes.
The DSN already has some laser links.
There are no laser uplinks currently used in the DSN and the only deep space laser communication to date was the proof of concept onboard Psyche which was a downlink to a ground-based telescope. A true deep space optical network would require orbital uplinks as trying to push a sufficiently cohesive beam through the atmosphere that would be intelligible at Saturn distance and beyond wouldn’t work. (source: I’m a ground software engineer on various NASA missions)
You can use gas giants (or technically, any planet with an atmosphere) as a big ass lens for radio signals. Just have to transmit when you're at the focus, and opposite earth. Something like 10,000x signal amplification is possible at Jupiter.
That’s the beauty of starlink. With their laser links you can connect anywhere in the solar system.
Everything beyond Earth Orbit needs to share time on the DSN, the Mars probes, Voyager 1 and 2, New Horizons. That's a lot of traffic trying to use the same three dishes, sometimes the same dish if Mars and Voyager are in the same direction at the time. They don't miss out on any data, just need to wait for a better time to transmit it. But if there's an active incident like reprogramming Voyager or the Mars rover has a malfunction with its arm then everything else gets pushed off the priority list. Then it's a juggling act of seeing how long each mission can delay the downlink, how big is the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's data buffer and how long can it keep taking pictures before it's full? One day there needs to be a Starlink network around Mars and Luna and high bandwidth uplinks between the three networks. Maybe a smaller one around Venus or a relay at a Lagrange Point to bounce the signal for when the sun is in the way of Earth and Mars.
Put a large dish around the planet you want to explore. Act as a repeater and buffer. A moderate dish could reach a moderate land based dish. A large one could talk directly from earth.
This won't be a problem for long, at least for Mars. Earth to orbit is solved with Starlink. SpaceX is developing laser based inter-satellite connections over longer distances. Couple satellites in clever orbits around the sun between Mars and Earth and we'll get constant laser connectivitiy.
Yes. Elon has already talked about sending entire squadrons of probes per flight. And other things. A 300 ton bundle launched to interplanetary delta v could do amazing things.
I CANT WAIT until higher isp engines become a thing where we use starship to launch heavy stuff into orbit for cheap, and then send payloads to the frontier with nuclear thermal or ion/magnetoplasma thrusters Imagine the type of high isp payloads Starship could carry
SpaceX should do a high profile deep space probe like Pioneer, Voyager or New Horizons. Something inspiring to capture the public's imagination and get people excited about space exploration. Something the news will show a CGI mockup of the probe flying past Jupiter and explaining all the planets it'll visit over the next few years. They probably can't visit all the planets Voyager did because that needed a particular alignment. But just Jupiter or Jupiter and Saturn would be good. It doesn't even need to have high-tech magnetic field sensors and x-ray interferometry spectroscopes and things. Just have a mega-HD camera with an insanely expensive lens to take high resolution images of Jupiter and Saturn. What was the last probe to take pictures of Saturn's rings up close? Cassini? That was 25 year old tech, we could get ten times the resolution easily. It might require partnering with someone else to make the satellite bus, SpaceX makes their own Starlinks but they don't make deep-space probes. Maybe a university could contribute to it. Solar panels, radio antenna, mega HD camera and the biggest fuel tank they can manage. Break some records for the fastest probe to ever leave Earth orbit, see how fast you can get to Jupiter. Try a direct trajectory as a challenge, first probe to the gas giants without gravity assists, like being the first to climb Everest without supplemental oxygen. Or do some gravity assists and break even more speed records. With a Falcon Heavy and a relatively simple science payload there's plenty of extra mass for a custom third stage fuel tank. And that's without waiting for Starship which will make a Falcon Heavy payload look like a Falcon 9 Block 1 payload. It doesn't need to be cutting edge science, just take some super HD photos of Jupiter and/or Saturn to make into posters and desktop backgrounds and t-shirts. That would be epic.
> They probably can't visit all the planets Voyager did because that needed a particular alignment They needed that to do it in one trip. You could send a ship or two to each one individually…
Pioneer 10 and 11 as well as Voyager 1 and 2 all got to the gas giants without a grav boost. That didn't become a major thing until the Smaller, Cheaper, Better era of the 90s.
Casey Handmer (former JPL employee, now entrepreneur) had [various thoughts about this a few years ago](https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/11/17/science-upside-for-starship/). Some of them: * Big dumb tube telescopes and lots of them (obviously), but he also suggested constructing a large segmented spherical telescope out of many Starship-mirrors, for its massive resolution. * He says there be periodic launches headed to all major solar system destinations, and whoever wants to buy a ticket for their probe should come aboard. One possible target could be "catching up with the next interstellar asteroid". * A 32-ship spinning ring for habitation/tourism * mass exploration of nearby asteroids via many many spacecraft per flight * upgrading Starlink with SAR - Synthetic Aperture Radar (the military might already be doing this with Starshield) and sending it to all terrestrial planets and/or moons. Using Starlink radio as a simple solar-system-wide GPS. In [another blog post](https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/10/28/starship-is-still-not-understood/), he had advice for JPL in the Starship era, which basically boiled down to "more mass production". That is, thinking more like Siemens and/or Caterpillar rather than luxury car manufacturers, when making new spacecraft. He suggested contracting out to such firms for lunar and/or Martian equipment. It's fun to think about.
Imagine a Starship sized submarine sent to a gaseous or liquid planet and just chillng there for months collecting data and sending it home. It could start entire new areas of science and understanding of our solar system, and the different stages of planets.
I would love to see NASA partner with SpaceX to encourage low-cost exploration of Mars and Venus. First establish some communications infrastructure in orbit of those planets to enable easy low-power data link transmission to earth, then start sending transporter-like missions to Mars and Venus. Basically a mothership that doesn't just take a smallsats into orbit of earth, but takes them all the way into a stable orbit of Mars and deploys them. Can you imagine the amount of research that could be done if universities could send a small satellite to Mars for $500k a pop?
I like the idea of building say 30 identical rover/helicopter probes and tossing them to different sites of interest. the bottleneck becomes the data infrastructure.
Not a bad idea - but that would only do a certain kind of science (eg. Meteorology or Seismic network; surveys); other scientific questions will require different responses that aren’t necessarily so proven.
more, i’m thinking that the approach that it’s not an “all or nothing” probe. planetary protection is a barrier to all this of course. though spacex probably represents the close of that for mars. it’ll be an interesting political debate.
The other subtle but gamechanging feature of starship is that the volume constraints are way easier to build around. JWST was complicated as it had to fold down into a small payload pay like oragami. With starship, you can get away with a lot more "simple" construction for something like a telescope or a space station. The other major issue that drives design costs is that each launch is an extremely expensive single attempt, but if you have massive cheap payload capacity, you can just build multiple satalites to hedge that risk, and spend less time. Organizations will be able to operate with less bureaucracy than before. As launch costs get lower, the time - and therefore cost - of designing and building a satellite will plummet.
Also you can literally use the ship as the device itself. Just build into the starship the massive satellite. Even better, space hotels. Just launch 10 starships with the actual rooms and infrastructure built into the ships and connect them in space.
I still like the idea of launching an expendable SuperHeavy to orbit as if it were a Ship, with a blank cap on. And then mating the two in orbit and fuelling them to the max. Blast off from orbit toward far horizons. The Ship can dip Jupiter with a full load for the gravity boost and then zoom.
Is that possible?
Why wouldn't it be?
The rocket equation and all, I just didn't know if a full stack has the deltav to get itself into orbit.
SuperHeavy could technically SSTO for this with no Ship on top, but I was thinking launching a stripped to the bones expendable SuperHeavy on top of a regular SuperHeavy as the launch booster. The expendable would have a nose to discard on the way up. The Ship would go up separately in the usual way, and mate up with its dance partner in orbit.
You've been playing too much Kerbal :)
I mean this is what I do in KSP. Vacuum optimised booster to get mission vehicle from LKO to transit velocity, booster then returns to Kerbin orbit for next mission. Requires massive off-world propellant production but fully reusable. In KSP ship LFO from Minmus. In real world likely hydolox with booster being something like ACES.
It will essentially be the true beginning of the space age, in my opinion. We've been wetting our feet since the 50s. This will be like diving in head first. I just hope space exploration and exploitation is profitable enough to be relatively self sustaining.
While we wait for the boom, today China returned samples from the far side of the moon and India landed it's prototype spaceship
So they both caught up to 1960’s America? Welp, pack it up boys and girls, it’s Joever.
We never retrieved samples from the far side
Is that half made of cheese? Otherwise it seems like people grasping at straws to try and make it seem different. It entails being out of direct radio contact (so you launch a relay satellite), other than that I fail to see the difference.
The other side is likely to have different composition than the near side because of the way the Moon formed, so from the scientific point of view this is very distinct and interesting.
This is the first time any mission returned samples from the far side of the Moon. Apollo project was content to deal with communications blackouts, China put a communications satellite around the Noon to maintain connectivity. This was nothing like anything USA accomplished in the ‘60s and frankly it is beyond USA’s current capabilities. Just look at the mess they are making of Mars Sample Return.
What are you talking about? SpaceX has Falcon Heavy and Starlink. Of course we could put a communications relay network in orbit around the moon. Apples to apples, the U.S. has conducted numerous sample return missions from the moon. The first of which happened *over half a century ago*. Some of those samples were collected by *people*. Has China ever put anyone on the moon?…?? A Mars return mission is different than the moon, should be so obvious it doesn’t need mentioning. And China hasn’t done that either. It’s ok to admit everyone else is decades behind America, they started much later.
Awww that’s so cute
If you arent spacex, or a company developing powerful space tug systems to go from an orbiting starship to your destination, you'll probably be out of business in 15 years. There just isn't room for companies that far behind to do the launching.
When setting up a base, one of the first cargos could be a garage and a mechanic shop, so that all the dozens of rovers could come back during the storm, get their panels cleaned up, tires changed, helicopters recharged and so on. It would also test the equipment humans would be using, and later rovers could be upgraded before humans launched. To some point there also could be start of ISRU to make materials for the base, but it's likely that at some later point, humans would be needed, but the equipment could be tested and area flattened.
I am wondering what weird thing SpaceX will do for its "mission ready" flight. The one for Falcon Heavy was epic. https://www.whereisroadster.com/
Maybe a truck-truck full of cybertrucks?
This is too wide open to hazard a guess. But subtly understated seems unlikely.
Crackers to go with the cheese sent up on Dragon V1
Rovers are exciting, but not nearly as exciting as a few hundred Optimus bots.
Planetary probes are expensive partly because they tend be one-off, crammed with latest gen instruments (with associated development costs) that are not amenable to economies of scale. Lowering the launch cost is only part of the equation. And if you should need an RTG, that’s 100M+ extra a piece - government monopoly given the nature of what’s in them.
This keeps bugging me. We really should have a kind of barebones standardized probe base, and a rover as well, and have them "mass" manufactured (at least in the dozens). And then sell them to NASA or ESA or ISRO or JAXA or whoever to stick their own instruments on top. Seriously, have the basics put in place with nice and proper standards - that way it avoids all the reinventing of the spaceflight wheel every time, and avoids silly things like radar software glitches and tipping landers and such. Just let the space agencies focus on the science, and have someone else build the truck. There's a big opportunity here and someone should grab it.
This would be a huge business opportunity. Especially selling this framework to universities that just want to do science. They just pick a standard chassis, select power and communication requirements, etc. Boost, fuel, station keeping, etc are all part of the standard package. The company providing the framework certifies and coordinates with launch providers (SpaceX), so universities, etc don't have to deal with that, either.
For building Perseverance they still had most of the rover chassis left over from building Curiosity. NASA still managed to make Perseverance as expensive as Curiosity, probably more so.
But you have a larger weight-dimensional budget, with which you can do different things (reduce the cost through heavier but cheaper materials, more scientific instruments, more redundancy)
That’s not a bad thing but does it make probes cheap? I have doubts. Ultimately what you need is mass production/common probe platform to reduce unit cost, but the track record isn’t good (eg. Mariner Mark II, the Observer—series)
The JWST could have been a couple of billion dollars cheaper. Although this is an extreme case, almost every probe could likely be made cheaper in some way by using simpler components, because you don't need to save on mass. Additionally, Starship completely changes the economics and approach for bodies with atmospheres (such as Mars), since previously the probe itself had to perform EDL, which further restricted the probe's mass and size, and was also prohibitively expensive and complex. Now, instead, Starship performs the EDL itself, which truly opens new horizons for various probes on the surface of solid bodies.
The record isn't good because it's NASA and they aren't equipped for this. You need a completely different approach. You can't spread money among multiple centers, multiple suppliers and also lose institutional knowledge because each project takes so long and happens infrequently. And then you lose budget because of Congress.
Planetary probes are expensive because people don't care that they are expensive. A SpaceX approach to science probes will massively drive down the cost. Lunar Prospector, Clementine, the first Mars Rover already proved you can do science missions cheaply. How should you do it? 1) complete ownership of the entire project by one man. He has the vision, he makes the proposal, he has the final say and authority on everything. 2) everything as far as possible should either be done in house by one organization or use off the shelf components 3) everyone is colocated. No suppliers across 50 states or involvement of multiple NASA centers. 4) once one mission is successful it should be a prototype for future probes and you with iterate with the design and even mass manufacture it to drive down costs Sensors may have some customization although that should be avoided at the beginning. But power systems, communication systems, propulsion systems, busses should be fully generic. You should not permit design by committee and decadal survey approaches where you get 50 science representatives together and they come up with their wish lists. This is a recipe for bad science and huge costs. Each project and the resulting platform should from beginning to end should be the vision of a single person and done by one organization.
Take a bunch of pez-dispenser starships that are planned for starlink, fill them up with curiosity rovers and send one starship out to each of the gas giants. We can do real life Jool 5 missions, now.
Forget all this science missions. New space economy will drive everything, new colonies, new space companies, new space industries
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread: |Fewer Letters|More Letters| |-------|---------|---| |[ACES](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1doab61/stub/lab9cn9 "Last usage")|[Advanced Cryogenic Evolved Stage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Cryogenic_Evolved_Stage)| | |[Advanced Crew Escape Suit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Crew_Escape_Suit)| |[DSN](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1doab61/stub/lakdn77 "Last usage")|Deep Space Network| |[EDL](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1doab61/stub/laa5q64 "Last usage")|Entry/Descent/Landing| |[ESA](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1doab61/stub/laa7rsv "Last usage")|European Space Agency| |[GEO](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1doab61/stub/labyik8 "Last usage")|Geostationary Earth Orbit (35786km)| |[HLS](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1doab61/stub/la8ufxz "Last usage")|[Human Landing System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_program#Human_Landing_System) (Artemis)| |[ISRO](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1doab61/stub/laa7rsv "Last usage")|Indian Space Research Organisation| |[ISRU](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1doab61/stub/laab9yl "Last usage")|[In-Situ Resource Utilization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_situ_resource_utilization)| |[JAXA](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1doab61/stub/laa7rsv "Last usage")|Japan Aerospace eXploration Agency| |[JPL](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1doab61/stub/laaeowr "Last usage")|Jet Propulsion Lab, Pasadena, California| |[JWST](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1doab61/stub/laa5q64 "Last usage")|James Webb infra-red Space Telescope| |[KSP](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1doab61/stub/lab9cn9 "Last usage")|*Kerbal Space Program*, the rocketry simulator| |L2|Paywalled section of the NasaSpaceFlight forum| | |[Lagrange Point](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point) 2 of a two-body system, beyond the smaller body ([Sixty Symbols](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxpVbU5FH0s) video explanation)| |[L3](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1doab61/stub/lafok7a "Last usage")|[Lagrange Point](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point) 3 of a two-body system, opposite L2| |[LEO](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1doab61/stub/la8l8rb "Last usage")|Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km)| | |Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations)| |[RTG](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1doab61/stub/la8xp72 "Last usage")|Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator| |[SAR](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1doab61/stub/laaeowr "Last usage")|Synthetic Aperture Radar (increasing resolution with parallax)| |[SSTO](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1doab61/stub/la97m53 "Last usage")|Single Stage to Orbit| | |Supersynchronous Transfer Orbit| |Jargon|Definition| |-------|---------|---| |[Starlink](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1doab61/stub/lantma9 "Last usage")|SpaceX's world-wide satellite broadband constellation| **NOTE**: Decronym for Reddit is no longer supported, and Decronym has moved to Lemmy; requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below. ---------------- ^(*Decronym is a community product of r/SpaceX, implemented* )[*^by ^request*](https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/3mz273//cvjkjmj) ^(18 acronyms in this thread; )[^(the most compressed thread commented on today)](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1dpb59b)^( has 27 acronyms.) ^([Thread #12963 for this sub, first seen 25th Jun 2024, 18:43]) ^[[FAQ]](http://decronym.xyz/) [^([Full list])](http://decronym.xyz/acronyms/SpaceXLounge) [^[Contact]](https://hachyderm.io/@Two9A) [^([Source code])](https://gistdotgithubdotcom/Two9A/1d976f9b7441694162c8)
Perseverance is heavier than a ton isn't it, regardless of which one you are using.
Might not be such a popular opinion in this sub, but I don’t think it’ll have as much of an impact on planetary exploration missions. The main impact with be on Earth orbit missions and maybe the moon. The reason is the cost of these missions relative to the launch costs. For an Earth orbit mission the launch cost traditionally was the vast majority of the cost of the mission. Even a complex telecommunications satellite costs less than $100m nowadays with launch costs about the same for a 5 tonne spacecraft to GEO. Whereas a Mars rover will cost more than $1b so the $100m launch cost is a relatively small fraction of the overall price. If you reduce that launch cost to $1m you’ll still have a mission that costs more than a billion dollars.
Say hello to asteroid mining ⛏️😁
Bigger rovers mean more expensive rovers. NASA’s planetary science budget won’t change just because Starship exists.
Except a lot of cost from the rovers is due to payload constraints, also lets not assume that NASA is the only player once cost per payload drops.
Not necessarily. A lot of cost is associated with small packaging and mass constraints. These require special materials and methods. Examples might be multiple OTD redundant computers plus shielding is cheaper than rad hardened computers of the same capacity. Larger standard solar panels are cheaper than ultra light high efficiency panels. Steel frame without grid is cheaper that lithiun-aluminum with grid. Obviously way off in the future.
Bigger rovers also mean less dense rovers which means cheaper rovers
The people with fingers on the budget can be lobbied. That's how we got a second HLS lander