Space Origami
/0 Comments/in Long Articles/by Rudolf HuberA couple of days ago the world was given the opportunity to watch the fourth test flight IFT4 of the Starship-Superheavy combo from SpaceX. This new super large space transport system has created quite a stir over the last couple of years. But it was this test flight that made every space enthusiast jump up from his chair in excitement.
And I am not the nervous kind of person. But it wasn’t the nail-biter because we were afraid of what might go wrong. It drove us to the edges of our seats because, for the first time, we started to see what was possible. Of course, we were able to imagine what could be done with such a powerful transportation system, but we were also aware of the bubble of expectations that Elon Musk knows how to create and maintain. We knew that bold aspirations take time, money and perseverance to be made a reality. It was all a bit unreal. That is until IFT4 took to the skies.
I was born in 1969, the year when humanity left its first footprints on the Moon. It was also the year when my parents bought their first small black and white TV to follow this monumental event. Naturally, I was a Spacie from the get-go. I guess I would have been a space nerd no matter what year I was born, but what a nice coincidence.
Like everyone from my generation, I grew up with a steady diet of Star Wars and Star Trek movies plus a whole slew of other science fiction films and TV series. Exciting as they were, they also created a romantic and utterly unrealistic idea of what space is about. This “freakshow in exciting looking but still crazy vessels” has not only permeated until today, but it has bloomed so that expectations most people have in Space are almost laughably unrealistic.
And because those ideas were so unrealistic, people like me were disappointed to see our creative ideas from decades ago produce so very little in terms of real space flight developments until today. Where are the space cities? Where are the colonies on faraway planets, the space stations that would harbor entire civilizations, the mining operations, and solar energy harvesters? What happened to warp drives, world engines, and tachyon converters?
However, there was one single reason for our unfulfilled dreams. Space is unimaginably expensive.
Pretty much all the exciting stuff that had happened for the last 50 years or so was nothing but a giant dick-measuring contest between some of the most powerful countries of our age. Space was no business – it was an expense and things happened only if those monies were made available on a donation sort of basis. This means that national governments and their legislatures wrote a cheque to do what they thought needed to be done to outshine the other.
But this only goes so far. When the Cold War – the single most powerful aphrodisiac for the Space race – petered out the funding spree came to an end as well. There is a reason why there has never been the promised follow-up on the Space Shuttle.
The only true business-like activity was satellites. Not all of them mind you as many of them still follow the old model “If you want space bling, gimme lots of green paper”. But commercial satellites were there and expensive as they were, they still earned their owners money.
But why is everything that’s being done in Space so horrendously expensive? Transport cost is only part of the answer. It runs a lot deeper.
On Earth, pretty much anything you do is being done under the premise that when something fails, it can be repaired. Maintenance is part of normal project planning, and we also plan for some sort of unscheduled maintenance and repair. This means that things can be built to acceptable standards using materials and technologies that are economical and good enough. No need to overengineer things as this is always expensive.
Costs come down with better processes and mass production. Again, stuff needs to be good enough to pass a smell test. That’s fine as faulty stuff can be called back and exchanged or sometimes be mended or repaired. This also allows for the mass fabrication of stuff and rapid iteration into better versions of whatever is being produced.
When you do stuff in space, none of this is possible. The thing you shoot up there must work and it has to work for the whole mission duration. In the case of interplanetary probes, this sometimes means decades of operations. But that’s also true for near-Earth orbital business to a large degree. Going up there and repairing things simply is not in the cards except for the most high-profile cases such as the Hubble Space Telescope.
This constant need for overengineering makes things outrageously expensive. Things that would cost you hundreds of dollars in Earth-bound business suddenly cost you millions. Exotic materials, crazy over-engineered technologies, and multiple levels of redundancy combine to create a cost monster. This all is done because transporting anything to space costs a lot of money, so you don’t want to do that too often.
But we are not even done here. Stuff that goes up also needs to fit into payload fairings of rockets. Big as today’s rockets often are, they cannot hold fully deployed probes and satellites in their fairings. So, things must be folded up.
Big stuff space tech is super sophisticated origami. Just think about the Mars rovers. How many hyper-expensive engineering hours must be used up to make sure that the rovers unfold the way they are supposed to? But even much simpler satellites and probes often have problems with solar arrays not deploying correctly or other stuff not doing what it is supposed to do. This constant tweaking and testing have a price too and you cannot take risks, which means that prices balloon even more.
Now imagine you don’t have much of that anymore. Imagine you have a very large reusable rocket that can not only hulk your stuff into orbit for far less money than you are used to. It can and will also build an orbital waystation for refueling and why not, repairs and maintenance. What would hold SpaceX back from using their waystation not only to refuel but also as a depot for spare parts? Or as a place where large complex stuff can be assembled in space, tested, and once you know it works it is sent on its way with a minimum of moving parts.
Are heat shield tiles falling off the rocket at take-off? No issues, the waystation has spares and can pop some new ones on in no time. An engine experiences malfunction? Simply swap it at the waystation and off you go.
Same for satellite business. Now you can build your satellite from way more economical materials and even transport it in parts to the waystation where solar panels and other stuff that needs to deploy can simply be put on. Of course, your satellite will then have to leave the waystation and need to be brought to its operational orbit, but a simple space tug could do that very cheaply.
The space tug would make it once into orbit and stay there. For eccentric orbits it could use chemical engines for the extra push but if orbits are only mildly different from the one of the waystation, much more economical ion engines could be used. The electricity for the ion engine could be harvested from giant solar arrays at the waystation. Remember, in Space, solar is not an interruptible source of energy. The waystation could be in an orbit that experiences permanent sunlight.
Wait a minute. The waystation would also be a fuel depot for Spaceships and other hardware that wants to go into special orbits or further. This fuel needs to be cooled as it is cryogenic. This means constant cooling to keep the fuel in its liquid state. The solar arrays could function as a sunscreen that creates a cold bubble behind which the fuel depot can store its fuels at minimal vaporization loss.
This waystation is starting to become substantial in size and importance so no surprise it might just add on more infrastructure to serve as an orbital hotel, a research center, a service hub for in and outbound travel, and a communication relay for deep space communication, the list is endless. Maybe it’s enough to couple some Starships together and rotate them for artificial gravity.
What does all this mean for the Space business? Stuff that goes up could be built of standard materials using standardized technologies and simple pop-on modules to do simple stuff like providing solar energy and radiating heat away. Things can also be built to acceptable standards as the consequences of failure won’t be crushing anymore. Cheap transport also makes entire clouds of satellites possible whereas before only a few had to do everything. If thousands or tens of thousands the job, the loss of a few is insignificant. Also, they can be built much simpler as exotic tasks will be devolved to specialized satellites.
Space mining is on everyone’s mind, but the hard reality will be that stuff going to space will primarily come from Earth, so we need cheap and reliable access to orbit. Having a fully reusable rocket is just one first step. Space-bound services like refueling and repairs and maintenance will be just as important.
The Starship still has a lot of development to go through but that was no different for the workhorse SpaceX uses today. The Falcon 9 was famous for its spectacular explosions and mishaps and today it’s the poster child of reliability and good economics. Things that were unthinkable just a decade ago such as the vertical landing of boosters are standard operating procedure today.
IFT4 made the dreams a lot more real. A businessman with a large checkbook transforms space business from expensive origami into a streamlined, dependable business pipeline that runs to a schedule and follows cost patterns that don’t require financial acrobatics to make them digestible.
He makes Space normal. Time for us to get creative on how we can build upon this.
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