I responded with The Most Common Delta V error. High school seniors typically mispatch conics the same way Murphy does. Murphy's level of expertise is somewhere below Orbital Mechanics 101 for liberal arts majors.
Stasse passed this on to Tom Murphy. And got a reply. Stasse quotes Murphy:
I don't dispute the more careful approach used on hopsblog. I put pieces together very simply, which may not represent more clever ways to manage interplanetary trajectories. That said, I stated clearly what I was doing, so that it's an easy job to pick it apart. I'm fine with that. I hope I never appealed to my authority as an orbital mechanics expert, because I am not.By his own admission, Murphy's no expert. Perhaps Murphy hasn't appealed to his authority. But Stasse and his friends certainly have. Murphy goes on:
I just try to put scales on things and sort out roughly how hard things are. At the pace of a post a week (during that time)--on top of a busy job--I could not spend time polishing. 15 km/s (allowing a bit of rounding) is still frikin' hard, so my main point is barely scratched.Murphy's point isn't merely scratched, it's gored. 15 km/s is about what it takes to put a geosynchronous communication satellite in place. This is doable as demonstrated by the large number of geosynchronous sats. Murphy's 20 km/s is about what it takes to land on the moon's surface and come back. 15 km/s and 20 km/s are vastly different delta V budgets.
But 15 km/s vs 20 km/s is isn't the worst Murphy error. He's done much worse. From Grab That Asteroid! in Murphy's Stranded Resources post:
The asteroid belt is over 20 km/s away in terms of velocity impulse. If the goal is to use the raw materials for production on Earth or in Earth orbit, we have to supply about 10 km/s of impulse. We would probably try to get lucky and find a nickel-metal asteroid in an unusual orbit requiring substantially less energy to reel it in. So let's say we can find something requiring only 5 km/s of delta-v. . . .
To get this asteroid moving at 5 km/s with conventional rocket fuel (or any "fuel" that involves spitting the mass elements/ions out at high speed) would require a mass of fuel approximately twice that of the asteroid. As an example, using methane and oxygen, . . .
Does fetching an asteroid take twice the rock's mass in propellent?
Ratio of propellent to dry mass can be found with Tsiolkovsky's rocket equation:
(Mass propellent)/(dry mass) = e(delta V/exhaust velocity) - 1
Let's see -- in Murphy's example delta V is 5 km/s. Exhaust velocity of oxygen and methane is about 3.4 km/s.
e(5 km/s / 3.4 km/s) - 1 = 3.35. So for every ton of asteroid, we'd need more than 3 tons of propellent. At first glance it looks like Murphy is being kind and even under estimating propellent needed.
But methane and oxygen isn't the only propellent. Xenon from an ion engine has an exhaust velocity of around 30 km/s.
e(5 km/s / 30 km/s) - 1 = .18
So about .2 tonnes (or 200 kilograms) of propellent to park a tonne of asteroid. 2/10 is not a "rough approximation" of 2.
But Murphy's error gets worse.
Murphy thinks we'd be lucky to find an asteroid outside of the Main Belt that takes 5 km/s to retrieve. Evidently he hasn't heard of Near Earth Asteroids. There are many asteroids that take much less.
The Keck study for retrieving an asteroid notes some asteroids take as little as .17 km/s. Let's plug in .17 km/s delta V:
e(.17 km/s / 30 km/s) - 1 = .006
So 6 kilograms of propellent to park a tonne of Asteroid. Now Murphy's guesstimate of twice the asteroid's mass is off by a factor of about 350.
Six kilograms is about the mass of two chihuahuas. Two tons is about the mass of two large horses, big horses as in Budweiser clydesdales.
Tom Murphy is a busy guy. So he uses furious handwaving to excuse info that's completely wrong.
Murphy's figures are often off by several orders of magnitude his PhD notwithstanding.
Neither Stasse's appeal to authority nor Murphy's "rough approximation" defense salvage Murphy's arguments.
