Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

SpaceX Successful Static Fire

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the to-infinity-and-beyond dept.

ron_ivi writes "SpaceX's website is announced that they had a " great static fire today" where their Falcon rocket successfully had 3 seconds of thrust. Nice pictures and video of the test; and if analysis shows all was well, they'll be launching Thursday."

1 of 122 comments (clear)

  1. Nice, but we did that in the 1950s. by Animats · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Very nice. Reasonable design. And roughly comparable to the Atlas ICBM booster of half a century ago.

    The proposed bigger model, the Falcon 9-S5, is comparable to the modern Atlas V. 6 launches to date, 100% success rate. About 2x the price the new guys claim, but then, the Atlas is a proven product.

    But the commercial launch market has collapsed. Iridium is done, and nobody wants to launch that many sats again. The geosync comsat market is saturated; everybody is going fibre optic. There's just not that much going up.