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New Photos of SpaceX's Falcon 9 Assembly
RobGoldsmith writes "New images are now available of SpaceX's Falcon 9 being assembled. The images are accompanied with a small update from SpaceX. If there are no unexpected delays, it's possible Falcon 9 will be completely integrated by the end of the year. This update shows real flight hardware and really brings the rocket alive. View images of the Falcon 9 nearing completion now!"
as in the end of 2009? or tomorrow? Or somewhere in between, like the Chinese new year or Rosh Hashanah?
More music, fewer hits
Yay, newly-created organization which hasn't accumulated a work-impeding bureaucracy.
SpaceX is doing great work. Let's hope they don't become another bloated military-industrial dependency anytime soon.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
http://www.spacex.com/falcon9.php (Please make source articles more complete)
The offical site and news: http://www.spacex.com/updates.php It says exactly what the article links to, just a bit more offical ;)
I know a lot of people never thought SpaceX would get this far. I watched the first three Falcon1's explode like everyone else before this last successful launch in Sept (even though it had no real payload). I'm hopeful their Falcon9 starts out successful.
http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
Next time free enterprise puts a man on the moon, you let me know.
If you capitalists hadn't have f--- up with your stupid lending decisions and dumb investments, there wouldn't be a government bailout now, would there? There was no need for government to momentarily take control of everything, until the people that previously controlled things utterly screwed up.
This is my sig.
whats a "cockblock" tag mean?
All that NASA is good at doing these days is burning money.
Deary me - isn't that a little unfair? The only thing they can do is burn money? You don't see any value at all in the various Mars missions, the fascinating output of Cassini-Huygens, or SOHO, or...? And so on.
Check out the NASA Current Missions for a bit of an overview of some of the amazing work that NASA are doing.
Whilst I don't disagree with your main point that small, nimble, commercial outfits can often work smarter and quicker than monolithic government departments, I don't think it's fair cast NASA as nothing but a bottomless sinkhole for cash.
It might also be worth considering how many of those current projects would never even get to the drawing board stage if the only space enterprises we had were entirely commercial.
OMG!!! Ponies!!!
Yes, although the Congress and administration would like you to believe that the current "crisis" is a result of greed, the bottom line is that the money had to come from someplace, and it came from them.
Yes, in a way it did come from the government -- it's called deregulation. IOW, "freer" free enterprise. Since the bad boys in the banks didn't have Big Brother looking over their shoulder, they were free to do very risky things -- bordering on outright fraud -- with other people's money. That's what caused the bailout, that's what caused the economic collapse. Don't just take my word for it -- read what's been coming out of the mouths of economists.
Look at this project in comparison to "Orion". A small team vs. thousands. A few designers vs. hundreds of engineers using bulky project management. It goes to show that you really only need project management to do something the first time (IE, not knowing where the major failing points will be). After that, you need something lightweight and agile so that you aren't throwing away the experience of your people by second guessing them until they are unable to make quick decisions.
You can't compare the two. Orion's eventual goal is go to Mars. First Orion will go back to the moon to 'practice', and what is learned there will be used to further develop the Orion program for a manned mission to Mars. Let me know when Elan Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are even remotely planning anything on that scale. Then we can compare.
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They've already put the Falcon 1 into orbit. I'd say that's an accomplishment.
You don't make the poor richer by making the rich poorer. - Winston Churchill
I knew clicking on these thread it would be full of libertarians mentally wanking themselves off.
The "power" of capitalism is what caused the current financial crisis, not teh evil government. Banking institutions collapsed after regulations were removed, not whilst they were in place. To go from that to claiming that a 50-years-behind corporate spaceflight program (that is hardly capitalist anyway as it is driven largely by Musk's cash and optimism, not genuine returns) shows a lack of grasp of reality.
Oh, and never forget that his only real customer is the government. Its practically socialism!
Retard. Their "small team" and "quick decisions" are what caused them to blow up the first 3 rockets they launch with hilariously simple mistakes. Your beloved capitalist market tends to interpret redundancy and quality control as waste and bureaucracy, when in fact they are necessary for space flight.
Thanks, but I'd rather take facts over the uninformed ranting of a teenage Ayn Rand fanboy. The facts are, SpaceX have a 75% failure rate and NASA have been putting people into space for decades with relatively few mistakes.
If you actually approached some kind of understanding of the subject and weren't just trotting out capitalist dogma like a mindless drone, you might know that a lot of the early problems NASA had were due to competition between contractors and insufficient (government, gasp!) management of them. Sorry if the facts interrupt your little
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
let's see Falcon 9 actually get off the pad first without blowing up.
Hell, I'd pay to see either option.