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SpaceX's Dragon Module Successfully Re-Enters
Zitchas writes "Following the news of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket with a Dragon module on-board, and its arrival on orbit, we now have the news that is has successfully re-entered the atmosphere and splashed down in the Pacific. As their website proudly claims, this is the first time a private corporation has recovered a spacecraft they orbited, joining the ranks of a few space nations and the EU space agency. A great step forward for space travel. Hopefully everything continues to go well for them."
but wasnt this already reported in the launch thread? it only did two orbits, so the total flight time was a few hours.
Two days news turn-around is something one would expect from a news-paper in the good old telex days, not a website in 2010
Back on topic, awesome achievement! kudos to the SpaceX guys
People, what a bunch of bastards
Agree completely. Buchenwald, for example.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Everything was coming to this. It's normal to assume that what was done by governments before will one day be done by commercial companies.
If you can get some ROI on it, there's obviously a decent market for satellite launches. And making deliveries to ISS, but that's demand all generated by the government. Maybe you can get some space hotels in LEO, but for everything else like sending out probes, going back to the Moon or to Mars there's not really been many realistic business plans, even if you count on playboy billionaires.
There's lots of services I don't see the private industry ever overtaking from the public like courts, police, CPS and so on. You might subcontrat specific things like ISS resupply missions, but not the overall thing. That I think will be fairly true for space exploration still.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The POIC (and probably every other NASA center with a TV) had the launch up on the big screen. Scott Kelly, the USOS crew on the ISS right now, took a break and watched it live on the feed we sent up to him between LOS's.
Scott asked CAPCOM to give the SpaceX team his congratulations on a successful launch. We in the ISS community are doubly excited: not only is it great to see such a flawless launch, but the Dragon/Falcon 9 is key to our future logistics and science return!
Well done, SpaceX.
Well, as reported elsewhere... If SpaceX can secure the funding they will design and build a super heavy lift which would give them capability of 120mT - 140mT to orbit. They're floating a fixed price of $2.5B for development and building the initial flight hardware. That's cheap compared to the current proposals for heavy lift vehicles that NASA is floating. If they can arrange for the funding, that gives us a vehicle in the Saturn V class (again) and it's game on.
The achievements themselves (launch, orbit, reentry) are not nearly as significant as the COST to perform these operations. Apollo and the shuttle cost many billions to develop. This company developed 2 rockets, a capsule, launch operations and production lines for roughly $600 Million. Barring a major Earth catastrophe, cost reduction is the only way to accelerate our reach into the stars.
Double-check your facts. It's helium-3 that's in abundance on the Moon, not tritium. Helium-3 is a byproduct of tritium decay. Tritium has a short halflife and doesn't accumulate over geological timescales.
Tritium can be manufactured on Earth. Future fusion reactors (at least the magnetic confinement type, like ITER), will almost certainly test or operate lithium breeding blankets that'll produce tritium in abundance, and it'll hardly be worth millions of dollars a kilogram to ship a bulky product all the way back to Earth.
Plus, they have the advantage that they are bound to protect you. In the US, the Supreme Court has ruled that police have no duty to protect any individual, only "society," a few special people, and those imprisoned by them. Even if you have a restraining order that commands the police to take action, you are not considered special enough. (See Warren vs. DC, Hartzler vs City of San Jose, Riss vs. New York, DeShaney vs. Winnebago County Department of Social Services; there are plenty of other)
SSC
Oh yeah, and you need a reactor to burn it in too. Ignore all the stupid internet-crackpot garbage about Lew Rockwell, polywell, cold fusion and rubbish like that -- it's a super hard problem which will take billions of dollars and decades to solve.
Too bad the conservatives are doing their best to defund fusion research and limit the US' involvement in international fusion research.
I heard that a wheel sized sample of the lunar surface was successfully recovered and delivered to earth.
If we're going to do in orbit assembly way don't we just use a Verne Cannon to get the raw materials up into space, anything that's too fragile to be launched that way can be sent up in a more traditional method.
First and foremost, SpaceX achieved its funding through voluntary means, quite the opposite from how governments achieve their funding.
That's right: Investors voluntarily invest their money in SpaceX. But they do it mainly based on the expectation that SpaceX will win fat government contracts, so they can repay these same investors with a larger amount of money involuntarily extracted from the taxpayers.
Our scientific missions seemed a lot more important and interesting on the moon with Apollo 17 in 1972.
The moon landings weren't really about science, they were about engineering and national pride. The Russians launched the first satellite, the first man in space, and the first man in orbit; we needed to beat them to the moon and prove that we could keep going there.
We've gotten far more and better science with unmanned space missions.
Free Martian Whores!
The point, I think, is to get the government institutions (who are the ones who don't have to make money at things) OUT of the business of doing repetitious, potentially profitable things. Like putting satellites into orbit, doing ISS supply runs, and other generic things that are pretty much routine these days.
If they are barred from doing easy stuff, maybe they will take their budget where it is supposed to go: into exploration and the development of new things, things that the the private industry won't do because there is no profit there yet.
Z
The summary seems to indicate that there is an European Union (EU) space agency. Although many members of EU are members of the ESA, not all EU members are members of ESA, and there are members of the ESA that are not members of the EU (Norway and Switzerland).
Actually, I'd go with a "horses for courses" approach. If I wanted to lift low value, easy to replace and high mass raw materials for the superstructure into orbit I'd go for the heavy lift. Sensitive equipment with high value, long lead times and lower mass I'd want to spread across multiple smaller launches to minimise the impact of something going wrong. There's clearly a use for both approaches, so why not provide your prospective customers with a choice if you are in the business of commercial space launches?
:)
As to the passenger plane question, is it made by Airbus and outfitted with Rolls Royce engines?
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Sure, but those future changes are going to result from non-profit oriented exploration. There's just nowhere near enough knowledge about the resources available or the costs of extracting/shipping them for a for-profit business to invest. The upfront costs are enormous, the expected payoffs are very hard to calculate, and the various risks are immense.
A good analogy is fusion research. The amounts of money required to make serious progress are immense (although probably small compared to what a manned mars mission would cost), but the potential payoffs if you were successful are huge and obvious. And while there are various companies dabbling in it, you don't see huge projects from big companies pouring money into figuring it out. Mostly because it's such a risky investment that corporations can't justify it.
And if fusion power research can't pull in that kind of funding, then what hope does interplanetary exploration have? The costs are higher, the risks are higher, and the payoffs are questionable. Any CEO who tried to shovel serious money towards it would be replaced faster than he could write the first check.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
First off, watch the post-mission SpaceX/NASA press conference. There's written notes here. A few relevant points made by Elon Musk:
* The heat shield on the Dragon capsule is massively overengineered to survive not only reentry velocities from low-Earth orbit, but also the much faster velocities from Lunar or Martian return trajectories.
* Instead of solely relying on parachutes, the next generation of the Dragon capsule will incorporate thrusters which will allow it to make a precise landing on the ground, on a target as small as a helipad. Musk didn't say this explicitly, but this is of course a key requirement for building a Lunar or Mars lander.
* During the press conference Musk fired some rather surprising shots at NASA's Orion capsule. Orion is the under-development capsule NASA intends to use for beyond-Earth exploration, and Elon Musk claimed that "anything Orion can do, Dragon can do better." This is quite arguably true, but it's unclear if this was the wisest thing for him to do politically.
* As Musk has stated a number of times before, the whole reason he started a company in the space industry, which historically has comparatively mediocre profit margins, is because of his dream of enabling Mars colonization.
I don't see the incremental steps between low earth orbit and serious interplanetary travel. The jump between them is huge, both literally in the distance you must travel, and figuratively, in the types of engineering challenges that need to be solved. And there's not many places worth stopping on the way.
Let's just look at the incremental possibilities just from a space tourism point of view:
1) Suborbital space tourism - a few minutes of zero gravity. Can be grown into a new, faster alternative to air flight.
2) Orbital space tourism - hours to weeks to years in orbit. Also, provides a big opportunity for zero gravity space science.
3) Lunar orbit - relatively easy once you've mastered Earth orbit. Swing some tourists on a trip around around the Moon and back.
4) Lunar trips to surface - the first trips might be a few hours, but eventually extending to stays of weeks or longer.
5) Trips to near Earth asteroids - these targets have relatively low delta-v. Once you've mastered living in deep space (outside of Earth's magnetic field) for weeks and have rockets that can get you to lunar orbit and back, you're pretty much ready for a trip to one of the many nearby asteroids.
At this point, you can start trying in situ resource utilization, that is, living off the land. Both the Moon and asteroids provide raw materials that a hotel or outpost could use to replace some m0aterial shipped from Earth. You've also have figured out radiation shielding, closed life support, and other issues of long term living in deep space.
6) Mars orbit - even if you can't figure out how to land safely, you can still reach Mars orbit and visit the Martian moons.
7) Mars landing - land and live on another world.
8) Asteroid belt - only marginally more difficult than Mars to reach. Trojan asteroids are a bit harder again.
At this point, you should be able to fly by all the major planets out to Jupiter or perhaps Saturn. With fission power, you probably can visit any point currently known in the Solar System.
There are a series of incremental steps taking tourists to the Moon, Mars, NEAs, and beyond. The really hard part is just getting established in low Earth orbit and figuring out how to live indefinitely in space without immediate access to Earth supply.