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SpaceX Awarded First Military Contract
An anonymous reader writes "Ars reports that commercial space company SpaceX has gotten its first launch contracts from a military organization. The United States Air Force has hired SpaceX to launch the NASA DSCOVR satellite aboard a Falcon 9 rocket, and several other satellites aboard a Falcon Heavy. (The Heavy isn't finished yet, and SpaceX currently has no place to launch it, but the contract gives them three years to do so.) 'According to the mission requirements, the Falcon Heavy must carry its payload up to an orbit of 720 km and deploy a COSMIC-2 weather- and atmospheric-monitoring satellite, up to six auxiliary payloads (probably microsats), and up to eight P-POD CubeSat deployers. The rocket should then restart and continue all the way up to a 6,000 x 12,000 km orbit and deploy the ballast, more science experiments and more microsats.'"
Some engineers at NASA must be very sad right now. SpaceX is doing what they couldn't: More economical space flight" .
Then again they might've set their sights a little bit further, but still opportunity missed.
I'm sure this is the satellite's true function.
I'm pretty sure their goal is the still the same:
Do as much as possible with the funds they have, while simultaneously defending themselves from an incompetent legislature who believes it's more important that we spend money on bombing brown people instead of investing in the future of not only our own country, but our very existence as a species.
That aside, hell yes, SpaceX. While I'm not an idiot who believes the "free" market is the answer to everything, commercial enterprises becoming involved in actual spaceflight is perhaps one of the most important things that will occur during my own lifetime. (I'm still bitter, though, because it's 2012 and I should be living on the Moon by now.)
Amazing what you can accomplish when you get Congressional pork-barrel politics out of the way.
We should try that for other failing agencies.
oh dear, did I just say that out loud?
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
"The second, a Falcon Heavy launch, will put up several satellites and a 5 metric ton ballast, in an effort to demonstrate the Falcon 9 Heavy for the Air Force."
Why don't they just say "we're going to launch a 5 ton spy satellite and several decoys", it's not like anyone who follows this doesn't know.
public heath care -> try to save money -> goal, make people healthy so they don't need health care
private health care -> try to earn money -> goal, keep people sick so they need health care
Is it just me, or does deploying 20 satellites with 1 rocket sound like we're still actually getting somewhere, even when it sometimes feels like space tech progress stopped 30 years ago?
Yes, it's just you. I guess you missed the nuclear powered remote control truck on Mars. Or the constellation of satellites that beam a constant signal down to the computer in your pocket with such precision as to be able to tell you where you are within a few feet. Or the pair of satellites flying in perfect tandem, mapping the gravitational pull of the Moon. Oh look...we might have found water ice in Mercury.
But you're right. I guess we haven't done anything in the last 30 years.
Weird example for you to pick. Health care is the one area where you do have clear examples of the superiority of government run systems. Such as countries with government health care having half the costs per person as US health care. Such as government programs even in the US being more efficient/effective healthcare than rival private systems.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
Given how expensive it is to lift anything to space, lifting ballast to space is a sin. Lift another satellite in its place.
Ballast is always a necessity in rocketry. In order for the thing to fly in a straight line, the thrust vector must be aligned with the vehicle's centre of mass. The upshot of this is that if your spacecraft (Rocket and payload) doesn't have the center of mass precisely down the centerline, you need to add ballast weights in order to keep the thing from coming apart. If you look closely of an image of the shuttle at launch, the exhaust from the main engines (not the solids) is on an angle compared to the rest of the vehicle. As the fuel is burned off and the SRBs jettisoned, the center of mass changes, and the engines will gimbal to keep things on course.
On traditional rockets, the same thing is accomplished by adding weights so the whole thing is balanced. Back in the day, the way that most amateur radio satellites got launched was as ballast on a launch with some larger payload. That's getting tougher and tougher in the modern era due to competition for that space, and also, to put it bluntly, it's a lot easier to certify a lump of concrete for flight than it is to certify a satellite built by a bunch of guys you don't necessarily trust, sometimes int heir basement.
Launching a big lump of nothing also makes sense, given that this is really just an all-up test of the launch platform. Are you going to entrust a $500,000,000 payload to an unproven launch vehicle? If they did and it went boom (which tends to happen in rocketry a lot), we'd here no end of their choice of an untested vehicle. If the test passes, then there is more confidence in the subsequent launches being safe enough.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
What you actually meant to write:
I'm pretty sure he actually meant this: "Studies evaluated in this systematic review do not support the claim that the private sector is usually more efficient, accountable, or medically effective than the public sector; however, the public sector appears frequently to lack timeliness and hospitality towards patients." (low and middle income countries)
Or this: "Despite having the most costly health system in the world, the United States consistently underperforms on most dimensions of performance, relative to other countries. This reportâ"an update to two earlier editionsâ"includes data from surveys of patients, as well as information from primary care physicians about their medical practices and views of their countries' health systems. Compared with five other nationsâ"Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, the United Kingdomâ"the U.S. health care system ranks last or next-to-last on five dimensions of a high performance health system: quality, access, efficiency, equity, and healthy lives. The U.S. is the only country in the study without universal health insurance coverage, partly accounting for its poor performance on access, equity, and health outcomes."
But do please continue to spout ideology-addled "corrections" that contradict reality. It amuses the hell out of the rest of us to watch you do it. And keep on losing those elections while you're at it!
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.