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SpaceX Successfully Lands Its Rocket On A Floating Drone Ship Again (theverge.com)
Early Friday morning, SpaceX successfully landed its Falcon 9 rocket on a drone ship at sea for the second time. The company has recovered the post-launch vehicle a total of three times, two of which involved the rocket landing on a floating drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean. Before the launch, the landing was deemed unlikely as the rocket would be "subject to extreme velocities and re-entry heating" in its attempt to launch a Japanese communications satellite into a geostationary transfer orbit high above Earth. Elon Musk tweeted: "Rocket reentry is a lot faster and hotter than last time, so odds of making it are maybe even, but we should learn a lot either way." As a result of the successful mission, Musk followed up with, "May need to increase size of rocket storage hangar." The first successful launch was in December, when the rocket landed at a ground-based spaceport in Cape Canaveral, Florida. The second landing occurred in April on a floating drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean.
How does this impact me or most other people in any significant way? I don't think it does.
I'll get modded down because this is an unpopular question to ask. But it needs to be asked. Shouldn't we put our resources to better use, like stopping global warming? Can anyone give me a good answer? I'm doubting it.
No you'll be modded down because its an idiotic question to ask, not mention flamebait.
How does this impact me or most other people in any significant way?
To start with, you would likely not be writing this comment in the first place if it wasn't for space-based assets. While you might be able to say that your actual TCP/IP packet only traveled along a fiber cable, the work of placing that cable inevitably used at least the GPS satellite constellation along with numerous other space-based vehicles. Like it or not, spaceflight has every day impacts upon your life, no matter how disconnected and isolated you might think your life has become. It is what makes the modern civilization function.
As a matter of fact, this particular satellite was a telecommunication satellite that will be broadcasting over the western Pacific Ocean region (aka eastern Asia).
Shouldn't we put our resources to better use, like stopping global warming?
It is stuff like this that you even know about global warming. How else do you think a genuinely global monitoring effort measuring temperatures, ocean conditions, sea levels, and other factors are even followed in the first place? This is how resources are being used to help stop such environmental pollution. If you don't know what is happening, you can't stop it from happening in the future.
I promise you that at least some data packets you are going to be using in the future will go across this particular satellite. The world is just far too interconnected.
The fact that the rocket landed again successful means that anything going into space is going to be much, much cheaper in the future as competitors to SpaceX try to copy the effort and come up with at least something that can compete commercially against SpaceX. That is what is so significant about this particular flight in addition to the payload that actually got up into space.
You've had it explained to you several times. This is exactly the sort of story that Slashdot should be running. Most of its readers are interested in exactly this kind of inspiring and exciting scientific achievement (also loud rockets and flames and stuff). And that didn't happen by accident, it's Slashdot's raison d'etre.
If you don't like it, just fuck off somewhere else!
Shouldn't we put our resources to better use, like stopping global warming?
Why are you wasting time posting idiotic questions to Slashdot instead of spending every waking moment searching for a cure for cancer, or whatever you believe to be the single most important issue?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
So, I'm disappointed that Elon announced the "instant Mars demo" immediately after last month's at-sea landing. Yes, for Elon SpaceX has always been about Mars. But now is the time for SpaceX to focus on making a profit and having a rapid cadence. If Elon does that, he will have lots of $$$ and recovered boosters for Mars projects.
Perhaps, but the reality is that Elon did not design these rockets himself. What he did was convince the best minds in rocketry to move to a startup company with fewer resources than the companies they were leaving, longer work hours, and greater job insecurity. His ability to create a vision and convince people to buy into it is his real strength (as was Jobs etc) and that is what he knows best. Talent isn't easily attracted by 'we will ramp up production to xxx units per year'. It is attracted by 'we will change the world...' etc etc.
Having said that, you are right that at some point Elon needs to deliver in quantity, both with SpaceX and Tesla. The reality is that changing the world normally requires a lot of boring grunt work and it will be interesting to see if he is a good enough business manager to pull this off. Worryingly, this lack of pragmatism is what sunk Jobs before his second coming. He got carried away with the vision on things like Lisa and this got in the way of making a commercially viable product. One just hopes that Musk's reality distortion field has not developed to a level where it engulfs the host yet.
Reusable rockets is one of the key technologies to bring down the cost of space travel. Once it comes beneath a certain treshold, you get a positive feedback loop in the form of space-based industries. The end result is hopefully having it cheap enough for colonization.
So, potentially, it's the beginning of industrial-scale space travel, which would be just as much of a change Industrial Revolution has proved to be. But even at absolute worst, it means cheaper satellites.
One of our worst problems is that our resource management system is still based on the feudal model, with money taking the place of land, and our nobility is just as corrupt, selfish and inept - and nowadays just as hereditary - as the preceding bunch. If one of them actually does his job - invests the resources under his control into advancing humanity - should he be attacked for it just because you'd rather see him take on some other cause?
You got modded down because you got handed a bar of silver and are whining it's not gold.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
The GPS satellites have a limited lifespan. They need periodic replacement, which means we need more launches. If the US can buy those launches for less money, then there is more money for beer.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
The headline ends with the word "again", making it sound like this is a repeat of a prior event, but in reality this is very much a new achievement. The first two successful landings were from relatively light payloads sent into low Earth orbit (LEO). This mission was sent to geosynchronous transfer orbit (GTO), a much harder destination. The max payload for GTO is well under half what it is for LEO, because you need to get the satellite going much faster.
To get a big satellite to that orbit, SpaceX has to push the launch vehicle a lot closer to its limits. The engines burn longer, on the ascent, leaving the rocket with less fuel to try and slow itself for landing. At the same time, the first stage boosts to a much higher suborbital peak. It therefore has to re-enter through more atmosphere, while going faster, with less fuel to slow down. The increased speed and distance means more heating of the bottom of the rocket, which doesn't have anything like the heat shielding a Dragon capsule (or similar) would. Fortunately, it's not going as fast as an orbital capsule... but it's still going a lot faster than it would be on a launch to LEO.
Demonstrating that the first stage can be recovered even after a launch to GTO is a really big deal. In it's own way, it's as big a deal as the first two successful landings. In December we saw the first ever landing for an orbital booster, then a few weeks ago we saw the first ever landing at sea (which is necessary for GTO boosters to have any hope of landing, but that launch was a LEO launch). Today, we saw the first even landing of a GTO launcher. That is a huge deal!
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
The ability to do manned repair of satellites lowers the cost of the satellites and improves their longevity. That helps weather prediction, which affects food availability and food prices worldwide. This also paves the way to refuel and upgrade LEO satellites, and the next generation of such craft should be able to reach geo-synchronous orbits. It also paves the way for manned manufacturing in space, where zero gee make the creation of large, uniform crystals or silicon wafers for computers much easier, and certain types of electrolysis based chemical synthesis and analysis becomes much easier.
It also paves the way for solar satellites to harvest solar power and send it to non-polluting power stations on Earth, which can provide far more energy than is available from fossil fuels or fusion, and far more safely than fission.
Indeed. Recovery can thus be seen as a "scale up" of operations, not a replacement for them. Last I heard they were hoping to get a couple dozen uses out of each stage. Doing so would thus represent a 1 1/2 orders of magnitude scaleup in operations.
It's not really crazy because their needs are certainly expected to increase. Not even taking into account the growth in the market that would occur from such low prices. Every Falcon Heavy is going to consume 28 engines and represents four large cores. And who says things stop with the Heavy? We know some of the speculation about the "Raptor", but they could very well give a Raptor-powered main stage standard Falcon-style boosters. That is, if they ever do end up producing a large Raptor-powered launch system. And no matter what, every Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launch consumes one engine that never comes back.
With how much of the launch market they want to take over, especially for heavy launches, they're going to need a serious scaleup. And recovery is a type of "scaleup".
"I know you have questions." "That would be why I just asked them."