Slashdot Mirror
NASA Announces New Mars Probe, While SpaceX Is Urged To Focus on Launches
NASA will land a new probe on Mars on November 26, 2018, "paving the way toward an ambitious journey to send humans to the Red Planet," according to one NASA official. The $828 million project will investigate how the planet was formed, NASA announced Friday, calling it "an unparalleled opportunity to learn more about the internal structure of the Red Planet."
Meanwhile, long-time Slashdot reader taiwanjohn shares an editorial published by Ars Technica the same day, titled "We love you SpaceX, and hope you reach Mars. But we need you to focus." Noting that SpaceX receives the majority of its funding from NASA, the site's senior space editor writes that the company's business model requires that they ultimately deliver a reusable launch system. "I understand SpaceX has a master plan -- the company wants to colonize Mars... But at some point you have to focus on the here and now, and that is the Falcon 9 rocket... if there is no Falcon 9, there is no business."
In a related story, Saturday NASA's history office shared a photograph from the Viking 2's landing on the surface of Mars -- which happened exactly 40 years ago.
Meanwhile, long-time Slashdot reader taiwanjohn shares an editorial published by Ars Technica the same day, titled "We love you SpaceX, and hope you reach Mars. But we need you to focus." Noting that SpaceX receives the majority of its funding from NASA, the site's senior space editor writes that the company's business model requires that they ultimately deliver a reusable launch system. "I understand SpaceX has a master plan -- the company wants to colonize Mars... But at some point you have to focus on the here and now, and that is the Falcon 9 rocket... if there is no Falcon 9, there is no business."
In a related story, Saturday NASA's history office shared a photograph from the Viking 2's landing on the surface of Mars -- which happened exactly 40 years ago.
They need to keep doing whatever they are doing.
An explosion of a rocket is nothing. I wish them another hundred of them, and the attached room to make mistakes.
The goal is not to not trigger these sensationalist dipshit journalists but to actually make progress, burning some millions is collateral damage.
Maybe the editors should also just group together other articles? Like you have one article about Stallman wanting to allow anonymous payment, and another about Apple approving certain crypto-currencies - just lump those together, they're about the same thing.
nuclear ticket but ppl are scared of nucular stuff.
I'm not a US Citizen and I don't have any affiliation with SpaceX. I read that Ars article when it first came out, but it really annoyed me.
If you've seen the video, it's reasonably clear that the initial signs of trouble - i.e. the start of the explosion - happens right at the top of the First Stage, perhaps where the Second Stage engine might be situated within the casing. OK, that means that we could narrow this down to a rough physical location.
Yet on this, Ars reckon that they know what the fault is and that the fault lies with SpaceX. They may even be right...
But...
1. Do Ars know that for a fact? No.
2. Do Ars know whether the launch was a repeat of a previously known-good configuration, or whether SpaceX were trying out new design and/or components? No.
3. Do Ars know whether the Facebook payload imposed any specific requirements on the Falcon configuration that might have led to the incident? No.
Yet despite a complete and utter lack of knowledge of the subject at hand [except, I concede again, that the rocket blew up! ], Ars reckon that they know how to tell SpaceX and Elon musk how to run their space launch business... There could be literally scores or hundreds of reasons behind the failure. That failure could be design, material defect, or process in nature, or it could be an obscure combination of several things. It could quite easily be a failure induced on SpaceX because of constraints imposed elsewhere, by someone else.
I'm quite certain that there will be people who read this comment and think ("Ah, SpaceX fan-boy there...") but you'd be wrong. I'm not writing this because I'm a particular fan of SpaceX, but because I'm particularly unimpressed with the arrogance and disengenuous nature of Ars reporting. [ If the launch had been perfect, no doubt they would have been writing about the "unstoppable SpaceX" ].
No. A lot of the time, a lot of the Ars journalists are respectable and write thoughtful pieces. This, on the other hand, was opportunistic garbage written by an ambulance-chasing waster.
Eric Burger: If you're so good, how about you go design a rocket that can put the same mass into LEO and show us all how it's done, eh?