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SpaceX Returns To Flight, And Nails Another Drone Landing (cnn.com)
Applehu Akbar writes: SpaceX successfully launched a 10-satellite Iridium NEXT package, and then landed on a drone ship — this time from Vandenburg AFB in California. The launch had been delayed several days by this week's record rainfall and flooding.
CNN has video of the launch, and points out its obvious significance. "Because rockets are worth tens of millions of dollars, and they have historically been discarded after launch, mastering the landing is key to making space travel more affordable... Saturday's launch marks the seventh time SpaceX has successfully landed a rocket."
CNN has video of the launch, and points out its obvious significance. "Because rockets are worth tens of millions of dollars, and they have historically been discarded after launch, mastering the landing is key to making space travel more affordable... Saturday's launch marks the seventh time SpaceX has successfully landed a rocket."
Can't wait to see three boosters land at once
Landing a rocket is quite an achievement but the real test (and the ultimate goal) is to actually relaunch a used rocket successfully without extensive refurbishing
look at the shadows in the video. they're all wrong.
SpaceX is launching for Iridium, a private corporation, and making lease payments to the Air Force for use of SLC-4B at Vandenberg. At the Cape, SpaceX sells launch services to NASA as a replacement for the more expensive Russian launches of its Progress space sattion supply missions. Eventually, it will take over NASA's other Russian operation, ferrying ISS crews.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTmbSur4fcs
If you aren't living your life doing things that bring you happiness, that is on you.
Well, you could allow ULA to have an (also ultimately government subsidized) monopoly. See if that saves you money.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
actually, they have not. You obviously are a constant liar and do not care for the truth.
Trump, why are you here trolling?
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
says the boy from a taker state.
That AC is being dumb about the subsidies--Elon has done far more good with those than most and I cheer for his success. I sincerely wish more of our subsidies were bringing us awesome tech the way the ones going to him are. That said, your post is nonsense too.
Elon is a Trump advisory team member and they've been cooperating together.
But why let facts get in the way here when you can conjure more Russian boogeymen?
What do people mean when they say "make America great again"? My understanding is that they want a USA which is making new innovative industries, employing lots of people in the USA with high paying jobs, and making profit in the process (the more the better.) Elon Musk is the poster child for doing all of those things - yet many people crying "Make America great again" are trying to tear him down. The kindest explanation is that they are so blinded by ideology that they can't think straight.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
Most of Europe agrees with you. And even the US agrees with you up through high school plus with various forms of assistance for college, including state-subsidies, particularly for state colleges, and federal subsidies (direct subsidies, tax credits, and tax breaks), roughly $80B/year each. Pell grants alone cost the government $35B.
Dear Diary...today I was pompous and my sister was crazy.
Well, when CRS-7 failed, it did destroy a reasonably valuable piece, the International Docking Adapter A.
Interestingly, the Dragon would most likely have survived (and will now in the case of a similar failure) had the software been setup to deploy the parachutes in case of a breakup like that. Unfortunately, the IDA was in the trunk, which wouldn't have been saved by the parachutes.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
.... who can't help but cheer at my screen when they nail one of those landings? Now I finally understand how sports fans feel when they watch a game and do the same thing ;)
One thing nobody can deny about them is optimism. ;) Seriously, their IPS numbers are, pardon the pun, out of this world. $200k per booster launch. $500k per tanker launch. I mean, really? Good luck with that. No, seriously, good luck with that; I won't be expecting anything close to that, but please by all means prove me wrong ;) ITS would be a great system to have, I've been playing around with some Venus trajectories with it recently. Looks like it can do a low-energy transit with nearly 300 tonnes of payload from LEO and back again with the same, over 400 if starting at a high orbit - but from an economics perspective the high energy transfers actually make more sense.
I noticed a lot of people were confused about why Musk wanted the trips to be so short and was willing to sacrifice so much payload to do so - many assumed it had to do with radiation or something. But the issue is, when your craft costs so much but your launch costs are cheap, you can't have it spending all of its time drifting in deep space, you need to get it back for a new mission as soon as possible. There's a balancing point, in that if you try to go too fast, you reduce useful payload below the point of making up for it with going faster - but a minimum energy trajectory is just not optimal when the ratio between launch costs and transit vehicle cost is so extreme. I come up with the same thing from Venus as they were getting for Mars, although for the Venus case you end up aerobraking to a highly elliptical orbit rather than to the surface for ISRU refill (you need ISRU, but for the ascent stages, so it's not realistic to do so for the return stage in the nearer term). So for Venus they get no refill like on Mars, but they also don't have to do a powered landing nor do an ascent on return - it's six of one, half a dozen of the other. Both are quite accessible with it.
Dear Diary...today I was pompous and my sister was crazy.
It's Vandenberg, not "Vandenburg"!
May I help to explain the difference?
http://www.harmless.de/images/...
I can't believe how many think Elon is some swell guy, even after he created that rabid parasitic overlord called PayPal with his mates.
PayPal is still the only service that let's me transfer money fast and easily internationally.
So, yes, Elon is a great guy.
And the rest of your post is just as much of a lie.
Awesome, hating on Elon for having a private company pay to launch private satellites on a private launch vehicle.
Successfully
At a lower price than the competition
Free as in "Here's $3B in free money Elon, have a party or buy a yacht or do whatever you want with it" or was it free like "Here is $3B Elon, please build the following rockets so we can use them instead of expensive Russian rockets"?
You and I likey disagree as to what constitutes "free money".
And the rest of your post is just as much of a lie.
One word: Why?
Everything else is negotiable, including the "free market" and "love of their country".
Of course it should. You're perfectly right. (But no art history courses, OK? Useful stuff.)
Ezekiel 23:20
And mostly fail if you look at the launch record..
Take a gander at Falcon 9's launch statistics. 30 launch attempts with 4 failures (including one while test burning the engines). "Most" would be 16 or more, not 4.
Even if we try to inflate the number of failures by including Falcon 1 (3 failures of 5 launch attempts) and all 6 Falcon 9 first stage landing failures (even though not a one of those counts as a launch failure since NASA didn't pay for even one of those), we still end up with 13 out of 35 launches. 18 is "most".
That's brazenly wrong.
You sir, have the credibility of CNN.
Look who's projecting.
By that token the government should pay for my education because when I graduate I will help move the country forward, generate more tax revenue, reduce the unemployment rate, and create more jobs.
Unless, of course, you don't. Maybe they should bill you the full amount of your education when you turn out to be a waste of oxygen?
Awesome, hating on Elon for having a private company pay to launch private satellites on a private launch vehicle.
While actually paying the US Air Force pad lease and range fees at Vandenberg. The US government actually came out ahead on that launch.
I really wonder why Slashdot is subjected to so much ham-fisted, pathetically obvious, qualitatively bad propaganda. Why do they care what we think? Why is someone spending actual money trying to change how we think? There's a handful of millionaires lurking. I would be astonished if there's even one billionaire lurking on Slashdot. The vast majority of us control nothing, spend nothing, affect nothing. So why do we have to put up with these crap attempts to convince us to hate a rocket company? Makes no sense.
One answer, because it's factually incorrect at best, and misleading at worst.
Without the 'welfare' to musk, NASA and the military would have spend far more 'welfare' with ULA and the Russians. Even at current prices, the 300 million that was given to SpaceX will be recuperated by having paid less for the launches within 3-4 years, and that is *without' any future reductions in price in the future.
So, however you look at it, it is cheaper, even in the relative short term, than not having given SpaceX the money.
One could argue that no 'welfare' should be paid for anything, including NASA itself, or any other welfare or research or education program, or governmental agency, etc. But that is another discussion, and only rabid libertarians make a huge deal off it in an obsessive way. The fact remains, as long as you have subsidies, SpaceX/Musk is a far better 'program' to invest in - or spend welfare on, if you want - than the vast majority of other things money is spend on, since it will repay itself back quite fast.
Falcon 9 had 2 failures, not 4. They had one secondary failure that you might count as the 3rd one. But `4` as a failure count of F9 is patently false.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
You're right. I was eyeballing the graph and counted one of the pips as two.
Without all the welfare given to musk, it would have been cheaper to launch with the Russians.
Which means that with the welfare given to Musk, it is cheaper to launch without the Russians.
Works for me.