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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
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.
.... 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.
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".
Everything else is negotiable, including the "free market" and "love of their country".
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.
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.