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SpaceX Makes Aerospace History With Successful Launch, Landing of a Used Rocket (theverge.com)
Eloking quotes a report from The Verge: After more than two years of landing its rockets after launch, SpaceX finally sent one of its used Falcon 9s back into space. The rocket took off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, this evening, sending a communications satellite into orbit, and then landed on one of SpaceX's drone ships floating in the Atlantic Ocean. It was round two for this particular rocket, which already launched and landed during a mission in April of last year. But the Falcon 9's relaunch marks the first time an orbital rocket has launched to space for a second time. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk appeared on the company's live stream shortly after the landing and spoke about the accomplishment. "It means you can fly and refly an orbital class booster, which is the most expensive part of the rocket. This is going to be, ultimately, a huge revolution in spaceflight," he said. "It's been 15 years to get to this point, it's taken us a long time," Musk said. "A lot of difficult steps along the way, but I'm just incredibly proud of the SpaceX for being able to achieve this incredible milestone in the history of space."
Major kudos to the SpaceX team! Thank you for letting me get to see the future.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Staring at the stars up here to-nite. Lookking down at Trump sucking off Putin.
That's another few million saved per flight.
With this huge milestone down, the next big one is Falcon Heavy - with 3 of these boosters landing for reuse.
We are on the cusp of a new age of space - prices are going to drop like crazy, and Mars just got a whole lot cheaper to reach!
become politicians and try to enslave the population others take their money and move humanity forward. Imagine if more billionaires did this .
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Truly amazing and a real milestone in humanity reaching for the stars.
Well done!
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
You just may have re-ignited the dreams of a couple of generations.
So, yes, I wanted to be a space pirate! I will be downloading those so-called illegal copies of movies that haven't even been shown, by travelling at FTL speeds I will obtain those films a day before their worldwide premiere.
one owner. only been driven twice.
The original argument in favor of the Space Shuttle was that it was reusable.
But they skimped on the maintenance, allowing tiles to get loose. Over time they loosened and fell off, resulting in major catastrophe.
Hopefully the fact that the boosters are a lot simpler than the shuttle will prevent another maintenance related disaster.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Bet your ass that rocket was gone over with a fine-toothed comb, at great expense.They won't have proven the economy of re-launching rockets until it's routine with zero to very few accidents and the finance numbers are in.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
My coworker is at their plant at the moment. I'll have to ask if he got to be in there with all the employees. So cool :)
It seems to me the space shuttle reused solid rocket boosters quite often. Tell me again how spacex made history?
And so is this story. I posted it earlier:
https://slashdot.org/submissio...
From Robert A. Heinlein, Excerpts from the Notebooks of Lazarus Long
Good thing that Elon Musk listens to experts. I believe those experts are telling him that he can't go to Mars.
After so many years of reading science fiction it's nice to see some of it becoming science fact. Please keep pushing ahead Elon.
The solid rocket boosters the shuttle used were also first stage rockets that were reused. The use case was different, parts from different previous launches were mixed around and re-combined, but the bottom line is that first stage re-use has been around for more than 30 years.
Those boosters parachuted into the ocean, which is a much simpler approach than a soft landing. To many of us, simpler still means better. Yes, they hit the ocean hard and bobbed around in salt water, and it required a very extensive re-build because it was solid fuel based. There's nothing inherently "wrong" with any of that, and it was a design and approach that worked (with one VERY notable failure). This begs the question, why go through all the work for the soft landing?
If the metric here is simply re-usability, previous rocket makers solved that problem decades ago.
SpaceX's metric is probably cost, though.
That's a great metric, maybe the BEST metric, but it's not what the article is about. Disappointingly absent from TFA about today's launch was the cost to SpaceX to refurbish and test the rocket, although we know the process took 4 months. (Launch price and refurbishing cost are not related yet, SpaceX took a loss here to prove a point.)
It is pretty shitty to all the engineers who came before and accomplished great things to pretend their work never happened simply because a cost focused news blurb is less effective than "aerospace history."
A great deal of technology went into the success of the re-useable rocket. I'm curious to know how much of that is shared. In bioscience, for instance, there is much sharing of information, presumably for the public good. Does Musk share his discoveries with other space programs?
We at Slashdot all have an interest in patents and copyright. We are of many opinions but seem generally antagonistic toward locking up Intellectual Property. Should space exploration developments be shared? How would that effect or offset the expensive research necessary to pull off this re-useable rocket success?
...omphaloskepsis often...
that he didn't run.
Crickets...
The shuttle was a learning curve. Having to replace windows every second flight due to micrometeorite impacts was not something that was expected for example.
It's also a bit of an argument against those people who push for mass production of a bleeding edge technology. Instead of having the dream of a few perfect space vehicles we had a number of space vehicles with exactly the same fault that had to be fixed or worked around at exactly the same time.
Space X are not in the situation of making a pile of identical rockets whether they want to or not so it's very likely that there will be a lot of incremental improvement.
musk says a lot of things.. how about 9 out of 10 successfull landings first.
Yes he says a lot of things and he backs a huge number of them up. His company managed to launch and land a booster twice and they did it successfully on their first try at landing a used booster. Gives pretty good confidence that SpaceX can replicate the results. More work to do of course but unlike snarky slashdot posters, he's actually doing the work. What have you done to advance human kind today?
This is a huge stepping stone. Your cynicism is misplaced.
Interesting discussion. He made a comment there "economics don't make sense until next year". I assume that means the cost of refurbishment is currently more expensive than the value of the booster.
That would be more or less expected for the first iterations of any new project. Companies rarely make money on the early versions of a product because they are still working out the kinks and paying for the tooling and engineering. It will take them some time before it really starts to become profitable because they are still in the steep part of the learning curve and investment cycles. Normal and expected. If they are actually doing it and making a profit by next year then that is outstanding progress. (disclosure: I'm a cost accountant and a process engineer so I do this sort of analysis for a living)
Does anyone know what font SpaceX uses for its broadcasted telemetry displays? I've tried whatthefont, et al but to no avail.
Is there some source out there that says how much of the rocket is re-used and how much is replaced with new parts? I would like to know what percentage is "original equipment" vs. how much is new. I would also be interested in knowing what the regeneration process is like in general.
But then he says shit like hyperloop and super-speed tunnel boring and colonize Mars.
Yes he does. What's your point? Just because he hasn't actually completed those things yet he shouldn't talk about them? Seriously, what is wrong with trying to do amazing things? I feel pretty confident that unlike you (and me) he actually might make those crazy ideas happen. Probably not tomorrow but it took SpaceX 15 years to land a booster twice. Might take a little longer to get to Mars... He's working on hard problems that actually matter and making real headway on them. Fifteen years ago you probably scoffed at him starting SpaceX too. Personally I can't wait to see what he does in the next 15 years.
Seriously folks. If you aren't impressed by what Musk has done then you either don't understand it or are just trying to be too cool for the room because... reasons. You don't have to like the guy but you have to respect the hell out of him.
are so obsessed with identifying and calling out anything that looks like a "Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field" that you are unable to acknowledge that we are witnessing the future happening.
Elon Musk is indisputably a tech visionary--or else that phrase has no meaning at all.
BTW: so was Steve Jobs. It doesn't make you "immune to groupthink" to claim otherwise, it makes a fucking idiot.
The problem is that he's got a mini version of the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field. He's got University students enthusiastically developing prototypes, when professors should be looking at this and saying, "bunk" for all sorts of sound engineering reasons.
Arthur C Clarke once said "If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; but if he says that it is impossible, he is very probably wrong."
Point is don't be that guy. You're criticizing the guy who is actually making real progress on hard problems and willing to literally put his money where his mouth is. Unless you have done the same cut him some slack. No, not everything he tries will pan out but that doesn't mean it isn't worth looking into. Working on something like hyperloop is a much better use of student's time than making yet another useless/redundant app for smartphones.
Low mileage. Only 15 million miles, one owner.
To be fair to NASA et al, a lot of their costs and processes are related to public oversight and government contracting in general. To the degree that NASA is an ineffective organization it's mostly at the dictum of Congress.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
I really like that Slashdot is so ready with primary sources. Things like this are why I keep coming back here. That, and comments like, "But hey, what do I know. I only ran those propulsion plants for a couple of years."
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
You ignore that uber-important word "probably".
Not remotely. We cannot prove a negative which is why that word probably is in there. Sometimes the elderly scientist is right when he says something is impossible. But I fear you missed my point.
There's a Very Big Difference between electric cars and reusable rockets (which is "just" very, very hard) and:
Yeah, yeah, they're tough problems but so what? It's cute how you so casually dismiss them as impossible. You proclaim that these other problems are somehow more intractable than the ones Musk has been working on as if it is axiomatic. You're akin to that elderly professor declaring it to be impossible and odds are you are almost certainly wrong. Worse, like me, I'm pretty sure you aren't an expert in any of these fields or at most in one of them. I've been around long enough to realize that few problem are impossible as long as they don't directly violate a known law of physics as we currently understand them. The constraints are usually more economic than technical.
1) Colonies (not research stations, but *colonies*) on a dead planet (there's a darned good reason why it's dead which gets 40% less sunlight than the Earth),
Self sustaining colonies on Mars are going to take centuries to really happen baring some technological miracles. But getting boots on Mars and having some sort of presence there should only take decades and really is a political/economic problem more than a technical one. The technical problems are serious but do not appear intractable and I'm pretty sure Musk is well aware of the challenges. The major limitations of colonizing Mars appear to be mostly economic. And Musk is working on solving THE major economic hurdle in doing it (cost to orbit) and he's made considerable progress. Every other problem in colonizing Mars follows from that one. For example there is little point in working on developing shielding for the trip there unless you can get to orbit cheaply enough to make the trip feasible. Yes Musk has talked about colonizing Mars and some of his time lines are to all appearances unrealistically optimistic but that doesn't make him wrong in the big picture. It just means it will take longer than he hopes. If SpaceX gets cost to orbit low enough a Mars colony becomes almost a certainty because either economic profit motive or geopolitics (or both) will almost certainly make it worthwhile. I feel reasonably confident that there is something economically valuable to be had somewhere on an entire undeveloped planet.
Imagine for a moment how much progress we could make on exploring the solar system if NASA and the defense department swapped budgets. NASA gets about $18 billion per year. The entire Apollo program in 2016 dollars was around $110 billion spread over a decade. We spend $600 PER YEAR on the US military. That's 5+ fully funded Apollo programs per year with more money left over than NASA's current budget. Our pace of progress on this is a economic choice, not a technical limitation.
2) boring stable tunnels at high speed through geologically highly unstable ground, and
"High speed" is something of a relative term here. Current boring technology goes "slow" because insufficient engineering effort has gone into making it go faster. Why? Again, economics. The mere fact that ground is unstable in places does not make tunneling through it at a faster pace than we currently do an intractable problem. Indeed, improving the speed of tunnel boring seems to be rather low hanging fruit for someone with the resources to seriously work on the problem. The problem will be in financing the tunneling projects, not in making a better tunnel boring machine.
Musk is interested in this technology because it has the potential to solve a key traffic issue which is that we have 3 dimensional cities but a (mostly) 2 dimensional transportation system. Flying car
When something is a matter of engineering, and not physically impossible, I like to be a little slow before calling it impossible. First, I want to check and see if anyone's actually doing it.
Quite right. Most of the problems we face aren't limited so much by technology but by economics and/or politics. Imagine for a moment what would happen if NASA and the Defense Department swapped budgets. On a short enough time scale all problems are impossible. On a long enough time scale very few problems are intractable. The rate at which you can get from impossible to feasible is usually a function of the economic resources applied to the problem.