Slashdot Mirror
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)
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*
one owner. only been driven twice.
"But they skimped on the maintenance, allowing tiles to get loose. Over time they loosened and fell off, resulting in major catastrophe."
Neither crash was caused by tiles falling off the Shuttle.
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.
Be happy that Elon made those goalposts out of fiberglas so you can move them all by yourself.
Let me rephrase. We didnt save nearly as much money as we thought we would by re-using them. The cost to refurbish was ridiculously high. Yes they were 'reusable', but not in the way they were planned to be. WE would have gotten a lot more flights than 135 if they had been cheaper to refurbish.
Good-bye
The SRBs fell, uncontrolled, into the ocean and were re-filled with firecracker stuff. It was always only marginally economical to reuse them. In contrast, the Falcon 9 is a liquid fueled rocket with on-board avionics, which soft-lands in a usable state. Its engine has been tested after landing, without any refurbishment at all.
The new goal is to turn around a booster and re-fly it in 24 hours.
Bruce Perens.
In addition to the corrections to your post concerning the tiles, the Shuttle orbiter was basically a second stage (at best, a 1.5 stage). A significant minority of the dry mass of the system. The SRBs were also "recovered", but A) they landed in saltwater, B) "landing" is being generous, they hit *hard*, C) solid rockets aren't just a "refill and reuse", you have to disassemble and recast. The net result is that reuse didn't really save any money on the SRBs.
The Shuttle's TPS was a big maintenance problem (not an issue for Falcon). The SSMEs were also pretty high maintenance. Shuttle had to build a whole huge ET each launch. And NASA has such huge amount of heavy infrastructure overhead.
It's hard to say how well reuse of Falcons will go at this point. But it should at the very least fare far better than the Shuttle system.
It's also worth noting that Falcon is only the start of SpaceX's plans. While they've learned what to do and what not to do from the Shuttle program, they want their experience with F9 and FH to influence their design of ITS and its support infrastructure.
Kneel Before Christ!
Excellent advice when you have an author looking after your interests who will ensure things work out in the end. But in real life, if you believe that, you should get to work on your perpetual motion machine now.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
As far as I know NASA never skimped on tile maintence, it was one of the many reasons every shuttle flight was so damn expensive.
I read the internet for the articles.
Does Musk share his discoveries with other space programs?
No. As has been pointed out on multiple occasions, SpaceX is doing little or no new science. They are doing groundbreaking, revolutionary engineering, but they're not discovering new things about the universe in order to do it, so there isn't anything to share of the nature you're referring to.
Beyond the engineering, they are also doing highly effective management. Management so effective that ULA partisans have claimed repeatedly that it's impossible. They're producing quality rockets, with continuously improving quality, with team sizes far smaller and far more effective than ULA can currently field. It may be that someone has written and published something about how they do that, but as with all things managerial, it's effectively impossible for an organization that isn't run that way to remake itself into an organization that is run that way.
SpaceX is successful not for what they are discovering, but for what they are not doing. They're not operating with a cost-plus contract with the US government, which has the same effect on an engineering project that an unlimited budget has on a movie (see Michael Bay), and they're not operating with a bloated, dysfunctional management structure. Those two simple things allow them to pull off what are being called engineering miracles, but they're not miraculous. It's just that our standards have become so absymally low thanks to decades of bumbling by Lockheed, Boeing, and yes, NASA, that when we encounter competence, it appears amazing.
When you get right down to it, Elon Musk doesn't have anything to share that would do any good. The Atlas and Delta rocket families already work, after all. Elon Musk could talk about the design decisions he made that made the Falcon 9 far cheaper, but Lockheed and Boeing have reams and reams of PowerPoint presentations about why those were the wrong decisions. They simply can't back down from that now.
Jesus, you doubters are dense. At least pick at SpaceX over their faults instead of spouting off with this bs.
If the guy only gets two throws per booster, the market is going to get rocked. If it's 10, the Big Boys are dead. 100 is almost unpredictable because there's no way to test the elasticity of the market that far out.
At some point, the boosters get too many flights. Take the old ones, and use them as the expenable middle stick in the big F9H or as a single stick throw. Or boost them all the way and make space station volume from them (STFU if you don't know about SkyLab or the other Apollo Application projects).
Pick on SpeX over their ability to sustain a culture of quality while maintaining innovation and risk taking. Big companies don't do this well, and I haven't heard a good story about how this will happen.
Or any other valid attack vector...
I dunno, I watched the webcast and that leeward fin will definitely need a new paint job. So, like I said, I dunno about 24hr turn around so far.
In the press conference after the launch, Elon Musk specifically said that the grid fins would be made from titanium instead of aluminum on the final revision of the Falcon 9 so it would not suffer from that problem.
Slashdot your i and slashcross your t.
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.