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SpaceX Pulls the Plug On Its Red Dragon Plans (arstechnica.com)
SpaceX has largely confirmed the rumors that the company is no longer planning to send an uncrewed version of its Dragon spacecraft to Mars in 2020, or later. Ars Technica reports: The company had planned to use the propulsive landing capabilities on the Dragon 2 spacecraft -- originally developed for the commercial crew variant to land on Earth -- for Mars landings in 2018 or 2020. Previously, it had signed an agreement with NASA to use some of its expertise for such a mission and access its deep-space communications network. On Tuesday, however, during a House science subcommittee hearing concerning future NASA planetary science missions, Florida Representative Bill Posey asked what the agency was doing to support privately developed planetary science programs. Jim Green, who directs NASA's planetary science division, mentioned several plans about the Moon and asteroids, but he conspicuously did not mention Red Dragon. After this hearing, SpaceX spokesman John Taylor didn't return a response to questions from Ars about the future of Red Dragon. Then, during a speech Wednesday at the International Space Station Research and Development Conference, Musk confirmed that the company is no longer working to land Dragon propulsively for commercial crew.
"Yeah, that was a tough decision," Musk acknowledged Wednesday with a sigh. "The reason we decided not to pursue that heavily is that it would have taken a tremendous amount of effort to qualify that for safety for crew transport," Musk explained Wednesday. "There was a time when I thought the Dragon approach to landing on Mars, where you've got a base heat shield and side mounted thrusters, would be the right way to land on Mars. But now I'm pretty confident that is not the right way." Musk added that his company has come up with a "far better" approach to landing on Mars that will be incorporated into the next iteration of the company's proposed Mars transportation hardware.
"Yeah, that was a tough decision," Musk acknowledged Wednesday with a sigh. "The reason we decided not to pursue that heavily is that it would have taken a tremendous amount of effort to qualify that for safety for crew transport," Musk explained Wednesday. "There was a time when I thought the Dragon approach to landing on Mars, where you've got a base heat shield and side mounted thrusters, would be the right way to land on Mars. But now I'm pretty confident that is not the right way." Musk added that his company has come up with a "far better" approach to landing on Mars that will be incorporated into the next iteration of the company's proposed Mars transportation hardware.
You mean this whole idea of spending billions on a flashy project with absolutely zero profit potential was all publicity-generating bullshit designed to boost Elon Musk's cult of personality?? No way!
I think he has just got bored with his space toys, and decided to play with the digging toys for a bit.
Richter has given up on this one! The BIG ONE!
SpaceX is routinely doing things that NASA has never been able to do . He is getting paid to launch his rockets, but he's charging less than the government would have to pay otherwise.
The Government rocket program isn't even attempting to match what he's doing currently. They have a grand plan for a bigger rocket that will fly in a decade or so (if it manages to keep the 'schedule' they've defined), but SpaceX will get a LOT of launches in between now and then, and I wouldn't be surprised if they keep ahead of NASA in pure lifting capacity per rocket.
hardly waiting for the taxpayer to do all the R&D. At this point he is leading the way. NASA hasn't done much real R&D since they design of the shuttle.
In other words, Musk is feeding at the public trough and looking for a bigger hand out.
from the top 5 media outlets over & over.... barely perceptible.. liars touts & shills oh my,, cease fire stand down is the real story part of creations' wildly popular planet/population rescue initiative... pretending we cannot feel it is useless? that's the spirit...
Is this "tremendous amount of effort to qualify that for safety for crew transport" really true?! Who could have thought about such a tiny issue to be so relevant! Isn't it enough with just doing some tests and simple calculations in a model and then scale the conclusions up? Or just taking what works in situations without people and adding the having-humans-there factor? Hopefully, videos showing technology which has never been created before will continue being a very reliable source of engineering knowledge!
CLARIFICATION FOR SARCASM-CHALLENGED PEOPLE: this post is 100% sarcasm.
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
Actually, it has been SpaceX doing the heavy lifting for some time now. The have worked out how to land an orbital class first stage booster on a tiny ship in the middle of the ocean without anyone paying them to do so. They have designed new engines, modules and rockets faster than anyone else in the game using modern technology instead of relying on "tried and tested" 1960's engineering. Nobody demanded that their capsules must return to the launchpad propulsively, but they pushed ahead anyway and showed in full scale testing how their superdraco engines can hover and balance. There is no legitimate reason to doubt that they have the technical ability to land propulsively. However, if the safety demands of Nasa force them to stick with old (but proven) technology, then so be it.
Amazing how many naysayers there still are after all the amazing things SpaceX have already acomplished that most people thought were completely impossible just a couple of years ago. They are saving the American tax payer millions every single day and the trolls still come out and whine. As a European, I cannot fathom how so many Americans can be so ungrateful to a company that has been the leading star in private space technology. Maybe they will screw you all over tomorrow or a decade from now, but that can be said of any company in the world.
Impressive refutation of the points made.
It's like you didn't even read the article or pay attention to what he said. So I guess someone has to repeat it for you.
NASA's regulations for propulsive landing of a Dragon 2 capsule are too difficult to reasonably meet. So they're dropping propulsive landing from Dragon 2. Meaning it can't land on Mars either. At the same time, they've decided that there's a better approach to landing on Mars than Dragon 2's approach of a bottom-mounted heat shield and side-mounted thrusters.
And for the record, that better approach is what they're looking at with ITS - a side lifting body heat shield with base thrusters for landing. The latter spreads the heat out over a much larger area (Dragon 2 had no option for that because it had no giant, partially empty propellant tanks attached) and increases the length of time over which the heating occurs, slowing the rate.
It'll be interesting to see their changes to ITS. I'm glad to see that "smaller" is among them - I like ambition, but ITS was a step too far, IMHO.
Nietzche: "I'm immortal because I'm all sin." Jesus: "I forgive you." (Bang!) -- Jesus Christ Supercop
That's the thing I don't get. SpaceX is saving the US government huge amounts of money. Yet so many Slashdotters have this weird conception that they're a giant leach sucking government budgets dry. Their conception is precisely the opposite of reality. ULA has been getting an unbelievable sweetheart deal for government launches, getting paid even when they don't launch anything, and charging massive fees when they do, while also getting government subsidy to develop new craft. SpaceX paid back its COTS funding in spades versus what was being doled out to ULA.
Nietzche: "I'm immortal because I'm all sin." Jesus: "I forgive you." (Bang!) -- Jesus Christ Supercop
Said the Anonymous Expert...
Idiot.
If you think SpaceX has only made one landing, you haven't been following things well, landings are pretty close to routine now (unless the mission is for a payload heavier than anything short of a delta heavy can handle, and they're rivaling that, the Falcon heavy will be able to handle payloads over double the max that a delta heavy can do)
You ask if it's reproducable, they've landed about a dozen first stages, (7 so far this year)
they've had two first stages that they've flown and landed twice, and one dragon capsule that's flown and landed twice.
They are on track to have about 20 'flight tested' first stages by the end of the year, and either late this year or early next year are planning to land, refuel and refly a first stage with a 24 hour turnaround.
we feel almost nothing? what could be better? sing along.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRCgueckAXE .. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nXGPZaTKik --
Are they launching silence of the lambs instead?
He used both neurons his "progressive" brain could spare.
SpaceX is saving the government money. The nay-sayers are upset that the government spends its money on the launches rather than pork-barrel projects for their districts and entitlements, 'cause heaven forbid someone has to work...
Right, so you apparently think there was just some printed list sitting around of what NASA will and won't accept when you want to do something that's not been done before (propulsive crew landing)? As was made abundantly clear, what NASA will and won't accept came out of discussions with NASA. It became increasingly clear over time that they weren't going to allow it, so they cut it. I'm sure that you and your army of space psychics could have handled it better.
Yeah, let's just go back to Redstones. Because that will surely lead us to the future that SpaceX is working to achieve! The whole point is to innovate in ways that can make access to space cheaper and more routine, not to keep repeating what we know doesn't allow for cheap, routine access to space.
I love this double talk that you get from Slashdotters. On one hand, bringing a brand new mode of transportation from almost nothing to huge demand, to the degree that each new model is produced is in volumes an order of magnitude than the previous and yet accumulates even greater waiting lists, isn't happening nearly fast enough, that Tesla is "low sales" (actually, no, they're not, not when you take into account market segment). On the other hand, we're also always flooded with posts about how Tesla isn't paying dividends and keeps having to take capital rounds. So let me get this straight, Slashdot. Tesla is supposed to have, in a decade, gone from "design concept for an electric car" to "selling more cars than the major automakers", of an entirely different type of vehicle, while paying dividends and not raising capital. Am I understanding this correctly?
Tesla's rate of growth has been phenomenal. The fact that you find an automaker going from almost nothing to opening up factory lines to produce hundreds of thousands of $35k+ vehicles per year in under a decade to be way to slow, boggles the mind.
For decades, US launch costs had stagnated. In the matter of a few years, SpaceX cut them to a small fraction of their former value - and they've only barely just started reuse. Again, the fact that you find this to be "not really achieving much" and that you think NASA would have done better (despite decades of distinctly not doing better) likewise boggles the mind.
Nietzche: "I'm immortal because I'm all sin." Jesus: "I forgive you." (Bang!) -- Jesus Christ Supercop
To elaborate on the above AC's point, here's a list of SpaceX launches (starting with the first oceanic "landing" attempt) and their success/failure rate.
29-sep-2013: Ocean failure
03-dec-2013: No attempt
06-jan-2014: No attempt
18-apr-2014: Ocean success
14-jul-2014: Ocean success
05-aug-2014: No attempt
07-sep-2014: No attempt
21-sep-2014: Ocean success
10-jan-2015: Drone ship failure
11-feb-2015: Ocean success
02-mar-2015: No attempt
14-apr-2015: Drone ship failure
27-apr-2015: No attempt
**********28-jun-2015: In-flight failure
22-dec-2015: Ground pad success
17-jan-2016: Drone ship failure
04-mar-2016: Drone ship failure
08-apr-2016: Drone ship success
06-may-2016: Drone ship success
27-may-2016: Drone ship success
15-jun-2016: Drone ship failure
18-jul-2016: Ground pad success
14-aug-2016: Drone ship success
**********01-sep-2016: Pre-launch testing failure
14-jan-2017: Drone ship success
19-feb-2017: Ground pad success
16-mar-2017: No attempt
30-mar-2017: Drone ship success
01-may-2017: Ground pad success
15-may-2017: No attempt
03-jun-2017: Ground pad success
23-jun-2017: Drone ship success
25-jun-2017: Drone ship success
05-jul-2017: No attempt
These don't even tell the whole story because not only has their success rate gone way up, but they've also been attempting to land from increasingly difficult flight envelopes that previously they wouldn't have even attempted from (and simply flown legless / finless rockets)
The issue with testing rocket landing is, you can't just do it in some research lab; you can only do it by actually landing rockets, and changing whatever doesn't work. That's the only way you can learn of your failure modes. Sure, you can use scaled-down testbeds, and SpaceX did that with the Grasshopper series - but there's the difference between a testbed and something that actually goes to orbit. There's a reason that SpaceX used to call them "experimental landings". I don't think they use that term any more; nowadays a landing failure would be seen as a pretty significant setback.
Nietzche: "I'm immortal because I'm all sin." Jesus: "I forgive you." (Bang!) -- Jesus Christ Supercop
For killing a red dragon?
This guy is just trying to power level.
Space exploration was one of the favourite things for liberals to point fingers at and scream "let's see free market tackle THAT". Now it is, they're in panic.
NASA came out and basically said going to Mars was not in the budget at this time. Clearly we don't have the funding to take up such a mission and its going to affect everyone involved. I am certainly not one against space exploration but we do have more pressing matters on Earth that need attention. I do not think going Mars is tops on the list. I would probably say were decades if not more from placing humans on Mars. Its probably a commitment that needs a more global funded project then just the US going it alone.
To be fair, Paypal was a solid idea. Though "Guy who got rich being a middleman for beanie baby auctions" sounds less impressive than "TECH VISIONARY SUPERINVENTOR".
For decades, US launch costs had stagnated. In the matter of a few years, SpaceX cut them to a small fraction of their former value
He's cost-optimizing the grunt work of space exploration, he's not frigging Zefram Cochrane. SpaceX is a glorified freight company.
> previous NASA designs used successfully.
NASA doesn't have a design that has been successfully used to land a human on Mars. NASA doesn't have a successful design for reusable rocket either. Very un-American of you to tell someone how to spend their money. May be you should grow up and contribution something to society.
Even Zefram Cochrane wasn't Zefram Cochrane, he was just in it for the money. He wanted to retire to Tahiti.
Space exploration was one of the favourite things for liberals to point fingers at and scream "let's see free market tackle THAT". Now it is, they're in panic.
I'm a liberal, I follow both politics and space news, and you just pulled that completely out of your ass. I have NEVER seen anything about liberals insisting that space exploration be a government monopoly. In fact, guys like Musk are the darlings of liberal politics. They actually believe in reality instead of trumpist "alternate facts".
Meh, for every person who achieves something there's ten people who want to slap them down and find their faults and their weaknesses and belittle whatever they do. Everything from jocks bullying nerds to the people who have to hate on Jobs, Ballmer, Ellison, Zuckerberg, Jimbo Wales, Musk etc. almost out of principle. That just have to find that Jobs was an asshole and a terrible family man, so the universe is back in balance. Doesn't matter if you're fucking Gandhi somebody's going to get so pissed at you they'll want to shoot you dead. Maybe he's read a bit too many sci-fi novels. Still better to be a dreamer than a bitter, miserable old coot. Because that's mostly what your post comes across like.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
That's the real obstacle standing between humanity and aggressive space exploration: lack of profit. Once someone figures out a plan to make zillions in space we'll have warp drive within 10 years. Barring that our only hope is another silly pissing contest with Russia or China.
>Doesn't matter if you're fucking Gandhi somebody's going to get so pissed at you they'll want to shoot you dead.
This is probably going to shock you, but Gandhi could be a bit of a creep and an asshole.
Very few people in history have been 'ideal'. I suspect Fred Rogers is about as close as you're going to find, and I'd bet at some point in his life even he had a screaming match with somebody.
You misread him. It isn't that they are " insisting that space exploration be a government monopoly." It is that they couldn't conceive of any for-profit company putting in the long term investment on something that doesn't give an immediate boost to the quarterly reports.
Here is a couple examples:
https://mic.com/articles/2267/...
http://bgr.com/2015/12/03/neil...
“Private enterprise will never lead a space frontier,” Tyson told me in a phone interview. “In all the history of human conduct, it’s as clear to me as day follows night that private enterprise won’t do that, because it’s expensive. It’s dangerous. You have uncertainty and risks, because you’re dealing with things that haven’t been done before. That’s what it means to be on a frontier.”
Imagine a meeting between a space-obsessed entrepreneur and a venture capitalist, Tyson suggested. “We want your investment.” For what? “To go to space.” Why? “We want to put humans on Mars.” How much will it cost? “A lot. People might die.” What’s the return on investment? “Probably nothing in the short term, but later on you’ll make money.”
It’s not a perfect comparison, since the likes of Bezos and Musk have deep enough pockets to fund much of what they want to do, but the larger point remains.
“The government is better suited to these kinds of investments,” Tyson told me. “They have a longer time horizon. They’re not shackled to quarterly reports like you see in a private enterprise.”
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
well i am glad that some slashdotters are basement dwellers, but those can make the silliest comments. One thing I know is that Space X has renewed hope for space travel, where NASA could not
It's because most Slashdotters are jealous morons who begrudge anyone else's success.
Seriously, look at any story about someone being successful at something and many of the responses are "well, it was obvious - ANYONE could have done it!"
They never ask the obvious follow-up: if it were obvious, if it were something anyone could have done, why didn't THEY do it and reap the rewards?
These are the same people who come up with an idea and then engage in mental masturbation about how awesome it is and how it's the most amazing thing and then never do a goddamn thing about it, but they act like that's exactly the same thing as coming up with (or borrowing) an idea and executing on it.
Ideas are easy. Everyone knows an "idea guy." But actually making shit happen is harder - extremely hard, in some cases, and takes dedication and time.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
There's always a critic.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
It remains to be seen whether Musk can send people to Mars without his investors wringing his neck for the unprofitability of it. He can get away with planning because that's cheap and may have commercial side benefits. I suspect in the end he'll have to get a government contract to fund a Mars mission.
This space intentionally left blank
"He's a kid with a lot of money that's read too many sci-fi novels. "
Who has already accomplished far more in space than you ever will.
SpaceX used to call them "experimental landings". I don't think they use that term any more; nowadays a landing failure would be seen as a pretty significant setback.
IIRC the last three-engine landing burn used up pretty much the entire crush core. As in, it almost failed. They still seem pretty willing to push it straight to the limit rather than the conservative approach of trying it little by little. And as long as the expectations are set right to the engineers that you can push the limits and fail and to the public that we're pushing the limits and might fail, it works quite well for everyone. As long as it's cargo and dry-runs anyway, I'm sure NASA has made it very clear that you don't try any new funny business on manned flights.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
We're at the top of the business cycle, which means capital is expensive. It is a natural progression of things at this point for companies to cut off capital spending, new projects, and new jobs.
We have already been seeing job losses for about a year now (if you look at REAL numbers, not the phony baloney government rose-colored-glasses, head-in-the-sand numbers) as the result of capital spending reductions across all industries.
This is why Democrats are going to win the white house and Congress in 2020.. there is a recession coming in the next 6-12 months and it is going to last 3-5 years like the last one. Nobody gets re-elected during a recession. Just look what happened to Obama in 2010 - Congress flipped because of the recession.
"for every person who achieves something there's ten people who want to slap them down and find their faults and their weaknesses and belittle whatever they do. "
And inevitably, such critics are people who have no clue about how to improve in what the folks they flame have ALREADY accomplished, let alone what they will contribute in the future.
Just for the sake of sitting back and seeing what happens. Start a Genesis project of sorts. Maybe something interesting will happen without risking a human life.
I think it's much more important to point out that Zephram is a fictional character living in a fictional universe. I guess your parent and ledow are both living in that fictional universe.
SpaceX isn't really such a good counter to that. They benefitted from around a century of government research into rocketry, aerospace and space flight, as well as lots of government subsidies. Their biggest customer is one of the biggest governments in the world. And although they're doing it in very innovative ways, they're serving a pretty well-established market.
Tesla has sold every single production vehicle they've made, plus 10s of thousands they haven't yet made. That's poor sales in absolute numbers, but in relative terms, the traditional auto makers would figuratively kill for those numbers.
Basically, you're a useless shit, hating someone you don't know, and almost certainly because you're a jealous loser. The Universe would be better off if you were no longer interacting with it.
He accomplishes more by waking up than that shit you replied to ever will.
He was agreeing with the post he replied to, you retarded illiterate.
It looks like I misunderstood. /goes to sit in the corner.
Greatest Generation liberals from the time of Roosevelt to JFK supported science and its applications, but starting in the Seventies they switched sides and went Nu Nukes No GMO No Nothing.
Last month in Iceland I saw geothermal power being tapped from a volcano, with the spent water ( heat exchanger isolated from the highly mineralized volcano circulation) piped all the way to Reykjavík for district heating. There are not many places in the world where you can do that, but one of them is Hawaii, the kind of solidly blue state where the New Dealers would have installed a plant like this without a second thought.
But no - apparently geothermal power might anger the volcano gods. Hawaiians will have to get power from the rapid rotation of FDR in his grave, just as they will from now on get their astronomy from Chinese research papers.
You are talking about something completely different, which is respecting the local people who actually happen to live in an area. That has zero to do with whether you believe in science or not. Not stomping on the locals doesn't mean you don't believe in science.
It's like you didn't even read the article or pay attention to what he said. So I guess someone has to repeat it for you.
To the contrary, it's like you read the article but weren't really familar with the mission.
NASA's regulations for propulsive landing of a Dragon 2 capsule are too difficult to reasonably meet.
Red Dragon was a proposed private mission to Mars. It is not a NASA mission, and NASA requirements are irrelevant.
I like Musk. I like the approach of trying stuff, and if it doesn't work, try something else. They worked on this idea and, when they got down into the details, decided the propulsive landing technique wouldn't work, so they gave up on it. Good for them.
But don't blame NASA. It wasn't a NASA mission in the first place.
No, this is exactly what I'm talking about. If you as a present-day Democrat had been in charge of things during the Depression, you would have given bartenders in Boulder City veto power over Hoover Dam. Except that before the dam, Boulder City didn't exist.
Uh, it is the liberals backing private space and the gop that is working hard to destroy them.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Comment blows a cloud of smoke -> you insult him and wish he dies quickly because it was your favourite smoke.
He didn't say anything wrong. You did.
> previous NASA designs used successfully.
NASA doesn't have a design that has been successfully used to land a human on Mars. NASA doesn't have a successful design for reusable rocket either.
Right on the first, wrong on the second.
The space shuttle was a reusable launch vehicle that flew in 1981-- before half of you slashdotters were even born. More reusable than Falcon-9, in fact, since the Falcon 9 throws away the second stage (which tends to be the more expensive part).
(The problem with the space shuttle is that the technology got frozen in 1981. It should have been retired in favor of some better next-generation launcher by the 1990s. Instead, the demonstrated problems got patches, but the design itself never evolved, never changed. )
Very un-American of you to tell someone how to spend their money. May be you should grow up and contribution something to society.
I don't know if what's "American," but I love the idea of private individuals trying stuff with their own funding and succeeding or failing on their own merits.
Lots of people out there are underestimating that it takes to do space travel. As usual, reality is stepping in to put everyone in their place.
Space exploration was one of the favourite things for liberals to point fingers at and scream "let's see free market tackle THAT". Now it is, they're in panic.
Yeah, I'll challenge that statement. I don't think I've ever heard a liberal say that.
It just hasn't been a big issue on the liberal agenda, frankly.
SpaceX isn't really such a good counter to that. They benefitted from around a century of government research into rocketry, aerospace and space flight, as well as lots of government subsidies. Their biggest customer is one of the biggest governments in the world. And although they're doing it in very innovative ways, they're serving a pretty well-established market.
And, most particularly, they leveraged NASA funding to build the Falcon-9.
To his credit, Musk doesn't ever try to hide that-- he clearly and directly acknowledges NASA's help. In interviews, he points out that after Space-X failed on their first three launches, NASA was the only one willing to invest in them, and they would have gone bankrupt without it.
In fact, SpaceX may have found the right middle ground -- working with NASA changed them from a company with a record of a string of failures to a company with a record of a sting of successes, but they are separated from NASA enough that they can try cool stuff without too long a string of regulations and reviews. Good for them.
They're still working with NASA. Let's hope they can keep that middle ground, distant enough to be innovative, close enough to be rigorous.
That fictional universe is more real to me than this one. Sad really. Keep up the good bark moo.
One thing I know is that Space X has renewed hope for space travel, where NASA could not
SpaceX renewed hope for space travel by working with NASA.
There's a reason that SpaceX used to call them "experimental landings"
For the same reason Doctors calls it "practice"? Yeah, that transplant didn't work too well. We'll just have to continue to practice on it. :)
Anyone up for an "experimental landing" on the moon?? Oh, I have no doubt the world isn't short of dare devils that are willing to give it a shot :)
Here's a quick rule-of-thumb that I've learned from 45 years of disappointment:
Anyone who says they're going to send a man to Mars is full of shit. Any date they announce is bullshit. Any plan they announce will never happen. Any technology they plan to use will never materialize.
Now there, print that out and keep it handy for future reference. It will save you a lot of heartache in the future.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Musk is exhibiting the kind of real-world-driven financial decision-making that got him where he is. He doesn't like having to kill a developing product line, but in recognition of the fact that it was high-risk and a long shot, he decided to fold this hand and the money already in the pot, and try again next hand. There's a huge difference between "I quit" and "I have to stop and re-calculate the route" and he is doing the latter.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
"As a European, I cannot fathom how so many Americans can be so ungrateful to a company that has been the leading star in private space technology."
We call those people "assholes." Hating something is not an achievement, but they think it is.
I suspect Fred Rogers is about as close as you're going to find, and I'd bet at some point in his life even he had a screaming match with somebody.
The current Internet fixation seems to be on Bob Ross. So far, I have yet to hear anything terrible about him.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Tesla has sold every single production vehicle they've made, plus 10s of thousands they haven't yet made. That's poor sales in absolute numbers, but in relative terms, the traditional auto makers would figuratively kill for those numbers.
They would not kill for those numbers for such a small production level as it is not profitable. There have been many 'big car company' models that could not meet initial demand. What you want as a manufacturer ideally is to supply 100% of demand with minimal inventory.
> So far, I have yet to hear anything terrible about him.
Nothing TRUE, anyway.
It is that they couldn't conceive of any for-profit company putting in the long term investment on something that doesn't give an immediate boost to the quarterly reports.
SpaceX is doing it because there is a relatively immediate boost due to government funding. The profit is coming from NASA and the DoD.
It's still not private industry doing it by itself.
> They still seem pretty willing to push it straight to the limit rather than the conservative approach of trying it little by little
Not surprising - re-launching rockets isn't yet a major part of their short-term business plan, and landing failures are going to be far less of a PR problem now than in the future. Meanwhile, they've got their sights set on bigger projects in the future, and unqualified success teaches you nothing.
Plus, they're trying to land rockets from increasingly aggressive launches - situations where the launch expense has already been paid, and the alternative to an aggressive landing attempt is to just throw away the rocket. Pretty easy choice there I should think. After all, any failed landing attempt that offers lessons more valuable than the damage done to the pad/ drone ship is still a net win.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Well sure, consider trying to design a working rocket without believing in reality. It would be quite challenging to do so successfully.
Yeah, and they were trying out never-before used titanium grid fins, too. But that was their highest energy trajectory yet (as noted, they keep pushing the bounds on trying to land more and more difficult trajectories). I imagine they'll cut back on that a lot once the Heavy is in full service and they can just offload heavier payloads to the Heavy.
Nietzche: "I'm immortal because I'm all sin." Jesus: "I forgive you." (Bang!) -- Jesus Christ Supercop
Worst I've heard about him that has any evidence whatsoever is "His jewfro was fake, he did it just for TV". Well, lots of people make their TV personas different from their daily life, so I'm perfectly willing to give him a pass on this one. Do actors and actresses deserve scorn for taking an hour or two in the makeup chair before every shoot?
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
I am more interested about what SpaceX does. Why do your keep obsessing over Musk?
There is nothing on Mars we want or need.
This is a Big Business dream shot to profit in a complete do over with them at the wheel instead of the founding fathers.
That way they can correct all the mistakes the founders made and allow themselves unencumbered profit.
Rick B.
ahhh... I was looking forward to a 17 minute long version of "inna gadda da vida" during landing...
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Well, to be honest, I believe Elon Musk is boring now.
I essentially agree with most of what you are saying, but I do have two points. Firstly, Musk spends his money on exciting new technology and solving problems rather than exciting new football teams and taking drugs. I think it's easy to lose sight of that fact when he opens his mouth. Second, have you driven a Tesla P85D? That car is a whole other weird kind of fast. I don't actually like it for a bunch of reasons, but if you want a GT car that will outrun most hypercars that would do it.
How do the words "NASA's regulations" lead you to think that "NASA requirements" are irrelevant?
NASA is first and foremost the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Their requirements are relevant, unless perhaps you are launching from another country than the US.
Hawaiians will have to get power from the rapid rotation of FDR in his grave
With all due respect to FDR, Hawaii will be getting its power directly from the sun. There's more than one way to skin a cat.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Aside form being an asshole, Steve Jobs also has a history of intellectual theft and anti-consumer practices. I have yet to encounter an example of him doing anything to benefit anybody other than himself. Based on the evidence I have, he was a bad person by every definition of the term that I will accept. So lets not use him as the example, huh? Lets go with George Westinghouse or something.
No, this is exactly what I'm talking about. If you as a present-day Democrat had been in charge of things during the Depression, you would have given bartenders in Boulder City veto power over Hoover Dam. Except that before the dam, Boulder City didn't exist.
What you're really talking about is the difference between unrestricted green-field development and development in populated areas where there are already established interests.
When it's the wild frontier and the only people out there are you and the buffalo, then there's nobody to stop you from doing whatever you want.
When people live in an area and have an interest in preserving their way of life, you either have to steamroller over them or you have to negotiate and make compromises with them.
Yes, large-scale engineering is much more difficult when you have to consider other peoples' needs and not only your own.
No, that's not their problem, it's your problem. The fact that contemporary companies and government are less able to unilaterally destroy peoples' local environments in pursuit of their "larger goals" (read: profit, mostly) is a good thing.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Vapor coming out of the general direction Elon Musk's butt? THAT hasn't happened before. Why does anyone finance this meathead's delusions?
At my job I spent a weekend learning something new and making a tool that would handle a lot of very company specific busywork that would save 2-3 hours per developer per week. We have ~200 developers across the company, so we're saving between 400-600 developer hours, per week or 20,000+ developer hours per year.
As a result of making this tool, from the company, I got 2 comp days to compensate for my weekend and a very nice cash bonus. In addition, when my performance review came around a few months later, I was given a promotion about a year before people at my level were usually given a promotion and a very solid raise to boot, as well as a very nice retention bonus, and the tool I built was specifically mentioned and the way I followed through on building it being part of why.
As a result of making this tool, from my coworkers, I got told repeatedly that it was a no brainer and any of them could have built it and made it better and they had all thought about making something like it but never bothered. They also complained that they didn't get big bonuses or promotions at their reviews.
People like them let people like me get ahead in the world so I don't mind it if they cannot follow through. They might be smarter than me for all I know, but I follow through and they don't so I'm going to win.
Is Tyson someone I should be taking business advice from?
I'm not aware of him being anything but a public science personality and generally kinda cool guy, so maybe I missed that he is considered an authority on business, finance and economics?
The parent of the post you are responding to was just some ideological warrior trying to stir the pot. I'm as liberal as they come, and the only time I panic about private entities doing something is when they harm other people or behave unethically. Maybe not vilifying the private sector makes me a bad liberal, but I can easily name a number of private entities that spend big on basic research when a payday might never come, and so, too, should literally anyone who is familiar with tech.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
>Worst I've heard about him that has any evidence whatsoever is "His jewfro [wisegeek.com] was fake, he did it just for TV".
I'd just assumed it was... given that was kind of a style at the time he rose to prominence, but still rare enough to make him iconic. A quick googling prior to this post produced a picture of him in the military, and post-military but pre-fro. The fro was a good choice.
NASA has never landed or even attempted to land crew-capable landers on Mars.
Any regulations they might have regarding Mars landings can only be based on extrapolations of the few successful probe landings so far.
If SpaceX can successfully demonstrate a crew-capable landing, then - barring any politics - NASA will have an opportunity to revisit their basis for any such regulation.
NASA requirements may not be "irrelevant", but they're not carved in stone either.
Like it or not, NASA is a science-based organization. They don't deny themselves the possibility of evolution.
There's "truth" on both sides of this. Reusable seems to be promising. However, there is still insufficient data to claim that it will actually reduce (stable, profitable) costs for launch to orbit. Time will tell (and the auditors, if they can actually get hold of the books). Musk has vastly exaggerated what is possible, and rightly should be ridiculed when his attempts to reinvent the wheel go down in flames, especially with him implying no one knew. It's inevitable that innovation and "can do" collide with physical and economic reality. In the resulting "froth" Musk has had some successes and some failures. The rule of thumb we used to use for choosing (industrial) R&D projects was that 1 idea in 100 was worth investigating, and of those projects, 1 in 100 could be brought to completion and of those, between 10 and 20% would actually be profitable. It's the reason companies buy products rather than develop them internally; cost is - on average - higher than reward. (kinda the opposite of the "black swan", it's the golden egg effect. How do you organize your business to both not spend yourself into the poor house buying chickenfeed, and at the same time allow for the recognition (and nurturing) of the rare golden egg.)
Behind every great fortune is a great crime. This principle holds true so often it can assumed as the default. When police pull over a black kid in a nice car and a stack of cash, they assume he is a drug dealer and search for corroborating evidence. When I see a white guy with a fake smile and a tailored suit, I assume he's running a scheme to inflate his stock price.
That's the thing I don't get..
Take it from me, it's not worth your mental effort.
I tend to rant.
Bezos? Musk? Someone else?
The point is that SpaceX is planning on using this version of Dragon for the commercial crew program, so NASA's requirements are VERY relevant to what SpaceX decides to develop. Since NASA's requirements for powered landings are more than SpaceX wanted to meet, they decided not to spend the money to do it.
Enigma
Yeah, and they were trying out never-before used titanium grid fins, too. But that was their highest energy trajectory yet (as noted, they keep pushing the bounds on trying to land more and more difficult trajectories). I imagine they'll cut back on that a lot once the Heavy is in full service and they can just offload heavier payloads to the Heavy.
Maybe, but there seems to be a sliding scale from landing all three back at the launch site to landing one or all on drone ships to using them as expendables so they probably want the most aggressive landing profile possible for a given weight. With three first stages to one second stage I guess the value of reuse and quick turn-around goes up. And if I understand it correctly the center stage will go longer and faster than the side boosters, that one is probably always coming in hot.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
FTFA:
"In 2015 solar provided 6% of Hawaii's electricity."
Wow. 6%. Pretty underwhelming.
Enigma
Posting to undo accidental down moderation.
Parent SHOULD have been moderated +1 Funny ...
Check out my novel.
Actually, a pompadour (once his preference) made him look like a cross between Tim Allen and Rick Astley. That wouldn't have been entirely out of place with the times either. Still, it was his choice, and whether I like the look or not, he had every right to make it. Just like Colin Kaepernick -- I think his hair is absolutely ridiculous, but it's his choice and people should stop giving him grief about it.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
They can't even get a manned crew up or down from the International Space Station .. what if we did for some reason get into a problem with Russia? we would have crew up there we can't get down.. we have no shuttle.. SpaceX can't do what they were doing 3 times a year back in the 1970's with the Space Lab.. can't get crew down in an emergency.. CRAP HE CAN'T EVEN STOP HIS CARS FROM CATCHING ON FIRE... sorry .. forget Mars.. try to get approval to fly men back from the space station in an emergency first.. its a bit more important.. then again how important is any of this? Its not like anyone alive now or in the next 500 years will be moving to the moon or mars.. NASA would never allow him to fly a one way suicide mission to mars anyway.. can you imagine that playing out in a live stream?
Kjella opined:
Meh, for every person who achieves something there's ten people who want to slap them down and find their faults and their weaknesses and belittle whatever they do. Everything from jocks bullying nerds to the people who have to hate on Jobs, Ballmer, Ellison, Zuckerberg, Jimbo Wales, Musk etc. almost out of principle.
I fail to see how either Ballmer or Ellison belongs in the company of the other individuals you list. Ballmer is an MBA candidate who never displayed the slightest trace of vision, invention, or originality (unlike Gates, who, love him or hate him, built a career and a company that achieved market dominance based on his having all three). For proof of his profound unfitness as an executive, you need look only as far as his slavish insistence on the stacked ranking model for employee reviews. Ellison had one good idea - a multiuser relational database for businesses - and an ethos of profound ruthlessness and exploitation with regard to his customers that's based on his bullshit interpretation of bushido. Neither one is what I'd call a positive role model.
The other guys, though, are genuine visionaries, IMnsHO ...
Check out my novel.
The 'digging toys' are for radiation shelters on Mars, Phobos, Deimos and the Moon. In case the caves theorized to be there, aren't. For access in any case.
Everything Musk, is doing is in pursuit of becoming a martian himself.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
You're mixing up two different things. This article was about Red Dragon, which was a proposed unmanned Mars mission. Commercial crew is a different thing-- doesn't go to Mars, doesn't land on Mars, does carry humans.
How do the words "NASA's regulations" lead you to think that "NASA requirements" are irrelevant?
Possibly because the words "NASA's regulations" don't appear anywhere in the article cited?
The article states that propulsive landing was deleted from human transport missions because "it would have taken a tremendous amount of effort to qualify that for safety for crew transport." But it was deleted from robotic Mars missions because "'I'm pretty confident that is not the right way" and SpaceX has "a far better approach". (Those are Musk's words, not mine.)
More reusable than Falcon-9, in fact, since the Falcon 9 throws away the second stage (which tends to be the more expensive part).
Nope, that's just wrong. In a rocket, the most expensive parts are the engines, generally followed by the capsule (which in SpaceX's case is also recovered and reused).
It turns out that the upper stage is way more mass sensitive than the lower stages. All the real tech goes into the upper stage-- the first stage can be dumb and low performance, but the second stage can't. The upper stage has all the GCD and avionics as well-- the bottom stage has more engines, but it only is fuel tanks and engines-- the expensive stuff is on top.
Moving under ground
Rick B.
Ha! Nice screed. Firestone Theater did it better, though. Lookup "Everything You Know is Wrong!".
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
Mod me down all you like, foolish dreamers. It ain't gonna get you any closer to Mars.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I'm confused.
What the hell does political affiliation have to do with scientific improvement of a private company?
SpaceX IS private right? Honestly don't know or care. Just get my ass to Mars!
Your need to make this a political issue, and in in particular to attack "librals brah!", is pathetic.
Go back and masturbate in your Mom's basement. You'll feel better and it's your natural environment.
Jobs forced through ease of use. Computers of various sorts would be harder to use without him.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Space-X is not pushing frontiers. Space-X is doing stuff we've already been doing for decades and slashing the cost. This is very valuable, but it's not what Tyson was talking about.
Musk wants to go to Mars, but we'll see how that plays out. As Tyson pointed out, there's no profit potential. Musk can spend his own money, but getting a publicly held corporation to go along is by no means guaranteed.
There is value in getting people to Mars, but it's the sort of general value that a government is best at providing. Space-X has benefited from NASA before, and perhaps will for the Mars mission.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
If considering the feelings of the local people even meant using the small-d democratic process to poll the sentiments of the public, there wouldn't be so much of a problem. But this privileging of the crotchets of a tiny minority of activists who happen to have good connection with academia is no better than giving corporate lobbyists a free hand in determining what gets built.
The problem with solar in Hawaii is that the islands do not have large tracts of empty desert to pave over with collector arrays. I'm assuming that rooftop solar will eventually be used to its full potential, but only a continuously available source will put an end to those ugly diesel generators. Geothermal could be the renewable to fill that need without being an eyesore on the landscape.
Gates had "Vision"?
Yeah, steal the LIZA interface, steal the DOS (from MPM-86),
Steal the Basic Interpreter (from the Dartmouth),
"Embrace, and expand" every standard to make them proprietary (Engulf and Devour),
use Permatemp labor until caught.....
if that is "vision" in Capitalism, I'll take better trains every single day
Well that IS how wealth is made
From Pharmacology to nuclear energy, the risks are all public, the profit all private
Now the Republikkklans want to privatize the mail.
Well THAT will make things faster, better, cheaper, more reliable, equal in service to all
NOT!
AutodidactLiberal scoffed:
Gates had "Vision"? Yeah, steal the LIZA interface, steal the DOS (from MPM-86), Steal the Basic Interpreter (from the Dartmouth), "Embrace, and expand" every standard to make them proprietary (Engulf and Devour), use Permatemp labor until caught..... if that is "vision" in Capitalism, I'll take better trains every single day
All of what you say is true. But:
a. He had the vision to retain the rights to BASIC, rather than selling it outright to IBM,
b. He had the vision to retain the right to sell unbranded versions of DOS to other vendors than IBM,
c. He had the vision to realize that, despite the fact that OS/2's technology was inherently superior to Windows 3.x's, reneging on his OS/2 partnership with IBM would allow Microsoft to dominate the desktop windowing interface market, and
d. He had the vision to push beyond the complacency that nearly destroyed post-Jobs Apple and replace the 16-bit Windows 95 shell with the 32-bit (and later 64-bit) Windows 2000 and subsequently WIndows XP.
There are plenty of other examples of him seeing what an absurd nonentity such as Ballmer was completely oblivious to, but I think I've made my point sufficiently clear.
True vision can be employed for good or ill, but it's foolish to refuse to acknowledge it exists, regardless of the purpose it's put to.
Check out my novel.
Zukerberg had vision? I'll give him some credit for growing a basic idea into a large billion dollar company with help, but certainly not a visionary. Musk and Jobs were fairly visionary throughout their careers. Jimbo Wales also shouldn't be in this list IMO - didn't invent Wiki (just used it) and kind of shit on his cofounder Larry Singer and stole his light, used wiki money to buy lots of great toys and generally be an ass to everyone. And christ those giant squinting eye banners asking for money were annoying as hell.
More to the point and less in the realm of opinion - being a visionary isn't being in the right place at the right time. Many of these guys were simply that. Sure, smart enough to see the opportunity and seize it, but that's just being an opportunist. A visionary is someone who sees opportunity that no one else does in a product that at present doesn't exist.
I think it is a case of here is the mission. Can we land this rocket?
They don't have an option of trying little by little.
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1. Gates never owned BASIC, it belonged to Dartmouth college
2. "Dos" was MPM-86 barely modified. That was a direct theft of copyrighted material (Said Dr. Killdall, creator of MPM-86 as well as CPM).
3.Having brokered a bargain with IBM to make a portion of the Windows Memory Architecture compatable with OS/2, the simply reneged by creating a new one that was INcompatible, without being superior in any way
Every version of "Gates the Great" requires the same blinders you offer, to wit, ignore his moral (and occassionaly legal) lapses and call it "Vision"
Yes, we all know Capitalism is about establishing empires based on criminal acts, but this lust for gain at the expense of both civil and criminal law is WHY the nation is at such peril, with 296% income increase in the top 1% since 1981, while the rest of the economic structure has stagnated.
It is foolish, even dangerous, to laud such acts, if the future of Capitalism is not to be one of simple plunder.
You should re-acquaint yourself with reality. The world in your head is only experienced by you.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Yeah, people like the Thiokol engineer who was slapped down for insufficient optimism about Challenger
It's your pessimists who save you from destruction