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SpaceX Successfully Landed the 12th Falcon 9 Rocket of 2017 (theverge.com)
Shortly after launching from Cape Canaveral, Florida, SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket successfully landed on one of the company's drone ships in the ocean. "It marks the 12th time SpaceX has successfully landed the first stage of a Falcon 9 rocket this year, the 18th overall, and the second this week," reports The Verge. "It was also the third time that the company has successfully launched and landed a rocket that had already flown." From the report: The vehicle for this mission has flown before: once back in February, when it lofted cargo to the International Space Station and then landed at SpaceX's ground-based Landing Zone 1. Going up on this flight is a hybrid satellite that will be used by two companies, SES and EchoStar. Called EchoStar 105/SES-11, the satellite will sit in a high orbit 22,000 miles above Earth, providing high-definition broadcasts to the U.S. and other parts of North America. While this is the first time EchoStar is flying a payload on a used Falcon 9, this is familiar territory for SES. The company's SES-10 satellite went up on the first "re-flight" in March. And SES has made it very clear that it is eager to fly its satellites on previously flown boosters.
Musk may be pushing for some very interesting deadlines and pretty outlandish sounding concepts...
However his cars, even with all the weaknesses they have, are viable and his space company also successfully delivers.
I'd say that should at least be impressive.
I lived through the later Apollo missions. Watched the Space Shuttle program prove that, if you have infinite money, you can make a brick fly. Watched that excessively complicated ship come apart - twice.
Watched ISS become operational, then watched us lose the ability to fly people to it.
And I watched SpaceX go from blowing up rockets, to making orbit less than ten years ago, to becoming a (semi) reliable truck to the ISS, to LANDING A FREAKING ROCKET ON A BARGE, to reflying reused rockets almost casually.
Age of Miracles.
And the worms ate into his brain.
Now that they are starting to re-use rockets and are successfully landing them, have they crossed some magic threshold where their launches are now much cheaper than their competitors using disposable rockets?
Or are they still having to charge a premium due to R&D investments into their system?
If they aren't starting to reap cheaper launch costs, when will they? I would think that while the reusable rockets is an interesting design goal, it would need to cut launch cost meaningfully to be really beneficial.
Quite a bit less in payments than what others ask for, and what "more limitations"? There's no spacecraft other than SpaceX's at the moment with a downmass capacity in the 100+ pound region.
Soyuz.
SX has launched 43 times with 1 launch failure ( and a partial ).
Huh? What are you talking about? SpaceX failed in its first three launches. You can hardly call that "only one launch failure (and a partial)".
I admire that: the best way to push the boundaries is to fail, and then learn from the failures. But learning from the failures means: don't pretend that failures didn't happen.
Even it you meant "Falcon-9" and not "SX", you can only count "1 launch failure" if you ignore the one that exploded on the pad. That was only a year ago, so you'd think people would remember. https://www.space.com/33929-spacex-falcon-9-rocket-explodes-on-launch-pad.html
So, two out of 44 failed-- that comes to a demonstrated 95.5% success rate, very close to what the AC said, "that the average reliability of orbital rockets historically sits currently at 94%."
If you want reliability, go with Atlas-V. But you will pay for it: moving up from 95 percent to pushing 100% costs a lot.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2016/03/23/why-the-most-maligned-rocket-in-the-world-is-also-one-of-the-most-reliable
Yup, after the moon landings, the American space program fell apart at the seams. They lost three times more people in the space program than Russia.
Uh, yes, but that's a bit misleading, since as of the end of the shuttle program, the American space program had launched five times more people into space than the Russian program. We tend to forget how large the shuttle was and how routine the launches were, but do recall that the total number of crewmembers of all 135 space shuttle missions was 833-- that's more than the total of all the people launched by all the other launch vehicles put together.
I think you make the point quite well that government is not well equipped to offer innovation and efficiency. The best things happen when .gov just gets out of the way and let's people create.
Yes... and no.
Some history: The young innovative rocket company SpaceX had made claims that it had designed the most reliable booster ever built, one that would have a 99.9% reliability right from the very first flight... and then blew up their first three launches. When they finally got one to work, the fourth launch, they were out of money, and nobody but Kazakhstan was willing to fly on vehicles with a demonstrated reliability record of 25% (and even Kazakhstan wouldn't have, except that they had already bought the launch.)
The only people willing to trust SpaceX... was NASA. Back when SpaceX had a record of three failures, no successes, NASA awarded SpaceX a contract to design and build Falcon-9: NASA's anchor tenancy allowed SpaceX to attract other funding, and other customers.
This is not news: Elon Musk credits NASA with saving SpaceX.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/04/without-nasa-there-would-be-no-spacex-and-its-brilliant-boat-landing/
https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/14/8605597/elon-musk-discusses-spacex-tesla-near-bankruptcy
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/836443541001797632
So, when you say the best things happen when .gov gets out of the way, perhaps you should say, the best things happen when .gov works in partnership with innovators.
Well, both only deliver thanks to millions in tax rebates, adding millions more in direct payments for milestones during development, and direct payments for cargo with more limitations than not due to the weak rocket power.
Nobody who has the money to buy a Model S or Model X is buying one because they need the tax rebates. It's a cool car that costs nearly six figures and people are buying it because they like the product and what it represents. If they get a tax rebate so much the better but that's not what makes it sell. Furthermore there is NOTHING wrong with some tax incentives to help develop a new clean technology. The internal combustion engine has had a good run but that run needs to come to a close. They are dirty, noisy, inefficient and limited to oil based fuels. If we need some tax incentives to get EVs up to scale then I have zero problem with that. It will benefit us all in the long run.
As for SpaceX, yes the government is a big customer and helped them get the company going but again, so what? NASA is hardly their only customer and are you seriously going to argue that SpaceX hasn't dramatically lowered the cost to orbit just like they said they would? "Weak rocket power"? WTF does that mean? You sound like one of Trumps twitter rants.
There's no spacecraft other than SpaceX's at the moment with a downmass capacity in the 100+ pound region.
Soyuz.
Yeah, let us now compare capabilities a 7 year old rocket/ship to another with over 50 years of history. Soyuz can carry three astronauts at most to ISS, and is a single purpose ship.
The post to I was responding was about downmass capacity. The statement was incorrect: Soyuz--as you pointed out-- routinely brings down three astronauts, which is a down mass of a lot more than 100 pounds.
The fact that Soyuz has "over 50 years of history" and Dragon doesn't was not brought up in the statement to which I was responding, so I didn't mention it.
Crew Dragon can carry 7, and also some cargo making the transportation to station cheaper overall.
If we're comparing to vehicles that haven't flown yet, we'd have to also add Boeing CST "Starliner", NASA Orion and Sierra Nevada Dream Chaser, among others
Actually, Soyuz is the very spacecraft that I had in mind that is limited to ~100 pound payload downmass or so. There just isn't any significant mass reserve in it besides the ability to land with a crew of three, nor is there any significant volume for it.
Unless the crew consists of three people each weighing 33 kilograms (73 pounds) or less, the downmass is more than 100 kg.
Those 3 were F1s, not F9s.
The statement of yours to which I was responding stated that "SX" had only one failure and one partial failure. I assume "SX" was an acronym for "SpaceX." I can't see any way to interpret "SX" as being short for "F9".
If you are going to make up acronyms, be clear. It would not have taken more than few seconds to type "SpaceX" when you mean SpaceX, and "Falcon 9" if you mean Falcon 9.
"SX has 1 F9 that exploded during launch, and put 1 payload into too low of orbit. So, 1.5 as I said
Again: only true if you ignore the one that blew up on the pad, which would make it 2.5, not 1.5.
"ULA charges 4x what SX does. A single launch from ULA costs more than what 3 payloads AND launches that SX puts up.
Yes, that's precisely what I said: if you want reliability you will pay for it: moving up from 95 percent to pushing 100% costs a lot.
So from a cost efficiency POV, ULA is a joke.
Yes, slashdot readers not in the aerospace business might think so. However, not having failures is important to many missions. There are a lot of missions for which it does make sense to pay for that added 5% increase in success record.
Again: only true if you ignore the one that blew up on the pad
You mean "the one that was blown up on the pad by improper handling"?
Blown up on the bad by a failed helium tank strut. If there was improper handling somewhere, so far nobody has identified that as the problem.
But I'm not sure what your point is. All accidents have causes, which I suppose ultimately comes down to somebody doing something improper. It's still a failure.
That's like blaming cars for crashes caused by amateur drivers.
Or blaming SpaceX for explosions caused by amateur rocket engineers?
They learn from their failure. It's a very effective way to learn, and I approve of the fact that they do learn, and keep on going. Nevertheless, it's a failure.
Good catch, that link pointed to the earlier failure.
Here's a link to the failure on the pad http://spacenews.com/spacex-narrows-down-cause-of-falcon-9-pad-explosion which was attributed to a helium tank failure http://www.latimes.com/nation/ct-spacex-explosion-20170102-story.html, or http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/rockets/a23652/spacex-falcon-explosion-cause-helium-loading/.
Sorry I inadverently linked to a different failure that was linked to a different helium tank failure.