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SpaceX Enters a New Stage of Reusability (mashable.com)
SpaceX will now be attempting to land and reuse all of the rockets it launches. Over the weekend, SpaceX launched and successfully landed its second Falcon 9 Block 5 rocket in Cape Canaveral, Florida. An anonymous reader writes: The landing of this vehicle, designed with reusability in mind, marks the beginning of a completely recyclable era of rockets for the company. The Block 5 can be used hundreds of times if recovered successfully. Now that the company has transitioned to this more reusable model, recovery will be an even more crucial part of the launch. In a two week period, it's planning five recoveries. Mashable: The landing marks one of the first landings and launches of the company's newest, upgraded Falcon 9 rockets, called Block 5. Before this launch, SpaceX got rid of a backlog of their Block 4 rockets by launching without landing them back on Earth. That type of launch without landing is the traditional way of getting things to orbit, but SpaceX managed to change that. The whole point in the company's rocket landings hinge on the fact that it could reduce the cost of flying to orbit. By reusing rocket stages for multiple launches, it could drive down the exorbitant cost of flying to space for companies and nations around the world. SpaceX has been killing it the past couple years. The company -- founded by Elon Musk -- launched 18 times in 2017.
Space elevators are infinitely more dangerous than current systems.
If a rocket explodes, the occupants die. If the self-destruct fails, a few people may die wherever the remnants fall.
If a space elevator breaks, everybody dies.
Space elevators are infinitely more dangerous than current systems. If a rocket explodes, the occupants die. If the self-destruct fails, a few people may die wherever the remnants fall. If a space elevator breaks, everybody dies.
No. That idea comes from people who haven't actually thought it out, and the idea of catastrophic space-elevator destruction got popularized by the dramatic but unrealistic space-elevator destruction scenes in Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars.
A good way of visualizing what space elevator would be made out of is to picture spider silk, but lighter. A space elevator can't be massive: it has to carry its own weight 40,000 km. If a space elevator breaks, the parts that are high up (and thus have high energy) disintegrate in the atmosphere; the parts that are lower down (and thus don't have much energy) sift down like dandelion fluff.
People have simulated this.
Of course, the material to make a space elevator does not yet exist. But if it did exist, we know it would have to be exceptionally light.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Daily Kos-- which you can hardly call a pro-billionaire publicity rag-- had an article discussing exactly these points:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/5/29/1767826/-The-War-on-Tesla-Musk-and-the-Fight-for-the-Future
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
No, and the rockets don't have anywhere near the performance required to do this. The Parker solar probe will take an enormous rocket to launch a small craft in order to be able to get relatively close to the sun, and to do that it will use multiple gravity assists from Venus to slow down.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
Minute Physics explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Nobody cares what the Ruskys claim it costs them. They care what the Ruskys charge. Which is MUCH more than $60/million per flight. Rather $80 million per seat.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
The NASA claim (not YOUR claim - I am not calling YOU dishonest) that the Soyuz is "man-rated" is and always has been a fraud, just as it was for the Shuttle. Neither vehicle would pass the "man rated" standards being required for SpaceX's Falcon+Dragon or Boeing's Atlas+Starliner.
NASA Had no supervision over the design and construction of Soyuz and no ability to dictate ANYTHING about the system nor does NASA have any control over the system as it is in use. NASA has no supervision over production or testing of the Soyuz system. The "man rating" of Soyuz by NASA is a combination of diplomatic nicety (it would be bad internationally to claim the system was unsafe or not up to our standards) and necessity (it's the only way to get to ISS right now and saying its not man rated would present a dilemma).
Remember: NASA had NEVER flown a shuttle unmanned before stuffing humans into it and firing it into orbit. The system had NO survivable abort mode during the 1st ~2 minutes of flight and it was not automated sufficiently to fly itself so it could not be flown unmanned. John Young and Robert Crippen should go down in history as the bravest pair of test pilots in world history, and given the capabilities of modern computers, nobody should ever need to do that again. Even the gliding approach-and-landing tests done on Enterprise years before the 1st orbital flight were never done without humans aboard. NASA has never previously enforced the current supposedly rigidly-enforced REQUIRED "man rating" standards onto any of its prior vehicles nor the Russian systems it rents rides on. It's very much like the anti-SpaceX rules that the Air Force had when SpaceX first started trying to get certified for launches. The Air Force had simply supposed all their prior established vendors were "certified" and when SpaceX wanted to get certified, the USAF had to start making the rules (which the big defense contractors had input into and were not required to pass).
SpaceX cargo dragons have spend more time on-orbit already than ALL of NASA's previous capsules (Mercury, Gemini and Apollo) COMBINED. Those cargo dragons have also flown more launches and reentries.