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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.
A funny thing happened on the way to outer space... SpaceX developed a business model that is quickly obsoleting Russia's space launch supremacy. Now that it's an actual threat, expect to see frequent bot attacks on SpaceX, Elon Musk, Tesla, Hyperloops, et cetera. That's how the disinformation age works. Delegitimize anyone that is deemed a threat.
Space flight is very dangerous, and I don't see it becoming much more safe in my lifetime.
Unless we can get into space without explosive force, such as a space elevator, it is going to be dangerous, and people will die in the future from space travel.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I would love to have an old block4 standing on its landing legs outside a local museum. I hope they save some of them.
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
Space flight is very dangerous, and I don't see it becoming much more safe in my lifetime.
SpaceX is making it much more safe in two ways:
1) Coming up with a highly reliable design that has been tested so often failure modes are more rare than aircraft.
2) Designing a proper escape capsule to eject a crew module in the event there is a problem. Which commercial aircraft having nothing like for passengers in case something goes drastically wrong...
In the near future I would rather be on a rocket than a commercial aircraft,.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Space flight is very dangerous, and I don't see it becoming much more safe in my lifetime.
Maybe. It's gotten a lot safer during my lifetime but I was born near the start of the space age when we really didn't know what we were doing. We've learned a lot in the last 5 decades. (at the cost of some lives) That said it's still quite dangerous and likely to remain so for the near future. It's going to take quite a while to get the technology of chemical rockets to the point where they have a safety record even close to airlines at reasonable cost. They have a fairly good safety record today but at outrageous cost. The real question is whether we can keep or improve on the current safety record while reducing the cost to orbit. That is not going to be easy to do and won't happen overnight.
Unless we can get into space without explosive force, such as a space elevator, it is going to be dangerous, and people will die in the future from space travel.
You think a space elevator wouldn't be dangerous? You might want to think about that a little deeper. Those things are enormously dangerous even if they prove to be possible to actually build. Not just to the users of the elevator but potentially to people on the ground or in space if they fail.
Anything dealing with space is going to be dangerous. But it's conceivable it could be made safe to a reasonable degree someday. Won't be easy but it could be made to be reasonably safe for most travelers. Take the airline industry for an example. It took decades but eventually it became quite safe with good regulation and technological advancement. Same with ocean travel. I'd expect the space industry to take longer (harder problem) but I also could someday see spaceflight being "routine" to a reasonable degree.
Average lifetime for a mammalian species is 1 million years. A few mammalian species last as long as 10 million years.
About 300 million years from now the brightening of the sun will indeed mean "we" will have to do something, but the term "we" in that phrase means "some different future species that is related to us about as closely as we are related to the very first reptiloids that would, in the future, evolve into dinosaurs."
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
The problem isn't the part that's in orbit, or the cables. It's the cargo that was being transported when some space trash cuts the wires near the top. Unless you want to argue that a space elevator would only be used to transport very light objects individually.
The statement was that it would be "infinitely more dangerous" than a rocket. No, it wouldn't. The space elevator itself is exceptionally light (or "impossibly light," in the words of anonymous coward above). The cargo would be like any other cargo dropping down from a high altitude, except unlike a rocket, not carrying a load of fuel.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Venus would be a great destination for nuclear thermal, and an excuse to develop the tech to a point that people could be more comfortable with using it on Earth. You still have to launch nuclear fuel from Earth, of course, but just as a payload, not in the form of a operating, short-lived-isotope-generating reactor. People could rest easy knowing that the only time it would be turned on would be in the atmosphere / orbit of an entirely different planet. Of course, once you've had such a rocket working on another planet for years without incident, the question would arise... why not Earth?
It would be exceedingly useful as an ascent vehicle for a Landis-style (floating, breathable-air-lofted) Venus habitat. While the need for using a light gas as propellant makes pure hydrogen the only realistic option for nuclear thermal, and hydrogen is in relatively limited supply in Venus's atmosphere, the extreme fuel efficiency of nuclear thermal rockets (and in particular the airbreathing hybrid variants) means that you just don't need that much of it - less than all but the most hydrogen-sparing of chemical propellant options (such the hydrogen-free LOX-CO or LOX-C2N2 combinations... although even they're best with a bit of methane or H2 in the mix). It also means that the ascent stage can be vastly lighter when fully fueled, allowing for far more human/water/crop mass inside a given habitat rather than dedicating ~90% of the habitat's lift to lofting a fueled ascent stage. Lastly, some nuclear thermal designs involve compressors and can effectively hover indefinitely - eliminating the need*** for returning stages to be balloon-lofted during docking to the habitat's underside.
You certainly can also use a nuclear thermal rocket on Mars as well - not just Venus - but it's not nearly so essential. It's a lot easier to get off of Mars' surface with chemical rockets than it is out of Venus's atmosphere - even directly landing your Earth-Mars transfer stage (as in the case of BFR). With Venus, realistically you need at least two stages for a chemical-powered ascent vehicle, and the payload fraction is low. And you have to re-mate the stages - each docked individually - while they're hanging from the underside of the habitat.
*** It's technically possible to have a SpaceX-style platform landing, but extremely difficult. If the platform is on the top of the habitat, the platform has to be able to hold an extremely heavy rocket (large chunk of the total habitat's mass) without flipping it over. If the platform is hanging from the bottom, you need a lot of clearance - and in either regard, a huge amount of structural strength on the platform, yet with strict mass limits. The failure modes on this sort of landing/docking are also a lot more severe than with balloons (which reenter further away from the habitat). You have as much "go-around" time as you want with a balloon, and are never going to accidentally send a returning stage crashing through the habitat at hundreds of meters per second; you just have the habitat approach from well above and use a tethered drone to mate the two together. Balloon-lofted returning stages have been investigated before for use on Earth (and ballutes have been used for deceleration of returning spacecraft), but never implemented.
"Lock and load, Brides of Christ!"
You can launch garbage toward the sun with a homemade water rocket. It's getting to the sun that's difficult. It takes more dV to get to the sun via a direct Hohmann transfer than it does to leave the solar system entirely.
"Lock and load, Brides of Christ!"