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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.
>> SpaceX has been killing it
Not sure you're old enough to remember deaths involved in space flight, but this may not be the smartest statement for the marketeers to put out.
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.
Those Block 4 first stages did land albeit on the bottom of the ocean.
Sig?
This is really impressive. Lower cost access to space helps us all. With this and Tesla, Elon Musk is really hitting it out of the park!
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?
SpaceX got rid of a backlog of their Block 4 rockets by launching without landing them back on Earth.
Oh they "landed" them. The landings were a little more... exuberant than the Block 5 rockets will be though.
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
IIRC, SpaceX is planning on launching all their Block 4s, especially when the mission requires "Maximum Performance" (which means they can't be recovered). In terms of what they have left, I think it's only one or two - certainly less than five.
They cost $30M or so to build, so if they're flyable, SpaceX wants to make money on them.
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
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
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
We should get off oil and use nuclear!
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...
Why would we want to permanently get rid of the resources that we use the most?
Minute Physics explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
To be honest, my comment was made in jest.
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!"
You really make me wish that the energy put toward Mars was focused on Venus.
I demand floating cities on Venus. Not because of some Star Wars reference but to stick it to those mole-like Martians!
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.