The factory is in California because of congressional support.
Hardly.
The factory is in California, Los Angeles County in particular, because that is where the aerospace engineers are for the most part as well as the skilled technicians who know how to operate and work in an aircraft or rocket factory. The Space Shuttle was built there and the current SpaceX factory happens to also be the former factory for many of the components of earlier version of the Boeing 747. LA County is also where the design studios for a great many of the aerospace companies who do business in America are located at as well.
That some of those factories for other companies might have been built with an eye for some congressional districts in the past may be true, but that was not even a remote consideration for SpaceX as the main driver was simply trying to recruit talent and get people who could help out without needing to relocate them and their families across the continent. Some have obviously relocated to LA County too, but the main point is that you build the factories where people are at in the first place.
The San Francisco Bay Area is where you go for computer technology, LA County is where you go for aerospace technology. It really is that simply. That is why there are many millions of people living in that area too, as those aircraft manufacturers were one of the major recruiters over the past century who brought people there and gave them decent jobs to feed their families.
I was merely trying to imply that those who are critical SpaceX isn't already putting these on land is precisely because it is still in testing. That still shouldn't be a reason to dismiss the soft landing attempt they have already done though.
It is a huge difference to be merely suggesting that you can recover spacecraft compared to actually launching a spacecraft and needing only a barge to fish the thing out of the water.
>>I'm pretty sure NASA (and plenty of others) also said Elon/Space-X was stupid...
Actually, didn't NASA award SpaceX a bunch of money to help get started... That's what I remember anyway. Do they help fund stupid?
It was DARPA, not NASA, which gave some initial seed money to fly a few experimental payloads. Still, even that money was just a drop in the bucket for what was needed to get the rocket off the ground and certainly wasn't sufficient to pay for the development. All told, the development costs of getting the Falcon 9 ready were under a billion dollars, something a NASA study done a few years ago claimed couldn't be done for less than $10 billion.
The DARPA money was just a few tens of millions of dollars. NASA has certainly paid for stuff like the ISS resupply missions (one is currently in space as I write this down), and they are also paying for a commercial crew program that also has money going to some other companies as well. Those were also highly competitive contracts that were literally open to any business or even group of investors who cared to put together an idea for a vehicle (including Jeff Bezos with his Blue Origin company who actually submitted a bid for that money too).
Still, none of that would have been possible without substantial private capital including most of the private fortune of Elon Musk himself who has reportedly invested as much as $200 million of his own money into SpaceX.
The recoverable first-stage flight system SpaceX is proposing is meant to launch from a purpose-built launch facility in western Texas with the landing spot for the first stage somewhere to the east of there. This involves flying over populated areas during the first part of the flight profile and that is going to raise some eyebrows. It's Texas though where killing people in industrial accidents is regarded as a cost of doing business without pesky Federal government regulations getting in the way of making money.
The testing facility is in McGregor, Texas, but the launch is intended to be out of KSC, Vandenberg AFB, or if they get the permits from a general purpose spaceport that SpaceX is building on their own dime in Brownsville, Texas.
They are not intending nor would likely get any sort of permit to fly over populated areas of any kind, which is sort of the point of having a whole bunch of ocean (hence uninhabited surface area) under the launch profile. All of the testing in Texas has a flight ceiling of about 10k feet, after which they are moving to New Mexico for additional testing at the Spaceport America facilities (the first commercial spaceport, which is also where Virgin Galactic is launching from). Even the New Mexico testing won't be over populated areas although SpaceX is going to get high enough with their vehicle that it will be in technically space as they plan on getting to about 100 km or so.
The point of the Methane-LOX is to hopefully improve the ISP of the rocket, but that is with the Raptor engine as well. A really cool and advanced engine design that if successful is going to blow away commercial competitors. As far as I know, there hasn't ever been an engine of that particular size ever built before as well as it is even larger than the F1 engines used by the Saturn V.
The current plan is to have these go to land. If you want to see the full flight profile of what SpaceX is aiming for, I'd suggest watching this (now two year old) video:
They are not going to be landing in the water except as a part of the testing process while they get the FAA-AST comfortable with the landing process. Yes, they are taking very seriously the potential of this to ruin somebody's breakfast by taking out their garage, so I also understand why they are cautious.
SpaceX does have insurance to help pay for an unfortunate accident, so it isn't the bucks that are the problem. What is at stake is that any human enterprise has risks, and in this case rockets are quite risky. None the less, KSC is a big place and there are plenty of locations to land this rocket.
Beyond stating the obvious, these quotes from the NASA engineers don't really seem to fly with me.
I get that building rocket engines is a tough challenge, as can be clearly demonstrated by how few new rocket engine designs ever get completed.n All of the complaints about the RD-180 engine with its manufacturing being done in Russia center around the fact that trying to get even just a rough equivalent would require building a brand new engine from scratch. For large engines that can launch payloads of several metric tones into orbit, typically only one or two ever get designed each decade by anybody around the world. This past decade one of those engines was the Merlin engine designed by SpaceX.
What makes the Merlin engine so interesting is precisely because it is bland. SpaceX hasn't been trying to push the envelope in a hardcore sense with exotic fuels or pushing the limits of specific impulse (the efficiency rating of a rocket engine). Instead they are using rather mundane fuels (Kerosene and Liquid Oxygen.... stuff used in rockets for decades) and instead are trying to simplify the design of the rocket every chance they get. Also unlike the SSME, the #1 consideration on building the Merlin has been saving money and not trying to improve performance.
I'll also note that SpaceX does not intend to do sea recovery of these rockets, so doing any consideration of salt water besides general ocean spray into the launch environment (still a problem at KSC) is not really an issue. A problem facing the managers at KSC, or rather the Cape Canaveral Air Station, is trying to find a place for these stages to land. Both the Cape Canaveral Staff and the FAA-AST want to make sure that SpaceX doesn't land their rockets on top of other facilities (like taking out pad 39B), but that is a traffic control problem and not anything to do with the technical capability of getting the rockets to a recoverable location.
As for the economics argument, a company driven by profits rather than a government agency who gets billions of dollars to extend failed programs is somebody who I expect to understand if something is going to be economically feasible or not. I'm sure SpaceX has done all of the number crunching a long time ago as they don't have the sugar daddies in the U.S. Senate to bail them out if it doesn't work.
The Challenger exploded because the spacecraft was flying outside of its design parameters. The engineers themselves asked for, I dare say even begged NASA to not fly that day, but NASA was under a huge amount of political pressure to get the vehicle into orbit or risk an embarrassing trip to congressional meetings to explain why this supposedly reusable spacecraft (meaning the Space Shuttle) wasn't really reusable and couldn't fly in conditions that were not a problem with the Saturn V.
No doubt that the Space Shuttle was an incredibly complicated machine that could break with a series of bad events, but there is far more to the destruction of the Challenger (or the loss of the Columbia a few years later) than simply hand waving and saying "it is so complicated that it was simply going to have problems."
Besides, the Space Shuttle is a really horrible demonstration vehicle for reusable spacecraft. So many design compromises were done with that spacecraft it is a wonder it flew at all in the first place. It certainly was never going to live up to the hype that surrounded the spacecraft in the late 1970's and early 1980's.
No doubt that SpaceX has put a whole lot of effort into making this work, but it amazes me that people who are otherwise knowledgeable about this kind of stuff can't stand looking at actual results rather than assuming this is just random musings. One of the ways SpaceX knows how many potential launches they can get out of their engines is because they have put some of these Merlin-1 engines on their test stand in Texas and have fired them for full mission duration burns 40-50 times. SpaceX definitely doesn't make up these numbers out of their hind end but rather from experience and actually using this equipment.
Again reality sort of bites these guys hard because SpaceX has been able to bring the 1st stage down to a soft landing. With the most recent launch, SpaceX was denied the opportunity to do more because both the FAA and the USAF folks at Cape Canaveral didn't really want that return stage going anywhere near the launch pad until SpaceX has proven they have control of the vehicle. Regardless, SpaceX has done the really hard part of actually getting the spacecraft to return in a recoverable condition.... something these "experts" in this article are denying is even possible in a theoretical sense.
The 2nd stage recovery is going to be a whole lot harder, and it is something that even SpaceX themselves have said may not be successful. Still, I wouldn't categorically write off SpaceX either and it is just stupid to dismiss something like this as impossible without even making an attempt to see if it could be done.
When US special forces out of uniform but still acting at the direction of the US government are seizing Mexican government offices by force let me know.
America has invaded and even occupied territory on a permanent basis that used to belong to Mexico. Check out the very Mexican cities of Albuquerque and Santa Fe where soldiers of the U.S. Army in uniform occupied and seized Mexican government offices by force.
I'd call that a precedent. There is no reason it can't happen again and you are a fool to think historical situations don't repeat themselves.
Considering the utter lawlessness of many towns on the U.S.-Mexican border on the Mexican side of things, I would dare say furthermore that President Obama is ignoring his constitutional mandate to defend the USA if he fails to order special forces from at least occupying such Mexican government offices currently occupied by the drug cartels. It is a festering problem right now that could really blow up and become a major headache for the USA in the near future and already is a problem so far as the crime happening in Mexico is spreading to the USA as well.
Russia has long held a policy of "Russification", in other words a deliberate attempt to push the cultures of its client states and homogenize the culture to basically become Russian. This was going on in every one of the former Soviet republics, which is why there are such strong ethnic Russian groups of people in those areas.
The USSR was expecting to still exist right now, and a cultural shift can sometimes take a century or more. Unfortunately for the USSR, it fell apart and this cultural shift was incomplete, including in the Ukraine. As these former Soviet Republics start to charter their own cultural course, what remained was just the worst of all possible situations. Some Russian families have lived in these places for several generations and call places like Crimea home, hence why deporting them isn't a viable option either.
I can only imagine that this sudden rush of PR is due to SpaceX's recent smear of UL for locking them out of the military space market
How about this was just something positive that the company could say about themselves? You don't need to look into conspiracy theories here, just simply that a bunch of Boeing engineers did something cool and decided to brag about it. That the timing also coincided with some negative publicity certainly could be a good thing for Boeing as well, but frankly they've been doing steady progress with this spacecraft anyway.
Did you even read the article? I doubt it, based upon your response here. Most of your questions were answered in that article BTW.
As for the rest of the actual spaceship, it has already been built... at least the engineering prototypes. The launcher is going to be likely the Atlas V (assuming that the whole issue with Putin can be put to rest so the Russian engines can keep coming for that rocket). That has already done nearly a hundred launches so it is safe to assume it is in pretty good standing. The main problem for the Atlas V is to crew-rate the vehicle, but that is mostly an academic exercise as nobody is going to throw a $10 billion DOD satellite on a rocket like that which isn't damn close to 100% reliability.
We are talking effing Boeing about being able to build a spaceship? They either built themselves or purchased the companies that built nearly every American spacecraft which has gone into space, including both the Saturn V and the Space Shuttle. You have got to be downright dense in the head to think it is just vaporware here.
This is stuff that will be built. Bigelow Aerospace is going to use the CST-100 in particular for flights to their private commercial space stations and Boeing may have other customers besides NASA that they don't care to (and certainly aren't legally obligated to) talk about publicly.
SpaceX is just doing the hard work upfront with their R&D
Dear God Almighty, SpaceX is not doing jack-shit R&D. The R&D was done 50 years ago, and documented in extraordinary detail by others.
I'd like to see the video or for that matter even a classified U.S. Army Air Corps document that has anybody from any country of the world (hell, even the Nazi's at their secret Antarctic base) do something like this 50 years ago:
How about a selfie at the bottom of the ocean? Where's the tourist market for that?
You mean something like James Cameron at the bottom of the Marianas Trench? There is also a pretty brisk business of people who are trying to get married on the deck of the Titanic.... literally. Note the selfie in that last link in particular.
There actually is a pretty brisk tourism market for that..... so what are you talking about again? That space tourism won't happen until the underwater deep sea market for tourism is penetrated? Already happened.
The same could be said about a non-profit group that receives a $50k donation towards its activities. If anything, a non-profit group might even be able to leverage that $50k to go a whole lot further than a for-profit software development company simply because there are volunteers who can perhaps be managed better by a paid manager-architect or that such a donation could secure for a long time the hosting services and other aspects of that open source (presumably) project.
The problem with a non-profit group developing software in this fashion is the tragedy of the commons situation, where many people (and companies) who would be paying the $50k without blinking an eye towards the commercial solution all of a sudden go nuts and have their board of directors breathing down their throat because they made the donation for nearly the same amount.
I've heard about some open source development groups who offer for sale the next version of the software project with the latest updates and changes for a price, but older versions are available to download for free. I do know this business model is controversial though.
ULA is trying to make the case that their rockets are indeed as different from those of SpaceX as a Mac is from a PC, hence why the contract doesn't need to go out to a bid. It is also on these kind of mundane details that ULA is furthermore claiming as reasons and rationale for why SpaceX doesn't meet the technical requirements for launching EELV-class payloads.
I didn't say it was a perfect analogy, and since you understand computer technology you see how such a contract bid would be really silly and obvious misapplication of the contracting process. Sadly, I have seen some real world "sole source-no bid" contracts awards that were done on equally silly reasons. I can't give specifics of those contracts because of a NDA, but they did involve several million dollars and some government agencies as well. I have also seen such contracts thrown out and forced into a bidding situation precisely because the officials involved forgot to take everything into consideration and missed a few points that the law required for those sort of sole source contracts.
I think it is funny to no end for SpaceX to bring out the Obama administration executive orders about prohibiting purchase of parts or supplies from Russia.... and in particularly prohibiting any sort of renumeration toward Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin by name.
You're confused. It's called levelling the playing field. What the USAF did was sign a no-bid contract with the Boeing/Lockheed to purchase Russian rocket engines. A huge no-no in the public sphere, if not illegal. The only way to get them to reverse on that was to go to court.
It isn't wrong to do sole source contracts as a public entity. I did them when I was working for a state agency several times. The big thing is that you need to demonstrate convincingly (and be willing to back that up in a court room if necessary... like SpaceX is trying to call the bluff here with regards to ULA and the USAF) that the company you are sole sourcing is really the only company which could possibly provide the project being desired.
There are a couple of ways to get that to happen, and one of common methods (IMHO it really is corruption at its finest) is to over specify the technical requirements in such a way that one and only one company could possibly present a bid. For example with a computer, you could require that the computer has certain non-standard connectors, be very specific with an operating system (especially an off-beat OS like QNX), monitors have a 63.224 Hz screen refresh capability (or some other really weird number like this), and other details that exclude anybody else. You can reject any other potential bids simply because they failed to meet the original specification.
That is essentially what ULA has done here with regards to their rocket purchases, and SpaceX is crying foul by pointing out their rockets are just as capable to put up many of the same payloads reliably as well. Once the Falcon Heavy has launched a few times (its first launch may be this year or early next year), SpaceX will literally be able to launch anything ULA has with its inventory of rockets. There are other companies like ATK-Orbital that could conceivably be able to compete as well at least for some of these payloads.
The analogy would be some state college putting out for bid a bunch of Mac computers, and some PC dealer filing protest suggesting their products are just as capable for the applications being done at the college. The Apple dealer would point out that specialized software excludes the PCs, and the finger pointing goes on from there in the protest.
Indeed I think Elon Musk and his lawyers are going to bring up Orbital several times if this goes before a courtroom basically saying "it isn't just us".
1st of all, neither one of these companies is what would be called a major player in the space launch industry, even though both do get involved at a significant level. I would dare say both companies had a foot in the grave and could disappear if this merger didn't happen.
Also, neither company seems to be in direct competition with each other in terms of the various parts of the space launch areas that they have concentrated on. ATK is more into military sales (especially missiles and military munitions in general) and of course the solid rocket boosters, including the SRBs that the Space Shuttle used. Orbital has experience with liquid fueled rockets and working with commercial spaceflight customers in particular, including satellite construction (their main profit area). ATK has been losing its military business for some time, so they are in desperate need to change course and especially get into the commercial spaceflight area... something that obviously Orbital has a lot of experience in working with.
While this merger still shocks me that it is happening, I see huge benefits for both Orbital and ATK if this is completed. The combined company will definitely be in a position to challenge SpaceX in a number of ways and can definitely blow out of the water anything produced by United Launch Alliance (ULA). ATK has the raw capital and some substantial physical assets that could definitely build upon everything Orbital has been doing.
Former? I know some people like to think he has been serving since 1776, but that zombie is still in office. He rules Utah politics as his own private fiefdom almost on the level like Huey Long did for Louisiana.
Yeah, ATK is one of his major cookie jars though, and Thiokol was previously his sugar daddy.
If you are worried about smaller companies being represented, you really want municipal governments involved. They tend not to be concerned at all with regards to large multi-national companies, but they do care about local businesses (as do their constituents). It is possible for a large company to dominate the local politics, but such companies "own" the town anyway in a number of ways and usually means the employees of that company are the ones who mostly dominate the local politics too (as opposed to the CEO).
A big company like Comcast is likely to lose an argument in terms of throwing their weight around in local politics, but they definitely are able to control the discussion when done on a national level. That is the reason why the fight in the U.S. Congress and with the FCC is happening at all, because it isn't being controlled at the local level.
Who do you think does a better job of managing their municipal assets.... Los Angeles City or Compton? I'm not saying either are the best, but some of the smaller suburbs definitely maintain their infrastructure much better.
Regardless, I think you would find it much easier to complain to a local city alderman and getting them to take your phone call rather than trying to get some member of congress to help you out because the assets are owned by the federal government. I shudder to think of what it would be like if the federal government was in charge of municipal street repair.
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The factory is in California because of congressional support.
Hardly.
The factory is in California, Los Angeles County in particular, because that is where the aerospace engineers are for the most part as well as the skilled technicians who know how to operate and work in an aircraft or rocket factory. The Space Shuttle was built there and the current SpaceX factory happens to also be the former factory for many of the components of earlier version of the Boeing 747. LA County is also where the design studios for a great many of the aerospace companies who do business in America are located at as well.
That some of those factories for other companies might have been built with an eye for some congressional districts in the past may be true, but that was not even a remote consideration for SpaceX as the main driver was simply trying to recruit talent and get people who could help out without needing to relocate them and their families across the continent. Some have obviously relocated to LA County too, but the main point is that you build the factories where people are at in the first place.
The San Francisco Bay Area is where you go for computer technology, LA County is where you go for aerospace technology. It really is that simply. That is why there are many millions of people living in that area too, as those aircraft manufacturers were one of the major recruiters over the past century who brought people there and gave them decent jobs to feed their families.
I was merely trying to imply that those who are critical SpaceX isn't already putting these on land is precisely because it is still in testing. That still shouldn't be a reason to dismiss the soft landing attempt they have already done though.
It is a huge difference to be merely suggesting that you can recover spacecraft compared to actually launching a spacecraft and needing only a barge to fish the thing out of the water.
>>I'm pretty sure NASA (and plenty of others) also said Elon/Space-X was stupid...
Actually, didn't NASA award SpaceX a bunch of money to help get started... That's what I remember anyway. Do they help fund stupid?
It was DARPA, not NASA, which gave some initial seed money to fly a few experimental payloads. Still, even that money was just a drop in the bucket for what was needed to get the rocket off the ground and certainly wasn't sufficient to pay for the development. All told, the development costs of getting the Falcon 9 ready were under a billion dollars, something a NASA study done a few years ago claimed couldn't be done for less than $10 billion.
The DARPA money was just a few tens of millions of dollars. NASA has certainly paid for stuff like the ISS resupply missions (one is currently in space as I write this down), and they are also paying for a commercial crew program that also has money going to some other companies as well. Those were also highly competitive contracts that were literally open to any business or even group of investors who cared to put together an idea for a vehicle (including Jeff Bezos with his Blue Origin company who actually submitted a bid for that money too).
Still, none of that would have been possible without substantial private capital including most of the private fortune of Elon Musk himself who has reportedly invested as much as $200 million of his own money into SpaceX.
The recoverable first-stage flight system SpaceX is proposing is meant to launch from a purpose-built launch facility in western Texas with the landing spot for the first stage somewhere to the east of there. This involves flying over populated areas during the first part of the flight profile and that is going to raise some eyebrows. It's Texas though where killing people in industrial accidents is regarded as a cost of doing business without pesky Federal government regulations getting in the way of making money.
The testing facility is in McGregor, Texas, but the launch is intended to be out of KSC, Vandenberg AFB, or if they get the permits from a general purpose spaceport that SpaceX is building on their own dime in Brownsville, Texas.
They are not intending nor would likely get any sort of permit to fly over populated areas of any kind, which is sort of the point of having a whole bunch of ocean (hence uninhabited surface area) under the launch profile. All of the testing in Texas has a flight ceiling of about 10k feet, after which they are moving to New Mexico for additional testing at the Spaceport America facilities (the first commercial spaceport, which is also where Virgin Galactic is launching from). Even the New Mexico testing won't be over populated areas although SpaceX is going to get high enough with their vehicle that it will be in technically space as they plan on getting to about 100 km or so.
The point of the Methane-LOX is to hopefully improve the ISP of the rocket, but that is with the Raptor engine as well. A really cool and advanced engine design that if successful is going to blow away commercial competitors. As far as I know, there hasn't ever been an engine of that particular size ever built before as well as it is even larger than the F1 engines used by the Saturn V.
The current plan is to have these go to land. If you want to see the full flight profile of what SpaceX is aiming for, I'd suggest watching this (now two year old) video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_1WJ7UUm8I
They are not going to be landing in the water except as a part of the testing process while they get the FAA-AST comfortable with the landing process. Yes, they are taking very seriously the potential of this to ruin somebody's breakfast by taking out their garage, so I also understand why they are cautious.
SpaceX does have insurance to help pay for an unfortunate accident, so it isn't the bucks that are the problem. What is at stake is that any human enterprise has risks, and in this case rockets are quite risky. None the less, KSC is a big place and there are plenty of locations to land this rocket.
Beyond stating the obvious, these quotes from the NASA engineers don't really seem to fly with me.
I get that building rocket engines is a tough challenge, as can be clearly demonstrated by how few new rocket engine designs ever get completed.n All of the complaints about the RD-180 engine with its manufacturing being done in Russia center around the fact that trying to get even just a rough equivalent would require building a brand new engine from scratch. For large engines that can launch payloads of several metric tones into orbit, typically only one or two ever get designed each decade by anybody around the world. This past decade one of those engines was the Merlin engine designed by SpaceX.
What makes the Merlin engine so interesting is precisely because it is bland. SpaceX hasn't been trying to push the envelope in a hardcore sense with exotic fuels or pushing the limits of specific impulse (the efficiency rating of a rocket engine). Instead they are using rather mundane fuels (Kerosene and Liquid Oxygen.... stuff used in rockets for decades) and instead are trying to simplify the design of the rocket every chance they get. Also unlike the SSME, the #1 consideration on building the Merlin has been saving money and not trying to improve performance.
I'll also note that SpaceX does not intend to do sea recovery of these rockets, so doing any consideration of salt water besides general ocean spray into the launch environment (still a problem at KSC) is not really an issue. A problem facing the managers at KSC, or rather the Cape Canaveral Air Station, is trying to find a place for these stages to land. Both the Cape Canaveral Staff and the FAA-AST want to make sure that SpaceX doesn't land their rockets on top of other facilities (like taking out pad 39B), but that is a traffic control problem and not anything to do with the technical capability of getting the rockets to a recoverable location.
As for the economics argument, a company driven by profits rather than a government agency who gets billions of dollars to extend failed programs is somebody who I expect to understand if something is going to be economically feasible or not. I'm sure SpaceX has done all of the number crunching a long time ago as they don't have the sugar daddies in the U.S. Senate to bail them out if it doesn't work.
The Challenger exploded because the spacecraft was flying outside of its design parameters. The engineers themselves asked for, I dare say even begged NASA to not fly that day, but NASA was under a huge amount of political pressure to get the vehicle into orbit or risk an embarrassing trip to congressional meetings to explain why this supposedly reusable spacecraft (meaning the Space Shuttle) wasn't really reusable and couldn't fly in conditions that were not a problem with the Saturn V.
No doubt that the Space Shuttle was an incredibly complicated machine that could break with a series of bad events, but there is far more to the destruction of the Challenger (or the loss of the Columbia a few years later) than simply hand waving and saying "it is so complicated that it was simply going to have problems."
Besides, the Space Shuttle is a really horrible demonstration vehicle for reusable spacecraft. So many design compromises were done with that spacecraft it is a wonder it flew at all in the first place. It certainly was never going to live up to the hype that surrounded the spacecraft in the late 1970's and early 1980's.
No doubt that SpaceX has put a whole lot of effort into making this work, but it amazes me that people who are otherwise knowledgeable about this kind of stuff can't stand looking at actual results rather than assuming this is just random musings. One of the ways SpaceX knows how many potential launches they can get out of their engines is because they have put some of these Merlin-1 engines on their test stand in Texas and have fired them for full mission duration burns 40-50 times. SpaceX definitely doesn't make up these numbers out of their hind end but rather from experience and actually using this equipment.
Again reality sort of bites these guys hard because SpaceX has been able to bring the 1st stage down to a soft landing. With the most recent launch, SpaceX was denied the opportunity to do more because both the FAA and the USAF folks at Cape Canaveral didn't really want that return stage going anywhere near the launch pad until SpaceX has proven they have control of the vehicle. Regardless, SpaceX has done the really hard part of actually getting the spacecraft to return in a recoverable condition.... something these "experts" in this article are denying is even possible in a theoretical sense.
The 2nd stage recovery is going to be a whole lot harder, and it is something that even SpaceX themselves have said may not be successful. Still, I wouldn't categorically write off SpaceX either and it is just stupid to dismiss something like this as impossible without even making an attempt to see if it could be done.
When US special forces out of uniform but still acting at the direction of the US government are seizing Mexican government offices by force let me know.
America has invaded and even occupied territory on a permanent basis that used to belong to Mexico. Check out the very Mexican cities of Albuquerque and Santa Fe where soldiers of the U.S. Army in uniform occupied and seized Mexican government offices by force.
I'd call that a precedent. There is no reason it can't happen again and you are a fool to think historical situations don't repeat themselves.
Considering the utter lawlessness of many towns on the U.S.-Mexican border on the Mexican side of things, I would dare say furthermore that President Obama is ignoring his constitutional mandate to defend the USA if he fails to order special forces from at least occupying such Mexican government offices currently occupied by the drug cartels. It is a festering problem right now that could really blow up and become a major headache for the USA in the near future and already is a problem so far as the crime happening in Mexico is spreading to the USA as well.
Russia has long held a policy of "Russification", in other words a deliberate attempt to push the cultures of its client states and homogenize the culture to basically become Russian. This was going on in every one of the former Soviet republics, which is why there are such strong ethnic Russian groups of people in those areas.
The USSR was expecting to still exist right now, and a cultural shift can sometimes take a century or more. Unfortunately for the USSR, it fell apart and this cultural shift was incomplete, including in the Ukraine. As these former Soviet Republics start to charter their own cultural course, what remained was just the worst of all possible situations. Some Russian families have lived in these places for several generations and call places like Crimea home, hence why deporting them isn't a viable option either.
Built in the 70s.
How many of those engineers are still working there, forty to fifty years later?
They did get replacements for those engineers over the years. Ever hear about the Delta IV? It flew into space last month.
I can only imagine that this sudden rush of PR is due to SpaceX's recent smear of UL for locking them out of the military space market
How about this was just something positive that the company could say about themselves? You don't need to look into conspiracy theories here, just simply that a bunch of Boeing engineers did something cool and decided to brag about it. That the timing also coincided with some negative publicity certainly could be a good thing for Boeing as well, but frankly they've been doing steady progress with this spacecraft anyway.
Did you even read the article? I doubt it, based upon your response here. Most of your questions were answered in that article BTW.
As for the rest of the actual spaceship, it has already been built... at least the engineering prototypes. The launcher is going to be likely the Atlas V (assuming that the whole issue with Putin can be put to rest so the Russian engines can keep coming for that rocket). That has already done nearly a hundred launches so it is safe to assume it is in pretty good standing. The main problem for the Atlas V is to crew-rate the vehicle, but that is mostly an academic exercise as nobody is going to throw a $10 billion DOD satellite on a rocket like that which isn't damn close to 100% reliability.
We are talking effing Boeing about being able to build a spaceship? They either built themselves or purchased the companies that built nearly every American spacecraft which has gone into space, including both the Saturn V and the Space Shuttle. You have got to be downright dense in the head to think it is just vaporware here.
This is stuff that will be built. Bigelow Aerospace is going to use the CST-100 in particular for flights to their private commercial space stations and Boeing may have other customers besides NASA that they don't care to (and certainly aren't legally obligated to) talk about publicly.
SpaceX is just doing the hard work upfront with their R&D
Dear God Almighty, SpaceX is not doing jack-shit R&D. The R&D was done 50 years ago, and documented in extraordinary detail by others.
I'd like to see the video or for that matter even a classified U.S. Army Air Corps document that has anybody from any country of the world (hell, even the Nazi's at their secret Antarctic base) do something like this 50 years ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwwS4YOTbbw
Seriously?
What Boeing is proposing here is going to be for a little bit longer than 10 minutes.
How about a selfie at the bottom of the ocean? Where's the tourist market for that?
You mean something like James Cameron at the bottom of the Marianas Trench? There is also a pretty brisk business of people who are trying to get married on the deck of the Titanic.... literally. Note the selfie in that last link in particular.
There actually is a pretty brisk tourism market for that..... so what are you talking about again? That space tourism won't happen until the underwater deep sea market for tourism is penetrated? Already happened.
The same could be said about a non-profit group that receives a $50k donation towards its activities. If anything, a non-profit group might even be able to leverage that $50k to go a whole lot further than a for-profit software development company simply because there are volunteers who can perhaps be managed better by a paid manager-architect or that such a donation could secure for a long time the hosting services and other aspects of that open source (presumably) project.
The problem with a non-profit group developing software in this fashion is the tragedy of the commons situation, where many people (and companies) who would be paying the $50k without blinking an eye towards the commercial solution all of a sudden go nuts and have their board of directors breathing down their throat because they made the donation for nearly the same amount.
I've heard about some open source development groups who offer for sale the next version of the software project with the latest updates and changes for a price, but older versions are available to download for free. I do know this business model is controversial though.
ULA is trying to make the case that their rockets are indeed as different from those of SpaceX as a Mac is from a PC, hence why the contract doesn't need to go out to a bid. It is also on these kind of mundane details that ULA is furthermore claiming as reasons and rationale for why SpaceX doesn't meet the technical requirements for launching EELV-class payloads.
I didn't say it was a perfect analogy, and since you understand computer technology you see how such a contract bid would be really silly and obvious misapplication of the contracting process. Sadly, I have seen some real world "sole source-no bid" contracts awards that were done on equally silly reasons. I can't give specifics of those contracts because of a NDA, but they did involve several million dollars and some government agencies as well. I have also seen such contracts thrown out and forced into a bidding situation precisely because the officials involved forgot to take everything into consideration and missed a few points that the law required for those sort of sole source contracts.
Your objection is sort of proving my point too.
I think it is funny to no end for SpaceX to bring out the Obama administration executive orders about prohibiting purchase of parts or supplies from Russia.... and in particularly prohibiting any sort of renumeration toward Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin by name.
You're confused. It's called levelling the playing field. What the USAF did was sign a no-bid contract with the Boeing/Lockheed to purchase Russian rocket engines. A huge no-no in the public sphere, if not illegal. The only way to get them to reverse on that was to go to court.
It isn't wrong to do sole source contracts as a public entity. I did them when I was working for a state agency several times. The big thing is that you need to demonstrate convincingly (and be willing to back that up in a court room if necessary... like SpaceX is trying to call the bluff here with regards to ULA and the USAF) that the company you are sole sourcing is really the only company which could possibly provide the project being desired.
There are a couple of ways to get that to happen, and one of common methods (IMHO it really is corruption at its finest) is to over specify the technical requirements in such a way that one and only one company could possibly present a bid. For example with a computer, you could require that the computer has certain non-standard connectors, be very specific with an operating system (especially an off-beat OS like QNX), monitors have a 63.224 Hz screen refresh capability (or some other really weird number like this), and other details that exclude anybody else. You can reject any other potential bids simply because they failed to meet the original specification.
That is essentially what ULA has done here with regards to their rocket purchases, and SpaceX is crying foul by pointing out their rockets are just as capable to put up many of the same payloads reliably as well. Once the Falcon Heavy has launched a few times (its first launch may be this year or early next year), SpaceX will literally be able to launch anything ULA has with its inventory of rockets. There are other companies like ATK-Orbital that could conceivably be able to compete as well at least for some of these payloads.
The analogy would be some state college putting out for bid a bunch of Mac computers, and some PC dealer filing protest suggesting their products are just as capable for the applications being done at the college. The Apple dealer would point out that specialized software excludes the PCs, and the finger pointing goes on from there in the protest.
Indeed I think Elon Musk and his lawyers are going to bring up Orbital several times if this goes before a courtroom basically saying "it isn't just us".
I mean really. Cheap imported Russian rockets resold by a cold war era aerospace dinosaur vs an all-American entrepreneur company?
Russian rocket engines. The rest of the rocket is manufactured in America, but the engines (arguably the most critical part though) is made in Russia.
1st of all, neither one of these companies is what would be called a major player in the space launch industry, even though both do get involved at a significant level. I would dare say both companies had a foot in the grave and could disappear if this merger didn't happen.
Also, neither company seems to be in direct competition with each other in terms of the various parts of the space launch areas that they have concentrated on. ATK is more into military sales (especially missiles and military munitions in general) and of course the solid rocket boosters, including the SRBs that the Space Shuttle used. Orbital has experience with liquid fueled rockets and working with commercial spaceflight customers in particular, including satellite construction (their main profit area). ATK has been losing its military business for some time, so they are in desperate need to change course and especially get into the commercial spaceflight area... something that obviously Orbital has a lot of experience in working with.
While this merger still shocks me that it is happening, I see huge benefits for both Orbital and ATK if this is completed. The combined company will definitely be in a position to challenge SpaceX in a number of ways and can definitely blow out of the water anything produced by United Launch Alliance (ULA). ATK has the raw capital and some substantial physical assets that could definitely build upon everything Orbital has been doing.
aka; former Sen. Orrin Hatch's cookie-jar.
Former? I know some people like to think he has been serving since 1776, but that zombie is still in office. He rules Utah politics as his own private fiefdom almost on the level like Huey Long did for Louisiana.
Yeah, ATK is one of his major cookie jars though, and Thiokol was previously his sugar daddy.
If you are worried about smaller companies being represented, you really want municipal governments involved. They tend not to be concerned at all with regards to large multi-national companies, but they do care about local businesses (as do their constituents). It is possible for a large company to dominate the local politics, but such companies "own" the town anyway in a number of ways and usually means the employees of that company are the ones who mostly dominate the local politics too (as opposed to the CEO).
A big company like Comcast is likely to lose an argument in terms of throwing their weight around in local politics, but they definitely are able to control the discussion when done on a national level. That is the reason why the fight in the U.S. Congress and with the FCC is happening at all, because it isn't being controlled at the local level.
Who do you think does a better job of managing their municipal assets.... Los Angeles City or Compton? I'm not saying either are the best, but some of the smaller suburbs definitely maintain their infrastructure much better.
Regardless, I think you would find it much easier to complain to a local city alderman and getting them to take your phone call rather than trying to get some member of congress to help you out because the assets are owned by the federal government. I shudder to think of what it would be like if the federal government was in charge of municipal street repair.