The problem is the presumption that the data doesn't have a physical location when you are dealing with a cloud. You may not directly know where a given hunk of data is physically stored at, but such storage is still a requirement for current computing practices. It can be destroyed, confiscated, lost, or even simply scrambled where you have no control over what happens. It can also be copied and distributed to places which may not be in a place you want it at (like a competitor or somebody who intends to do you harm).
Keeping data in a cloud is fine for temporary stuff or for data that is of a transitory nature that might be discarded a day or two later. Also if the data is of a nature that if it is published on the front page of a newspaper or on Wikipedia, nobody would care.... you generally don't have a problem. If you really want to keep the data for any length of time... due to legal requirements or even something that is vital to the mission success of your company or organization, it is really idiotic to rely upon 3rd parties who don't have a vested interested in your success to be keeping that data.
I'd say it is just as doomed as Nupedia too. Apparently this really surprised the Wikinews regulars as a sort of strike of lightning out of the dark and that their relationship with Jimmy Wales is dubious at best. Mr. Wales got zero input and feedback from the Wikinews regulars in terms of how to set up the site or how to effectively manage it. That sounds like a colossal waste of time and energy as well as basically shooting himself in the foot right out of the gate as those would likely be the largest experienced group of users who could make it work.
At the very least, Mr. Wales needs to mend some fences there and smooth over the feelings of the volunteers at Wikinews before they poison the effort for this "WikiTribute" effort completely. I've seen him run roughshod over other Wikimedia projects, and stuff like his random deletion of what he claimed to have been porn on the Wikimedia Commons really backfired in a miserable way and spilled a whole lot of bad blood too.
The editing of news articles by volunteers in a manner like Wikipedia has already existed for a great many years. It is called Wikinews.
Of course Jimmy Wales already knew about that site and is obviously dismissive of the ability of that project's volunteers to objectively look at news information and to distinguish between actual news and fake news.
On a practical side, Wikinews is really quite effective in terms of what it does and also has an interesting set of stories that is quite a bit different than from other news sources. Definitely worth reading for its own sake. The drawback is mainly a lack of eyeballs and the fact that writing a news article is hard work.
That right there is a part of the problem. Software testers report bugs. Hints about potential bugs can come from end users, but end users are not software testers.
There is no substitute to a really good (professional.... and paid) software tester that and reliably reproduce bugs that need to be removed. If anything, they are far more valuable than even code monkeys writing thousands of lines of code per month (something also largely irrelevant for quality software). If anything, I would pay the software testing team before the coders if you need to use some volunteer labor like in an open source project.
End users can offer hints to a good software testing team as to what might be bugs, and end user reports should definitely be taken seriously since it is something that slipped past those testers as well. When the software testers are fired and/or it is presumed that unpaid volunteers are going to be doing that quality assurance process, especially for a commercial software product, you get what you pay for.
John Carmack was simultaneously working for Oculus, ID Software, and not mentioned at all here is Armadillo Aerospace where he was even doing NASA contracts all at the same time. Trying to be Buckaroo Bonzai by doing everything at once is more than most normal people could do. It was about the time Zenimax took over ID Software that John Carmack wanted to continue doing this sort of multi-tasking, but they insisted he decide who he was going to work for exclusively.... and he told them to go take a hike.
If you are an engineering who is moonlighting on multiple side projects, it can definitely get a little bit fuzzy about what stuff you develop on your own time vs. what you develop for your employer. In Carmack's case, the previous management was a whole lot more open to him pretty much doing as much as he wanted to do and however he wanted to do it as long as they got a piece of the action. ID Software got the better end of the bargain in that situation and made a whole bunch of money off of the work that John Carmack was able to perform on their behalf.
That these asshats tried to kill the goose that laid golden eggs... is what they are pissed about. Even more because that goose flew away rather than them getting to eat goose for dinner and laid some golden eggs for somebody else instead that made billions of dollars for those investors.
Indirectly, it is going to be making a huge difference for consumer cells. Most importantly, all of the production capacity that has been sucked up by Tesla for building their automobiles is going to be available for other folks (likely to be snatched up by other automobile companies for awhile) but in the long run it will simply imply that the whole market for Lithium-ion batteries is going to grow as a whole. All of the chemicals (besides Lithium) are also going to be made in much larger quantities, the machines which make the batteries are also going to be made... even to be made on an assembly line themselves... and more people simply getting familiar with how to cheaply and efficiently being able to make these batteries.
Besides automobiles, the one market that Tesla is getting into is power storage systems for homes and businesses. It is possible that you might end up having a bunch of these batteries in your home in the form of a Tesla power wall... especially if you have solar panels on your house. Other applications that require the storage of large amounts of electricity are likely to be the primary customers from this factory for awhile.
Tesla actually plans on building several of these factories in other locations too, because they anticipate that all of the production from this Gigafactory is going to be used for internal purposes (aka products that Tesla themselves are making where the batteries are but a part of those products). It is pretty odd that their planned consumption of batteries is going to outstrip this production facility.
No, a legitimate grammar rule is to convert a "y" into an "i" when adding a suffix. A few exceptions happen also... hence why "hobbyist" is a thing.
Otherwise..... learn a little about the language you are using and realize it is convoluted and that stuff like standardized spelling is not nearly as standard as you think. Besides, you understood the context when it was originally given, or are you that clueless about context too?
That is like complaining about the difference in spelling between dwarves and dwarfs (something that JRR Tolkein himself spilled far too much ink over if you want to get into the details.... and it was Tolkein who coined "dwarfs" too). Spelling something "hobbiest" really is a valid, if perhaps from a 21st Century rather archaic way of spelling things.
Really, complaining about this as a grammar Nazi is about as low and uninformed as you can get.
Given the circumstances of how this rocket exploded, it seems entirely reasonable that SpaceX should open up another flight spot to send up a replacement vehicle. The contract was for the flight, not the launch vehicle itself.
As for who is going to foot the bill for that flight... after Spacecom has already paid for this flight that never happened in the first place... that is between SpaceX and any insurance companies they may have against this kind of disaster. In this context, it is likely to be seen as an industrial accident rather than a space transportation issue, so there likely will be other insurance companies getting into the fray. As a matter of fact, the insurance on the satellite itself is covered under a marine transportation insurance contract that was valid until the moment of launch when other contracts kicked in.
Most of what Spacecom is talking about here though is that there was a contract clause that either refunded the launch cost (which was about $50 million) or an assurance that a loss of vehicle would result in a flight getting scheduled at a later time. I would expect the same sort of thing from FedEx or even the USPS if a package was lost and never delivered. Of course package insurance applies even in that situation.
The first re-launch is scheduled to happen in October with SES-10.
Not anymore. At best you can say it is "to be announced" after some significant return to flight effort that will require the FAA-AST to recertify the Falcon 9 as being eligible to launch at all. A total loss of vehicle tends to do that with air and space based vehicles.
Otherwise, you are correct that was when it was previously anticipated that the first lower stage was going to be reused.
I really hope that SpaceX finds and can replicate the problem which caused this disaster. The replication, like what happened with the struts, is important so far as it is something that can be addressed and eliminated as a source of problems in the future. By replication here I'm also talking about showing how a pipe fitting or some other component failed, not about sitting another whole Falcon 9 up to deliberately blow it up.
SpaceX also dodged a huge bullet so far as window glass of buildings with people in them did break from the explosion of this Falcon 9 rocket. People could have definitely been injured even if it wouldn't have necessarily been life threatening in terms of the distance they were from the launch pad.
Yes, saying that no lives were lost in this explosion is something of a legitimate statement to make, as lives could have definitely been in danger of being lost even if it wasn't astronauts sitting on top of the stack.
So this "$50M or free flight" may just be them trying to save themselves the money that they paid SpaceX for the launch....
It has an even easier explanation:
This was something in the launch contract and a previously agreed upon penalty that would happen if the launch didn't happen. Spacecom is just stating publicly that this clause exists.... something that seems prudent if they are trying to assure their investors that they can financially recover from this disaster.
Who in their right mind would insure a satellite of that cost for flight on an experimental vehicle?
First of all, how is this an experimental vehicle and how do you jump to the conclusion that it is such? What was done in this particular SpaceX flight was to do the equivalent of somebody sitting down and turning on the engines and checking the fluids of their car and doing other basic diagnostics evaluating the status of a vehicle before going on a long trip. While unusual for most other companies, it speaks volumes about the reliability of the engines that SpaceX is willing to have them fire multiple times even before they go into space in the first place.
This was not an experimental vehicle in the first place.
Which is why this whole thread is just silly including all of the counter arguments..... as in this particular case for spaceflight it is required due to regulations made by the FAA-AST (the guys who regulate private commercial spaceflight in the USA). It is also required by treaty so far as it is the government itself that assumes liability for any 3rd party damage... and the government gets that out of the hide of the people who send stuff up.
This payload wouldn't be uninsured because it can't be uninsured. The insurance policies in place are required even before a launch permit is issued.
There is still a whole lot of work that needs to happen before boosters are even reused. At the very least, SpaceX needs to restart their F9R development program, which halted due to the one test vehicle blowing up over central Texas. Legitimately SpaceX decided against building a replacement because they thought they were far enough along to at least recover in one estimate about 50% of the boosters and with the launch rate that would have a half dozen by the end of last year. The CRS-7 explosion also set that timeline back a bit further.
I am expecting that the current recovered boosters (beyond the first recovered booster that is already slated to become a monument at SpaceX headquarters) will be flown extensive in both Texas and in New Mexico (Spaceport America). It will likely be an aggressive program to fly and refly those boosters over and over again until several of them crater into the ground to push the limits of what they can be doing, spending just manpower to deal with them and the minor cost of the fuel. SpaceX has also said that a couple of the boosters have already been pulled apart for a deep level engineering review to see how the engines have performed, and that at least some of the parts and pieces are already slated to be reused in future flights even if it isn't the full cores yet. Very likely there will be at least some Merlin engines that will make a flight very soon a second time, which is already a huge savings.
It will take several years before SpaceX will take a recovered core and re-integrate on the spot with a new upper stage and payload. I agree that is the standard being aimed for, but the recovery is just the first of a long, long process of getting there.
I fervently wish he'd leave off the Mars stuff until SpaceX was on a solid footing as a profitable launch company with rapid cadence.
How can you say that SpaceX is not profitable at the moment? They have not had an investment round for several years now, except for the Google investment that seems to be aimed at something other that building rockets. SpaceX is also going to have well over a dozen launches at the current launch rate unless there is a major glitch that appears which would ground the launch fleet.
This comment would have been appropriate in 2009 or earlier when SpaceX was still flying the Falcon 1 and still struggling to simply get into orbit with only announced plans for the Falcon 9 and some test hardware in the assembly line. That is no longer the case right now.
If Elon Musk succeeds at sending a probe to Mars in 2018 like he already announced, it isn't just talking about Mars but rather actually going there. He also committed to sending at least one payload to Mars on every Hohmann Transfer Orbit opportunity between the Earth and Mars for as long as the company exists in the future (and mentioned in the above video). The question isn't just pontificating about what the future could be like, but rather holding actual hardware that will be on the surface of Mars in a definite time table.
When companies talk about spaceflight, I always look at "bent metal" to see how serious they are about getting the job done. SpaceX certainly has plenty of bent metal to prove they are serious about going into space and a growing resume of completed missions in space.
But the big challenge for SpaceX now isn't one with astounding demonstrations of technology. It's doing the same thing over, and over, and doing it quickly, and making a profit.
I agree with you that is a core problem for the company. Having two launch pads in Florida and getting the third launch pad in Texas (not ignoring the one in California.... but that is specialized for polar/military payloads) is going to help a lot in terms of clearing their manifest too. Gwynne Shotwell just gave a speech with a Q&A recently about the Falcon Heavy and made a few remarks about the work done on pad 39A too. They are just about ready to start using that site for launch operations there, where a second launch team is likely to help increase that flight rate.
I'll also point out that at the moment range operations at Cape Canaveral in general needs to be streamlined if launch rates are to be increased. That involves more than just SpaceX and might even require a general rethinking for flight operations there for the other launch providers that use the same site. I know for a fact that the Space Shuttle really messed up launch schedules where a Shuttle launch not only took priority but also blocked out a huge hunk of the calendar for nearly a 3-4 week period of time. I would expect that the SLS and the crewed launches (both SpaceX and Boeing are launching out of KSC) are going to be in a similar situation.
By Texas law and the contract signed by SpaceX with the City of Brownsville and the surrounding communities, the Brownsville spaceport can have at most 12 launches per year and each one must be no closer than 20 days from the previous launch. While that might help work around some scheduling problems for some payloads when stuff is happening at the cape, it doesn't mean there is going to be much more of an increased launch tempo.
In other words, I think about the most that almost any private commercial launch provider could ever do right now with the current launch infrastructure for orbital spaceflight in America is about 20 launches per year... and that is being very generous. Last year SpaceX got in seven flight, with one catastrophic failure that required a full engineering review and a return to flight program that satisfied not only the FAA-AST regulators but also all of the customers... especially NASA and the DOD. If they get over a dozen flights in this year, I would be surprised.
Part of that effort to build the satellite network resulted in the Iridium satellite constellation. A combination of 1990's electronic technology (it wasn't all that good... really) along with as you said the extremely high launch costs caused the companies to go bankrupt. Iridium itself has gone through several sets of owners, and it was kept on life support financially basically because the U.S. military couldn't find any alternative that could provide global coverage like Iridium was doing.
To give an example of the technical capabilities of Iridium, the first generation had a data throughput speed of 2400 baud for individual customers. That might have been sufficient for reading a few e-mails in the 1990's, but is grossly slow for current needs. The costs for Iridium phones are also insanely expensive compared to what was promised.... and frankly the satellites couldn't handle the crush of millions of users in that first generation either to spread those costs around.
Bill Gates' plan to have a large number of cheap satellites might have worked, but as you have pointed out it needed cheap launch costs to make it possible. $10k/kg to orbit is not cheap.
How does this impact me or most other people in any significant way?
To start with, you would likely not be writing this comment in the first place if it wasn't for space-based assets. While you might be able to say that your actual TCP/IP packet only traveled along a fiber cable, the work of placing that cable inevitably used at least the GPS satellite constellation along with numerous other space-based vehicles. Like it or not, spaceflight has every day impacts upon your life, no matter how disconnected and isolated you might think your life has become. It is what makes the modern civilization function.
As a matter of fact, this particular satellite was a telecommunication satellite that will be broadcasting over the western Pacific Ocean region (aka eastern Asia).
Shouldn't we put our resources to better use, like stopping global warming?
It is stuff like this that you even know about global warming. How else do you think a genuinely global monitoring effort measuring temperatures, ocean conditions, sea levels, and other factors are even followed in the first place? This is how resources are being used to help stop such environmental pollution. If you don't know what is happening, you can't stop it from happening in the future.
I promise you that at least some data packets you are going to be using in the future will go across this particular satellite. The world is just far too interconnected.
The fact that the rocket landed again successful means that anything going into space is going to be much, much cheaper in the future as competitors to SpaceX try to copy the effort and come up with at least something that can compete commercially against SpaceX. That is what is so significant about this particular flight in addition to the payload that actually got up into space.
Unfortunately SpaceX is screwing the American taxpayers right now, being incapable of getting even 10 tonnes into orbit for 133M with its CRS flights.
You do realize that SpaceX just sent a CRS payload into orbit this past week, and the capsule is still up on the ISS attached to the station as I'm writing this reply?
I don't know what you are complaining about, other than a big oops happened with the CRS-7 flight. Those issues (at least the cause of that incident) have been resolved and the Falcon 9 has gone back into service with what I have seen as one of the fastest turn around times of any launch provider after a complete catastrophic failure of their primary launch vehicle.
The only people complaining are folks who are clueless about rocket science.
China is also being extremely timid with their space exploration plans. While they have done everything you have said, they aren't really pushing any sort of frontiers in any real sense of the word or doing anything that hasn't been done repeatedly by other spacefaring countries in the past.
In that sense, statements like "we will build a base on the Moon" definitely makes them sound a whole lot like "space nutters" that you are railing against. They have so much to accomplish and so much to learn about what it would take to actually get there that I strongly question any bold statements of that nature. Ditto with anything going to Mars or the Moon beyond just a duplication of the Surveyor & Ranger series of vehicles. China is at least 20-40 years away from duplicating Neil Armstrong's walk on the Moon as a weekend camping trip much less actually building a permanent structure of any kind there.
Yes, they can eventually get there if they actually commit resources to making it happen. China even now has the money necessary to do some national prestige projects like planting a red Chinese flag next to the completely white flag with a few extremely faded strips left by the Apollo astronauts several decades ago.
My largest complaint about the Chinese astronaut corps though is the lack of an operational tempo where those astronauts definitely are not getting the experience needed in space to actually perform the tasks that are going to be needed when the going gets tough. It took a decade of constant practice, multiple crewed spaceflights each year, and frankly some incredibly bold steps in order for both the USA and Russia to be ready to send people to the Moon. Russia's main drawback was that they couldn't get a reliable super heavy launch vehicle working (aka the N1 rocket). China doesn't have that kind of depth to its astronaut corps to pull off any significant effort beyond LEO right now.
The big difference between private companies and government is that a private company who screws up with budget and schedule problems (like Rocketplane Kistler.... a private space launch company started well before even SpaceX and even won a similar COTS launch award to bring cargo to the ISS like SpaceX), they simply go bankrupt and go out of existence providing a niche for a new company to take its place. Managers and employees in that old company going bankrupt don't hold the same positions in any new companies, so they need to prove themselves all over again and more importantly can't make the same mistakes.
Governments on the other hand also have budget and schedule problems, but making bad governments go away is sort of a tough thing to do. Government agencies or even sections can almost never disappear. Entire governments almost never go away... or when they do they usually cause a whole lot of bloodshed and other civil strife that accompanies that sort of event. There are often counter-productive things that happen in government agencies too simply because the purpose of that government is not necessarily to provide a particular product or service, but instead has other significant goals well outside of the core principles. A good example of this is the Muslim outreach that Administrator Charles Bolden did with NASA... something that has absolutely nothing to do with aircraft R&D or sending vehicles to Mars.
There is nothing specifically wrong with governments doing things, and sometimes they get done well with government agencies too. It is how to deal with them when the organization falls apart is the problem.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is the presumption that the data doesn't have a physical location when you are dealing with a cloud. You may not directly know where a given hunk of data is physically stored at, but such storage is still a requirement for current computing practices. It can be destroyed, confiscated, lost, or even simply scrambled where you have no control over what happens. It can also be copied and distributed to places which may not be in a place you want it at (like a competitor or somebody who intends to do you harm).
Keeping data in a cloud is fine for temporary stuff or for data that is of a transitory nature that might be discarded a day or two later. Also if the data is of a nature that if it is published on the front page of a newspaper or on Wikipedia, nobody would care.... you generally don't have a problem. If you really want to keep the data for any length of time... due to legal requirements or even something that is vital to the mission success of your company or organization, it is really idiotic to rely upon 3rd parties who don't have a vested interested in your success to be keeping that data.
I'd say it is just as doomed as Nupedia too. Apparently this really surprised the Wikinews regulars as a sort of strike of lightning out of the dark and that their relationship with Jimmy Wales is dubious at best. Mr. Wales got zero input and feedback from the Wikinews regulars in terms of how to set up the site or how to effectively manage it. That sounds like a colossal waste of time and energy as well as basically shooting himself in the foot right out of the gate as those would likely be the largest experienced group of users who could make it work.
At the very least, Mr. Wales needs to mend some fences there and smooth over the feelings of the volunteers at Wikinews before they poison the effort for this "WikiTribute" effort completely. I've seen him run roughshod over other Wikimedia projects, and stuff like his random deletion of what he claimed to have been porn on the Wikimedia Commons really backfired in a miserable way and spilled a whole lot of bad blood too.
The editing of news articles by volunteers in a manner like Wikipedia has already existed for a great many years. It is called Wikinews.
Of course Jimmy Wales already knew about that site and is obviously dismissive of the ability of that project's volunteers to objectively look at news information and to distinguish between actual news and fake news.
On a practical side, Wikinews is really quite effective in terms of what it does and also has an interesting set of stories that is quite a bit different than from other news sources. Definitely worth reading for its own sake. The drawback is mainly a lack of eyeballs and the fact that writing a news article is hard work.
That right there is a part of the problem. Software testers report bugs. Hints about potential bugs can come from end users, but end users are not software testers.
There is no substitute to a really good (professional.... and paid) software tester that and reliably reproduce bugs that need to be removed. If anything, they are far more valuable than even code monkeys writing thousands of lines of code per month (something also largely irrelevant for quality software). If anything, I would pay the software testing team before the coders if you need to use some volunteer labor like in an open source project.
End users can offer hints to a good software testing team as to what might be bugs, and end user reports should definitely be taken seriously since it is something that slipped past those testers as well. When the software testers are fired and/or it is presumed that unpaid volunteers are going to be doing that quality assurance process, especially for a commercial software product, you get what you pay for.
John Carmack was simultaneously working for Oculus, ID Software, and not mentioned at all here is Armadillo Aerospace where he was even doing NASA contracts all at the same time. Trying to be Buckaroo Bonzai by doing everything at once is more than most normal people could do. It was about the time Zenimax took over ID Software that John Carmack wanted to continue doing this sort of multi-tasking, but they insisted he decide who he was going to work for exclusively.... and he told them to go take a hike.
If you are an engineering who is moonlighting on multiple side projects, it can definitely get a little bit fuzzy about what stuff you develop on your own time vs. what you develop for your employer. In Carmack's case, the previous management was a whole lot more open to him pretty much doing as much as he wanted to do and however he wanted to do it as long as they got a piece of the action. ID Software got the better end of the bargain in that situation and made a whole bunch of money off of the work that John Carmack was able to perform on their behalf.
That these asshats tried to kill the goose that laid golden eggs... is what they are pissed about. Even more because that goose flew away rather than them getting to eat goose for dinner and laid some golden eggs for somebody else instead that made billions of dollars for those investors.
Indirectly, it is going to be making a huge difference for consumer cells. Most importantly, all of the production capacity that has been sucked up by Tesla for building their automobiles is going to be available for other folks (likely to be snatched up by other automobile companies for awhile) but in the long run it will simply imply that the whole market for Lithium-ion batteries is going to grow as a whole. All of the chemicals (besides Lithium) are also going to be made in much larger quantities, the machines which make the batteries are also going to be made... even to be made on an assembly line themselves... and more people simply getting familiar with how to cheaply and efficiently being able to make these batteries.
Besides automobiles, the one market that Tesla is getting into is power storage systems for homes and businesses. It is possible that you might end up having a bunch of these batteries in your home in the form of a Tesla power wall... especially if you have solar panels on your house. Other applications that require the storage of large amounts of electricity are likely to be the primary customers from this factory for awhile.
Tesla actually plans on building several of these factories in other locations too, because they anticipate that all of the production from this Gigafactory is going to be used for internal purposes (aka products that Tesla themselves are making where the batteries are but a part of those products). It is pretty odd that their planned consumption of batteries is going to outstrip this production facility.
Have you ever heard about satellite insurance? About about an analogy?
It sounds like both have flown way over your head.
No, a legitimate grammar rule is to convert a "y" into an "i" when adding a suffix. A few exceptions happen also... hence why "hobbyist" is a thing.
Otherwise..... learn a little about the language you are using and realize it is convoluted and that stuff like standardized spelling is not nearly as standard as you think. Besides, you understood the context when it was originally given, or are you that clueless about context too?
That is like complaining about the difference in spelling between dwarves and dwarfs (something that JRR Tolkein himself spilled far too much ink over if you want to get into the details.... and it was Tolkein who coined "dwarfs" too). Spelling something "hobbiest" really is a valid, if perhaps from a 21st Century rather archaic way of spelling things.
Really, complaining about this as a grammar Nazi is about as low and uninformed as you can get.
Given the circumstances of how this rocket exploded, it seems entirely reasonable that SpaceX should open up another flight spot to send up a replacement vehicle. The contract was for the flight, not the launch vehicle itself.
As for who is going to foot the bill for that flight... after Spacecom has already paid for this flight that never happened in the first place... that is between SpaceX and any insurance companies they may have against this kind of disaster. In this context, it is likely to be seen as an industrial accident rather than a space transportation issue, so there likely will be other insurance companies getting into the fray. As a matter of fact, the insurance on the satellite itself is covered under a marine transportation insurance contract that was valid until the moment of launch when other contracts kicked in.
Most of what Spacecom is talking about here though is that there was a contract clause that either refunded the launch cost (which was about $50 million) or an assurance that a loss of vehicle would result in a flight getting scheduled at a later time. I would expect the same sort of thing from FedEx or even the USPS if a package was lost and never delivered. Of course package insurance applies even in that situation.
Not anymore. At best you can say it is "to be announced" after some significant return to flight effort that will require the FAA-AST to recertify the Falcon 9 as being eligible to launch at all. A total loss of vehicle tends to do that with air and space based vehicles.
Otherwise, you are correct that was when it was previously anticipated that the first lower stage was going to be reused.
I really hope that SpaceX finds and can replicate the problem which caused this disaster. The replication, like what happened with the struts, is important so far as it is something that can be addressed and eliminated as a source of problems in the future. By replication here I'm also talking about showing how a pipe fitting or some other component failed, not about sitting another whole Falcon 9 up to deliberately blow it up.
When the N1 rocket was being developed in the Soviet Union, a similar explosion create what could arguably be called one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in history. There were unfortunately people near/on the pad of that N1 rocket that died.
SpaceX also dodged a huge bullet so far as window glass of buildings with people in them did break from the explosion of this Falcon 9 rocket. People could have definitely been injured even if it wouldn't have necessarily been life threatening in terms of the distance they were from the launch pad.
Yes, saying that no lives were lost in this explosion is something of a legitimate statement to make, as lives could have definitely been in danger of being lost even if it wasn't astronauts sitting on top of the stack.
It has an even easier explanation:
This was something in the launch contract and a previously agreed upon penalty that would happen if the launch didn't happen. Spacecom is just stating publicly that this clause exists.... something that seems prudent if they are trying to assure their investors that they can financially recover from this disaster.
First of all, how is this an experimental vehicle and how do you jump to the conclusion that it is such? What was done in this particular SpaceX flight was to do the equivalent of somebody sitting down and turning on the engines and checking the fluids of their car and doing other basic diagnostics evaluating the status of a vehicle before going on a long trip. While unusual for most other companies, it speaks volumes about the reliability of the engines that SpaceX is willing to have them fire multiple times even before they go into space in the first place.
This was not an experimental vehicle in the first place.
Which is why this whole thread is just silly including all of the counter arguments..... as in this particular case for spaceflight it is required due to regulations made by the FAA-AST (the guys who regulate private commercial spaceflight in the USA). It is also required by treaty so far as it is the government itself that assumes liability for any 3rd party damage... and the government gets that out of the hide of the people who send stuff up.
This payload wouldn't be uninsured because it can't be uninsured. The insurance policies in place are required even before a launch permit is issued.
There is still a whole lot of work that needs to happen before boosters are even reused. At the very least, SpaceX needs to restart their F9R development program, which halted due to the one test vehicle blowing up over central Texas. Legitimately SpaceX decided against building a replacement because they thought they were far enough along to at least recover in one estimate about 50% of the boosters and with the launch rate that would have a half dozen by the end of last year. The CRS-7 explosion also set that timeline back a bit further.
I am expecting that the current recovered boosters (beyond the first recovered booster that is already slated to become a monument at SpaceX headquarters) will be flown extensive in both Texas and in New Mexico (Spaceport America). It will likely be an aggressive program to fly and refly those boosters over and over again until several of them crater into the ground to push the limits of what they can be doing, spending just manpower to deal with them and the minor cost of the fuel. SpaceX has also said that a couple of the boosters have already been pulled apart for a deep level engineering review to see how the engines have performed, and that at least some of the parts and pieces are already slated to be reused in future flights even if it isn't the full cores yet. Very likely there will be at least some Merlin engines that will make a flight very soon a second time, which is already a huge savings.
It will take several years before SpaceX will take a recovered core and re-integrate on the spot with a new upper stage and payload. I agree that is the standard being aimed for, but the recovery is just the first of a long, long process of getting there.
I fervently wish he'd leave off the Mars stuff until SpaceX was on a solid footing as a profitable launch company with rapid cadence.
How can you say that SpaceX is not profitable at the moment? They have not had an investment round for several years now, except for the Google investment that seems to be aimed at something other that building rockets. SpaceX is also going to have well over a dozen launches at the current launch rate unless there is a major glitch that appears which would ground the launch fleet.
This comment would have been appropriate in 2009 or earlier when SpaceX was still flying the Falcon 1 and still struggling to simply get into orbit with only announced plans for the Falcon 9 and some test hardware in the assembly line. That is no longer the case right now.
If Elon Musk succeeds at sending a probe to Mars in 2018 like he already announced, it isn't just talking about Mars but rather actually going there. He also committed to sending at least one payload to Mars on every Hohmann Transfer Orbit opportunity between the Earth and Mars for as long as the company exists in the future (and mentioned in the above video). The question isn't just pontificating about what the future could be like, but rather holding actual hardware that will be on the surface of Mars in a definite time table.
When companies talk about spaceflight, I always look at "bent metal" to see how serious they are about getting the job done. SpaceX certainly has plenty of bent metal to prove they are serious about going into space and a growing resume of completed missions in space.
But the big challenge for SpaceX now isn't one with astounding demonstrations of technology. It's doing the same thing over, and over, and doing it quickly, and making a profit.
I agree with you that is a core problem for the company. Having two launch pads in Florida and getting the third launch pad in Texas (not ignoring the one in California.... but that is specialized for polar/military payloads) is going to help a lot in terms of clearing their manifest too. Gwynne Shotwell just gave a speech with a Q&A recently about the Falcon Heavy and made a few remarks about the work done on pad 39A too. They are just about ready to start using that site for launch operations there, where a second launch team is likely to help increase that flight rate.
I'll also point out that at the moment range operations at Cape Canaveral in general needs to be streamlined if launch rates are to be increased. That involves more than just SpaceX and might even require a general rethinking for flight operations there for the other launch providers that use the same site. I know for a fact that the Space Shuttle really messed up launch schedules where a Shuttle launch not only took priority but also blocked out a huge hunk of the calendar for nearly a 3-4 week period of time. I would expect that the SLS and the crewed launches (both SpaceX and Boeing are launching out of KSC) are going to be in a similar situation.
By Texas law and the contract signed by SpaceX with the City of Brownsville and the surrounding communities, the Brownsville spaceport can have at most 12 launches per year and each one must be no closer than 20 days from the previous launch. While that might help work around some scheduling problems for some payloads when stuff is happening at the cape, it doesn't mean there is going to be much more of an increased launch tempo.
In other words, I think about the most that almost any private commercial launch provider could ever do right now with the current launch infrastructure for orbital spaceflight in America is about 20 launches per year... and that is being very generous. Last year SpaceX got in seven flight, with one catastrophic failure that required a full engineering review and a return to flight program that satisfied not only the FAA-AST regulators but also all of the customers... especially NASA and the DOD. If they get over a dozen flights in this year, I would be surprised.
Part of that effort to build the satellite network resulted in the Iridium satellite constellation. A combination of 1990's electronic technology (it wasn't all that good... really) along with as you said the extremely high launch costs caused the companies to go bankrupt. Iridium itself has gone through several sets of owners, and it was kept on life support financially basically because the U.S. military couldn't find any alternative that could provide global coverage like Iridium was doing.
To give an example of the technical capabilities of Iridium, the first generation had a data throughput speed of 2400 baud for individual customers. That might have been sufficient for reading a few e-mails in the 1990's, but is grossly slow for current needs. The costs for Iridium phones are also insanely expensive compared to what was promised.... and frankly the satellites couldn't handle the crush of millions of users in that first generation either to spread those costs around.
Bill Gates' plan to have a large number of cheap satellites might have worked, but as you have pointed out it needed cheap launch costs to make it possible. $10k/kg to orbit is not cheap.
How does this impact me or most other people in any significant way?
To start with, you would likely not be writing this comment in the first place if it wasn't for space-based assets. While you might be able to say that your actual TCP/IP packet only traveled along a fiber cable, the work of placing that cable inevitably used at least the GPS satellite constellation along with numerous other space-based vehicles. Like it or not, spaceflight has every day impacts upon your life, no matter how disconnected and isolated you might think your life has become. It is what makes the modern civilization function.
As a matter of fact, this particular satellite was a telecommunication satellite that will be broadcasting over the western Pacific Ocean region (aka eastern Asia).
Shouldn't we put our resources to better use, like stopping global warming?
It is stuff like this that you even know about global warming. How else do you think a genuinely global monitoring effort measuring temperatures, ocean conditions, sea levels, and other factors are even followed in the first place? This is how resources are being used to help stop such environmental pollution. If you don't know what is happening, you can't stop it from happening in the future.
I promise you that at least some data packets you are going to be using in the future will go across this particular satellite. The world is just far too interconnected.
The fact that the rocket landed again successful means that anything going into space is going to be much, much cheaper in the future as competitors to SpaceX try to copy the effort and come up with at least something that can compete commercially against SpaceX. That is what is so significant about this particular flight in addition to the payload that actually got up into space.
Unfortunately SpaceX is screwing the American taxpayers right now, being incapable of getting even 10 tonnes into orbit for 133M with its CRS flights.
You do realize that SpaceX just sent a CRS payload into orbit this past week, and the capsule is still up on the ISS attached to the station as I'm writing this reply?
I don't know what you are complaining about, other than a big oops happened with the CRS-7 flight. Those issues (at least the cause of that incident) have been resolved and the Falcon 9 has gone back into service with what I have seen as one of the fastest turn around times of any launch provider after a complete catastrophic failure of their primary launch vehicle.
The only people complaining are folks who are clueless about rocket science.
China is also being extremely timid with their space exploration plans. While they have done everything you have said, they aren't really pushing any sort of frontiers in any real sense of the word or doing anything that hasn't been done repeatedly by other spacefaring countries in the past.
In that sense, statements like "we will build a base on the Moon" definitely makes them sound a whole lot like "space nutters" that you are railing against. They have so much to accomplish and so much to learn about what it would take to actually get there that I strongly question any bold statements of that nature. Ditto with anything going to Mars or the Moon beyond just a duplication of the Surveyor & Ranger series of vehicles. China is at least 20-40 years away from duplicating Neil Armstrong's walk on the Moon as a weekend camping trip much less actually building a permanent structure of any kind there.
Yes, they can eventually get there if they actually commit resources to making it happen. China even now has the money necessary to do some national prestige projects like planting a red Chinese flag next to the completely white flag with a few extremely faded strips left by the Apollo astronauts several decades ago.
My largest complaint about the Chinese astronaut corps though is the lack of an operational tempo where those astronauts definitely are not getting the experience needed in space to actually perform the tasks that are going to be needed when the going gets tough. It took a decade of constant practice, multiple crewed spaceflights each year, and frankly some incredibly bold steps in order for both the USA and Russia to be ready to send people to the Moon. Russia's main drawback was that they couldn't get a reliable super heavy launch vehicle working (aka the N1 rocket). China doesn't have that kind of depth to its astronaut corps to pull off any significant effort beyond LEO right now.
In other words, Reddit is now nothing more than a poor imitation of Facebook.
The big difference between private companies and government is that a private company who screws up with budget and schedule problems (like Rocketplane Kistler.... a private space launch company started well before even SpaceX and even won a similar COTS launch award to bring cargo to the ISS like SpaceX), they simply go bankrupt and go out of existence providing a niche for a new company to take its place. Managers and employees in that old company going bankrupt don't hold the same positions in any new companies, so they need to prove themselves all over again and more importantly can't make the same mistakes.
Governments on the other hand also have budget and schedule problems, but making bad governments go away is sort of a tough thing to do. Government agencies or even sections can almost never disappear. Entire governments almost never go away... or when they do they usually cause a whole lot of bloodshed and other civil strife that accompanies that sort of event. There are often counter-productive things that happen in government agencies too simply because the purpose of that government is not necessarily to provide a particular product or service, but instead has other significant goals well outside of the core principles. A good example of this is the Muslim outreach that Administrator Charles Bolden did with NASA... something that has absolutely nothing to do with aircraft R&D or sending vehicles to Mars.
There is nothing specifically wrong with governments doing things, and sometimes they get done well with government agencies too. It is how to deal with them when the organization falls apart is the problem.
Burning an orbiting spacecraft inside an orbiting spacecraft?
You are missing something here. It is simply the orbiting spacecraft.... catching fire on the inside of that same spacecraft.... in space!
It is like a Beowulf Cluster of Linux servers........ in space!
That is why this is so impressive..... in space!