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“Did you see that ludicrous display last night?”
“What was Musk thinking, separating the stage that early?”
“The problem with SpaceX is they always try to fly it in.”

Am I doing this right?

KTG17 wrote:

 A Town Called Malus wrote:

But you have no evidence that it was accomplished thanks to anything unique in the US.

WHAT?!?!

You were the one who had to bring up the moon landings to try and defend your view of the US space industry in an attempt to belittle others. For reference, that was almost 50 years ago. You could have brought up Juno and New Horizons, instead.

Exactly, because another euro was knocking this accomplishment by stating other countries have space programs too. Big deal. The man on the moon happened 50 years ago and we're still the only ones that have done it. So then the others do, it will tell me they have caught up.

No. If other countries would put people on the moon they would be stupid, not catching up. Putting people on the moon was a prestige project that the Americans pursued to compensate their hurt feelings at having been beaten in everything space-related by the Soviets. No other country has really pursued trying to put people on the moon, because doing so has little scientific value and is very expensive compared to sending unmanned missions. A manned moon landing was not really a scientific goal, so no one was really pursuing it until President Kennedy arbitrarily declared it as a major goal. It was a political goal. After Kennedy set the goal, the US spent massive amounts of resources on reaching it. It also made the Soviets set up two small programs just to see if they could beat the US, but those never were given much attention or resources as Soviet researchers were more interested in orbital space stations (and even with these limited resources, the Soviet program was on schedule to put someone on the moon in 1968 until the guy in charge of the program died in 1966 and the whole project kinda died with him). Additionally, the Soviets, unlike the Americans did not really have anything to proof. They had already shown the world who is the boss in space.
So that is why no one else has ever landed a man on the moon. It has little scientific value relative to the costs and besides the US no one really needed the prestige.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

KTG17 wrote:
We could, but I chose to specify the USA's, because of this specific launch. For some reason, peeps have to knock it down and talk about others.

This event was awesome, and that's that.

Agreed, it definitely was awesome.

More science, less “my county can beat up your country” please?

 d-usa wrote:
More science, less “my county can beat up your country” please?

Right, especially since 89% of all porn is made right here in the USA according to a quick google search I just did at work...

Anyway, I might be out on the streets soon, but at least I know that I'm on the streets of the Number One Country!

USA! USA! USA!

 kronk wrote:
I am sad he did not launch a '57 Chevy with an 8-track blasting some Lynard Skynard.


THAT would have been 'Merican!

NO! I'll not let this stand. I'll let the extremely gauche display of chest thumping nationalism slide, but not this!

Lynyrd Skynyrd has no need for proper vowels! They were rocking so hard, all the proper vowels fell off.

Now we all have to watch and listen until the spirits of Van Zant and co. are appeased.




edit: wrong link

KTG17 wrote:

Some people might resent him, but then I have to ask what are they doing to change the world for the better?

I have done more for this world and the people in it than Elon Musk has by: not being a union-busting bastid.

lliu wrote:
I'm wondering though, the body slammed into the ocean at 300 km/h after running out of fuel. If they can make miscalculations like this, what will the risk be when they start sending more valuable payloads? What happens when they send astronauts in their spacesuits into space? The error margin must be considerably lower for me to feel safe watching one of these takeoff. However, this is only a small part and it is pretty amazing to have both boosters touch down within milliseconds of each other precisely on target. It's very cool, at the very least!

Indeed. Which is why I think that it would still be better to focus on making a craft which can take off like a airplane as well as land like one.

Its definitely an amazing feat, but I still feel like its a lot of energy in the wrong direction.

KTG17 wrote:
Man, I was really impressed with the single rocket returning back to the earth, but this is really incredible. . .




You know, as divided as this country can get, and despite the problems it has, and the criticism of it from outside this country, I look at this and just think, "Man, who else is doing sh!t like this?" No one. Those Space X employees have every right to be as excited as they are. Really cutting edge stuff. Amazing. And the balls to send a car into space. Awesome.

We still got it. Best years still yet to come.

I watched the launch on live stream. It was awesome. Especially putting a freakin' Roadster in space.


Mars isn't that far in the future. Woot!

 Grey Templar wrote:
Indeed. Which is why I think that it would still be better to focus on making a craft which can take off like a airplane as well as land like one.

You think wrong. The design compromises for that kind of craft are crippling. It's why the space shuttle was trash even though it only tried to do the landing half of that idea, with a glide ratio that compares unfavorably to a brick. And what do you get for that? A design that still has opportunities for catastrophic failure. Vertical landing works far better, especially in the context of unmanned cargo flights. It doesn't require major design changes to the rocket itself, only reserving a fraction of the fuel for the return trip. If you want maximum payload capacity you can treat it as an expendable rocket, burn all of that reserve fuel, and get much better performance.

Isn’t the general plan more like a beefed up lunar approach to get to Mars, rather than sending a Space Shuttle to Mars?

The human components would still fly in more traditional capsules, landing on earth via parachutes on land or water. And on lunar or mars mission they could land via parachutes or more like the old lunar landing modules.

The reusable rocket modules would be send prior to any humans, carrying supplies and equipment to make fuel for the flight home. After they arrive safely you send humans the traditional way, strap the capsule back on the rocket for a return flight home, and take back off.

Or at least that’s my very basic and simplified understanding of the plan.

As for the stage that crashed: I thought the issue wasn’t a miscalculation, but that only 1’of 3 engines fired during the landing which didn’t slow it down enough?

 d-usa wrote:
As for the stage that crashed: I thought the issue wasn’t a miscalculation, but that only 1’of 3 engines fired during the landing which didn’t slow it down enough?

Correct. The course was set and executed, the igniters for the other two engines just ran out of fuel and they couldn't restart all three. One engine wasn't enough braking thrust, so it hit the water at a fatal speed. So it's a miscalculation somewhere in design, because the igniters clearly didn't work as intended, but it's the kind of miscalculation you expect to get with initial test flights (again, why they launched a car into space instead of anything useful) and don't see again once the problems are worked out.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 d-usa wrote:
And on lunar or mars mission they could land via parachutes or more like the old lunar landing modules.

Well, parachutes for a Mars mission maybe, though you still need a powered landing once the parachutes have provided initial braking power. Kind of impossible to use parachutes for a lunar mission.

Wow, I just came here today and what ? People arguing against Musk and the USA...
Really ? This thread has only been 3 pages...
Let's just enjoy this great Science and technical feat !
Go USA ! Let's go to Mars and find the Protheans !

 Peregrine wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
Indeed. Which is why I think that it would still be better to focus on making a craft which can take off like a airplane as well as land like one.

You think wrong. The design compromises for that kind of craft are crippling. It's why the space shuttle was trash even though it only tried to do the landing half of that idea, with a glide ratio that compares unfavorably to a brick. And what do you get for that? A design that still has opportunities for catastrophic failure. Vertical landing works far better, especially in the context of unmanned cargo flights. It doesn't require major design changes to the rocket itself, only reserving a fraction of the fuel for the return trip. If you want maximum payload capacity you can treat it as an expendable rocket, burn all of that reserve fuel, and get much better performance.

But as we've seen. It is incredibly difficult to make a rocket do this. The chance of catastrophic failure seems to have been far higher so far with these reusable rockets than it has been with the space shuttle.

And if the space shuttle was truly trash, why was it so successful for so long? If it was so bad, surely we would have just kept using rockets to go and parachutes to go back down?

Of course the better solution all around would be to make a space elevator...

I wonder if part of the success with the Space Shuttle was influenced by the ability of it to be modular and act as a hybrid between Crew Transport System and mini Space Station.

By the time the ISS came around we didn’t have any traditional transport options and ended up shooting the small space station to ferry people to the big space station. And I think our rosy glasses make it easy to forget just how risky the shuttle was, that half our fleet crashed or exploded, and that in the end we spend a large part of each flight inspecting the shuttle to make sure it could land and one couldn’t fly without the other standing by as a life boat.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 godardc wrote:
Wow, I just came here today and what ? People arguing against Musk and the USA...
Really ? This thread has only been 3 pages...
Let's just enjoy this great Science and technical feat !
Go USA ! Let's go to Mars and find the Protheans !

Nobody is arguing against either.

 Grey Templar wrote:
And if the space shuttle was truly trash, why was it so successful for so long? If it was so bad, surely we would have just kept using rockets to go and parachutes to go back down?

It wasn't trash. It was a workable concept at the time, and it was successful because we didn't yet have the modern computational power we do to make a better solution possible. That doesn't make it a fundamentally superior design.

To use an analogy, you're a guy in 1941 saying piston driven fighters are a better design since they've been working for 40 years.

I'm excited for the possibilities that this launch mission has opened up. Once they get the bugs worked out of the system (through more tests and number crunching), we'll have ourselves a pretty nice little launch system thanks to Mr. Musk. Hopefully they keep making even better ones and get some humans to Mars, or at least back to the moon, in my lifetime. I know some people think that that's all about ego or something, but to me it's just that much more of a real accomplishment if an actual person is able to make such a journey rather than just a machine. We're eventually gonna need to find a way off this rock before the sun explodes in about 5 billion years anyways...

 Grey Templar wrote:
But as we've seen. It is incredibly difficult to make a rocket do this. The chance of catastrophic failure seems to have been far higher so far with these reusable rockets than it has been with the space shuttle.

It's difficult, but it has been accomplished. SpaceX is already to the point of using their boosters on multiple flights, this was a test of a new thing that failed. Long-term reliability is likely going to be just fine.

And if the space shuttle was truly trash, why was it so successful for so long?

Because we had it available, and we didn't want to admit defeat. It was a terrible idea, but once we sunk all that money into it using it was arguably better than just scrapping the shuttles. And it would have been a rather embarrassing PR debacle to admit the complete failure of a national prestige project like that.

It wasn't trash. It was a workable concept at the time, and it was successful because we didn't yet have the modern computational power we do to make a better solution possible. That doesn't make it a fundamentally superior design.

To use an analogy, you're a guy in 1941 saying piston driven fighters are a better design since they've been working for 40 years.

Actually it was trash at the time. The problem with the shuttle was that it was a compromise design based on conflicting program needs. The military wanted a spaceplane with very flexible landing options and then promptly forgot about that requirement once the design was committed, NASA wanted a reusable launch vehicle based on a launch rate that we never even came close to meeting, and expendable rockets were ruled out in favor of "reusability" that involved a complete rebuild of major systems before every flight. The shuttle program should have been scrapped before it became operational and replaced with systems that actually met the design goals in any kind of efficient manner.

A slight tangent, but I re-watched the Martian the other day and it got me wondering why everyone is so focused on one-shot missions to Mars; I’m thinking it would be more practical (and faster) to build a sort of Mars liner (think a mobile ISS). Get it up to speed and set it on a repeating Earth-Mars-Earth loop. Send up new crew and supplies near Earth and deploy landers at the other end.

It could save a lot of fuel accelerating and decelerating the whole thing, possibly even allow a shorter journey time from operating at a higher average speed and offer more security to the people on the Mars end, as you know there is going to be a resupply / return option coming back in a few months.

Why didn't they put parachutes on the solid booster rockets? It's an impressive technical feat to get them to hover down, but it seems a bit like the Space Pen approach to technical solutions. Just use a pencil.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Why didn't they put parachutes on the solid booster rockets? It's an impressive technical feat to get them to hover down, but it seems a bit like the Space Pen approach to technical solutions. Just use a pencil.

Because parachutes alone are not sufficient. You're smashing the rocket down into a corrosive environment, compared to a nice soft landing on a dry surface. The shuttle boosters were only "reused" in the sense that, after tearing everything apart, inspecting, and overhauling it they used some of the old components to build a new rocket. The "reusable" part of it turned out to be mostly of PR value, the actual costs ended up being higher than just using expendable boosters. SpaceX, on the other hand, lands the rocket without damage and can re-use the entire thing as-is. Give it a routine inspection to make sure nothing was damaged, load some more fuel in, and go. That's an immense advantage, and makes reusable rockets practical.

 Jadenim wrote:
A slight tangent, but I re-watched the Martian the other day and it got me wondering why everyone is so focused on one-shot missions to Mars; I’m thinking it would be more practical (and faster) to build a sort of Mars liner (think a mobile ISS). Get it up to speed and set it on a repeating Earth-Mars-Earth loop. Send up new crew and supplies near Earth and deploy landers at the other end.

It could save a lot of fuel accelerating and decelerating the whole thing, possibly even allow a shorter journey time from operating at a higher average speed and offer more security to the people on the Mars end, as you know there is going to be a resupply / return option coming back in a few months.

That's a neat idea, not sure how the physics of having a space station orbiting two planets would work though. If it needed a big chunk of fuel which would have to be sent up to it then I don't think it would be much more advantageous than using rockets. If it did work though I could see something like that being really useful.

The idea of a one way trip could be down to the fact that any people spending an extended period of time on Mars would be unable to live comfortably in Earth's weaker gravity or just the fact that it would be much more expensive.

What we really need is a space elavator but I highly doubt that such a thing would ever happen. Even if we did invent carbon nanotubes that could grab an asteroid or something, I bet there would be many nations that would object to such a potentially dangerous project...



More on topic though, that was a great looking launch! Say what you like about Musk but he has got people talking about space exploration again and making it much more affordable is definitely a step in the right direction.

 Commander Cain wrote:

 Jadenim wrote:
A slight tangent, but I re-watched the Martian the other day and it got me wondering why everyone is so focused on one-shot missions to Mars; I’m thinking it would be more practical (and faster) to build a sort of Mars liner (think a mobile ISS). Get it up to speed and set it on a repeating Earth-Mars-Earth loop. Send up new crew and supplies near Earth and deploy landers at the other end.

It could save a lot of fuel accelerating and decelerating the whole thing, possibly even allow a shorter journey time from operating at a higher average speed and offer more security to the people on the Mars end, as you know there is going to be a resupply / return option coming back in a few months.

That's a neat idea, not sure how the physics of having a space station orbiting two planets would work though. If it needed a big chunk of fuel which would have to be sent up to it then I don't think it would be much more advantageous than using rockets. If it did work though I could see something like that being really useful.

The idea of a one way trip could be down to the fact that any people spending an extended period of time on Mars would be unable to live comfortably in Earth's weaker gravity or just the fact that it would be much more expensive.

What we really need is a space elavator but I highly doubt that such a thing would ever happen. Even if we did invent carbon nanotubes that could grab an asteroid or something, I bet there would be many nations that would object to such a potentially dangerous project...



More on topic though, that was a great looking launch! Say what you like about Musk but he has got people talking about space exploration again and making it much more affordable is definitely a step in the right direction.

I don't think it would be possible to have a station continuously orbit between Earth and Mars on its own momentum.

But having a station with engines that would allow it to move itself between orbiting Earth and Mars as desired would be possible. Of course that would really make it more of a space ship than a station.

 Grey Templar wrote:

 Commander Cain wrote:

 Jadenim wrote:
A slight tangent, but I re-watched the Martian the other day and it got me wondering why everyone is so focused on one-shot missions to Mars; I’m thinking it would be more practical (and faster) to build a sort of Mars liner (think a mobile ISS). Get it up to speed and set it on a repeating Earth-Mars-Earth loop. Send up new crew and supplies near Earth and deploy landers at the other end.

It could save a lot of fuel accelerating and decelerating the whole thing, possibly even allow a shorter journey time from operating at a higher average speed and offer more security to the people on the Mars end, as you know there is going to be a resupply / return option coming back in a few months.

That's a neat idea, not sure how the physics of having a space station orbiting two planets would work though. If it needed a big chunk of fuel which would have to be sent up to it then I don't think it would be much more advantageous than using rockets. If it did work though I could see something like that being really useful.

The idea of a one way trip could be down to the fact that any people spending an extended period of time on Mars would be unable to live comfortably in Earth's weaker gravity or just the fact that it would be much more expensive.

What we really need is a space elavator but I highly doubt that such a thing would ever happen. Even if we did invent carbon nanotubes that could grab an asteroid or something, I bet there would be many nations that would object to such a potentially dangerous project...



More on topic though, that was a great looking launch! Say what you like about Musk but he has got people talking about space exploration again and making it much more affordable is definitely a step in the right direction.

I don't think it would be possible to have a station continuously orbit between Earth and Mars on its own momentum.

But having a station with engines that would allow it to move itself between orbiting Earth and Mars as desired would be possible. Of course that would really make it more of a space ship than a station.

Yes, it would be a ship, with manoeuvring capabilities; I don’t know much about orbital mechanics, but enough to know that you can’t just stick it up there and not course correct. I was just trying to manage expectations, you say “spaceship” and immediately people start thinking of the Enterprise

When I said “one-shot”, I wasn’t meaning the one way mission idea (which I do find an interesting concept), but the more conventional proposals that involve getting a ship into orbit, accelerating it to interplanetary speed, decelerating to inject into Mars orbit, circling Mars for a while, accelerating back to interplanetary speed and then decelerating back into Earth orbit (or even just landing). Seems like a lot of stop-start and spending a lot of time at less than full speed.

Herzlos wrote:

KTG17 wrote:

 Skinnereal wrote:
I don't know how international SpaceX is, but Elon is a "South African-born Canadian American". This stuff as gone beyond national teams, and commercial projects like Space X see the money involved.

All true, but I don't see these things happening in Canada, South Africa, or anywhere else for that matter. Its happening here for a reason, that's my point.

I think that's more to do with suitable sites close to the equator than anything else? The talent at this level will likely move around as required, or be done remotely.

Theres not the level of skills at this level and specialist abilities available in every nation. Many people will be recruited from afar, tale t at this level will move to the jobs, and there's not jobs in this industry so people are going to travel to them.

Rocket science is hardly a field where you find a ad in thr newspaper a few miles from your house. Fi ding a high level rocket scientist is not always going to be easy, your going to have to start looking wider beyond borders to find those rare elite talents in the industry.

 Grey Templar wrote:
I don't think it would be possible to have a station continuously orbit between Earth and Mars on its own momentum.

In theory you could do it, put the "station" into a solar orbit that intersects the two planetary orbits. The problem is that most of the delta-V requirement between Earth and Mars is getting from the surface into orbit, and most of the rest is moving between low orbit to escape velocity (since the hypothetical station can't slow below escape velocity or it will become trapped at either planet). Once you have your spacecraft into the interplanetary region of its trip and a deceleration option at the end you've effectively solved the entire problem of getting there. Any "on the way" assistance is solving the last tiny part of the problem.

And it only gets worse from there. For a 100% passive station you have to keep it in a transfer orbit between Earth and Mars, never burning any meaningful amount of fuel (we'll assume arriving ships carry a bit of extra to top off the maneuvering thrusters). It can't ever provide any delta-V to the spacecraft using the station, otherwise it will fall out of its orbit and no longer be useful. And any food/water/etc you want to use aboard the station has to be carried aboard the incoming spacecraft. All you're really getting is the ability to move into a temporary apartment and have some bigger living space on your way to Mars, without having to boost a bunch of empty space into orbit. Except wait a second, you have to carry empty space anyway. Remember your fuel tanks? Well, if you're a clever rocket engineer you realize that for a small mass penalty you can partition off the tanks and make it so that once you do your final Mars-ward burn all of the remaining fuel (for arriving at Mars and slowing down into orbit) is in one tank and all of the fuel you used came from a second tank. Haul some furniture and privacy curtains into the fuel tank and you have a new living space.

But wait, there's more! To have a 100% passive transfer orbit between Earth and Mars you have to accept the fact that you can only go between the two planets when they line up in the right relative positions, putting a serious time constraint on your mission. How many years are you willing to wait for the perfect opportunity? It seems like a ton of work for a very marginal benefit.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Anyway, the problem with a Mars mission is not how to do it, it's why to do it. The how has been in place for decades. Yeah, it's a massive engineering project to actually build a Mars spacecraft, but it's a natural extension of concepts we've understood just fine since the Apollo era. From there it's just a matter of investing enough time and money to turn theory into hardware. What we don't have is the desire to go to Mars. Space exploration hasn't been a major national priority since the Apollo era, and that rules out massive-scale projects like a Mars mission. And now, with robots getting more and more capable there's less and less scientific justification for sending humans. Why spend payload capacity on humans and their support when, for the same cost, you can cover the planet in robot probes doing much more science? At this point you're pretty much depending on someone feeling sufficiently motivated to launch a nationalistic flag-planting mission, and I don't see that happening any time soon.

KTG17 wrote:

 Skinnereal wrote:
I don't know how international SpaceX is, but Elon is a "South African-born Canadian American". This stuff as gone beyond national teams, and commercial projects like Space X see the money involved.

All true, but I don't see these things happening in Canada, South Africa, or anywhere else for that matter. Its happening here for a reason, that's my point.

Yep, it's closer to the equator than Canada or South Africa, so space launches are at an advantage.
A nationalist take on a private venture is pretty absurd, especially since it's partly happening because the national space agencies are largely wasting time and money.

Voss wrote:

KTG17 wrote:

 Skinnereal wrote:
I don't know how international SpaceX is, but Elon is a "South African-born Canadian American". This stuff as gone beyond national teams, and commercial projects like Space X see the money involved.

All true, but I don't see these things happening in Canada, South Africa, or anywhere else for that matter. Its happening here for a reason, that's my point.

Yep, it's closer to the equator than Canada or South Africa, so space launches are at an advantage.
A nationalist take on a private venture is pretty absurd, especially since it's partly happening because the national space agencies are largely wasting time and money.

The National agencies aren't wasting time or money, it is just that their missions don't get as much publicity any more. I mean this made the news for sending a car into space. Why? Launching a car is pointless except to get into newspapers. The national agencies build and launch actual satellites which do actual scientific work, be that providing networks of earth observation satellites allowing us to learn more about our own planet, space observatories to learn about the far off reaches of the universe or probes to learn more about our own solar system. Thing is, you often only hear about these when they find something big which is also easily understandable.

New Horizons launched in 2006. It only got widespread coverage when it actually reached Pluto 9 years later.

KTG17 wrote:
I think what makes this launch cool, and something I have been frustrated with NASA for, is that it does create attention and capture imagination in ways that most NASA launches do not. Sometimes I can't believe some of the crap they send up there. Its not that I am not in favor of hardcore scientific projects, but at times you also need to justify your budget to the average person, and sending something up like Kepler is rather pointless to me if we have no means to reach any of the planets it finds. I would rather see them do things like Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity, only send them to every moon in the Solar System. Send satellites to map all of the planets and moons. That would be far more interesting to the average person. If we ever manage to develop light speed, then yeah, that would be a good time to fiddle around with something like Kepler.

I agree with this almost completely. I think its cool that we have found so many other planets and solar systems out there, but then reality kicks in for me. Yes thats really cool and they have found some really i teresting things floating around out there but these objects are SO IN INCREDIBLY far away that we simply will never see it let alone visit. Inside our solar system though people argue about how many actual planets there are. And if any of the moons could carry life. Hell we just recently finally saw what Pluto looks like and before that we werent really sure of its color.

Id rather learn and explore our backyard first before we start wondering what the backyards in Australia look like

 A Town Called Malus wrote:
Launching a car is pointless except to get into newspapers.

And to test the new rocket design. Remember, the car was a dummy payload on a launch that would otherwise have just carried a load of concrete blocks to demonstrate its ability to lift a given mass into Mars orbit. It's cooler than a load of concrete blocks, but it's still the least interesting thing about the mission. Falcon Heavy will soon be joining its smaller variants in launching legitimate scientific and commercial payloads.