Posted on 02/10/2018 8:49:17 AM PST by Voption
"Capitalism in space: SpaceX has highlighted the last image from its Tesla car, heading out to the asteroid belt after being lofted into space by its Falcon Heavy rocket... .....this also highlights that a private American company was able to send a payload beyond Earth orbit, and it took them only seven years of development and no government funds. ....[an almost perfect test] according to Musk, the reason the [1st stage] core hit the water so fast is because some engines did not fire as intended. [SpaceX] engineers believed only one of three engines fired during a final burn designed to slow the rocket’s descent, before touchdown. The stage only missed the boat by about the length of a football field, but the force of its water impact was enough to “take out” two engines on the nearby drone ship, and spray it with debris...."
(Excerpt) Read more at audioboom.com ...
I still believe Tesla is mostly vaporware...
NASA spent 30 years ignoring rocketry. From 1975 - 2005, the Shuttle program and the Space Station ate up the NASA budget.
Thanks Nixon for offing Apollo and pushing that system that was just an expensive astronaut killer.
The lessons learned from the Space Station will be implemented for decades in the future.
About all we learned from the space station is how bad the health effects are from being in zero-g for a couple years at a time. And we already knew much of that from Skylab/Salyut/Mir.
I read an account somewhere that it was supposed to land, also. If it wasn’t, that isn’t a failure, just a still untested component of the system.
I read an account somewhere that it was supposed to land, also. If it wasn’t, that isn’t a failure, just a still untested component of the system.
That is first stage center or core stage
Second stage designed to burn dry and send payload out to Mars, went farther to asteroid belt
There were 135 space shuttle missions. Two had catastrophic failures. Was the Shuttle Program a success?
On an aside, would you fly into space on a rocket that had a 1 in 67.5 chance of failure?
Could you imagine if 1 in 67.5 crashed in regular commercial air flights? There were about 36,800,000 commercial flights in 2017. If they had the Space Shuttle record, there would have been 545,185 crashes, or just under 1500 a day.
I’ll bet flights would be cheaper.
Let’s clarify:
“Gets subsidies” means “had less money confiscated as taxes”, NOT “got a big check without earning it”.
There’s a huge difference between “I kept mine” vs “I got yours”.
“But Musk doesn’t do just that, he takes taxes.”
No, he doesn’t.
Not paying taxes is NOT the same as getting taxpayer money.
Keeping your own earned money vs being given money taken from others.
Big difference.
If Musk isn’t the modem poster boy for capitalism, what would he have to do to become it?
Roadster in space looks fake because the cameras, vacuum, dust, and lighting all add up to visuals we’re not used to seeing.
Yes it wasn’t a perfect success.
It did, however, achieve the primary goal: got cargo to orbit, capable of hauling 64 tons, multiple simultaneous booster landings, and not having the whole thing blow up in a $90M explosion.
Accuracy to Mars wasn’t paramount.
Recovering all 3 boosters wasn’t paramount.
Musk has a project to place several thousand communications satellites into low orbit (800 km) to form an overlapping swarm, such that a transceiver ground station is in contact with about four at any given moment. This is proposed to provide gigabit speed connectivity and phone service anywhere on earth. His proposal is one of at least a half-dozen pursuing this as a goal. Low cost self-launch capability is a plus toward achieving a viable business, one providing orbital communications services.
I’m ready for the addition of another service option, in this case high capacity internet on-the-go, anywhere, and portable.
IMHO people don’t grasp the magnitude of what Musk has achieved.
By showing what a private company and motivated entrepreneur can achieve, on his own, we have just goosed the exploration of space. Its like in 1500 the King of Spain telling everyone - go to the New World, its open for business!
Also, who is freaking out? The military-political apparatchiks of China and Russia. They very much want a model where all space is controlled from the top down. They definitely do NOT want to compete with US entrepreneurs, because they will fall behind very quickly.
“They definitely do NOT want to compete with US entrepreneurs, because they will fall behind very quickly.”
Seems like Musk, very quickly, has just leapfrogged everyone.
He’s made USA space exploration exciting again.
Good stuff.
(I remember Apollo 1, we have the Roger Chaffee (memorial) Planetarium near me in Michigan, and I was lucky to have witnessed the Apollo 8 launch in person as a kid.)
Russian oligarchs use ancient Soyuz tech to become rich.
Musk in a 2017 white paper said he only decided to become rich because his goal was to colonize Mars.
Simplistic, but there it is.
Tangent—
I believe the Iridium network People, already have 20-30 new replacement satellites in orbit as part of their newer constellation. (something like 120 total satellites.)
[if I recall, the Falcon-9 made 2 launches for Iridium in 2017?)
NASA imported talent through paperclip. Recruited former members of a 1930’s rocketry club that pointedly avoided Russian capture.
Once bureaucratic top-down thinking supplanted the X-program mindset, little original development continued. NASA post 1990’s devolved to a fed work program bringing pork to congressional districts.
This type critical assessment of government programs should be applied to much more than just NASA. All government programs should have a sunset provision requiring total re-assessment, rather than rubber-stamping appropriations to keep the beast shuffling along well past the expiration date.
The new Iridium constellation has 40 sats launched by 4 SpaceX launches in 2017, some launches on previously launched and landed first stages. There are 10 sats per launch. The final constellation will be 66 active Iridium sats, plus 9 more for in orbit spares. Total planned is 75 in orbit.
Vitaly Egorov: In the final accounting, landing a stage or making a superheavy rocket is a mathematical task, and we aren’t out of mathematicians. What we are out of is dreamers.
I can imagine the state-run space agency saying: "Comrade Egorov, we have considered your opinions and decided the 5 year plan will create more dreamers. How many do you need?"
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The claim to achieve an elliptical orbit with apogee near Mar’s orbit was a conservative engineering assertion, not the most optimistic possible performance capability. They in fact well exceeded that delta-v claim. The maximum dv achieved with a given lift-off weight is mathematically related to the ultimate heavy lift capacity to reach orbit.
The test flight was not laden to maximum design take-off weight, nor were the engines operated at maximum thrust for the test flight of a new vehicle configuration. This flight was a well instrumented engineering prototype measuring the stress reaction of the air-frame.
They actually pushed the center unit far above the typical FH launch velocity profile required to achieve LEO. This could be related to the testing of the second stage capabilities, to assure a direct to Geo-stationary orbit insertion for military payloads. It’s all related to what were the actual testing priorities.
Landing hardware on the drone ship has failed before from running out of consumables. Remember, it was the first ever test flight. They intended to push the capability boundaries to find the limits.
Of final consideration, all the asteroid mining guys just witnessed a delivery capability extending to near the orbit of Ceres in the belt. Think they missed that implication?
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