Posted on 05/21/2012 4:47:45 PM PDT by KevinDavis
Good luck again.. I'm sure they will make it..
Congratulations Space X!
The launch manifest for the Falcon 9 lists at least 3 more launches this year as well as the Falcon Heavy demo flight. Hopefully safe and routine flights will allay your doubts. Meanwhile, there was an Atlas V flight scrubbed earlier this month because of a faulty valve. Hmmm
I think you are ignoring the benefial economic consequences of reusable spacecraft.Imagine BOEING having to rebuild an airliner from scratch for every trip Only the very rich would ever partake in airplane journeys. Normal cargo flights would be non existant.
benefial= beneficial
“I think you are ignoring the benefial economic consequences of reusable spacecraft.”
Not really. The shuttle was a flawed concept from the beginning. The cost-per-pound-to-orbit was radically underestimated, and the ability to turn the vehicles around was radically underestimated.
A reusable craft makes some sense if it is small, and is indeed the payload itself - such as a re-entry vehicle only
A bulk cargo to space should be mostly non-reusable You should NEVER return a pound of anything placed in orbit unless you absolutely have to - it’s a waste of money and energy.
The airliner analogy is ridiculous. Actually that’s the line that was sold for the Shuttle - to make space “routine”. It turned out to be a lie. We dismantled a proven bulk-cargo to orbit system in the Saturn series so that the Shuttle would have “something to do”.
The shuttle was a failure, in terms of killing astronauts, in terms of the mostly pointless work it did in orbit, and in terms of making spaceflight “routine”, and in terms of pushing out mature systems that worked.
Lets just be honest about that before we move on to the next phase.
Of course the next generation lifter concept NASA is peddling looks remarkably like a Saturn V with strap-on SRB’s.....that should tell you something right there.
NASA should stick with the things its now good at - making powerpoint slides.
Let real men, real explorers, and real Americans do the work that America needs done.
First off, sorry about the mixup with Kevin - must have looked at the wrong post for the name.
“The least amount of cost doesn’t translate in the safest design.
I used to provide beacon readout for the eastern range at KSC and Canaveral. Sitting in on Space-X’s first launch gave me a detailed education on the problems with 9 motors.”
“The least amount of cost” for a commercial venture involves not having failures. Failures mean lower profits and fewer customers going forward. Clearly the first priority at SpaceX is reliability - as it should be, and must be for manned flight.
There is no inherent problem with nine motors - they provide redundancy in the case of one or more motor failures.
“There are certain things government does very well in, such as a standing military.....etc., also space flight.”
The “government” doesn’t “do” space flight - they pay contractors to build the vehicles.
“If cost is the holy grail for you, be prepared for a body count that will prove my point.”
LOL...first of all there won’t be any body count until SpaceX gets through the entire manned vehicle test regimen. That will mean a lot more Falcon + Dragon flights. SpaceX has eleven more cargo flights scheduled for the ISS, that’ll go a long way in working any kinks out. That’s a nice contract at $1.6 billion total.
“I have every hope of success....just not the direction that Space-X has taken it.”
We shall see - that was a picture perfect launch this morning, eh? All nine engines functioned flawlessly from what I saw and heard. Do you have any contradictory information?
BTW, it showed a strength of the Falcon system when they aborted the first launch. The spacecraft is anchored to the ground until it can be determined that all systems are within acceptable parameters after ignition. Unlike solid fuel motors, the liquid fueled Merlin engines can be shut down if needed.
“Once again, Atlas is probably going to prove the best platform.”
LOL! Which manned capsule is in the works for Atlas, again? Also Atlas has only half the payload capacity of Falcon Heavy. Atlas is mired in the defense contractor mentality, we’ll see if it can be made competitive on launch pricing.
At any rate, although I didn’t watch the launch live, it was exciting to see the video this morning and to hear that everything is on track including solar panel deployment. Now we’ll see how the orbital trials go - I’m definitely pulling for SpaceX to hit a home run on this mission!
Space X plans on returning the first and second stage of their spacecraft, as well as the capsule, in the future, reportedly to cut costs. To do that they will have to uprate their Merlin engines and carry the extra fuel for the return. That will cut their payload to orbit but according to Musk it’s necessary and feasible. Time will tell I guess.
If the shuttle did not do the roll maneuver after launch they would have put all those huge external tanks in orbit.
I will leave to the reader as an exercise what could have been done with over a hundred such tanks bolted together and provided with airlocks and such.
Bump, bump, and bump.
I am eagerly awaiting that Falcon Heavy launch.
Getting a 500 kilo payload to LEO is an accomplishment, but they are a long way away from where we were in the early 60’s.
The best rockets now are about twice as large as this one, and still one tenth that of the Saturn V.
Sure are. The mailroom boy at Space-X has more computing power in his cell phone than NASA had in total when man landed on the Moon.
Space-X has sent a capsule, designed for 7 persons, into orbit, and recovered it successfully. At a much, much lower cost than NASA managed.
The Saturn V was capable of launching about 262K lbs into LEO, while the Falcon Heavy is rated at 120K lbs into LEO.
Of course, everything is lighter and more functional today than it was in the '60s.
/johnny
Yes, the Falconheavy will be a significant step towards getting back to the 1970s.
Thank God for generation X. 40 years of boomers pissing away the space program.
Are you maintaining that if they loose 1 of 9 motors they will reach LEO?
“The “government” doesn’t “do” space flight - they pay contractors to build the vehicles.”
So then your insinuating that NASA is a free enterprise facilitator?
“Unlike solid fuel motors, the liquid fueled Merlin engines can be shut down if needed.”????????????????????
“Each Atlas V rocket uses a Russian-built RD-180 engine burning kerosene and liquid oxygen to power its first stage and an American-built RL10 engine burning liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen to power its Centaur upper stage.”
“LOL! Which manned capsule is in the works for Atlas, again?”
6 June 2011, 8 October, 30 November and 19 December;[41] and 7 January 2012, 30 April, and 7 May are attempted launch dates.
Falcon 9 heavy, 27 motors, sequencing hell.
If the nine primary are as hard to sequence with the ability to fire and see a problem, a la the attempt prior to eventual launch, how are they going to know about the other 18 on the two stages will sequence with the benefit of firing? I don't know.
Wow, you just blew my mind. What a freaking waste!
Like Jello Biafra, I blow minds for a living...
Fellow nerds...Check out the heavens-above website. SpaceX Dragon and ISS both visible for next week. Dragon magnitude 1.0 tomorrow AM at my location.
The Greatest generation ended the Apollo lunar missions.
The boomers engineered, developed and launched Mars rovers like this, nearly as big as a car, which will be roving around the surface of Mars in a couple of months.
Taken during mobility testing, this image is of the Mars Science Laboratory rover Curiosity, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
please add my name!
Interesting that the tires or roller tracks or whatever the term is have the two different types of tread. One section for sand, the other for hard rock? Spin until they get traction? And they also appear elliptical, not round, unless that is just my astigmatism.
Interesting you should ask.
Each wheel has a pattern which helps it maintain traction but also leaves patterned tracks in the sandy surface of Mars. That pattern is used by on-board cameras to judge the distance traveled. The pattern itself is Morse code for "JPL" (·--- ·--· ·-··) JPL: Jet Propulsion Laboratory
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