This is my personal blog, which is about news in general. we have a collaboration, with Mashable. my blog It's called ''Find a way out of reality'' why?, I ask you that question. find a way to escape reality.
Starship's fifth test launch was a ringing success for SpaceX and it's booster-catching mechanical arms. Credit: SERGIO FLORES / Contributor / AFP via Getty Images
Progress can only be achieved after failure. Success is the accumulation of many failures. Something that those that seldom know success can understand.
I'm very sorry to have interrupt your comments section.pardon me. your profile popped up on people I may know. You got am amazing profile. I sent you a request but it's failed 😙 I guess it's because it's wasn't authorized by you . If you don't mind can you kindly send me a request or send me a dm on messenger if you don’t mind..
I'm very sorry to have interrupt your comments section.pardon me. your profile popped up on people I may know. You got am amazing profile. I sent you a request but it's failed 😙 I guess it's because it's wasn't authorized by you . If you don't mind can you kindly send me a request or send me a dm on messenger if you don’t mind..
The only tax dollars spent on SpaceX were for services. They received money from NASA to take supplies or people up to the ISS. Boeing received twice as much money and haven't had a successful flight yet. The SpaceX Falcon9 and Dragon capsule have been to orbit and back many times.
The end goal us reusability. All other rockets go to orbit and then burn up or crash into the ocean and sink. SpaceX has lowered the cost to orbit from close to a Billion dollars per launch to about 50-70 million with the Falcon9. The Starship will haul 150 tons instead of 20 tons and will refuel and be ready to fly again.
Yeah.. I am here in the comments to see these "yeah.. but" responses from Elon haters. They have a difficult time visualizing why this reusable system is worth it and the amazing engineering it takes to pull it off. It's just negativity
While musk Quasimodo sleeps with his vance couch. He grabbed what he likes best. That is why he is with dirty diaper don so he can grab a place in his dictaorship. Roughshod over people makes him feel powerful. While any of our military if dictator dump makes it in will fight on ruskie side against Europe.
Well that's nonsense. I'm waiting for that successful mission to Mars. We've had Space Shuttles, Space Stations, gone to the Moon none of which Musk has done yet. Now, he may accomplish those goals and I look forward to him doing so but one's take is false. NASA has accomplished quite a bit. They don't have the resources Musk has and he had the advantage of starting all of this by using technology that had been developed BY Nasa. Credit where it is due for both.
A government agency could not tolerate the failures that a private company can have in pursuit of success. Musk wouldn’t do well there and NASA would face considerable heat from politicians. I think it is better that he continue to operate on his own so he can achieve his goals unrestrained by a bureaucracy that would try and cut his budget or hem him in. A NASA engineer recently pointed out that they didn’t have the option of failure but in order to succeed one has to be prepared for it.
musk's failure rate has been significantly less than the government's. We need to make our government less risk adverse. We toasted a space capsul full of astronauts on the way to the moon. Unlike boeing, there's no indication that spacex has endangered anyone.
The FAA needs to become leashed and get out of the way of private space industry.
The FAA did NOT regulate NASA. And the FAA must be relegated into a proper supporting role which is to ensure the private space industry conforms to some basic static regulations.
Landing legs need to be light so that they can be launched but that make them fragile and non reusable.
Falcon 9 landing legs are "crushed" while absorbing the shock. So the "shock absorber" is transferred to a sturdier launch tower. You can see the shock absorber in video from perspective of tower.
Engines fire far away from ground. When falcon 9 lands, engines fire very close to ground and do a little damage to rocket and engines. But with tower landing, engines are like one a building away from the ground.
Rapid reusability as you can launch it from the same tower you landed it in.
Landing legs are heavy, which means that the rocket can carry less useful payload.
Incidentally, aircraft have the same problem, and there have been several attempts to get rid of landing gear on planes. None were really practical.
For example, one downside for aircraft is that every airport would need a "catch vehicle" on which the aircraft would belly-flop-land. But for a rocket, it's only ever going to land at a single place - the launch pad - so only one "catch mechanism" is needed, which changes the economics.
Elon can both be someone who does objectively bad things, while also being involved with positive things. Everyone should use their brains and be reasonable about all things rather than acting hysterical either for or against Elon. I am so tired of watching fellow humans be so stupid. If you think negative comments about Elon are always baseless you are wrong. If you think negative comments about Elon are always right you are wrong.
Woah, I must be on Reddit in a different dimension because someone has actually made a rational comment about Elon and it’s not downvoted into oblivion.
Like him or not, he enabled SpaceX to do this in some capacity, sure he’s not the engineer, but he still had a hand in making this happen and this is awesome, so good for him.
Although it seems that the net is always positive relative to most people in my eyes at least. Thus the pendulum should be in favor of Elon with kept criticisms that we should talk about in a civilized way.
It's clear though that the establishment has him in the bulls eye so every major media group pushes out everything negative every second they can. It's really sad to see.
An evaluation of which things he did that were positive vs negative will be grounded in your world view. And now more than any other time in modern history there is a significant split it how people perceive reality. There have been active efforts for decades to create alternative views of everything that relates to social and political issues. Once you establish a broad enough base of distortions of truth layered over a long enough period of time it is literally impossible to tell if what you believe is based on truth or lies unless you can somehow pull yourself out of the situation and view it objectively. Almost no one does that (even if they think they do). So your idea of a positive could be my idea of a negative despite us possibly having the same fundamental ethical views.
It removes the whole logistics of transporting the landed booster back to the tower. The final idea would be for these boosters to be so round-service ready that the service required once caught in the tower is minimal and they just can be refueled, re-mated to a new payload and take off again.
Yes, that’s exactly right. They want to be able to rapidly launch these. Also, removing the landing gear saves on weight which is a huge deal in space travel.
This booster is much, much larger and can't be transported by ship or road. Landing it on the launch pad is the only real way this booster can be reused.
Doing this unlocks sending up to 100 tonnes into orbit a day.
It's been talked about for years as a theoretical feat, but today it finally happened.
They’ll still be making profit with military contracts for the X-37B. It was only a few days ago that the one in orbit right now made some enormously unprecedented maneuvers using aerobraking; rather than just using aerobraking to lower the orbit with drag like other spacecraft, it used the lift generated by its wings to create astonishingly large changes to its orbital inclination.
What a time to be alive. This is such awesome news. And now we get to really learn what kind of stress this puts on the structure. The heat and vibration from the rickets. So awesome.
This is an amazing feat, though I wonder if the FAA will require extensive testing around the grab areas to check for cracks and stress on the hull. *Edited for British ignorance.
One of the main advantages of this system is the weight savings. Eliminating the need for landing legs means that the booster and Starship can carry more cargo or fuel, improving efficiency. In addition, because the booster is caught right at the launch site, there’s no need to transport it from a landing pad or drone ship far away, significantly reducing the time and logistical complexity involved in reusing the rocket. Mechazilla's design is a key innovation for SpaceX’s goal of making space travel as rapid and cost-effective as possible.
Cheers to Elon, SpaceX, and a future with fully and rapidly reusable rockets. I still can’t believe that worked on the first attempt. Crazy engineering.
A couple of reasons. Landing leg system for something that size would be heavy, requiring more fuel/thrust and decreasing payload. Less damage to the ground since it’s being caught higher up. Ability to refill and restock for next launch in an hour.
As a layman can somebody explain the benefit of landing the rocket in the launch tower? I assume it makes it easier/faster to launch again due to logistics?
The booster is 230ft tall, 30 ft in diameter and 200 tons empty. Flying it back is probably way easier and cheaper than bringing it back on barges and trucks. It certainly is faster.
When it comes to rockets there are basically two things that make them hard to reuse. And Moving parts are a huge one.
With traditional legs you not only have a metric buttload of extra moving parts, but those parts also become structural weakness that require constant maintenance and replacement as well as lengthy analysis periods post landing to refurbish them. Not to mention that they add in a whole bunch of weight. And that weight means you either need to cut into your carying capacity (more expensive launches) or make a bigger rocker, with bigger landing legs.
So with that said, you can probably see why being able to complete remove those elements from the rockets, and move them to the launch/landing infrastructure itself is a much better mechanism for long-term reusability.
Exactly this. You land it back at base, check it over, then send it back up again.
It’s the size of a skyscraper. Much too large to transport long distances. It’s only when you see a photo with people in the picture that you can really understand how big it is.
Funny how the company that elon ignores is the only one doing well. Tesla just had actors in robot suits as a big receal (for real lol) and twitter is worth 30% of the value as when he purchased it.
He doesn't ignore it, but he at least is smart enough to realize he's not smart enough to do much of anything there except toss out ideas his engineers will figure out... and promote shit.
That’s awesome. I wish Elon wasn’t a man child. But he has the greatest American engineering minds working for him and we are living through the age of creating inter-planet travel. Hope we see it happen in our lifetime.
Exactly. NASA’s share of the national budget is less than 1/10th of what it was during the height of the Apollo program, yet the scope of their operations is a dozen times larger. Congress wants NASA to do more and then gives them even less money to do it, and any time they start making progress, they cancel the program so that they can dump another few billion dollars into a decade-long war that they eventually give up on and go home from.
NASA builds the payloads; SpaceX is basically just a glorified delivery truck driver. It’s the payload that does the actual mission, whereas the SpaceX rockets just deliver it to space.
Have you heard of Starlink? Apparently it's responsible for most of the satellites in orbit around the Earth. Every one designed and built by SpaceX.
SpaceX is going to Mars. That's their charter. The space delivery business for NASA and others is side jobs for gas money. Yes, A NASA contract saved the company once long ago so that NASA could encourage another provider of services they need. It wasn't charity and they got their money's worth. When you're bootstrapping such a big enterprise there are going to be challenges like that. It doesn't make that one job the primary mission.
Because every four to eight years a guy takes their best made plans and projects and sweeps them into the dustbin to stamp his own name on the amazing new space, science and technology projects that his successor will do the same thing to.
Rapid reusability (rather than towing it back to land on a barge, they just swing the catch arms over and place it back down on the launch pad), increasing payload capacity by removing unnecessary weight, massively reduced cost to launch to orbit… I’m pretty sure that ALL of those get us closer to Mars.
Really cool! Although a feat to accomplish am not sure why we didn’t do this before a few years ago when the rocket landed back on the launch pad. I guess things just take time to get to..
A few years ago, the technology to do this didn’t exist yet - it was still being researched. That’s why we didn’t do it years ago; you can’t use a technology that hasn’t been invented yet.
Landing a booster the size of a 20-story skyscraper on top of the Empire State Building would be enormously impressive, the hell are you going on about?
Progress can only be achieved after failure. Success is the accumulation of many failures. Something that those that seldom know success can understand.
ReplyDeleteAmazing!
ReplyDeleteThat's really impressive
ReplyDeleteSo, something NASA has already accomplished
ReplyDeleteNASA has never recovered an orbital class booster, or any booster for that matter.....
DeleteNobody has done this before.
DeleteWhere are Elon's haters?
ReplyDeleteThe way Mashable loves Leon. 🤮
ReplyDeleteAbsolutely incredible. Tesla and SpaceX are achieving just insane things these days.
ReplyDeletehttps://x.com/TeslaHype/status/1845452580958216247
If you're interested in cryptocurrencies investment join telegram for more details
ReplyDelete👇 👇 https://t.me/+Gm354fCRPYpiYzE0
Were so clever, pity we couldn't keep the planet habitable!
ReplyDeleteElon is literally the smartest engineer in the world. Hands down.
ReplyDeleteI'm very sorry to have interrupt your comments section.pardon me. your profile popped up on people I may know. You got am amazing profile. I sent you a request but it's failed 😙 I guess it's because it's wasn't authorized by you . If you don't mind can you kindly send me a request or send me a dm on messenger if you don’t mind..
Deletehe sure is good at hiring the best engineers
DeleteSo much for woke Mashable constantly hating on Elon. Don’t bet against Elon!
ReplyDeleteWrong picture!!
ReplyDeleteAwesome 👍
ReplyDeletehttps://giphy.com/gifs/iwmuEXy2cgsTuRue7i
ReplyDeleteI'm very sorry to have interrupt your comments section.pardon me. your profile popped up on people I may know. You got am amazing profile. I sent you a request but it's failed 😙 I guess it's because it's wasn't authorized by you . If you don't mind can you kindly send me a request or send me a dm on messenger if you don’t mind..
DeleteAnd the question is, how much US tax dollars were used for this exercise?
ReplyDeleteA whole lot less tax dollars than we gave to boeing. I prefer we give our money to successful companies and not give our money to failures like Boeing
DeleteThe only tax dollars spent on SpaceX were for services. They received money from NASA to take supplies or people up to the ISS. Boeing received twice as much money and haven't had a successful flight yet. The SpaceX Falcon9 and Dragon capsule have been to orbit and back many times.
DeleteWe don't know it will be a failure until the launch or recovery. SpaceX has also had their series of failures as well. No one is immune from that.
DeleteTotally amazing. But totally unsustainable. Carrying up extra fuel to land with? I’d like to see what their end goal is.
ReplyDeleteCheaper to carry the extra fuel than to build a whole new missile.
DeleteThe end goal us reusability. All other rockets go to orbit and then burn up or crash into the ocean and sink. SpaceX has lowered the cost to orbit from close to a Billion dollars per launch to about 50-70 million with the Falcon9. The Starship will haul 150 tons instead of 20 tons and will refuel and be ready to fly again.
DeleteIt's not a missile.
DeletePeople want to whine and complain about Musk but dont want to acknowledge how significant this is.
ReplyDeleteYeah.. I am here in the comments to see these "yeah.. but" responses from Elon haters. They have a difficult time visualizing why this reusable system is worth it and the amazing engineering it takes to pull it off. It's just negativity
DeleteSpace X is restoring America's swagger after these last four years of OBiden and Konmalahamas
ReplyDeletePolitics doesn't even play into this. It's a technological achievement and should be admired as that.
DeleteAbsolutely amazing. Great job SpaceX.
ReplyDeleteThat was a super cool landing. Musk made it happen!!
ReplyDeleteGreat job Musk!!!! Coming up soon, Mars!
ReplyDeleteWhile musk Quasimodo sleeps with his vance couch. He grabbed what he likes best. That is why he is with dirty diaper don so he can grab a place in his dictaorship. Roughshod over people makes him feel powerful. While any of our military if dictator dump makes it in will fight on ruskie side against Europe.
ReplyDeleteWOW Everything in this comment is false and 100% ignorance.
DeleteWell, it's his opinion.
DeleteElon musk has pulled off an incredible feat that neither United states government, nasa or boeing could accomplish.
ReplyDeleteWell that's nonsense. I'm waiting for that successful mission to Mars. We've had Space Shuttles, Space Stations, gone to the Moon none of which Musk has done yet. Now, he may accomplish those goals and I look forward to him doing so but one's take is false. NASA has accomplished quite a bit. They don't have the resources Musk has and he had the advantage of starting all of this by using technology that had been developed BY Nasa. Credit where it is due for both.
Deleteimagine if we could put musk in charge of nasa.
DeleteA government agency could not tolerate the failures that a private company can have in pursuit of success. Musk wouldn’t do well there and NASA would face considerable heat from politicians. I think it is better that he continue to operate on his own so he can achieve his goals unrestrained by a bureaucracy that would try and cut his budget or hem him in. A NASA engineer recently pointed out that they didn’t have the option of failure but in order to succeed one has to be prepared for it.
Deletemusk's failure rate has been significantly less than the government's. We need to make our government less risk adverse. We toasted a space capsul full of astronauts on the way to the moon. Unlike boeing, there's no indication that spacex has endangered anyone.
DeleteGiving up on the space shuttle essentially took us out of the game and if not for elon musk, we wouldn't have very many options right now.
DeleteThe FAA needs to become leashed and get out of the way of private space industry.
ReplyDeleteThe FAA did NOT regulate NASA. And the FAA must be relegated into a proper supporting role which is to ensure the private space industry conforms to some basic static regulations.
It was an amazing accomplishment. Something the Federal government could never do if it wanted to.
ReplyDeleteThis is a remarkable technological achievement. Good for Space X.
ReplyDeleteNow do it 1000 more times.
ReplyDeleteLook at all that pollution and massive heat. I guess we have given up on that environment stuff. Good to know.
ReplyDeleteNOT A EV CRYING
DeleteFew things
ReplyDeleteNo landing legs so weight is reduced.
Landing legs need to be light so that they can be launched but that make them fragile and non reusable.
Falcon 9 landing legs are "crushed" while absorbing the shock. So the "shock absorber" is transferred to a sturdier launch tower. You can see the shock absorber in video from perspective of tower.
Engines fire far away from ground. When falcon 9 lands, engines fire very close to ground and do a little damage to rocket and engines. But with tower landing, engines are like one a building away from the ground.
Rapid reusability as you can launch it from the same tower you landed it in.
Less parts so less things to fail.
Why let it land if you can catch it?
DeleteNext step is refueling without landing at all. Take everything out of the equation!
DeleteMagnets, really big magnets, just have it hover there like my desk ornament.
DeleteLanding legs are heavy, which means that the rocket can carry less useful payload.
DeleteIncidentally, aircraft have the same problem, and there have been several attempts to get rid of landing gear on planes. None were really practical.
For example, one downside for aircraft is that every airport would need a "catch vehicle" on which the aircraft would belly-flop-land. But for a rocket, it's only ever going to land at a single place - the launch pad - so only one "catch mechanism" is needed, which changes the economics.
Reusable rocket boosters were thought to be impossible and spaceX pulls it off and makes it a weekly occurrence.
ReplyDeleteNow they’ve brought this to reality as well
We are going for a science victory
ReplyDeleteThis is our third modern match too. There’s been 2 culture victory’s so far.
DeleteGotta put on my hazmat suit before reading these comments.
ReplyDeleteCatching the booster was Elons idea, has been for years.
ReplyDeleteAnother confirmation by Tom Mueller
https://x.com/lrocket/status/1845486565591798164
Where all the Elon haters now
ReplyDeleteElon can both be someone who does objectively bad things, while also being involved with positive things. Everyone should use their brains and be reasonable about all things rather than acting hysterical either for or against Elon. I am so tired of watching fellow humans be so stupid.
DeleteIf you think negative comments about Elon are always baseless you are wrong.
If you think negative comments about Elon are always right you are wrong.
Woah, I must be on Reddit in a different dimension because someone has actually made a rational comment about Elon and it’s not downvoted into oblivion.
DeleteLike him or not, he enabled SpaceX to do this in some capacity, sure he’s not the engineer, but he still had a hand in making this happen and this is awesome, so good for him.
Although it seems that the net is always positive relative to most people in my eyes at least. Thus the pendulum should be in favor of Elon with kept criticisms that we should talk about in a civilized way.
DeleteIt's clear though that the establishment has him in the bulls eye so every major media group pushes out everything negative every second they can. It's really sad to see.
An evaluation of which things he did that were positive vs negative will be grounded in your world view. And now more than any other time in modern history there is a significant split it how people perceive reality. There have been active efforts for decades to create alternative views of everything that relates to social and political issues. Once you establish a broad enough base of distortions of truth layered over a long enough period of time it is literally impossible to tell if what you believe is based on truth or lies unless you can somehow pull yourself out of the situation and view it objectively. Almost no one does that (even if they think they do). So your idea of a positive could be my idea of a negative despite us possibly having the same fundamental ethical views.
DeleteLink to video: https://x.com/spacex/status/1845442658397049011?s=46&t=e3kDIjYDCHu-Id6V6XqtpA
ReplyDeleteThis is all I thought about. Ha
ReplyDeleteThey happened in 2022. SJ-21
DeleteWow! My hat is off to all of the incredible engineers and scientists who are solely responsible for this achievement.
ReplyDeleteHell yeah, well done Elon and team! Great step forward for humanity!
ReplyDeleteCongrats to Elon and his team for a historic achievement
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
ReplyDeleteIt removes the whole logistics of transporting the landed booster back to the tower. The final idea would be for these boosters to be so round-service ready that the service required once caught in the tower is minimal and they just can be refueled, re-mated to a new payload and take off again.
DeleteYes, that’s exactly right. They want to be able to rapidly launch these. Also, removing the landing gear saves on weight which is a huge deal in space travel.
DeleteAn amazing feat indeed. I wonder how this will change the trajectory of rocket descension
ReplyDeleteCan someone explain why catching it is such a big deal? They were landing boosters a few years ago from what I remember
ReplyDeleteThis booster is much, much larger and can't be transported by ship or road. Landing it on the launch pad is the only real way this booster can be reused.
DeleteDoing this unlocks sending up to 100 tonnes into orbit a day.
It's been talked about for years as a theoretical feat, but today it finally happened.
Thanks! Wow, I can appreciate it much more now, that's crazy
DeleteThe new future of space exploration is here.
ReplyDeleteNext Olympic event: sub-orbital javelin catching.
ReplyDeleteMINDBLOWING!
ReplyDeleteBoeing space and defense is cooked
ReplyDeleteThey’ll still be making profit with military contracts for the X-37B. It was only a few days ago that the one in orbit right now made some enormously unprecedented maneuvers using aerobraking; rather than just using aerobraking to lower the orbit with drag like other spacecraft, it used the lift generated by its wings to create astonishingly large changes to its orbital inclination.
DeleteWhy am I not hearing about this shit besides here. I hate all we get is negative Boeing news.
DeleteWhat a time to be alive. This is such awesome news. And now we get to really learn what kind of stress this puts on the structure. The heat and vibration from the rickets. So awesome.
ReplyDeleteThis is an amazing feat, though I wonder if the FAA will require extensive testing around the grab areas to check for cracks and stress on the hull.
ReplyDelete*Edited for British ignorance.
That would be the FAA, not the FCC. SpaceX will do these checks anyway, because this type of launch/landing is expected to happen many more times.
DeleteWhy do you wonder that? Of course extensive testing would be done regardless.
DeleteThat was so cool!
ReplyDeleteThat is awesome, true engineering at its finest
ReplyDeleteWhen will they start doing commercial flights with it?
ReplyDeleteWhat's the advantage of this over just landing it?
ReplyDeleteWeight savings and simplified systems from removing the landing gear.
DeleteSimplified logistics for rehabilitation and relaunch.
One of the main advantages of this system is the weight savings. Eliminating the need for landing legs means that the booster and Starship can carry more cargo or fuel, improving efficiency. In addition, because the booster is caught right at the launch site, there’s no need to transport it from a landing pad or drone ship far away, significantly reducing the time and logistical complexity involved in reusing the rocket. Mechazilla's design is a key innovation for SpaceX’s goal of making space travel as rapid and cost-effective as possible.
ReplyDeleteCheers to Elon, SpaceX, and a future with fully and rapidly reusable rockets. I still can’t believe that worked on the first attempt. Crazy engineering.
ReplyDeleteI’m totally amazed at the engineering here but why?
ReplyDeleteA couple of reasons. Landing leg system for something that size would be heavy, requiring more fuel/thrust and decreasing payload. Less damage to the ground since it’s being caught higher up. Ability to refill and restock for next launch in an hour.
DeleteAs a layman can somebody explain the benefit of landing the rocket in the launch tower? I assume it makes it easier/faster to launch again due to logistics?
ReplyDeleteThe booster is 230ft tall, 30 ft in diameter and 200 tons empty. Flying it back is probably way easier and cheaper than bringing it back on barges and trucks. It certainly is faster.
DeleteWhen it comes to rockets there are basically two things that make them hard to reuse. And Moving parts are a huge one.
DeleteWith traditional legs you not only have a metric buttload of extra moving parts, but those parts also become structural weakness that require constant maintenance and replacement as well as lengthy analysis periods post landing to refurbish them. Not to mention that they add in a whole bunch of weight. And that weight means you either need to cut into your carying capacity (more expensive launches) or make a bigger rocker, with bigger landing legs.
So with that said, you can probably see why being able to complete remove those elements from the rockets, and move them to the launch/landing infrastructure itself is a much better mechanism for long-term reusability.
Exactly this. You land it back at base, check it over, then send it back up again.
DeleteIt’s the size of a skyscraper. Much too large to transport long distances. It’s only when you see a photo with people in the picture that you can really understand how big it is.
no complicated foldable landing legs with shock absorption systems required (which would cut into the mass to orbit potential).
DeletePretty cool to watch. I'm still never going to mars though
ReplyDeleteThat's got to be about as difficult as catching your own shit with a pair of tongs after jumping off a trampoline.
ReplyDeleteKuddos to all the incredible engineers and people who worked on the project !
ReplyDeleteFunny how the company that elon ignores is the only one doing well. Tesla just had actors in robot suits as a big receal (for real lol) and twitter is worth 30% of the value as when he purchased it.
ReplyDeleteHe doesn't ignore it, but he at least is smart enough to realize he's not smart enough to do much of anything there except toss out ideas his engineers will figure out... and promote shit.
DeleteThat’s awesome. I wish Elon wasn’t a man child. But he has the greatest American engineering minds working for him and we are living through the age of creating inter-planet travel. Hope we see it happen in our lifetime.
ReplyDeleteWhy does NASA suck so much?
ReplyDeleteMany of the top people at SpaceX worked at NASA... so, it's a strategic/money problem.
DeleteLacks consistent funding and vision. Both come from congress.
DeleteExactly. NASA’s share of the national budget is less than 1/10th of what it was during the height of the Apollo program, yet the scope of their operations is a dozen times larger. Congress wants NASA to do more and then gives them even less money to do it, and any time they start making progress, they cancel the program so that they can dump another few billion dollars into a decade-long war that they eventually give up on and go home from.
DeleteNASA builds the payloads; SpaceX is basically just a glorified delivery truck driver. It’s the payload that does the actual mission, whereas the SpaceX rockets just deliver it to space.
DeleteHave you heard of Starlink? Apparently it's responsible for most of the satellites in orbit around the Earth. Every one designed and built by SpaceX.
DeleteSpaceX is going to Mars. That's their charter. The space delivery business for NASA and others is side jobs for gas money. Yes, A NASA contract saved the company once long ago so that NASA could encourage another provider of services they need. It wasn't charity and they got their money's worth. When you're bootstrapping such a big enterprise there are going to be challenges like that. It doesn't make that one job the primary mission.
Because every four to eight years a guy takes their best made plans and projects and sweeps them into the dustbin to stamp his own name on the amazing new space, science and technology projects that his successor will do the same thing to.
DeleteEngineers do all the remarkable work, Elon fires them all right before this, then takes all the credit and money for it.
ReplyDeleteSCIENCE IS WONDERFUL.
ReplyDeleteElon IS the SCIENCE. make this man president already (forget nationality rules)
The American public are truly grateful for this science minded business genius.
It seems like a stunt. How does it get us closer to Mars? Are we really thinking Mars at this point?
ReplyDeleteRapid reusability (rather than towing it back to land on a barge, they just swing the catch arms over and place it back down on the launch pad), increasing payload capacity by removing unnecessary weight, massively reduced cost to launch to orbit… I’m pretty sure that ALL of those get us closer to Mars.
DeleteReally cool! Although a feat to accomplish am not sure why we didn’t do this before a few years ago when the rocket landed back on the launch pad. I guess things just take time to get to..
ReplyDeleteA few years ago, the technology to do this didn’t exist yet - it was still being researched. That’s why we didn’t do it years ago; you can’t use a technology that hasn’t been invented yet.
DeleteThey could land it on top the the empire state building and I wouldn't give a fuck...
ReplyDeleteLanding a booster the size of a 20-story skyscraper on top of the Empire State Building would be enormously impressive, the hell are you going on about?
Delete