SpaceX Barge Landing, from on-barge GoPro

Jim_R said:
Oh, come on. It's not that simple. If it were, then why is NASA SpaceX's biggest customer? Or is NASA not a bureaucratic agency? You can't have it both ways.



SpaceX is the new kid. Their capabilities don't yet match what ULA (why do you keep saying "Boeing"?) can provide in terms of payload-to-orbit, so some missions simply can't fly on SpaceX's current rockets. Until recently, SpX didn't have the flight history to demonstrate reliable access to space on the F9. They're now elbowing their way up to the table, and it seems likely they'll become a competitive option for DoD flights going forward.







Um....first, Titans were a Martin product, so would belong to Lockheed today if they were still flying. Second, they're not flying anymore: http://www.space.com/1697-final-titan-rocket-launch-ends-era.html
Click to expand...


Who knows? Who's screwing which Congresscritter?

They finally shelved the things, eh? I missed it.

Yawn.

Let's see. We once had this thing that would carry pretty damn big payloads, a bunch of people, and land on a runway... Could do oodles of science missions, assemble large objects in orbit, launch large satellites, etc.

But the public got bored so we scrapped it and started over instead of engineering in incremental changes over time...

Now the public is back to rah-rahing for a completely unnecessary upright landing on a barge, since it's the only game in town.

Sounds like pretty smart PR, if you ask me. Give it a "challenge" feel so folks think we didn't scrap a manned program for nothing.

The "genius" shall be hailed. LOL.

Let us all know when it's human-rated, a real challenge. I'll have a lot more grey hair by then. And we'll be all the way back... to Apollo.

(Yeah I know there are groups working on the other human thing. It'll be ten years before it flies. The full sized thermal protection test mockup just was flown into Colorado three or so weeks ago on a Super Guppy.)
 
Don't get me wrong. I'm not a SpaceX fanboy, and I agree with much of your assessment of Elon Musk.

But the fact remains that SpaceX is no longer all hat and no cattle. They've accomplished real results, and are doing things today that as recently as 15 years ago, experts in the field didn't think SpaceX could achieve. It's silly to pooh-pooh what they've accomplished to-date, and perhaps sillier to pooh-pooh their chances for future success.

That doesn't mean you have to pick up the pom poms that so many folks in the peanut gallery like to carry for them, though.
 
Last edited:
Checkout_my_Six said:
reusable (like hours later).....and recoverable.....ain't the same.
Click to expand...

The latest story is that they want upright landings for passenger transport. So what's the TBO on the rocket motors? How are you going to thoroughly inspect a spaceship and deem it worthy of carrying passengers in hours? Would you go on the third or fourth flight in a day? Not me.
 
Lindberg said:
The latest story is that they want upright landings for passenger transport.
Click to expand...

Source? I've not seen any indication that SpX is currently interested in passenger flights, except for carrying crews to/from ISS. Dragon v2 is way overdesigned for the sorts of suborbital/short-orbital space tourism that folks like Branson are competing for.
 
SpaceX's pace of development of real, reliable, commercially successful, rockets is just unmatched in the history of aerospace.

You have to go back to the Mercury/Gemini and Polaris missile projects to find any comparable technical success stories, and those projects had essentially unlimited budgets.
 
Yeah, I don't get the SpaceX hate at all. New players doing things. If it were so easy NASA would have had their next generation launcher on line long ago. Virgin Galactic would be flying paying passengers. Space isn't easy, indeed it makes hard look easy. I am nothing but impressed at the progress of Space X and wish them well.
 
Lindberg said:
The latest story is that they want upright landings for passenger transport. So what's the TBO on the rocket motors? How are you going to thoroughly inspect a spaceship and deem it worthy of carrying passengers in hours? Would you go on the third or fourth flight in a day? Not me.
Click to expand...

the same way you do your aircraft between flights.....;)
 
denverpilot said:
Who knows? Who's screwing which Congresscritter?

They finally shelved the things, eh? I missed it.

Yawn.

Let's see. We once had this thing that would carry pretty damn big payloads, a bunch of people, and land on a runway... Could do oodles of science missions, assemble large objects in orbit, launch large satellites, etc.

But the public got bored so we scrapped it and started over instead of engineering in incremental changes over time...

Now the public is back to rah-rahing for a completely unnecessary upright landing on a barge, since it's the only game in town.

Sounds like pretty smart PR, if you ask me. Give it a "challenge" feel so folks think we didn't scrap a manned program for nothing.

The "genius" shall be hailed. LOL.

Let us all know when it's human-rated, a real challenge. I'll have a lot more grey hair by then. And we'll be all the way back... to Apollo.

(Yeah I know there are groups working on the other human thing. It'll be ten years before it flies. The full sized thermal protection test mockup just was flown into Colorado three or so weeks ago on a Super Guppy.)
Click to expand...

I grew up in the age of the Space Shuttle, and was disappointed it was retired, but it had to go. Don't get me wrong, it was an amazing piece of technology when it was built, but it never lived up to its promise. Initial estimates of the cost per flight were $43 million in 2011 dollars, actual costs were in the neighborhood of $450 million per flight in 2011 dollars.

Are capsules and splashdown landings 'Apollo-era' approaches? Yes. Do they work? Yes. Are they significantly cheaper than the Space Shuttle could ever have hoped to be? Absolutely.

Let's look at the numbers...

SpaceX:
$1.2 billion for 12 launches
$ / Launch: $100 million
Payload: 28,990 lbs
$ / lb: $3,450

Space Shuttle:
$ / Launch: $450 million
Payload: 53,600 lbs
$ / lb: $8,395

The development money NASA sunk into SpaceX was also a minor amount compared to the money they spent on the Shuttle development and the money they're currently spending on the SLS.

Can Elon Musk be a bastard? I have no doubt he can be. But he seems to be at least somewhat interested in solving problems as opposed to just making money as quickly as he can. IMO we need more people like him.
 
Interesting discussion.

Jim_R said:
Don't get me wrong. I'm not a SpaceX fanboy, and I agree with much of your assessment of Elon Musk.



But the fact remains that SpaceX is no longer all hat and no cattle. They've accomplished real results, and are doing things today that as recently as 15 years ago, experts in the field didn't think SpaceX could achieve. It's silly to pooh-pooh what they've accomplished to-date, and perhaps sillier to pooh-pooh their chances for future success.



That doesn't mean you have to pick up the pom poms that so many folks in the peanut gallery like to carry for them, though.
Click to expand...


I don't mind cheering the team's success. I'm getting a kick of those translating "Elon Musk isn't what his marketing says he is" to "SpaceX hate". LOL. Musk != SpaceX. Folks do have a strange way of equating a single human to a team effort here, though. Ha.


JimNtexas said:
SpaceX's pace of development of real, reliable, commercially successful, rockets is just unmatched in the history of aerospace.



You have to go back to the Mercury/Gemini and Polaris missile projects to find any comparable technical success stories, and those projects had essentially unlimited budgets.
Click to expand...


Different times. Technically a government program ALWAYs has an unlimited budget. Right up until it gets someone "un-electable". Spending rises with no correlation to income.

steingar said:
Yeah, I don't get the SpaceX hate at all. New players doing things. If it were so easy NASA would have had their next generation launcher on line long ago. Virgin Galactic would be flying paying passengers. Space isn't easy, indeed it makes hard look easy. I am nothing but impressed at the progress of Space X and wish them well.
Click to expand...


Again no SpaceX hate here. I find the upright landing unnecessary grandstanding that serves no significant purpose, but that's far from "hate". Not even close. And see the comment about Musk != SpaceX above.

Relating non-human-rated to human-rated is so far apart on the engineering spectrum, it's not even worth addressing. Space is hard, but human space flight is WAY harder.

Fredbob711 said:
I grew up in the age of the Space Shuttle, and was disappointed it was retired, but it had to go. Don't get me wrong, it was an amazing piece of technology when it was built, but it never lived up to its promise. Initial estimates of the cost per flight were $43 million in 2011 dollars, actual costs were in the neighborhood of $450 million per flight in 2011 dollars.



Are capsules and splashdown landings 'Apollo-era' approaches? Yes. Do they work? Yes. Are they significantly cheaper than the Space Shuttle could ever have hoped to be? Absolutely.



Let's look at the numbers...



SpaceX:

$1.2 billion for 12 launches

$ / Launch: $100 million

Payload: 28,990 lbs

$ / lb: $3,450



Space Shuttle:

$ / Launch: $450 million

Payload: 53,600 lbs

$ / lb: $8,395



The development money NASA sunk into SpaceX was also a minor amount compared to the money they spent on the Shuttle development and the money they're currently spending on the SLS.



Can Elon Musk be a bastard? I have no doubt he can be. But he seems to be at least somewhat interested in solving problems as opposed to just making money as quickly as he can. IMO we need more people like him.
Click to expand...


One could argue that trying to compare costs between something that first hit the design pages in the late 1960's/early 1970's and something designed starting in the 1990's, would always see such a drop in costs. Technology changed. An example would be even just the launch sequencer from the Shuttle era, that thing was a whole lot of stuff no one was doing... Fiber optic loop, redundant computers running different code at each workstation but each capable of running all the other's code and all had full access to all information busses, and custom communications protocols, etc. That was damned expensive in 1981. They're using consumer laptops on a commercial grade Gig-E IP network for the firing room now. They didn't create nor lower the cost of a significant number of their infrastructure systems. They were already cheaper.

The main thing that changed was the public opinion that NASA wasn't a national treasure and didn't deserve to revamp technologies they already knew, in lieu of a societal desire to move to privatization. That's fine, but when we try to boil it down to "NASA was expensive" that's really not a reason SpaceX should be (over-)lauded. SpaceX is doing some new stuff but not ALL new stuff.

Ultimately society wanted to kill human space flight for robots. That's also a significant difference.
 
denverpilot said:
Different times. Technically a government program ALWAYs has an unlimited budget. Right up until it gets someone "un-electable". Spending rises with no correlation to income.
Click to expand...

Oh, c'mon with the dumbed-down one-liner "explanations" of complex systems. That's too silly to even rebut.

I find the upright landing unnecessary grandstanding that serves no significant purpose...
Click to expand...
You're entitled to your opinion about the value of trying to develop a flyback booster, I suppose, but then others are also entitled not to take you seriously, too. One thing Elon Musk doesn't do is waste money for no reason. He sometimes spends lots of it on crazy-risky ventures...like, say, an all-electric car company, or a new-from-scratch rocket company...but he doesn't just light up wads of cash and burn it for fun. Musk gets plenty of media coverage just for his normal business activities. The amount of R&D money being poured into the flyback booster idea is ridiculously high, and would make zero sense if it were simply a PR stunt. It only makes sense to spend that kind of cash if you expect to get a business return out of it eventually. The fact is, to achieve some of the still-seemingly-crazy goals SpaceX has in terms of low launch costs, booster recovery is mandatory.

This idea has been with SpaceX from the get-go. They attempted to recover their original Falcon 1 booster, launched from Kwajalein, via splashdown in the sea, and failed on every attempt. Then, they tried to recover the Falcon 9 they're currently launching from Florida via splashdown in the sea, and after a couple of complete failures there, they changed tactics from the splashdown recovery approach to the flyback booster idea. It remains to be seen whether they can perfect it, but there's no denying that they are completely serious about figuring out some way to retrieve their boosters and reuse them to save money. It has always been, and will continue to be, a key factor in their long-term business model.

If SpX gets PR mileage out of their efforts, then I'm sure Musk is thrilled--he's never met a camera or microphone he didn't want to schmooze up to.

But to dismiss their booster recovery efforts as nothing more than a PR stunt is to admit utter ignorance of the company, its history, and it's stated goals.
 
Jim_R said:
Oh, c'mon with the dumbed-down one-liner "explanations" of complex systems. That's too silly to even rebut.
Click to expand...

Has government spending lowered in your lifetime? Has their income kept up with their outflow? There's quite literally nothing real about a government "budget" other than a popularity contest every few years. Think hard. Find facts that refute it. There's a lot of people who'd like you to believe there's substance there, but there's not. Might as well get over the charade and grow up. There's people who get to spend without bounds and people who don't, and you and I aren't invited to the without-bounds party.


Jim_R said:
You're entitled to your opinion about the value of trying to develop a flyback booster, I suppose, but then others are also entitled not to take you seriously, too. One thing Elon Musk doesn't do is waste money for no reason. He sometimes spends lots of it on crazy-risky ventures...like, say, an all-electric car company, or a new-from-scratch rocket company...but he doesn't just light up wads of cash and burn it for fun. Musk gets plenty of media coverage just for his normal business activities. The amount of R&D money being poured into the flyback booster idea is ridiculously high, and would make zero sense if it were simply a PR stunt. It only makes sense to spend that kind of cash if you expect to get a business return out of it eventually. The fact is, to achieve some of the still-seemingly-crazy goals SpaceX has in terms of low launch costs, booster recovery is mandatory.



This idea has been with SpaceX from the get-go. They attempted to recover their original Falcon 1 booster, launched from Kwajalein, via splashdown in the sea, and failed on every attempt. Then, they tried to recover the Falcon 9 they're currently launching from Florida via splashdown in the sea, and after a couple of complete failures there, they changed tactics from the splashdown recovery approach to the flyback booster idea. It remains to be seen whether they can perfect it, but there's no denying that they are completely serious about figuring out some way to retrieve their boosters and reuse them to save money. It has always been, and will continue to be, a key factor in their long-term business model.



If SpX gets PR mileage out of their efforts, then I'm sure Musk is thrilled--he's never met a camera or microphone he didn't want to schmooze up to.



But to dismiss their booster recovery efforts as nothing more than a PR stunt is to admit utter ignorance of the company, its history, and it's stated goals.
Click to expand...


I think you've missed the point. Musk's time in the popularity spotlight is now. He didn't take any significant risks with the car company, he calculated that government subsidies (and the popularity contest, whether it made any fossil sense or not) would pay his bills for that venture. Now he's marketing the SpaceX one.

As long as he has fans, he can pretty much do as he pleases. He has fans because there's a lot of stuff that needs to go up to make lots of folks money and he's the only car lot with even a four door Tercel on the lot. The TV commercials for the car are great on late night TV. Especially since there aren't any other car dealers.

He's riding the wave of popularity. More power to him. It's an age where folks easily forget what was accomplished yesterday through long hard work, and want to see the "new shiny" every few years.

It was Shuttle, then Arienne 5, now SpaceX for western pop culture. He knows how to milk the cow. No big deal. It'll be something else soon enough. There's nothing else to put on TV right now and 500 channels literally dying for advertisers.
 
denverpilot said:
Not really. I'm assuming that was a joke, though.
Click to expand...
not really, I was serious.....the Shuttle's budget was several billion a year. Divide that by the number of flights and it was down right expensive to operate. That money can now be spread across multiple start-ups and used to fund commercial space.
 
Uuuh lost in the babble is the Raison d'être for Elon spending all that money on the fly back booster.
Lets put it this way: How much flying would you do if after every flight you had to scrap the engine and the landing gear?
How much an hour would renting a Skyhawk cost?
That is the analogous cost per flight that NASA is paying out now - whether doing it for ourselves or renting the Russian version of a Skyhawk.

The simple fact that the Boeing (I keep calling them that because it annoys my buddy Jim which tickles me) and their henchmen commited felony crimes to block Space X from bidding on flights for NASA tells even a simpleton like me, that they are scared sheetless of him.
 
denverpilot said:
Has government spending lowered in your lifetime? ... Think hard. Find facts that refute it.
Click to expand...
Your post that I responded to didn't say "government spending". It said "a government program". So going back to that, absolutely I have seen government programs reduce spending. I've seen it for most of my career, and the testament is the empty office buildings in my neighborhood and the empty desks in my office building.

But it's nothing new. The giant Saturn V lawn darts at JSC, MSFC, and KSC are testament to the collapse of funding for the Apollo program...there wasn't money to launch those last three missions after the vehicles were (mostly) built. That was the most drastic example of a funding decline; NASA's budget peaked in 1965 and dropped to 1/3 of that funding level over the next 10 years, and has never again been more than about half that peak in equivalent dollars since, and never more than 1/4 of that funding in terms of fraction of the overall US budget.

So yeah, I've seen it, and those are facts. Didn't have to think too hard about it, either.

I think you've missed the point. Musk's time in the popularity spotlight is now. He didn't take any significant risks with the car company, he calculated that government subsidies (and the popularity contest, whether it made any fossil sense or not) would pay his bills for that venture. Now he's marketing the SpaceX one.
Click to expand...
So, then what's the point, exactly? It's that SpaceX was a ho-hum, can't miss venture...just open the doors and suckle at the never-ending gummint teat?

I guess that's why there's dozens of copycat shops out there now doing the same thing, since Elon showed 'em how easy it is? Just a little PR dust here, some braggadocio there, big smile for the cameras, and let the money start rolling in?

Either their success is all about Elon and his ability to ride the PR wave, and it's all going to fall apart when the cameras find some new shiny object to focus on, or else there's more to it than that and there's some real substance under the hood. Which is it?
 
Virgin, using the same technology as Space Ship One still doesn't have its commercial venture off the ground a decade later. And that's only suborbital. When are you guys going to wake up to the fact that space is HARD?
 
Space is really easy! Unless you do not go to space today...

up_goer_five.png
 
steingar said:
Virgin, using the same technology as Space Ship One still doesn't have its commercial venture off the ground a decade later. And that's only suborbital. When are you guys going to wake up to the fact that space is HARD?
Click to expand...
Space has been done. People have gone to space, they've gone far away from Earth, they've hung out in space for a long time, they've come back to Earth from space, and they've even done it in reusable vehicles. These companies are trying to do space differently. And they're all trying to do it differently from each other.

It's a very tech-startup mentality: "We can do it better." I can tell you that there is little more frustrating than talking to someone with that mentality about "best practices" or "industry standards." They would rather fail doing it differently than succeed doing it the same. That often leads to spectacular results. Sometimes good, sometimes bad.

Reinventing the wheel is hard. People usually caution against it. As long as they are not using my money, they can do whatever they want.
 
Lindberg said:
Space has been done. People have gone to space, they've gone far away from Earth, they've hung out in space for a long time, they've come back to Earth from space, and they've even done it in reusable vehicles.
Click to expand...

People have only scratched the surface of space...we've only gone a couple miles and space goes on for billions and billions of miles...


I just wanted to type that since it calls to mind an interesting but perhaps impossible concept, e.g. the "surface" of space
 
Clark1961 said:
People have only scratched the surface of space...we've only gone a couple miles and space goes on for billions and billions of miles...


I just wanted to type that since it calls to mind an interesting but perhaps impossible concept, e.g. the "surface" of space
Click to expand...

It's all a hologram anyway. :)
 
Jim_R said:
Your post that I responded to didn't say "government spending". It said "a government program". So going back to that, absolutely I have seen government programs reduce spending. I've seen it for most of my career, and the testament is the empty office buildings in my neighborhood and the empty desks in my office building.



But it's nothing new. The giant Saturn V lawn darts at JSC, MSFC, and KSC are testament to the collapse of funding for the Apollo program...there wasn't money to launch those last three missions after the vehicles were (mostly) built. That was the most drastic example of a funding decline; NASA's budget peaked in 1965 and dropped to 1/3 of that funding level over the next 10 years, and has never again been more than about half that peak in equivalent dollars since, and never more than 1/4 of that funding in terms of fraction of the overall US budget.



So yeah, I've seen it, and those are facts. Didn't have to think too hard about it, either.





So, then what's the point, exactly? It's that SpaceX was a ho-hum, can't miss venture...just open the doors and suckle at the never-ending gummint teat?



I guess that's why there's dozens of copycat shops out there now doing the same thing, since Elon showed 'em how easy it is? Just a little PR dust here, some braggadocio there, big smile for the cameras, and let the money start rolling in?



Either their success is all about Elon and his ability to ride the PR wave, and it's all going to fall apart when the cameras find some new shiny object to focus on, or else there's more to it than that and there's some real substance under the hood. Which is it?
Click to expand...


Both. Like you said, all the offices go empty sooner or later when the public isn't interested anymore. There was no actual lack of money for those empty building programs, since the money is spent whether there's a a deficit or not.

Keep going. Put it together. You're close. Empty offices mean popularity waned, not that there wasn't an endless supply of money.

SpaceX will build useful things, if that there's no doubt. It'd be damned near impossible not to. And their offices will be empty when Elon's star fades.

It takes both things. SpaceX doesn't work without "substance" (your word), but they also need the Hollywood stylings of a "genius" for the TV cameras.

Color me unimpressed with the "genius", I still know they need him.
 
steingar said:
Virgin, using the same technology as Space Ship One still doesn't have its commercial venture off the ground a decade later. And that's only suborbital. When are you guys going to wake up to the fact that space is HARD?
Click to expand...


No one has said it isn't. Where did you see that in the thread anywhere?

But your point is mixed anyway. Want to make money on space? That's even harder. Virgin has been trying to hit a price point.

Or do it accident free? Damn near impossible.

Aviation had the same problems in spades a century ago. And still does today. The accident record got a lot better over time. The cost, not so much, or we'd all be enjoying enough legroom to breathe in the high speed aluminum tubing business by now.
 
Hmm, we had some discussions in two different threads about Musk and his suckling from the government teat, making him "successful"...

I'll just put this here.

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hy-musk-subsidies-20150531-story.html

Genius? Probably not.

Smart enough to know where the sheep will beg government to spend via debt and helping to create the hype that drives it? Yup.
 
Whoa, did it just explode??


//
Confirmed, the rocket either broke apart or exploded after getting to max dynamic pressure during the first stage.
 
Last edited:
"You better take good care of that docking adapter, because we are both counting on it," Boeing's Chris Ferguson joked to his SpaceX counterpart, Hans Koenigsmann, during a news conference Saturday at Kennedy Space Center.
Click to expand...

Man, I did not see that coming at all. The landing was where I saw problems happening. After the camera swapped to the internal view on their stream because it flew behind a cloud, I thought to myself that it'd be really handy in figuring out what happened if something bad happened. And then I saw the breakup. :(

SpaceX @SpaceX
1m The vehicle experienced an anomaly on ascent. Team is investigating. Updates to come.

View details ·
Click to expand...
 
Last edited:
All these decades later, getting into space still isn't very easy. There has got to be a better way than strapping things to a rocket, lighting a fuse and crossing your fingers. :(
 
3393RP said:
I like the caption in the right of the frame...Max Q? Must have been!
Click to expand...

No kidding. It was actually a really well put together launch screen. I think "Florida, Earth" was a bit weird to say, but there was a fantastic layout of the timeline critical events along the bottom and when they would happen - from before launch checks to docking at the ISS. Along with little blurbs on the side about what each was and how it was important.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top