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SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy successfully launches

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Re: SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy successfully launches

#771

Post by Stratoscope »

zouhair wrote: post #748

Devil's advocate, here. Am I the only one that find it quite disturbing that a private corporation taking over more public space? In the long run this stuff will bite humanity at large in the butt.

For another way to look at it, consider how quickly commercial airline travel became available after the Wright Brothers' first flight.

Compare that with how long it's been since Yuri Gagarin's first flight, and we're just now getting to where we can imagine passenger flights to space in the next few years.

Of course aviation may be easier than spaceflight, but I think a large part of the difference is that aviation was developed by companies trying to make a buck, while spaceflight until recently was dominated by governments who were in it for political purposes.

Myself, I'll take the faster progress you get from the profit motive.

I truly believe that if spaceflight had developed under private enterprise like aviation did, you and I would have been able to buy tickets years ago.

Re: SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy successfully launches

#772

Post by philjohn »

aquadrop wrote: post #752
nigwil_ wrote: post #743

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Platinum is USD$32K per KG, so if the platinum grid fins are 100KG, then they would cost > $300K each just for materials. With 4 per booster that might be a million dollar price tag for the grid fins.

That would be $3200k for each, but they are made out of titanium, not platinum, and most of the cost is in the work, not material. I'd like to know the price too though.

Yep - Titanium is notoriously difficult to work with.

Re: SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy successfully launches

#773

Post by bojanvidanovic »

oevi wrote: post #766
ggregoire wrote: post #712

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Official picture of the landing: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DVZ0NPoU0AAMWk6.jpg

Here they are in full resolution: https://www.flickr.com/photos/spacex/with/25254688767/

Wow, just wow! And huge congrats to SpaceX!

Re: SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy successfully launches

#775

Post by nickik »

zouhair wrote: post #748

Devil's advocate, here. Am I the only one that find it quite disturbing that a private corporation taking over more public space? In the long run this stuff will bite humanity at large in the butt.

I will never understand this sort of idea?

Did you think the future as a space fairing civilization would be all run by one government agency?

Do you think NASA would fly tourist to moon and the mars?

That seems absurd to me. We don't have government building cars, or airplanes, or trains or anything like that. Why should rockets be built by government?

If government wants to do something in space, they have a wealth of private options.

Re: SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy successfully launches

#776

Post by mathw »

z3t4 wrote: post #747
mikejb wrote: post #740

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The damage to the ASDS might be more of a problem. Depending on how badly it was damaged, it might not be available to catch other cores that could have landed otherwise

It look cool to have them land on their own, but wouldn't it be much cheaper to use parachutes and drop them in the ocean !? Either way they are going to take them apart down to each bolt and then reassemble again to make sure there are no faults. You don't simply fill it up and relaunch.

A large part of the work SpaceX are trying to do is get it so that they can pretty much just give it a fairly simple inspection, fill it up and relaunch it. They already need far less work between launches than the space shuttle did.

Re: SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy successfully launches

#777

Post by nickik »

dingo_bat wrote: post #547

It's such a shame that so many people with Elon kind of money aren't doing anything to transform us into a spacefaring species. Why doesn't apple have a mars program? What the fuck are people doing with all the money? Awesome work by spacex. They are peerless, except if you want to count massive superpower governments as peers.

Elon does not have so much money. SpaceX was buissness he started and he put all his money into it. He has only become really rich since.

Re: SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy successfully launches

#778

Post by msl »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #686
bryananderson wrote: post #662

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no way we could have achieved a similar volume of data without ISS. With ISS we get six astronaut-years of data every single year, and it’s got at least another decade in it, barring political stupidity. The argument could be made that we could have made do with less data, perhaps. But we could not have gathered this volume even once without ISS, let alone “many times”.

> There is no way we could have achieved a similar volume of data without ISS NASA spent 72 billion 2010 dollars on the ISS [1]. (Total cost is over $150 billion.) From Expedition 1 in 2000 through Expedition 53 in September, the ISS played host to 25,290 crew days of human occupation [2]. That comes to $2.8 million per day for NASA or over $5.9 million more generally. (Remember: this does not include the cost of get…

> We could have replicated the time spent on the ISS with a series of Apollo programs

I doubt an Apollo CSM [1] could support astronauts for a full year (although Mir could [2]). It has proven very handy to have a space station within reach of resupply missions and with enough space to house some gym equipment and a whole bunch of medical equipment. You might also have trouble finding people willing to spend much time beyond the Van Allen radiation belts [3] in an Apollo era space craft [4].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Command/Service_Module

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mir_EO-3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_TM-18

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Allen_radiation_belt

[4] https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/stereo/news/stereo_astron...

Re: SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy successfully launches

#780

Post by ygra »

geerlingguy wrote: post #556
latj wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did anyone else notice that the bottom two windows are not different cameras on different boosters? The guy even told us, "I know they look similar but they're different". Nope, they are the same. Watch how you can see two pads and they both land on the pad on the right. And you can see the second booster burning in the same orientation. The roads leading to the pads also make it easy to notice.

For this launch the live stream editors probably had 4x the normal amount of feeds to switch, so I’ll forgive them for a couple editing mishaps. I’m guessing they don’t have the same setup as would be at something like the Super Bowl... at least not yet :)

They also failed to show the fairing separation view when the music started and repeated that shot after the stream was essentially over. I guess a lot of things were just new and not quite like normal F9 launches (where presentation has been largely flawless for a while now).
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