201–207 of 207 posts
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Weird bit of trivia... The pad the the rockets are landing on is a helipad (green perimeter lights). I suppose that makes sense for the video, since there isn't, AFAIK, an FAA spec for rocketpad lighting...
Takes off and lands vertically, same thing really :)
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Yet, NASA plans to use them on the new Space Launch System (SLS). Lobbyism?
Pretty much, yes. They want to keep the people making those engines employed. I think there might be some talk about eventually going to a renewed F-1 engine with a much reduced complexity and greater thrust than the original. There is a reason why the SLS is also known as the Senate Launch System.
It's more like wanting the companies that make them more profitable by requiring no retooling. I don't buy the "it's about the workers" thing.
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Not to mention the operational costs of a small navy to recover the rocket and transport it to a launch site.
I believe the "small navy" was a political and technological requirement and not something you'd need today. A single ship ought to do now. Political, because it was the Space Race, and a lot of it was about shows of force. And hey, why not? You have a bunch of carrier battle groups just waiting around for a hot war, and you need to have them out training anyway, so why not use them to pick up spacecraft from time to…
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Actually not true, but I suspect if you've been researching this you've discovered that. NASA has of course researched vertical landing techniques from the beginning, both with manned missions (Apollo) and robotic. However, it was "on the list" prior to the great de-funding and generally sat in the 'to be looked at' drawer from then on. The DC-X program, and others like it were spawned by private industry who were be…
>A six degree of freedom inertial unit was $125,000 in 1970 and resolved differences of .1G. A 9 degree of freedom unit from Sparkfun Electronics [1] is now $125, and reliably resolves 1/4096'th of a G. And the 1970s one weighed a lot more than 3.52 oz! http://i.imgur.com/nrm2fUb.jpg
All these things could have been done earlier if the politics was different.
DC-X used F-15 gyros / guidance with some software tweaks for example.
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Hey! Can you spare some career advice for an aspiring aero engineer that wants to work on the software side of the rocket? If you could share what you would consider is a good path to follow to get to where you are right now, I would really appreciate it. I am a programmer at heart but even that could not pull me away from my love of space ;) so I decided to study aerospace engineering first.
It's hard to say what works best since we have so many different backgrounds on the team. I think having an interesting portfolio of projects (professional or side / hobby type stuff) is important - make sure you've done some awesome stuff that you can map onto what you might do here. Also, hone your communication skills. A big part of success at SpaceX is being able to work with others in a team and quickly get idea…
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I've been on the Flight Software team at SpaceX for a little over three years. It feels a lot like a startup. The team is still relatively small and people are pretty passionate about what they are working on. The project variety is wide as well. Personally, I've gotten to work on low-level drivers and OS stuff, application code that runs on the vehicles and ground systems, Dragon's fault-tolerant platform, internal…
Would you guys consider remote work? I would love to work for SpaceX but I can't really justify uprooting my family and moving to the other side of the world for it :-\
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Traffic_in_Arms_R...
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A single stage rocket is desirable from a technological point of view since it sheds a lot of complexity: you don't have to deal with multiple engines, separation mechanisms, structural considerations, etc. However, multi-stage rockets can deliver more real payload to orbit, since they maximize the amount of fuel that is spent on taking the actual payload up there. Single-stage rockets need to carry a lot of dead mas…
>once it's cleared out most of the Earth's gravitational pull There's about 90% as much gravity at the altitude of the ISS. It's the atmosphere (and associated gravity drag), not the 1/r^2 scaling, that does it.