231–240 of 347 posts
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Addendum: well, crap. The future is still hard.
Your post was in my mind when I was watching the live stream. Your post was the first thing that I thought of when I realised what had happened.
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According to the One True Reliable Source of All Knowledge ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Resupply_Services ), SpaceX got $1.6 billion for 12 resupply missions, so that's about $133 million for the Falcon 9, the Dragon, and all the work involved in shooting them into space. I have no clue what their profit margin would be on that, but that at least gives us an upper limit.
There is a lot of money thrown around in commercial space, but it is not a particularly high-margin business. http://spacenews.com/39492orbital-eyes-broader-antares-busin... This cites Orbital Sciences (now Orbital ATK) CEO David Thompson as saying that the profit margin on CRS was about 5.5% and they hoped to reach 6% with CRS-3.
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Your post was in my mind when I was watching the live stream. Your post was the first thing that I thought of when I realised what had happened.
How are their posts that are 4 hours old when OP is only 3 hours old? How does that work?
From Elon just now via Twitter: "There was an overpressure event in the upper stage liquid oxygen tank. Data suggests counterintuitive cause. That's all we can say with confidence right now. Will have more to say following a thorough fault tree analysis."
Received telemetry from Dragon after the event - Gwynne (From Conference). Bit of positive news to take from this sad day.
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It's part of the job. I was working on a mission scheduled to be launched on Columbia when it blew up. Loss of life aside, that our vehicle blew up wasn't the end of the world. We just used another (which required some adjustment- orbiters weren't all the same).
Interesting - what were the differences between the orbiters that you had to account for?
There are probably other minor differences (I want to say there were some electrical interface issues), but that was the part that impacted my work.
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There is a lot of money thrown around in commercial space, but it is not a particularly high-margin business. http://spacenews.com/39492orbital-eyes-broader-antares-busin... This cites Orbital Sciences (now Orbital ATK) CEO David Thompson as saying that the profit margin on CRS was about 5.5% and they hoped to reach 6% with CRS-3.
So with a 5.5% margin the $1.6 billion contract would be expected to yield $88 million in profit? Given what I'm assuming are large R&D expenditures on top of launch-related costs, I wonder whether the business is sustainable.
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How many teslas started on fire? How many of them were not modified by their owners? How many have they sold in total?
Also relevant: how many gasoline-powered cars catch fire every day (lots), and how many Tesla fires injured their occupants (zero)?
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Received telemetry from Dragon after the event - Gwynne (From Conference). Bit of positive news to take from this sad day.
Yeah, it is too bad there wasn't some way to deploy the parachute system manually. It would be nice if the cargo could be saved.