251–260 of 497 posts
Am i missing something, is the need to land vertically a requirement of a fragile fuselage? Seems wasteful to carry extra anything (in this case rocket propellant) to space, just to avoid having to re-right the rocket when you get it back on earth for a subsequent launch. Is extra fuel payload < landing gear or parachutes?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The current legs aren't flimsy, and they seem way less complicated than a gripper system would have to be. How would a gripper system handle off-centered landings? It would have to catch the falling rocket very quickly because there's not much fuel left in the tank to hover. Your proposed system would add a lot of complexity, all for the small decrease in launch mass.
> because there's not much fuel left in the tank to hover They can't hover at all, since the throttle doesn't go low enough. They need to do the landing perfectly, on a single try.
The long-term plan is to put humans on these right? How many years out is that?
I find the level of criticism for SpaceX on this site to be incredible. I understand this is a place for intelligent discussion, but sometimes I feel like I can't find a single thread on this site without someone in the comments presuming they are smarter than someone else.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
mass != momentum. I'm sure the thinking was that they wouldn't be able to slow the rocket down enough and that the speed of impact would punch through the barge. The autonomous control needed to get the rocket to slow down and stop at just the right time, while accounting for the movement of the barge, the movement of the rocket (eg: unpredictable wind impact), and the difficulty of gathering telemetry through the ro…
They initially aim the rocket to the side, then correct over to the barge after the engine lights, so a failure there doesn't cause a high-speed crash. Either way, the relative masses matter. It takes a lot more effort to punch a hole through something much more massive than your projectile! It doesn't make much sense that a light, nearly spent rocket stage would punch all the way through a massive barge. And even if…
I remain confused about why SpaceX is getting so much fanfare and praise. What have they accomplished that NASA didn't already accomplish during the Apollo missions? I know SpaceX is doing it all more cost effectively, because we have better technology, but have they actually accomplished anything tangible that NASA didn't a generation ago?
Nailing down the remaining operational workflow and they'll be able to achieve reusable rocketry, and bring down the cost of spaceflight significantly. It truly is the dawn of a new space age.
Here is the video http://www.space.com/32811-spacex-rocket-landing-jcsat-14-la... Hopefully we won't have the typical hacker news discussion about why the employees chant USA.
Yoo.Ess.Ae! Yoo.Ess.Ae! Yoo.Ess.Aeh! There. See. No harm, no foul. Anyways, as a non-American living in the US since 2001, I fail to see an issue with chanting USA, one way or another. It is an American company, with majority US employees, running this project (mainly) for an American entity (NASA), on US sovereign territory (or ocean?), using a significant chunk of US resources. So, it is their company and their cou…
NASA is the largest customer but so far they account only for about 50% of the launches. This one in particular was for JSAT (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSAT_Corporation), a Japanese company.
I'm a little uneasy with the chant mostly because I (want to) perceive it to be largely a commercial enterprise and this win should belong firstly to the company and people working there. Too bad that "SpaceX" just doesn't sound that great as a chant.
It reminds, a little, of certain systems where the state is held above all else, where patriotism is a requirement and a virtue in itself, and where there's no division between government and economy.
I find the level of criticism for SpaceX on this site to be incredible. I understand this is a place for intelligent discussion, but sometimes I feel like I can't find a single thread on this site without someone in the comments presuming they are smarter than someone else.
What is it about software development that brings out these kinds of people?
The long-term plan is to put humans on these right? How many years out is that?
One. They're planning on testing manned missions with their Dragon 2 and Falcon Heavy in mid-2017.
Unmanned failure doesn't bring much press.
Kill a few people and it will set back the whole program years.
How are non-US space agencies and companies (like ESA, Russia, Japan, China, etc) reacting to the SpaceX and Blue Origin achievements? Are they also testing similar things but we aren't hearing? Or they aren't threatened by the advances?
I attended a conference from the head of the CNES (Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales, ~ French NASA) in Paris a week ago and he talked about that. Ariane 6 is going to be built with a cost effective approach and trying to focus on market needs (3D printing of parts, reusability of the first stage, etc.) At first, concerning SpaceX, his group of experts told him that the design of the rocket wasn't going to work and…
Otherwise, I fear it'll be much too little, much t0o late.