51–60 of 72 posts
But why fueling continues after crew has boarded? What is the technical reason?
This is not considered less safe than fueling after the crew has boarded, and NASA agrees.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
See, I am not convinced at all. It is reasonable to assume that SpaceX has lower development cost (it would be hard to be more expensive than Ariane and ULA so). Which means SpaceX reaches the program break-even point earlier. Launch costs on the other hand are driven by production cost mainly. And there I don't see any systematic advantage that would explain the lower prices SpaceX is advertising. I know that there…
There's a NASA study that says that SpaceX has lower development cost. SpaceX has a volume advantage for manufacturing. SpaceX makes a lot of usually-contracted-out stuff in-house and at high volume, for example they are the #1 maker of composite rocket fairings. Horizontal assembly and payload integration is much cheaper than the way ULA/Arianespace assemble and launch rockets. The most recent announced number for F…
Musk seems to attract so, so many tinfoil hat type conspiracy theories. He's veering into being almost a Hank Rearden caricature. EDIT: The tinfoil bit was over the top, but he's such a lightning rod and attracts so much criticism and persecution from the entrenched interests he is trying to disrupt, that it starts to look like there is some shadowy cabal trying to bring him down. I rather like the guy, we need some…
Is the accusation of something being a "conspiracy theory" still a valid dismissal after Snowden?
Which makes it very weird to see people level that accusation against claims that an obviously-real group did an obviously-plausible thing, like "this agency that exists to gather information gathered a lot of information". Or in this case "this PR firm ran several articles to affect PR". Sure, it's a conspiracy in that they aren't admitting to doing it, but why is that surprising?
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As just one example, you say Google most likely saved SpaceX from bankruptcy in 2016. As far as I know, neither Google nor anyone else did any investment into SpaceX in 2016. Where are you getting your information? Also, have you not even considered the official reasons given for why SpaceX is cheaper? Namely vertical integration, extreme cost consciousness, use of off the shelve hardware, designs made to take advant…
Alphabet and some other fund (fidelity?) invested $ 1bn in, I think 2016. Could have been 2015 as well. I don't have the numbers ready right now. But I'm rather sure it was the year after a Falcon 9 exploded and they didn't launch for a couple of months.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
See, I am not convinced at all. It is reasonable to assume that SpaceX has lower development cost (it would be hard to be more expensive than Ariane and ULA so). Which means SpaceX reaches the program break-even point earlier. Launch costs on the other hand are driven by production cost mainly. And there I don't see any systematic advantage that would explain the lower prices SpaceX is advertising. I know that there…
> Which means SpaceX reaches the program break-even point earlier I mostly agree, but it's entirely possible that they just spread the cost out more, which would reduce the cost of individual launches. As far as production goes - my recollection is that SpaceX does a lot of in-house stuff, so they've got vertical integration going for them. Perhaps more importantly, they build their own engines, and lots of them (10…
The Falcon 1 even went so far as to strip the most failure-prone part of the engine that could be eliminated, the turbopump, and simply pressure feed the vacuum engine. They called it Kestrel, but the combustion chamber and most of the rest of the motor (sans bell) was identical to the Merlin on the first stage.
Short version of the article: One op-ed article attacking SpaceX's safety practices appears in the newspapers of several space-industry-oriented cities. The article is not written by the person it is attributed to, but rather by two people apparently affiliated with a PR firm in Washington, DC. One of the three main clients of said PR firm is Boeing, SpaceX's direct competitor.
I actually got approached myself to write something like this recently. I blog occasionally about defense issues. I got a call out of the blue from someone who said they liked something I'd written about the F-35 (this: https://jasonlefkowitz.net/2013/08/stovl-the-f-35-and-how-we... ), and would I be interested in getting paid to write an op-ed about the current state of the F-35 program? I'm always interested in get…
Curious what the going cost for funding this type of activity is. I assume drastically cheaper than desired result profits, but in comparison to traditional advertising?
Short version of the article: One op-ed article attacking SpaceX's safety practices appears in the newspapers of several space-industry-oriented cities. The article is not written by the person it is attributed to, but rather by two people apparently affiliated with a PR firm in Washington, DC. One of the three main clients of said PR firm is Boeing, SpaceX's direct competitor.
I actually got approached myself to write something like this recently. I blog occasionally about defense issues. I got a call out of the blue from someone who said they liked something I'd written about the F-35 (this: https://jasonlefkowitz.net/2013/08/stovl-the-f-35-and-how-we... ), and would I be interested in getting paid to write an op-ed about the current state of the F-35 program? I'm always interested in get…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And what of safety of people on the ground, in areas where a device may crash land? And so on and so forth? Should we disregard safety on their account, too?
When does spacex launch over populated areas? They are either launching into polar orbits on the west coast or florida for non-polar orbits, neither of which overflies populated areas.
But why fueling continues after crew has boarded? What is the technical reason?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Alphabet and some other fund (fidelity?) invested $ 1bn in, I think 2016. Could have been 2015 as well. I don't have the numbers ready right now. But I'm rather sure it was the year after a Falcon 9 exploded and they didn't launch for a couple of months.
Well, it was in January of 2015, half a year before the CRS-7 anomaly. Google and Fidelity jointly invested $1 billion on a $10 billion valuation. You can't have been researching this very carefully.
HN is a great place to have that kind of discussion.
So let me rephrase my statement: Alphabet and Fidelity invested $ 1 bn in January 2015, this helped to keep SpaceX afloat when in June 2015 a launch mishap resulted in a launch hiatus and subsequent loss of $ 260m in fiscal year 2015. Now even the timeline is correct.