SpaceX wows world with a ho-hum launch of a reused rocket, landing it on a tiny boring barge Elon Musk's promised revolution in affordable orbital delivery has begun: today his upstart SpaceX successfully launched a refurbished rocket from Earth, carrying a commercial satellite into orbit, and then landed the rocket's first stage on a sea barge. For any miserabilists hoping for drama, failure, and explosions, no such …
Fully agree. It still amazes me that a rocket can land after doing a full launch. More amazingly, they do it on a moving barge at sea. And then they do it with one that's already done it before!
Once Bezos gets fully up to speed, I think we'll see what real competition looks like. It's a shame ULA are going for a sort of half-hearted "we can do it too" approach, but max Kudos to Musk and SpaceX for their successes.
I wish we had someone like Musk or Bezos backing Reaction Engines.
The problem is that the fastest way to make a small fortune in aerospace is starting with a big one.
The amount of turnover required in order to make a small profit is staggering, and billionaires got to be billionaires by watching their money. What is needed as a billionaire with enough drive to overlook the abovementioned problem, preferring to enjoy the ride for what it is worth.
Aerospace is an industry full of people with too much love for their wonderful art.
IAAAE
Virgin galactiic are still around,
The old bearded goat is a Virgin Islands citizen. He is NOT a UK resident any more. That is not really ours. More like the citizen of the Universe May loves to hate and throw Hitler and Stalin quotes at.
The only ours left in the UK (for a given value of ours) are Russian mobsters with dual citizenship. They are happy to pay an arbitrary size check for a dick with legs in football boots, donation to the Tory party keep us at loggerheads with their "other" Fatherland or a new super-yacht.
Something to advance science and engineering for the common good?
Not so much - you will have to wait for a few generations until their fortunes are controlled by the robber barons' grandchildren.
"But it seems our billionaires are boring old farts who prefer to play it safe by buying properties."
To give him his dues, and it pains me to say this, Richard Branson is investing in technology projects. Sadly it seems that his vision is a little restricted though. Musk and Bezos are clearly enthusiastic and have been steeped in The Culture as well as culture. Those two want to make our future like the ones we saw in old re-runs on Saturday morning Kids TV. The world of "Lost in Space", "TinTin", RKO serials and "Flash Gordon" where rockets were infinitely reusable.
Branson's ambitions are more modest but have the potential to pay off in slightly unexpected ways. So there's Virgin Galactic which isn't much more than a way of separating millionaires from their cash in return for an experience which used to be possible from Thunder City - an edge of atmosphere trip. White Knight 2 and Spaceship 2 have other potential uses for lifting loads for sub-orbital missions at low cost and given the lift capability of WK2 it could be used to lift a two-stage payload that could be fired into orbit.
Branson's other project is his investment in Boom, which is planning a small (45 seat) SST. I hope that comes off also.
The shame is that these are US projects and an investment in Reaction Engines would be an investment in UK engineering.
Don't forget the other billionaire, Paul Allen, who is building a humungous aircraft to haul a rocket to altitude and then dropping it (hopefully after lighting the blue touch paper). More stuff about his monstrous machine here (don't forget to hum the 'Thunderbirds' tune):
http://aerospace.vulcan.com
I'll see competition when big aero starts putting fly-back airbreathers into the first-stage phase of launch. This land-on-tail stuff is thrilling Buck-Rogers era, but it's literally a waste of oxygen. Light and medium launch weight systems should be taking off and returning to airport runways, and getting reflown within the hour.
Wonderful, wonderful wonderful stuff. Takes me right back to the excitement of the Apollo era of my youth. Astronauts and cosmonauts simply trump ALL other celebrities for sheer cool!
Big thumbs up to all rocket scientists, engineers and all other staff at Space-X for making this happen. I will certainly raise a glass (or two, it's Friday after all) this evening
I'll see competition when big aero starts putting fly-back airbreathers into the first-stage phase of launch.
Prelude to Space - Arthur C. Clarke
To those people that say you can't use them on other planets (Mars) I don't think anyone was saying that you had to. The thing is that such a fly-back craft would be the best way of getting material and manpower up into space to build the craft that would go to the other planets.
This land-on-tail stuff is thrilling Buck-Rogers era, but it's literally a waste of oxygen.
Of all the things you could waste in rocketry, oxygen is probably one of the better picks. Oxygen is wonderful: it's dense, it's very cheap, the tanks are light, and you throw most of it out the tailpipe so it isn't part of the dead mass carried into orbit. On the other hand, replacing the rocket engines (with 100:1 to 200:1 thrust-to-weight ratios) with an airbreathing engine that might optimistically have a 10:1 thrust-to-weight ratio means you're hauling more deadweight into orbit. You need a more aerodynamic aeroshell and heat shield, which means it has a worse surface-to-volume ratio than a simple oxygen tank and thus more weight. You need more elaborate aerodynamic controls and landing gear for the aircraft-style performance.
Worse, the stuff you're keeping with these oxygen-saving airbreathing engines is probably hydrogen. Hydrogen's a headache: it has very low density, so its tankage is heavy compared to oxygen, and it's a pain to store, insulate, and handle. Everything associated with hydrogen is heavier than denser fluids: heat shields have to be larger, engines have lower thrust-to-weight ratios, the tanks are bigger and thus heavier, etc.
A glimpse of the value of dense fluids is seen in this comparison of hydrogen-oxygen and kerosene-oxygen SSTOs (end of the email chain has plenty of detailed numbers and engineering discussion).
So, like I said, oxygen is probably one of the best things you can waste in rocketry.
Apart from the issue that the airbreathers are going to have trouble in less than 30 seconds, you could do worse than strapping turbofans to the side and popping 'em off at 20,000 feet, or sitting the entire platform on a catapault to get more "kick" in the initial launch.
(NB: These add complexity and make things more likely to fail. Rockets and launches have been shown to work best when the stack is as simple as possible. Vibration from the _sound_ alone is enough to break a lot of stuff - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MErKkBWRY9E)
Fly-back airbreathers? You clearly missed the press release from ULA! They're already on this.
They plan to have the first stage re-enter the atmosphere using a heat shield. Special high-altitude helicopters will carry a wing with integral motors and fuel to 80,000 feet and rendezvous with an F-35 that is waiting on-station. As the spent rocket stage approaches, the helicopter will drop the wing while the F-35 deploys Chuck Norris from the weapons bay. He will then catch the wing, maneuver it to meet the falling rocket, and attach it with his bare hands. Then Chuck will start the motors and fly the first stage down to a landing in the jungle where he will destroy a terrorist training camp while waiting for the pickup helicopter to arrive.
What could go wrong?
To be living in a world where YouTube accompanies my nightly cocoa with a live HD feed of a rocket performing a Thunderbirds mission that's on the cusp of being boringly routine, then the same YouTube suggests one of the apparently limitless "flat Earth" videos (rockets can't work in space because no air to push against, would collide with celestial dome, contradicted by the Old Testament, etc, etc)
Perhaps the Law of Conservation of Stupidity will soon mathematically establish that every time someone does something wonderful, clever, beautiful then a counter-balancing amount of cretinous mendacity is unleashed?
"Perhaps the Law of Conservation of Stupidity will soon mathematically establish that every time someone does something wonderful, clever, beautiful then a counter-balancing amount of cretinous mendacity is unleashed?"
To true I am afraid.
Hopefully all the cretinous mendacity released by the current US administration will be counterbalanced soon by something breathtakingly clever and beautiful.
One can but hope
"I look forward to an actual landing on the boat video."
What like this one?
There have been a couple of landing on the barge videos. The problem has been keeping the live uplink aimed at the right satellite as the rocket comes in (rockets are LOUD - enough to actually shake the snot out of stuff).
The best solution would probably be a floating fibreoptic cable to another RO-boat a few hundred yards away carrying the uplink. You'd get the advantage of a wider angle landing view too.
"I am firmly of the opinion that eventually science will prove human stupidity is the only infinite resource in the universe."
Science has already proved it. We're in an age now where we could feed every single person on the planet, give power and electricity to all, and allow people to view all of the content and knowledge the world has to offer.
But greed, paranoia, and racism gets in the way and ruins the whole thing for everyone. Then some bright spark decides he doesn't like someone else, decides to send them a missle with a nuclear bomb at the top of it and destroys the world at the click of a finger.
Happy Friday.
"YouTube suggests one of the apparently limitless "flat Earth" videos"
Me too.
You'd think having a browsing history filled with aerospace and science stuff, that maybe I'd not be interested in some idiot that still thinks the moon landings were a hoax*.
Still, I guess you can't accuse them of keeping people in their own little media bubble.
* My brother's girlfriend is one such idiot
"Perhaps the Law of Conservation of Stupidity will soon mathematically establish that every time someone does something wonderful, clever, beautiful then a counter-balancing amount of cretinous mendacity is unleashed?"
The sight of videos in the same feed that have been created by greedy, mendacious snake-oil salesmen to sell tat to people who are too uneducated to know the difference between science and magic is bad enough. But the thing that causes me to rend my garments and daub my faces with ashes is the response of the moonhowler commentards who can barely wait to jump in and post a message that all of this rocketry is "fake news". Why the actual do they do it?
Musk has said in interviews how close the whole Tesla/Space-X ensemble was close to imploding due to things not going well at the start and running out of money.
It takes one heck of a driven/determined person to hold on by their fingertips and keep going in those kinds of dire straits.
"Many of the worlds most successful entrepreneurs have been borderline psychopaths"
True but that doesn't mean they are bad to work for. Look at Hank Scorpio. Yeah he may have been an international criminal mastermind, but he came across as a really nice guy. And yes, it was real folks, it was real.
Between his various projects Musk appears to be genuinely trying to save the world single-handed (or at least ensure some of the human race survives it's end if it all goes wrong). How much more of a good guy do you want?
(Either that or he's not joking about the white cat, and super-villain volcano lair)
"All, I suspect, we currently see of Musk is what a well-oiled PR machine sees"
you have never actually seen or heard Elon Musk then.... Elon is about as non-PR as it gets. He unashamedly a geek, who's bad at public speaking and wears his heart on his sleeve. He's speaks his mind without filters and is actually a dreamer who decided to try and do some good with his life/money.
I bet you can only think of a handful of people like that. The world of people is full of people like Zuckerberg who say they are trying to change the world but are really just making money. SpaceX are privately held to allow them to do things that are BAD for business so they can follow Elon's dream.
@John Smith 19
Actually the obvious one is Hugo Drax in Moonraker.
No cat, but a nice line in collarless jackets IIRC.
Hugo Drax. Elon Musk
First and last names have 4 letters each,
first name 2 vowels, last name 1
Both made money elsewhere before using it to develop missiles/rockets for the government
Will he follow the plot of the Moonraker novel or the film adaptation?
In the film, Drax's shuttles dock with a space station
Musk's Dragon craft docked with ISS
What's the progress on Bond's Musk's submersible Lotus Esprit? - Time to get worried is when that's operational
(Paris - where there's a Bond villain, there's a Bond Girl)
The film of course.
Drax in the film is (like Musk) concerned about a catastrophe wiping out human civilization on Earth.
Besides I strongly doubt that Musk can pull off a Liverpudlian ascent if his life depended upon it.
What I am waiting for is Bill Hader of Saturday Night Live to pop on a Nehru jacket and announce what all those rockets are really for.
I can't shake the feeling he's been tweaking his Julian Assange, waiting for the right script.
I don't think that Drax in the book has a Liverpudlian accent...
And plenty of Nazis headed to S Africa. Coincidence?*
Gala Brand (see icon) is a great Bond girl name, and the only one in the books who has a genuine twist to her character/actions.
* yes of course it's f##king coincidence you fool.
From memory Drax has stolen the identity of a British soldier from Liverpool who lost his memory (and his face) in an explosion.
So supposedly all he knows about himself is from his Army records. As part of his cover he visits the area to try and see if he "remembers" anything.
He doesn't remember the locals because of course he's never actually met them before and the plastic surgery explains why they don't remember him. No scouse accent? "Explosion damaged my vocal chords. I had to learn to speak all over again."
Quite neat, eh?
I'd forgotten about the "goes up there every so often to try and dig up his roots" - thanks! His voice I think remains "harsh" (or similar adjective) as a result of the explosion.
I do think Fleming's influence on literature is underappreciated...
"Drax in the film is (like Musk) concerned about a catastrophe wiping out human civilization on Earth."
Um, in the movie Drax is about to cause * a catastrophe, namely wiping out all human life on Earth using nerve gas. Because he seems to have a god complex.
IIRC, in the book Drax wants to destroy London with a nuclear armed rocket, but is crushed to death under some giant bog rolls or something.
So I guess we'll have to wait and see where this is all going.
* Okay, technically planning something could sorta qualify as "being concerned about something", I'll give you that.
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