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Spacex success!Follow

#1 Apr 08 2016 at 2:55 PM Rating: Excellent
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They just managed to land their first stage on the floating platform (without exploding). Super neato!
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#2 Apr 08 2016 at 3:06 PM Rating: Excellent
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Smiley: yippee

Here's to more space science stuff and less inopportune explosions. Smiley: chug

Edit: twitter link, for those wondering WTF is going on, and like pictures and soundbites.

Edited, Apr 8th 2016 2:26pm by someproteinguy
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#3 Apr 08 2016 at 4:10 PM Rating: Good
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Man, I'm behind. I thought you were trying to say that the mile high club was now in space.....
#4 Apr 08 2016 at 4:37 PM Rating: Excellent
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Yeah. This is actually pretty huge. They've been trying for years to be able to prove their technology for recovering the first stage like this. For those who don't follow this kind of stuff, the first stage, after detaching from the second (which goes on to deliver its payload wherever it's going, in this case the ISS), instead of just falling and burning up in the atmosphere, actually has additional fuel which it uses to break out of "burn up speed" and enter a controlled descent, and then land, butt down, using the same rocket motor it launched with, onto a platform. For safeties sake, they place the platform on an unmanned floating barge in the ocean. Just getting the stupid thing to descend and find the platform is an amazing accomplishment (which they've been able to do for a couple years now), but getting it to actually land safely has been a problem. As you might imagine, trying to land a rocket isn't easy, especially in Earth gravity. Now, try to do that on a floating platform.

This is the first time that didn't end in a large ball of fire. And I honestly didn't have high hopes, since the platform looked to be rocking pretty well this time (cause, you know... on the water).

Why this is huge is that the rocket itself is capable of being started, stopped, restarted, etc, as needed (which is useful for a number of reasons). It's also refuelable and reusable. It still remains to be seen how much reusable it is. The Space Shuttle turned out to not be as cost effective as intended because the turn around cost was so huge. In theory, this should be much much cheaper though, plus nearly the entire craft can be recovered and reused between flights. Ironically, it's kinda the opposite of the shuttle at this time. The capsule portion isn't yet reusable (although it does return to Earth and is also designed to land using rocket motors, eventually for use on Mars for land and return), while the launch component is (which is the largest part).

What I love about how SpaceX is approaching this, is that they're doing things in modular steps, each designed to prove a single component, but also designed to operate together later for more advanced operations (like say, going to and returning from Mars). The launch component (Falcon) is designed to operate with a variety of different payloads (in the case of today's launch, the Dragon spacecraft). They also have an inflatable habitat thingie, for more or less pre-fab space station building (or say, long term Mars bound spacecraft building). And the whole refuelable/restartable rockets bit opens up a lot of options even just for near Earth stuff. Pretty darn exciting!
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#5 Apr 08 2016 at 5:11 PM Rating: Excellent
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#6 Apr 10 2016 at 10:39 AM Rating: Good
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This is *********

It's 2016. Make this **** work, already, so I can finally smoke a blunt at the foot of Mon Olympus like I'd always dreamed.. and stop ******* around! I'm getting to old for this ****.

Smiley: motz
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#7 Apr 12 2016 at 10:21 AM Rating: Excellent
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gbaji wrote:
Yeah. This is actually pretty huge. They've been trying for years to be able to prove their technology for recovering the first stage like this. For those who don't follow this kind of stuff, the first stage, after detaching from the second (which goes on to deliver its payload wherever it's going, in this case the ISS), instead of just falling and burning up in the atmosphere, actually has additional fuel which it uses to break out of "burn up speed" and enter a controlled descent, and then land, **** down, using the same rocket motor it launched with, onto a platform. For safeties sake, they place the platform on an unmanned floating barge in the ocean. Just getting the stupid thing to descend and find the platform is an amazing accomplishment (which they've been able to do for a couple years now), but getting it to actually land safely has been a problem. As you might imagine, trying to land a rocket isn't easy, especially in Earth gravity.
I'm interested in seeing just how reusable the whole rocket is after recovery. Not up to speed on how it was built, and the re-usability of different rocket parts, etc. (i.e. might not be a rocket scientist...). That's an awful lot of extra fuel to lift up just to slow down a rocket? Not even thinking about the challenges of making something capable of stable flight both in forward and reverse...

All those 1950's cartoons make it look so easy.
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#8 Apr 12 2016 at 10:44 AM Rating: Good
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someproteinguy wrote:
All those 1950's cartoons make it look so easy.
I like the one with the alley cat that lives in a city, and all the people and noise get on his nerve so he goes to like a 7-11 and rents a rocket to the moon, but the moon's population is even worse than Earth so he takes the rocket back and he now loves being trampled on by human traffic and this long run on sentence doesn't really have anything to do with the actual topic and I just really like cartoons.
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#9 Apr 12 2016 at 10:51 AM Rating: Excellent
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lolgaxe wrote:
someproteinguy wrote:
All those 1950's cartoons make it look so easy.
I like the one with the alley cat that lives in a city, and all the people and noise get on his nerve so he goes to like a 7-11 and rents a rocket to the moon, but the moon's population is even worse than Earth so he takes the rocket back and he now loves being trampled on by human traffic and this long run on sentence doesn't really have anything to do with the actual topic and I just really like cartoons.
It's okay, if nothing else I kinda want to see this cartoon now. Smiley: lol

Edited, Apr 12th 2016 9:51am by someproteinguy
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#10 Apr 12 2016 at 11:43 AM Rating: Good
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someproteinguy wrote:
It's okay, if nothing else I kinda want to see this cartoon now. Smiley: lol
I couldn't remember the name so I googled a general description to see what came up. Apparently "cat hate people moon" leads to the 1948 Tex Avery cartoon "The Cat That Hated People." So I watched it a few times ... you know, for quality control and making sure it was the right one. I was remembering the end wrong. Now I miss all those zany random cartoons.
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#11 Apr 12 2016 at 12:27 PM Rating: Excellent
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Well now that's just awesome. Back when our biggest fear of space is that it'd be filled with sentient pencil sharpeners.
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#12 Apr 12 2016 at 12:56 PM Rating: Decent
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Fuel is cheaper than spaceships. That's the real benefit. The other big benefit is one of convenience. You no longer need to build a rocket every time you want to launch something, that's a huge time saver. If you can create a spaceship that can land, refuel and take off again suddenly space travel becomes a heck of a lot more convenient. You can lower the cost of fuel through mass production once you've worked out the hardware.

We're not there yet but this is a very big step. This opens a lot of doors.
#13 Apr 12 2016 at 1:29 PM Rating: Excellent
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Well not just cost in fuel, but cost in the loss of payload as well. Something about how slowing down from orbital velocity would take about 15x the amount of fuel as speeding something up to that speed because in addition to the spacecraft you also have to lift all that extra weight in fuel. That fuel comes at the expense of other stuff (people, satellite, supplies, whatever) unless you want a gigantic expensive rocket.

Of course obviously the first stage didn't go all the way up, and still used a good amount of air-braking on the way down (so it's not completely analogous), and there are some very smart people who are figuring out how to make this work and be a good idea and all. Just is interesting because it was a big factor in the past as to why we don't usually try to "recover rockets" like this. Of course we basically did the same sort of reuse of the shuttle rockets, albeit with a much less impressive method of recovery.

Still darn cool they can land a rocket like that.
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#14 Apr 13 2016 at 6:56 AM Rating: Good
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I watched a TED Talks where they were all about a particular place on the Moon called the Shackleton Crater where they thought they actually found a lot of water and considered using the H from the H20 to create fuel from water... essentially eliminating a need to use up space/volume with fuel and instead creating a kind of 'filling station' on the Moon... from there expand. I haven't been following their progress..

here we are http://www.shackletonenergy.com/news/

Looks like they are still at it.
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#15 Apr 13 2016 at 7:18 AM Rating: Good
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Could lead to a space 7-11, and then it's just a matter of time before we have the diner scene from Spaceballs.
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#16 Apr 13 2016 at 9:37 AM Rating: Good
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lolgaxe wrote:
Could lead to a space 7-11, and then it's just a matter of time before we have the diner scene from Spaceballs.


At the very least a place to whine about having to go to pick up some power converters.
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#17 Apr 13 2016 at 9:54 AM Rating: Decent
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Sure there's some loss in payload but if you can launch for a fraction of the cost (because you're not building new rockets every time) that's not nearly as much of an issue. There's also the benefits of being capable of remote landing a spaceship on a shifting surface. Now your landers don't have to be one shot ponies even if it currently makes financial sense to continue to leave the lander on the surface to die. This is one significant part of the path to spacecraft that can land, launch, go somewhere else, land, launch, go somewhere else.
#18 Apr 14 2016 at 3:28 PM Rating: Decent
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Yeah, I think the math works once you have "enough" to put a payload in orbit. From that point, you start asking the economic question. Do I just build my rocket and the fuel it carries to meet that enough point, thus being efficient, but having to rebuild a new rocket every time? Or... how much bigger must I make that first stage, to give it "enough", plus enough to land the entire first stage rocket back on Earth? And, is the extra cost in fuel and size of that rocket worth it over time since that bigger first stage is (theoretically) reusable?

IMO, it does kinda come down to the question several of us have mentioned: How reusable is this rocket, really? If they can cheaply turn it around and refuel it (cheap being relative to the time/cost to just build a new smaller rocket each time), then it's worth it. And, as mentioned above, just having proved the capability of landing, launching, and landing again with the same rocket has a ton of other uses in the future. Of course, as with the Shuttle, it may turn out that said turnaround time/cost is much higher than expected. Doubly so if they're planning to do manned launches in the future (which they certainly are).
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#19 Apr 15 2016 at 8:24 AM Rating: Decent
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Yes and I suspect right now it's probably cheaper to just build another rocket. That won't always be the case though and as such we need to develop these technologies which means actually doing the things to see what happens to the rocket we're landing and identify the challenges we need to overcome.

The space shuttles were expensive to maintain, but maintaining them taught us a lot about failure points and maintenance so future generations of craft can avoid those pitfalls.
#20 Apr 15 2016 at 1:37 PM Rating: Good
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What are the chances that any of the testing will involve shooting cats into the stratosphere? I'm most interested in that part.
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#21 Apr 15 2016 at 2:27 PM Rating: Excellent
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#22 Apr 15 2016 at 5:22 PM Rating: Good
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#23 Apr 18 2016 at 7:53 AM Rating: Good
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We've used monkeys already, and cats are horrible and abundant.
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#24 Apr 20 2016 at 6:36 PM Rating: Excellent
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Oh. Figured I'd provide a follow up. The payload was a success too. Which puts us one step closer to shipping all those cats to mars!
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#25 Apr 21 2016 at 8:26 AM Rating: Good
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So, can we build a moon base yet?

Edited, Apr 21st 2016 10:26am by Timelordwho
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#26 Apr 21 2016 at 8:28 AM Rating: Good
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gbaji wrote:
Which puts us one step closer to shipping all those cats to mars!
Are you mad? Have you not seen any hokey b-space movies? We send them to Mars and they come back as ten foot tall mutated murder beasts.
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