totm nov 2023 SpaceX Discussion Thread

[Brent Kerman]

What time is the fire?

[DVDRW]

Explained here:

https://spaceflightnow.com/2017/05/11/inmarsat-5-f4-launch-preps/

"Venting of oxygen vapors should be visible around the rocket in the final hour before ignition..."

Edited May 11, 2017 by DVDRW

[XB-70A]

I hope so. I was more than doubtfully of them at their beginning but not reluctant. The fact that they have revived a share of interest in space for the general public must be considered.

Equally important for me is the highlight of the civilians in a sector still too much dominated by the militaries. The fact that any STS pilot was a military or ex-military is not justifiable to me (even more at the end of the program).

 

On the other side, I simply can't support and even h.a.t.e those kind of TV shows with sometime stupid comments made by presenter. Without whistling or howls at every launch. But here they make it out too by proposing a channel without any comments.

[tater]

Static fire complete.

[tater]

There is a reason why NASA pilots were military---who else gets many 1000s of hours in high performance aircraft? Certainly no one in the private sector. Even if you owned a jet fighter, it's not like anyone short of Bezos could afford to fly it often (jet-A costs alone).

 

[tater]

 

[CatastrophicFailure]

It looks so lonely without legs. 

What happened to "that last one was the last expendable flight!"

[TheEpicSquared]

12 minutes ago, CatastrophicFailure said:

It looks so lonely without legs. 

What happened to "that last one was the last expendable flight!"

I believe the Intelsat-35e mission is also expendable.  

[XB-70A]

That still is not a sufficient reason for such a strict selection (to me, of course). In my own experience of flying pieces of c..p made of wood, tissues and powered by something you can hardly call a performant engine I've met in years different persons on the fields. One of them, an active instructor on "Super Etendard" in the French Navy found a way to broke two times the front landing gear of our airclub Aquila A 210. He probably thought to be at the landing on an aircraft carrier... and still he can't be the sole in the world. 

[tater]

1 hour ago, XB-70A said:

That still is not a sufficient reason for such a strict selection (to me, of course). In my own experience of flying pieces of c..p made of wood, tissues and powered by something you can hardly call a performant engine I've met in years different persons on the fields. One of them, an active instructor on "Super Etendard" in the French Navy found a way to broke two times the front landing gear of our airclub Aquila A 210. He probably thought to be at the landing on an aircraft carrier... and still he can't be the sole in the world. 

ESA can pick commercial pilots or civil aviation pilots if they like, but int he case of the Shuttle, I was fine with only trusting a billion+ $ Orbiter with someone with loads of military flight experience. I want to say that it wasn't until the 1990s (perhaps late 1990s) that any of the Shuttle pilots were not only military, but military test pilots.

[StrandedonEarth]

Too bad they couldn't convince these guys to fly on used rockets. Then expending rockets wouldn't make Elon wince so much. 

These heavy comsats were probably slated to fly on Falcon Heavies, recovering all three cores (and eventually the second stage). But with all the F9H delays, the customers would want their birds in the sky generating revenue, so they were moved to F9E's. That's my guess, anyways. 

[TheEpicSquared]

7 hours ago, StrandedonEarth said:

These heavy comsats were probably slated to fly on Falcon Heavies, recovering all three cores (and eventually the second stage). But with all the F9H delays, the customers would want their birds in the sky generating revenue, so they were moved to F9E's. That's my guess, anyways. 

I know that Inmarsat 5 F4 was supposed to fly on FH, and I'm pretty sure that Intelsat-35e was as well. Not sure about Echostar-23 though.

[kerbinorbiter]

Echo star XXIIII was probably going to fly on FH

[Skylon]

How easy would it be to get a 100g payload on a Dragon/Falcon 9 rocket? Based on their cost/kilo it could be less than £250. Would be cool for squad to have a kerbal figure that has been to space in their office (or wherever they work).

[K^2]

11 minutes ago, Skylon said:

How easy would it be to get a 100g payload on a Dragon/Falcon 9 rocket? Based on their cost/kilo it could be less than £250. Would be cool for squad to have a kerbal figure that has been to space in their office (or wherever they work).

Not going to be that cheap. ~1kg cubesat rides are going for $50k+. It's highly non-linear, because a lot of work goes into verifying your payload is safe and can be properly deployed to a safe orbit. I can't imagine you'd be able to launch anything at all for less than $10k.

[Skylon]

9 minutes ago, K^2 said:

Not going to be that cheap. ~1kg cubesat rides are going for $50k+. It's highly non-linear, because a lot of work goes into verifying your payload is safe and can be properly deployed to a safe orbit. I can't imagine you'd be able to launch anything at all for less than $10k.

Yeah, I figured it wouldn't be that easy

[The Raging Sandwich]

No they are not going to colonize Mars in 30 years. Maybe... 40 or 50. Their ITS is too prone for failure. The Falcon 9s are proven to work well though. Hope the Falcon Heavy works well too. But sending 2 people around the Moon and back in such a short amount of time is going to end up killing somebody. The only reason people are only focusing on SpaceX is because NASA isn't doing anything. "NASA lacks the funding though!" No it doesn't, it just got a lot more funding. With it, a manned Mars mission could be done late next decade, but it won't. 

[tater]

Colonization is a different animal from manned exploration. Both Musk and Bezos have the notion that people will love and work in space in meaningful numbers... it's something that I would like to see just because that's sort of what most of us here likely are at our cores. When you read enough SF, and think about this stuff enough, you want to be there, even if just vicariously. As musk put it (in his TED interview?) it would be sad if that was not the future. Bezos has said that Amazon is a thing because there were already postal services, etc, so the infrastructure was there that allowed him to prosper, and he wants infrastructure in space to allow space entrepreneurs. 

I'm not as sanguine as some are, but the resources that Bezos has gives me some hope of seeing things moving forward. As for Musk, SX is currently dependent upon NASA, but Tesla has the potential to be worth rather a lot of money, which might well give him more money to play with, as well. If I had a pitched roof, I'd be all over those Tesla roof tiles.

[XB-70A]

19 hours ago, tater said:

ESA can pick commercial pilots or civil aviation pilots if they like, but int he case of the Shuttle, I was fine with only trusting a billion+ $ Orbiter with someone with loads of military flight experience.

To be honest I will be willing to bet a ball that even the ESA would not want to place a civilian in this position.

 

20 hours ago, tater said:

I want to say that it wasn't until the 1990s (perhaps late 1990s) that any of the Shuttle pilots were not only military, but military test pilots.

It is logic to me when the different space programs begun, of course who in the 50's to 60's were already trained to those extreme conditions if not the fighters pilots. Probably not the guys (sturdy anyway) flying between the turbulences in multi-piston engines. But at the end of the 80's I can not doubt that a good number of civilians could have been capable after the same rough training in flight onboard simulators and the couple of G-II.

[tater]

Reread the bit you quoted above, though. Until at least the 1990s, all NASA pilots were TEST pilots. This is beyond flight training, but the ability to observe, document, and often address design problems with aircraft in flight. Far more dangerous than routine flying, and a different skill set. Armstrong, for example, was apparently not the best "stick and rudder" instinctual pilot, but he was apparently an excellent test pilot for his ability to diagnose design problems.

[NSEP]

On 11/05/2017 at 3:27 AM, cubinator said:

I think Musk is going to keep working towards his goals until his death.

Actually i heard that the design of the ITS will be public for other companies to adapt in the future, so if spaceX (or spaceflight in general maybe) fails. Future companies with enough money can still bring the ITS to life. Even After his death.

Elon Musk really cares about the future of humanity.

[cubinator]

1 hour ago, NSEP said:

Actually i heard that the design of the ITS will be public for other companies to adapt in the future, so if spaceX (or spaceflight in general maybe) fails. Future companies with enough money can still bring the ITS to life. Even After his death.

Elon Musk really cares about the future of humanity.

Yes, he definitely does. I think even if SpaceX doesn't get humans on Mars, their work will definitely be a huge leap in our progress towards getting there.

[Bill Phil]

On 5/11/2017 at 3:20 AM, KSK said:

Yes they have but NASA got themselves a pretty good (and comparatively cheap) new cargo launcher out of the deal. SpaceX have also managed to do cool things with a lot of other people's money: Musk's, his investors and quite a handful of private customers. Check out this list - I'm counting fifteen purely commercial launches (as in not NASA or other space agencies) for the various iterations of Falcon 9, out of the 33 launches to date.

NASA have absolutely been key to SpaceX's success but describing them as 'a commercial company that's managed to do some cool things with NASA's money' isn't really telling the whole story to my mind.

To answer OP's question, it depends what you mean by making it to Mars. Red Dragon - I would think so but almost certainly not launching by 2018.  Boots on the ground - I'd love to see it but I'm not counting on it. A colony - see previous comment but even more so.

 

NASA is responsible for the rocket's funding. No NASA, no rocket. It was developed with NASA's money, uses NASA's launch pads, is launched at a loss... it boils down to cool things with NASA's money. Not to mention that NASA had done a lot of R$D on engines and other flight hardware over decades which lowered the cost of development of F9. SpaceX hasn't opened up space travel yet, and likely won't for quite some time... They're an interesting company that is using NASA's money for the bulk of its development. Is NASA getting a good deal? Sure. But at least give credit where credit is due. No NASA, no SpaceX.

[Vanamonde]

Your thread has been merged into the existing thread for this subject, @Vinhero100. 

[Scotius]

2 hours ago, Bill Phil said:

NASA is responsible for the rocket's funding. No NASA, no rocket. It was developed with NASA's money, uses NASA's launch pads, is launched at a loss... it boils down to cool things with NASA's money. Not to mention that NASA had done a lot of R$D on engines and other flight hardware over decades which lowered the cost of development of F9. SpaceX hasn't opened up space travel yet, and likely won't for quite some time... They're an interesting company that is using NASA's money for the bulk of its development. Is NASA getting a good deal? Sure. But at least give credit where credit is due. No NASA, no SpaceX.

NASA doesn't generate any revenue they could use for self-funding. NASA gets its funding from the U.S. government. U.S. government, as any government in fact, doesn't have any money on its own - they all come from the taxpayers. Both individual persons and from businesses - including SpaceX. Elon Musk and every employee of his that ever filled a tax form in U.S.A. contributed to the funding of NASA research projects, maintenance of launchpads used by Falcons and construction of every government - owned piece of hardware ever launched on Falcon rockets. Please, give credit where credit is due