DerekL1963

No duh. They know exactly what went wrong - they ran out of starting fluid. What they don't know (or haven't announced yet), and what's no doubt keeping those engineers up late tonight, is why it went wrong. You're badly mistaken in confusing the two. Seriously? If the booster was meant to be discarded, then the ASDS would have been in port rather than at sea and configured for recovery. (Just as it was for the Govsat-1 flight.) They did't plan on reflying it (AUIU), but they certainly planned on recovering it.

No doubt some will do so. Many others won't sleep at all tonight - because they'll be trying to track down a flight anomaly. A particularly nasty one, because it threatens reusability, the bedrock foundation of SpaceX's plans.

They announced a date - and missed it by five years. (And that's not mentioning all the interim slips during those intervening five years.) An intentional slip is still a slip. Falcon Heavy, like practically every other major SpaceX milestone, was late. Period. No amount of hand waving, smokescreens, or mirrors will change that fact.

Shall we enumerate the ways? First off, SpaceX has a long track record of missing their announced target dates by wide margins. (Let's not forget that FH was announced in 2011 with a target launch date of 2013.) Second off, there's a whole [censored] lot more to a Mars mission than reaching LEO. Pretty much none of which SpaceX has demonstrated. 2050 may be a bit much, but I wouldn't expect anything in 2024 except a delay to the next window.

Well, duh. Certainly a permanent settlement is inevitable - Antarctica is practically infested with them. But a permanent settlement isn't a colony.

Watching the FH launch brings joy... and a certain sadness. I watched so many historic launches, from Apollo through Shuttle, with my dad.

Reality TV won't even come close to financing any kind of space colony. A show that rakes in ten times the cash per episode of a show ten times the size of the current largest hits... wouldn't even pay the interest on the interest. Certainly. It's well within the realm of engineering practicality. Financially, it was well within the realm of practicality at the time of planning and construction - subsequent events beyond the control of the owners/financiers however rendered it marginal. I mean, it sounds like you're constructing an argument that we should build a space colony regardless of "practicality"... but really you're playing silly semantic games.

You recall correctly. Bigelow even offered a prize for the first team to demonstrate a reusable manned capsule back in 2004.

Which sounds impressive to gullible - but is largely meaningless. Going to the Moon (or Mars for that matter) isn't a computationally intensive task.

Bigelow has been "planning" to launch a station for about a decade now.

Sphere-cone-flare works like any other RV. There are various details difference, but the Polaris RV can be seen here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/MIRV (The UK used the same RV.)

MJ cannot correct for PEBKAC and ID10T class errors. If you build a 200 ton behemoth, outfit it with the appropriate control systems.

As safe as possible. Which isn't always very safe when you're operating a high performance/low margin vehicle. As they say - [[Citation Needed]]. "Does not meet Slashy's unreasonable and idiosyncratic definition of a safe vehicle" does not mean they didn't consider the risks and decide they were acceptable. No vehicle of land, sea, air, or space is designed with safety in mind from the outset, at least not with your narrow definition thereof. Shuttle, like everything else, was designed to be as safe as possible within the myriad of constraints on the vehicle. Give it a rest already, you're sounding like a broken record here.

He said "similar", you said "more expensive than". Words mean things. That's because you don't grasp the complexity and custom equipment your concept requires. Something that I've mentioned twice now and that you seem to have missed or ignored.

Nobody made that claim. You're not grasping that it's not the amount of custom equipment - it's the nature of the custom equipment. The habitation module is basically a free flying space station, with all the complexity and cost that implies. Not to mention the costs involved in developing and flight qualifying the tether system before committing human lives and and expensive hardware to it. "Overestimated" doesn't even begin to describe the situation. Tethers on this scale are basically TRL 1, maybe 2 at best. Nobody is going to commit money until you're at TRL 5-6.

That's how I read it, given they seem to use "none" for "no previous use".

The idea of using existing equipment is a good one, but cancelled out by having all the important bits be new-build. And in the case of the tethers, not only new build but requiring an extensive and expensive R&D program. Tethers are still... extraordinarily poorly understood to put it very charitably.

That's not that the able says. 41-C and 51-C also show that both segments had been reused.

Because the SLS was designed to maximize employment in key congressional districts re-use of Shuttle components. But even if it wasn't, we still haven't solved the issues with large monolithic solids that lead them to spec segmented solids in the first place. (Some of them probably aren't solvable.) Soyuz retained the parachutes and the re-pressurization valve that killed two crews. Apollo retained the O2 tank that nearly killed a crew.... Which is basically a snarky way of saying it's not the segments that caused the loss but poor joint design (it's much more than the O-rings). That joint hasn't flown since 1986. The replacement has flown, without failure, 176 times.

So, they should spend their own money to perform a function not required by the contract? (Even presuming they're given permission to occupy a port.) 0.o So... who pays? Especially given that a crew version is a) more expensive than a cargo version, and b) less cargo capable than a cargo version.

During the Apollo program, having engineers be managers was (is) lauded as being one of the keys to the program's success. Many of those managers played key roles in the development of the Shuttle. Many who had been working level engineers during Apollo went on to become managers on the Shuttle program. Food for thought.

I have always found it interesting that Shuttle's inherent safety flaws are brought up - but never those of Soyuz. I doubt many people are even aware of those flaws, let alone the fact that they've lead to three in-flight accidents. As Pakled said, this isn't a discussion of engineering or reality... it's a theological debate. Yup. Very few of Shuttle's detractor know anything beyond "Cold is Bad Cold is Bad Cold is Bad". And only having a cargo cult view of the situation, they don't realize the worst burn through incidents (prior to Challenger) all occurred at temperatures well within the "safe" range. Nor do they realize that the "engineers issuing warnings" were a small handful at the last moment. Which is why management, not entirely without cause, distrusted them - despite the multiple prior burn through events, they'd been repeatedly told it was safe to continue to fly. (A pattern that would be repeated when it came to the foam strikes and Columbia.) The key safety problem with the Shuttle wasn't it's design, low margin high performance vehicles are always risky. It wasn't directly people, engineers or management. It was a culture that encouraged myopia and the belief that since they'd gotten away with it so far, they would continue to do so into the future. All vehicles are designed by managers with engineers doing the best they can to juggle all the requirements placed on them, even when the requirements are contradictory.

Nope, the AIRS reference sphere was developed for MX (which was later named Peacekeeper), and has now been installed on Minuteman-III. Poseidon uses a more conventional gimbal based system.

Which doesn't mean the same thing as "obviated the need for the thrust termination ports", which you originally wrote. Just so we're clear here: Yes, the MM-III has thrust termination ports. Yes, it uses them to terminate third stage thrust when it has sufficient energy. No, it doesn't use them to set the final trajectory as that function is now performed by the bus. All three of these points are illustrated in the video you linked of the MM-III flight sequence.

You're defending the scheme and lauding the benefits it provides. You don't save money by spending tens or hundreds of billions of dollars up-front and billions to tens of billions per annum in operating and support costs without a market in the hundreds of billions per annum. That's what so many people don't get - space exploitation isn't an engineering problem. It's an engineering problem and an economic problem and a financing problem.