Blue Origin Thread (merged)

[Frida Space]

It's not really a matter of fanboyism here. Whether you love or you hate or you don't have any feelings towards SpaceX, this failure is bad news for anyone who supports the International Space Station (I'm one of those who think the ISS "steals" money from much more interesting programs, but still, I don't think anyone with some brain would like to see the ISS being abandoned after all these years and billions spent because we can't resupply it). I personally somewhat dislike Orbital Sciences Corp. (before it became Orbital Sciences ATK), but still, I was really sorry to see the Antares failure. Now, with 3 failures in <8 months, really no one can feel happy after what happened.

[AngelLestat]

Would you feel more secure flying in a 747 that has more duct tape holding it together than nuts and bolts due to budget cuts and supervisors caring more about meeting time schedules than passenger safety, or a new 747.

I still choose the old 747 and everyone will do the same.

This happen with any product, if you buy a new laundry machine or a new PC, or air cooler, is always the same, the first time you press on you are not so sure that all will be ok as you will be if you used all days.

Airplanes had very expensive and intensive test, and fly test after leave the factory, And companies who buy it test them again.

Then you can transport people, and dont worry about test for a month.

The fanboyism is annoying, whether its for SpaceX, Apple, Ford or your favorite washing powder. These are corporations, not football teams.

Why is different? Is just matter of taste.

If you like rockets, you will fan of esa, nasa, spacex, cosmodrome, ULA, etc.

If you like cars you will be fan of Toyota, ford, porsche, etc.

[bigdad84]

Looks like SpaceX has postponed their next launch with the JASON-3 NOAA Satellite.

http://www.theverge.com/2015/6/29/8864751/spacex-falcon-9-launch-postponed-explosion

[Jouni]

Whether SpaceX manage to change the game and if they survive the process is unforeseeable. But they are making interesting waves.

I'm not sure whether reusability would even be a game changer. It could feasibly lower the launch costs by 2x or 3x, but they're only a small fraction of total costs anyway.

Falcon Heavy may actually have more potential. The idea isn't particularly new: instead of building a big rocket, just strap together several small ones. Everyone else is doing it already. What sets the Falcon Heavy apart from the competition is its size. The small rocket is already almost as big as everyone else's big rockets. Strapping three of them together gives you the ability to launch significant payloads at short notice.

Now we just need the ability to build those significant payloads at short notice. Trying it would be an interesting exercise, and probably not even that expensive. Announce an ambitious mission (e.g. rendezvous with an asteroid) a year before the intended launch date, and see if you can pull it off. That's something the human race must be able to do, if we're ever going to be serious about space travel.

[YNM]

They said

that there was no destruct signal sent, and that the second "explosion" was probably due to aerodynamic stress.

Hmm... Well if so that's very dramatic. How can a sudden depress makes flame ? Or were the flame came from the first stage engine's flame ?

That's probably ineffective. In basically any field, roughly 80% of problems are easily fixed by targeting the low-hanging fruit. Those remaining 20% are your bigger problem. You're going to have to spend ever increasing amounts of effort for just a tiny reward. If you were to plot effort spend vs success rate, it's probably going to be a curve that's asymptotically approaching 100%.

There is going to be a point at which further QC is more expensive in any terms than just having the occasional failure every now and then.

Yeah, but they're going to send lives (more importantly, human lives) on it,how much do you value human lives ?

Would you feel more secure flying in a 747 that has more duct tape holding it together than nuts and bolts due to budget cuts and supervisors caring more about meeting time schedules than passenger safety, or a new 747. It's all fun and games to say "Old and Tried is better" but everytime that 747 lands it is "suppose to" be given a through field check and any problems are "suppose to" ground the flight until fully repaired. Airline regulations are "suppose to" treat every "Old and Tried" 747 exactly like a "New and Unpredictable" 747.

It doesn't matter if we get re-usability or not, it astonishes me still that we knew that Apollo 13 had problems and we STILL launched it despite knowing those problems existed because we had to stick to time schedules and decided a little "duct tape" would suffice. Unless we get better work ethic, we'll always have failure; and as failure is calculated as such (1 - 0.99999^n) where n is the number of systems that can go wrong and weren't checked in triplicate, the greatest cause for failure is not having enough time/money/manpower to sufficiently lower n.

Re-usability is akin to landing that 747 and saying "this hunk of metal is as sturdy as the titanic" then realizing a loose bolt, which should have been caught, is what caused the crash after it took off without being inspected. Even if reusable, the rocket will be stripped down to parts, fully tested (ideally, in practice probably not, have to keep that insurance premium up) then reassembled with worn parts replaced. The rocket is the same as a brand new rocket (which is good) instead of an old used rocket, protective layers failing, with a 90% failure rate.

If you never tried, you can't tell is it doable or not. A 747 is a far more complex machine with a fair amount of redundancies, compare that to Wright or so that even troubled in landing ! Now rockets should also go down the same way of development, if your goal is to make them more plausible to be used widely (like, really wide, say about space tourism or to the point that everyone can build a small LEO-capable rocket easily) then developments have to be continued. I'm not saying that its going to be easily reached, I'm saying that you should start something to see it done in the end.

If you think rockets are bad, go ahead and develop an alternative. Else, you're just cursing the darkness.

[basic.syntax]

SpaceX is a small, tenacious player with "can-do" spirit, showing the old dogs some new tricks. Regardless, ULA can't be discounted: for their component companies have a long history and tremendous experience in the aerospace field. Every success should be celebrated, and every failure acts to renew respect for the complexity and challenge of the task.

[StrandedonEarth]

Hmm... Well if so that's very dramatic. How can a sudden depress makes flame ? Or were the flame came from the first stage engine's flame ?

The only flames I saw were from propellants reaching the first stage exhaust. To me, the 'explosion' appeared to be the rocket finally ripping itself to shreds and appeared surprisingly flame-free

[saabstory88]

The final "Explosion" was likely the result of the S-2 tanks failing. This would disrupt the S-2 break-wire and cause the full FTS system to destroy the vehicle.

[Shpaget]

Are you saying football teams are not corporations?

[Albert VDS]

The fanboyism is annoying, whether its for SpaceX, Apple, Ford or your favorite washing powder. These are corporations, not football teams.

Why would fanboyism for a football team be OK? It's only a form of entertainment and doesn't help humanity.

Also, SpaceX fanboys don't get into a fist fight with ULA fanboys or cause vandalism in the name of space exploration.

So why is it so annoying? It's just someone who likes a product/company/person.

[Superfluous J]

Why would fanboyism for a football team be OK? It's only a form of entertainment and doesn't help humanity.

I don't think he said it was okay, just that that's the kind of thing that attracts "fanboys" because in general, the only reason to cheer for a football (or any sports) team is that their stadium is geographically closer to you than any others'.

And the thought that entertainment doesn't benefit Humanity makes me both laugh and wince.

I actually find the term "fanboy" annoying. It's so easy to paint anybody with the brush and there is no way to spin it positive. "Oh YEAH I'm a fanboy. I like thing X with no amount of thought what so EVER. Boo-yah. Take that rational person with reasoned arguments!"

[Mazon Del]

I do find the almost religious support for SpaceX a little strange. I would ask the same question back, "What makes you a fan of SpaceX?"

Like some of the others have said in here, it's a combo of Musk having a dream and chasing it in a way a lot of us wish we could, but also the fact that they ARE shaking things up when it comes to ways of doing rockets.

Up until SpaceX was a thing, the idea of reusable rockets wasn't really out there. The shuttle's re-usability was a bit of a boondoggle, and regardless of the reasons why that was so the point is that it put people off on the idea of such technologies. Additionally, nobody had ever REALLY done the whole reusable thing when it came to stack rockets. Sure the solid boosters from the shuttle were reused, but they were almost rebuilt from the bottom up in the process, so it's not exactly the same thing. But now that people are seeing how close SpaceX is coming to actually retrieving their first stage rockets, all of a sudden you are hearing from these other companies (ULA even) about how their next gen rockets will do the same thing. Long before KSP, fuel cross feed had been considered but discarded as being too complex, unnecessary, and in some cases thought to be impossible. The Falcon heavy has not yet flown of course, but should it work, it stands to disrupt the way people have been doing rockets yet again.

The long and short of it I suppose, is that for a lot of us youngsters, we missed out on the glory days of the space race where every month or so there was something new and fantastical. For the last decade or so, rockets were just mostly a humdrum thing that occasionally went bang, but otherwise was like the twenty rockets that preceded it and was like the twenty rockets that followed it. What SpaceX is doing is giving us our own little space race (admittedly with only one participant). Particularly because (customer willing) they are showing live telemetry of what is going on, so we can watch their successes (and even failures) in ways that people don't usually see till much later. Chances are pretty decent that they'll figure out what went wrong within a few weeks, and probably within 2 weeks of that point (and honestly I feel within 4 weeks from Sunday at the outside) they will release the video from the on board cameras. Something that NASA wouldn't likely do that quickly and that the ULA would doubtfully ever do excepting for a Modern Marvels: Rocketry Disasters episode or something. So in a way I guess, we are all getting to vicariously be part of the SpaceX adventure in what for many of us is our first time with this sort of thing.

A bit wordy, but there it is.

[CatastrophicFailure]

Like some of the others have said in here, it's a combo of Musk having a dream and chasing it in a way a lot of us wish we could, but also the fact that they ARE shaking things up when it comes to ways of doing rockets.

Up until SpaceX was a thing, the idea of reusable rockets wasn't really out there. The shuttle's re-usability was a bit of a boondoggle, and regardless of the reasons why that was so the point is that it put people off on the idea of such technologies. Additionally, nobody had ever REALLY done the whole reusable thing when it came to stack rockets. Sure the solid boosters from the shuttle were reused, but they were almost rebuilt from the bottom up in the process, so it's not exactly the same thing. But now that people are seeing how close SpaceX is coming to actually retrieving their first stage rockets, all of a sudden you are hearing from these other companies (ULA even) about how their next gen rockets will do the same thing. Long before KSP, fuel cross feed had been considered but discarded as being too complex, unnecessary, and in some cases thought to be impossible. The Falcon heavy has not yet flown of course, but should it work, it stands to disrupt the way people have been doing rockets yet again.

The long and short of it I suppose, is that for a lot of us youngsters, we missed out on the glory days of the space race where every month or so there was something new and fantastical. For the last decade or so, rockets were just mostly a humdrum thing that occasionally went bang, but otherwise was like the twenty rockets that preceded it and was like the twenty rockets that followed it. What SpaceX is doing is giving us our own little space race (admittedly with only one participant). Particularly because (customer willing) they are showing live telemetry of what is going on, so we can watch their successes (and even failures) in ways that people don't usually see till much later. Chances are pretty decent that they'll figure out what went wrong within a few weeks, and probably within 2 weeks of that point (and honestly I feel within 4 weeks from Sunday at the outside) they will release the video from the on board cameras. Something that NASA wouldn't likely do that quickly and that the ULA would doubtfully ever do excepting for a Modern Marvels: Rocketry Disasters episode or something. So in a way I guess, we are all getting to vicariously be part of the SpaceX adventure in what for many of us is our first time with this sort of thing.

A bit wordy, but there it is.

This. This is why I'm a SpaceX "fanboy." This is why my wife (who's not a space nerd) is possibly an even bigger SpqceX fangirl. Like the early days of the space race, SpaceX has been promising some pretty awesome things... and then delivering them when no one else is even close. Let's face it, the current Dragon is basically a man-capable capsule. Might be risky and uncomfortable, but you could probably survive a trip to space and back in one. They've already reduced launch costs well below their competitors, and now they're a hairs breadth away from actually landing a spent booster. They have flight-ready hardware demonstrating technologies while all the competition has is plans and CGI renders.

But the biggest part is that SpaceX's advances are evolutionary, not revolutionary. Each flight is a slight improvement on the last. That pace of development slows the hype train and so can absorb mishaps like this one that might doom other newcomers (heard from Virgin Galactic lately?).

[KSK]

Mazon Del - thank you for putting it better than I could have.

[AngelLestat]

@Mazon Del and @CatastrophicFailure, very well said.

Besides, if we specific talk about Elon, he is also doing Tesla, Solar City, Gigafactory, internet constellation, free superchargers in all USA and China, Hyperloop, etc.

Is a man who tries to make a better world, and his ultimate dream is Mars.

Rich men in his position only cares about the money they will get if they buy or sell certain company, does not matter if is something good or bad for the world.

So the question, why someone will be fan of spacex or elon musk.. is kinda weird considering the facts. But I am ok with that, is just matter of taste.

[Mazon Del]

Thanks everyone!

[Superluminaut]

Up until SpaceX was a thing, the idea of reusable rockets wasn't really out there.

This is not true. The idea of reusability probably predates the idea of staging, just watch any old-timey rocket movie. Additionally, conceptualizing, studying, and testing reusable rockets has been fairly constant probably since about the mid 60s.

For example

[Volcano]

The F9's exhaust plume is so gigantic that journalists are using pre-RUD photos to depict the explosion:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB12367224787933994021304581062191281870326

(though the white spot on the second stage might be the beginning of it)

[Volcano]

That makes too much sense, for it to be a "counterintuitive cause."

Thinking about it further, maybe the "counterintuitive cause" was too SMALL a payload? I haven't looked at all F9 missions, but it seems that CRS-7 included the smallest payload among F9 v1.1 CRS missions. Smaller payloads would mean higher acceleration, i.e., higher G-forces. And the failure occurred between Max-Q (highest aerodynamic forces from the nose) and MECO (highest acceleration, I think). Thus, the squeeze on the second stage between the first-stage engines and the nose cone might have been higher than in any prior launch.

Thoughts?

[Volcano]

Sorry for the serial posts, but a lighter Dragon would also theoretically transmit a greater portion of the aerodynamic forces through to the second stage. And non-Dragon launches have a fairing that might reduce the forces on the interior of the second stage. So this mission really could have involved the greatest compressive stress applied to the second stage so far, which maybe it just can't handle.

Obviously I'm speculating here, but that's all any of us can do until we have answers...

[CatastrophicFailure]

No one has come as close to actualization as SpaceX with real, production-grade hardware. I remember the DCX, shame they canned it after such a minor failure, but that was never intended to reach orbit.

[Albert VDS]

This is not true. The idea of reusability probably predates the idea of staging, just watch any old-timey rocket movie. Additionally, conceptualizing, studying, and testing reusable rockets has been fairly constant probably since about the mid 60s.

For example

Sure it has been studied and applied in some form, but SpaceX is trying it in a different way. Perfect one step before going to the next.

This is a much better approach than designing a reusable vehicle and launch the whole system at once.

An other thing which helps is that SpaceX has the lowest price per launch.

The point is a new company enters the market with a low cost launcher and are successfully exploring reusablity and suddenly every other company wants to walk that path too.

Here's an other video recorded at Jetty Park at Cape Canaveral:

Edited July 1, 2015 by Albert VDS

[Superluminaut]

No one has come as close to actualization as SpaceX with real, production-grade hardware. I remember the DCX, shame they canned it after such a minor failure, but that was never intended to reach orbit.

True in a way, to date I would say the shuttle has been technically more successful. We still don't know if spacex will actually do it, could be every first stage falls over on landing. Then they still need to beat the track record of the shuttle, which admittedly wont be that hard to do. However I still don't think the claim that spacex put re-usability on the map is valid. Another example, in 06 Russia opened a competition for a contract that would be fulfilled with a reusable first stage. The stage would use the same boostback flight path the f9 plans to use, predating it.

Not saying the russians invented it, odds are someone at the end of the 19th century probably dreamed it up for the first time.

Also the russian proposal is more versatile than f9 because it allows for the boost of a variety of second stages/payloads.

Claiming that the DC-X was never intended to reach orbit is like saying the grasshopper was never intended to be a first stage. It was a test article, the DC-Y would have been a ssto vtvl capable.

[Albert VDS]

Still SpaceX has made greater strides than any other attempt.

[CatastrophicFailure]

True in a way, to date I would say the shuttle has been technically more successful. We still don't know if spacex will actually do it, could be every first stage falls over on landing. Then they still need to beat the track record of the shuttle, which admittedly wont be that hard to do. However I still don't think the claim that spacex put re-usability on the map is valid. Another example, in 06 Russia opened a competition for a contract that would be fulfilled with a reusable first stage. The stage would use the same boostback flight path the f9 plans to use, predating it.

http://makeyev.ru/userfiles/image/rossiyanka/chmeng.jpghttp://makeyev.ru/userfiles/image/rossiyanka/i1eng.jpg

Not saying the russians invented it, odds are someone at the end of the 19th century probably dreamed it up for the first time.

Also the russian proposal is more versatile than f9 because it allows for the boost of a variety of second stages/payloads.

Claiming that the DC-X was never intended to reach orbit is like saying the grasshopper was never intended to be a first stage. It was a test article, the DC-Y would have been a ssto vtvl capable.

My point about the Delta Clipper project is that it never advanced beyond the technology demonstrator phase. The other day, and for the last several flights, SpaceX was flying production-grade, revenue-generating hardware. Henry Ford didn't invent the car or mass production, he put the two together and made the concept actually work in a completely practical way, that produced a tangible return on investment. SpaceX is right on the cusp of doing that now, far, far closer than any other attempt has come so far.

Oh, and LMFAO @ "Oxygene," that's my company's ridiculous mascot.