totm nov 2023 SpaceX Discussion Thread

[tater]

8 minutes ago, Nothalogh said:

Time for them so step up, we all know they have it in them, they got fat and lazy though

A few observations:

1. ULA is incredibly reliable. Barring incident, it will take SpaceX years to have the run of successful launches ULA has.

2. Why leave money on the table? SpaceX is not going to immediately cut prices by much with reuse. When there was less competition, they had no reason to reduce cost to the customer. Now that there is meaningful price competition, they have to adjust, obviously.

3. The USAF has an interest in not putting all their eggs in one basket.

[_Augustus_]

45 minutes ago, CatastrophicFailure said:

ULA must be ready to pop a space gasket about now. 

Is the X-37 still in F9 territory, or will it need a FH?

F9 has more than enough capacity.

[Nothalogh]

2 minutes ago, tater said:

A few observations:

1. ULA is incredibly reliable. Barring incident, it will take SpaceX years to have the run of successful launches ULA has.

2. Why leave money on the table? SpaceX is not going to immediately cut prices by much with reuse. When there was less competition, they had no reason to reduce cost to the customer. Now that there is meaningful price competition, they have to adjust, obviously.

3. The USAF has an interest in not putting all their eggs in one basket.

All those points are true, but Lockheed and Boeing, both separately and together, have shown little innovation or improvement on their rocket designs over the recent decades.

 

[tater]

Their rockets always work, what's to improve?

[Nothalogh]

1 minute ago, tater said:

 

Their rockets always work, what's to improve?

 

If that sentiment is the culmination of US rocket development, Werhner Von Braun should have just burnt his drawings and documentation

[tater]

11 minutes ago, Nothalogh said:

If that sentiment is the culmination of US rocket development, Werhner Von Braun should have just burnt his drawings and documentation

Rubbish. Current ULA LVs are highly evolved form their earlier progenitors.

Government contracts (what ULA services) tend to be expensive, and the mechanism by which they are funded makes getting it right the first time pretty critical. It has been a different ecosystem, with different incentives. New space is also ideologically motivated---they have goals outside selling launches.

I'm not a die hard defender of old space, but credit where it is due. If you had a payload to put into space, no redo, ULA would be the company to chose right now. Assuming reuse is anything like as cost effective as it might be, ULA will certainly need to pivot or be in big trouble, but they cannot be blamed for not innovating as much with no incentive to do so.

[StupidAndy]

SpaceX is trying to make space uninteresting and normal in the most awesome and abnormal way

[Nothalogh]

9 minutes ago, tater said:

Rubbish. Current ULA LVs are highly evolved form their earlier progenitors.

Government contracts (what ULA services) tend to be expensive, and the mechanism by which they are funded makes getting it right the first time pretty critical. It has been a different ecosystem, with different incentives. New space is also ideologically motivated---they have goals outside selling launches.

I'm not a die hard defender of old space, but credit where it is due. If you had a payload to put into space, no redo, ULA would be the company to chose right now. Assuming reuse is anything like as cost effective as it might be, ULA will certainly need to pivot or be in big trouble, but they cannot be blamed for not innovating as much with no incentive to do so.

That's my point.

Von Braun gave us something, something he believed we would value and build upon.

And what have we done with it?

[tater]

Von Braun is overrated. He gave us a single rocket not capable of orbit. Comparing that to even the atlas evolution is pretty goofy.

In short, ULA are not "lazy," they just had different incentives. New players have to innovate at something to even have a chance. Minus competition, the new guys could just copy the old.

Edited June 7, 2017 by tater

[CatastrophicFailure]

Can we start the hype train for BulgariaSat yet? 

Quote

Launch window: 1810-2010 GMT (2:10-4:10 p.m. EDT)

On the 15th, that is. 

Edited June 7, 2017 by CatastrophicFailure

[Nothalogh]

1 hour ago, tater said:

 

Von Braun is overrated. He gave us a single rocket not capable of orbit. Comparing that to even the atlas evolution is pretty goofy.

 

There is no response to to a statement such as this that wouldn't get me banned

[Bill Phil]

2 hours ago, tater said:

Von Braun is overrated. He gave us a single rocket not capable of orbit. Comparing that to even the atlas evolution is pretty goofy.

In short, ULA are not "lazy," they just had different incentives. New players have to innovate at something to even have a chance. Minus competition, the new guys could just copy the old.

Von Braun was the Chief Architect of the Saturn V, and was a very competent team lead. He helped popularize the idea of space travel being science fact and not just fiction, and is partially responsible for the first orbital rocket used by the US, at least the first successful one. He may be overrated, but he certainly gave us more than a single rocket not capable of orbit. Would we have those rockets without him? Probably. But that guy would be given similar respect.

ULA just needs to make sure that it can stay in business. If that doesn't require anything revolutionary, then that's what they'll do.

[Nibb31]

3 hours ago, Nothalogh said:

All those points are true, but Lockheed and Boeing, both separately and together, have shown little innovation or improvement on their rocket designs over the recent decades.

That's simply not true. Just because they don't hype every single innovation doesn't mean there isn't. What their engineers do might not be spectacular, and might not always be followed by customers, but they do deliver.

You must remember that it's a conservative business, with conservative customers, so you offer conservative products.

Edited June 7, 2017 by Nibb31

[HebaruSan]

3 hours ago, tater said:

If you had a payload to put into space, no redo, ULA would be the company to chose right now.

What if you only have $62M to spare?

[tater]

38 minutes ago, Bill Phil said:

Von Braun was the Chief Architect of the Saturn V, and was a very competent team lead. He helped popularize the idea of space travel being science fact and not just fiction, and is partially responsible for the first orbital rocket used by the US, at least the first successful one. He may be overrated, but he certainly gave us more than a single rocket not capable of orbit. Would we have those rockets without him? Probably. But that guy would be given similar respect.

ULA just needs to make sure that it can stay in business. If that doesn't require anything revolutionary, then that's what they'll do.

 

1 hour ago, Nothalogh said:

There is no response to to a statement such as this that wouldn't get me banned

The hype of Von Braun is to create a cult around him as if the US space program would not have functioned otherwise. The number of people who were engineers on the Apollo program certainly numbered many hundreds with no connection to Von Braun at all, perhaps thousands. He was great, but not the be all and end all of US space at that time period, Apollo was designed and built by defense contractors, not VB. We're still paying for the MSFC cult, BTW---it's called SLS. That's why he's "overrated," because people tend to make him personally responsible, ignoring the massive team that did the job.

Knee-jerk SX fanboys (I'm just the regular kind of SX fanboy, not the knee-jerk variety) like to dismiss ULA, but they are supremely competent at what they do. Getting everything they stack into space is what they are good at. Cutting costs, or coming up with utterly novel approaches like reuse? Not so much. As I said, there was no incentive to do so, the incentive was to always get high-value payloads where they needed to go, every time. The benefit of low launch costs is to incentivize less expensive payloads more than anything else---creating a new market. JWST will not be picking a LV based on which is cheapest, it's which one has the least chance of failure.

5 minutes ago, HebaruSan said:

What if you only have $62M to spare?

Then you are not launching a high cost payload. If you're launching something that costs billions, where your work was getting the thing designed and flown, then waiting for it to arrive so you can reduce data before you die, the payload might be insured, but if it blows up, you might be dead or retired before the replacement probe ever flies.

With cheap launches, you can now consider spamming less expensive craft (I'm talking space probes for now), which is awesome. But space probes take years to get funded and built, so expect the cheaper ones to start appearing in the next decade, now that people know they can send something 10X less expensive than they thought they could. Still, there's a very human reason for probes to be incredibly robust. The people that fly the instruments are personally invested. Have an idea, get it funded, get it built... it might be over a decade before there is a chance of it flying. Then maybe years to get to the destination. 40 YO PI pushes hard, probe launches when he's 52. Say it's to orbit Uranus... that's a 10 year trip. The guy is 62 when it arrives. If it fails at any point, his life's work is toast. With 10X cheaper launch, you might want to launch a few craft just in case. Still possible cheaper than 1 big one, and more redundancy, though.

[Streetwind]

Leave it to the SpaceX thread to turn an on-topic news announcement into a fervent personal opinion argument. *sigh* 

If we absolutely have to go off topic on every single page of this thread, can we at least talk about what a freaking rad vehicle the X-37B is instead? It carries over 3 km/s onboard dV, and is designed to save dV on plane changes by dropping its periapsis into the atmosphere to use its wings before boosting itself back out.

[Elthy]

Where did you get that information? Afaik not much about it is known...

[Streetwind]

The dV information is actually quite well known and easy to look up, since it was a primary design target from back when the X-37 was still a NASA project. The air force took over the project in 2006 after funding dried up, and added further development of its own, creating the "B" variant that we currently see, but the engine and fuel tanks are still the same.

It's much harder to find a source for the other claim. I've seen it multiple times before, in unrelated places, which lends a bit of credibility... but okay, it's not entirely out of the realm of the possible that it all comes from one unsubstantiated rumor that got spread around. However, the X-37B has repeatedly and effortlessly changed its orbital inclination in unexpected ways during past missions, successfully disappearing from tracking for a while until it was found again later, which could potentially have come from unusual maneuvers like this (though admittedly also from just using its engine). Furthermore, the spacecraft is openly called a testbed for reentry technology, thermal protection systems and unmanned avionics and navigation. It is uniquely equipped for this kind of thing.

And then there's the fact that the US air force has wanted a spaceplane like this ever since the X-20 Dyna-Soar in the early sixties. Which was also built by Boeing, and even shared some mission design goals, like satellite interception, servicing and relocation. In many ways, the X-37B is the (latest and most successful) spiritual successor that's realizing many of the ideas that were too far ahead of their time back then.

Edited June 7, 2017 by Streetwind

[sevenperforce]

New aerial footage of the last Falcon 9 landing:

Beautiful, as always.

Anyone care to guess what the debris is that gets kicked across the landing pad?

[TheEpicSquared]

3 minutes ago, sevenperforce said:

New aerial footage of the last Falcon 9 landing:

Beautiful, as always.

Anyone care to guess what the debris is that gets kicked across the landing pad?

The bugs being blown around?  

[tater]

8 minutes ago, sevenperforce said:

New aerial footage of the last Falcon 9 landing:

Beautiful, as always.

Best thing to watch in space for a long time.

 

8 minutes ago, sevenperforce said:

Anyone care to guess what the debris is that gets kicked across the landing pad?

They supposedly added metallic paint to the landing zone to increase radar reflectance to improve the landing accuracy. Perhaps the actual center has something thicker than just paint on the surface?

[sevenperforce]

Just now, tater said:

They supposedly added metallic paint to the landing zone to increase radar reflectance to improve the landing accuracy. Perhaps the actual center has something thicker than just paint on the surface?

No, it's something on the very right-hand edge of the painted area, a panel or something. It is kicked away at 0:06.

Also, just for fun:

[tater]

 

It looks like part of the outer ring of black paint (play youtube frame by frame). It could be that they didn't paint, but adhered a sheet of material (perhaps it's easier than applying a template every time to glue down sections they have cut from a roll?).

[CatastrophicFailure]

BulgariaSat pushed back to the 17th , probably due to the previous delay. But I think that's a Saturday again.

[TheEpicSquared]

1 hour ago, CatastrophicFailure said:

BulgariaSat pushed back to the 17th , probably due to the previous delay. But I think that's a Saturday again.

Aw. Still, maybe Iridium 11-20 might be able to launch in June, seeing as it's currently slotted in for the 25th. Either way, I think it's a safe bet that Intelsat-35e will be delayed to well after the 1st.