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jmbthirteen
United States10734 Posts
On March 31 2017 07:42 zatic wrote: This was so exciting holy shit. What is there to say, great fucking job SpaceX! That shot once it landed on the drone ship gave me chills. amazing | ||
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{CC}StealthBlue
United States41117 Posts
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LegalLord
United Kingdom13775 Posts
Good job on the launch though. Took a few years worth of delays to make it happen. | ||
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ZerOCoolSC2
8983 Posts
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{CC}StealthBlue
United States41117 Posts
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{CC}StealthBlue
United States41117 Posts
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{CC}StealthBlue
United States41117 Posts
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ShoCkeyy
7815 Posts
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LegalLord
United Kingdom13775 Posts
On April 01 2017 04:43 ShoCkeyy wrote: Congrats to Musk to reaching a re-used rocket for once. Let's hope the outcome is even better! In truth the indicator of success on reuse is if launch costs come down. Reuse of a rocket is not technically troublesome; economy is. | ||
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Yurie
11841 Posts
On April 01 2017 05:02 LegalLord wrote: In truth the indicator of success on reuse is if launch costs come down. Reuse of a rocket is not technically troublesome; economy is. The likely case is that a reusable rocket costs more to build since you need to account for wear and tear on components over the normal base line. Adding the repair costs to that and the shuttle showed that it wasn't economical in all cases. I agree with you that it might not be economical right now. You do need to start to find the problem areas simulations missed or overstated and over a few iterations bring costs down. Even if it loses them money right now it is something they need to do for the long run. You can liken it to the first cars that weighed tons (coal powered) and ran once before never being used again due to the issues they had. They slowly improved over many generations to what we have today, if you don't challenge the status quo you don't get that fast enough though. Even if SpaceX crashes and burns it has served a very good purpose. It has forced its competitors to start rapid innovation. It has also sparked interest in investing in the market (though that might have happened anyway with the development of the phone and the internet). | ||
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LegalLord
United Kingdom13775 Posts
Musk has peddled bullshit about this in the past with such stupid commentary as "fuel costs are only $200k so we can reduce costs a hundred fold." Well now we're down to partial reusability and a claim of 39 percent savings. Maybe that's doable, maybe it isn't. Musk is known for making exaggerated claims and making people excited over relatively simple achievements (because they are part of "some grander plan" towards which only small progress has been made). Sure, it's good that ULA has been forced to take competition more seriously and that many have been forced to increase efficiency. Rockets that are ancient and saddled with legacy (and government-specific) costs aren't as cheap as what Musk has made. But see it for what it is: a moderate reliability, moderate cost option to launch a rocket into space. They don't have any of the expensive yet reliability-focused quality control that ULA/Ariane/NASA have, and they save some big money there. Which is fine because we need cheap launches too. But what SpaceX actually manages to do is so much less than what they hype themselves up to be. Follow the money and you see something that is either an unprecedented super-project of glorious proportions, or an impressively long-lived scam that hasn't run out of suckers yet. Kind of a dickish way to rain on the parade, perhaps, but the economics is what actually matters here. Maybe they managed to make the reuse economical but until we see some specific indicators of that - e.g. lower launch prices in the future - then I can only conclude that no such thing occurred. Given that this is a guy who is perpetually on the verge of that big break that will finally make everything work out, I'm not holding my breath just yet. | ||
zatic
Zurich15328 Posts
Who cares if their announcements are way of target. Everybody knows that, and everybody adds a SpaceX delay factor on everything. Even if their cost per flight is double their asking price they are still way way cheaper than the competition. And even if it is all a scam like you claim, and they would have to be bailed out at some point it would still have saved the tax payer real money compared to $400m per launch at the old space giants. And that is just economics, which are frankly boring when we are talking about the final frontier. For 50 years NASA has been paralized by budget cuts and crippled by fear after Challenger and Discovery. It took someone with the crazy idea to go to Mars, and the will and drive to actually make it happen, to finally bring new life into space exploration. Maybe it's irrational, expensive, and risky. But so was Apollo. I'd rather have some irrationality than another 50 years of complacency. | ||
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xM(Z
Romania5281 Posts
Maybe it's irrational, expensive, and risky. i'm sure you have your own barometer for those terms but goddamn, it looks like you're happily chasing the carrot.LL seems to hate(distrust) everything that might turn out to be good for others, but i don't see him militating for his believes; i do see you taking action, defending Elon Musk / Space X on faith alone. i hope those dudes at Space X succeed in what they're doing, but i would never think of giving them some slack because they're at least trying. | ||
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Yrr
Germany804 Posts
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xM(Z
Romania5281 Posts
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LegalLord
United Kingdom13775 Posts
On April 01 2017 19:15 zatic wrote: LegalLord, if you really care about economics you should spend all your posting time hating on the fat cats at ULA. Oh, they do deserve plenty of criticism. They (LM+Boeing in whatever form) have sat on a government monopoly for decades and have just used legacy technologies all this time because there was no reason to innovate. But it's almost pointless to do so since the current climate basically villainizes them by default. Frankly it makes it so that it's more necessary to highlight when they actually do make progress than to spend time complaining about their historic monopolistic tendencies. On April 01 2017 19:15 zatic wrote: But since you really just hate Elon Musk and SpaceX specifically you'll find a reason to hate no matter what they pull off. Lol. Fuck no. I'm not enamored by him, I'll give you that much - I'm not going to speak in excited terms about a rocket launch or a very preliminary step towards "a greater goal." It's nice that he can hype it in a way that does get people excited; space PR does count for something. But I'm not going to ignore what I see: a hypester who is known for overpromising, who has multiple companies and performs the same shitty practices within all of them, and who will lose everything the moment people stop buying into the hype train because none of his companies are profitable. The way I see it is something like this: Musk promises a perpetual motion machine. Steps towards that goal: 1. Go to the store. 2. Build a generator. 3. Create net energy gain within a closed system using the generator. He accomplishes (1) and (2) and people are like "OMG PERPETUAL MOTION MACHINE INCOMING." No idiot, step 3 is where the real bottleneck is because (1) and (2) are very doable. Then he's going to sell energy from the generator created in (2) and say that it's going to create a beautiful economy of scale once it's a perpetual motion machine. And this is basically what Musk offers in all cases. The perpetual motion machine in this case is perhaps twofold: Mars and a satellite internet business. Great dreams - not always feasible realities. Those great super goals are always a bit out of reach - in all three of his major enterprises of today. One of those folded into another already under bullshit arguments of a synergy that doesn't really exist. I mean, for all my personal dislike of him, I do realize that space is important enough to put those aside if he really is on to something. My problem is that I don't really think he is. He delivered (2) and says that (3) is on the way. It's been on the way for a while now and there's always another (2.1) to (2.95729057289758903) that we can squeeze in there if we squint hard enough. The WSJ report on the internal finances of SpaceX doesn't paint a particularly great picture either. Nor does what I've heard from actual employees, current and past, about working there. While the assets of SpaceX are clearly worth something, I do take exception to people gushing with excitement over (2). And for reusable rockets, the steps look more like: 1. Land a first stage. 2. Reuse a rocket. 3. Make it economically feasible. On April 01 2017 19:15 zatic wrote: Who cares if their announcements are way of target. Everybody knows that, and everybody adds a SpaceX delay factor on everything. Time isn't as much of a factor as spouting bullshit. Which Musk does a lot of. "Hundred fold reduction in cost" is what matters. On April 01 2017 19:15 zatic wrote: Even if their cost per flight is double their asking price they are still way way cheaper than the competition. Are you sure about that number? They're cheaper, but not by THAT much. And commercial versus government payloads have entirely different standards that need to be met. I think even SpaceX started to raise costs significantly after their first AF contract. On April 01 2017 19:15 zatic wrote: And even if it is all a scam like you claim, and they would have to be bailed out at some point it would still have saved the tax payer real money compared to $400m per launch at the old space giants. If they lose the cargo that the AF has - which can be worth billions in certain cases - all that "savings" is for naught. And they were bailed out once by NASA, who wanted to see them succeed. Certainly they deserve praise for forcing the old space folk to actually get off their ass and innovate; no argument there. All the good ideas that ULA is now trotting out which they've kind of sidelined because it wasn't necessary in the past, that does show a specific deemphasis on innovation. But let's put it into perspective. What SpaceX has made is a rocket that is moderate cost, moderate reliability, high hype. If they deliver on reusability cost savings on the scale they suggested then that will push them to "low cost." But in any case, they will probably get your cargo up there, and if you're a commercial customer who simply can't afford the ~$130m of an aerospace (Ariane/ULA) launch, you're better off just insuring your cargo and taking a somewhat smaller risk. The AF launches include those kinds of missions too, where they don't need the kind of expensive quality assurance that more reliable launchers pay out the ass for. A cheaper launch option is a good thing to have, and should be encouraged. The hype train pisses me off though. On April 01 2017 19:15 zatic wrote: And that is just economics, which are frankly boring when we are talking about the final frontier. Well I'm sorry if the logistics of actually making things happen on the "final frontier" don't excite you. Too bad that economics is probably the most important constraint of all. Doesn't matter how much cool shit you can dream up if no one is going to pay for R&D or production. With reusable rockets specifically, it isn't even the first rocket to be reused - with the last one suffering from precisely the ailment that most people who have actually worked on reusables are actually concerned with now. Economics. On April 01 2017 19:15 zatic wrote: For 50 years NASA has been paralized by budget cuts and crippled by fear after Challenger and Discovery. Well there's more than that. They (and the Old Spacers) have legacy commitments, senators to please, jobs to create, pensions that they have to pay, and so on. Some of those commitments can be shed, some can't. NASA is the only one that can really pursue long-term projects that are unlikely to turn a profit, though. In that sense the move towards privatization of space seems like an interesting, possibly effective decision - though we are still in catch-up mode until the private groups develop the capabilities that NASA used to have (like launching people into space at all), after which we will see if they can actually do better. On April 01 2017 19:15 zatic wrote: It took someone with the crazy idea to go to Mars, and the will and drive to actually make it happen, to finally bring new life into space exploration. The Constellation program that Bush started and Obama cancelled, before anyone gave a rat's ass about SpaceX, had Mars as a goal... On April 01 2017 19:15 zatic wrote: Maybe it's irrational, expensive, and risky. But so was Apollo. I'd rather have some irrationality than another 50 years of complacency. Let's just hope the irrationality doesn't extend to the scientists and engineers who actually put the stuff together. They, of all people, should have a level head and not get overly excited by hype. | ||
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Dav1oN
Ukraine3164 Posts
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LegalLord
United Kingdom13775 Posts
On April 01 2017 20:07 cSc.Dav1oN wrote: Interesting what u gonna say when they launch their project to Mars. If they actually pull it off, I will say "good job." Until they show a worthy breakthrough towards that goal I remain skeptical. | ||
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a_flayer
Netherlands2826 Posts
The fact that SpaceX actually built a reusable rocket is an extraordinary breakthrough. It took them 15 years to get from nothing to completing the re-usability cycle in the Falcon 9. In another 15 years time, there'll be half a dozen of companies with similar rockets, and the economic gains will be improved further. It's an extraordinary accomplishment, simple as that. They're pretty much living up to my expectations in terms of advancing space travel compared to their announcements (I try look through the marketing aspects), and absolutely exceeding my expectations when compared to what I would have expected without such an enthusiastic company that dares to push as hard as they do. Driving down the costs of spaceflight to merely the cost of fuel isn't a task that is completed by simply proving the concept of re-useability, but that is the first step, and a step that is necessary. There will be many more steps that need to be taken, and at least someone is on that path now, paving the way as they go. I expect they'll have that ITS booster done in another 15 years, which will drive down the cost of bringing stuff to Mars significantly even without the more ambitious ITS spacecraft. I don't think - and I doubt anyone else does - that there will be a complete colony ready for tourism at that time, but they are absolutely going to get to Mars at some point in some way or form. SpaceX is pushing for that simply by increasing competition and making new concepts into reality. | ||
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LegalLord
United Kingdom13775 Posts
On April 01 2017 20:30 a_flayer wrote: I'm fairly certain you will just look at the shortcomings, comment on the delays, and complain how the hotel at colony doesn't have a second pool table. And I'm fairly certain most others would be impressed by just the scale model of the pool table that will eventually end up on a hotel that will be built on Mars - once that mission finally launches in (current year plus 15). | ||
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