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Hot take alert:
SpaceX has accomplished some amazing things. There are some very brilliant engineers working at that company. The fact that they are routinely landing and reusing first stage boosters is absolutely extraordinary, Starship is one of the most impressive launchers that humanity has ever devised, In a century, when children are learning about space flight, SpaceX will be alongside the space shuttle and Soyuz as groundbreaking achievements in human spaceflight.
The fact that The engineers and technicians at SpaceX have accomplished so much, while being led (on paper) by a man as stupid as Musk, is a massive testament to their skill. I salute those workers who have accomplished so much despite all the hurdles that have been put in their way.
Remember what this article is about. After several dozen, if not hundreds, of successful launches and landings, one booster failed to make a successful landing on a barge in the middle of the ocean after successfully putting its payload in orbit. People who designed and built this system deserve to be proud of their accomplishment.
And we should be grateful, that while Musk is nominally CEO, He's let competent people run this company for him. Because God knows if he were actually running things day to day the falcon 9 would look like the bazinga truck and would explode 3 ft off the ground.
(Of course, their environmental record is not good, their plan to fill low earth orbit with cheap satellites that deplete or ozone is questionable, there are plenty of legitimate criticisms to make about this company.)
Well, vertically landing rockets was a solved problem before Spacex was a twinkle in Elon Musk's stupid eye. He certainly managed to funnel a large amount of federal money into re-solving that problem, though.
I mean that was a one-off prototype and tiny. as far as I can tell it carried no payload, and even if it had been completed, would have had a payload like 1/8th of the very first falcon 9, which has since increased, and frankly is more impressive as a layperson considering its proportions. I get that we hate musk here but bringing that to fruition is a big accomplishment of all the workers involved
Landing vertically is the problem, size is just a question of scope. It was a testbed. The project got shitcanned because of lack of funding, if the same amount of money had been dumped into it as into Spacex then vertical landing rockets would have been in production much earlier. All Musk has done is be the conduit through which money flows.
Nobody here is giving any credit to Musk. Saying "hey this is a nice building, the engineers and architects and builders really did a good job", is not giving any credit to my landlord, we all know he's just a guy with money. Check your reading comprehension. We all hate Musk, he's up there with the worst of the worst, I get it
Yes, this probably could have been done much earlier, and if it was we'd say the same things about the engineers and crew that brought that hypothetical project over the finish line. It's cool to see things progress
edit: also I said proportions not size. Tall shit wants to fall over more than short stubby wide shit
Don't shit on talented workers because they have to work for an asshole.
Pretty sure I wasn't shitting on anybody but Elon. The workers at Spacex have done good work, but it's not some earth shattering change, it's just a progression of already existing technology. They didn't invent self-landing rockets, and at this point people can make self-landing R/C rockets with off-the-shelf hardware.
Literally all technology is a progression of already existing technology. I feel like you're being kind of persnickety.
Coming up with a new thing vs refining a thing that already exists seems to be extremely distinct and easy to understand. Coming up with a completely new thing - landing a rocket on its tail - was done in the 90s. Refining that idea that was already come up with and then demonstrated as possible is just taking somebody else's idea and perfecting it.
I think it's very distinct and not persnickety at all.
This is characteristic of every single thing Elon is involved with. He does not invent ideas, he takes other people's ideas and then dumps truckloads of money into them while treating the people he pays like dogshit and pretending to be clever.
This is needlessly hostile
Check your reading comprehension is an unnecessary comment on someone's ability to read, rather than just engaging with the argument at hand. If you feel like someone didn't adequately address your point, you can say that without insulting their intelligence.
So check your comprehension of pig pooping on balls.
We disagree, instead of acknowledging that they went directly for the reddit-tier "check your reading comprehension", which is extremely hostile so they got the pigpoopballs. I also blocked them because I don't want reddit hostility on my communist website, so it's a nice zero conflict result where I will no longer need to interact with them and vice versa.
If getting ppb is too hostile for you, I dunno what to tell ya.
im getting 10x more reddit particles from you than @[email protected] so i guess thanks for the advice re: block button
lol how is this thread still going
I get that I was a little hostile and probably would have chosen a slightly different phrase if I were writing that comment again, but we literally weren't disagreeing, I was just getting yelled past!
Absolutely. But the engineers that worked on that project and the engineers that work on the falcon 9 both deserve our praise.
The workers at spacex have done some amazing things despite all the hurdles in their way.
size is absolutely not just a question of scope. there are qualitative differences that emerge from the accumulation of quantative change.
Electric cars were a solved problem before modern China was even a country. All BYD and Nio are doing is funneling a large amount of state funding into re-solving that problem.
Yes I agree, they are progressing and iterating on something that is quite old.
And so is SpaceX
Glad we can agree.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Commoditizing something is harder than showing a demonstrator (even if it's less cool than the demonstrator)
I'm pretty sure that he bought space x the same way he did Tesla and the point of the above comment is that Musk sucks, but the workers actually doing things are cool and should be supported
Sorry, I do not support capitalist endeavors. I don't think the workers suck, but I don't support their environmental degradation nor their abuse by a psychotic billionaire nor the products they create. Guess we have a difference of opinion.
Edit: also Spacex was absolutely founded by Elon Musk, after his dipshit ass went to Russia to try to buy Russian rockets and a Russian rocket engineer literally spat on his shoes and told him he would never be able to use his filthy money to buy the Soviet rockets. That engineer deserves accolades.
yeah, let me find the post about how much effort spaceX has to waste on managing Musk
https://www.tumblr.com/numberonecatwinner/701567544684855296/elon-wyd
We should nationalize SpaceX, make them part of NASA, and go back to just building our own goddamn rockets.
If these people can reuse a rocket three dozen times, landing it on a barge in the middle of the ocean, while trying to placate the world's richest toddler, imagine what they could do with an actual budget, part of an actual agency with a mission to explore space instead of make musk more money.
NASA has always used contractors for building rockets BTW.
EDIT: mostly
Well said!
China have currently like 8 concurrent projects on this. In 10 years, SpaceX will be fart of history.
China is definitely going to overtake soon. In a few years they're going to have the only operational space station.
Congrats to the engineers on... succeeding in their project to give us all turbo melanoma, I guess?
Seconding all this. And I'd like to add that "rocket stage crashing back to Earth uncontrolled" is the standard practice for every orbital rocket not named Falcon 9. And that this flight was this individual rocket's 23rd.
Also, calling this a crash is pretty misleading. The rocket did land on the uncrewed barge used as a landing platform out in the Atlantic ocean. The problem is that one of the legs collapsed and it tipped over. The residual vapors in the propellant tanks mixed and went boom. This is the aerospace equivalent of a 50-year-old cargo ship springing a leak while moored at a dock in shallow water. It's old hardware that failed at the least-concerning moment possible.
23 flights for a single rocket booster is absolutely mad. 30 years ago you'd have been called a madman for even suggesting it.
The space shuttle orbiters, engines and solid boosters have similar numbers, and similarly high maintenance costs. Very much a ship of Theseus question.
The space shuttles were different vehicles altogether, they needed three disposable parts to get to space. The SRB and the main tank were discarded after each use, they needed to be built from scratch every time.
It's not comparable to what Falcon can do, which is drop a payload in space, come back and fly again after a quick routine check and a refuel.
I love the space shuttle but it was a very different vehicle.
The srbs were recovered and reused. It was utterly ridiculous.
And the most expensive and complicated bits of the rocket, the SMEs and the Orbiter itself, were reused.
The only bit not reused was the main tank which was relatively simple in comparison to the other components
Oh yeah you're right, I read that a few years ago and didn't question it as it made sense given the cost of each shuttle launch. Thanks for the info!
Reusable boosters were never a particularly important problem to solve
Reusable rockets is a pretty important step in bringing down the cost to orbit
There are myriads reasons to be skeptical of that claim.
For a start, SpaceX is a private company and we can’t see their financials so claims about the true launch costs of SpaceX rockets are impossible to verify. You’re trusting Musk on that and you should know by now not to trust Musk.
Secondly their actual launch prices are not much lower than their competition. SpaceX claims this means a high profit margin but this cannot be verified.
Their competition have alleged unfair pricing practices, using debt and government loans to subsidize launches, claiming this is the reason why SpaceX can undercut the competition.
Very very very frequently when arriving at cost per kilo comparisons, people fudge the numbers due. For example, it’s extremely common to see price per kg derived from reusable launch cost but assuming the payload of a non-reusable rocket. Actually the reusable configuration has a dramatically decreased payload (about 2/3rds) and this has an important impact on price per kg that gets overlooked.
Another common error is comparing LEO vs geostationary launches or even more nonsensical comparisons such as claiming SpaceX LEO is dazzlingly cheap by comparing it to the cost of getting to the moon and back.
And reusable isn’t really reusable. Major maintenance and refit is required between each launch. The cost of labor is the most important factor here rather than the materials cost, plus the most expensive parts like engines would often only be worth their scrap metal costs, so the saving isn’t easy to quantify without seeing their books, which we can’t.
NASA and government contracts with SpaceX are juiced and NASA seems fine with this so it amounts to a public subsidy to a US company, which would explain how they are able to undercut rivals more directly than the questionable economics of rocket reuse.
Other private companies and government programs going back decades have looked at this problem and the answer has always been that the economics of massively reducing payload to save on boosters just doesn’t work out. No one has ever identified why SpaceX cracked the economic side of this problem other than Musk magic.
There probably are some use cases where rocket reusability moves the needle, specifically LEO for Starlink and small comms satellites really, but it isn’t a game changing or critical development and it definitely is not relevant for Mars or Lunar missions or for larger launches and probably not for geostationary either. It’s not that big a deal.
Musk is really good at headhunting and cutting through middle management cruft. He's actually really good at being a CEO, he's just also... y'know
Idk, seems like the company he is most hands-off (SpaceX) is the most successful. There are articles about how SpaceX engineers "manage" him and keep him from fucking everything up, guardrails he lacks at Twitter and Tesla, to obvious effect.