News SpaceX heavy-lift vehicles: Launch Thread

SpaceX tried using parachutes to land the first stage on their first two flights, and those attempts failed, so they figured they needed legs and boostback/landing burns and vertical landing.

 

They're damaged when parachuted down. Properly landed boosters can be serviced, refurbished and reused.

Disposable or reusable - either way they're precision manufactured mechanisms and cost a fortune.

 

Possibly a step towards the spacex
Interplanetary transport system

 

That is never, EVER going to happen. Most of Musk's crap like Hyperloop and BFR are just marketing his own ego as a "visionary".
A lot of that stuff was already explored by NASA and the Soviets in the 70s and found it largely unfeasable due to G-forces involved along with safety and the NASA designed commercial space plane is far, FAR more feasable than nightmare BFR. "HEY GRANNY, LETS WANNA EXPERIENCE BETWEEN 6 TO 14G's!?"


NASA X-30 commercial space plane.

It's basically a marketing gimmick.

 

A very cool one...

Lol

 

It is a cool marketing gimmick, but like the Space Shuttle, it's an idea that is good in theory, less cost effective in practice. I think it's to make Space X actually seem like they are advancing science rather than retreading what NASA and the CCCP already achieved all the way back in the 50s and 60s.
Man I wish NASA was just properly funded. Honestly we entered the worst timeline when the Americans landed on the moon first, if the Soviets got there first, we would already be on Mars and probably have a moon base.

 

Do you have a source for this? I think the deafening silence from SpaceX makes it obvious that it failed but don't understand why they can't just say so.

 

You know, I've been following SpaceX since they were founded, and commercial space since Connestoga and the early days of OSC.

And every time someone has said that about SpaceX, they've been dead wrong. Good luck with that I used to work for one of the big aerospace companies, not the most lethargic of them but it was nothing like the pace of these new firms like SpaceX and B-O. People who say never, ever going to happen never get much done but they seldom get in the way of those who do.

center core btw ran out of igniter fuel and hit the water at 300mph. they may dive for the grid fins, though, they're worth a lot of money. But they never had any intention of reusing any of these cores.

 

Elon has now confirmed it in the post-launch conference.

Elon also says we missed Mars “Third burn successful. Exceeded Mars orbit and kept going to the Asteroid Belt.”

 

I know someone who is involved in the project. There are 2 branches of it. One is the "theoretical exploratory" of creating a large scale hyperloop, and the other is set endeavoring to actually build one in Dubai. He's on the theoretical one. And it is very, very slow going. He's not confident they'd be able to build something large scale in the USA for many decades to come.

 

Imagine being a human on board the first manned mission and hearing "oops"

 

Another reason why I don't think long term or even medium term, that chemical propulsion is the way to settle the solar system. You're right on the margin of what is possible and can run into situations where course major course corrections are just not possible.

Now if you're flying in a VASIMR powered ship, you make corections and keep on going. The reactor or solar panels powering the engine should have enough margin. Slough's "Fusion Driven Rocket" would have the same options.

More exotic tech like EmDrive, Plasma-Magails or Woodward MEGAdrive , if any of them pan out, would be even more forgiving. Rockets are good for getting out of the gravity well, but it seems a bit like trying Magellan trying to cross the world on an armada of dugout canoes, using chemical rockets.

 

Well, I'm sure it wasn't a mistake, and they simply burned all the spare propellent for the test mission to see what trajectory they can get.

Projected orbit

 

And in a few centuries an asteroid miner will die because he'll get backed over by a car...

 

Where did we have reusable rocket boosters self-land (and within feet of a bullseye) in the 50s and 60s?

Never ceases to amaze me how many people on the internet come out of the woodworks to throw shade on someone's accomplishments... The envy is deafening.

 

Chemical rockets are ideal at getting into orbit because they burn fast and hard which is what you need to overcome Earth's gravity in a short period of time. But when it comes to long trips through deep space, chemical rockets are not ideal. You want something more efficient like ion propulsion that will burn slow but steady.

 

But once you are upto speed in deep space do you really need to have your engine on?

 

No but the question is efficiency. Mass is bad because the more mass you have the more energy you need to spend to accelerate it to the desired speed. So you want to get the most thrust out the least amount of propellant mass as possible. Chemical rockets are really bad in this regard. Yes, you can get huge thrust but it requires a lot of propellant mass. That's fine if you just need to get into orbit but in deep space, it would be better if you could get the required amount of thrust with less propellant mass because then you could actually have more cargo. Basically, you don't want most of your total mass to just be propellant mass because you won't be able to take a lot of cargo with you.

 

As God and Robert A. Heinlein intended....

 

Crazy marketing gimmicks seem to be working:


But aren't as crazy as this marketing gimmick:

(Dreadful photoshop skills too! )

And that's just the lovely gimmickry to end the day with: