Space Exploration Technologies launched its Falcon 9 rocket on Friday, achieving Earth orbit in nine minutes.
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SpaceX Rocket Achieves Earth Orbit
- Thread starter John_Keck
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I definitely think this is a good step. The geek in me really doesn't want to see the shuttles mothballed, But I think its what needs to happen to continue moving forward, and if the private sector can step up to fill the gap, then good. (Now, if it just didn't involve Elon Musk, Whose name sound like a womans perfume..) I'm really hoping to get to Florida to see the final shuttle Launch though. I've always wanted to see one in person, and I guess when I was younger, took it for granted.
sirmonkey1985
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finally something good to hear about space travel after the fiasco going on with NASA and the government sticking their noses where it shouldnt be.. which sucks because id like to see people on the moon in my lifetime..
You'd be surprised what the private sector can get done when there's a glimpse of profit. I like this change personally.
sirmonkey1985
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oh i like that the private sectors getting into it.. but spaceX had the contract way before obama took office so its not like he changed anything.. he just had to put his damn name on it to make it look like he actually had a say in it.. everyone knew the shuttle was going to be mothballed soon.. the question that was brought up years ago was when will NASA put a man on the moon again.. thanks to obama we now know the answer and thats never..
westrock2000
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Thats what I'm betting as well
Now we just need to find lithium, platinum, or iridium deposits on the moon.
DeathFromBelow
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Right, because the Bush administration came up with a realistic plan for a shuttle replacement...
Obama significantly increased the NASA budget and has told them to develop a heavy lift rocket. Under the Bush plan reaching the Moon by 2020 was effectively a pipe dream without huge budget increases. Obama's budget saves the useful parts of that program, gives us a heavy lift vehicle, and sets realistic short term goals (it takes a lot less fuel to go to an asteroid than to visit the moon, and we need to come up with ways of deflecting dangerous asteroids). There's no reason we couldn't go to the moon in the future with that same rocket if a future administration wants to spend money on a new lunar lander.
It was sad when the Bush-style two rocket system was canceled, but the Bush administration never funded it in the first place. They were just testing the first stage of Ares I a few months ago, SpaceX is already going orbital. It made sense to cancel the smaller Ares I rocket and have NASA focus on building the big heavy-lift rocket that private enterprise can't currently build.
Machupo
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Thats what I'm betting as well
Now we just need to find lithium, platinum, or iridium deposits on the moon.
or start railgunning refined elements into a transfer orbit
Actually, this would be a case of the government removing their noses from something that they've supported for years, perhaps a bit too early.
Stories like this, though, bring hope that the private sector will pick up where NASA left off. I certainly hope this happens without much delay in between.
Right, because the Bush administration came up with a realistic plan for a shuttle replacement...
Obama significantly increased the NASA budget and has told them to develop a heavy lift rocket. Under the Bush plan reaching the Moon by 2020 was effectively a pipe dream without huge budget increases. Obama's budget saves the useful parts of that program, gives us a heavy lift vehicle, and sets realistic short term goals (it takes a lot less fuel to go to an asteroid than to visit the moon, and we need to come up with ways of deflecting dangerous asteroids). There's no reason we couldn't go to the moon in the future with that same rocket if a future administration wants to spend money on a new lunar lander.
It was sad when the Bush-style two rocket system was canceled, but the Bush administration never funded it in the first place. They were just testing the first stage of Ares I a few months ago, SpaceX is already going orbital. It made sense to cancel the smaller Ares I rocket and have NASA focus on building the big heavy-lift rocket that private enterprise can't currently build.
Money was the not only problem with CxP and the reasons can be found in a lot of places (nasaspaceflight.com thespacereview.com), just too many to list.
hellokeith
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Obama killing the Constellation program is shameful. And the first time a private company rocket explodes with loss of human life, the company will get sued out of existence and Bama will put a moritorium on private-sector space flight just like he's doing with off-shore drilling.
DeathFromBelow
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Why?
How do you figure that? They're contracting for the government, I'm sure the possibility of an accident and what would happen afterward has already been worked out.
In any case, the Dragon spacecraft should be significantly safer than the Shuttle (it actually has a launch abort system and uses a traditional ballistic re-entry).
Why would you assume that?
Just like when the first passenger airplane crashed and killed people, right?
I totally agree. Our knowledge base will go away and we will be buying seats on Russian rockets for many years. Obama is no JFK for sure. At least Bush had a plan. Obama is spending our future on clunkers and bailing out his union buddies and cutting things that helped provide growth in previous years. My "hope" changed to dismay but now the administrations bumbling with everything they touch has become a daly expectation and a joke.
DeathFromBelow
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You can't win with you people. If Obama had kept ignoring NASA like Bush did you'd call him incompetent. If he had poured money into saving Constellation you'd accuse him of bailing out a bad government program.
It's doublespeak. You're literally criticizing the president for supporting free enterprise and saving taxpayers money.
Hornet
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I'm glad too that private sector are now seriously in the business of space exploration. Not to long ago, we only hear stuff like aircraft that takes tourist to the edge of space but never quite going into orbit or beyond.
Good thing is they won't have to depend on government funding and contend for budget share
Good thing is they won't have to depend on government funding and contend for budget share
Constellation was 100% pork for certain states. It had zero practical use. Even if it hadn't been over budget and over schedule, it wouldn't have been able to put anyone on the moon before 2025. In essence it was a piss-poor attempt to replicate the glory years of the Saturn program while allowing engineering to take a backseat to politics. Look for example at the decision to use solid-fuel instead of liquid-fuel like every other rocket with Constellation, which would have turned the manned rockets into deathtraps. It makes the decision to launch with frozen O-rings look sane in comparison.
Under Obama NASA will focus once again on what it was designed for: doing fundamental research and engineering, not play shuttle service for the ISS or for moon tourists. Looking at for example deep space probes like the Voyager I & II, it is incredible how much we have learned from those probes. They were launched in the 70s. What have we done since that time which deserves real scientific merit? Hint: it's not manned spaceflight. We got space probes on Mars and in/around/on many other planetary bodies, while humans can only get to the moon with huge effort.
There's many decades of work there for NASA. R&D which commercial undertakings won't bother with, but which are extremely suitable for a government funded agency as it isn't expected to run a profit.
Under Obama NASA will focus once again on what it was designed for: doing fundamental research and engineering, not play shuttle service for the ISS or for moon tourists. Looking at for example deep space probes like the Voyager I & II, it is incredible how much we have learned from those probes. They were launched in the 70s. What have we done since that time which deserves real scientific merit? Hint: it's not manned spaceflight. We got space probes on Mars and in/around/on many other planetary bodies, while humans can only get to the moon with huge effort.
There's many decades of work there for NASA. R&D which commercial undertakings won't bother with, but which are extremely suitable for a government funded agency as it isn't expected to run a profit.
DeathFromBelow
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Well, a lot of rockets use solid boosters... the idea with Constellation specifically was to re-use modified Space Shuttle SRB tooling/designs as part of the first stage of Ares I and V. Solid rocket boosters are generally very safe and provide a better thrust/weight ratio than liquid fuels. The downside being that they're difficult to shut off in an emergency. Saftey wise the launch abort tower and traditional ballistic re-entry would have made the Orion capsule far safer than the Shuttle anyway.
Technologically there's no reason that Constellation couldn't have been successful, but you're right about it being political. On top of that, two separate rockets + Orion + Altair was too big of a task for NASA (especially since they didn't have the necessary funding).
Yes and no. Obviously continued robotic exploration of the solar system is important, there are so many places we haven't visited yet. At the same time, saying the manned space program is pointless is like saying the early European voyages to the Americas were pointless. It's a drop in the bucket compared to all the other things the government spends money on. It's a necessary investment in technology needed to get us off this planet.
The Space Shuttle and the ISS have been dragging NASA into the ground for years. The Shuttle was not designed to be our primary launch vehicle for building things in orbit, it was intended to piggyback on the Saturn V or other rockets and provide low cost transportation to space while the Saturn V (or a successor rocket) did the heavy lifting. Obviously it didn't work out like that. The Shuttle ended up being ridiculously expensive and more dangerous than previous spacecraft. If you do the math it would have actually been far more cost effective to have kept using the Saturn I-B & V instead of going to the Shuttle. You could have built the entire ISS with 5 Saturn V launches. Hell, if it weren't for the Shuttle program we'd probably have put people on Mars by now.
I'm really interested to see what sort of heavy lift rocket NASA comes up with now that they have a realistic budget and goals.
Monkey God
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Prove it.
Correction... "Obama's Puppets"... Obama doesn't know what the hell he's talking about most the time (hence the teleprompters). Have you heard him speak sans-teleprompter on health care, when someone from the audience fields a non-rehearsed question? He's really got no flipping idea what he's talking about.Right, because the Bush administration came up with a realistic plan for a shuttle replacement...
Obama significantly increased the NASA budget and has told them to develop a heavy lift rocket. Under the Bush plan reaching the Moon by 2020 was effectively a pipe dream without huge budget increases. Obama's budget saves the useful parts of that program, gives us a heavy lift vehicle, and sets realistic short term goals (it takes a lot less fuel to go to an asteroid than to visit the moon, and we need to come up with ways of deflecting dangerous asteroids). There's no reason we couldn't go to the moon in the future with that same rocket if a future administration wants to spend money on a new lunar lander.
So, "Obama's puppets" increased the budget. And BTW, budget increases don't save the taxpayer money unlike your claim:
I'm glad he's supporting free enterprise. Probably because NASA doesn't seem to know what the hell they're doing anymore. All the Saturn guys from the glory days are too old or dead to work nowadays... NASA lacks vision. I'm sure you could throw a ton of money at it, but with that same money, offering X-Prize type things would do more to generate innovation than it would going to NASA's budget.
Point is that private enterprise just does stuff more efficiently... I'm not a fan of government-exclusive contracts, though- the wasted money is just stupid.
Yep.
Our country wasn't sue-happy a hundred years ago.
Fact is, he's right. First time "free enterprise" goes bad, we'll just end back to square 1. Or more likely, Obama will ban private space travel, and instead of losing their investments, those companies will be moving their operations overseas. So we lose jobs, money, and forward progress... He pledged to lower unemployment, decrease the budget, and bring technological progress. Banning enterprises aren't the way to do that. Just like the knee-jerk reaction to the off-shore drilling. hellokeith is right.
The whole idea of Constellation is to employ the shuttle workforce and the contractors, but were stuck with STS hardware and infrastructure. SDLV cannot exist in the era of more efficient, lower cost launch systems, and organizations. They could not start with a clean sheet design, just politically impossible. SpaceX is benefiting very well with the many "mistakes" from congress and misfortunes with NASA programs over the years.
There was an article a few months ago showing that in case of an emergency, the use of SRs (which can not be turned off at all, no matter what) would have led to a debris field and exhaust field which would have basically incinerated the astronaut's capsule, meaning that escape in case of a failed launch would be impossible. Period. Hence my use of the word 'death trap'.
Scaled Composites, the company working with Richard Branson, already had an explosion at a test facility in 2007 that killed 3 employees. They're still around and kicking.
And as far the off-shore drilling ban, it was lifted four days ago for shallow wells and the feds have already approved drilling of another well in the Gulf of Mexico. The deep-water wells probably won't be far behind. Go Obama?
DeathFromBelow
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It's pretty well known for being the most complicated machine ever built...
1. It has the worst statistics in terms of flight losses. 2 complete hull losses + 14 crew member deaths vs no hull losses/deaths for Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo. Not necessarily a fair comparison because of the disparity in the number of missions, but still worth pointing out.
2. The Shuttle piggybacks on it's first stage boosters rather than riding at the top of the stack, meaning there's no way for the astronauts to escape using an escape tower system in the event of a failure. The shuttle does have escape modes if the orbiter survives, but the orbiter is very prone to damage because of its position. Almost any major emergency during ascent would kill the crew.
3. The Space Shuttle's uses a "low and slow" re-entry profile that relies on a delicate layer of ceramic heat shield tiles. These tiles are exposed throughout the flight and as we saw with Columbia are particularly prone to being damaged during liftoff (another problem with riding piggyback on the first stage). On the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo/proposed Orion spacecraft a traditional ballistic re-entry is used and the heat shield is protected until it is needed.
Yeah, I saw an article about that:
http://www.space.com/news/090608-ft-orion-safety.html
I wonder whether the sort of total explosive failure of the first stage they talked about could be survived regardless of the fuel used. It's not like there's not a risk of a liquid fueled first stage exploding, and the additional complexity involved with liquid hydrogen+oxygen fuel could increase the risk of failure vs a relatively simple solid booster.
As they point out in the article, the risk of the SRB failing is quite low, 1 in 2,800 vs the 1 in 200 chance of the Shuttle failing. The launch abort system might not be useful for the entire ascent, but anything would be an improvement over the Shuttle in that regard. A failure like what happened with Space Shuttle Challenger would be survivable on Ares I, the Shuttle was destroyed because the leaking SRB caused the liquid fuel tank to explode.
It's all moot anyway. NASA is going to build a heavy lift rocket akin to the Saturn V now.
SilverSliver
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Because Bama is the king of the kneejerk.
Pretty sure people have died on passenger planes in the past 100 years, certainly recently enough that the "sue happy" people would have sued their little hearts out.
Fact is, people die on the job EVERY DAY, and a great majority of those companies continue to function beyond that day, beyond the suing.
Sued? Sure. Successfully? Maybe. Out of existence? Get real.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1
No of SS Missions - 132
No of missions lost - 2
Loss Rate - 1.5%
No of Apollo Missions (Manned) - 10
No of Missions lost (manned) - 1 (Apollo 1)
Loss Rate - 10.0%
Add Apollo 13 into a near miss and you have a much higher loss rate.
Monkey God
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The shuttle is phenomenally reliable, and both disasters were avoidable considering the heavy human error factor.
DeathFromBelow
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Apollo 1 wasn't a flight loss.
Compare the Shuttle to the Soyuz. The Russians have flown over 100 Soyuz missions and haven't had a fatality since Soyuz 11 back in 1971.
nissanztt90
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1967 January 27: fire on board: A fire in the cabin claimed the lives of the Apollo 1 crew as they rehearsed the launch sequence for their planned February 21 launch. An electrical fault sparked the blaze that spread quickly in a pure oxygen atmosphere, killing Gus Grissom, Edward White II, and Roger Chaffee.
Definitely a training accident.
DeathFromBelow
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Just about all accidents can be pinned on human error at some point, thus a less complicated launch system is preferrable to a more complicated one.
Even if the Shuttle had a sterling safety record it's still ridiculously expensive and limits our activities to Earth orbit. The Shuttle was an expensive prestige project that was kept alive because it forced the Soviets to spend money trying to keep up.
DeathFromBelow
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It has nothing to do with the safety of the rocket design, which is what we're talking about here.
It was a stupid mistake caused by the bureaucracy at NASA. Had NASA listened to the astronauts and engineers safety concerns about the pure oxygen atmosphere it could have been avoided.
Assuming proper maintenance and safety requirements are followed, a traditional rocket/capsule design like the Apollo or Soyuz is cheaper and safer than the Shuttle because it's a less complicated system and there are more launch abort options.
Key word there is "testing"... People are, harshly enough, expected to die...
Now if it was on a blast off high profile event with people in the rocket heading to the ISS, you'd have news.
I'm specifically talking about the deep-water ban. I don't see it being lifted anytime soon, at least until Cap and Trade gets passed
The oil companies down there are ALREADY moving rigs off to Africa. They're giving a big middle finger to Obama right now, he won't let them drill- they'll drill elsewhere. Obama is helping nobody here in America by doing this (again, feel-goody knee-jerk reaction not based in logic).
Some of these rigs cost almost $500,000 PER DAY just to LEASE THE RIG ITSELF, much less all the other operational expenses. Those companies aren't going to wait for our idiot government to come around.
Most people 100 years ago had common sense.
Only reason the plane-in-water disaster in NY didn't end up in court was because they paid everyone off in exchange for no lawsuits. Common sense (100 years ago) dictated that accidents on complex machines traveling hundreds of miles an hour happen.
I don't think the shuttle was expensive, just the government implementation of it. If you gave the same "research funding" to a private company and let them invent their own version of the shuttle, with a big $$$ prize for doing so, I'd bet you'd have an incredibly efficient method of space travel.
DeathFromBelow
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Maybe. I think we just ran into the limits of 1970's technology. The problem with the Shuttle is that while the vehicle is reusable, getting it back into a usable state after a flight didn't save a whole lot of money compared to expendable vehicles. The heat shield tiles, SRBs/fuel tanks, and main engines ended up being expensive to repair and maintain. Private companies might be able to attract better engineering talent than NASA, but I don't think anyone could have produced a more cost-effective Shuttle with 70's technology. We should have worked on a lower cost version of the Saturn I-B/V
The future of reusable spacecraft is a single-stage-to-orbit spacecraft like the VentureStar. That sort of tech is still a ways off.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VentureStar
Lockheed Martin has had some success with smaller designs in the last few years:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33329828/ns/technology_and_science-space/
S
SpeedRunner
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If you were being sold a car, and they told you there was a 2 out of 5 chance that the car would eventually explode and kill you and all your passengers, would you consider that safe?
There were 5 Shuttles... Challenger, Columbia, Atlantis, Discovery, and Endeavor. The first two are no more. RIP to the crews.
As a spaceflight enthusiast, I was very excited and happy to see SpaceX succeed. I watched the live feed as it happened. They were worried about stage seperation and second stage ignition, but those went perfectly. They almost exactly nailed their desired orbital path in the first try. That's extraordinary.
And if that doesn't impress you enough... consider this... NASA has spent $9 bill on a rocket that has one test flight of the Ares 1-X, that didn't even reach orbit. NASA has thousands of workers and a much more infastructure. SpaceX is a start-up company with a little more than 900 employees and $500 million spent so far.
You're comparing a 40 year old program to a program that only had 10 missions??? Come on, dude... If you want to compare the safety, the Shuttle had the first 10 missions go without fail, much better rate than the Apollo disasters.
S
SpeedRunner
Guest
The Soyuz program is also about 40 years old, and it has not lost any crew. The Russians boast that it's the world's safest spacecraft, and there is some validity to that argument.
The manned Dragon spacecraft will probably be safer than the Soyuz, because it is designed to meet all NASA safety standards, and also comes with a crew escape system as a bonus.