So I’ve heard and seen the newest launch, and I thought for a private firm it seemed cool they were able to do it on their own, but I’m scratching my head that people are gushing about this as some hail mary.
I get the engineering required is staggering when it comes to these rocket tests, but NASA and other big space agencies have already done rocket tests and exploring bits of the moon which still astounds me to this day.
Is it because it’s not a multi billion government institution? When I tell colleagues about NASA doing stuff like this yeaaaars ago they’re like “Yea yea but this is different it’s crazy bro”
Can anyone help me understand? Any SpaceX or Tesla fans here?
Disclaimer: Fuck Elon Musk and all the shady shit he’s been pulling off.
That said, this is one of the most impressive things I’ve ever seen in terms of the potential it holds to shape the future.
Up until 5 short years ago we had:
- No main booster recovery
- No rocket nearly as powerful as this one
- No successful flight of a full-flow stage engine
- Nobody even considering the catch with chopsticks thing
- No private company testing super heavy lift vehicles (BO is about to enter the chat as well)
- No push for reusability at all
This was all built on top of the incredible engineering of NASA, but this one launch today has all of the above ticked.
This is like making the first aeroplane that’s able to land and be flown again. SpaceX uses this example as well, like, imagine how expensive any plane ticket would have to be if you had to build a brand new A380 every single time people wanted to fly and then crashing it into the sea.
Going to space is EXPENSIVE. If this program succeeds it will both massively reduce the cost to space and spin off hundreds of companies looking to do the same in various ways.
Look at any new rocket currently in development, they all include some level of reusability in the design and that’s all thanks to the incredible engineers of SpaceX paving the way, first with Falcon 9 and now with Starship.
We’re talking industrial revolution levels of progress and new frontiers in our lifetimes, which is very, very exciting.
I hate Musk and his personal everything, but Like SpaceX. However, when people gush about reusability, they seem to forget the 135 Space Shuttle missions (2 fatal failures , yes.). All done with 5 vehicles. Yes expensive etc, but truly amazing.
Also, I really don’t find anything SpaceX is doing revolutionary. Impressive? Yes, but it’s essentially incremental engineering, made possible by ginormous funding, including NASA money, and a private company doing things that NASA can-t politically afford.
Imagine NASA crashing 4 Shuttles before getting landing right. There’d be no NASA by now.
The space shuttle wasn’t as reusable as it was claimed to be.
Each airframe required massive refurbishment after every flight.
And the “crashes” you’re talking about were part of the project process, articles that were never going to be any more than test objects to begin with.
NASA crashed a lot of stuff, unintentionally. Three off of the top of my head, killed 15 astronauts, all which were preventable (not to mention the launch pad failures getting to Apollo).
NASA/NACA/Air Force crashed a lot of stuff along the way.
Ffs they knew Columbia had a tile problem, and said “it’ll be OK”. They knew it had been too cold for the booster seals on Discovery, and launched anyway.
The shuttle was reusable in the same way a soyuz capsule is. And NASA very much crashed shuttle prototypes on the way.
Pedantic, but the shuttles were orbiters not rockets
The big ass rocket engines in the back fueled by the massive fuel tank may disagree with you
No, the shuttle ALONE is not a launch vehicle. It’s an orbiter. They are apples to oranges.
It does not power itself off the pad, it uses boosters. So comparing the boosters to the SpaceX stuff is most relevant
A bit of a timeline correction. The falcon 9 started landing succesfully in 2016. So 8 years ago but your argument still stands.
That can’t be right! 2016 was just… Fuck I’m getting old so fast
The Saturn 5 was able to lift 141t to LEO.
The Space shuttle was reusable.
The Saturn V could lift 141t to LEO…once. Also it’ll be at least another 5 years before we reach a stable max power version of Starship.
For example the Falcon 9 v1.0 first flew in 2010 and the current Block 5 version first flew in 2018 with more than double the LEO capacity when fully expendable.
If they configure Starship as fully expendable it can lift 250t to LEO (per SpaceX, so grain of salt there to be fair).
As for the shuttle, I love it to bits and I’m sad it had to be grounded. It was refurbishable but not really reusable and the massive liquid fuel tank was discarded in each flight.
My guy they just caught an object falling from space using a pair of giant chopsticks
They caught a building, with a building holding chopsticks.
https://youtu.be/b28zbsnk-48?t=412
That thing is about 70 meters long and weights 300 tons and some.
Technically not from space since the lower stage never made it past the Karman line, which is 100km above sea level.
It reached the altitude of 96km, not space but not far either.
Because they are impressive in the way NASA was. Which is the problem - we should be doing this as a nation and not subsidizing whatever a billionaire fancies at the moment.
Exactly. It’s concerning that a private individual is allowed to do this, much less without government competition. It’s like we’ve forgotten that the boosters that got us to the moon were the same missiles that terrorized Britain.
Yes. It’s down right scary to think about what the consequences of private ownership will mean.
In best case it will turn into a profitable business which means burning a shit ton of fuel in the atmosphere and leaving tons of garbage in orbit.
Yes it’s impressive that it’s possible, but is it less impressive if it means screwing up the option for others to launch anything in 50 years just because the richest man on earth right now wanted to earn more money.
It’s a small step for a large corporation, but it’s a large step backwards for humanity.
I’d rather see new technologies like the slingshot launches becoming successful than seeing SpaceX launching the same old dirty rockets over and over for profit.
eh, it will probably be good thing to just commercialize space buses and leave NASA to the science.
Good thing in what way
It would allow NASA to focus on science and not trivialities of moving things into orbit. Thought that was well implied.
Moving things into orbit requires a substantial amount of science.
The science is largely figured out. Takes engineering and refinement, sure. But we know how to do these things.
The science of space flight is largely figured out? That will be news to the scientists on spacex’s staff. I don’t think you know what you’re talking about
I hate Elon just as much as the next guy, but pretending that this wasn’t a marvel of engineering is really disingenuous. People with intelligence beyond my comprehension made that a reality, and just because the company had his face on it, it doesn’t make it any less impressive
I’ve seen so many people grudgingly pretending what they saw wasn’t one of the coolest fucking things they’ve seen all year all because they hate Musk. Like, you know he’s not personally involved in the design or manufacture of these things right? By all accounts he’s more of a hindrance and these amazing fears of engineering have been accomplished despite him, not because of him.
I personally don’t really care how big of a douche Musk is, as long as he’s willing to fund these kinds of things.
So I was teaching some kids snowboarding, one kid started talking to me about musk on the chairlift. He tells me that musk is the greatest engineer to ever live. I say that he’s really more of a business man buying up companies. Kid is not convinced. I tell him that the only engineering that musk may have done was software engineering on PayPal. Kid thinks that’s great support of his claim.
Adults and 11 year olds are pretty much the same, so I would say there’s lots of people that think musk is a super genius. Probably a dwindling amount, but there’s a lot of people on earth.
He bought co-founder status at Paypal too IIRC. He was ousted in part because he wanted to rename it “x.com”. Weird that.
Unfortunately, a lot of smart people are under his spell too. I had to listen to the CEO of a medium sized company wax poetic about how he’s a super genius and the greatest boon to human ingenuity in a century, desperately trying to hold my tongue as I rolled my eyes into the back of my skull.
I think he’s an okay businessman. That’s about as much praise as I’m willing to afford him. He’s definitely charismatic enough to convince a room full of investors that the ideas he’s pitching are worthwhile. Part of that is that his passion for these projects are genuine, and when you put somebody in a room with a passionate guy, the enthusiasm tends to rub off on them just a little.
Most of his investments that garnered him his wealth are just him being at the right place at the right time. Getting in on PayPal when Ecommerce was in it’s infancy and partnering with Ebay to take advantage of shopaholics who just couldn’t help themselves. Buying his way into Tesla right when EVs were primed to take off and pushing hard for an economy class variant that could be mass produced rapidly (in an already-made factory that Toyota closed down, no less!). Founding SpaceX and pouring a shit ton of his own money into rocket and aeronautics R&D right around the time the U.S. Government was looking for cheap contractors to take over the space program. I think the only project he miscalculated on was buying Twitter for way too much money when social media was really starting to stagnate.
His politics are fucking weird, though. Him being a Trump nutter is really not helping his “I’m a genius” image. I find his personality to be pretty repugnant. I already didn’t like him because back in the early days of Tesla he pushed all the management to essentially become slavedrivers for the line workers. I live in California near the plant and I had friends who worked there in production that got nearly worked to death, extreme overtime and weekend shifts, few breaks, the only saving grace was the above average pay that kind of kept them trapped in that hell of a job for way too long. Then the whole Thai soccer team incident happened and I was so over him. Haven’t heard anything about him since that has made me feel like he deserves to be the richest cunt in the fucking universe.
He’s literally the chief ticket designer as well as CTO. Deeply involved in the engineering.
Rocket not ticket. Lol
these amazing fears of engineering
😱
What did people see that was so cool?
I personally don’t really care how big of a douche Musk is, as long as he’s willing to fund these kinds of things.
He’s not funding this, dude. We are. Space X gets massive government contracts and subsidies. The rest comes from income streams like Starlink.
you know he’s not personally involved in the design or manufacture of these things right?
He actually is. Everyday astronaut has done several interviews with him and the dude knows about rockets and engineering.
He’s the chief rocket designer as well as chief technology officer. He’s deeply involved and is well regarded as an incredible engineer
Like, you know he’s not personally involved in the design or manufacture of these things right
Not everybody does. I’ve seen some threads, mostly on insta, where people were fallomg over themselves to get on their fucking knees to slob on Elon’s nob. I get that the average insta user isn’t the brightest, but people like that do exist.
And it leaves a bad taste in my mouth, because there is a chance that the hard work of the engineers, laborers, and Shotwell will be used for Elon’s fame throughout history.
So yeah, fuck Elon. The tech is cool as fuck though.
Like, you know he’s not personally involved in the design or manufacture of these things right?
Just don’t look up who made the design changes to stainless steel, aerodynamic flaps or tower capture.
SpaceX is not run by Elon and he’s kept from being involved closely by a buffer of people that keep him from getting too close to making any “elon” level changes.
SpaceX is successful despite Musk, not because of. And the woman who runs it knows that and keeps Musk away from any important decisions or impacts.
So the stuff they’re doing is legit, cool aerospace stuff.
It’s just not something Musk should take credit for. He does/will. But he shouldn’t. He’s a hack.
That’s not true in the least. He is CEO, CTO and Chief rocket designer. He’s deeply involved in every step
He can give himself whatever titles he likes, that doesn’t mean he makes any positive technical contribution.
Watch a few of the multi hour interviews he given while raining through explaining everything. He knows what he’s doing if you’ve not been paying attention. Lots of reasons to not like him but your completely wrong on this one
I have watched them. He’s just repeating things. He has no grasp of engineering or astrophysics at a fundamental level. He is a sales guy.
The same is true for his software engineering skills. They are novice level, at best. Watching his engineering brainstorm sessions at Twitter was a painful experience. He only knows how to talk the talk. He constantly misuses key tech jargon and design patterns. His engineering group will literally visibly cringe whenever he makes a suggestion.
You worked with him at Twitter?
My dude.
I’m a Principal software engineer with 27 years in the industry. I run a team of highly tenured, extremely badass engineers for an extremely large enterprise corporation with 30k+ employees.
I know what I’m on about when it comes to software development.
I’ve watched the musk interviews and behind the scenes brainstorming sessions for the Twitter 2.0 idea. He’s a hack.
What are your qualifications for praising him?
“deeply involved in every step” absolutely not, because if he was it would be painfully obvious.
But he shouldn’t. He’s a hack.
He’s also a stupid doodoo brain, with poop and pee in his pants! Cacca doodoo!
There are a few things that are different from what NASA has done in the past:
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SpaceX Rocket is the most powerful rocket ever, surpassing everything that NASA or anyone else has ever done.
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they are landing the rockets, with the aim of being able to recover them. If you skip the technicality that SpaceX first stage is suborbital but is part of an orbital launcher, that makes SpaceX the only entity who has achieved that, with some comparison to the Space Shuttle and Buran, though both were losing significant sections of the initial launcher, with very difficult repairs once on the ground.
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the cost of the launcher. In terms of capabilities, NASA’s SLS is probably close to Starship. However, it costs around $2B/launch, and nothing is recoverable. Starship is meant for low cost. It is estimated that the current hardware + propellant for a single launch is under $100M. With reusability, a cost per launch under $10M is achievable in the mid term (10 years I would say) once the R&D has been paid ($1.4B/year at the moment, I would guess the whole development for Starship will be $10-20B, so same if not less than SLS).
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the aim for high speed reusability - SpaceX aim is to launch as much as possible, as fast as possible, with the same hardware. While it is a bit early to understand how successful they will be (Elon was saying a launch every 1hr, which seem to be very optimistic, I would bet 6-12hrs to be more achievable). That was NASA’s original goal for the Space Shuttle, and they failed that.
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finally, orbital refueling means you have a single vehicle that can basically go anywhere in the inner solar system without much issues, and minimal cost.
Also, what gets people excited are the prospects of what this enables. A 10-100x decrease in the access to orbit changes completely the space economics and opens a lot of possibilities. This means going to the Moon is a lot simpler because now you don’t need to reduce the mass of everything. This makes engineering way easier as you do not need to optimise everything to death, which tends to increase costs exponentially. And as for Mars, Starship is what makes having a meaningful colony there possible. Doing an Apollo like mission on Mars would have been possible for decades, but at a significant price for not much to show for. With cheap launch, you can just keep sending hardware there.
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Wait, when did NASA land a fully reusable rocket like fucking Buck Rogers?
Then do it again, but capture it with the freakin’ launch tower?
When did NASA even have a reusable rocket? Oh, the shuttle, the bastardized money pit for NSA/NRO/Air Force, that appears to have been designed to orbit a surveillance satellite chassis, which most people know as Hubble (it’s one of many, this one being used to surveil the universe, instead of the earth).
And the shuttle was a quasi-reusable orbiter, not a rocket.
Can I just add that “fucking Buck rogers” is an excellent phrase and all three words can mean sex and when combined they don’t.
Did you just talk shit on the shuttle and Hubble? Whaaat?
The shuttle was a massive and unsafe waste of space ship.
Not sure what Hubble did to catch this stray however.
NASA, nor anyone else, has done this before. I’m not sure what you’re referring to when you say NASA did this already.
Have you seen their boosters land? It very much IS impressive. They basically made reusable rockets viable, which is a huge step for more affordable space flight.
Also their raptor engine is a marvel of engineering.
What you’re asking is akin to: why are people impressed by the airplane? We’ve already reached the Americas and India by boat.
SpaceX, and others actually are not advancing science per se, but are greatly improving/optimising the engineering so that it can be used in cheaper ways by others.
There’s also the issue that after the moon landing we didn’t really improve that much and much of the knowledge faded
There’s also the issue that after the moon landing we didn’t really improve that much and much of the knowledge faded
For me being impressed with SpaceX is kinda like loving a piece of art even though the creator turned out to be an asshole. Or liking Star Trek, even though Berman was shady af to put it mildly.
What SpaceX does is very impressive from a technical point of view. Even if the rocket never amounts to anything except this one successful test, it’s still amazing they pulled it off. It tickles my engineer brain. And I think it’s worth to honor all the people that made it happen, despite them having to work for Musk. Combine this with what could be in the future and you can hopefully see why people hail this test flight.
Now I still have serious doubts about Starship in the moon program. The on orbit refueling seems very sketchy and unproven at this point. Sure they will get two rockets into orbit, mate them up and transfer some fuel, that’s a given at this point. But how much fuel are we talking? And how fast does the turnaround need to be to prevent losing a lot of it? How many ships and how many launches? Will this completely offset the cheaper launch costs due to reusability? It’s a huge unknown and will push back the moon program to well into the 2030s.
Not a fan, but it generally boils down not to where they can fly but how they differ in other aspects, mainly cost.
SpaceX is currently the world pioneer in heavy reusable rockets, which is another way to say they are the only ones to launch big stuff up there so cheap, and it gets even better.
They are essentially doing the good side of capitalism - making stuff cheaper - applied to space, one of the most expensive industries in the world.
You’ve supported none of these hollow, false claims.
SpaceX is a hole where government subsidy goes to die without purpose. They said they’d fly multiple manned cargo missions to a city they’d built on a terraformed Mars by 2022. How we doing?
Instead, musk was just served a divorced, sexually assaulted a woman and tried to bribe her with a horse, publicly destroyed twitter for the Saudis and stuck his whole gender affirming surgery reshaped face into trump’s sloppy, bediapered asshole on stage - all while giving him $50 million dollars a month to interfere with an American election and demonize immigrants… as an immigrant.
I might be wrong on the side of cost efficiency, this is just common perception and you can inform me, but where did I tell anything about Musk himself?
I do think he is an asshole, but this is irrelevant to the topic
musk is spacex is musk.
And "I might be wrong"after the fact is a pleasant way to say, “I completely pulled my previous assumption out of my ass while stating it plainly as fact”
They are essentially doing the good side of capitalism - making stuff cheaper
I mean yeah, it’s cheaper due to technological advancement, but I fail to see how that’s an effect of capitalism. I’d argue similar developments would have been made even without capitalism. I just don’t think we would have the desire to leave this place without capitalism, but that’s besides the point.
Rapidly reusable orbital launch vehicles were unheard-of until Falcon 9. The Space Shuttle was supposed to fill that role, but NASA, ULA, and government elements have made it a horrid overbuilt pile of feature creep that was, at the same time, the crowning achievement of American aeronautical engineering, which was impossible to refurbish quickly. The same thing that is currently happening to SLS.
Propulsive landing of a first stage booster was an insane idea. Even massive space nerds like Everyday Astronaut were skeptical, and I watched him cream his jeans live when the first booster landed. That alone, the ability to reuse both the structure and the engines of the booster, as opposed to ditching them in the ocean (or in China’s case, on top of villages), has made access to low Earth orbit significantly cheaper, and affordable to underfunded scientific organizations.
That being said, competition is closing in. Rocket Lab (New Zealand) is targetin the same industry with the Neutron rocket (CEO Peter Beck literally ate his hat when the announcement was made) and is experimenting with recovering its smaller Electron rocket using mid-air capture by a helicopter. Astra (USA) is developing a rapidly deployable small orbital launch rocket that can fit inside a standard shipping container. There’s also Jeff Bezos and his massive overcompensation of a dick rocket that can also land propulsively, but not worth discussing.
Jeff Bezos and his massive overcompensation of a dick rocket that can also land propulsively, but not worth discussing.
In case anyone doesn’t know why… it’s not an orbital rocket. It just goes up and down. Orbital is going up AND sideways very fast.
Yep. It’s called a sounding rocket. Jeff Bezos and his dick-shaped sounding rocket.
If he ever gets two vehicles into orbit and makes them dock together, the mental image might just be enough to kill me.
Here’s some solid numbers:
The Shuttle was so expensive that it might have been better to keep using the Saturn V. It accomplished a lot, but was ultimately a failure at its original goal of a reusable rocket with a fast turnaround. Some of the old hopes for it were to launch 100 Shuttle missions per year. As problems were found, it was clear it would never be close to that.
Falcon 9 was already an order of magnitude drop from what came before. Being able to grab the Starship booster by the chopstick method means it can quite possibly do the quick turnaround the Shuttle promised. That could mean another order of magnitude drop. Possibly even two orders of magnitude.
That’s transformative. It’s not just cheaper. It let’s things be done that weren’t possible before.
One subtle thing that’s already come out of this is related to Starlink. Now, this has a whole lot of problems that I won’t get into here, but it does have one fascinating effect. A rocket coming back down generates plasma that blocks radio signals to the ground. This means there’s a blackout time where everyone in mission control stands by nervously while waiting to hear if it blew up or not.
What Starlink does is provide a high bandwidth link above the rocket, letting them relay data back to the ground. This means that not only do we have full communication during reentry, but even a live video feed of the exterior. This was not possible until fairly recently.
It should also be noted that we SpaceX didn’t do this on their own. They benefited from decades of NASA R&D, launch facilities, and funding. Their biggest success comes from working around the pork barrel politics that hangs around NASA’s neck.
