The Astronomy Thread

Vaclav_sl said:

It's still NASA basically... all of them hobnob with each other and staffing moves between them pretty fluidly.

It's pretty much only a difference of where the equity is coming from now.

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SpaceX is _not_ NASA, basically or otherwise.

Speaking of reusable rockets, Blue Origin did a suicide burn* launch & landing with a reused stage a couple of days ago too:



*tl;dr version "If anything goes evenslightlywrong, we get a nice new crater"

cuck cuck cuck, god damn CUCK!!!!!!!!!


edit: wrong thread

They engineered it for those stresses and for reuse. It seems like the Blue Origin design had a lot more tolerances built into it, but then again it didn't have to deliver a second stage to the ISS either. Or land on a boat.

Prepare your bodies for Falcon Heavy's launch this year. It'll be the most powerful rocket by a factor of two---it can lift53 TONSof shit all the way up to translunar orbit. That's the full load capacity of a Boeing 737 full of passengers, fuel and luggage.

And then all three boosters land for reuse.

Tuco_sl said:

That's pretty awesome, and they still clearly had a huge buffer to work with.

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It is cool that it is usable several times to reach a suborbital height.

It will be more cool if they can get a rocket capable of delivery to orbit.

As far as I have been able to tell they haven't yet made any money from people hiring them to use their rockets. I hope they can get to that point.

So this is just a synced view of the landing - check out the attitude adjustments of those control surfaces full of holes as it comes down.

khorum_sl said:

They engineered it for those stresses and for reuse. It seems like the Blue Origin design had a lot more tolerances built into it, but then again it didn't have to deliver a second stage to the ISS either. Or land on a boat.

Prepare your bodies for Falcon Heavy's launch this year. It'll be the most powerful rocket by a factor of two---it can lift53 TONSof shit all the way up to translunar orbit. That's the full load capacity of a Boeing 737 full of passengers, fuel and luggage.

And then all three boosters land for reuse.

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This is why nailing the barge landing was so important - the side boosters will have enough impulse left to fly back to the spaceport and land there but the main first stage doesn't...so the plan is to have a barge a few hundred miles out into the Atlantic and havethatas the main stage's target.

Then why the misleading video? I certainly won't be investing now that I know the main stage doesn't pirouette down next to the boosters like a sciencey interpretive dance routine.

They're massive. Each booster is about as tall as a 22-story building. The parachutes to aerobrake them wouldn't be worth the mass if they've got the software to control their attitude and land a 22-story metal tower upright on a boat. Those 4 control surfaces and the small adjustments from the motors themselves are all that software uses to go from 2400 mps to a full standing stop.

That's the other thing about the blue origin rocket....it's tiny in comparison to the Falcons. The blue origin is only about 8 meters tall vs 23 meters for the falcon9.

khorum_sl said:

They're massive. Each booster is about as tall as a 22-story building. The parachutes to aerobrake them wouldn't be worth the mass if they've got the software to control their attitude and land a 22-story metal tower upright on a boat. Those 4 control surfaces and the small adjustments from the motors themselves are all that software uses to go from 2400 mps to a full standing stop.

That's the other thing about the blue origin rocket....it's tiny in comparison to the Falcons. The blue origin is only about 8 meters tall vs 23 meters for the falcon9.

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The Falcon 9 Full Thrust is 70 meters tall (this is the one they landed on the barge on April 8th, 2016), not 23 meters. I think that is something like 13 stories tall or some such. Compared to Blue Origin's test rocket, it is incredibly huge (and commercially useful as well). I really hope they get the reusable rockets going soon.

Ah 230 feet I meant. I was watching their stream and someone said the first stage was 22 stories or something?. It was embedded here earlier. Yeah the wiki says 230 ft so about 22 stories tall. Their stream was pretty awesome actually, even though you couldn't make out what they were saying after everyone started crying and chanting "USA!" when it landed on the barge, there was a lot of good stuff in the preceding 20 mins:


The falcon9 is a full service rocket already and the Falcon Heavy is basically just three of them joined together. In fact the ULA (the United Launch Alliance which is a joint venture by Lockheed and Boeing) is cutting 10% of its staff and streamlining their operations because of the pressure from SpaceX, which costs about half to launch payload into orbit NOW and will be an additional 30% cheaper with reusable rockets.

Lost in all this is Bigelow's BEAM module tho. The expandable module uses lamellar materials and polymer foam materials that should make micrometeor strikes much more survivable than pressurized aluminum ___AND___ it's supposed to be much MUCH more resistant to radiation than the rest of the ISS's modules.

In fact, Bigelow's expandable habitats figure prominently on future mars habitats and even NASA's Nautilus "multi-mission platform" (read Spaceship). The model the dragon delivered is just gonna sit there taking measurements for a year but it's a proof of concept for spacecraft and habitats using expandable materials:

Tuco_sl said:

The three boosters land independently??? That's awesome.

Have they ever said why they don't use a parachute at all? It just seems like it'd add so much stability and wouldn't weigh much.

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Mars dude. The whole point of this all is Mars. Atmosphere on Mars is too thin, so it's parachutes would be pointless.

Apparently there are six ships docked at the ISS right now. That's pretty cool.

Elon Musk was at theISS program conference in Chicagotalking about the drone ship landing and he let slip that the rockets are designed for TEN TO TWENTY missions.

Chicago Now_sl said:

SpaceX is eager to improve its landing capabilities, both at land and sea, because of the financial and manufacturing benefits that a reusable rocket offer. During Friday's press conference Musk said, "almost everything on the rocket will be good for ten to twenty missions" an impressive change from one time use rockets that are lost or destroyed once they have completed their purpose.

Speaking at the International Space Station Research and Development Conference in Chicago, the commercial sales manager for SpaceX, Joshua Brost, stressed the importance of a reusable rocket in order for SpaceX to continue its success. Already, SpaceX attached legs to Falcon 9 for the CRS-3 mission in order to test their durability and performance in flight, and steadily built on that innovation in order to accomplish landings like the one witnessed today.

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That's a big range but even ten reuses is kinda crazy.