So, apparently this is happening.
(Emphasis mine since he article headline is a bit misleading.)
Talk about bragging rights. âYeah, I rode a dragon around the moon and lived to tell the tale.â
Press release:
Fuck. I want to do that so badly. Nerd envy rising!
Yeah. Danger be damned, I really want to do this.
Well really, how dangerous is it? I mean yeah, strapping yourself onto a skyscraper filled with rocket fuel and lighting the fuse is never 100% safe. But SpaceX especially have a really good track record for safety/success so far. And once youâre in orbit things are pretty smooth sailing from there. Youâre not really getting far enough out into space to worry about radiation. A few automated engine burns to get you on course to the moon, I assume they would use a free return trajectory, and then itâs just eating freeze dried ice cream and learning how to poo into a bag for a week or two while you coast along and stare out the windows. I mean sure, you might have issues with something Apollo 13 style blowing up en route, but again thatâs really rare across the entire history of manned space flight. Worth the risk for the bragging rights Iâd think :)
At this point, Elon, maybe it would be a good idea to deliver on the very first part of your project, reflying a used rocket booster, before literally promising the moon.
Thatâs sort of two different things, isnât it? The re-useable Falcon 9 is definitely a big part of the plan here. But the crewed Dragon capsule has a lot of testing left to do, too. A mission around the moon sounds like a great way to do that. And itâs doable whether the Falcon 9âs are reused or not.
Well, sure. Basically nothing of what is needed to do the moonshot, including the capsule and the heavy lift rocket, has even been tested unmanned, let alone flown crewed.
While I like that SpaceX is ambitious, given its track record on deadlines it just gets a bit silly when they keep announcing ridiculously short timelines for extravagant new missions before they even deliver on their core business model of reusable rockets.
Muskâs entire career is based on promising the moon. I really dislike his approach and suspect I would dislike him personally if we ever met. But the strange thing about him, which distinguishes him from the vast majority of con-men, is if you give him enough time and money he actually delivers something.
I like his big grandiose claims because it keeps space/science/invention relevant. In elementary school, everyone wanted to go to space camp and grow up to be an astronaut. Shuttle launches were shown live in class. Nowadays, SpaceX is one of the few things keeping that whole feeling alive. Even if he doesnât hit every mark he promises, so long as heâs moving things forward it is a win.
Thereâs an article over at Popular Science about the future of the ISS.
[quote]In 2024 the clock will run out on the International Space Station. Maybe. Thatâs the arbitrary deadline that Congress imposed back in 2014, at which point theyâll have to decide whether or not to keep funding the ISS. And yeah, thatâs a whole seven years away. But then againâŚitâs only seven years away.
The ISS takes up half of NASAâs human exploration budgetâhalf of the pile of money allotted for things like sending humans to Mars or to an asteroid. And if they want to push further into space exploration, NASA canât keep sinking three to four billion dollars a year into the ISS. Not that itâs really their decision. Congressâspecifically the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technologyâdecides how much money NASA will get. And because politicians arenât experts in space travel, they keep holding hearings to discuss what they could possibly do with the ISS in seven yearsâ time. Let private industry take it over? Let it crash and burn into the South Pacific? Let the program keep running? The latest hearing took place last week.[/quote]
My gut reaction is âof course, we want to keep the ISS!â But then again, Iâd be even happier to build something even better that could be used as a jumping-off point for more interesting missions like Mars. Most importantly, though, Iâd hate to see the USA abandon any kind of orbit platform.
And really, thatâs the key. For a thought leader like Musk, heâs not just making promises, heâs pushing himself too. And how does a visionary do that? By making bold promises and trying. He may fail, the project may fail, but he will try.
If someone else picks up the pieces of the failure and is successful, itâs still a win. Imagine if we had closed up shop after the Apollo 1 failure and subsequent congressional hearing?
Wow cool. You close enough to hear the sonic boom?
Also congrats to SpaceX! First time an orbital class booster has launched and landed twice. The start of real reusability is here!
Depends upon which way the wind is blowing. Not today. But Iâve heard it faintly at night. And yeah, bravo SpaceX!
It never gets old watching rockets take off and now land twice!
Plus its so cool to watch nerds getting excited.
Not to negate the awesome accomplishment of relaunching the Falcon 9 - itâs super-cool, and watching rockets land on a stream of flame is so âRocketship XMâ cool!
That said, though, I think NASA kind of gets the credit for the reusable thing. They did this big spaceplane thing back in 1981 and flew them once or 135 timesâŚ
One thing I never see any coverage of is the fact that, like the Shuttle, SpaceX apparently has to strip down and rebuild the Falcon 9 booster after every flight. The first ârefuel and reflyâ is the Blue Origin New Shepard, though obviously itâs not an orbital rocket. (New Glenn will be, and will be orbital, but itâs still in development.)
Had to share, from my recent visit to Houston:
Full-size mockup of the shuttle and carrier plane at the Space Center visitorâs center. That tower is where you walk up and then go inside. It feels surprisingly roomy, consideringâŚalthough I daresay for a multiple-day mission it wouldnât take long to go stir-crazy in there.
[quote=âDennyA, post:1999, topic:61992â]
That said, though, I think NASA kind of gets the credit for the reusable thing. They did this big spaceplane thing back in 1981 and flew them once or 135 timesâŚ[/quote]
Well, it was a reusable command and cargo module, far from a space-plane. It still needed external, disposable rockets and fuel tanks. Command modules returning to Earth in one-piece are sort of the default state.
Fun-fact: the original design for the Soviet Vostok module (the one Yuri Gagarin flew in) called for the pilot to jump out at some high altitude and parachute back to Earth. The module would come down on its retro-rockets unmanned. This would spare the cosmonaut to 12 gravity acceleration and the likely pulping of their brains. [The Vostok design was adapted from an existing photography platform, and the film didnât mind the acceleration, apparently.]
Someone in the Soviet Air Force mentioned to the Politburo that under international rules, a successful flight requires that the pilot begin and end in the aircraft, so their plan would actually be counted as âabandoning shipâ and the US would get the official rights to the first manned space flight the next year. So they went back to the drawing board and were able to get the acceleration from the retros down to a mere 8 Gs.