SpaceX explosion

a reply to: SleeperHasAwakened

What the current state of space exploration should show people is how impressive NASA's accomplishments were in the 60s.
Now if we could get politicians out of NASA they would be farther ahead

originally posted by: cooperton
They need to start using the magical technology from 1969

You are aware they are currently placing hundreds of satellites in orbit along with being the only US company delivering crew and payload to the ISS right?
They are going places. Consistently.
When you build new tech there are going to be explosions. This is part of the design process.

originally posted by: nerbot

"They need to start using the magical technology from 1969"

And how do you know they already don't?

Because they explicitly said they lost it:



bureaucrats, amiright??

originally posted by: Skyhigh00
You are aware they are currently placing hundreds of satellites in orbit along with being the only US company delivering crew and payload to the ISS right?
They are going places. Consistently.
When you build new tech there are going to be explosions. This is part of the design process.

The ISS is 1/1000th of the way to the moon. So if that's the extent of human travel to space, then we're literally doing 1,000x worse than 50 years ago in regards to human space travel.

originally posted by: SleeperHasAwakened

- we no longer have a reusable space plane (Space Shuttle)
- we have not created a production-grade, widely used rocket more powerful than Saturn V
- we've not had a person land on the moon since 1972 (?!?)
- numerous missions to Mars (including a few notable flameouts) but no manned missions (yes, engineering a return mission to/from Mars is hard, but we haven't progressed from how to do such moon missions enough in 50 years to try it?)

The question is, who is to blame for this lack of progress (arguably hindered progress), and what are there motivations?

Thanks for the analysis. That's why I'm stoked for the privatization of space travel, less bureaucratic stuff. But now I guess shareholders are involved... so who knows. For that reason I don't think they can fully disclose what's going on so they don't expose potential doubts or whatever. I'm hoping these companies don't go bankrupt trying to get there.

I was also promised a moonbase by my government and I want a moonbase. Everything seems to continually be pushed back though.

a reply to: SleeperHasAwakened

Problem is that the engineers have been replaced by bureaucrats, lawyers, accountants, finance guys whose sole purpose is the squeeze as much money out of NASA without doing anything to advance the technology

Look at Boeing and its clusterf*cks like the SLS and Starliner

Before Musk nobody bothered to make rockets recoverable - why should they spend all the money and sweat to recover boosters like Space X and its Falcon 9 and fully recoverable Starship when can charge Nasa couple hundred million for each launch

Musk may be a little eccentric, most genius are, but cant argue with the results

Starship is a quantum leap in technology and should expect a few stumbles on the way , but if Musk can pull it off will render every space launch rocket obsolete at a stroke

a reply to: SleeperHasAwakened

Let's see: The Saturn V was stupendously expensive per launch and not designed for re-use. Starship is designed for re-use (to make repeated launches economical). SaturnV built upon a highly motivated and skilled engineering base which was given tremendous funding for the previous 15 years. And most importantly the funding for that project was motivated by the need to simultaneously develop military missile systems (using mostly the same technology) to match the USSR. Since that has been accomplished there is no further military use.

A manned mission to Mars is immeasurably more difficult than Moon. There isn't any practical mission design yet with current technology until Starship can launch 35-50 payloads to space and maybe the surface. Mars is very difficult because its gravity is enough to be strong but its atmosphere thin enough to preclude aerodynamic slowdown and flying landings. Getting astronauts back will be very difficult. And then there's the radiation. Cancer is nearly guaranteed.

Elon can ask for suicide volunteers (landing is feasible, return really isn't) but the government can't.

Is it the cost factor, or was it simply more advantageous to get the public's attention shifted off government space programs, and stop scrutinizing NASA, to instead be dazzled and beguiled by Musk? It's indisputable that NASA's public profile and press is WAY less significant than say, 1985. Was this just an accident, or an intentional, calculated move.

Intentional and accidental. NASA large heavy lift has become entirely corporate welfare directed by Senators & Congressmen (particularly Shelby from Alabama/Marshall, but also the congressmen from Morton Thiokol and Boeing and Lockheed and Rocketdyne). They don't care about success at a good price, it's now about featherbedding jobs and profits primarily.

NASA science is usually less corrupted, and their budgets small (other than JWST which deserved its enormous budget as its science return is worth 30 individual missions).

SpaceX is enormously more effective and efficient. Incumbent aerospace companies hate SX, because SX shows up how inefficient and expensive they are. The legacy aerospace contractor's primary skill set is manipulating through the government procurement process (which was less legalistic and more honest in the 1960's) to maximize profit. SpaceX's primary skill set is rocket engineering.

Take a look at the NASA map of "Artemis partners": www.nasa.gov...

What does that mean? All the contracting has been spread out everywhere to all sorts of places. That's clearly inefficient and expensive, but is what Congress demands. SpaceX tries to do as much as it can on its own, starting from banging on steel.

Yes, the expenses of building and launching rockets is a huge problem when the SLS will launch at 2500 million vs Starship at 20 million a bang.

I don't believe that we are seeing less progress on space exploration due to incompetence or poor engineering. I believe that the space exploration programs have deliberately been slow-played and side tracked. I fall short of saying the word "sabotaged", but simply put, considering the advances that have been made in material science, computing (the guys supporting Apollo had slide rulers FFS!), propulsion research ... we should be farther along the scale than we are now.

Human travel is exceptionally expensive and there is no real motivation given the costs. Robotic exploration has been continuing reasonably successfully---the Mars rovers are much more advanced than their predecessors.

The guys supporting Apollo also had support from IBM's largest scientific computers of the time 7090 and invented the embedded real-time operating system in the Apollo Guidance Computer.

a reply to: SleeperHasAwakened
How did we give up on our successes in space? I say it was the Cabal! We are in the way of their plans. They want us to fail miserably. They don't want us to go out to space and colonize until they can control it. They haven't gotten that yet, thank God.

All politics aside, last night's launch was awesome. I watched from Cocoa beach, Block house beach to be exact. I'll drive up to the cape on the next launch. You could really feel the power, even from 14miles south. The booster separation was unbelievable... I'll try to get video next time...
Go Space Force!