"A few minutes later, the first stage of the rocket landed successfully on a platform in the Pacific Ocean." - They have made this so normal. Its not even news title worthy now. Exciting times we live in!!
Right, most people have seen this trick performed with a broom handle or maybe even done it themselves. This is the same trick done from edge of space to sea level with a much smaller margin for error and a gravity well.
To me it's fucking awesome. To everyone else it's just a large broomstick.
With unlimited money almost any engineering problem can be solved. It isn't a miracle men walked on the moon, we just decided to go.
>Compared to what was achieved in the 60s it doesn't seem that impressive.
Is all of computing since 1960 unexciting and pointless? It's just making computers faster and cheaper, so what? The internet? We already had networks, who cares? It turns out that scale matters. Cost matters. Access matters. Details matter. If you can't see the value of treating rockets more like airplanes then you have a small-minded worldview and I don't know what to tell you.
History is littered with inventions that didn't amount to a hill of beans until someone else found a way to turn that invention into an awesome product and sell it to a much wider audience.
When a trip into orbit costs $20,000 then a lot more people can go. When it costs $2,000 then anyone in the developed world can go. What impact that will have on our society?
>When a trip into orbit costs $20,000 then a lot more people can go. When it costs $2,000 then anyone in the developed world can go. What impact that will have on our society?
Are you seriously implying that landing a rocket is an unprecedented step in that direction?
Do you think something like this would have been impossible if people had set their minds to do it, in the 60. I don't think so. I mean, we had missiles that could follow and destroy jets moving faster than a bullet...like, I don't know, 30 years back? Exactly that is why I think this is just marketing and PR (Not the actual stuff they are doing, but how it is seen and projected)...
>Are you seriously implying that landing a rocket is an unprecedented step in that direction?
>Do you think something like this would have been impossible if people had set their minds to do it, in the 60.
It would have been impossible. They just didnt have the materials science to build lightweight engines, fuel tanks, landing legs and such. The computers needed to control the rocket would have been the size of a large building and have to be on the rocket to be responsive enough. Remote control wouldn't have been an option. Also GPS didn't exist and no contemporary positioning technology light enough was up to the precision required.
The 90s is another matter. The DC-X was pretty much a direct ancestor of the SpaceX and Blue Origin plans. Still, it would have required a manual or remote control landing, which would be horribly inefficient compared to an entirely computer controlled 'suicide burn' landing. Even so there's a world of difference between being able to do something and actually doing it.
I don't know if they could have reduced costs as agressively in the 60's. The market was then smaller and making things more expensive (as the world population was smaller and productivity was lower than today). I don't know if this matters though. I'm sure soviet russia could have manufactured space tourist busses in stead of all the nukes and launchers they did as they played by a bit different economic rules. That would have been awesome. Instead we got just an opportunity for thousand megadeaths.
What was achieved in the 60s built on what had come before. Goddard worked out the principles of liquid-fuel rocketry in the 20s and 30s, John Clark (and presumably others, but he wrote the book) developed rocket fuels in the 50s and 60s, and Von Braun took Army money to build large rockets based on science other people had worked out between 1940 and the 1960s. Setting aside a certain amount of arguing about whose developments were more important, it's probably safe to say that most of the impressive developments of the 60s were actually developed earlier.
That said, SpaceX certainly isn't doing anything more than an incremental improvement on previous ideas, of course. Even the Space Shuttle used refurbished boosters, this is just the same idea with a much faster refurbishment cycle.
Newton's remark was mostly a backhanded slur against Hooke, as far as can be told. If you can point to some novel development in rocket fuel or rocket engine engineering of the 1950s that somehow contradicts my account, I am sure that I would be grateful of the correction. I wasn't alive then nor am I a particularly good scholar. But I did read Dr. Clark's book, which I understand to be the authoritative work on the subject, and the distinctions in the persons and nationalities involved in the periods in question do seem to be fairly distinct. Von Braun acknowledged the influence of Goddard explicitly, and the post-war and pre-Mercury/Apollo era of rocket science does seem to be quite an interesting one both scientifically and politically. As far as the fundamental science of rocket fuel goes, yes, there is unfortunately not much further to be done, but every science has noted limits to efficiency. But if I may repeat myself somewhat, the point was not that there had been prior art, but that nothing particularly important happened in the 1960s. There are only so many chemical reactions that are suitable for liquid fuel rocketry, and -- pertinent to the news event -- SpaceX is going down a very well-worn thermodynamic road with these rockets. So the impressive point, the reason that anyone is giving these people business, is not that they have any sort of greater chemistry-related insight than anyone else, but that they are planning on re-using enough components to drive launch costs down. But they haven't actually done that yet. They have yet to re-use anything but the barges. So perhaps in that sense, one could consider the achievements of the 60s and SpaceX to be equally lackluster, but otherwise it seems like a poor comparison.
Basically Hooke was short, so he Newton was backhandedly saying he didn't get his ideas from him. Since then it has acquired a secondary meaning apart from the insult.
I knew he was insulting someone! For all I have read Newton seems such an a uppity give credit to none asshole that that phrase always has struck me as completely out of character. Now, if he was dismissing a competitor...
I hate to smash this concept, but if you'd bothered to read the link I provided:
> This has recently been interpreted by a few writers as a sarcastic remark directed at Hooke's appearance.[8] Although Hooke was not of particularly short stature, he was of slight build and had been afflicted from his youth with a severe kyphosis. However, at this time Hooke and Newton were on good terms and had exchanged many letters in tones of mutual regard. Only later, when Robert Hooke criticized some of Newton's ideas regarding optics, Newton was so offended that he withdrew from public debate, and the two men remained enemies until Hooke's death.
I'm going to break with the pack and say you are quite right. By itself landing the boosters isn't a dramatic achievement. After all they're not even manned.
But it's not about landing the boosters, it's about what this will enable in the future. If Musk really can reduce the cost to orbit by a factor of 100 it will revolutionise space transport. Imagine a series of moon landings just like in the 60s and 70s, but all using the same launchers and spacecraft? How about manned missions to Mars in reusable ships? It's the first step in a new era. So ok it's not headline grabing next to the moon landings. But compared to that, the Mercury missions don't look all that much of an achievement in hindsight. Yet they were vital groundwork.
I mean, from an engineering perspective it's pretty dramatic. The rocket is going two kilometers a second in the wrong direction, it has to null out that speed, hit a moving target in the middle of the ocean and come to a stop. The rocket is too light to hover (the engine can't be throttled low enough, it's too powerful) so the velocity must be zero'd out right at the deck, too early and the rocket starts moving back up, too late and it hits the boat and blows up.
The economy factor is the main point here that many seem to be missing. SpaceX has already more than halved (and in some cases quartered) the cost of sending satellites into orbit. Heck, even NASA is finding it cheaper to contract satellite launched to SpaceX, and several countries who wouldn't previously have been able to afford to send their own hardware into space are now finding it viable.
For all of the marvellous things done in the 60's space program, we are now half a century down the track from that and things were still expensive with a lot of throwaway hardware. The orbiter (shuttle) program never really delivered on the reduced cost it promised. It has really only been in the past decade or so that private industry has taken up the reins and pushed the technology for more cost effective space travel.
NASA did operate the STS throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s though, which landed and re-used, albeit expensively, the orbital space-plane component.
Letting bulk cylindrical metal shells slam into the ocean is a bit less sophisticated than tail landing a liquid fueled rocket. Landing the orbiter was a technical tour de force, but the effort went into increasing cross-range, taking away from the economics.
Nasa was landing and reusing the main engines of an orbital launch system is the early '80s. SpaceX hasn't actually reflown anything yet - the landing is cool and all but it's a pointless stunt unless and until they can actually refly the boosters they've landed.
Sort of. The Shuttle was reusable only in the loosest sense:
- Most of the launch tankage was discarded after each flight
- Boosters were basically rebuilt after each flight
- Cost per pound to LEO wasn't remotely competitive with 60s vintage expendable systems like Soyuz
SpaceX has a new, simpler and much better design. Even when flown fully expendable, the F9 is highly cost competitive. With the first stage landing, most of the launch tankage and 9/10 engines can be reused.
SpaceX is poised to dramatically reduce the cost of going to space for the first time since the advent of spaceflight.
> The Shuttle was reusable only in the loosest sense
I specifically mentioned the main engines. And we can't really compare with the F9 when, once again, it has never been reflown. A lot more of the Shuttle was intended to be reusable than ended up being the case - who's to say how that will play out for the F9?
> Cost per pound to LEO wasn't remotely competitive with 60s vintage expendable systems like Soyuz
Soyuz is an excellent system, but it didn't have anything like the lift capacity of the Shuttle. The Shuttle wasn't cheap, but it was designed for a particular set of requirements - some of them reasonable, some of them less so - and for a much higher launch rate than actually happened, for a variety of reasons.
I specifically mentioned the main engines. And we can't really compare with the F9 when, once again, it has never been reflown. A lot more of the Shuttle was intended to be reusable than ended up being the case - who's to say how that will play out for the F9?
The shuttle main engines required a lot of maintenance and inspection after each flight. That's to be expected at the start of a program, but they never got away from that.
Both of them are big deals. Landing on the Moon was a historic event, the first (and unfortuately one of the few) time a human being stepped onto something that is not the earth. That is a one-time historic landmark to be listed in history books from now on.
Landing rocket boosters is a very big deal in practical terms as this should reduce the cost of going to space to a point where it becomes more accessible. The shuttle was an attempt to achieve the same, but while being a technological marvel, it failed to reduce costs (quite the contrary) and was abandoned. Everyone else so far at best managed to keep the cost of one-time use rockets low, but SpaceX should have a break-through there, and that is why this matters so much.
Some might argue that having an unlimited budget, and nearly a million people working on a project, and utilising 'throwaway technology' would be arbitrarily easier than trying to do it with private funding.
Moon travel is not a common everyday thing now, because the original effort wasn't geared for that - it was primarily to put a man on the moon as fast as possible, before the Russians did it.
If the aircraft industry worked the same way and airlines had to throw away a 747 after each flight, it wouldn't be an every day thing like it is now.
SpaceX are essentially setting up the future building blocks for far more affordable and common space flight now. It is a longer path, and IMO no less difficult than what NASA was doing back in the 50's and 60's.
Well, despite what you think landing the rocket was a breakthrough. Sure it involved the application of standard techniques in the industry but a combination so executed becomes more than the sum of its parts.
If you want something where SpaceX has blazed trail in science as well as engineering then there's thir work on CFL and more importantly supersonic retro propulsion. It turns out that the bow shock created by the engines is enough to serve as an ersatz heat shield and it protects the rocket when it would otherwise be destroyed during reentry. NASA's studying the data they've recorded for the purposes of applying it to Mars EDL. It's given them a chance to investigate an entirely new EDL technique which is important seeing as the Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator seems to be going nowhere.
>What exactly is the breakthroughs/discoveries that Spacex have made that will justify the claim.
The breakthrough is actually doing it. A lot of space engineers were saying before Falcon 9 that what SoaceX were trying to do was impossible.
Hindsight is 20/20. It's easy to see now what steps were required to pull this off and that clearly those steps were possible. But if it's so clear, why wasn't it done before? The ottoman line is only Must and SoaceX were prepared to get the job done. Nobody else was even trying.
Not all breakthroughs are just theory. If you can show me someone actually managing to land a launch-capable rocket, and not just some testbed demo capable of throttling to less than hover, I'm all ears.
The only other player in this space is Blue Origin, and they are still working on their commercially-viable engines. Everybody else throws away their rocket after the launch.
> If you can show me someone actually managing to land a launch-capable rocket, and not just some testbed demo capable of throttling to less than hover, I'm all ears.
Are you saying only SpaceX is capable of doing this? Seriously?
- Building an engine capable of multiple restarts while facing into a supersonic headwind, which are necessary for any kind of successful propulsive landing.
- Designing a mass-thrifty first stage simultaneously lightweight enough to be able to accommodate the added weight of landing equipment, but strong enough to handle the tensile stress and buffeting of atmospheric reentry.
- Developing ultralight landing legs to enable stable landings at low mass cost.
But most of the innovation has been in the realm of integrating existing technology in new ways. They brought together cold gas thrusters, grid fins, and thrust vectoring - none of which were new - into a complete package capable of precisely controlling the flight of a 15-storey first stage from the upper atmosphere to the ground. It's the act of getting technologies to work together that is often the source of the greatest gains.
Landing the rocket is the first step in figuring out reuse. Its irrelevant that it probably did not involve some scientific breakthrough - in fact it makes it all the more sadder that no-one bothered to do it before. Same situation with Tesla. No breakthroughs there either. Now imagine all the things we can do right now but aren't because no-one is interested in funding it.
Their unique breakthrough is relighting rocket engines in a hypersonic airflow. Everything else is shoulders-of-giants and design iterations and good project management, but relighting rocket engines like that was an unknown.
Landing is a critical prerequisite to reuse: we can't reuse what we discard.
But the important reusability breakthrough comes in a few months when they do the first reflight of an orbital booster.
