Falcon 9 / Dragon

Just the parachute idea... they tried it earlier. From the wiki;

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9#Reusability

btw Sphinx- thanks for the summary of the press conf - appreciate it!

 

More reference for scale, being trucked back to SpaceX..

(click to zoom)

 

Not exactly a backyard thing

 

For any of you who love rockets you should try Kerbal Space Program

http://forums.overclockers.com.au/showthread.php?p=17113529

There is a mod called RSS (realistic solar system) that lets you play a career mode starting at small sounding rockets and going all the way to building rockets just like falcon 9 (you can literally make one that is the same).

Very cool game.

 

why is it driving down the wrong side of the road

 

Because when you are that big you can use any side of the road that you want.

 

Updated Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy capabilities released for Low Orbit, Geo Orbit and Mars payloads:
http://www.spacex.com/about/capabilities

 

Has anyone been able to get their credit card to work, I can't seem to get my ticket to Mars...

 

Where is the per lightyear costs?

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-05-...-orbiting-nearby-ultracool-dwarf-star/7376862

 

So for a billion bucks I can get 151 tonnes on Mars. 600 tons in earth orbit.
Cheaper, but still pretty gawd dam expensive. I wonder if they can get a 10 fold decrease in cost. I would imagine they would make some good money off the prices they are charging.

 

From a previous post in the thread, fuel for the Dragon 9 is only about $US200-300k. A 10x decrease would still make for ~$6million in overheads. Could possibly be done if they get close to the 100 trips per Falcon 9 with large parts of the turn around being automated.

 

I imagine if they can find enough cargo to launch, prices will keep declining. But Is there enough demand at all price points to get is sliding all the way down.

 

I don't think they are making any real money TBH. Well no overall profit as they are fully private still. All funds go back into R&D and expansion by the looks. They're nearly @ 5000 employees or something now which is pretty mad. That's double of what I remember maybe two or so years ago.

Looking into the launch schedule for the next 12 months, they seem to be the number one operator at the moment. They are undercutting Ariane buy 2 to 3 fold and blitzing ULA with their Delta and Atlas units by an even further amount which is incredible. I guess once their Falcon Heavy comes online, they might take the lead even further unless Ariane and ULA can pull their finger out for the big launches. The Delta IV Heavy' launch cost is nearly $400m now or something and can only carry half the weight of the planned Falcon heavy. That's nearly an 8 fold decrease in cost per kg. I guess ULA (Boeing and Lockheed) are officially 'shitting their pants' at the moment.

 

You make a good point. How much stuff can you put into orbit? Then I think of the Wall-E movie and have a laugh. How far can you go

SpaceX are 25% of all launches or something - and rising. Perhaps if costs go down even further you may have more private companies (i.e PayTV, Sat phone) wishing to enter the market sooner than later. Even though these launch costs are huge numbers, I'm sure coming up with $60m is easier than $160m. $20m is an even easier number to deal with.

 

SpaceX just pulled off another Falcon9 barge landing again, about 20m ago... in the dark this time.
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/728457165606780928

Edit: Apparently this time was coming in at twice the speed, four times the energy and eight times the amount of heat generated!

 

Wow, that I did not know! I was watching live but mostly muted at the office, had a few of the other guys crammed around my computer - we did have a laugh at the U S A chanting.

That's some feat though - and it looked like it landed much closer to the middle of the target zone this time. Simply amazing.

 

Three different angles of last week's landing.




edit: For scale, remember a person can easily stand underneath the engines when landed. Pic: http://i.imgur.com/VBv2bkO.jpg

 

Wow there were two big take aways from the latest footage.
1. the swell was pretty big, so the first stage had a lot to account for
2. it REALLY slid across the deck, so much that if it hadnt slid, but caught, I reckon it would have tipped.

Fantastic stuff though, SpaceX are really on their game now, I really cant wait to see Falcon Heavy

 

It's going to be fascinating to see how it goes with the falcon heavy test late this year. Latest info from elon was that the plan was to attempt landing all three on the first test flight, the side boosters (stage 0.5) on land at the cape, and the central stage at sea.

Gwynne Shotwell (the coo/president/presumably the person who runs the company day to day while elon's busy with every other damned thing he has happening) said they were tossing up whether they were doing a commercial payload vs just launching a self-funded payload, but that either way they wanted to demonstrate a commercial capability they hadnt demonstrated yet. The two obvious candidates for that would be a direct launch of a large payload to GEO, including providing the apogee kick, which a lot of american classified military/spy satellites require. They havent demonstrated that kind of time in operation for the second stage yet. Or a cislunar launch or one of the further lagrangian points

It's probably escaped nobody's notice that they have a lot of perfectly servicable dragon 1's lying around they arent allowed to use for station resupplies under the terms of their contract with nasa...

 

Why aren't they?