Space - The Final Frontier

Here's an interesting article on Musk, SpaceX and why Failure is an Option.

With his rocket company Musk has dreamed big dreams. He has unflinchingly talked about landing humans on Mars in the 2020s, which is at least a decade before NASA and its international partners, and their plans which will cost hundreds of billions of dollars, might hope to do so. To boldly go to Mars requires risks. It requires accepting failure. And so when the most likely outcome on Friday morning was that his rocket would break apart in a fiery calamity for all the world to see, that was OK. SpaceX had failed before, and it would again. Exploring the frontier of physics, engineering, and aerospace isn’t for the timid.
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Or as Q told Captain Picard:

If you can't take a little bloody nose, maybe you oughtta go back home and crawl under your bed. It's not safe out here. It's wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross; but it's not for the timid.
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Because failure is an option SpaceX can do stuff like land rockets on a boat | Ars Technica
 
The CFO of SpaceX is a grad of our local university. He gave a talk last week. She went, and we took our 5th and 8th grade girls out of school for the talk.

They loved it!

I consoled myself with these cool NASA posters I had made a few months ago and put in our basement.

Visions of the Future
nasagrandtour01.jpg
 
clifp said:
He also seems to have made embracing failure is ok part of the culture. The articulate webcasting crew, made it a point to emphasize that even if they failed to land the first stage "THAT WE WILL STILL LEARN A LOT"
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One still has to remember where the line "Failure is not an option" came from. According to this site Gene Krantz never said it, but it was attributed to him in a movie, supposedly during the Apollo 13 mission. The stakes were a bit higher then...

"As far as the expression 'Failure is not an option', you are correct that Kranz never used that term. In preparation for the movie, the script writers, Al Reinart and Bill Broyles, came down to Clear Lake to interview me on "What are the people in Mission Control really like?" One of their questions was "Weren't there times when everybody, or at least a few people, just panicked?" My answer was "No, when bad things happened, we just calmly laid out all the options, and failure was not one of them. We never panicked, and we never gave up on finding a solution." I immediately sensed that Bill Broyles wanted to leave and assumed that he was bored with the interview. Only months later did I learn that when they got in their car to leave, he started screaming, "That's it! That's the tag line for the whole movie, Failure is not an option. Now we just have to figure out who to have say it." Of course, they gave it to the Kranz character, and the rest is history."
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:LOL::LOL::LOL: Back in 1970 when I was a tad younger a manager red faced and swearing(they did that back then) threw me out of his office when I made the mistake of disparaging a Vanguard model on his desk as one of our less than stellar efforts to catch up with the Ruskies.

Try, improve, evolve is still prone to bad press once in a while.

heh heh heh - :cool: If the cost equation has shifted as much as hoped we have a barn burner in options to structure and plan future missions.
 
Keim said:
The CFO of SpaceX is a grad of our local university. He gave a talk last week. She went, and we took our 5th and 8th grade girls out of school for the talk.

They loved it!

I consoled myself with these cool NASA posters I had made a few months ago and put in our basement.

Visions of the Future
nasagrandtour01.jpg
Click to expand...

The Grand Tour! Nice poster. Where do I purchase my ticket?
 
Another successful launch and booster recovery for Space X today, though the booster landing did push the limits of the vehicle's landing system.

Elon Musk ‏@elonmusk 2h2 hours ago Rocket landing speed was close to design max & used up contingency crush core, hence back & forth motion. Prob ok, but some risk of tipping.
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Chuckanut said:
As Mr. Musk has tweeted, you wouldn't want to ride to Mars in a dragon capsule since the inside is about the size of an SUV. But, getting it to Mars and successfully landing it would be an accomplishment.

I would love to see an advanced propulsion systems that could cut the time of the trip down to say 4-6 weeks. Granted, that is not an easy task, but a quicker trip would makes things safer and easier: less food, water, air to carry, less exposure to solar radiation, easier to get somebody back quickly if needed, etc.
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4 to 6 weeks? Yes, that would be fast by our current standards but how about 4 to 6 hours? Impossible I hear someone say, well, so was landing on the moon. But we did it.
 
Just back from Spacefest VII. Had a great time and met lots of astronauts, flight directors, controllers, writers, etc. Had meals with Glynn Lunney and Gerry Griffin. Another highlight was having Jim Lovell sign my photo of Earthrise.


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The Blue Origin rocket's shape looks very uh, suspicious to me. Maybe Bezos is trying to send a message to Larry Ellison? I'm not an engineer, but it doesn't look very aerodynamic.
 
Juno is in orbit around Jupiter.

http://arstechnica.com/science/2016...ls-its-jupiter-orbit-to-within-tens-of-miles/

Traveling at a speed of 165,000mph toward a swirling gas giant Monday night, the Juno spacecraft would have no second chances. Had its Leros 1b engine burned too long, Jupiter would have swallowed Juno into its gaseous maw. If the British-made engine burned too short, the spacecraft would have zipped onward into space, lost into the inky blackness forever. But Juno needed no second chance late on the night of July 4th as its hardy little engine fired for a total of 2,102 seconds, perfect to within one second, inserting the spacecraft neatly into orbit around Jupiter.
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It is tweeting us! https://twitter.com/NASAJuno
 
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Just found out that Juno is the wife of Jupiter, and the moons are named after his many lovers. I only knew the Greek names (Hera/Zeus).

Scientists do have a mild sense of humor after all.
 
SpaceX launched another Falcon 9 and delivered the JCSAT-16 satellite into geostationary transfer orbit. They also landed the first stage onto their barge in the Atlantic.

I guess Musk's goal is starting to be realized: it's begining to be ho hum to recover a rocket's first stage.

Of course, it'll be a big deal again when they actually start reusing those recovered first stages.
 
mpeirce said:
Of course, it'll be a big deal again when they actually start reusing those recovered first stages.
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I would love to be a fly on the wall when they get together and discuss the condition of the first stage and what it will take to get it ready for another successful launch.
 
I would very much like to attend the late 2018 launch of the SLS. Does anyone know the best way to find a good place to watch a launch? Does NASA give passes for good viewing areas?
 
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