unclemick
Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
Ho Hum..... Another successful 1st stage landing on "Of course I still love you".
Hurrah! Keep it up.
heh heh heh -
Ho Hum..... Another successful 1st stage landing on "Of course I still love you".
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.
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.
Here's an interesting article on Musk, SpaceX and why Failure is an Option.
Or as Q told Captain Picard:
Because failure is an option SpaceX can do stuff like land rockets on a boat | Ars Technica
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"
"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."
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
The Grand Tour! Nice poster. Where do I purchase my ticket?
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.
Another successful launch and booster recovery for Space X today, though the booster landing did push the limits of the vehicle's landing system.
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.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.
Although broadcasts for Juno will start earlier, the big moment for the Juno spacecraft will be happening at approximately 11:18 p.m. Eastern, when Juno’s 35-minute main engine burn to enter Jupiter’s orbit begins. The capture into orbit is expected to happen at 11:38 p.m. Eastern.
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.
Of course, it'll be a big deal again when they actually start reusing those recovered first stages.
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?
Shades of the 50's and 60's!!!!
An explosion on the pad destroyed a Falcon 9 rocket and its payload. At this time they are unsure if the explosion started with the F9 or something on the pad.
SpaceX: Explosion at Cape Canaveral launch pad - Sep. 1, 2016