No expert…but I don’t think a dedicated radar/radio system could not have been designed pre GPS that would accomplish the same results.
Remember, even way back in the cold war ICMBs had some pretty amazing accuracy…especially considering the size of the package and the fact the neither the Russians or the Americans were putting out beacons for the warheads to home in on.
Duh. :rolleyes:
It’s obvious what it was supposed to be; it just wasn’t.
Air Force Strike Takes Out SpaceX’s Floating GovSat Booster
If you’ll recall, before the Falcon Heavy launch, there was another launch (GovSat-1) that ended in an odd state–they did not attempt a barge landing, but rather just a soft water landing. Previously, all attempts at this (successful or not) ended up with the booster tipping over and exploding (recall that it’s basically a 10-story tin can filled with traces of rocket fuel).
Well, it tipped over but managed to survive. It was going to be towed back to port, but apparently that proved unsafe and so they found an alternative: get the Air Force to blow it up with a surgical air strike. I find this amusing.
Indeed it is.
What constitutes “Space Command”? I guess SC made the decision because it was a rocket, but surely a USAF or USN aircraft did the shooting.
Hello, Trump? Listen, I can’t hear you too well, do you suppose you could turn down the music a little? Oh, that’s much better. I can hear you now, Trump. Clear and plain and coming through fine.
Well, then, you know we’ve always talked about the possibility of something going wrong with the rocket. The Falcon rocket. Well, what happened is that we tried to slam it into the ocean, and it survived. Trump, let me finish. Let me finish, Trump. Can you imagine how I feel about it, Trump? Why do you think I’m calling you? Just to say hello? Of course I’d call to say hello, it’s just that I’m calling you to tell you something terrible has happened.
Listen Trump, it’s just floating there. We’d like to give your forces the coordinates of the rocket. I mean, if we can’t tow it back, then we’re just going to have to help you destroy it. I know it’s our rocket! Alright, well who should we call? The Air Force centeral headquarters? Where is that, Trump? Sorry, you faded out there for a second. Ok, I’ll just call information.
I’m sorry, Trump. I’m very sorry. All right, you’re sorrier than I am. But I’m sorry as well. I’m just as sorry as you are.
Between this and learning that the Coast Guard gets to shoot up shipping containers that have gone overboard, I think I missed my calling.
Best username and post combo ever. EVAR.
Something for Dr. Strangelove to pray to at night: Elon Musk Almighty - Album on Imgur
Spaceship comparison: Imgur: The magic of the Internet
I’m particularly curious about that. Could you go on about possible industries or activities that could either start or become common as a result of lowering costs enough and getting critical mass?
His management philosophy seems to be that since we don’t know for sure what we’re capable of, we aim for the impossible to get the most we’re capable of. You have to create the right culture to get that. You also have to structure incentives correctly because if you punish people for failing to do the impossible, they’ll quit or lose motivation. I wonder how bonuses and promotions are awarded within SpaceX, whoever misses deadlines by the least?
Space billboards and Moonvertising.
Shoot for the moon, eh?
I like to think that he talks about mars a bunch because that is what many space enthusiasts are interested in. But, the requirements to go to mars are pretty similar to the requirements to go pretty much anywhere else in the solar system, including asteroids. I personally find asteroids to be a much more useful resource in space than Mars. My hope is that once he is capable of launching a mission to Mars, he “changes his mind”, and goes to the much easier and productive near earth asteroids.
Would the plan be to mine asteroids so that materials would not have to be brought from Earth?
If anyone is still thinking that SpaceX should have tried harder to put a real payload on Falcon Heavy, we now have this:
SpaceX could save NASA and the future of space exploration
And specifically:
And from Lori Garver’s Twitter:
Given that SpaceX makes rockets and not (aside from Dragon) payloads, the real question is why NASA and the Air Force couldn’t make some use of a free launch.
I would hope so. That’s really the point where we start making space economical. When things can be made form the resources there, rather than being lifted up out of the Earth’s gravity well.
Did they have any hardware laying around that they didn’t mind losing?
It was the first launch of a new system. Even Musk’s comments on it didn’t seem all that optimistic that it would work as desired.
Anything made to go into space is pretty expensive. I would think that they just didn’t want to take the risk of paying a bunch of money to build and develop something to go in there, only to have no assurances that it would make it to orbit.
Right. My point isn’t that NASA and the AF should have taken the ride. It’s that of all the groups qualified to make use of it, those would be some of your top choices. The offer was there, and refused–which gives us more confidence that a boilerplate payload was the right choice.
Though I do wish he had given it a bigger battery and maybe a solar panel so that it could keep transmitting a bit longer.
Of course, anything making it actually spaceworthy would have quickly left the range of trivial costs.
The way Musk handled this launch was just brilliant. First, he went out and started giving interviews where he basically laughed at the idea of success and said he just hoped it would clear the pad before blowing up. He pushed expectations as low as he possibly could.
The roadster was really shrewd. Musk knew if that rocket was carrying anything of real value, the story after a mission failure would be all about the lost payload. Even if it had been a free ride for a cub scout project, you can just imagine the ‘poor Cub Scouts’ stories that would undoubtedly emerge.
Instead, Musk decided to do something different. He created the greatest art installation in history. And art it is - that little tableau with the roadster, the Starman, the carefully chosen camera angles was put together intentionally to be able to capture a series of different yet awe inspiring images. I don’t think any of us will forget seeing that car emerge right on the beat to Bowie, with the Earth in the background and “Don’t Panic!” on the touchscreen. Even the way the Starman was positioned seemed intentional - like he was pretty chill about the whole thing. As a time capsule of the culture of the people who built that rocket and who love space goes, that car is about it. Right down to the “Foundation” series novels in the glovebox.
And for the rest of our lives, we will live in a world where we’ll know that somewhere out there Starman is still gliding along in the black.
Best art installation ever. But more importantly at the beginning, it helped inoculate SpaceX from failure. Had it not survived to give us those iconic moments and images, it would have been seen as a whimsical but silly choice for ballast, but would have helped cement the idea that this was a test flight were failure was likely and expected, and it was more about data collection until failure.
But then it all worked really well, and now it looks like genius.
Well, the main thing is that they should take all the money they’re spending on programs like SLS and spend it instead on planetary exploration. NASA’s really good at it, and they’ve produced a ton of good science from it. The rovers are especially nice because of the way people personalize them. Spirit and Opportunity in particular really interested people due to lasting well beyond their design lifetime.
With NASA’s budget, we could be sending a half-dozen probes out every year. There are plenty of places left to explore, and even the places we have explored could use more. Let’s go back to Venus. Hit all the main Jovian and Saturnian moons. The asteroid belt, more comets, the outer dwarf planets, Mercury… there’s just a ton left. Not to mention Earth.
Putting out so many probes solves another problem: no one loves dedicating their entire life to a single craft since there’s such a high risk of cancellation, failure, or otherwise. If there’s just a constant stream of missions, it’s far more attractive since you can jump in any time and if something goes wrong, there’s always another.
I can guess at a few things, but this is a pretty big market dispruption, and the nature of in ovation tells us we can’t predict what will come of it over the long term. things will be tried, markets explored, and we will find out.
But let me give you an example: The chief problem with solar power satellites has been launch costs. The lightest design for a 4 GW solar power satellite came in at 4,000 tonnes. Using traditional rockets, the launch cost alone came out to 40-60 billion dollars, which made it 10 times as expensive as an equivalent power plant on Earth. with full reusability, BFR could put 4,000 tons in ordit for about 50 million dollars.
As another example, the International Space Station required 36 Shuttle Launches, and launch costs alone were about $50 billion dollars. The shuttle masses 420,000 kg or so.
if someone wanted to put up a new station of equivalent mass using BFR, it would take two or three launches and cost maybe 5 million dollars to launch. and it would be a much better environment, becuase the ISS was constrained by the small size of the shuttle bay.
For that matter, you could simply build another top half of BFR, outfit it as a lab and launch it into space permanently. One launch and a total cost of $120 million dollars. That’s far less than 1% of what ISS cost.
just come home and we will figure it out.
Oops. ignore that last sentence.
Anyway…
To put that in perspective, the Mandalay Bay in Vegas cost about a billion dollars. So BFR brings the capability to launch very large structures into space at a price easily within reach of private industry. An industry that will spend half a billion on an oil platform wouldn’t have any problem throwing $50 million at a reasonable mission to the asteroids to prospect for rare minerals.
Getting things back to Earth is cheap and easy too. BFR can return 50 tonnes of material to Earth and soft land it. In platinum, that payload would be worth about 3 billion…
Ah, so many errors in there. I had typing on an iPad. Anyway, I meant the ISS masses that, not the Shuttle.
At BFR launch costs, lunar research missions are within range of universities. A large telescope on the moon might be built for less than one of the new giant earth observatories. An orbital hotel is easily within range of large corporations. And 100 tourists can fly into space and back for $1 million, or $10,000 per seat - not far from the cost of an ocean cruise now.
No it wouldn’t. That much platinum would seriously depress the price of platinum to the point that it wouldn’t be worth nearly that much. 
But that would be a good thing - metals like platinum and gold have lots of industrial uses that they’re just too expensive for, so if we could bring back large quantities of the stuff it would open up a lot of opportunities to do things we can’t now. Who cares if it disrupts the precious metals markets.