I’d much rather see hundreds of robots in space than dozens of people. And OldSpace is pretty good at the space robots.
Of course, let’s send the robots out first!
But where’s your pioneering spirit? To go where… etc…
And there’s the eggs in one basket argument. Not that Mars is a great potential habitat.
It’s rather depressing that the more we discover about planets in other solar systems, the less likely it seems that there may be a lot of earth-like planets out there…
Damn, I rather liked the idea of a Galactic federation…
The Mars sample return mission has bloated out to $11B, not including the money used to collect the samples in the first place. And it’s unlikely they’d even meet that target.
Even without humans in space, we need cheap launch. Starlink has demonstrated that even modestly cheap launch is an incredible boon. And we’ll have even more powerful systems as launch becomes cheaper yet.
And even sticking with scientific endeavors, cheap launch is necessary. The JWST would have been vastly cheaper had they a big rocket available. It’s not just about the per-flight cost; it had to fold up like delicate origami to fit in the payload bay of the Ariane 5, plus undergo expensive mass-saving measures. If they had a giant bay with enormous upmass, it would have been finished years earlier for far less cost. Which means we could have had two or three space telescopes for the same cost.
Absolutely right!
And whatever you think about Musk, he (or engineers working for him, with his access to financial resources) have made big advances in that direction.
Come on Bezos, put your money where your mouth is!
Blue Origin has actually made some decent progress recently. Everyday Astronaut has had a couple of walkarounds with Bezos and they’re actually showing off some hardware.
NASA has delayed their ESCALADE launch, which was supposed to go on New Glenn’s debut launch in October. And frankly I’d be very surprised if New Glenn actually does launch in October–I think they’ll be lucky if they launch this year. But it is coming.
It’s no Starship, but it’s a sizeable upgrade over a Falcon 9 and will be partially reusable. So it’ll be nice to have a real competitor.
Curiously, neither of those are related to Starship. I wonder if the strikedown of the Chevron ruling will give SpaceX a bit of ammo in their suit against the FAA.
Probably.
SpaceX (well, mostly Elon) certainly wants to give it a go.
Looks reusable to me!
I presume the point is that they want to examine exactly what went wrong so hopefully that can be prevented in the future.
Hey, give it to me, and I’m confident I can find some use for it.
It’s not entirely clear yet why they’ve salvaged the thing. Maybe so Russia or China doesn’t get it? Or Jeff Bezos? They waited a long time for the operation, which makes me think they were somehow influenced by a third party. Hard to say.
And yeah, I’d pay a few bucks for a piece of that. I’m sure I can make the space.
BTW, nothing at all went wrong with the booster, except a single engine-out, which didn’t affect anything. It was always intended to perform a soft-landing in the water, which it did successfully (otherwise it would be in lots more pieces than this!). They’re so happy with the performance that they’re going for a tower catch on the next flight. They must think they already have the sub-meter level accuracy they need.
Can’t quite figure out what to make of this. SpaceX says they’re planning on launching flight 5 as soon as Oct 13:
“Pending regulatory approval”. SpaceX has already put out NOTMARs (notices to mariners) for that general date range.
But the FAA is still saying late November:
So what’s the deal? Has the FAA had a (not yet public) change of heart? Has some other compromise been found–say by tweaking the flight to conform more to flight 4 (for example, by releasing the hot staging ring in the same area)? Is this just a pure political ploy to apply pressure to the FAA?
Guess we’ll find out soon enough. The FAA is getting some actual political pressure as well. Some representatives are not too happy:
SpaceX has fought and won some political fights before. But more to open up some good-ol-boy contracting antics in the military than anything like this. I don’t think the FAA has been a problem quite to this extent before.
I wouldn’t be surprised if it were to turn out that the FAA is pursuing an unpublished agenda of quasi-socialism; if not actively squelching the development of a private space industry, then seeking to establish that private launch must obtain permission for its existence within an ultra-strict regulatory environment. In effect, that private launch is a priori presumed to be harmful or hazardous to the environmental or public good until proven otherwise to the satisfaction of the regulators.
That’s, uh, a rather stronger statement than I’d make . The fact is that we have the best commercial space sector that we’ve ever had, by a wide margin. The FAA has mostly kept up, even with significant changes like the introduction of Autonomous Flight Termination Systems (a significant factor in SpaceX’s rapid cadence).
It does look like there’s some selective enforcement of the rules that’s not favoring SpaceX right now. I can make some guesses why. But they have plenty of forces on their side as well and if there is any kind of pressure to slow-boat SpaceX it’ll probably come to light.
And there is undoubtedly the usual effect that bureaucracies always tend to absorb as much power as they possibly can, not because they have some covert agenda but because that’s just their nature. So they exert more control than is probably optimal. But there are checks and balances against that as well.
Could it be some sort of work to rule? Seems like Space X is the only US company regularly launching from the USA these days. “Gee we’d really like to get these approvals done in a timely manner if we only had the staff. Whatever could we do about that?”.
There’s been some talk in the past about the FAA charging SpaceX for some of the work they perform so that they can pay for more staff. That seems reasonable–SpaceX is using a lot of their resources. And IIRC SpaceX has offered to pay as well. I don’t know if anything has come of that.
For Flight 5, it seems the slowdown is with outside agencies like Fish & Wildlife. SpaceX made some small changes to their flight plan like where they drop the hot staging ring (still in the ocean) and where the sonic booms are heard (still within reasonable levels), and so the FAA decided to reevaluate some of these things, which required more outside consultation, which added months to the process.
But I don’t know why the FAA pushed for the reevaluations. It seems obvious in a practical sense that these were not meaningful changes and that they could be rubber-stamped given that Flight 4 was already approved. The FAA hasn’t said much except that they are different from Flight 4 and therefore they had to reevaluate.
Ok, this is funny. 51 U.S. Code § 50905 says:
(3) The Secretary may waive a requirement, including the requirement to obtain a license, for an individual applicant if the Secretary decides that the waiver is in the public interest and will not jeopardize the public health and safety, safety of property, and national security and foreign policy interests of the United States.
Pete Buttigieg is the current Secretary of Transportation. Who has Elon been praising lately for their level-headedness and fast response on Helene relief flights? Pete Buttigieg!