Category Archives: Space

Business, Space, Technology and Society

Elon’s Announcement

67 Comments

He’s going to say something about SpaceX at the National Press Club at 1 PM. Before I heard the venue, I was speculating on Twitter that it was about recovering the stage, but I don’t think he’d do that at the Press Club. Must be something big. Taking the company public? I thought he’d decided that he couldn’t risk losing control. Commenters are welcome to speculate here.

[Update during presser]

So far just announcing success of soft landing on the ocean. As I guessed last week, it was subsequently destroyed by the waves. Saying that it’s a very positive development for reusability. Next time he’ll get a bigger boat. In principle should be able to refly the same day.

[Update after the presser]

OK, the purpose of the press conference was to announce that SpaceX is filing suit to force the Air Force to compete the block buy for EELV that they just issued to ULA late last year. SpaceX didn’t find out about the contract until the day after last month’s hearing on the Hill. It will be interesting to hear what General Shelton has to say.

[Update a while later]

Oh, the other news: they are definitely planning to fly out of Brownsville, within a couple years. Bad news for Shiloh fans, I guess.

[Update a while later]

In response to the question in comments, yes they could probably launch in Texas and land in Florida with a good performance advantage, though it would slow down turnaround. But it just occurs to me that if they do that, they could probably just refuel there and self-ferry back, if the FAA lets them.

Economics, History, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

Base Camps

5 Comments

Derek Webber writes that in order to advance into the solar system NASA needs to take some lessons from Everest climbers.

Not to mention be willing to lose folks occasionally.

[Update a few minutes later]

Jeff Foust notes that there seems to be an emerging consensus that Mars is the goal, though none on how to do it.

Meanwhile, John Strickland says we need an integrated approach, with robots and humans. to get to Mars. He seems to be focusing on Mars surface water, though. I think we need to trade that with manufacturing propellants at Phobos or Deimos.

My take, as always, is that destinations are less important than capabilities. Put an off-planet space-transportation infrastructure in place, and the entire solar system (including Europa and Enceladus) is opened up to us. But Congress would rather build big rockets.

Business, History, Social Commentary, Space

Happy Berth Day To Dragon

21 Comments

It was launched on Good Friday, and now the Dragon has berthed with the ISS early in the morning on Easter Sunday, over the region of the world in which Christ was reportedly born, died, and resurrected. That wasn’t planned, though. They’d have preferred to have it up weeks earlier.

Meanwhile, no word from SpaceX about recovering the first stage. I’m going to interpret that as bad news, for now.

Business, Space, Technology and Society

SpaceX Flight

69 Comments

Looks like another perfect flight of the Falcon 9 and Dragon. Press conference is scheduled at 1700 EDT, when they’ll presumably tell us how the recovery attempt went. They did report a successful entry burn.

[Update about 5 PM PDT]

Elon has some news:

[Another update about twenty minutes later]

[Update an hour or so later]

I should add that while this is great news, it will still be disappointing if the rough seas prevent recovery, or break up the vehicle, because they’ll lose data they’d like to have to see how the stage handled the flight. That’s critical to understanding turnaround. The good news is that they’ll be able to do this every flight (that doesn’t need a lot of performance, like their earlier GEO missions) to get it right, and finally start to understand that.