I guess "amazing science" wasn't strong enough for you. If we were able to look around 360 from the POV of the driver, rather than getting the two feeds, it would be better. It doesn't cost a lot to put a lens on the camera you have, provided it was high enough resolution. Even a 1080 can do 360, but 4-8k is better.
I'm not sure what happened that was new here other than the PR of putting a car into solar orbit. They landed their 20 something rocket vertically. They crashed another one or something.
It just seems like a lot of expense and science to stop at a normal camera.
Amazing. Do you honestly believe that what you've just witnessed is prioritized in terms of the quality of the video feed rather than everything else that just happened?
Do you even begin to appreciate the challenges in getting a 4-8k feed from space to earth?
I've been in the video business from '95 to 2015 and there is so much going on behind the scenes from even a simple live stream from a spacecraft to earth that I am wondering what it would have taken for you to be satisfied. FWIW I've personally done the Internet portion of two Space shuttle launches live-stream to earth and I can tell you that nothing about such an event is 'simple' by any stretch of the imagination. 2.5 million people watched that stream and it 'just worked'.
This never was about the quality of the feed (which is nothing short of amazing by the way), but about testing a new rocket. The fact that only one of the three first stages didn't make it is also quite impressive.
Yes, it was PR. But given the amount of work that went into this I figure they were entitled a bit of leeway.
This comment is totally out of place on a site like this, and it makes me wonder (1) what incredible stuff you've been up to today and (2) whether or not you are even remotely aware of any of the complexity a feat like today's launch entails to put you in a position to criticize any of this rather than to accept it in gratitude and wonder.
Keep in mind that according to Elon Musk there was a 50% chance the whole thing blew up on the pad I'd say they got their priorities right and spent what time and budget they had on the main item rather than on the PR bit.
To go with this - Apple has struggled to get live footage to work from the middle of the tech world, with good infrastructure and a with a massive budget. It would seem harder to get space tv working.
I’m guessing it’s bandwidth and tech limitations. They don’t have a very fat pipe up there, and they also have tons of experience with the type of camera they have mounted in there... maybe they didn’t have time to test and certify any modern 360 cameras. Hopefully it’ll happen sometime though!
I think bandwidth isn't the issue. You can do 360 with a 4k feed. I expect it was more of a issue of hardware that would make it past Mars without space killing it.
I hope it's not close to our generational moonshot. We've had quite a few impressive launchers in the past - not commercial, of course, but also built without current level of accumulated experience - so to consider FH their modern version would be to accept lowering the standards.
Nevertheless :) FH first launch is an impressive feat.
Did anyone else notice that the bottom two windows are not different cameras on different boosters? The guy even told us, "I know they look similar but they're different". Nope, they are the same. Watch how you can see two pads and they both land on the pad on the right. And you can see the second booster burning in the same orientation. The roads leading to the pads also make it easy to notice.
For this launch the live stream editors probably had 4x the normal amount of feeds to switch, so I’ll forgive them for a couple editing mishaps. I’m guessing they don’t have the same setup as would be at something like the Super Bowl... at least not yet :)
They also failed to show the fairing separation view when the music started and repeated that shot after the stream was essentially over. I guess a lot of things were just new and not quite like normal F9 launches (where presentation has been largely flawless for a while now).
Nah, the two feeds were identical including a portion of the other booster’s rocket plume in the top left. The two pads are different colours, both feeds showed the rocket landing on the lighter pad.
Hopefully we will get a corrected version for the official movie!
Or the part where he was about to spill the beans about the center core, but was quickly told to STFU in his earbud so they could delay the news of any failure until after the primary news cycle burned through the tandem landing miracle fuel.
I hope one day to be as good at both engineering and PR as SpaceX is.
They are slightly different, I suspect it's for creating 3d illusion. If you cross your eyes and overlap the two images you will see the landing in 3d.
I fell this is the most important moment in space exploration since the Apollo landing, but I don't see a big coverage in mainstream media. Elon is probably on the trajectory to be remembered as the biggest entrepreneur ever.
I would say, "since the ISS". The ISS isn't as exciting as sending humans to another celestial body, but we'll never get to Mars without the lessons learned and it's an amazing feat.
I am pretty sure at some point in history, launching two rockets at the same moment must have been a big achievement. And now you have two rockets (in some sense boosters are rockets) landing back at the same time.
Yep I believe on the live feed they showed the same booster camera twice. You can tell when they land and you see the landing pad coming up. Maybe this was a mistake, or maybe one of the boosters wasn't returning video and someone improvised? Its a bit weird.
I get a headache watching Star Wars like sci-fi where everything is manually controlled by the pilot. How did sci-fi get so disconnected from the actual future?
> Space opera is a subgenre of science fiction that emphasizes space warfare, melodramatic adventure, interplanetary battles, chivalric romance, and risk-taking
> A science fantasy is a cross-genre within the umbrella of speculative fiction which simultaneously draws upon and/or combines tropes and elements from both science fiction and fantasy
The core difference between science-fiction and fantasy goes back to the philosophical debates about the nature of the universe in ancient greece, the difference between a mechanistic view of the Universe (which we have come to accept as the foundation of science) and a teleological view of the Universe. Star Wars has a teleologic view of the Universe, it's baked into the DNA of the material. "The Force", the light side, the dark side, being "strong in the force" based on your heritage, and so on. That's the foundation of Star Wars.
Star Wars is not science fiction, it is fantasy or mythology in a science-fictional setting. It is fusion cuisine.
It clearly doesn't meet some definitions of science fiction but would still be almost universally called that. Try (getting in a time machine and) going to a Blockbuster Video and try to convince them that Star Wars doesn't belong in the science fiction section.
> teleological view of the Universe.
Almost all fiction is almost completely teleological. Nothing ever happens by accident in fiction, everything that happens has a human motivational cause. The characters' incredibly improbable and complicated schemes almost never fail by accident as they very likely actually would but always due to confrontation or betrayal. (See also: political narratives.) The human brain just cannot help but pay attention to sex, alliances, confrontation and betrayal.
The Force being with you by birth is a bad theme because it takes away the humanity of the people that have it. They succeed or fail in part not because of their intentions but because of magic stuff they happen to have that you cannot have. It's painful to watch.
> They succeed or fail in part not because of their intentions but because of magic stuff they happen to have that you cannot have. It's painful to watch.
A great deal of success or failure in real life comes down to legacy, genetics and random chance, or "non-magical stuff" other people have that you cannot.
> Also, 2001: A Space Odyssey is a great movie about a great example why you do not pilot your ships with computers all the time.
No, it merely illustrates why you want your AI properly bottled up and airgapped that way the flight computer will follow your instructions after you consult with the AI (assuming an AI is ever built...).
Computers can control spacecraft just fine in the present without AI so really there does not seem to be a pressing need for this.
HAL is merely an expression of the 20th century trope of the computer run amok. Same as the IBM system from "Desk Set" and the "War Games" WOPR. It's a product of ignorant naivete of what computers are capable of and what their true weaknesses are. It has no basis in reality. Just a way for writers to personify a machine with flaws to drive the plot forward.
Since 2012 the SpaceX Dragon capsule has been under AI control for rendezvous with the International Space Station for grasping and docking. It uses computer vision to estimate its pose relative to the ISS and steers accordingly.
Source: Andrew Howard of SpaceX, who is in charge of this software and has to endure the stress of each rendezvous. Screwing up could kill the ISS crew.
Isn't the key part of Sci-fi that it contains a society that has in some way advanced beyond our own? Saying it's not sci-fi because the fictional advance is set in our past (but at a development technologically beyond our own) seems quite a strange distinction.
> Saying it's not sci-fi because the fictional advance is set in our past (but at a development technologically beyond our own) seems quite a strange distinction.
I didn't say that at all. It is in the past, and also, it is not science fiction. Star Wars is quite fantasy, offering no explanation in science for the force, hyperspace, lightsabers, etc.
I love Star Wars with all my heart. But it is not about the future and it is not science fiction. It takes place "a long time ago" and it centers around magical, unexplained powers.
Edit:
And,
> Isn't the key part of Sci-fi that it contains a society that has in some way advanced beyond our own?
No, I don't agree with this at all. I would even say that in nearly all science fiction published, the societies have not advanced beyond our own that much - or if they have, they are also demonstrated to be far behind us in other ways. Science fiction is a lot of things, but certainly there is no requirement for it to show a more advanced society than ours.
No. The key part of SF is the "What if...?" question. A Science Fiction story should posit a difference about the setting from our own world and this difference should have consequences. Alternate history stories like "The Man in the High Castle" are Science Fiction. "What if the Nazis won?".
Likewise the key part of Romance genre fiction is the Happy Ending. It doesn't matter whether they sleep together (a lot of Romance aimed at older and Christian readers doesn't have any sex at all), or get married, but there must be a Happy Ending.
>How did sci-fi get so disconnected from the actual future?
The original Star Wars was made in 1977, and based heavily on World War 2 combat films (much of the space combat and the trench run on the Death Star was lifted - sometimes shot for shot - from a film called "The Dam Busters.") For reasons of continuity and tone, that mechanical aesthetic can't ever change much throughout the franchise, or else it wouldn't "look" like Star Wars.
But the point is that it's exciting, it's visceral, the archetypes of the fighter pilot and joystick and of buttons that do important things make sense to the audience, and as a result those scenes can convey emotion though the use of familiar visual language.
Sci-fi was never "connected" to the future, and it was never (or at least, never explicitly) about attempting to accurately describe or predict the future. Yes, you could have replaced the ships and pilots in Star Wars with remote or AI controlled drones, not colored in the blasters, etc, and it might be more realistic, but no one would enjoy watching it.
People do enjoy dogfights (and spaceships that bank when they turn) and space wizards with laser swords doing flippy shit and punching each other with telekinesis, though.
Maybe they could explain it all away saying that in a previous era autonomous weapons were used and almost exterminated everyone in the whole star wars universe, so all parties including the empire and the rebels agreed to not make use of automatically controlled weapons or space craft.
Or maybe software technology was lost and they are only able to use extremely rudimentary systems...
>Maybe they could explain it all away saying that in a previous era autonomous weapons were used (...)
Except that fully sentient AI is already commonplace in the form of droids, including battle droids.
This is a universe where a small robot that only speaks in clicks and whistles had to physically transport holographic "data tapes" about a moon-sized space station that can travel faster than light. A lot of it doesn't make sense when you think about it, but then it's supposed to be Flash Gordon with the serial numbers filed off.
In the book The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe writes about some thing similar, the first astronauts in the Mercury program had nothing much to do, and NASA was considering choosing people like trapeze artists, who are used to stress and high acceleration for the role.
They were not, I've watched closely and right before slowdown burn, attitude engines were firing a little late on one. It was only parts of a second, but clearly visible if you watched closely.
There was a mistake as in the feed they claimed they were separate, but in fact it was a duplicate of the same stream:
https://youtu.be/wbSwFU6tY1c?t=2268
They were the same. Don't know if they did this intentionally. I actually watched them for two minutes for that, and was 99% sure they're the same image, just translated a bit. The final confirmation came near the end, when the other booster entered the view, and you could see for sure, both rectangles streamed from the same camera.
Those are not at all the same. You can see different parts of the ground. You can even tell that the source of the right stream was really to the left of the other one.
You'd think it would be easy to tell. I mean, you see the other booster ignite in both views, which means they have to be looking toward each other - in opposite directions. I don't know about you, but when two people look in opposite directions they tend not to see the same things.
I thought it was interesting that they specifically said the two panels represent the two boosters. I don't think they ever directly claimed each video was from a different booster.
I think they were themselves a bit surprised they were so similar, and weren't yet sure whether they were from different boosters or not, so they kept it vague.
The landing pads were different in the preview, so it indeed looked like it was the same image. Also, no 3D/misalignment effect from cross-eyeing them.
They certainly looked very similar (as they would from that height) but the thruster firings were not at all synchronised (I thought the same thing, until I saw that).
I've almost lost hope around the end of the Space Shuttle program. I thought it will be only satellites, ISS and occasional science probe launches. SpaceX single-handedly restored my faith in the future of space activities again, and with other player on the scene, we now have realistic hope of seeing an actual industry in space within our lifetimes.
Moreover, there's lots of companies in every vertical needed for bootstrapping the industry - ground services, satellites, in-space manufacturing, asteroid prospecting & mining... all in the early stage, all betting on cheaper access to space than it was just few years ago. We're in a critical moment where things suddenly start adding up and - I hope - will form something great!
And Linkspace in China are making good progress with their scale prototype too (they just posted the first untethered hop video to their twitter).
It rather looks as if the tail-landing reusable booster stage is a "steam engine" type of eureka form factor, and everyone's going to be doing it. Yay!
Wonder what success of FH would do to works on BFR? If BFR would be as successful as Musk writes, would SpaceX make two rockets - or optimization will lead to just one?
If BFR is as successful as Musk hopes (_especially_ around the reusability aspect), I think BFR would replace the F9 and Falcon Heavy as a lift vehicle.
If BFR is actually fully reusable it would be cheaper to launch than the F9 (due to the non-reused second stage).
Musk has actually said that he expects BFR to be cheaper to fly than their original Falcon 1 ... meaning prices in the $5-10M range, as opposed to $60+M for F9.
FH success mostly helps BFR in regards to operating a ton of engines simultaneously (27 for Heavy, 31 for BFR) and in operating heavy lift capacity rockets in general.
BFR/BFS will come online as a self-competitive offering from SpaceX initially and both lines will be out in the market together (BFR vs. F9/FH). If and when BFR attains sufficient maturity, reliability, and market trust then the Falcon line of rockets will be phased out. BFR will have much greater capabilities (higher payloads, etc.) but will be substantially cheaper because it'll be 100% reusable and the reusability longevity for its parts will be much higher than for F9/FH, so there won't really be much reason to keep Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy around.
Most of our space travel challenges are caused by the size restrictions and cost associated with putting spacecraft into space. Currently spaceflight is still very much an aerospace (literally translated as airspace) problem.
In a theoretical world where we could just beam anything into earth orbit, unmanned interplanetary spaceflight would likely be an expensive hobby instead of something only governments attempt.
From '02 - '06 Musk dumped 100MM of his own cash into this, with uncertain outcome. Is it fair to say SpaceX was at least partially an expensive hobby, at some point?
If by "hobby" you mean "not making you money", then yes - in the same sense as just about like every startup in existence.
If by "hobby" you mean doing something for fun or personal growth, with only vague - if any - expectations of future usefulness, then no. SpaceX was aimed at getting us to Mars from the day 1; it's their entire raison d'être. Musk bootstrapped it with his own cash because he also set this goal - getting humanity to Mars.
If by "hobby" you mean doing something meaningful instead of just making moar money - then sure.
The goal back then was to make things possible. Right now, especially with SpaceX shaking the competition up a bit, the process is making things cheaper, which enables space access for uses that have been cost-prohibitive in the past. However, I guess cubesats and tiny launchers are just as much a part of that development as SpaceX' work on reusability.
Quantity has a quality all of its own. And quantity is only achieved through this sort of further optimisation.
It is much too easy to disparage an optimisation as unimportant compared to some hypothetical "original" idea of which it is a refinement, and we should not do this, especially to try to claim credit for people we know at the cost of those far away we've never heard of.
The "original" inventions behind recorded music, the telephone, the incandescent light bulb, and numerous other obvious examples are poor shadows of the commercially successful item that means we know them today. We honour many of the people who refined these items as "geniuses" today, often pretending to ourselves that they invented them rather than merely refining the work of others, this does everybody involved a disservice, and it disparages the real contribution of people (in China and elsewhere) optimising today's inventions. The flat panel display you're almost certainly reading this on is the product of _millions_ of such optimisations.
Very good points; I'm in general though space skeptic in the following sense. Human race as a whole always seeks more, bigger, further, faster as solution its problems. I don't think space is the solution to our earthly problems.
Maybe 1000 years from now, people look at us and say god damn it. I wish they had stayed there and learned how to live in earth well. We are now speared all over the place and we all hate hate each other; and just right now I hear Martian went ahead and annexed Venus and they also seem to be interfering in Andromeda elections.
Honestly it’s amazing how much better I understand this and other space stuff I’ve seen in the last year or two (like shows about Apollo, etc) since playing KSP.
No better way to learn basic orbital dynamics out there.
They don't need to buy anything. Related visuals (models and textures of KSP rockets) were already made and are maintained by the community, and all they need to do to crowdsource a test is to post it on Reddit. I guarantee you, hundreds of players will try to one-up one another on that one.
I guess they'd have to make the center rocket stronger to handle the added force of more rockets. Also, there may be diminishing returns when it comes to adding more boosters, and at some point it makes more sense to just redesign the rocket to be bigger (hence the BFR, which is the planned successor to Falcon Heavy).
It was almost a brain stack-overflow for me. I made a weird, bleating laugh noise and tried to open my eyes wider than design spec. A sincerely surprising and amazing sight.
In the past few years we've gone from not even having a reusable launch vehicle to synchronized spaceships as performance art. (Oh and sending a car to Mars for fun.) What a time to be alive.
I remember watching the artists impression animation video of how the the falcon heavy launch and landing would proceed, and when it showed both boosters landing at the same time I thought "heh, I wonder if they'll be able to pull that off in real life", and they did! Almost identical with the animation.
Even when we know that each one is fully automatic, and really (after staging) the booster return is just two instances of $booster, it's still absolutely magnificent.
That was incredible. Watching the double landing of the boosters I couldn't help but feel like we live in the future. It was actually a little emotional.
That was thrilling. An incredible accomplishment. The first time in my life I thought I had an inkling of what it had been like to watch the Moon landings.
The main argument for Falcon Heavy over Ariane 5 is cost, not reliability. Ariane 5 remains the most reliable heavy launcher, so that's the launcher you want for JWST.
On average, that's true. however, the most recent Ariane 5 launch did not go as expected. I can only imagine all of the people involved with JWST just got a little more anxious than they wanted to be this close to launch.
Depends on how much a Falcon Heavy launch will really cost at the end, but right now the nominal fee seems to be around 70M€ for Falcon Heavy and around 150M€ for Ariane 5.
It has just burned again to raise apogee, and will burn a third time to switch from earth orbit to a transfer orbit (edit: or perhaps the next orbit is the final Earth-Mars orbit?)
It's actually orbiting around the Sun, it passes near Earth orbit at the perihelion and near Mars orbit around aphelion, but is not actually in orbit around either planet.
Yes, I believe you are correct, I got slightly too excited. (: It's on a highly elliptical earth orbit at the moment. The second big test is doing a long stage 2 burn after passing through the Van Allen belt. I believe that will take place in 6 hours or so.
It is quite elliptical. Right now the second stage is in GTO, with an apogee of 7000km and perigee (presumably) of ~200 or so. When it arrives at apogee, it'll reignite and go hyperbolic, onto a trajectory that escapes the Earth's SOI - then it will no longer be in Earth orbit.
Watching the car orbit and the Earth's reflections in the windshield and paint and Starman's visor is sublime (sometimes goes to cameras of the engine/orbit overview)
It's pretty much constant in the video; just keep watching until you notice small particles floating about. I recall them being visible especially well about 1 hour into the stream.
I've had the same running all day, to be honest. Having the 2001 a Space Odyssey soundtrack and Interstellar's soundtrack in the background is quite pleasant.
Oh, perhaps I have the name wrong. I meant the part connected to the payload with the Merlin engine designed for vacuum, above the three main rockets (the center of which must be the core).
Absolutely amazing. Just watched it live, gave me goosebumps. Although:
"SpaceX also attempted a recovery of all three of the first stage boosters it used during the launch. It has recovered two of those thus far, and we’re waiting to hear back from SpaceX on the official status of the final, third booster, which was landing at sea."
Why wouldn't it last functionally forever? It's now in vacuum, and eventually will get to whatever temperature the sun can bake it to at that distance from the sun... I'm guessing it'll be there as long as the car is.
Makes my day that much better. Giving approval to that kind of lightheartedness shows great confidence in the team's ability and makes overall morale palpable. Well done.
I absolutely love that Musk is putting a car into Mars orbit. Assuming mankind doesn't have an extinction event (or dark ages event), it is extremely likely we'll populate the solar system over the next millenia. In 200 years, Martian children can look up in the sky and know that one of the quickly moving visible satellites is a hilarious, old-Earth car. Depending on how accessible orbit is from planets over the next couple hundred years, it could very well be some sort of space station museum.
Or, imagine we hit a dark age and bounce back, and this event is lost to history. Five hundred years later we manage to get some people to Mars orbit and they find a fucking car in a capsule with a little mannequin stuffed into it flinging around the planet at hundreds of kph.
All while it's blasting David Bowie over their radios.
It would be cooler if it was going to be in Mars orbit, but it is just going into an elliptical solar orbit that will vary in distance from the sun between Earth orbit and and Mars orbit.
Hmm, they said heliocentric several times. But it’s a cool orbit no matter how you slice the the pork chop. Pretty sure this is intended to be similar to a “mars cycler” orbit. A “mars cycler” is an interplanetary space station which follows a sort of transfer orbit between earth and mars. This provides a cushy radiation shielded environment for interplanetary travelers and economizes on propulsion by leveraging gravity assist. IIRC some guy named Aldrin came up the gist of the design.
Is it okay to put unnecessary stuff in the orbits around our or other planets? Isn't this space trash that can potentially be problematic for future endeavors? Are we creating problems for ourselves to satisfy our vanity?
Mars is really big relative to a car. You could probably put dozens or hundreds of cars in orbit around Mars without any added difficulty.
Anyway I wouldn't normally consider it to be space trash, but in this case it's pretty much just a big Tesla ad billboard orbiting the planet so I agree with you sentiment
Space debris is a problem in a small number of high-traffic Earth orbits. There is almost nothing in existence on this random Hohmann transfer solar orbit where the car will live for hundreds of millions of years.
It's going into a heliocentric orbit, and people will surely be tracking it.
If it gets to be a problem in the future, it will have so much historical value that someone will launch a mission to go fetch the Roadster and bring it home to Mars.
the standard cargo for these missions is a chunk of cement. If you want to test a rocket you have to throw something up there.
It probably does not add a measurable amount of junk to hit than is already up there in the form of natural rocks.
Though if in the future human population hits the quadrillions and we are living on all 8 planets we should probably start worrying about our space trash.
It's not in orbit around Earth, and won't be visible from Earth. As soon as it boosts out of its parking orbit, it will be orbiting the sun between Earth and Mars.
Also, there is not any danger of stuff "crowding" out there because the amount of space between Earth and Mars is really quite extremely huge.
Still don't understand this waste of ressources. Waste of ressources to build this Tesla Roadster. And then the waste to kick it into space. It is not that we are littering our earth itself. We now do it in space as well.
This is what Pirelli used to say about their calendar. It costs so much to get a front page ad in a newspaper, it's worth all the costs of the calendar.
Who cares though, it's just so fucking amazing that there exists a geek with enough cash and gumption to get a car flying through space with h2g2 in the glove box.
You're mistaken; it's one of the original-style Tesla roadsters, not the newly announced model. You can see an image of the payload here [0], and of the new model here [1].
That roadster was not cheap. This is no scrappage scheme going on here. The first roadster cost many tens of millions of pounds, maybe hundreds. Subsequent units were cheaper as they just used the tooling from the first ones, including this one. Compared to a satellite this roadster cost a fair bit in R+D, just not for picking up hitchhikers in space though...
It's a test flight. Can't put paying cargo on a test flight, so you might as well put something on there that's going to give you press.
Also, space is big once you leave low earth orbit. It's really hard to actually understand how big it is. Putting a roadster out there isn't exactly junking up the place.
Okay, in my opinion it's a waste of resources because if it is at all, it is very bad art. (It took no discernment or taste to do; it's an empty, ostentatious gesture. Precious little discernment or taste in the predictable Adams reference, too.) (Disclaimer: I like Douglas Adams.)
There's plenty of art that I don't like, but appreciate it for what it is trying to do. That's absolutely fine. I'm saying this isn't even worthy of that sort of appreciation.
It is not a waste of resources. The car was built, it was used for its purpose. Now it is being sent out of the planet so you could argue that the overall amount of trash was reduced.
Also "Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space"
step back a moment, friend. your sense of perspective is completely out of whack. maybe take a moment to consider that everyone else is not wrong about this.
That was like watching a sci fi film when the two cores landed.... I watched it with my mother (who is 80!), and she said it was as significant as the moon landing.
I'll bet it blew up on the droneship. It was weird they didn't have an immediate confirmation; I thought they have a boat or heli within visual range for the photo.
Where i live it was 21:45 and i couldn't help but told my son that was on bed to come and see it, cause IMHO it's a significant moment for space exploration. He went to bed later than usual but has a nice story to tell tomorrow at school.
Considered the same with my 4yo, but she was fast asleep since hours before. I'll be sure to show her tomorrow though! Not every day you see someone launch an astronaut in a car into space, then land two boosters next to eachother.
We already dig other nice videos on youtube with rocket launches and the like. "How it's made" and so on. Some manufacturing videos have, believe it or not, caught her attention for half an hour! I think it was especially a video from manufacturing the Mini (car), lots of robots and automation.
Although there hasn't been an official statement by SpaceX yet, and whoever said "we lost the center core" could have just been referring to the video feed from the drone ship.
The quote from the video is: "We lost the center core."
For those like me unfamiliar with the terminology used in this context, is this wording reserved for situations where the rocket is destroyed or could it also mean they lost contact/video feed with the center core?
They normally call out "LOS" or "loss of signal" when they lose a video (or any other kind of) feed, but I have heard it on other streams that they say something like "We lost stage 1... signal/camera feed".
It’s a command center of a complicated operation, nobody cares if someone has a camera issue on a side goal, it’s all about situation. I vote the booster was lost, and it was not worth using more bandwidth on it.
I might be reading into something that's not there, but the presenters (I didn't get their names) acted like they received surprising news in thier monitors at 39:03[1] just as they were about to report on the drone ship landing.
Dude: "We've just gotten confirmation..."
Lady: "oh!"
Dude: "Oh"
Lady: "[laughs] We are waiting to hear what happens..."
in the background you can see the feed from the drone ship - they see that it comes back on and the smoke is clearing but there's no rocket. They were a bit surprised. :)
I felt like they were trying to redirect people to the main site for more information. I think the presenters were instructed not to give people more news so they could gain more traffic to their site. Seems like a smart way to gain more interest.
I think it was the right move, even if they knew then the main core had blown, it is too easy for the naysayers to make that the story. Taking away from the real and powerful narrative SpaceX must tell. That for the first time since the Saturn V we have a rocket powerful enough in active service to take us to the Moon/Mars, at a 1/3 of the price of the next heaviest lifter.
... and then back to the presenters. As someone said to me, "That's their lying face!" :)
Can't fault them for wanting to dwell on the positives though, was an amazing moment to watch.
Edit: You can switch cameras on the above youtube video to the countdown net; you can clearly hear them saying "We lost the centre core" at 38m30s - not sure if that means "lost signal of" or otherwise. The people in the control room appear to become more muted at that point, though they still seem composed. It's really not clear.
Can't fault them for sure, but it's strange for them. SpaceX tends to be very upfront with their failures, and tends to broadcast and in many cases re-upload video of their failures.
Doubly so when the "failure" isn't part of the primary mission.
It wasn't a lie; they just didn't know the result. There have been multiple cases in the past when contact was temporarily lost after drone ship landing.
It's ok to be professional and say that you need a day to look at a failure (if it's that) before you announce it with the beginnings of an understanding.
They know how the press works though. There's a huge amount of attention being paid to this launch, and journalists will be racing to report it ASAP. If they announce immediately that the centre core has been destroyed, the headlines around the world are going to be "SPACEX LAUNCHES CAR BUT LOSES SPACECRAFT", and the failure, however partial, will be a central plank of the story.
If they delay the core announcement by a couple of hours or so, the headlines are all "SPACEX SENDS CAR TO MARS", with a minor note appended later to say, "A SpaceX spokesperson later confirmed the landing of the spacecraft's central core did not succeed and it has been lost." Like it or not, issues of timing like this makes a big difference to how the exact same events are reported and perceived.
Yeah, presumably they worked out the various optimal messaging strategies for every possible combination of failure/success of each part of the mission in advance. Amazing work on their part; I was super impressed after I deduced what you wrote about 2 minutes after the stream ended.
A restart failure indicates there may be a systemic flaw in all Falcons that could impact recovery efforts in the future as well as other missions that depend on reliable restart capability. One would hope that they have enough telemetry to diagnose the cause.
I'm sure they do, they normally have pretty detailed information on failures.
But even in the worst case first stage engine restart issues will never halt falcon launches. The first stage engines don't ever need to restart to complete the primary mission, and while landing the first stages is a great bonus, it is and always will be a secondary mission objective.
They do eventually come out with it but pretty much every failure they've had so far they've kind of glossed over it during the livestream then come back to it later during a separate press conference.
At this point in that video, some minutes after the loss of signal, you can hear on the countdown net https://youtu.be/-B_tWbjFIGI?t=42m21s - it's garbled but sounds like "Suspected loss of signal".
Correct. There were several goals with the launch. The primary was successful payload insertion, the secondary goals were the successful return of the outer two boosters to land, and the central booster to a drone ship down range (success unknown). Additionally the goal was to recover the fairings, but the success of that is not publicly known at this time.
According to News Conference:
1) Elon confirmed that the faring recovery was not a goal as they have a new version of the faring in active development which should have a recovery strategy in place. 2) It appears that the center booster was definitely lost. 3) Loss of center booster was best case scenario for loosing one of the three boosters as the outer boosters had really sweet new titanium grid fins.
The feed quality drops in a way that makes the shaking antennae explanation seem plausible. I doubt the announcers knew then (why not just say so unless there was some ambiguity?), but it must have been a distinct concern, hence their 'smile nervously' reaction.
It is a bit odd they haven't announced that it was lost yet, but I agree that seems very likely.
I can concur. There’s always 5-10 seconds starting right as the exhaust enters the frame when it cuts. IIRC they have one or two satellite uplinks and they go down due to the vibration.
Also in the video if you watch mission control’s wall of monitors you can see the feed cut back with an empty drone ship a minute or so later. Seems to confirm that the rocket missed the deck due to the engines not lighting.
I noticed on the top right screen when landing the 2 outside boosters that they did a 3 engine landing burn. Previously they'd only done this over the water, but considering that the last one went well on 31 Jan, perhaps they also tried a 3 engine landing burn over the drone ship this time and something went wrong.
Elon Musk just confirmed in a press conference that the third core was lost; two of the engines that should have slowed it down failed to re-ignite and it came in too fast. I predict either success or a more interesting failure on the next flight.
One of those "this must be the future" moments for sure. I'm really amazed that there is a Tesla Roadster on its way to Mars at this point. That blows my mind.
It was so captivating to watch the launch production. Just watching this test launch you can see how SpaceX is recapturing the hearts and minds of the world and generating the same level of wonder that NASA did in it's hay-day. It's a proud day in annals of mankind and engineering. What an absolute feat. Congratulations to everyone on the team at SpaceX.
Yet another incredible show from SpaceX. At this point, if they said they were going to build a football stadium on Europa, my only question would be when does it open.
But I couldn't help but laugh at the fact that they can launch a massive rocket on the first try and land (at least) 2 cores, but the camera STILL cuts out on the drone ship.
The landing barge is towed into position by tugs, and once the boosters are landed I presume it is towed back out, so there will be some tug boats nearby.
It has station-keeping thrusters to stay at precise GPS coordinates. But it can't move far under own power and is towed. The name ASDS is not really to be taken literally here.
It will likely be a proper dynamic positioning system so will more than likely use two independent reference systems for position, one could be a DGPS system the other could be as basic as a taughtwire....
There aren't any nearby ships, for obvious safety reasons. Plus, any nearby ships would have the exact same issue - where exactly would you "feed" to, when any ship that far out is going to be using a commercial satellite data feed (ie, very slow and unreliable)?
The safety reasons don't hold, you can easily shoot from several kms away (there are people on land several kms away from the launch pad). In the worst case, you can pilot a drone from several kms away, close enough to the barge.
> any ship that far out is going to be using a commercial satellite data feed
The footage from the droneship always appears perfect seconds before the landings. So it's not simply the fact of being at sea.
Earlier in the feed they showed some ships that were presumably towing the drone out. I'm sure there are some that are within a mile or two.
To your second question, how about a camera on a boat closer in with a hard line to a boat farther out with the satellite connection? You act as if sending a video feed is an unsolvable problem despite them beaming living video through the rest of the mission when they are in space.
Yes, very hard to believe this was a technical failure/limitation. My money would be on a deliberate cut, possibly even automated, when the systems became aware of impending failure. It'd be important for SpaceX that any negative outcomes are delayed from public release in order to control what makes it into the headline news. The fate of the reusable components would be a particularly sensitive aspect of the PR campaign.
Nah, this is standard stuff for SpaceX. They always get signal dropouts and someone always says "conspiracy!"
They're not interested in the extra hassle of continuity for the sake of putting on a live show. The droneship has tons of cameras, the booster has tons of telemetry, that's all they're interested in.
(if you must spin a conspiracy, the one where they deliberately don't upgrade to keep their fans guessing is more credible - it's zero effort)
I have nothing to gain by SpaceX failing. I wish them all the best. I'm just stating what I think is pretty obvious - that this was a massive PR exercise, apart from anything else. My BS detector goes into overdrive at times like that.
When you mount cameras on a landing barge, you would expect there to be a high likelihood of them being damaged or affected in some way when your rocket lands. So you do the obvious thing, and setup a redundant camera feed somewhere at a distance. Previous test landings at sea had a chase plane. Where was that this time?
I don't find that surprising. The communication link back is presumably by satellite since it is in the middle of the ocean, and probably a directional antenna because of the high bandwidth. You have any good suggestions for having a reliable connection via directional antenna on a flimsy barge that a rocket is landing on in this middle of the choppy north Atlantic?
Tow a cable from the barge to a nearby ship, buoy, or platform on which the antenna sits, that's out of range of the vibrations and faces a different direction?
I believe they are required as part of FAA regulations to ensure that no manned craft are within 15 miles of the landing zone? Something like that, at least, which would complicate a tether-based approach.
I think the suggestion was a separate but tethered unmanned platform, which would presumably have less vibrations. I would imagine it's just not cost-efficient for SpaceX, as they'll be able to recover the footage later regardless.
Who needs a tether? Ubiquiti makes gear capable of slinging 400+ Mbps over 25km in a straight line. For about $1500 they should be able to shove the "last mile" to a ship outside of the exclusion zone and put the sat uplink on the ship.
They have grid antennas with a slightly wider beam, or maybe a sector style with 20-30 degrees could be used. I just think it's easier to engineer a workable ship-to-ship stabilized radio solution rather than deal with the ship-to-sat dish which probably has much tighter tolerances.
On the pictures of the droneship the quite distinctive Inmarsat BGAN (which is in essence 3G bounced of geostationary satellite) antenna pod is plainly visible.
Edit: inside the pod is fairly high-gain directional antenna mounted on motorized positioner, but it is designed to track the satellite from slow (ie. ship) or predictably moving (ie. truck) platforms and certainly cannot cope with vibrations from the landing reliably. Man-portable BGAN terminals usually have fixed antenna and officially require quite lengthly positioning process (on the other hand it will work for some value of "work" when you just throw it into car trunk and park with trunk vaguely pointing to south, but you will be lucky to get reliable phone connection, not to mention video stream, in that case).
How about a camera feed from the tow ship (with a view like the two other boosters landing)? If you can film a rocket 300km in the air, you can surely spot a rocket landing 15 miles away. Unless ofcourse you don't want the world to see it crashing into the ocean live.
They could perfect it, by having say an underwater wired data feed going to an ancillary ship which transmits it, which then is out of the thrust cone of the rocket. But it's probably just not worth it to get the footage 5 minutes early.
I'm just an amateur following along, but this seems likely to be one of the most important launches in modern rocketry history. This sets the stage for deep-space missions with reusable launch materials, which can greatly reduce the cost of future space exploration. Absolutely incredible achievement by the SpaceX team.
This definitely feels incredibly significant. The Soviet Union tried and failed 4 or 5 times to launch a rocket with this many engines, but now we're able to nail it on the first try aaaand land the boosters.
Well, but to be fair to the Soviets, they had to do it with really "stone age" electronics and technology and not knowing the many things we know today.
I am pretty sure that SpaceX was able to achieve what they did today also because they studied the Soviet N1 rocket and learned from what the engineers at that time had to figure out from scratch.
The other thing is that the N1 Moon rocket was a very different design - a single booster with many small engines, so incredibly difficult system to control, especially given the state of technology 50 years ago. Falcon Heavy is more similar to the successful Energia booster - core + strap on boosters - that was originally designed for the Russian shuttle. Or the Angara series.
I don't see how that's much of a credit boost to the Soviet failures the parent is referencing. The Apollo program had the same constraints of lacking modern electronics and not knowing many of the things we know today.
The comparison was that N1 had a some 30 engines (Falcon Heavy has 27, given it's 3x Falcon 9's) and that was its downfall.
In comparison, the Saturn V used only 5, they were just that much bigger. It's widely regarded that the 5 vs 30 was the difference as to why Saturn V was successful and N1 was not, as the Soviets simply had to roll too many dice in a situation where a failure resulted in complete mission loss.
It's a lesson in system engineering, particularly around failure durability and parallel vs serial critical subsystems.
It's interesting that in Soviet rocket engine school engines count by pumps, so, e.g. RD-180 is one engine, one pump, two chambers. In American rocket engine school engines used to count by chambers.
In this sense R-7 is remarkable because it has a good overall success record (most launched rocket) and 32 chambers working at liftoff. Some of those chambers are rather small - about 3 metric tons of thrust, about as much as main chambers on British launcher Black Arrow - but still.
My feel/understanding is that chamber design is something that gets more difficult as it increases in size (obviously), but also by combining multiple smaller chambers you only suffer minimal downsides from a reliability perspective. After all, it's not like multiple smaller chambers result in heaps of extra moving parts, so a lot of the risk of duplicating components is gone.
You're right, though, the R-7 is a fantastic achievement not only for the chambers, but also considering how many engines and pumps it has. All those spinning, moving parts are another point of failure and they're all necessary for success.
Apollo program certainly did not work under the same type of constraints the Soviets had. Yes, the electronics was primitive compared to what we have today but Apollo didn't need to work around international embargoes for every screw and piece of wire.
If Soviets wanted something modern, they had to reinvent it from scratch - or steal it. They were fairly good at both. Whether it was a computer, transistors or entire designs. The results were usually very simple designs where little could go wrong and that didn't need complicated technology - which wasn't available. E.g. the Soyuz capsule vs. both the Apollo and Space Shuttle craft.
I lived in a former Soviet bloc country and I can tell you that getting even silly components like LEDs required superhuman efforts. The few that were made domestically ended up in industrial uses (or exported to USSR) and importing anything from abroad was almost impossible. We had a black & white TV full of tubes until late 80s at home - color solid state TVs didn't become available until 1988 or so (and sucked big time).
Delta IV heavy looks pretty similar to the Falcon Heavy approach. I would imagine there was some knowdgle transfer there.
That being said, SpaceX is taking a much more pragmatic and efficient approach to building rockets with far less bureaucracy. This is the epitome of private sector efficieny over government projects.
I recall reading SpaceX had to reinvent quite a few wheels because the existing private sector was far too expensive — everything from cryogenic pumps to sea recovery of lower stages.
The problem is lack of meaningful competition, rather than government vs. industry; governments can be very good when competing with other governments.
Should have, but didn't. At least not for manned spaceflight. We learned how to keep humans alive in space way back with the Gemini project. A long-duration orbital sojourn could have been had for the cost of the ISS. At the end of the day, I struggle to think of a single big thing we can do post-ISS that we couldn't without.
It may not make headlines, but the knowledge we have gained about long-duration human health in space from ISS is utterly beyond price. For all its problems, that alone makes ISS worth it.
Here’s an article summarizing the findings of the most headline-grabbing medical study of the ISS program, the Twins Study in which Scott Kelly spent a year in space while his brother Mark remained on Earth; both were subjected to exhaustive testing, and the article briefly covers each investigation. One that I found particularly interesting: Scott’s telomeres grew significantly longer while he was in space!
Most astronauts spend six months on the station, and obviously most of them don’t have a twin, but they all add data to our knowledge of how space affects humans. We have learned a lot about how to counter muscle atrophy, and we have a better understanding of how the eyes and bones are degraded by prolonged weightlessness.
NASA loves to talk about ways that space research has improved life on earth (just google it, they’ll shout it at you), but even if you could find a way to do all that other research without a crewed space station, you can’t accumulate six astronaut-years of human medical data in space every single year for decades on end unless you’ve got a place in space to put a bunch of humans for a really long time, over and over again.
To me, that is what makes ISS a human treasure. Someday we will build a more cost-effective replacement on the basis of the lessons we’ve learned, but for now it’s the best we’ve got, and it’s quite good.
> the knowledge we have gained about long-duration human health in space from ISS is utterly beyond price
The knowledge was valuable, but not priceless. The same data could have been gathered, many times over, with long-duration multi-member orbital missions. We could have probably gotten an interplanetary flight in, too. The staggering cost of the ISS crowded out a lot of good science.
There is no way we could have achieved a similar volume of data without ISS. With ISS we get six astronaut-years of data every single year, and it’s got at least another decade in it, barring political stupidity.
The argument could be made that we could have made do with less data, perhaps. But we could not have gathered this volume even once without ISS, let alone “many times”.
> There is no way we could have achieved a similar volume of data without ISS
NASA spent 72 billion 2010 dollars on the ISS [1]. (Total cost is over $150 billion.) From Expedition 1 in 2000 through Expedition 53 in September, the ISS played host to 25,290 crew days of human occupation [2]. That comes to $2.8 million per day for NASA or over $5.9 million more generally. (Remember: this does not include the cost of getting to nor from the ISS.)
The Apollo program cost $107 billion 2016 dollars [3], or $98 million 2010 dollars [4]. (This includes the cost of the Saturn I, Saturn IB and Saturn V launch vehicles.) From Apollo 7 in 1968 through Apollo 17 in 1972, the Apollo program hosted 305 crew days of human spaceflight [5]. That comes to $3.2 million per day.
TL; DR We could have replicated the time spent on the ISS with a series of Apollo programs, using Apollo technology and Apollo-era costs, and had budget left over for a manned (probably non-landing) interplanetary mission [6].
The ISS is a boondoggle [7] on every measure except number of dollars funneled to defense contractors. It's not fun to trash these programs. (I grew up adoring the Space Shuttle and the ISs.) But over time, I've realized it's necessary. We cannot correct failures we refuse to recognize.
[6] Keep in mind the degree to which I'm putting my thumb on the scale in the ISS's favor. We're counting the Apollo program's launch costs but not the Space Shuttles. We're including, in $2.8 million per day figure, everyone's crew member hours but only NASA's costs.
[7] I am not (yet) in favor of de-orbiting the ISS. Sunk costs are sunk. Looking forward, there is probably something useful to be done with the beast.
> We could have replicated the time spent on the ISS with a series of Apollo programs
I doubt an Apollo CSM [1] could support astronauts for a full year (although Mir could [2]). It has proven very handy to have a space station within reach of resupply missions and with enough space to house some gym equipment and a whole bunch of medical equipment. You might also have trouble finding people willing to spend much time beyond the Van Allen radiation belts [3] in an Apollo era space craft [4].
On-orbit construction, how pressurized modules hold up after two decades of space travel, long-running experiments requiring in-person management, etc.
Right off the top of my head the medical data from long term space exposure will be absolutely critical to any future journeys. And I'm sure that's just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to perfecting long duration systems design, technology proofing, etc.
Hopefully the proof for this assertion is not simply that the majority of the ten longest spaceflights were conducted by the USSR/Russia, and rather the most impactful information was gathered from them.
for the amount of money spent on getting it there and maintaining it, and because we are keeping it understaffed for safety reasons, we are getting very little return on it.
Marginal at best. The Space Shuttle lofted 833 astronauts at a cost of $209 billion [1]. In 2013, NASA was paying Russia $70 million per astronaut for a Soyuz lift [2]. That comes to $58 billion in 2013 dollars. That leaves $151+ billion, ignoring inflation, to justify everything else the Shuttle did. $150+ billion is 10x SpaceX's lifetime capital expenditures. (It's about what NASA expects it will cost to put humans on Mars.)
At first, the Space Shuttle (conceived as a shuttle to an American space station, the latter never built) was an expensive way to low-earth orbit. After the ISS, the Space Shuttle became an expensive way to the ISS. It pioneered virtually nothing and nowhere and was better at nothing than any other craft.
It was not worthless. But for the cost we could have achieved vastly more. Opportunity cost is real; the Space Shuttle set spaceflight back at least a generation.
It's not fun to trash these programs. But over time, I've realized it's necessary. We cannot correct failures we refuse to recognize. The Space Shuttle's dismal ROI was a motivating factor behind the Bush administration's support of COTS [3]. Without that programme, SpaceX wouldn't be what it is today.
The Space Shuttle was remarkably well designed for orbital bombing missions, which is the only reason the Soviets felt compelled to build the Buran to reproduce its capabilities.
It's definitely another inflection point. The Falcon 9 is 75% reusable by cost of components, the Falcon Heavy is 90% reusable. And it's capable of much, much more. That might open up the heavy lift launch market to a whole new gaggle of players and begin really expanding out what is done there. It'll certainly put a lot more missions on the table that weren't there before, like low cost outer planets space science probes.
Also, something nobody has talked about yet. Falcon Heavy is capable of something no other US rocket is really able to do yet, launch new space station modules (or new space stations period).
> Also, something nobody has talked about yet. Falcon Heavy is capable of something no other US rocket is really able to do yet, launch new space station modules (or new space stations period).
I'm pretty sure one can launch space station modules on regular Falcon-9 as well. Russians launch some on Soyuz rocket.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 442 ms ] threadhttps://youtu.be/AGPH_i0ZlyM?t=56
When I saw the first successful booster landing on a drone ship I realized I was again watching history.
Live Webcam from Spaceman:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBr2kKAHN6M
I'm not sure what happened that was new here other than the PR of putting a car into solar orbit. They landed their 20 something rocket vertically. They crashed another one or something.
It just seems like a lot of expense and science to stop at a normal camera.
Do you even begin to appreciate the challenges in getting a 4-8k feed from space to earth?
I've been in the video business from '95 to 2015 and there is so much going on behind the scenes from even a simple live stream from a spacecraft to earth that I am wondering what it would have taken for you to be satisfied. FWIW I've personally done the Internet portion of two Space shuttle launches live-stream to earth and I can tell you that nothing about such an event is 'simple' by any stretch of the imagination. 2.5 million people watched that stream and it 'just worked'.
This never was about the quality of the feed (which is nothing short of amazing by the way), but about testing a new rocket. The fact that only one of the three first stages didn't make it is also quite impressive.
Yes, it was PR. But given the amount of work that went into this I figure they were entitled a bit of leeway.
This comment is totally out of place on a site like this, and it makes me wonder (1) what incredible stuff you've been up to today and (2) whether or not you are even remotely aware of any of the complexity a feat like today's launch entails to put you in a position to criticize any of this rather than to accept it in gratitude and wonder.
Keep in mind that according to Elon Musk there was a 50% chance the whole thing blew up on the pad I'd say they got their priorities right and spent what time and budget they had on the main item rather than on the PR bit.
Then again he calculated it, which is more than we can say for the countless teenagers trying to flip bottles in on their tables for views.
(...yes I do know it is the ol Sol)
Nevertheless :) FH first launch is an impressive feat.
[0] https://www.space.com/17307-neil-armstrong-one-small-step-qu...
Hopefully we will get a corrected version for the official movie!
The live (uncorrected) version for comparison: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8wxV-lUsZg
I hope one day to be as good at both engineering and PR as SpaceX is.
My non tech interested wife was cheering for both boosters to land safely. “What world am I in!?”
Thanks SpaceX for making us excited about space again.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCc16uozHVE
> Space opera is a subgenre of science fiction that emphasizes space warfare, melodramatic adventure, interplanetary battles, chivalric romance, and risk-taking
> A science fantasy is a cross-genre within the umbrella of speculative fiction which simultaneously draws upon and/or combines tropes and elements from both science fiction and fantasy
Star Wars is 100% science fiction.
Star Wars is not science fiction, it is fantasy or mythology in a science-fictional setting. It is fusion cuisine.
> teleological view of the Universe.
Almost all fiction is almost completely teleological. Nothing ever happens by accident in fiction, everything that happens has a human motivational cause. The characters' incredibly improbable and complicated schemes almost never fail by accident as they very likely actually would but always due to confrontation or betrayal. (See also: political narratives.) The human brain just cannot help but pay attention to sex, alliances, confrontation and betrayal.
The Force being with you by birth is a bad theme because it takes away the humanity of the people that have it. They succeed or fail in part not because of their intentions but because of magic stuff they happen to have that you cannot have. It's painful to watch.
A great deal of success or failure in real life comes down to legacy, genetics and random chance, or "non-magical stuff" other people have that you cannot.
Also, 2001: A Space Odyssey is a great movie about a great example why you do not pilot your ships with computers all the time.
Also, you do not know what the future holds. You are living in the present, not the future, where we very well may have pilots piloting ships.
Star Wars is not science fiction and it does not take place in the future. We are not living in the future either.
No, it merely illustrates why you want your AI properly bottled up and airgapped that way the flight computer will follow your instructions after you consult with the AI (assuming an AI is ever built...).
Computers can control spacecraft just fine in the present without AI so really there does not seem to be a pressing need for this.
Source: Andrew Howard of SpaceX, who is in charge of this software and has to endure the stress of each rendezvous. Screwing up could kill the ISS crew.
Unless your connection confirmed that the onboard computer of the SpaceX Dragon capsule is sentient.
I was just providing evidence against the claim of the last paragraph of your previous message.
While you are waiting for AI that meets your specs, the world is flying real spacecraft with software that most people are happy to call AI right now.
Instead of a daemon, call it a djinn?
I didn't say that at all. It is in the past, and also, it is not science fiction. Star Wars is quite fantasy, offering no explanation in science for the force, hyperspace, lightsabers, etc.
I love Star Wars with all my heart. But it is not about the future and it is not science fiction. It takes place "a long time ago" and it centers around magical, unexplained powers.
Edit:
And,
> Isn't the key part of Sci-fi that it contains a society that has in some way advanced beyond our own?
No, I don't agree with this at all. I would even say that in nearly all science fiction published, the societies have not advanced beyond our own that much - or if they have, they are also demonstrated to be far behind us in other ways. Science fiction is a lot of things, but certainly there is no requirement for it to show a more advanced society than ours.
Likewise the key part of Romance genre fiction is the Happy Ending. It doesn't matter whether they sleep together (a lot of Romance aimed at older and Christian readers doesn't have any sex at all), or get married, but there must be a Happy Ending.
The original Star Wars was made in 1977, and based heavily on World War 2 combat films (much of the space combat and the trench run on the Death Star was lifted - sometimes shot for shot - from a film called "The Dam Busters.") For reasons of continuity and tone, that mechanical aesthetic can't ever change much throughout the franchise, or else it wouldn't "look" like Star Wars.
But the point is that it's exciting, it's visceral, the archetypes of the fighter pilot and joystick and of buttons that do important things make sense to the audience, and as a result those scenes can convey emotion though the use of familiar visual language.
Sci-fi was never "connected" to the future, and it was never (or at least, never explicitly) about attempting to accurately describe or predict the future. Yes, you could have replaced the ships and pilots in Star Wars with remote or AI controlled drones, not colored in the blasters, etc, and it might be more realistic, but no one would enjoy watching it.
People do enjoy dogfights (and spaceships that bank when they turn) and space wizards with laser swords doing flippy shit and punching each other with telekinesis, though.
Or maybe software technology was lost and they are only able to use extremely rudimentary systems...
Except that fully sentient AI is already commonplace in the form of droids, including battle droids.
This is a universe where a small robot that only speaks in clicks and whistles had to physically transport holographic "data tapes" about a moon-sized space station that can travel faster than light. A lot of it doesn't make sense when you think about it, but then it's supposed to be Flash Gordon with the serial numbers filed off.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DVZ0NPoU0AAMWk6.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/WXQEsKo.png
https://youtu.be/wbSwFU6tY1c?t=37m49s
https://imgur.com/a/u6sLs
https://i.imgur.com/WXQEsKo.png
https://youtu.be/wbSwFU6tY1c?t=37m49s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbSwFU6tY1c&feature=youtu.be...
If it were two different cameras we'd see two different landing pads. In the end of the video both feeds are coming down on the northern pad.
Edit: Here's the sat image from december with notes added https://imgur.com/a/u6sLs
Since they are on the same rocket, you see them land on the same pad.
The rockets have redundant cameras, and through a probable misconfiguration we saw two feeds from two cameras on one rocket.
Wasn't intentional, but oops.
I think you're right.
https://youtu.be/wbSwFU6tY1c?t=37m10s "even though those look very similar those ... are representative of different boosters"
https://imgur.com/a/u6sLs
The live (uncorrected) version for comparison: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8wxV-lUsZg
When I saw that, all I could think about was seeing hundreds of those and that scene being as mundane as a plane landing.
I've almost lost hope around the end of the Space Shuttle program. I thought it will be only satellites, ISS and occasional science probe launches. SpaceX single-handedly restored my faith in the future of space activities again, and with other player on the scene, we now have realistic hope of seeing an actual industry in space within our lifetimes.
Arianespace has spent years developing new rocket engines specifically for reusability, and has started building prototype rockets.
Bezos’ company has mastered landing, and is directly building their mars rocket.
In 5 years we’ll likely see at least 3 major companies up there with SpaceX, and true competition in space.
Moreover, there's lots of companies in every vertical needed for bootstrapping the industry - ground services, satellites, in-space manufacturing, asteroid prospecting & mining... all in the early stage, all betting on cheaper access to space than it was just few years ago. We're in a critical moment where things suddenly start adding up and - I hope - will form something great!
It rather looks as if the tail-landing reusable booster stage is a "steam engine" type of eureka form factor, and everyone's going to be doing it. Yay!
Wonder what success of FH would do to works on BFR? If BFR would be as successful as Musk writes, would SpaceX make two rockets - or optimization will lead to just one?
If BFR is actually fully reusable it would be cheaper to launch than the F9 (due to the non-reused second stage).
BFR/BFS will come online as a self-competitive offering from SpaceX initially and both lines will be out in the market together (BFR vs. F9/FH). If and when BFR attains sufficient maturity, reliability, and market trust then the Falcon line of rockets will be phased out. BFR will have much greater capabilities (higher payloads, etc.) but will be substantially cheaper because it'll be 100% reusable and the reusability longevity for its parts will be much higher than for F9/FH, so there won't really be much reason to keep Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy around.
However, the FH uses RP-1-O2 Merlin engines, whereas the BFR will use Methane-O2 Raptor engines, so they might not learn too much.
Edit: RP-1 fuel.
I'm not trying to be negative, just trying to understand how you came to the conclusion you did.
In a theoretical world where we could just beam anything into earth orbit, unmanned interplanetary spaceflight would likely be an expensive hobby instead of something only governments attempt.
Maybe you could argue the Falcon 1 was an expensive hobby, but interplanetary spaceflight is certainly not.
If by "hobby" you mean doing something for fun or personal growth, with only vague - if any - expectations of future usefulness, then no. SpaceX was aimed at getting us to Mars from the day 1; it's their entire raison d'être. Musk bootstrapped it with his own cash because he also set this goal - getting humanity to Mars.
If by "hobby" you mean doing something meaningful instead of just making moar money - then sure.
And the landing shots are just damn cool.
And yet, some call him "visionary" or "genius" :)
The launches are cheaper because of the breakthrough in being able to reuse the rockets by landing them.
That's the exact opposite of copying.
It is much too easy to disparage an optimisation as unimportant compared to some hypothetical "original" idea of which it is a refinement, and we should not do this, especially to try to claim credit for people we know at the cost of those far away we've never heard of.
The "original" inventions behind recorded music, the telephone, the incandescent light bulb, and numerous other obvious examples are poor shadows of the commercially successful item that means we know them today. We honour many of the people who refined these items as "geniuses" today, often pretending to ourselves that they invented them rather than merely refining the work of others, this does everybody involved a disservice, and it disparages the real contribution of people (in China and elsewhere) optimising today's inventions. The flat panel display you're almost certainly reading this on is the product of _millions_ of such optimisations.
Maybe 1000 years from now, people look at us and say god damn it. I wish they had stayed there and learned how to live in earth well. We are now speared all over the place and we all hate hate each other; and just right now I hear Martian went ahead and annexed Venus and they also seem to be interfering in Andromeda elections.
So, whats to stop them attaching an additional two (or more) to the existing rocket now that they have the basic synchronization worked out.
No better way to learn basic orbital dynamics out there.
(Hell, I might even be among them.)
That was seriously impressive to watch. Congratulations to all the SpaceX engineers who made this a reality.
Perfect takeoff, 2 simultaneous landings (still waiting for confirmation on the droneship landing), the car is in orbit.
I don't remember being so nervous watching a launch video since... Space Shuttle missions, I think.
Great job, SpaceX!
Obviously JWST does not fall into that category. I imagine if it blows up, it is just done forever?
I know where I'm putting my money.
http://spaceflight101.com/ariane-5-va241/ariane-5-va241-anom...
That is correct...but NOT in orbit of our home planet!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBr2kKAHN6M
e.g. https://i.imgur.com/Yu6gRar.jpg
This is all I'm watching for the rest of the day https://imgur.com/oKWTAQk
Might I suggest pairing it with Pink Floyd's _Echoes_[0]?
- 0 - https://open.spotify.com/album/468ZwCchVtzEbt9BHmXopb
I've had the same running all day, to be honest. Having the 2001 a Space Odyssey soundtrack and Interstellar's soundtrack in the background is quite pleasant.
landing of the mars mission was pretty big in the spectacle sense.
They still want it back for data.
"SpaceX also attempted a recovery of all three of the first stage boosters it used during the launch. It has recovered two of those thus far, and we’re waiting to hear back from SpaceX on the official status of the final, third booster, which was landing at sea."
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/936782477502246912
Source: http://m.dw.com/en/what-you-need-to-know-about-the-falcon-he...
I posted more screen shots of launch: https://imgur.com/a/gh410
Or, imagine we hit a dark age and bounce back, and this event is lost to history. Five hundred years later we manage to get some people to Mars orbit and they find a fucking car in a capsule with a little mannequin stuffed into it flinging around the planet at hundreds of kph.
All while it's blasting David Bowie over their radios.
This is an amazing achievement and a huge PR win for space!
Opposition to non-bipedal forms of transport?
Or is it opposition to the type of urban planning that is centered around the car more than the pedestrian?
Anyway I wouldn't normally consider it to be space trash, but in this case it's pretty much just a big Tesla ad billboard orbiting the planet so I agree with you sentiment
Space debris is a problem in a small number of high-traffic Earth orbits. There is almost nothing in existence on this random Hohmann transfer solar orbit where the car will live for hundreds of millions of years.
Space is big.
If it gets to be a problem in the future, it will have so much historical value that someone will launch a mission to go fetch the Roadster and bring it home to Mars.
It probably does not add a measurable amount of junk to hit than is already up there in the form of natural rocks.
Though if in the future human population hits the quadrillions and we are living on all 8 planets we should probably start worrying about our space trash.
Also, there is not any danger of stuff "crowding" out there because the amount of space between Earth and Mars is really quite extremely huge.
> Following launch, Falcon Heavy’s second stage will attempt to place the Roadster into a precessing Earth-Mars elliptical orbit around the sun.
The amount of coverage both Tesla & SpaceX got from launching the Roadster equates to advertising costing considerably more than the cost of the car.
This is what Pirelli used to say about their calendar. It costs so much to get a front page ad in a newspaper, it's worth all the costs of the calendar.
Who cares though, it's just so fucking amazing that there exists a geek with enough cash and gumption to get a car flying through space with h2g2 in the glove box.
[0]: http://www.arabnews.com/sites/default/files/styles/ph3_660_4...
[1]: http://i2.cdn.turner.com/money/dam/assets/171117032715-tesla...
https://www.instagram.com/p/BezcvpzAgYI/
Makes more sense.
Also, space is big once you leave low earth orbit. It's really hard to actually understand how big it is. Putting a roadster out there isn't exactly junking up the place.
In fact, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.
Because if all you can think of is utility then all art should go as well. After all, it's all just a waste of resources. /s
Also "Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space"
Do we know the fate of the centre core yet?
We already dig other nice videos on youtube with rocket launches and the like. "How it's made" and so on. Some manufacturing videos have, believe it or not, caught her attention for half an hour! I think it was especially a video from manufacturing the Mini (car), lots of robots and automation.
Although there hasn't been an official statement by SpaceX yet, and whoever said "we lost the center core" could have just been referring to the video feed from the drone ship.
For those like me unfamiliar with the terminology used in this context, is this wording reserved for situations where the rocket is destroyed or could it also mean they lost contact/video feed with the center core?
I might be reading into something that's not there, but the presenters (I didn't get their names) acted like they received surprising news in thier monitors at 39:03[1] just as they were about to report on the drone ship landing.
Dude: "We've just gotten confirmation..."
Lady: "oh!"
Dude: "Oh"
Lady: "[laughs] We are waiting to hear what happens..."
1. https://youtu.be/wbSwFU6tY1c?t=39m5s
https://youtu.be/wbSwFU6tY1c?t=38m20s
... and then back to the presenters. As someone said to me, "That's their lying face!" :)
Can't fault them for wanting to dwell on the positives though, was an amazing moment to watch.
Edit: You can switch cameras on the above youtube video to the countdown net; you can clearly hear them saying "We lost the centre core" at 38m30s - not sure if that means "lost signal of" or otherwise. The people in the control room appear to become more muted at that point, though they still seem composed. It's really not clear.
Edit: On the countdown net you can hear some minutes later "suspected loss of signal": https://youtu.be/-B_tWbjFIGI?t=42m21s
Doubly so when the "failure" isn't part of the primary mission.
Watching the countdown net it seemed plausible that they didn't know whether it had successfully landed either.
If they delay the core announcement by a couple of hours or so, the headlines are all "SPACEX SENDS CAR TO MARS", with a minor note appended later to say, "A SpaceX spokesperson later confirmed the landing of the spacecraft's central core did not succeed and it has been lost." Like it or not, issues of timing like this makes a big difference to how the exact same events are reported and perceived.
But even in the worst case first stage engine restart issues will never halt falcon launches. The first stage engines don't ever need to restart to complete the primary mission, and while landing the first stages is a great bonus, it is and always will be a secondary mission objective.
It is a bit odd they haven't announced that it was lost yet, but I agree that seems very likely.
Also in the video if you watch mission control’s wall of monitors you can see the feed cut back with an empty drone ship a minute or so later. Seems to confirm that the rocket missed the deck due to the engines not lighting.
Just speculation, but it makes sense to me...
You can hear "Centre core defect on shutdown". Definitely didn't make it.
Anyone knows what happened to the core booster?
Even if the droneship didn't work out...
But I couldn't help but laugh at the fact that they can launch a massive rocket on the first try and land (at least) 2 cores, but the camera STILL cuts out on the drone ship.
The safety reasons don't hold, you can easily shoot from several kms away (there are people on land several kms away from the launch pad). In the worst case, you can pilot a drone from several kms away, close enough to the barge.
> any ship that far out is going to be using a commercial satellite data feed
The footage from the droneship always appears perfect seconds before the landings. So it's not simply the fact of being at sea.
To your second question, how about a camera on a boat closer in with a hard line to a boat farther out with the satellite connection? You act as if sending a video feed is an unsolvable problem despite them beaming living video through the rest of the mission when they are in space.
They're not interested in the extra hassle of continuity for the sake of putting on a live show. The droneship has tons of cameras, the booster has tons of telemetry, that's all they're interested in.
(if you must spin a conspiracy, the one where they deliberately don't upgrade to keep their fans guessing is more credible - it's zero effort)
When you mount cameras on a landing barge, you would expect there to be a high likelihood of them being damaged or affected in some way when your rocket lands. So you do the obvious thing, and setup a redundant camera feed somewhere at a distance. Previous test landings at sea had a chase plane. Where was that this time?
https://www.ubnt.com/airmax/powerbeam-ac-iso/
Edit: inside the pod is fairly high-gain directional antenna mounted on motorized positioner, but it is designed to track the satellite from slow (ie. ship) or predictably moving (ie. truck) platforms and certainly cannot cope with vibrations from the landing reliably. Man-portable BGAN terminals usually have fixed antenna and officially require quite lengthly positioning process (on the other hand it will work for some value of "work" when you just throw it into car trunk and park with trunk vaguely pointing to south, but you will be lucky to get reliable phone connection, not to mention video stream, in that case).
I am pretty sure that SpaceX was able to achieve what they did today also because they studied the Soviet N1 rocket and learned from what the engineers at that time had to figure out from scratch.
The other thing is that the N1 Moon rocket was a very different design - a single booster with many small engines, so incredibly difficult system to control, especially given the state of technology 50 years ago. Falcon Heavy is more similar to the successful Energia booster - core + strap on boosters - that was originally designed for the Russian shuttle. Or the Angara series.
In comparison, the Saturn V used only 5, they were just that much bigger. It's widely regarded that the 5 vs 30 was the difference as to why Saturn V was successful and N1 was not, as the Soviets simply had to roll too many dice in a situation where a failure resulted in complete mission loss.
It's a lesson in system engineering, particularly around failure durability and parallel vs serial critical subsystems.
In this sense R-7 is remarkable because it has a good overall success record (most launched rocket) and 32 chambers working at liftoff. Some of those chambers are rather small - about 3 metric tons of thrust, about as much as main chambers on British launcher Black Arrow - but still.
You're right, though, the R-7 is a fantastic achievement not only for the chambers, but also considering how many engines and pumps it has. All those spinning, moving parts are another point of failure and they're all necessary for success.
If Soviets wanted something modern, they had to reinvent it from scratch - or steal it. They were fairly good at both. Whether it was a computer, transistors or entire designs. The results were usually very simple designs where little could go wrong and that didn't need complicated technology - which wasn't available. E.g. the Soyuz capsule vs. both the Apollo and Space Shuttle craft.
I lived in a former Soviet bloc country and I can tell you that getting even silly components like LEDs required superhuman efforts. The few that were made domestically ended up in industrial uses (or exported to USSR) and importing anything from abroad was almost impossible. We had a black & white TV full of tubes until late 80s at home - color solid state TVs didn't become available until 1988 or so (and sucked big time).
That being said, SpaceX is taking a much more pragmatic and efficient approach to building rockets with far less bureaucracy. This is the epitome of private sector efficieny over government projects.
The problem is lack of meaningful competition, rather than government vs. industry; governments can be very good when competing with other governments.
SpaceX's Falcon project is the first major progress we've made in the field of human spaceflight since the Apollo program.
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/nasa-twins-study-investigators-...
Most astronauts spend six months on the station, and obviously most of them don’t have a twin, but they all add data to our knowledge of how space affects humans. We have learned a lot about how to counter muscle atrophy, and we have a better understanding of how the eyes and bones are degraded by prolonged weightlessness.
NASA loves to talk about ways that space research has improved life on earth (just google it, they’ll shout it at you), but even if you could find a way to do all that other research without a crewed space station, you can’t accumulate six astronaut-years of human medical data in space every single year for decades on end unless you’ve got a place in space to put a bunch of humans for a really long time, over and over again.
To me, that is what makes ISS a human treasure. Someday we will build a more cost-effective replacement on the basis of the lessons we’ve learned, but for now it’s the best we’ve got, and it’s quite good.
The knowledge was valuable, but not priceless. The same data could have been gathered, many times over, with long-duration multi-member orbital missions. We could have probably gotten an interplanetary flight in, too. The staggering cost of the ISS crowded out a lot of good science.
The argument could be made that we could have made do with less data, perhaps. But we could not have gathered this volume even once without ISS, let alone “many times”.
NASA spent 72 billion 2010 dollars on the ISS [1]. (Total cost is over $150 billion.) From Expedition 1 in 2000 through Expedition 53 in September, the ISS played host to 25,290 crew days of human occupation [2]. That comes to $2.8 million per day for NASA or over $5.9 million more generally. (Remember: this does not include the cost of getting to nor from the ISS.)
The Apollo program cost $107 billion 2016 dollars [3], or $98 million 2010 dollars [4]. (This includes the cost of the Saturn I, Saturn IB and Saturn V launch vehicles.) From Apollo 7 in 1968 through Apollo 17 in 1972, the Apollo program hosted 305 crew days of human spaceflight [5]. That comes to $3.2 million per day.
TL; DR We could have replicated the time spent on the ISS with a series of Apollo programs, using Apollo technology and Apollo-era costs, and had budget left over for a manned (probably non-landing) interplanetary mission [6].
The ISS is a boondoggle [7] on every measure except number of dollars funneled to defense contractors. It's not fun to trash these programs. (I grew up adoring the Space Shuttle and the ISs.) But over time, I've realized it's necessary. We cannot correct failures we refuse to recognize.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Space_Station#Co...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_International_Space_St...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_program
[4] https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_program#Mission_summary
[6] Keep in mind the degree to which I'm putting my thumb on the scale in the ISS's favor. We're counting the Apollo program's launch costs but not the Space Shuttles. We're including, in $2.8 million per day figure, everyone's crew member hours but only NASA's costs.
[7] I am not (yet) in favor of de-orbiting the ISS. Sunk costs are sunk. Looking forward, there is probably something useful to be done with the beast.
I doubt an Apollo CSM [1] could support astronauts for a full year (although Mir could [2]). It has proven very handy to have a space station within reach of resupply missions and with enough space to house some gym equipment and a whole bunch of medical equipment. You might also have trouble finding people willing to spend much time beyond the Van Allen radiation belts [3] in an Apollo era space craft [4].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Command/Service_Module
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mir_EO-3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_TM-18
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Allen_radiation_belt
[4] https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/stereo/news/stereo_astron...
It's not all about flashy missions like sending humans to Mars (for dubious scientific value as opposed to just sending robots).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight_records#Te...
Marginal at best. The Space Shuttle lofted 833 astronauts at a cost of $209 billion [1]. In 2013, NASA was paying Russia $70 million per astronaut for a Soyuz lift [2]. That comes to $58 billion in 2013 dollars. That leaves $151+ billion, ignoring inflation, to justify everything else the Shuttle did. $150+ billion is 10x SpaceX's lifetime capital expenditures. (It's about what NASA expects it will cost to put humans on Mars.)
At first, the Space Shuttle (conceived as a shuttle to an American space station, the latter never built) was an expensive way to low-earth orbit. After the ISS, the Space Shuttle became an expensive way to the ISS. It pioneered virtually nothing and nowhere and was better at nothing than any other craft.
It was not worthless. But for the cost we could have achieved vastly more. Opportunity cost is real; the Space Shuttle set spaceflight back at least a generation.
It's not fun to trash these programs. But over time, I've realized it's necessary. We cannot correct failures we refuse to recognize. The Space Shuttle's dismal ROI was a motivating factor behind the Bush administration's support of COTS [3]. Without that programme, SpaceX wouldn't be what it is today.
[1] https://www.space.com/12376-nasa-space-shuttle-program-facts...
[2] https://www.space.com/20897-nasa-russia-astronaut-launches-2...
[3] https://www.nasa.gov/commercial-orbital-transportation-servi...
Also, something nobody has talked about yet. Falcon Heavy is capable of something no other US rocket is really able to do yet, launch new space station modules (or new space stations period).
I'm pretty sure one can launch space station modules on regular Falcon-9 as well. Russians launch some on Soyuz rocket.
Surely FH is more convenient for big stations.