>>8037262

>NASA isn't paying a dime for anything. SpaceX is doing this out of their own pockets and they've reached a zero-exchange-of-cash agreement where NASA will provide technical assistance, help with mission planning, etc in exchange for access to assloads of data SpaceX is producing by landing a dragon on mars.
NASA's not handing SpaceX any money, but they're giving them a lot of expensive help, including time on their deep space network: the big radio dishes they have spaced around the world so they can talk to any probe at any time of day.

Anyway, SpaceX has developed pretty much everything they're using on NASA's dime. They might even be using a Dragon that NASA bought for them, on their "pretend these things aren't reusable" sweetheart contract. Maybe they'll even be using Falcon stages that NASA bought for them on "pretend these things are expendable" launch contracts.

I like and support SpaceX, but they are very much running on tax money.

perfection

Anything SpaceX does for NASA is way cheaper than anyone else
Which is why NASA is giving them money

SpaceX was the most expensive option in the latest round of commercial resupply contracts. Also, Cygnus has been a better deal than Dragon because it has so much more pressurized volume (about three times as much, and a nicer shape for fitting long items and packing efficiently). The initial resupply contracts were 8 Cygnus flights (184 cubic meters) for $1.9 billion ($10 million per cubic meter) and 12 Dragon flights (120 cubic meters) for $1.6 billion ($13 million per cubic meter).

The simple truth is that nobody has been given an opportunity like NASA has given SpaceX. Orbital's really the only one who came close, and since they weren't in on the crew stuff, they got way less NASA money.

SpaceX has been good at winning NASA contracts, but if they had said they were going to get things done when they actually did get things done, they wouldn't have won them. They are WAAAAY behind schedule. A lot of it comes down to Elon's salesmanship, and his money: NASA has let other companies, like Kistler, die when they failed to raise sufficient private funding, but SpaceX had a billionaire attached.

The trouble with this situation is that it's stlil government bureaucracy picking the winners. We want a competitive industry, but then NASA says, "Oh, this one looks promising." and dumps billions of dollars on it in advance of it really doing anything.

Can you imagine investing in an industry where the government has already picked a company to be its anointed son and given it billions of dollars in contracts to develop vehicles, and then own them, and to build and fly reusable vehicles once, and then own them? Can you imagine going to work in that industry? There's only really one place to put your money or talent.

Goes both ways, noone has given Nasa the oppurtunity like SpaceX has, to develop a real sustainable American commercial space industry.

It's 200 million a cygnus delivery from now until forever, no innovation, no advancements, less payload than dragon(which is why you focused on cubic meters)

It's not SpaceX's fault that noone else put any effort into developing resusable rockets.
This landing the first stage shit could have been long long ago

That's socialism for ya.

True.

>linking to a site which requires a subscription

EPIC VIRAL MARKETING

OP, I hope you get a promotion! :^)

>What is BugMeNot

i haven't even paid for my Veeky Forums gold pass

>noone has given Nasa the oppurtunity like SpaceX has, to develop a real sustainable American commercial space industry.
Think so? What about Kistler? What about Blue Origin?

The truth is, lots of people have proposed reusable launch systems and vehicles. NASA only subsidized one with billions of dollars.

NASA isn't developing a "sustainable American commercial space industry", they took a nascent one and crowned one of its players champion before the games got started. This has all but killed the suborbital-to-orbital development path. No sane investor would put their money into a competitor to SpaceX, only enthusiast billionaires are playing now.

>It's 200 million a cygnus delivery from now until forever, no innovation, no advancements, less payload than dragon(which is why you focused on cubic meters)
Guess what, chum? Dragon ends up carrying less mass of payload, because the things NASA actually wants to send to the ISS have low density. And Cygnus had an upgrade to carry 50% more after the fourth launch. Antares was also getting upgrades.

No innovation? No advancement? Less payload than Dragon? All false.

Besides, Antares was Orbital's first try at a medium-lift launch vehicle, not its last. They also made Pegasus, the air-launch rocket, and Minotaur, the small-payload launch vehicle. NASA picked SpaceX and Orbital because they had built orbital rockets before.

What's really different about SpaceX is bluffing about what they can deliver in order to secure large up-front payments, subsidies, and investments, then using what they're supposed to be getting for exciting new project B to pay for the boring old obligations of project A, kind of like a rocket ponzi scheme.

>27 engines will blow up

Kek. But seriously, why does the falcon core have 9 engines? Surely for reliability you should have, say, 5 like the Saturn launcher so you still get the engine-out capability but with less of a reliability hit from having too many engines? Replace that 'octaweb' with a 'quadraweb'?

Fucking saved

SpaceX only had the time or money to produce a single engine design
They need to be able to land the first stage propulsively
Engines can't be throttled down much

That dictates engine size, which dictates engine numbers

You don't even need a pass if you log into your google botnet account.

>What about all the technology transfer from NASA that was practically just handed to them free of charge?

That's the way science should be done, with open arms.

>claim that they didn't stand on top of the shoulder's of a giant to get to where they

No one even implied that.

Because he's a good business man and risk taker.

>They need to be able to land the first stage propulsively

So what if the thrust to weight is higher on landing? Just start the landing burn later and time it just right to land at the target speed.

It does have higher than 1 thrust to weight
Landing with 1.4 or whatever it is t/w is much different than 20 to 1 t/w

youtube.com/watch?v=KDK5TF2BOhQ
>360* degree view of landing.

Based Elon keeps delivering.

This misconception about the government helping out...... The gubmint gave out a bit of land in a fucking desert and that's it.

>why does the falcon core have 9 engines?
Merlin 1C was developed for Falcon 1, which used only one of them. They had a small pressure-fed, ablatively-cooled engine (Kestrel) for the upper stage.

Developing even a medium-size rocket engine like Merlin 1 is expensive and time-consuming. It took them about five years to get it working properly, and about a dozen years to get it to the mature Merlin 1D full-thrust version, which is powerful, reliable, and manufacturable.

Falcon 9 1.0 simply used the Merlin 1C they already had. Nine of them was the most that would fit on a rocket that could go by truck on the Interstate, and it was just barely good enough to carry the Dragon capsule that won them the big NASA moneys. In a heavy configuration of three cores, it was also good enough for the GTO comsat market.

When they wanted to step up to the big leagues, they had no time to spend five more years to get a barely-usable engine. Even Merlin 1C was still basically a prototype model. They struggled to produce it in volume, and still needed to redesign it.

Raptor is the engine they want. Merlin 1 is the engine they have.

>dat noise
The thrusters continue to fire even after the landing legs make contact, causing the craft to slide along the surface before coming to rest.

This seems like a potential instability issue for future consideration

probably doesn't turn off that fast, the throttle on the engine.
Likely they'd use a bigger boat for more regular landings

No, it's just bouncing a bit because they dropped hard on the legs, plus there was a lot of wind, so it was pitching pretty hard in the waves.

And it's not firing, it's purging. They can't throttle it down far enough to have thrust < weight without shutting the engines off, so if the engine was still firing, it would lift right back off again.

When they shut the engine down, they blast helium through it as they do, to clear out the remaining fuel and oxygen and have it shut down without complications or fouling.

Interesting thanks

>His fans are insufferable though.
Agreeing with you on this one.
I consider myself quite a massive fanboy for anyone doing anything rocket/space related, be it SpaceX, Boeing, Bigelow, NASA, and so on. I watch all those livestreams if I can. And by god, the circlejerk that is the most hardcore Musk Fanboys(myself included at times), is insane. Put those people into the same room as the most MuskBTFO-people on this board and you could power a fucking rocket all the way to fucking Neptune on pure hate and shit-throwing alone