So, now that SpaceX has been given FAA approval for return to flight and the launch is scheduled for Jan 9, 822 GMT, what will we be seeing? A perfect launch? A massive fireball? Epic memes in the next 48 hours?
spaceflightnow.com
Ofc we all now that this tread will derail into shounting, memeing and general shitposting, but it will still be a nice break from the FlatEarth and Global Warming treads that has filled this place the last weeks
Fly baby fly
Anyone have that picture of Bezos screaming, Musky musking and the Falcon landing?
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>old Cold War was Russia vs. America
>new Cold War is Musk vs. Bezos
pls dont blow up
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Launch delayed to the 14th due to weather.
Musk is a fraud. His fanboys are reddit tier midwits.
god damnit
God. fucking. damn. it.
I seriously thought we'd see a reflown booster around this time last year, then Falcon Heavy and Dragon 2 well before now.
They are making progress, but it seems increasingly possible that they could just fail, that their plans could crumble and in the end there'd be an investigation and it would turn out that their rockets weren't even cheaper to build than the competition, they were just subsidizing them with investment funds and advance payments, like a Ponzi scheme. Or worse, they can go on stringing people along indefinitely.
ITS means they have a ready-built excuse for failing with Falcon 9: "We've learned a great deal, but now we're focusing our efforts on the next generation." Its massive size and ambitious specs and purpose mean it's full of excuses for dragging it out past 2030, AND for collecting a practically unlimited amount of subsidies and investments.
Elon Musk has made a pretty solid career on companies not producing competitive results. Zip2 and X.com were just irrational-exuberance dotcom buyouts (and he got kicked out of PayPal for pushing to switch over their servers to running on Windows NT), but made him close to a billionaire. He bought into Tesla when it just needed money to start producing overpriced electric sports cars as a novelty, and it has gone on producing overpriced electric cars as a novelty and status symbol, and it has still never turned a profit. Solar City is just a financing/acquisition company set up to skim subsidies, and now Musk's making a fortune off of it by having Tesla buy it. SpaceX has certainly been running on investor funds and subsidies so far.
Musk has gotten extraordinarily rich on attracting investor funds, without ever building and operating a profitable business.
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eh
they can't do anything with the ITS until they are doing regular F9 launches
Thats where their funding for the ITS is supposed to come from
What baffles me is why does it take so long for them to restart launches
Weren't they supposed to have a rocket ready for september according to their planes? How come one still isn't ready....
fucking pleb
>treads that has filled this place
*threads that have filled this place
>they can't do anything with the ITS until they are doing regular F9 launches
They've been doing stuff with ITS for years already. The big public announcement was when they had built their first composite LOX tank and Raptor prototype.
>Thats where their funding for the ITS is supposed to come from
No. Elon Musk likes to imply that they're being all bootstrappy, building up using past profits, but there are no past profits and all of their development has been paid for with government money and private investments. ITS funding is also intended to come from government money and private investments.
How many times have you heard, "NASA should just cancel SLS and pay for ITS. At $10 billion, it's only a small fraction of what SLS costs."? I know I joined that chorus. Elon Musk knew people would start saying it. And once they did, they're going to be committed to the position that it's good. People don't like to turn around and admit they've been fooled.
It's been over a year now since they landed their first booster. Didn't most of us think that a refly attempt would follow shortly? Didn't the naysayers tell us, "You know, these are expendable rockets, they're too flimsy to just reuse like that. Wait and see, they'll be in the shop forever being refurbished. It won't turn out to save money."
Its almost as if a rocket company gets put on a no-fly list until they can give a good reason for why it went cabloomy in the first place. Then they have to come up with a decent way for the next one not to go cabloomy.
THEN its down to the FAA to go over everything, have loooooong ass meetings and finally give the all-clear.
It's not just FAA, though. There are other people who need a good answer, like the customers, insurance companies, and range authorities, not to mention SpaceX themselves, who are far better off delaying to get a proper answer than destroying another customer payload.
Yeah, forgot about that. It really is a massive set of cogs and wheels that has to turn before anything gets a "go" when it comes to this stuff.
>far better off delaying to get a proper answer than destroying another customer payload.
...or launchpad. With this kind of failure, it's not even safe to do pure test-flights with boilerplate loads.
Anyone remember how long it took to rebuild after the Antares went of? Like 10 months?
2 years to the month between the pad explosion and the return to flight. (though there might have been another reason for that, switching engines and all)
Someone post it.
Due to high winds and icy roads, I can't get to the computer where I have it saved. The post has been pushed back to next week.
lol, nicely done
Went and found it again.
Fireball as usual. Sasuga!
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