Is it OK to cringe at this? I mean, we have been doing this since before my parents was born

but you post in this shithole, so you TRULY love science, right

>being able to lower costs by a factor of 10 or 100
>publicity stunt

Pretty brainlet of u

Factor of 10 to 100? Impossible. Never going to happen. Go tell your propaganda to someone who actually doesn't know anything about engineering and science.

i'm polish and i can tell you that destruction of warsaw was a result of the uprising, and later scorched earth tactics after all the residents were expelled from the city.

bombing of dresden was indiscriminate bombing of a city with negligible military targets filled with civilians.

Shut the fuck up nerd

two of the US's main exports are aerospace technology, and energy technology.

Musk essentially brokers subsidy deals with the US government to advance just those interests, and he even chips in some of his own money. Elon's a raging narcissist and see's himself an equal with the most powerful country in the world. the Tony Stark delusion is real.

Isn't that the point of the image?

>this is what commies believe

hmm yes ah yes hmm yes very interesting yeah yes hmm

Yes hello where is the argument?

You want one on the .jpg? because the conversation I don't care about

accurate image

more than the sum of all natural numbers

I look forward to the day they launch a reused stage eagerly, because of what it means for space access. If you are too cynical to see why this project is a very good thing, i pity you. Cheaper space access is a very good thing for people that want us to stop dicking around on earth.

Cheap? Are you mad? Disposable rockets are wildly expensive.

Really makes you think.

>everything in science and technology works on the first attempts

LMAY someone got cucked by chad hard.
literally
>NOO! STOP ENJOYING THINGS!

it's more that enjoying certain things means you're stupid, such as sports or reality television

>Is it OK to cringe at this?
Did you mean the people with their mouths hanging open and screaming mindlessly?
I'm intelligent. Of course I find this retarded and useless.

All I'm hearing is "waaah why are the British so top notch at night time bombing, wahhh" whenever Dresden is brought up.

Why do trumples get so agitated when confronted with reality?

why do "liberals" advocate for violence against their political enemies?

Emotionally labile fanbois are always cringworthy, whether what they are fans of is cringey or not.

>I'm not an Elon fan by any means,

Yeah, me neither.

>but the guy is doing more to stimulate exploration and scientific accomplishment than 80% of national governments today.

Jumping into the Elon worship pretty early in your post, to not be a fan. 80% of the world's governments are third world Hell-holes -- you are doing more to advance science than they are, just by posting on Veeky Forums

>So no, it's not okay to cringe at this and you're a faggot. It's like saying "Is it okay to cringe at the pilgrims? Columbus made this journey in 1492 after all!"

If gangs of neets were screaming and weeping over the Pilgrims, it would be OK to cringe at them.

>Boundaries are still being pushed

Yep, and to the extent that Musk pushes them, rather than scamming governments for subsidy money and LARPing about being a Real Mars Colonist (tm), I'm all for him. Does not make his fans less cringey.

yes
useless shit

>>being able to lower costs by a factor of 10 or 100

Yeah, those of us who are a few years older recall how the Shuttle was going to slash prices of putting a kilogram in orbit because "Muh reusable space truck, not those bad old wasteful throwaway rockets anymore, no siree." We also remember how the watsteful old throwaway rockets kicked the Shuttle's ass in economic efficiency.

But hey, if SPaceX makes a cheaper launch vehicle, that's fine. Good thing, glad it happened. It is no more worth worshiping than the Ariane launches being cheaper than STS, though. The price of cheaper launch vehicles (assuming SpaceX delivers them, which they might or they might not) does not include sucking Musk's dick and crying in rapture when he launches something. He's not a messiah, he's a guy making money.

>Disposable rockets are wildly expensive.

Heard that one before. It turned out not to be the case.

Show me a cheap reusable reliable launch vehicle, I'll be excited to see it.

>Everything that does not work on its first attempt will work out flawlessly if we just put more government money in it.

Obviously, you have to develop a technology -- but just because you haven't succeeded at doing that until you succeed at doing that.

Oh shush.

>but you haven't succeeded at doing that until you succeed at doing that.

Extraneous "just because" there, sorry.

researches space exploration technology
promotes curiosity in science and space colonies
furthers our knowledge of mathematics, physics, the origin of the universe and alien intelligence

you know whats funny about spacex? it's not government funded, so unlike nasa, its budget isn't decided by the uneducated luddite taxpayer
no amount of complaining is ever going to make it or Musk go away, so why bother?

Are you arguing for nihilism or what? If you think every proposal is a waste of money with no exceptions, you might as well live in a box and starve to death.

>>Disposable rockets are wildly expensive.
>Heard that one before. It turned out not to be the case.
Uh... they've always been very expensive. This always turned out to be the case.

>Show me a cheap reusable reliable launch vehicle
You don't believe that Falcon 9 is going to be one at this point in the game, you're some kind of a monkey.

A few failures in the first few years of a rocket's operation says nothing about how reliable it'll be when mature. Ariane 5 had four failures in its first 20 launches, but now it would be shocking if there was ever another failure. Falcon 9's failure pattern looks like that of a young high-reliability vehicle: it's two in-flight failures were caused by bad suppliers (a bad batch of alloy, and a bad strut), and its preflight test failure was caused by an unanticipated failure mode of a new technology. These are the kinds of problems you fix and don't have again. Compare to the sorts of problems Proton has had, like an accelerometer hammered in upside-down.

Flyback landings have become very reliable. Unlike the shuttle, the vehicles have come back basically in condition for reflight, and design changes are being made to improve reflyability.

They're going to do their first reflight in a few weeks. This design and their pad operations will mature over the next few years. Their costs will go down dramatically, and their prices will eventually follow, as competition and flight volumes justify it.

>Are you arguing for nihilism or what?

No. I am arguing that you can;t say how great your achievement is until after you achieve it, because you don't know if you will succeed or not. Specific to OP's post, weeping in rapture because Musk is going to do this or that is silly -- even if it is something worth getting that excited about, wait until we see if he does it.

Some folks seem to think that his announcing a goal i tantamount to his achieving something. I find that foolish.

>>Heard that one before. It turned out not to be the case.
>Uh... they've always been very expensive. This always turned out to be the case.

Sorry, expressed that badly. What we've heard before and it turned out nnot to be the case is that the problem is the "disposable" part, these nifty new multi--use vehicles will make it so much cheaper." THAT turned out not to be the case -- it was the most expensive way to put a kg of payload in orbit ever devised.

Maybe the tech (or the approach) is going to be better this time, and the new system will really be cheaper. But "reusable" is not automatically cheaper.

>Large Hadron Rap live.wmw

>You don't believe that Falcon 9 is going to be one at this point in the game,

I try not to have beliefs about this sort of thing -- I try to see what happens. If it works out, nobody will be happier than me, though presumably a lot of people will be equally happy.

>A few failures in the first few years of a rocket's operation says nothing about how reliable it'll be when mature.

Of course. They also do not indicate that it will do everything the PR guys for the company claim. They are not relevant. We'll see what happens.

>Flyback landings have become very reliable. Unlike the shuttle, the vehicles have come back basically in condition for reflight, and design changes are being made to improve reflyability.

All fine. Like I say, I hope it works out.

>They're going to do their first reflight in a few weeks.

Barring unforeseen issues, probably.

>This design and their pad operations will mature over the next few years.

Likely, but we'llneed to see.

>Their costs will go down dramatically, and their prices will eventually follow, as competition and flight volumes justify it.

See, that's where I get skeptical -- we've heard that one before. Maybe it will work this time. But some corporate PR guy making the claim is a few steps short of it actually happening. I hope we get the cost of launching a reasonable payload way down in my lifetime -- I am not young any more, and there were some things we thought we'd maybe get a chance to see and do that the decision to go into STS robbed us of. I hope this, or some other, system finally makes it happen. I'll cheer when it does, though I probably won't weep at a test flight and proclaim that the product is inevitably going to do everything claimed.

First hatch them chickens, then count them.

The real money saving will happen with the Falcon Heavy. The Falcon Heavy will cost around 100 million to launch, the SLS costs around 500 million. You could build a fully functional moon base for ~10 billion with the Falcons heavy.

>we've heard that one before.
It was obvious bullshit on the shuttle program, before the shuttle ever flew:
freerepublic.com/focus/news/835107/posts

For one thing, the expendable external tank cost as much as an expendable rocket. Pic related. That little one on the left there is Proton. Look how much smaller it is than the shuttle external tank. Even though it was full of dense propellant, it also weighed less. It could put about as much payload in LEO as the shuttle could, and was also suitable for higher orbits. Because of its smaller size and lower mass sensitivity, Proton was simpler and cheaper to build than the shuttle external tank, even with the engines and guidance systems.

The American equivalent, Titan III, was somewhat more expensive, but still the manufacturing cost (not the whole launch cost) was comparable to the external tank (1980 Titan III launch price was about $50 million, equivalent to about $90 million in 1995 when then the external fuel tank cost was given as about $55 million). There was no potential for big savings from shuttle reusability, even if everything worked perfectly as intended.

The article doesn't really focus on this point, but it goes through all the ways the project was built on bullshit.

>First hatch them chickens, then count them.
I understand the principle, but at this point it's like doubting man will walk on the moon after Apollo 10. They've proven everything they need to prove for cost-effective reusability. The surprise now would be if they didn't realize big savings from flyback reuse.

Remember that Falcon 9 is not an expensive vehicle even as an expendable providing only its reusable payload. To reduce expended hardware from ten engines to one, and 50m of rocket body to 10m, is huge.

For start Falcon9 is already cheaper than competitors even at current expendable prices and will be cheaper if the reuse works if not they will go to expendable 8300kg to GTO for 62 mil $ compared with Ariane that gets over 10 000kg for over 200 mil$.The reuse target is around 45mil for 5500kg to GTO

Unlike STS the F9 is coming down from just mach3-4 after entry burn so on expensive TPS is necessary and the engines are cheap compared with state of the art rs25 that were over 40 mil$ each.

And last the RTLS landing brings the performance down to 60% of expendable while Shuttle always had to bring the orbiter to orbital velocity and at best the payload was 23 000kg while the orbiter was 80 000kg.

Orbiter ET was around 150-200 million $ and lost in each flight because the STS had to bring around 100 tonnes into orbit.

Can anyone put some numbers on this?

Are the logistics for the SpaceX reusable rockets actually cheaper than whatever the Russians are using?

It's still way to early, they first have to do falcon heavy and then the mars trip.
These small rockets are fun but aren't going to make humanity interplanetary with those but it's a step in the right direction of course.

>then the mars trip.
It's space LARPing like that which makes t hard to trust that Musk is not running a long con.

>Are the logistics for the SpaceX reusable rockets actually cheaper than whatever the Russians are using?
IIRC, the Falcon 9 first stage costs about $22 million to manufacture. I think the upper stage is something like $5 million.

So if they're not increasing their launch rate, they're at best saving around $20 million per launch. However, even without reflying they get to make a detailed inspection of the rocket after a flight, which is fantastic for engineering, and led to some of the improvements which will appear in Block 5.

On the other hand, if they do increase their launch rate, the benefits are much larger. For one thing, they can cheaply fly development flights, start offering new services like space tourist rides on Dragon 2, or building their own satellites.

The ~$30 million in expendable hardware sets a hard floor on sustainable price, like the wholesale price of a can of peaches sets a floor on the price on store shelves.

If a store owner gets peaches for $5/can, and he sells them at $8/can, and he's depending on that $3/can income to pay his rent and stuff, then when the wholesale price goes down to $1/can, he can only lower the price to $4/can, but if he'll sell ten times as many peaches at $2/can, then he can lower the price that far and still bring in more than triple the money. In a competitive environment, he might lower it as far as $1.25 and sometimes have them on sale for $1.10.

So the actual price reductions will have to depend on market conditions, but if the reusability of first stages is perfected so they basically stop having to build them, there's potential for them to lower launch prices to around $12 million.

>I'm intelligent.

Yeah, I don't buy it.

Develop space exploration technologies and vehicles that effectively use those technologies.

They use this technology to provide a launch vehicle (soon to be launch vehicles) to companies that want to put satellites into orbit in exchange for money. In order to be competitive they have managed to make their launch service one of the cheapest while still being comparatively capable to established launch vehicle payload capacities, and will soon surpass them.

They're also on track to becoming the most profitable space launch provider by a wide margin as the Falcon 9 nears reusability, as they will not drop the price of their launch service by the same amount of money they save by reusing the vehicle. More profit on a cheaper launch means more money to reinvest into better technology and future, further improved launch systems.

Shuttle was essentially a glass cannon in terms of being a launch vehicle. It could send a payload into orbit and return to land like an airplane, but at what cost? The orbiter needed to be resistant to the extreme heat of reentry, which required a high performance heat shield. It was mandated to be capable of a huge cross-range divert during reentry in order to secure funding from the air force during development, which is why it had such huge wings. All that surface area plus the need for a heat shield meant that every contemporary material was off the table because it was either not able to withstand the reentry heat or was so heavy the orbiter wouldn't be able to carry any significant payload. Thus, the orbiter's belly needed to be coated in a huge number of heat resistant, lightweight, and extremely fragile tiles, which actually significantly delayed the development of the vehicle because engineers couldn't even figure out a way to glue the things on effectively enough to survive a simple approach-and-landing test, let alone the violent vibrations and aerodynamic forces of a launch and later reentry. The main engines had to be both very efficient, very powerful, and reusable. They ended up being efficient, not powerful enough, and refurbish-able after a several month long tear-down and rebuild. The engine start-up sequence had to be timed exactly in order to prevent the three engines from ripping each other apart due to harmonic frequencies interacting, and the engines could only be lit on the ground. Since the engines physically could not be made strong enough to lift the orbiter and the fuel tank off of the pad, the two massive solid boosters needed to be included in the system in order to provide the needed thrust to lift the orbiter and fuel tank, as well as themselves. All this resulted in an incredibly complex and precarious launch system that no one in their right mind would ever have expected to lower launch costs.

>What does SpaceX do?
>Banned words: curiosity, knowledge, exploration
>Allowed words: money, welfare, happiness
Satellites are extremely useful and important for many practical purposes. SpaceX makes launching them cheaper.

whats there to cringe ?

shut up Adolf

Some moderates take on it
youtube.com/watch?v=f5whQyipm8U

Example of the more extreme right-wing response
youtube.com/watch?v=DToaPzmmFhU

Those hundreds of antifa guys by the way, are now living sex dolls in some max security prison. Go for it faggots, especially go for it near Trumps rallies, and even more so in Washington DC.

>Bans the most common answer for no reason.
>Sits on high horse when their answer is gone.

The weeping adulation. It is cringey when people do it about rock stars, it is cringey when they do it about politicians. It is, forever and always, cringey.

You really think that image is not some /pol/-tard pretending to be antifa? You'd have to be really retarded to trust what you read on /pol/