A thread for getting ultra excited and fanboyish about the near term future of space travel.
Fucking shit, do you realize that in the next 10 years the price of accesing low earth orbit could be merely a little more expensive than flying in a concorde?
We have no fucking idea what this is gonna do to our society, this is like the introduction of cell phones, it will hit hard and it will be super exciting and we will see it in our life time.
Other urls found in this thread:
spectrum.ieee.org
youtu.be
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lockheedmartin.com
mobile.twitter.com
twitter.com
arstechnica.com
youtube.com
youtube.com
spacenews.com
twitter.com
spacex for hte win, fuck yeah
Three spacex launches in ten days coming up lads
Not gonna lie, F9 launches have gotten a lot less exciting, almost as if they were any ULA launch or something, especially if there isn't a booster return. I'd say the landings and unmanned planetary exploration have been the only exciting things in space since the Shuttle retired.
The start of commercial crew is what is really keeping me pumped.
TAKE MY ENERGY ELON
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
in flight abort test will be fun
But yeah, regular f9 flights even with RTLS are awfully routine now
Do you know if we'll see crewed Dragon flights in 2018? I keep hearing conflicting things. I wouldn't be surprised if it's still scheduled for 2018 but knowing Elon there's a pretty good chance it will get pushed into 2019.
It's not really up to SpaceX in this case. If it was up to Elon, Dragon V2 would have first flown a year ago with propulsive landing but NASA is the one that's certifying the capsule for launch; which means that the Dragon V2 has to go through the 9 circles of bureaucratic hell to get certified for crew in turn causing substantial delays.
Did anyone else here follow the most recent astronaut application cycle?
I'm in the Astronaut Hopefuls group on Normiebook and a few dozen members were "Highly Qualified," several were interviewed, and one or two actually became astronauts. It was pretty interesting to see the ins and outs of it all.
Are these astronauts for the Orion missions or commercial crew, or both?
Both. Astronauts aren't really divided up these days like they were in the past, they don't even separate mission specialists and pilots like they did during the shuttle era.
One of them, Rob Kulin (the one holding the selfie stick), was a senior engineer at SpaceX before becoming an astronaut so I really hope he'll get to fly on a Dragon.
>Astronauts aren't really divided up these days like they were in the past
I take that back, considering how there are 4 astronauts to be guinea pigs for commercial crew.
Plus there were some who seem to have never been certified for long duration ISS flights and instead only took part in Shuttle flights (i.e. Piers Sellers, Stan Love, etc.)
Spacex is a meme.
Reusability is a meme.
Mars is unsuitable for manned spaceflight.
And the only way to get back to the Moon is massive gdp investment in science and international cooperation which isn't happening anytime soon because you know who is the president.
As is obvious "Diversity" is the primary selection category
I'm not disagreeing, but you still have extremely qualified candidates no matter what. With the massive number of people applying, you can keep putting on new criteria and get great candidates no matter what.
I can't say I blame them desu. It's a lot easier to get interested in STEM when you can identify with prominent figures in it.
7 white people (58%)
1 indian (8%)
1 asian (8%)
1 black person (8%)
1 hispanic person (8%)
1 Iranian (8%)
Not that different from US demographics desu.
Watch out for the dome space autists. You know that thing they call the "Van Allen radiation belts"? Yeah, that's the dome.
t. increasingly nervous ULA engineer
I for one support flying all brainlets to Mars, leaving earth to people with an IQ over 120.
Do you know how much energy that would take? have you ever seen an isaac arthur video? why do you think the fuhrer ended up gasing people?
F- see me after class
Epic! I hate GOD and love ELON MUSK AND SCENINECE.
9573070
>still baiting this fucking hard
Go home
>F9 launches have gotten a lot less exciting
Yeah, they're so frequent now, there's nothing special. Instead of getting burnt out on these, just wait for the big events:
- Block 5 Falcon 9
- Block 5 Falcon Heavy
- Dragon 2 unmanned test
- Dragon 2 manned test
- upper stage recovery experiments
- BFR suborbital prototype test flights
If the whole Mars thing takes off, which I am very skeptical about, how long is the waiting list for Mars going to be realistically?
>Several hundred thousand a ticket rules out most of the planet
>Requiring a solid set of useful practical skills rules out most of the middle class/rich yuppies
>Psych tests for enduring isolation and confined spaces rules out another large chunk
Is it pretty much just going to be multi skilled blue collars and engineers?
>mfw reddit soyboys with no practical skills and no capital assets think Elon will send them to Mars
Lmao
Large at first, decreasing as more BFRs become operational and can carry more people
There's also NASA stuff like TESS which is launching in April.
implying dusters or fucking dirt boys can even compete with glorious void inhabitants
>- Block 5 Falcon 9
when is block 5 ocurring? also, is that the booster that is supposedly reflown 10 times without significant refurbishment and 100 times with it?
t. OPA terrorist scum
>reddit soyboys with no practical skills and no capital assets think Elon will send them to Mars
Never underestimate the value of complete expendables on a new and dangerous frontier.
>Ok bugman we are having a critical reactor malfunction and need an expen- I mean great hero to sacrifice himself to lethal radiation to save our colony
>his face when
We'll either be dead or too old too truly reap the benefits of it. Who cares.
Bangabingbong-1 will be the first B5 mission
Silicon Valley startup secretly launches 4 banned satellites into space
>spectrum.ieee.org
what the actual fuck. this is like the Uber of spaceflight.
...
>launch your shit in another country
>FCC gets mad
A BLOO BLOO BLOO
who made iron man cry
lockheedmartin.com
Details on MADV Mars lander.
Launch vehicle is SLS Block 1b without fairing like X-20.
NASA neither has the budget or launch cadence to assemble all this shit in lunar orbit. A BFR would be great for this piece by piece assembly type of work, but wasting a 1 billion dollar rocket for each piece of infrastructure launched is utter madness and will take decades with the current rate of SLS production.
What a fucking jew
All these bureaucracies should be burnt to the ground
It's just a fantasy to pretend that the SLS has justification
Specifically aimed at politicians I imagine, people who wouldn't understand why this "Deep Space Gateway" in lunar orbit is so st upid
In real life void citizens would just ignore both Earth and Mars. Planets are irrelevant when you have the infinity of outer space at your disposal.
Thousands of habitats in Kuiper Belt would flourish while Earth and Mars would fade into thrashbin of history.
mobile.twitter.com
Apparently Jeff doesn't get to bring friends anywhere further than suborbital trajectory for quite some time...
t. Zeke
>NASA neither has the budget or launch cadence to assemble all this shit in lunar orbit.
The role of SLS and Orion is negligible in this proposal. They're included just for the sake of conclusion, while commercial rockets do most of the work while they pretend that their role is minor. Look at it, they've got only six SLS launches in that plan diagram, two of which are optional, and the other two are just launching crew on Orions to rendezvous with a transfer vehicle assembled by commercial rockets, justified only by the presumption that only SLS can launch Orion. By the logic of the transfer vehicle, obviously the first two SLS missions could also be done by distributed commercial launch.
It's a plan where every available SLS launch can be used (and they can pretend it was necessary), but it can go forward without SLS at all.
first manned BO launch in 2030 lol
Thats their long term plan omg
If you think we'll return to the Moon and reach Mars on a rocket different from the SLS you are absolutely delusional.
Quality comes at a price and this is especially true for anything space related.
not sure if trolling or retarded
SLS is a scheme to steal taxpayers money first, and a rocket second
the grotesque money spent on it does not go to ensure any kind of quality
>implying New Shepard will ever fly customers
suborbital tourism is the worst meme in commercial spaceflight.
2/10
It will fly with passengers, until it kills someone...
Virgin Galactic didn't even get that far before they killed people.
The program employs thousands of highly trained people all across the US in a field of high strategic importance. Not sure how that's bad for the taxpayers.
>The program employs thousands of highly trained people all across the US in a field of high strategic importance
This would also be the case if they spent billions of dollars hiring people to dig ditches and install fiber optic cables and set up communications hardware at either end, out in the middle of nowhere without connecting them to anything. None of those attributes matters if the project itself is a total waste of resources.
I forgot about them. I guess they did a test in January and reached Mach 0.9 with the VSS Unity.
Perhaps fanboys should learn to base their happiness on something other than one of the most dishonest companies in the history of private space travel. Seriously each launch following the Falcon family as they “revolutionize the launch industry” has been indistinguishable from the rest. Aside from the meme landings, the company’s only party trick has been to overwork and underpay its employees to reduce launch costs, all to make the mythical “full and rapid reuse” seem effective.
Perhaps the die was cast when Musk vetoed the idea of ambitious yet realistic missions like Red and Grey Dragon; he made sure the company would never be mistaken for an innovative force to anything or anybody, just ridiculously questionable government contracts for his companies. SpaceX might be profitable (or not), but it’s certainly the anti-NASA in its refusal of wonder, science and excitement. No one wants to face that fact. Now, thankfully, they no longer have to.
>a-at least the landings are cool though
"No!"
The camerawork is dreadful; the landings of the charred boosters are boring. As I watch, I noticed that every time a Falcon 9 lands, Musk said either “self-sustaining civilization on Mars” or “imagine if you had a 747 and you threw it away after one flight.”
I began marking on the back of an envelope every time one of those phrases was repeated. I stopped only after I had marked the envelope several dozen times. I was incredulous. Musk's mind is so governed by clichés that he has no other style of thinking. Later I read a poorly-written news story on SpaceX by some fat web blogger. He wrote something to the effect of, "If these kids are watching these launches now, surely they will work for SpaceX in the future and they too can have paychecks based off of government handouts." And he was quite right. He was not being ironic. When you are a SpaceX fan, you are, in fact, trained to be a mindless supporter of government-funded billionaires.
Blue Origin will fly people into space before SpaceX does, lmao.
>twitter.com
Yeah, for about 30 seconds it's a massive ripoff.
>Hey guys you are in space now wow isn't this cool
>Ok you've had enough time to snap a selfie, back to earth now
>$10,000 vs $90,000,000 for an orbital flight
>9000 times cheaper
>"ripoff"
If I pay 9000 times less for a 30 second space flight, then following that logic, a real rocket company only has to send them on a 3 day trip for the time to money ratio to break even
Also
>Implying one person will be footing the 90m bill, not a group.
More goalposts moving.
The average joe could fly on New Shepard whereas nobody that isn't a multimillionaire will ever fly on a SpaceX rocket.
SpaceX was supposed to fly astronauts to the ISS in 2016 and now they won't be doing it before 2020. Fucking pathetic. They also cancelled their Mars and Moon missions ahahahHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAH
2/10
Veeky Forums just likes to discuss the natural musk of a real chad, that's all
4000 posts out of 10million wow dude
I hope you are right op. Bioshock in a space station when?
>"I noticed the prices of the last one they say cost $80 million," Trump said. "If the government did it, the same thing would have cost probably 40 or 50 times that amount of money. I mean literally. When I heard $80 million, I'm so used to hearing different numbers with NASA.''
Dude the goverment cost to replace a fucking door is 130,000 the corruption has to end very soon.
>arstechnica.com
>loving science is bad
The state of new/sci/
go back to r.ddit, kid
Anyone else excite over space warfare? Russia brought back their military space force a few years ago, China made one not long after, now the US is reforming it's military space and it is pushing it's close allies into expanding their military space capabilities (UK, France, Japan, Australia, etc). spacenews.com
drop a rock eh? sassa?
The same NASA that certified its own space shuttle as safe proof?
Yes those people are fucking obnoxious, that absolutely does not invalidate what SpaceX is doing.
The Space Shuttle disasters really rattled NASA and because of it, the Dragon V2 has to meet ridiculously high safety requirements to fly with crew which is the cause of the lengthy delays. For example, just last year they randomly decided to force SpaceX to cancel the propulsive landing for the Dragon 2; which meant the capsule had to be re-designed for water landings.
>The program employs thousands of highly trained people all across the US in a field of high strategic importance. Not sure how that's bad for the taxpayers.
Who cares who it employs? Space program should not be a jobs program. This mindset is what is killing the space industry. The purpose is to advance spaceflight, not employ people.
Its not that it is bad for the taxpayers. The return on investment is probably positive even with all the corruption simply because money spent on high technology is so beneficial. It is that the program is grossly inefficient and fails to measurably advance spaceflight technology.
hahahahahaha fuck didn't expect this shit to pop up
It is a jobs program though and that's the primary purpose.
The beneficial side effect is we get some flights and science done but things could easily be a lot worse.
As for who cares who it employs then I'd say the ones employed do, the ones who do the employing do as well, and the politicians around them. Cancelling programs and firing people is not going to lead to anything productive.
>tfw we could just build a launch loop and send thousands of tons of material into orbit every day for a measly 30 billion dollar
What the hell is stopping us? Why the fuck does everyone focus on dumb rockets in the year 2000+18 Common Era?
>LMAO JUST BUILD 80 KILOMETER TALL BUILDING HOW IS THIS A CHALLENGE)))))))
This and space elevator are still the most efficient ways.
Rockets are outdated, dangerous, and expensive.
I don't know why people still consider that technology usable. Must be the military application.
Go ahead and build skyscraper to Pluto, nothing stops you.
You don't understand how launch loops work. It is not a building. It would be kept in the air by a rotor being accelerated through it. You wouldn't need any other supportive structures besides cables to keep it "straight". You would assemble it on the ground, and as you accelerate the rotator, it would start going up. It is definetely doable with current technologies. The reason it isn't is because you need thousands of kilometres of length. For safety reasons you would have to build it over the ocean. So you would need an agreement for international waters. Second reason is because if it fails, the repairing cost is gigantic. Third reason, probably the most important one, the army likes rockets and since we are going to have rockets for military use anyway, might as well use them for space travel.
Still no trace of your skyscraper to Pluto here
the by far easiest method to go to space is a sky hook. fly 25km or so high, connect with the sky hook, the sky hook starts swinging, congrats, you're in space. would probably cost less than the ISS to construct and going to space would be dirt cheap from then on.
He is correct. The path to more jobs, jobs security, and increased pay/kickbacks is literally what kills a program or corporation. Jobs should only ever be a side effect of the reason the program or company exists. It is one of the reason NASA went to shit for so long and became almost nothing but grant chasing until ULA and SpaceX started taking up their slack.
> It would be kept in the air by a rotor being accelerated through it.
The amount of energy needed to do this should be used for conventional rocketry, because you are expending far more resources to do this than to send up a normal rocket. The military doesn't like rockets for just any reason. They like rockets for the same reason the space industry likes rockets. They happen to be the best method to get things into space or across long distances very quickly. The only time this will ever change is if there's a new power source of some kind. Like nuclear rockets or something not yet discovered (serious doubt.)
>everything I don't like is /x/
>The amount of energy needed to do this should be used for conventional rocketry,
For a 5 ton payload you would need 400mw and 4000km length. 400mw are less than what an airport carrier needs. The hard part is the 4.000km length.
I wonder if you could build it circular, so basically like a spiral in the air.
They thought of that, the angular Gs would fuck people's shit up too hard
>ULA
Its government subsidiary, like how Chrysler, Convair, Martin made rockets for NASA and military.