Edit: they invented the first reusable liquid-fueled rockets and the first rockets that can autonomously land themselves. NASA used reusable solid rocket boosters on the space shuttle that would deploy parachutes and land in the ocean. Getting a solid rocket booster back into a reusable state seems like a lot of work to me.
LOL… NASA has existed for many more decades than Spacex has. The Spacex Falcon rocket is possibly the most reliable rocket available today, launches payloads more often than any other rocket and it’s much cheaper than its competitors. You’re comparing a brand new rocket design to other, thoroughly tested rockets that have had many iterations. This was literally the second flight of this rocket, they were expecting it to fail.
Given time and money, I’m sure Bob Jones could make a reusable rocket in his back garage. It would just take a lot of both. SpaceX is good at making a lot of progress with little time and money.
Maybe if you weren’t so blinded by your need to be edgy, you would see the accomplishments SpaceX has made. Starship is not even close to being completed. It blowing up and failing are expected at this stage.
The SRBs used on the final shuttle mission were the same boosters used on the first mission. That set was used a total of 60 times. Only 2 sets of boosters were never recovered for re-use. The set from STS-4 had a parachute malfunction, and the set from the Challenger exploded.
We can argue about semantics, but they were moreso rebuilt from the same parts than reused as is. NASA found that it would have been much cheaper to build new SRBs after each launch than rebuild them.
SRB boosters are quite close to literally just a big steel tube, and they reused them by dropping them into the ocean under a parachute.
They still had to clean out and refurb every booster launched. And that was without the complex rocket engines that would get destroyed by being submerged in the ocean.
Creating isn’t inventing, and there’s wasn’t the first to be flown. Man, the SpaceX fans don’t really know the history of the industry they make these claims about.
You referring to the DC-X subscale tech demonstrator?
I think inventing is a less well defined term, since anyone with a napkin can claim to invent something to a very low fidelity. The details are the hard part, not the idea itself. So that’s why I specified created, since that is inventing to a very high level of fidelity.
So it needs to be created in real life, rather than just a drawing or design? Or does creating it only as a design without building it count?
Also, all technology is built on previous work, especially rocketry. That would seem to eliminate the possibility of invention in rocketry due to the clause of your own ingenuity, etc. What’s the cutoff for invention vs refinement?
Sure repeating his lies well for someone pretending not to like him. Maybe have a few moments of critical thoughts about the marketing BS you believe and who created it?
It isn’t well established, look how much NASA paid Russia for launch services, now look at SpaceX. Seriously. For pretending to be fans of this shit in general, it really is only the musk lies you people repeat.
5k/kg for Soyuz vs 2.5k/kg for SpaceX? I don’t get your point. Or are you talking about the ride swaps with Russian and US Cosmonauts and Astronauts respectively to ride in each other’s rockets to give dissimilar redundancy?
Ah yes, the dollars per kilo fallacy. A favorite of people that don’t understand the industry but want to repeat the things Musk tells them to. Fantastic. We’re already on page two of the script. Now, go ahead and tell me how SpaceX invented something that already existed for decades.
You could start off with actual mission costs, launch support costs, and what missions need to be met. For example, this is why Star Shit is such a moronic idea when Falcon could perform all its launch needs.
Are you about to tell me that a 747 is always cheaper than a Cessna? Is that the next argument in your script, or do we have to skip a couple pages before you bring that one out?
Starship is actually planned to be better on all those fronts than falcon 9. Cheaper per launch, less support costs, more capable and flexible system, etc. There might be some small use case where falcon 9 is still superior, but it will be pretty small if starship works.
I mean, I now know how little you know. Congratulations tipping your hand here, because truly these are the words of someone that’s a fan of Musk and has zero serious thoughts about space. Jeff Bell would be beside himself reading what you’ve written. Back to the Zubrin books with you.
It’s guaranteed nothing I could say would make you leave your religion of musk lies. So, I’ll pass. Reality is available for you any time you want to try it out, though.
You’ve not actually said anything or given any evidence other than generally waving towards that Russia is cheaper, but have not clarified at all. If you know some secret sauce, I’d be happy to hear it. But you so far have stayed miles away from anything remotely close to solid evidence.
I’m guessing you work at a competitor as a parking lot attendant or something? Because saying Star Shit is going to be better than Falcon is utterly hysterical.
I bet you like him because he makes you feel like you can be a low effort, low knowledge person and still pretend to know what you’re talking about. SUPER popular with fans of his. Especially fans that think being a fan of his companies makes them an expert in a certain field even though actual experts laugh at the nonsense they repeat to one another.
I mean, just basic research would answer this for you. But I’ll start you off with an easy one. The SRB on shuttle launches was reusable. Now go forth and look up rocket history.
It depends how you define your terms. The parts were disassembled, cleaned, inspected, and reassembled. That’s not what most people think of as reusable, more like refurbishable. And anyway, they didn’t save any cost or time doing that vs building new ones, hence why SLS is using them as single use.
It doesn’t depend on how I define my terms. It was reused. You literally just fucking said it was reused. What you just described is the exact definition of what everyone considers reused. This is such a stupid conversation to have, and only the SpaceX sense are the ones that ever want to have it.
Also, because you don’t seem to know anything about anything, what you described is exactly what SpaceX does. How the fuck did you get this so wrong?
Again, I’m not trying to say these words have a single defined meaning. I’m saying that SpaceX’s reusable rockets are in a different category compared to SRBs. Call those reusable and refurbishable if you like, or call them anything else. I just use the reusable refurbishable terminology because that’s what everyday astronaut uses.
Do you know the turn around time on an srb? I couldn’t find it in your doc or in the wiki.
The only difference is propulsive landing. You’re obviously attempting to backpedal here, and it’s not working. SpaceX also refurbishes their units, you’re just bullshitting at this point. It’s painfully transparent.
NASA stopped refurbishing their SRBs because it costs more to do so. SpaceX is able to drastically lower it’s launch costs because of the immense savings they can realize by a quick turnaround for reuse. That’s the difference.
Mind giving your source? I found 2.5k/kg for falcon 9 vs 5k/kg for soyuz. The shtil is as far as I can tell military surplus and is now retired, so it’s costs aren’t really reflective of long term usage.
The shuttle SRB’s were really only reusable in the same sense that the engine from a wrecked car can be removed, stripped to a bare block, bored out, rebuilt, and placed into a new car is reusable. Hard to say exactly how long it took to turn around SRB segments, but just the rail transport between Utah and Florida was 12 days each way. SpaceX has turned around Falcon 9 boosters in under a month.
And even with all of that, the most reused reusable segments barely flew a dozen times. There is one Falcon 9 first stage that has now flown 18 times.
You’re not wrong about parts having been reused in the past but the scale of what has been done before really doesn’t compare to what SpaceX does now.
A rich asshole keeps raping the corpse of TRW in hopes of becoming a land baron of LEO activity. All while America’s gov lets him, cause capitalism and a fear of possible overreach (aka no real ethical guidance) means he’s too rich to be touched.
All while the internet gets flooded with hate speech, the skies ruined by satellite constellations, the soil polluted from rockets that can’t even reach orbit (despite nasa’s previous progress) and that’s not even counting the gemstone mining… etc.
As much as I really really hate that asshole, this was a success. The hot staging technically worked and the Starship got to space. Iterate on the booster top heat management and fix whatever went wrong with Starship and it will be fine.
That’s exactly why testing is needed. You can calculate a ton of things but you only know through testing, when and where things fail. Then you iterate and test again.
Rocketry is kinda different. Testing to failure can be very useful, and if you have the resources to throw at it repeatedly, can let you iterate much faster.
You can only pick two:
speed
quality
cost
NASA usually picks quality… and nothing else. SpaceX picked speed and quality.
It actually is, and it worked pretty well in this case. The first launch was pretty pre mature, they could have gotten more data out of if they had taken a little more time. But this one was pretty much the sweet spot of getting into the interesting parts of fight, but not waiting for diminishing returns.
Yes. Like, they literally corrected everything that went wrong in the first test. And it only took 7 months.
launch pad blown to shreds -> fully intact water suppression system
Engines exploding on takeoff -> all engines on both the booster and ship operational on first ignition
stage separation failed -> HOT staging successful
Self-destruct system didn’t destruct fast enough -> self destruct happened immediately
The next launch will probably focus on the fail points of this launch. That is, re-lighting the engines on the booster after turnaround. And whatever caused the starship to go off course (?) and activate the self-destruct.
meanwhile Boeing discovers some valves were stuck, takes half a year to fix it only to discover they’re still stuck, gonna need another half a year… oh wait, we took too long trying to fix it, we gotta completely replace them, that’ll be another year…