41 Replies to “Live: Watch The Space X Launch”

  10. Yes, Strad. An airplane.
    A reusable, affordable, 200k fuel cost instead of 16.2M in rocket plus fuel.
    An airplane. That’s the fucking point you idiot.

  11. A reusable, affordable, 200k fuel cost instead of 16.2M in rocket plus fuel.
    Yes, undoubtedly much more important than the voluntary use of the funds by the people the subsidies were confiscated from…

  13. Almost $5 billion in subsidies to his companies, and no profit yet made by any of them. But he did save $16 million building an aircraft that can land again.
    That’s almost laughable…

  14. The SpaceX program has government contracts such as supplying the space station, which it does much cheaper than the government could. So to that extent it’s subsidizing the government.
    I’m not thrilled by government spending, but this time there’s at least something to show for it.

  15. I’m happy about it. Dunno the details. How often can they re-use that thing?
    I’m not an anarchist. Some things could use the tax money. Military, police, firefighting, space too. Preferably not all things under the sun but I don’t mind those for example.
    Or is there something I’m missing?

  16. Tesla and Solar City aren’t profitable, but SpaceX has made a profit every year since the first year. They aren’t being subsidized by NASA, they are under contract to perform a service to NASA. Soon they will be flying astronauts to the ISS, seven at a time, for the cost of ONE SEAT on Soyuz.

  17. …SpaceX has made a profit every year since the first year.
    So they tell you…it’s a private company. I’d imagine anyone given nearly $5 billion from the taxpayer could claim profitability for awhile.
    If all they can do is invent an aircraft that can land, it would make me wonder…they’ve been in existence for years.
    They aren’t being subsidized by NASA…
    Does a subsidy of $278 million from the US gov’t count? Anyway, all of the technology of NASA, on which spacex has attached itself like a parasite, is paid for by taxpayers.

  19. AND I ONLY go to the CBC when I want to know what the ENEMY is thinking. That derisive snort that putrid mansbridge makes when he’s supposed to be reading the news makes my skin crawl

  20. Thanks for posting that Kate. Missed the live launch yesterday, but was nice to see the highlights today. Most impressive part of the whole event was first stage landing which means that space travel is going to get a lot cheaper now. Also nice to see a private company getting involved in the process. Great way to start my day.

  21. Yeah but NASA has muslim outreach……….ohhhh, I see.
    Sad to see the destruction of NASA, all it does now is lie about global temperatures.
    Well done SpaceX.

  22. “Does a subsidy of $278 million from the US gov’t count?”
    Not if it is not actually a subsidy, but a down payment on services to be rendered.

  23. That sound you hear as the first stage engine shuts off on the pad is the sound of pure triumph.

  24. …a down payment on services to be rendered.
    Of course it’s a subsidy…who else pays for a service years in advance except those robbing Peter to pay Paul? Just a convoluted way to pay welfare.
    What’s really laughable is how they scammed everyone into thinking it’s a big deal to get an aircraft to land…

  25. That sound you hear as the first stage engine shuts off on the pad is the sound of pure triumph.
    Heh, the same type of landing was made way back in the ’60’s…only it was on the moon. What a scam…get publicity to get more welfare.

  26. Are you at all familiar with the procurement practices of the US government? Are you aware that ALL US manned orbital vehicles have been built by private companies, all paid years in advance? Are you aware that SpaceX and Orbital Sciences are unique in that they are NOT under a cost-plus contract, but instead only get paid fixed prices?
    Strad, you are so very far off base here, I suggest you familiarize yourself with how the COTS program actually works.

  27. spacex, and all of musk’s companies, exist because of gov’t support. Without gov’t, they wouldn’t exist. That’s the beginning and end of everything that needs to be known.
    He’s a welfare queen who supports the left because he knows that’s where his bread is buttered. Also a good con man, all that publicity by pulling off something that’s been done 50 years ago…

  28. 50 years ago was 1965. Who was recovering first stages, intact, upright, on a landing pad, in 1965? While simultaneously achieving orbit with the second stage? Not the Russians. Not the Americans. Not the Chinese. Heck, there’s only ever been one other vertical takeoff/vertical landing rocket that has been to space, and that was for a suborbital rocket. That was also in 2015, by another private company, Blue Origin.
    And now that they’ve proven they can do it, SpaceX is going to tear that first rocket apart and carefully study every nut, bolt, wire, and paint fleck. The next one will incorporate lessons learned and will then probably be reused.
    The first stage is 90% of the cost of the whole rocket. Most of the cost of the rocket is the engines and their plumbing and electronics and control systems, and 9 of the ten engines are in the first stage. Of the $60 million SpaceX charges for a launch, propellant is only $200000. A first stage thus costs about $50 million or so. If it can be reused, then it just costs the maintenance. That brings the profit margin way up even if they cut their price in half, or even less than half, severely undercutting everyone else in price per ton to orbit.
    Make no mistake, Strad, this is huge. This is bigger than jet engines taking over from propellers. This is bigger than steam taking over from sail. It is a game changer on par with the advent of home computers.

  29. I’d say the manned lunar landing was just a little more notable…not quite 50 years ago, 1969. Just the same, it used rocket thrust to land.
    This is bigger than steam taking over from sail. It is a game changer on par with the advent of home computers.
    No it’s not, it’s the same as breaking windows so you can fix them…there’s certainly no useful product produced. Subsidized billionaires playing with their toys.

  30. Yes, the lunar lander used rocket thrust to land. Read up on delta-V (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta-v_budget) to see just how huge the difference is between landing on the moon vs landing on earth. The rocket equation is logarithmic and merciless.
    And as for no useful product … seriously???? With the all the energy and resources available for the taking in the solar system? One nickel-iron asteroid alone has enough metals and rare-earths to disrupt the economics of earth-based mining forever.
    By your way of thinking, the US rail revolution in the 1800’s was no more than “billionaires playing with their toys”. Nope, nothing out in the West except dirt and desert. Pointless to go there, really.
    Skepticism can be healthy, but too much will make you blind.

  31. Oh boy, time for a high school senior to school people on modern-day space tech & policy.
    Elon Musk isn’t a “welfare queen”… well, at least not in SpaceX’s case. SpaceX was born out of Musk literally pouring his entire fortune into one company. The “government subsidies” that people are referencing in SpaceX’s case are not subsidies, they are payment for services due. SpaceX has already done 7 cargo delivery trips to the ISS, at a much cheaper price point than anyone else. They will also be doing manned trips in the coming years. Yes, SpaceX received funding from NASA to develop their launch vehicles. But they were also able to develop the MOST ADVANCED ROCKET IN THE WORLD (Able to land itself and survive engine losses), as well as THE MOST ADVANCED SPACECRAFT IN THE WORLD (will be doing rocket-powered landing tests quite soon at their facility in McGregor, TX), for UNDER A BILLION DOLLARS.
    And to those who are speaking of subsidies… United Launch Alliance, SpaceX’s main competitor (Whose rockets also cost 2-4 times as much as SpaceX’s) receives a $1 Billion dollar payment every year from the US government, regardless of services rendered. They could all take a vacation to bermuda for a year and they’d still receive that BILLION dollar payment.
    Now, to those saying “we landed rockets 50 years ago!”. You are correct, we did land on the moon 50 years ago. Yes, it was an incredible achievement, and the reason for not going back was government idiocy, budget cuts, and bureaucracy.
    HOWEVER. You cannot compare the landing of the LEM (Lunar Excursion Module) to that of a Falcon 9. A Falcon 9, when fueled, weighs about 460 Metric tons, which drops to about 20 Metric tons when empty. The LEM weighed about 10 metric tons when empty and 20 metric tons fueled, despite being about 5m in height, versus the Falcon 9 first stage, which is about 42m in height. Conclusion: The Falcon 9 has to deal with more weight, and less structural bracing, than the Lunar Module.
    Now, what about the environment in which they have to land in? The Lunar Module did not have to deal with 5000km/h atmospheric re-entry, and had nice, cushy 1/6 earth gravity. The Falcon 9 has to deal with full earth gravity, hypersonic re-entry, and various difficult high-altitude flipping maneuvers, all while being shaped like a giant pencil, not a convenient, low center of gravity lander. The Falcon 9 is first and foremost a launch vehicle- it’s landing function is secondary.
    However, all of this is child’s play compared to one of the true hardest parts of a falcon 9 landing- the hover-slam. The Falcon 9 is powered by 9 merlin 1D engines, which each give a sea-level thrust of about 170,000 lbs. Only one of those engines is used for the landing burn. However, even when deep throttling to 70% rated thrust (an exceedingly difficult task with a rocket engine- most engines do not throttle more than 5-10%, because combustion instabilities arise when feeding lower amounts of propellant into a combustion chamber optimized for a certain cruising thrust) the rocket has MORE THRUST THAN WHAT IT WEIGHS. As a result, it CANNOT HOVER. Therefore, the landing burn has to be timed EXACTLY such that the rocket will hit zero velocity at zero altitude. Any mistake, and you hit the ground too hard, or you stop before landing, and start moving back up.
    The Apollo lander could hover.
    While doing all of this, the rocket has to steer itself by two means- hypersonic grid fins on top, and by pointing the rocket engine at the bottom. if you would like to try landing a falcon 9, here is a game made by a guy on the SpaceX subreddit http://janismac.github.io/ControlChallenges/rocketlander.html
    Conclusion: It is really, really hard to land a Falcon 9. Harder than landing a Lunar Lander, if you ask me. The scale is far larger, the degree of control over the vehicle is much lower, and the environment in which the landing must be conducted is far harsher than the low gravity and lack of aerodynamic effects felt on the moon. Elon Musk did rely on government funding to get some of his endeavours off the ground, but he has given an incredible bang for the government’s buck, making the most advanced launch vehicle in the world, and if you ask me, a damn good car (which will be soon followed by a much cheaper version of said car). Besides, How much money gets thrown into the military-industrial complex, and government bailouts of car companies anyways?
    Questions and Criticisms welcome.

  32. Still no product being produced…after how many years? Just playing with toys…
    Those who pioneered, paid as they went. Made their own living as they went. Nobody there to pay them to practice until they got it right.
    Of course musk is a welfare queen, where does the money come from that pays everything? Taxpayers…
    Conclusion: It is really, really hard to land a Falcon 9. Harder than landing a Lunar Lander, if you ask me.
    One big difference, the welfare rocket wasn’t manned, no courage involved…

  33. I’m speaking in technical terms, stradivarious. landing a rocket the size of a building is harder than landing a purpose-designed lander. Do you think i’m downplaying the courage of the apollo astronauts? I’ve read the memoirs of NASA flight directors and apollo astronauts- I know the story of Apollo inside and out.
    And how exactly is no product being produced? This launch was a commercial delivery of satellites to orbit. SpaceX has delivered cargo to the ISS SEVEN TIMES (SEVEN TIMES) for NASA. The falcon 9 rocket has successfully launched 19 times, 18 of which were launches of commercial or government payloads.
    The product is the transportation of stuff to orbit, which SpaceX has shown themselves to be very capable of.
    I’m not sure where you are going with this one. Every other rocket out there is using tech (mainly engines) from the 1970’s and 1980’s, or Russian-built engines. The Falcon 9 is the only rocket currently flying designed completely in the 21st century.
    And what other pioneers are you talking about? Every other Rocket manufacturer existed because of government contracts being fulfilled. They were “lowest bidder” companies working on cost plus contracts. Do you know what a cost plus contract is? It means that they can take as much money as they need to get the job done. SpaceX was mainly established on private funding, the rest came from SET contracts that were only granted to SpaceX AS THEY COMPLETED MILESTONES in the path of rocket and spacecraft development. NASA needed a spacecraft to get people to the ISS, SpaceX is currently building and testing it. All of the pioneers in the early space race were private companies making stuff for the government on government dime. The Private space industry didn’t even exist then, there were no satellite telecom companies to launch stuff for (the main private buyers of rocket launches).
    Strad, I’m on your side. I’m a political conservative. SpaceX is the prime example of private business being better than government glut. Yes, they got government dime to accomplish their goals -but so has every other space company out there- and delivered product in return, far below the cost of any other aerospace company currently doing business.
    Again, really not sure what you’re trying to criticize.

  34. The product is the transportation of stuff to orbit…
    Like I said, may as well break windows to have a job fixing them. The effect would be the same. No net profit for anyone but the welfare rocket builders.

  35. Alright, now I see where you’re going with this one. The Economics of Space Travel, and what it means for whoever is down here on earth.
    Well, without the ability to take stuff into orbit, we would not have:
    -24/7 weather coverage
    -Satellite TV and telecom (landlines are vulnerable)
    -GPS (essential not just for bad navigators, but a myriad of autonomous technologies, and virtually all modern air travel, not to mention modern militaries
    -Military Satellites (Wouldn’t have concrete evidence of Erdogan buying ISIS oil without ’em)
    -Accurate Solar Weather forecasting (Because it’s nice to have prior warning in the event that the entire power grid of North America breaks when the next really big solar storm happens)
    -Large-scale soil moisture mapping (very useful for agriculture just about everywhere)
    -Large-scale Oceanographic Survey tools (important for global trade, and, yes monitoring the climate (for the sake of shutting up al gore))
    -The Ability to expand human presence into space and other planets (with the coming WW3, it would be nice to have a backup on mars, No?)
    Now, for the two roughly biggest categories there (Telecom and GPS) in terms of # of launches, that’s money flowing around, and down into the pockets of workers at SpaceX- who aren’t government pencil-pushers or bankers that leech off everyone else- they are engineers, machinists, technicians, and other hard-working, skilled american citizens.
    SpaceX currently has about $12 Billion worth of launches in their manifest for the coming years- about half of those are government. So that leaves us with $6 Billion going directly to the skilled workers at SpaceX, and the Skilled workers at their metal suppliers, bolt suppliers, electronics suppliers, and whathaveyou. I’m not sure about the suppliers, but SpaceX is 100% american- something that sounds pretty good to me.
    Is spaceflight an essential business? No, BUT. It enhances the efficiency and productivity of industries the world over, and provides sustainable jobs for Americans, jobs that are not easily outsourced.
    Your Move.

  36. SpaceX currently has about $12 Billion worth of launches in their manifest for the coming years- about half of those are government.
    Oh, okay, only half the income from welfare. That’s $6 billion. And musk has already been given almost $5 billion in subsidies, so the majority of his income is still welfare…and so far he can land an remote controlled aircraft again. Something that was first done almost 50 years ago. Pretty brilliant heh

  37. I usually have a personal policy against delving into flame wars, but I can see that you don’t quite realize what SpaceX did by landing that rocket. Nor do you understand the difference between welfare and services rendered via a contract. Are you suggesting that any company which provides services to the government is made up of welfare queens? Guess Joe Average the snow plow driver is a welfare queen, then. Besides, on a lbs to orbit per dollar basis, SpaceX is doing things far cheaper than any other company- for missions that would have been launched anyways.
    Also, Rockets are not Aircraft. Aircraft are defined as machines which achieve flight due to buoyancy or interactions with air. Rockets use Newton’s their law. But I’m not going to dive into semantics, I’m going to try to illustrate the difference between landing on the moon and landing a falcon 9.
    I might have jumped the gun earlier by saying that landing the Falcon 9 was “A lot harder than landing on the moon”. They are both incredibly difficult things to do. But if you cannot seem to understand the engineering difficulty in:
    -re-entering and landing a rocket the size of a 14 story building
    -with a rocket engine too powerful for the job that only throttles between 40% and 100% thrust (the biggest range ever in a rocket engine)
    -with Landing legs intentionally made (relatively) delicate to save weight
    -with an incredibly small margin of error (If the rocket is more than about a meter too high at the stopping point, or more than a few degrees off perfectly vertical, it blows up) (Same with if the horizontal velocity (which is incredibly difficult to control with a gimballing engine))
    -with a budget far less than any government program
    -When a vertical rocket landing of this scale has NEVER (EVER) BEEN TRIED BEFORE
    -and doing it all in about 3 years from the first flight of the VTOL test vehicle (grasshopper)
    You might have failed “Common Sense 101”.
    Seriously, man. I’m getting tired here.

  38. “No net profit for anyone but the welfare rocket builders.”
    Orbcomm, which paid for the launch, just got 11 new satellites into orbit. That nearly triples their satellite constellation. They effectively just multiplied their communications bandwidth by a factor of 12, since each of these second generation satellites has as much bandwidth as the whole prior constellation put together.
    Orbcomm provides machine-to-machine tracking data. Receivers are being added to sea boxes and trucks all the time, and now Orbcomm can carry 12 times as much data.
    Orbcomm stock was trading at around 6.70 all last week. It is at 7.42 today.

  39. Nor do you understand the difference between welfare and services rendered via a contract.
    Maybe frame it realistically. The difference between welfare and services provided by a gov’t picked and preferred contractor already subsidized to the tune of nearly $5 billion.
    That’s about 9800 people devoting a lifetime of taxes to pay his subsidy. I wonder if any of those people would have used those funds for a better purpose? I guess we’ll never know…they don’t get any publicity. Ever heard of opportunity cost?
    Anyway, you’re tired, pay your taxes and go to bed.

  40. If you don’t think government should be involved in space, you’ll find yourself in agreement with me.
    However, the fact remains that NASA is involved. They need to keep the ISS resupplied on a fairly continuous basis. Russia does some resupply, as does the ESA and Japan, but NASA does supply runs as well.
    The difference between the COTS program, under which SpaceX and Orbital Sciences are paid to resupply ISS, and all previous NASA space operations is that the vendors are being paid fixed prices for services rendered as milestones are met, as opposed to the previous “cost-plus” method.
    The “cost-plus” payment method meant that the contractor was paid whatever it cost them, plus a percentage for profit. This meant that it was in the contractor’s favour to jack up the price as high as possible, knowing that a higher price times a fixed percentage profit meant a higher total profit. That meant dragging out any development program as long as possible and making engineering decisions without regard to value for taxpayer dollars.
    The cost-plus procurement was what drove up the cost of space. However, SpaceX (and OSC) get paid a fixed amount, and only if they succeed. That gives them incentive to keep the costs down while still maintaining reliability.
    If the taxpayer dollars are going to be spent anyway, is it not better that they be spent in this way, giving maximum value for the taxpayer dollar?

  41. If the taxpayer dollars are going to be spent anyway, is it not better that they be spent in this way, giving maximum value for the taxpayer dollar?
    Pragmatism got us where we are, not sure they need any more moral support in the form of more of it…

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