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SpaceX just landed a rocket on a drone ship for the first time
- jakozaur 11y agoWe will be talking about this milestone (first reusable space rockets) the same way my parents talked about first step on the moon.
- danbruc 11y agoNope. I don't want to diminish this great technological achievement in any way but this is not even close to setting foot on the the Moon. Actually I am not even sure that setting foot on Mars will top the Moon, in some sense it's the same thing. And yes, I am aware of the huge difference between Moon and Mars. The first permanent human outpost, whether on the Moon, on Mars or elsewhere, may be the next step after going to the Moon and living in space stations that doesn't have the feel of an incremental step.
- pilsetnieks 11y agoI agree that this isn't a Moon-landing scale event, it could be more similar to the first Apollo launch, or maybe the first Space Shuttle launch. This isn't so impressive in itself as it is in what it enables for the future. However, I would disagree that Mars is just more of the same as was the Moon landing. It would be not unlike saying that because Columbus went to America, later discoveries weren't so impressive.
- danbruc 11y agoI see this in a slightly different way. I consider (mass)producing chips with billions of transistors, building 200 meter high skyscrapers and similar things as impressive achievements even though they are kind of routine at this point. But they are no longer doing something for the first time and I think doing something for the first time is an important part of what makes an impressive event a really outstanding one. And at least for me right now going to Mars seems not sufficiently different from going to the Moon to have the feel of a first but that is surly very subjective.
- hyperpallium 11y agoIt is the clearest milestone of a new era - in a way the moon landings and shuttle turned out not to be - space travel where the main expense is fuel.
- XorNot 11y agoThe next one will be the first reusable flight with a booster.
- omni 11y ago> this is not even close to setting foot on the the Moon. You're right, this landing is a much bigger deal long-term. The Apollo program proved that one of the world superpowers, with a decades-long presidential mandate and a giant, massive bucket of funding, could do incredible things.[1] It was awesome, and it's clearly one of the defining moments in human history. However, the pace of space travel actually decreased after the Apollo program.[2] This probably had something to do with the fact that nobody wanted to spend untold billions of dollars to keep doing this stuff. The Moon landing was a big deal, but it was a one-off big deal. It didn't have world-changing impacts on the future, only on the moment. The whole Mars objective of SpaceX probably isn't going to be their lasting contribution to humanity. All their technological achievements so far pale in comparison to how hard it will be to live on Mars. They may well fail. However, the reusability improvements they are making have significant potential to increase the rate of space flight for the rest of our existence. That's a gift-that-keeps-on-giving big deal, and enables all sorts of options that were prohibitively expensive before. We're all really hoping the graph in [2] starts spiking up soon. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA#Cost_of_Apollo_program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA#Cost_of_Apollo_... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_spaceflight#Orbital_launch_rates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_spaceflight#Orbita...
- sigmar 11y ago>The Moon landing was a big deal, but it was a one-off big deal. It didn't have world-changing impacts on the future, only on the moment. I very much agree with this sentiment and your other points. I think the comment you are replying to is thinking about this achievement in a 20th century frame-of-reference[1], and not considering the tremendous amount of potential cheaper space travel has. [1] By this I mean that he is thinking of space exploration nothing more than an inspirational endeavour.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago> decades-long presidential mandate A small note to put things into perspective: moon landing happened only 12 (!) years after Sputnik. It happened only 8 (!) years after Kennedy's speech and Gagarin's first space walk. The first launch of actual Apollo equipment was 3.5 years before the manned landing. In other words: humans went from launching the first satellite to putting people on the Moon in 12 years. In 8 years from first person in space to first person on the Moon. That's the speed of focused progress. Something we very much lack these days.
- sigmar 11y ago>this is not even close to setting foot on the the Moon. I strongly disagree. Landing on the moon provides evidence that humanity is technologically capable of space travel. More or less a proof of concept. But markedly reducing the cost of going into outer space means that humanity now has access to space tourism and whatever future benefits space brings. No one knows about the first digital computers in the 1940s. The general public sees the computer revolution as happening in the 80s and 90s, because that is when computers were made available to consumers.
- DanielBMarkham 11y agoI agree. Fifty years since we stepped on the moon, and we're just now re-using rockets? It's a great accomplishment, no doubt. Many congratulations to all involved. But this should have been done in the 1970s. The same economic drivers that lead us to do it today were still there back in the day. What happened is that we lost sight of the economics of space travel -- if we ever had our eye on them in the first place. We chased a rabbit down the wrong hole. Political systems exist and thrive for political reasons. NASA was always going to be about bringing home the bacon to defense contractors and looking good for the current administration. Elon is stuck with an economics/efficiency goal: make it both safe and cheap. Just to be clear, my comment has nothing to do with the great folks at Space-X. I'm a huge fan. My point is that they're just continuing the natural evolution of spaceflight. But in the big picture, it's an incremental achievement (and yep, I know how difficult it was. All of this stuff is difficult.) The next big goal is probably regularly-scheduled private manned spaceflights. And no, I don't mean sub-orbital fun rides. More like week-long tourist trips to the space station or a moon base. This would indicate that 1) access to space is truly becoming relatively cheap and reliable, and 2) there's actually somewhere to go. Historic things are things we do for the first time, sure. Re-landing a rocket qualifies, but it is much in the category of orbital-docking: necessary but a footnote. Anybody remember the first manned space mission that did docking? How about that remembering the first one to leave Earth orbit? Space fans like me would know. But not in the history books for the general public. Note that the question was about how historically important this is. Not how critical it is to spaceflight, or any other qualifier. It can be stupendously important in terms of the technical details, yet have very little value historically.
- autokad 11y agomoon and mars basically the same thing? O_O the radiation earth||mars and earth||moon are quite different in both duration and intensity. I believe its something they really haven't figured out. speaking of duration, that's a big deal in both fuel and effect on human passengers. but lets get to the important stuff, mars is actually a planet, with an atmosphere. saying the two are equivalent is more or less saying kicking a field goal outside on a windy day is the same as kicking one in a dome. except when you miss everyone dies. you also need 5x escape velocity from mars (we want them to come back too), which means more fuel and landing with lots of fuel. or at the very least sending fuel prior and hope nothing happens to it.
- DiThi 11y agoIt's very likely that methane engines will be used. Methane will be easy to make in mars and it's much more dense than hydrogen. Also terraforming mars will probably involve dumping methane into the atmosphere.
- throwaway5752 11y agoThe Moon landing in the context of science and technologies available in the mid- to late-60's was an absolutely monumental human achievement that won't soon be equaled. It was just 66 years after the Wright brothers! ps - I think the landing yesterday was a pretty sizable achievement.
- ForHackernews 11y agoShuttle booster rockets were already reusable.
- timdiggerm 11y agoOnly sorta barely https://www.quora.com/Space-Shuttle-How-much-money-was-saved-by-reusing-the-Solid-Rocket-Boosters-SRBs-instead-of-making-them-disposable https://www.quora.com/Space-Shuttle-How-much-money-was-saved...
- JshWright 11y agoThey were also basically empty metal tubes that solid fuel was packed into. But perhaps more relevant to point, the shuttle itself was "reusable". It remains to be seen if SpaceX can reuse rockets in a more cost effective way than the shuttle.
- noir_lord 11y ago> It remains to be seen if SpaceX can reuse rockets in a more cost effective way than the shuttle. Given that the launch cost of a Falcon is already way less than the reused launch cost of a Shuttle I think if they can get 3-4 launches per rocket they'll massively reduce the cost to put stuff up. They already have done that anyway, they undercut pretty much everyone who is currently launching, sometimes hilariously. Musk said in one of his speeches to congress (iirc) (paraphrasing) "Our launch costs are so low that the cost of launch plus the satellite is less than ULA's launch cost alone, so you buy a launch and get a satellite for free".
- JshWright 11y agoYeah, don't get me wrong, I'm an all-in SpaceX fanboy, I just think getting the stage back on the ground is likely a smaller fraction of the task than we expect.
- noir_lord 11y agoI agree somewhat however you need it to not become a fireball on landing first, then you need to figure out if you can launch it again at all and then you need to figure out how to get that re-launch cost down. They've designed this for that purpose but he mentioned in the post launch talk that they will do 10 test firings on this one before they re-launch it. I think they'll pull it off but they might have a few undergo rapidly unplanned disassembly along the way.
- underwater 11y agoMaybe you could argue that it is a more important technological milestone but landing on the moon was a huge cultural moment. There was a huge build up and the world stopped to watch it happen. This is why people still talk about it. Very few people are aware of who SpaceX are, let alone the specifics of their launches.
- dghughes 11y agoBlue Origin already landed their rocket last year just not on a barge.
- BloodOfSokar 11y agoBlue Origin flew straight up then straight back down and landed, which SpaceX had already done a bunch of times before them.
- dghughes 11y agoAre you sure? Anything I can see shows it's after the Nov 2015 Blue Origin successful landing. Not that it matters I'm just curious.
- extrapickles 11y agoSpaceX had a rocket called grasshopper that went up and back down Blue Origin style (it didn't goto space though). Grasshopper was much closer in complexity to what Blue Origin did vs what SpaceX just did.
- moultano 11y agoThey didn't go to orbit. Not in the same league.
- dghughes 11y agoBut Blue Origin has sent rockets 100km up i.e. the Kármán line which is considered outer space, and landed. I think they've done a great deal just as SpaceX has I don't understand the dismissal of what they do why can't people be excited for both?
- moultano 11y agohttps://what-if.xkcd.com/58/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/58/ That does a good job of explaining it. Space isn't very far away. The difference between getting to space and getting to orbit is the difference between something you can build in your garage and NASA.
- maxxxxx 11y agoThe moon landing was just 12 years after the first satellite had been launched. On the way they had to solve a lot of problems that had never been solved before and nobody knew if they could even be solved. What SpaceX has done is cool and a big step in commoditization of space but essentially they had the balls to finally do something that could probably have been done 20 years ago.
- peter303 11y agoOlder people will remember the Space Shuttle as reusuable spacecraft. Although it nver reached its planned capacity of 25 missions a year (average four), a 134 missions were impressive.
- crispyambulance 11y agoHere's one thing I don't understand... The rocket lands upon a floating platform in the ocean. Presumably the platform rocks along with the waves. How do they keep the rocket from tipping over after the landing? If it were as huge as an aircraft carrier I can imagine that it might be possible but the platform is relatively small.
- castis 11y agoThe weight of the engines puts the center of gravity in a mostly empty rocket fairly low.
- pilsetnieks 11y agoThe center of gravity for the rocket is actually very low. The engines are on the bottom, and the rest is just a light aluminum tube (with other smaller tubing and tanks inside but still.) Also, after the landing they vent the remaining oxygen, and afterwards people come aboard to weld the rocket legs to the surface so it wouldn't slide off. Maybe very strong winds would be an issue, or very rough seas immediately after landing but they wouldn't launch in rough weather anyway.
- JshWright 11y agoA rocket is basically a giant fuel tank with some very heavy engines at the bottom. By the time it lands, the tanks are almost empty, so the center of mass is _extremely_ low. There are two main tanks in the stage, the top ~half is liquid oxygen, and the bottom ~half is kerosene. The liquid oxygen is lighter, and boils off pretty quickly once they open up the vents. So what little fuel is left (the kerosene in the bottom tank) also settles to the bottom, which helps push the CoM even lower.
- yaakov34 11y agoActually, liquid oxygen is almost 40% denser than kerosene (1.14 vs 0.82 g/cm^2). And this is the reason most rockets [1] put oxygen on top/forward: they want the center of gravity to be as far forward as possible, ahead of the aerodynamic pressure center, so that the rocket will be as stable as possible when ascending through the atmosphere. Just as we would put a weight on the front of the arrow, and feathers in the back, to make it more stable. For the vertical landing, this would seem to work against them, but I guess the mostly empty tanks don't dominate the considerations. Falcon has oxidizer on top in the conventional manner, as far as I know (they mention LOX feed lines going through the fuel tank). [1] The N1 rocket had oxidizer below the fuel in every stage, apparently because they wished to use spherical tanks, and this allowed packing them in a conical shape - the oxidizer tanks are much larger.
- manaskarekar 11y agoHere's some information about the drone ships themselves: https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2015/06/spacex-augments-upgrades-drone-ship-armada/ https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2015/06/spacex-augments-upgr... Some pictures of Marmac 303 : http://www.worldmarine.com/projects/barges http://www.worldmarine.com/projects/barges
- dyarosla 11y agoI can't seem to find the answer to this anywhere: Why did the Stage 1 not land on the midpoint on the drone ship (which has seemed to be the goal of all the other landings)? Did SpaceX take a page from Blue Origin and not aim for a perfectly mid-point landing to increase the chance of it surviving?
- imdsm 11y agoIt looked like it originally landed closer, but bounced a little.
- gizmo 11y agoThe drone ship and the rocket work independently. The drone ship uses GPS to position itself as closely as it can to a fixed position in the moving sea, and the rocket blindly lands at the position where the drone ship ought to be. So sometimes it will land in the middle, sometimes closer to the edges, depending on how steady the water is. The drone ship is huge so there is no need to land precisely in the center.
- rebootthesystem 11y ago> not aim for a perfectly mid-point landing That was a perfect landing. As far as not aiming for the center. Of course it is aiming for the center. That's where you have the greatest margins. Yet, this is nothing like what Blue Origin has been doing. The comparison is simply not warranted. Rather than go into a long explanation I'll just give you this data point: Blue Origin is FALLING down from zero velocity. It reaches a terminal velocity of around 300 to 400 miles per hour. It uses fins to navigate down to a spot that, for all intents and purposes, is almost straight down. Falcon 9 is FLYING down from somewhere around 17,000 miles per hour. During that time it has to flip around and use three of it's engines to slow down enough not to burn-up on re-entry. The grid fins also need to fly the rocket to a ship, in the middle of the ocean, about 600 miles from the coast...and then use a precisely timed single engine burn to land it. Here are a couple of pictures to further illustrate the point: http://goo.gl/BT92J8 http://goo.gl/BT92J8 https://goo.gl/9Vttob https://goo.gl/9Vttob Like I said. Perfect landing.
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- username223 11y agoMaybe this is a stupid question, but why is it better to land the rocket on a ship instead of having it plop into the ocean and float for a few hours or days until a nearby ship can scoop it up?
- Klathmon 11y agoThe sea is filled with all kinds of stuff that pretty much ruins anything it gets into. The cost of cleaning, refitting, and fixing issues from a splash landing is more expensive than doing it this way. At least that's what SpaceX's whole model is pretty much based on.
- Retric 11y agoThey could add a water tight cap to both ends. But this gets into weight / stress issues. PS: Being literal rocket scientists I a going to assume landing is a much more workable design.
- vrfcodf 11y agoWhat both ends? :-) This is a rocket, not a plastic tube. And who plugs them, and where. In space, before landing?
- partisan 11y agoThis made me laugh out loud. I think that one of the great things that comes out of this is that we start using our imaginations and trying to understand the whys and hows of space travel. It's really exciting to see.
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- username223 11y agoThanks. I'm just surprised that the cost of damage from seawater to a dumb rocket with a parachute and floats is more than the cost of a smart rocket making a much more error-prone landing on a tiny ship.
- esmi 11y agoPresumably once it gets "cheap" to launch stuff many projects which were uneconomic become possible. Does this mean low earth orbit gets overcrowded rapidly? Is there an international space traffic control? I wonder if this will be another area where the regulation is as tough a problem as the tech.
- helicon 11y agoI think it already is pretty overcrowded and this has become a problem that NASA/ESA and others are thinking about. Here is a good ESA video on space debris: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tN_CvGJKMOs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tN_CvGJKMOs
- ablation 11y agoVery Iain M Banks-esque name for that drone ship. Is Musk a fan?
- vermontdevil 11y agoYep. He named all these barges after the ships in the book series.
- Roritharr 11y agoI always wondered if he'd consider reading such SciFi a waste of time. Happy to see that he enjoys those books aswell as I do.
- CydeWeys 11y agoI can't imagine he'd see it as a waste of time. Without scifi he wouldn't be launching rockets at all.
- Matt3o12_ 11y agoIt think Elon doesn't consider books of almost any kind waste of time. He has, after all, made it though college by almost exclusively reading books and I believe he reads a lot. I'm quite sure not all of what he reads are textbooks.
- j2bax 11y agoAfter reading his biography, I came to realize Musk loves video games and books of all sorts. He thought about going into video game development when he was younger but didn't think he could have as much of an impact on the world in that line of work. He was featured in a gamer magazine around age 12 for a scifi game he developed. He brings the term work hard play harder to a new level!
- the8472 11y agoBoth autonomous spaceport drone ships are named after ships from The Player of Games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spacecraft_in_the_Culture_series#The_Player_of_Games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spacecraft_in_the_Cult...
- wcummings 11y agoSo... cheaper satellites? Thrilling.
- rkangel 11y agoCheaper satellites is good don't underestimate it - that's not the point though. This is cheaper anything to space, which means components of space missions that are suddenly an order of magnitude cheaper than they were.
- savagej 11y agoFalcon 9. On a boat. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSx4DGBstYA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSx4DGBstYA
- rootlocus 11y agoSeeing this puts my daily job in another perspective. Engineers at SpaceX can launch a rocket, deliver the cargo, and safely land it ON A FREAKING MOVING PLATFORM IN THE MIDDLE OF THE FREAKING SEA perfectly, and I can't write a stupid UI that doesn't break some unit tests. I've become so used to writing (and working with) less than perfect (sloppy) software, I'm ashamed to be called an engineer (not that anyone calls me that). I wouldn't be able to write software that lands a rocket anywhere without first crashing ~100 prototypes.
- rohit89 11y agoSpaceX has a testing framework where they can simulate thousands of flights so they've likely crashed it a fair few times in the simulations.
- rootlocus 11y agoI can't begin to imagine the number of variables that framework has to work with. Everything from atmospheric data to the rocket's structural integrity...
- prodmerc 11y agoYes, we all have KSP :)
- ForHackernews 11y agoThey've also crashed it a fair few times in real life.
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- SonicSoul 11y agoI agree 100%. After reading "Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future" I was really blown away by what kinds of problems the engineers at spaceX deal with. It makes my job as software engineer seem like a monkey with a typewriter could do it. It's many levels of magnitude more complex and there are no frameworks to just download and leverage. you're pretty much constantly inventing new stuff. edit, one example of the kind of problems they deal with: initial rocket testing was done on an island near Hawaii, so the engineers had to build their own living space and stay there full time rolling out this big heavy rocket onto an open field for testing and then rolling it back into it's hangar every day in grueling heat. they'd work 15 hr days which was pretty much expected and thankless. when there was component failure Elon would use his Jet to get parts at radio shack in a different state and fly it over to CA for testing, and then straight to the island speed up the work. Something that would take NASA months would take SpaceX days or weeks since they didn't need "space grade" components but instead used common parts. They'd just ensure that those parts passed enough tests that they could be confident of the quality.
- dang 11y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11457263 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11457263