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Once they've done a lot more landings, yes. Until then, I'd wager their focus is on testing materials after re-entry for annealing, heat and stress fractures, a
by madaxe_again 10y ago
Once they've done a lot more landings, yes. Until then, I'd wager their focus is on testing materials after re-entry for annealing, heat and stress fractures, ablation, and so forth.
From this they'll be able to optimise their design (more so than already) to be more resilient to these forces, and will end up with standardised check-lists for re-flight. They're also working heavily on autonomy, so the current ground crews of hundreds could diminish to the same kind of numbers one has for commercial flight. If you launch 200 times a day, which is where they are headed, it becomes routine space traffic control with inexpensive ground crews following procedural manuals.
So, I wouldn't expect any rapid turnarounds soon, but give it ten years and they could be turning them around in hours or days, which would absolutely change the economics of space flight. I don't think Musk is into demand driven pricing - he wants his eutopia to be for all - so we may see spaceflight costs rapidly trend down to the same order of magnitude as current commercial flight, perhaps by the 2030s, perhaps sooner. So far they've maintained fantastic momentum.
- SEJeff 10y agoSpaceX was founded 14 years ago. In another 10 years, they'll likely have what you describe on their Mars base. The velocity of this company is simply unprecedented. SpaceX was founded in July of 2002 and the first F9 (I'm purposefully ignoring the Falcon 1 program) went up in July of 2010. For reference, the Space Shuttle Program was formally created by President Nixon in 1972. The first Space Shuttle launch, STS-1, happened on April 12th, 1981.
- toomanybeersies 10y agoThat's 8 years for F9, and 9 years for the Shuttle. I wouldn't call 1 year faster unprecedented. The Apollo program was unprecedented. It took only 8 years to put a man on the moon, from putting a man in space.
- SEJeff 10y ago9 years for an agency with lots of space and rocket experience vs 8 years for a company with no space or rocket experience at all. There is no comparison between the two.
- ethbro 10y agoNot diminishing SpaceX's achievements, but like everything else they've been built on the back of a lot of basic science. One of NASA's primary goals is actually technology transfer (see: http://technology.nasa.gov/ http://technology.nasa.gov/ ).
- tbabb 10y agoAnd also, again, not diminishing SpaceX's achievements, but the space shuttle was a substantially more ambitious project than the f9.
- TrevorJ 10y agoAmbitious in it's actual design certainly. It arguably never achieved much of that ambition though, at least in regards to reusability cost savings.
- cptskippy 10y agoSpaceX is staffed by some of the brightest aerospace engineers and scientists with decades of aerospace industry experience. Tom Mueller and Gwynne Shotwell had over 3 decades of experience between them in the aerospace industry before they joined SpaceX. To say they had not space or rocket experience is absurd. Additionally SpaceX has received tremendous support from NASA both financially and technically. SpaceX has received close to half a billion dollars in "seed money" from NASA and has contracts for almost three billion dollars from them. NASA provides an extraordinary amount of technical oversight and guidance to SpaceX. That's not to say SpaceX hasn't made significant advancements, Boeing has considerably more experience and received similar amounts of funding from NASA but has failed to achieve nearly what SpaceX has.
- ethbro 10y agoTo be fair, Apollo ran from '61-'72, developed the Saturn series of rockets, associated technology, landed six missions on the moon, and cost somewhere around $100-200B* (USD$2010). *Sad context: Iraq War @ $750B-$1.1T (USD$2010)
- SEJeff 10y agoApollo was "human kind changing", I would say so is making rocket launches and landings as commonplace as jet flights.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]