4 ms·

I just can't get over how terrible an idea a PayPal founder starting a rocket company sounded. "Good ideas often sound bad," no joke. I was a pretty harsh criti

by nether 10y ago

I just can't get over how terrible an idea a PayPal founder starting a rocket company sounded. "Good ideas often sound bad," no joke. I was a pretty harsh critic of SpaceX in its early days (I was an aerospace engineer and have followed private spaceflight since its inception) and once they got over some failures and staffing issues, they've really blown me away.

goshx 10y ago
This reminds me of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8P8UKBAOfGo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8P8UKBAOfGo Pretty harsh.
avmich 10y ago
Alt-space community laughs about some aspects of "traditional aerospace" mentality for about quarter of century if not more. It's mostly about their opinion that rockets somehow are rocket science, pardon the pun. Given how glacial rocketry progress was by early 2000 it's no wonder people from outside of the industry were pretty annoyed, not to say more. Elon Musk isn't exactly alt-space guy - that would closer describe John Carmack or others - but the effect which he produced on world rocket industry is nevertheless pretty healthy. It's probably hard to believe that SpaceX is just a correction to a industry which got too swamped with status quo. Somebody - may be SpaceX itself - can actually demonstrate not only reasonable results, but significant innovation.
- nether 10y ago
  Aeronautics is just as stagnant. Whenever news of new small aircraft startup hits HN though, most comments are negative.
- cinquemb 10y ago
  >"Given how glacial rocketry progress was by early 2000 it's no wonder people from outside of the industry were pretty annoyed, not to say more." I think this is on the money. I think people might get more interested commercially if getting out of LEO per attempt was more reliable vs the current focus on bringing the cost's down with typical systems we have been using in rocketry (which seem to not have increased the reliability). It would be really cool if we heard about advancements in alternative exit strategies[0][1], but it seems we're still far off. I'm personally the most interested in electromagnetic rail assist for the first stage, with some sort of scram jet for the second stage, best most practical stuff will remain classified military research (looking at the US Naval programs) and the public ONR[2] reports still bring up issues as far as durability of rails over repeated use which probably is going to require some major break through in HEP & matsci. With the Falcon 9 current specs, the first stage takes about 162 burn time, and assuming its traveling roughly at 1.66 km/s[3], its first stage travels to around around 270 km (ISS is at about 400km in LEO) with a max paylod of about 2.28 * 10^4 kg, I don't wanna be anywhere near the launch of the kinetic EM slug that needs to have at at least ~60,340 MJ of PE between the 1st-2nd stage transition (setting aside any given directional vectors, and if present or near present scramjet array could support such payload). The navy doesn't even expect a 32MJ weapon until mid 2020[5], so who knows, maybe if I can be alive in 60-80 years, we will have built huge CSP arrays in the middle of the desert to be able to launch things into LEO with more reliability. But another hundred years of redox seems more likely. [0] https://www.nasa.gov/topics/technology/features/horizontallaunch.html https://www.nasa.gov/topics/technology/features/horizontalla... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-rocket_spacelaunch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-rocket_spacelaunch [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railgun#Outstanding_issues_in_fielding_railgun_weapons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railgun#Outstanding_issues_in_... [3] https://www.quora.com/How-fast-does-the-first-stage-of-Falcon-9-travel-when-returning-from-LEO-vs-GSO https://www.quora.com/How-fast-does-the-first-stage-of-Falco... [4] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9 [5] https://news.usni.org/2015/04/14/navsea-details-at-sea-2016-railgun-test-on-jhsv-trenton https://news.usni.org/2015/04/14/navsea-details-at-sea-2016-...
aidenn0 10y ago
Betting on failure of anything ambitious as SpaceX is fairly safe. Most such projects fail. It's not even clear to me in retrospect that there were signs that SpaceX was more likely to succeed. I really sat-up and took notice on one of their early launches where they had an abort and then re-prepped and launched in under 24h (IIRC?). That's something that few others could achieve, and they were doing it cheaper than everyone else.

by nether 10y ago

goshx 10y ago

This reminds me of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8P8UKBAOfGo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8P8UKBAOfGo Pretty harsh.

avmich 10y ago

Alt-space community laughs about some aspects of "traditional aerospace" mentality for about quarter of century if not more. It's mostly about their opinion that rockets somehow are rocket science, pardon the pun. Given how glacial rocketry progress was by early 2000 it's no wonder people from outside of the industry were pretty annoyed, not to say more. Elon Musk isn't exactly alt-space guy - that would closer describe John Carmack or others - but the effect which he produced on world rocket industry is nevertheless pretty healthy. It's probably hard to believe that SpaceX is just a correction to a industry which got too swamped with status quo. Somebody - may be SpaceX itself - can actually demonstrate not only reasonable results, but significant innovation.

nether 10y ago
Aeronautics is just as stagnant. Whenever news of new small aircraft startup hits HN though, most comments are negative.
cinquemb 10y ago
>"Given how glacial rocketry progress was by early 2000 it's no wonder people from outside of the industry were pretty annoyed, not to say more." I think this is on the money. I think people might get more interested commercially if getting out of LEO per attempt was more reliable vs the current focus on bringing the cost's down with typical systems we have been using in rocketry (which seem to not have increased the reliability). It would be really cool if we heard about advancements in alternative exit strategies[0][1], but it seems we're still far off. I'm personally the most interested in electromagnetic rail assist for the first stage, with some sort of scram jet for the second stage, best most practical stuff will remain classified military research (looking at the US Naval programs) and the public ONR[2] reports still bring up issues as far as durability of rails over repeated use which probably is going to require some major break through in HEP & matsci. With the Falcon 9 current specs, the first stage takes about 162 burn time, and assuming its traveling roughly at 1.66 km/s[3], its first stage travels to around around 270 km (ISS is at about 400km in LEO) with a max paylod of about 2.28 * 10^4 kg, I don't wanna be anywhere near the launch of the kinetic EM slug that needs to have at at least ~60,340 MJ of PE between the 1st-2nd stage transition (setting aside any given directional vectors, and if present or near present scramjet array could support such payload). The navy doesn't even expect a 32MJ weapon until mid 2020[5], so who knows, maybe if I can be alive in 60-80 years, we will have built huge CSP arrays in the middle of the desert to be able to launch things into LEO with more reliability. But another hundred years of redox seems more likely. [0] https://www.nasa.gov/topics/technology/features/horizontallaunch.html https://www.nasa.gov/topics/technology/features/horizontalla... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-rocket_spacelaunch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-rocket_spacelaunch [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railgun#Outstanding_issues_in_fielding_railgun_weapons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railgun#Outstanding_issues_in_... [3] https://www.quora.com/How-fast-does-the-first-stage-of-Falcon-9-travel-when-returning-from-LEO-vs-GSO https://www.quora.com/How-fast-does-the-first-stage-of-Falco... [4] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9 [5] https://news.usni.org/2015/04/14/navsea-details-at-sea-2016-railgun-test-on-jhsv-trenton https://news.usni.org/2015/04/14/navsea-details-at-sea-2016-...

aidenn0 10y ago

Betting on failure of anything ambitious as SpaceX is fairly safe. Most such projects fail. It's not even clear to me in retrospect that there were signs that SpaceX was more likely to succeed. I really sat-up and took notice on one of their early launches where they had an abort and then re-prepped and launched in under 24h (IIRC?). That's something that few others could achieve, and they were doing it cheaper than everyone else.