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It's not a greater achievement than the Apollo moon landings (it's basically the mission flown on Apollo 13, swinging around the moon without going into orbit a
by rlanday 10y ago
It's not a greater achievement than the Apollo moon landings (it's basically the mission flown on Apollo 13, swinging around the moon without going into orbit and then coming back), but it's still something that hasn't been done since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972.
- foobarbecue 10y agoHopefully more like Apollo 8 than 13!
- cswilly 10y agoI understand that SpaceX is not proposing to orbit the moon. Therefore it is more like Apollo 13. Apollo 8 orbited the moon.
- sqeaky 10y agoSomehow I think the details of flyby vs orbit were not the intended subject I suspect he wants a generally smooth mission like what Apollo 8 and to avoid any unplanned rapid disassembly like what Apollo 13 had.
- foobarbecue 10y agoGood point cswilly, I didn't think of that part! And yeah, I meant let's try and not explode stuff too much...
- astrodust 10y agoHurray for progress! We're able to repeat what was done in 1972!
- dwg 10y agoFor a fraction of the cost.
- astrodust 10y agoBeing the first to land on the moon was never intended to be cheap. So many things had to be invented simply to get there. Just imagine how economical space flight would be if all of that 1960s technology had been incrementally improved on for efficiency, manufacturing ease, and scale instead of a lot of it being almost literallly mothballed.
- gozur88 10y agoThere was never any reason to spend that kind of money. It was worth going to the moon once to see what was there, but I have yet to see anybody articulate a reason to go back that doesn't rely on soaring rhetoric and implausible money-making schemes.
- bdamm 10y agoRare-earth mineral security?
- Retric 10y agoRare-earth means low concentrations. There is still a lot of this stuff in the darts crust an it's not destroyed with use.
- gozur88 10y agoRare-earth minerals aren't actually rare. The name comes from the relatively low concentrations in which you find them naturally. But we won't run out; they're just more expensive to refine as we tap lower concentration sources. Even poor sources are going to yeild minerals at a cost that's a few orders of magnitude less than a what you'd get on the moon.
- kodfodrasz 10y agoYeah, why did they build computers so big and expensive and slow in the WWII? They could have waited for a Skylake Intel, and it would be not only better, but also cheaper...
- mrb 10y agoExcept today it will be done at less than 1/10th the cost. So yeah, progress.
- kworker 10y agoIf it will be done. Musk isn't great at the "deliver" part, not to mention how dangerous this mission is.
- varjag 10y agoMusk sends partially re-usable rockets into space for a few years now. A decade ago, all he had were some fancy powerpoint slides. We sure have different definitions of "delivering".
- rtkwe 10y agoWe're still not 100% that they're reusable in a meaningful way that actually reduces costs. The landings are awesome but if it costs too much to reuse them it's more a stunt than anything because as good as it is to not just chunk that hunk of metal in the ocean every launch if it's cheaper that's how it'll be done.
- varjag 10y agoIt's a lot easier to go from a stage that lands to one that has to be ditched than the opposite. Worst case, Musk has the same tech that the rest of the world does, although to me it's clear he has quite an advantage.
- rtkwe 10y agoOh yeah and personally I think that it's going to work but it hasn't been actually shown that it's cheaper and that the rockets can safely be reused. And that really won't be well shown until multiple reused rockets have been launched.
- 10y ago
- stephengillie 10y agoHurray for reproducability - we can still do what was last done in 1972 - this is something which eludes most scientists!
- astrodust 10y agoLook at F1 in 1972 and F1 in 2017 for an example of what relentless, continuous improvement looks like. Can you imagine what would be like if they'd given up on the series? If all that we had was NASCAR and Indy? The entire automotive industry would be over a decade behind, if not more. Most thigns people take for granted like ABS and traction control might not even exist. Look at SpaceX as an example of what happens when someone fumbles the ball so hard it takes over four decades to recover it. Virtually nothing happened in that time other than the shuttle program, and that was never intended for travel outside of Earth orbit. Now we're finally back to innovating and engineering for actual space travel.
- adrianN 10y agoWe did send plenty of robot missions that wouldn't have been possible in the seventies and produced very valuable science. Rosetta and Curiosity for example are very cool missions.
- astrodust 10y agoConsider these very cool missions are about 1/10th of the number of missions America was in a position to do. Consider an America with the Texas Collider operational where major discoveries were made a decade before the CERN one even existed. Consider an America where the ARPA internet project could have been one of the least notable breakthroughs in the last thirty years.
- grkvlt 10y agoIt's actually a good analogy. The F1 Cars (equals Apollo CSM vs. Crew Dragon 2) have much improved since the 70s, but the Tracks haven't changed and Silverstone is still Silverstone (and the Moon is still where we expect it should be) so the mission parameters are much the same too; you go round and round seventy-odd times (or, once) and come home.
- caseyf7 10y agoWhich is also the record for Farthest Humans From Earth. Any chance they can pass up the chance to break that record?
- Tepix 10y agoYep, they plan to go as far as 400.000 miles from earth, that's quite a bit farther out than Apollo astronauts ever went (less than 300.000 miles).