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SpaceX lands Falcon 9 booster on Just Read the Instructions drone ship
- slenk 8y agoI feel like 1 year ago this would have a lot more points. It's pretty cool that recovering used rocket boosters is becoming a norm
- 52-6F-62 8y agoAbsolutely. Childhood dreams gradually coming true. This is becoming the norm for kids now. Children yet to be born may not remember a time when such crafts weren't common!
- dmreedy 8y agoAs too went the government space programs, until the disasters in each started happening. The sense of awe sticks around though. I don't know, I still will from time to time get a little sense of vertigo when I'm in an airplane and the landing gear leaves the runway. The scope and scale of human accomplishment to get to the point where this miracle has become mundane will occasionally hit with the peculiar warmth that accompanies the loss of meaning of a word spoken one too many times. It briefly becomes new again, and amazing. It is pretty cool indeed.
- martincmartin 8y agoHave you seen "Everything's Amazing and Nobody's Happy"? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUBtKNzoKZ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUBtKNzoKZ4
- agumonkey 8y agocouldn't help but think about that
- djsumdog 8y agoah I remember that. I can't help but think in a modern context that this bit falls into the whole, "nostalgic for a better time that never existed fallacy" though. For example: old crufty rant about how no one talks to each other and everyone is on their phones. Get a video from the 1960s of people on a train in NYC. Everyone has their head in a book or newspaper or magazine. By the 1980s, some nerds have walkmans. By the 90s everyone has discmans, plus their book. Today every has their phone, on which their either reading a book, a magazine or listening to a podcast or music. The media is different, it's a bit more interactive, but it really hasn't changed that much.
- samatman 8y agoI'm reminded of one of my very favorite strips from the Far Side: https://familybreedscontent.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/beforetv.jpg https://familybreedscontent.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/befo...
- stcredzero 8y agoGet a video from the 1960s of people on a train in NYC. Of course people don't interact on mass transit. The media is different, it's a bit more interactive, but it really hasn't changed that much. It has been a progression. More and more interaction has been mediated electronically, where it's been widely known since at least the 80's that interpersonal cues do not work in the same way. Of course non-interaction on mass transit is going to be a constant. It's socializing in the home, day to day, where things have changed. Things have changed.
- jacobolus 8y agoToday they are mostly on social media or playing mindless addictive games. Which I guess is sort of like reading a magazine or watching TV, but not exactly. They are also on social media or playing mindless addictive games walking down the street, at restaurants, in stores, in the park, intermittently during the workday, in bed, on the toilet, ...
- noir_lord 8y agoIt's awesome in the original meaning of inspiring awe. I get that feeling alot when I consider think like that I have a device in my pocket more powerful than a 1980's supercomputer.
- Retric 8y agoModern cellphones would have made the top 500 chart well into the 90's. 2.0 Gflops = top 250 in 1993: https://www.top500.org/list/1993/11/?page=3 https://www.top500.org/list/1993/11/?page=3
- reaperducer 8y agoLooking at an old computer magazine last night (Byte's LISP issue), there was an ad for a storage device about the size of a small filing cabinet. I did the math, and my cell phone has 8,800x more storage.
- jdietrich 8y ago512GB MicroSD cards are now available. You could swallow 2TB of data in a single gulp. I wouldn't recommend it, but you totally could. https://www.integralmemory.com/product/smartphone-and-tablet-microsdhc-microsdxc-class-10-uhs-i-u1-memory-card https://www.integralmemory.com/product/smartphone-and-tablet...
- golergka 8y agoAs a person with severe aerophobia, I'd give a lot for air travel to feel mundane.
- elefantastisch 8y agoI don't know if it will help you, but I find it helpful to consider the sheer number of flights that occur without incident. Worldwide, there are roughly 100000 commercial flights per day. That's a little more than 1 per second. While it may not feel mundane to a traveler for whom flying is a fairly rare occurrence, air travel is absolutely mundane from a global perspective. I think that can be a helpful perspective to remember. (Citation: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IS.AIR.DPRT?end=2017&start=1970 https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IS.AIR.DPRT?end=2017&st...)
- squarefoot 8y agoI don't think aerophobia is related to statistics but rather to the perception of the accident if it happens. For those who travel by air every day, a car crash still is a lot more likely than an air crash, but while in most car crashes you don't have the time to see it coming, in most air crashes you have entire minutes to process what is going on. Mildly aerophobic here: i took the plane when I had to, but definitely never enjoyed it.
- 1123581321 8y agoI got over mine by repeatedly mentally willing the plane to crash while over the Atlantic during one trip, and watching lots of footage of crashes and people dying in fires. I suppose exposure therapy is the term for this when professionally administered, but I just needed to come to terms with the potential pain and accept my loss of control while in the air.
- C7H8N4O2 8y ago> the loss of meaning of a word spoken one too many times https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_satiation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_satiation
- simonh 8y agoWhat surprised me was how shocking it was to watch both side boosters of Falcon Heavy land side by side. We'd already seen multiple booster landings, both at sea and on land, but watching both land together seemed 10x more emotionally charged.
- JulianMorrison 8y agoIt was so coordinated, like a dance, is why.
- donkeyd 8y agoFor me, the hardest part was convincing my brain that it wasn't CGI. I think I got so used to seeing stuff like this in movies that my brain didn't process it as real for a while.
- greglindahl 8y agoYes. Every time I've watched the landing video since I have to remind myself that I saw the landing in person and that it's not CGI.
- imron 8y agoIn the lead up to the launch I remember seeing their artist impression CGI rendering of how they expected the launch/landing to go, and both boosters landed at the same time. I thought to myself "I bet they don't land both boosters at the same time in the actual landing" and then several days later they did. It was amazing.
- ph0rque 8y agoMy three-year-old son still asks me to "watch the rocket" every few days. I am always happy to oblige :)
- srcmap 8y agoI assume the ship's surface has to be perfectly level and no (close to zero) wind and wave. Curious what the minimal wind, wave requirements for such landing....
- greglindahl 8y agoThey've only had 1 time that they had to forgo a barge landing because the sea was too rough, Hispasat 30W-6. Plenty of history to go from.
- SAI_Peregrinus 8y agoThe seas were apparently rougher than they've ever attempted a landing with before.
- aplc0r 8y agoI would love to see the pitch and yaw of the barge as part of their livestream instrument cluster.
- kowdermeister 8y agoThis reads like some kind of weather report. I love the future we are living in.
- andygates 8y agoThe most interesting thing about this flight was the weather: it was windy enough that the booster was (gasp!) a few metres off-centre.
- mikeash 8y agoAnd this is really important! As SpaceX goes from “recovery is a nice bonus” to “recovery is a standard part of every launch,” they need to be able to handle challenging conditions. Weather delays for launch already cost a lot of time and money, and requiring perfect weather at the launch site and out at sea could make it much worse. I think this is a really important milestone for them, even though it doesn’t look that way at first.
- mhb 8y agoVideo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhOUkBZrO1E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhOUkBZrO1E But difficult to see anything.
- ftcHn 8y agoJust before the landing at 85s in: https://youtu.be/zhOUkBZrO1E?t=85 https://youtu.be/zhOUkBZrO1E?t=85
- ufmace 8y agoVery awesome. Now just waiting for the price to drop and launch frequencies to increase enough that it's basically impossible to compete in the launch market if you don't recover your boosters.
- greglindahl 8y agoSpaceX says they're currently selling reused-booster GTO launches < 5.5 metric tons for $50mm, which is plenty low enough to screw up everyone else's financial plans. Ariane 6, for example, appears to cost more than SpaceX's current price.
- Diederich 8y ago> Ariane 6 Also, the first Ariane 6 test flight is currently scheduled for 2020. Meanwhile, the next generation SpaceX platform, the BFR/BFS, is also expected to start orbital testing in 2020. BFR/BFS is 100% reusable, and will bring lift costs down at least an order of magnitude. Now, everybody knows about 'Elon time', but the 2020 estimate comes from their COO, Gwynne Shotwell, who is without a doubt far more realistic with estimates. I'm obviously a pretty huge SpaceX fan, but I really hope there is some meaningful competition for them in the future. It seems to me that Blue Origin might be the only possibility there.
- nickik 8y agoI don't think Gwynne ever said orbital testing by 2020. They will start upper stage hops in 2019 maybe and potentially. However the booster is unlikely to be ready by then.
- Diederich 8y agoWell noted. I pulled 2020 from the Wikipedia article, which is sourced from Elon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BFR_(rocket)#cite_note-34 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BFR_(rocket)#cite_note-34 And several years ago at that.
- vidanay 8y agoHas there been any talk of a night time booster recovery? I can't think of a reason this wouldn't be possible; I don't think the landing system uses visible wavelength cameras (other than for human consumption).
- stronglikedan 8y ago> I don't think the landing system uses visible wavelength cameras (other than for human consumption). I can't imagine they'd taste very good. (Sorry, I couldn't resist and have karma to spare.)
- cloudwalking 8y agoToday's recovery was at night.
- antpls 8y agoLaunch of the 22th July was at night too and they recovered the first stage as usual
- wlesieutre 8y agoYep, several of them. And at least one spectacular nighttime explosions. Telestar 19 is a recent success: https://youtu.be/xybp6zLaGx4?t=1274 https://youtu.be/xybp6zLaGx4?t=1274 Landing happens at about 23 minutes, but the video connection from the drone ship drops out as usual. Link goes to an earlier time because it's neat to see the grid fins silhouetted in front of the engines at night. Here's today's Iridium-7 NEXT night landing, again without good video: https://youtu.be/vsDknmK30C0?t=1749 https://youtu.be/vsDknmK30C0?t=1749
- 8y ago
- LandR 8y agoDid they mange to catch the fairings?
- ohitsdom 8y agoNo they didn't. They said the wind was too much.
- andrewbarba 8y agoThe TechCrunch mobile experience is just so infuriating. If you scroll even slightly too far past the last paragraph it does this ridiculous jump animation to the next story and then you can’t scroll back up to re-read anything from the story you were just on.
- tjoff 8y agoAnd when running statistics they have data to support that this design is great because users apparently read more articles with it. The lack of common sense / shortsightedness in this industry is deafening. Speaking of which, this site uses oath and thus one of the most asinine GDPR-violations thought up by man.
- larkeith 8y agoI disabled Javascript in my mobile browser a year or so back for privacy reasons, and it's made my browsing experience much better - no more ads, subscription popups, or bloated pages that grind my phone's cpu to a crawl - and, of course, no more "helpful" mobile-specific behaviors. While I fairly frequently have to make exceptions for sites that are nonfunctional without JS (anything video-related, for example), I recommend trying it out. Of course, that does not excuse poor web design. Disclosure: I have a vested interest in getting more people to disable JS, as it means developers are more incentivized to design with us in mind.
- TremendousJudge 8y agowhat browser do you use?
- larkeith 8y agoChrome for Android, though I've been considering swapping to Firefox, as I've heard good things about it - Chrome doesn't support any add-ons.
- kitsunesoba 8y ago
- jchanimal 8y agoIf you like the ship’s name, you should read this sci-fi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spacecraft_in_the_Culture_series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spacecraft_in_the_Cult...
- nategri 8y agoSecond this. Also helps you reverse-engineer an Elon Musk somewhat.
- tialaramex 8y agoIn that it suggests he's thirsty for "just" wars? Or you think that running for-profit companies that produce expensive luxury goods counts as socialism? Or... he's a bit shallow and just enjoys a fun novel? The Culture setting is a sort-of utopian socialist society, its people literally don't have money, and the most obviously valuable "things" made in their society, Ships, are people, not products. Musk doesn't look like any flavour of socialist to me, let alone a Utopian one. The book those two names are from, specifically, is about the Culture using below the belt tactics first on our protagonist (he's blackmailed into doing what they want), and then on an entire alien civilisation, sparking a massive civil war apparently as a means to the end of regime change. It's very easy to be gung-ho about the Culture's intervention here because the alien civilisation in question is clearly both corrupt and bigoted - but the thing about massive civil wars is that even if you like the eventual outcome it sucks for ordinary people caught in the crossfire.
- jessaustin 8y agoPublished in '88, but yeesh, that's a bit on-the-nose for recent military-media-industrial-complex adventures...
- B1FF_PSUVM 8y ago> it sucks for ordinary people Hey, that has not stopped anyone since whenever. Especially those hell-bent on installing Paradise on Earth soonest.
- 8y ago
- ForHackernews 8y agoElsewhere, flagged off HN frontpage: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17604933 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17604933
- Orangeair 8y agoThe name of that ship gives me the impression that Elon (or someone in SpaceX) wanted to name it RTFM but had to compromise.