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You are asking: how are they “pushing the limits of spaceflight technology?” Let's not go futher, just concentrating at the incident in question. The anomalous

You are asking: how are they “pushing the limits of spaceflight technology?” Let's not go futher, just concentrating at the incident in question. The anomalous test happened on a location named "Landing Zone 1". That's not a thing any other rocket company has. Why? Because they don't land their rockets. It happened with a space capsule fished out of the brine. No other company reuses their space capsules in such a way. The detonation very likely will be found to have something to do with the SuperDraco system. Which they originally designed there to enable propulsive landing on dry land. The russians have their kick engines, sure, but that's not really same as hover landing, isn't it? Why did they plan that? For rapid reusability. So yes, if you ignore all the things they did for reusability, then they indeed are not pushing the limits of spaceflight technology.

rayiner 8y ago
> Let's not go futher, just concentrating at the incident in question. The anomalous test happened on a location named "Landing Zone 1". That's not a thing any other rocket company has. Why? Because they don't land their rockets. Parachute landing a crew pod into the ocean is something we first did the year my dad was born. > Which they originally designed there to enable propulsive landing on dry land. We landed an entire orbiter like an airliner three years before I was born.
- gliptic 8y ago
  Landing an orbiter like an airliner is not what SpaceX is doing.
- grecy 8y ago
  > Parachute landing a crew pod into the ocean is something we first did the year my dad was born You're getting confused between the tiny pod that people sit in - which basically does nothing, and the actual rocket, with all the flames and gasses and actually make the pod go somewhere. Nobody has ever landed and reused the rocket before SpaceX > landed an entire orbiter like an airliner three years before I was born Yes, a thing with wings landed using lift from the wings. It did not use rockets for propulsive landing like SpaceX have designed.
- wolf550e 8y ago
  You are being very disingenuous. I do not believe you do not know that reusing the Space Shuttle Orbiter after landing required disassembling it, which made launching satellites on the reusable STS cost much more than using expendable rockets of the time as opposed to reusing the Falcon 9 booster which does not require disassembly and is cheaper than using a newly built Falcon 9 booster, which itself is cheaper than the competitor's Atlas V, which uses engines built in Russia and has lowered prices significantly in response to Falcon 9 became certified to fly government payloads. I am mentioning the fact that RD-180 is built in Russia only because the US company got the plans to build them from the Russians but decided that doing that is too expensive while built-in-Russia engines are available, so basically the US did not have the capability to manufacture state-of-the-art engines until SpaceX Raptor, Blue Origin BE-4. If newly built RS-25 happen, I'll count those as state of the art, but so far they're only using old already-flown-on-shuttle engines with extremely expensive computer upgrades.

rayiner 8y ago

> Let's not go futher, just concentrating at the incident in question. The anomalous test happened on a location named "Landing Zone 1". That's not a thing any other rocket company has. Why? Because they don't land their rockets. Parachute landing a crew pod into the ocean is something we first did the year my dad was born. > Which they originally designed there to enable propulsive landing on dry land. We landed an entire orbiter like an airliner three years before I was born.

gliptic 8y ago
Landing an orbiter like an airliner is not what SpaceX is doing.
grecy 8y ago
> Parachute landing a crew pod into the ocean is something we first did the year my dad was born You're getting confused between the tiny pod that people sit in - which basically does nothing, and the actual rocket, with all the flames and gasses and actually make the pod go somewhere. Nobody has ever landed and reused the rocket before SpaceX > landed an entire orbiter like an airliner three years before I was born Yes, a thing with wings landed using lift from the wings. It did not use rockets for propulsive landing like SpaceX have designed.
wolf550e 8y ago
You are being very disingenuous. I do not believe you do not know that reusing the Space Shuttle Orbiter after landing required disassembling it, which made launching satellites on the reusable STS cost much more than using expendable rockets of the time as opposed to reusing the Falcon 9 booster which does not require disassembly and is cheaper than using a newly built Falcon 9 booster, which itself is cheaper than the competitor's Atlas V, which uses engines built in Russia and has lowered prices significantly in response to Falcon 9 became certified to fly government payloads. I am mentioning the fact that RD-180 is built in Russia only because the US company got the plans to build them from the Russians but decided that doing that is too expensive while built-in-Russia engines are available, so basically the US did not have the capability to manufacture state-of-the-art engines until SpaceX Raptor, Blue Origin BE-4. If newly built RS-25 happen, I'll count those as state of the art, but so far they're only using old already-flown-on-shuttle engines with extremely expensive computer upgrades.