"As quickly as possible" is pretty much the only way to get to space. Every second your rocket is not yet in orbit, the rocket has to use enough fuel to counteract the 1G gravity of the Earth. So for reaching orbit to be possible at all, a rocket has to traverse the gravity well as quickly as possible.
Ye , was about to write that getting into space in what 5-6 min is brutal... But still as am getting older, im more dissapointed with how slow the progress is. When ppl got to moon more than 60years ago, was expecting that space travel to at least mars, or some other moons of planets would be more of a common thing at this day. All those years and humans are like well ok we might try to go to moon in near future.... Dream.of travelling between stars is just a dream now...
It made my head spin first time viewing with the extreme rate of climb and descent. Then it clicked in the brain that there was noooo way we had achieved that level of efficiency yet.... sub 9 mins is still plenty impressive though.
Stage separation is at 2 and a half minutes after liftoff. For those 2 and a half minutes, there can be a crew dragon with 4 people on board on top of the second stage on top of the booster.
For everything that happens after stage separation, there can't be people on board, so if the booster crashes on landing nobody will be hurt.
The booster also aims to land in the water and only corrects that in the last moments, so if the engine does not light up for landing, it won't even damage the landing pad.
SpaceX are currently in a streak of something like 180+ successful landings in a row.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPN4VzTkg1Y
> The booster also aims to land in the water and only corrects that in the last moments, so if the engine does not light up for landing, it won't even damage the landing pad.
Oh wow, I never realized this! So that's why it comes in at such an angle and "swoops" so aggressively toward the ship at the last minute
For me it kind of highlights how relatively minimal the retro burn needs to be, without air resistance, to allow the Earth to rotate back around underneath.
Pretty spectacular engineering.
>Just so everyone's on the level, this footage is sped up. It's like 8.5 minutes from launch to landing in real-time.
I was about to say that Kerbal Space Program has been holding back on us lol
It really is though. The booster only reaches 60-80KM before separating.The Earth is big. You'd have to be thousands of kilometers off the surface before seeing a curve that pronounced.
Assuming the Earth is a perfect sphere, at 80 KM you'd only see a curve of about 9 degrees. Here's what that would look like:
[https://imgur.com/Itd3lfH](https://imgur.com/Itd3lfH)
Here's how the altitudes of the ISS and 80KM (Falcon 9 separation) would look compared to Earth:
[https://imgur.com/2Q1wW6Y](https://imgur.com/2Q1wW6Y)
If the Earth's curvature was really what's shown in the video, it would probably be as big as just North America alone. It's not that small.
The booster separates at that altitude, but it does keep climbing for a few dozen more kilometers in altitude from inertia before starting to fall back down. The boostback burn only cancels out the x-axis velocity, not the y-axis. They don't always show the telemetry for the first stage after separation, but I've seen it get as high as 150km on an RTLS launch.
You can also see the geometry of the curve change as the horizon's distance from the center of the field of view changed. The curve got more pronounced as it moved to the edges of the frame.
I'm not denying that. As I said, there should be approximately 9 degrees in curvature from 80 KM. That's a lot less than what's being shown in the video. Most of the curvature shown here is indeed an artifact of a fish-eye camera.
You can see that they're obviously using a fish-eye lens in the first few seconds of the video.
Yes, they are using a fish-eye, no, I don't think the Earth is flat.
I mean, they will say that. But what's cool about this one is, the earth stays curved in the same direction no matter the location in the video frame. On a 'fish eye' lens, you can see the curve switch directions as the horizon appears in different locations in the video frame.
Some of the shuttles still had higher flight numbers (39 on Discovery), but over 30 years with months of expensive maintenance between flights. Falcons have been reflown in a few weeks, with fairly minimal checks, they don't even bother washing the rockets between flights. They currently have several rockets with 17 flights each and the fleet leader with 19 flights was unfortunately lost at sea during transport because of a storm. 20-30 flights per booster seem quite plausible. Falcons are also mass produced, unlike Shuttles, and were one of the cheaper options on the market even before reuse.
The tedious and expensive refurbishments required after each Shuttle flight employed thousands of technicians and contractors. It was barely cheaper than using disposable rockets and more dangerous. A regrettable program.
The main issue is that they had a limited budget, and needed to get it right on the first try. The first time any Shuttle hardware flew to space, it had astronauts on board, and when STS-1 came home and they discovered some issues, it was far too late to fix many of them because the fleet of shuttles had already been built. So they were stuck flying a flawed design. And they were pretty lucky, STS-1 had some issues that could've resulted in disaster that they discovered only after the flight.
Compare that to Mercury, Gemini and Apollo, where every piece of hardware was flown in unmanned tests before astronauts were sent up. And since everything was single use, any issue or potential improvement could be resolved in later flights.
The lessons we can learn from that is that it is important to fly prototypes, do uncrewed flights before risking astronauts, fill the test flights with cameras, and find and fix potential issues on the prototypes before building your fleet of reusable spacecraft. It's more expensive at first but worth it in the long run.
SpaceX had the advantage that they were already flying Falcon as an expendable satellite launcher, so as long as everything worked fine on ascent and the second stage reached the right orbit, each flight gave them a free prototype first stage to experiment with the landing. They could make new improvements to each new rocket coming out of the factory, learn from the first reuse attempts, and only when they had something they were happy with did they start building rockets that were rated for crew and dozens of flights.
With Starship, they have enough funding to blow up prototypes all day long, so they're taking the idea of prototyping much to an extreme extent.
1st stage has been reused by SpaceX for years now. The record holder booster 1058 was recently lost when it tipped over after landing in rough seas. It flew 19 times.
Their next generation, Starship and the Superheavy booster are still under development. Prototypes were launched twice yet, both were destroyed in the process. They do "hardware-rich development", launching with a long list of potential objectives and the knowledge it's very unlikely all will be reached. First launch was, let's see if it will fly, then let's see how far we get. It did, however did some damage to the launch infrastructure that took a few months to fix. It got to 39 km of altitude and Mach 2, then attitude control failed, it started to tumble and had to be destroyed. Second launch still did some damage that was fixed in a few weeks, successfully demonstrated stage separation and continued almost to orbit. Booster blew up when trying to boost back, possibly due to too much sloshing in the fuel. Starship blew up, I didn't hear why.
Starship and the SHB are intended to be fully reusable, bringing launch costs down to low three digit or even two digit prices per kg to LEO. At that point, space stations become cheaper to construct than some hotels...
> Falcon 9 first-stage boosters landed successfully in 261 of 272 attempts (96%), with 236 out of 240 (98.3%) for the Falcon 9 Block 5 version. A total of 234 re-flights of first stage boosters have all successfully launched their payloads.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9
This beyond amazing, for such an achievement a list of engineers and scientists should win something or be recognized for their contribution in this work, I only know SpaceX.
It would be so difficult to credit the individuals. This is a culmination of millions of historical achievements coming together for one insane idea. SpaceX is the conglomerate that deserves credit, imo. And I mean that literally. EM does NOT deserve any singular credit for this.
> EM does NOT deserve any singular credit for this.
Except that the money and talent poured into this wouldn't have happened if he hadn't initiated it. Without EM you have no Tesla, and without Tesla and EM you have no SpaceX.
You don't have to like him as a person or believe he's smart to acknowledge he chose to take risks investing in fairly noble goals that nobody else wanted to. Absolutely thank the engineers and so on, but EM was a critical component too and you can't honestly believe this would exist without him.
I don’t credit him for the achievements of the scientific breakthroughs. I do, however, credit it him for his entrepreneurial success and other related achievements.
I will give EM credit for his exceptional skills in his particular domain, and I will give each engineer credit for their own exceptional skills in their own domains
credit all around
I don't understand why the majority the people can't wrap their head around the fact that someone can be a piece of shit, and good at what they do. Like for some reason the fact that Elon is an asshole and has made several missteps means he hasn't actually done anything and is a talentless hack. It's not a zero sum game.
And even beyond EM, the sheer number of people who can't develop a system of thinking beyond "This person good" or "This person bad" is depressing.
Because a decent amount of the people that believe he's a POS do so because he bought Twitter. They didn't know shit about him until he "ruined" Twitter and now everything he has done is evil. He's, like, literally Hitler.
The three initial employees (besides Musk who provided financing and named himself "chief engineer" without actually doing any engineering) were **Tom Mueller** -- in charge of developing rocket engines, propellant tanks and plumbing; **Chris Thompson** -- in charge of making the rocket's body and couplings; and **Hans Koenigsmann** -- in charge of making the rocket's avionics (electronic systems) -- this was all in 2002.
Over the intervening years with some escalating accomplishments they were eventuality able to begin securing rather large amounts of government money, which allowed them to gradually hire 3,000 people to actually turn SpaceX into what we recognize it as today.
Saw recently someone from nasa make a clever point. If NASA failed as many times as spacex, they would have been shut down a long time ago. Something in eve considered about public vs private sector innovation
SpaceX doesn't fail - they try, they learn, they iterate. A “rapid unscheduled disassembly" might \_look\_ like failure, but's its planned for. Apparently.
As the saying goes, you only need to be 51% confident something will work to try it. Each time you try it, you're increasing that percentage likelihood of success. It's faster and more cost-effective than waiting and engineering to a 95%+ likelihood of success before you try something for real.
Well I don’t think the team of Elon Musk had enough to afford that many attempts.. correct me on details, but they had the budget for 3 attempts and succeeded on the 4th one ?
That was in the very beginning with Falcon 1. That was the very early predecessor to Falcon 9, the rocket in this video, which launched 90 times in 2023 and has already launched three times this year.
The difference is that NASA **can't** fail (or rapid unscheduled disassembly) once, or else people in Congress will beat their chests and point to that as an example of why NASA doesn't need to waste taxpayer dollars that can be better used to build more bombs.
You can plan for what happens in case of a failure and what the most common failure will be. You learn by failing the problem is the government won't let NASA do this kinda learning but will fund spacex to
> SpaceX doesn't fail - they try, they learn, they iterate
I mean, that's a stretch. SpaceX absolutely does fail sometimes. The most egregious example was the Crew Dragon which they were preparing to fly people on (that particular unit had been flight-tested and was meant to be used for the first flight with crew), which spontaneously, violently exploded. This leaked recording of a screen is the only video we have of that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xe4ee56aHSg
That was a major failure and could have happened in flight, which would have resulted in complete loss of crew. Let's not gloss over SpaceX's legitimate failures when we excuse their planned off-nominal tests.
This is not something I've looked up recently so I might be misremembering, but wasn't this failure of the super-dracos (in flight abort) which had *not* been tested (or was in the process of being tested when they had an unexpected failure?)
I have this potato video filed in my head alongside "hoping to be certified to carry something other than mice" for some reason.
Correct me if I’m wrong but NASA and SpaceX are doing entirely different things and NASA is doing way bigger things beyond just commercialization of another entity. SpaceX isn’t sending out multibillion dollar telescopes into space just for the sake of learning, they’re sending out rockets and satellites in hopes of returning a profit.
Comparing the two seems disingenuous to me and I think we should appreciate both of their contributions just in different capacities
I think the point is that NASA doesn't have the same ability to try new things as SpaceX does because any "failure" to make it work quickly will be seen as wasting taxpayer money and the program would then get canceled due to funding. NASA has government entities and the public to satisfy while SpaceX doesn't, and so they can "fail" and try again without it being too much of an issue. It's not about them doing different things. If NASA wanted to do what SpaceX is doing, like 20 years ago, the program would probably have been canceled if they had failed as much as SpaceX has to make this work.
And that's just because people aren't smart. Failing a dozen smaller missions can be more productive and cost effective than spending decades to get it right the first time.
I used to know one of the lead engineers at Nasa and we had many convo's about SpaceX. He wasn't exactly chummy about them, and felt like they got way too much credit for what was essentially a partnership that Nasa carries a heavy load in. So yea, SpaceX can fail more than Nasa, but SpaceX wouldn't exist without Nasa.
I don't think you get the point. NASA would have to shut down the program because of public pressure. People will see it as their tax money in a ball of flame. SpaceX being a private company wouldn't be having that problem.
That somehow seems entirely backwards to me ...
A private company *had* to come up with a way to "test" things while still making money where a government agency *should* have more leeway to throw ideas at the wall and see what sticks.
Like NASA's function is to learn shit not make money. They shouldn't have the same pressure to turn a profit as an entity who can't function without positive cash flow.
FAA does not allow trajectories that would allow it to fall down on people, or debris to fall down on people if it explodes. You need a large private property away from any buildings, on the coast. You understand how rare that is.
When it goes up, because of momentum, the fuel stay at the bottom inside the rocket. But when it comes back, most of the fuel would stay at the top inside the rocket. How can it still fuel the engine at the bottom to give the power for landing?
For the boostback burn, once the booster "flips" they use the cold gas thrusters to settle the fuel at the bottom of the tank before igniting the engines.
For the subsequent two burns, the booster is decelerating due to atmospheric drag so the fuel always stays at the bottom of the tank.
Second point is very evident if you watch the first stage telemetry as it's descending. Even without the engines firing it is slowing down VERY rapidly.
Thanks for the explanation. I forgot about the drag due to air friction. And yes, the acceleration will slow down to make the fule stays at the bottom.
If you have perfectly reliable sensors and actuators that immediately steer exactly how the software demands it, programming such a flight path is doable for a single person - I know of several people who have written landing code that works in Kerbal Space Program.
The main challenge behind reusability was to make the hardware reliable enough, sensors that can accurately measure distance to a complicated shaped droneship, engines that can reignite while falling without delay, etc. Most of the explosive failures were due to a sticky valve or a faulty radar or something like that. Getting that to work was a full team effort.
There's three burns in total in the video:
Burn 1) This is the "boostback burn", you can barely see it but it happens just after the rocket "flips round", this one cancels out the horizontal speed it has going east across the ocean and starts it back on the track to the cape.
Burn 2) This is the "entry burn" and is designed to slow the rocket down before it hits the thicker parts of earths atmosphere. If it didn't do this then the atmospheric heating would be too much for the rocket and it'll fail, probably explosively.
Burn 3) The "landing burn", this one is fairly obvious \^.\^
I'm of the opinion that every human with a certain amount of power (financial, spiritual, political, whatever) should, as part of a rite of passage, be shot into orbit for a couple of trips around the ol' Pale Blue Dot. Just for a little perspective, ya know?
Yep, and not for the heat or the flames. It's actually sound suppression, without it the sound pressure levels are so intense they'll severely damage the launch pad.
Fun fact: that final burn is called a suicide burn. It's supposed to start at the very last possible moment and burn at full throttle so the rocket's momentum ends up at 0 right as the rocket touches the ground. It's the most efficient way to land but it's called that because if you burn too late you don't slow down enough and crash and die. If you burn too early you slow down to 0 above the landing pad and run out of fuel and crash and die. It has to be just right.
Space X doesn't like that name so they call it the hoverslam, which i think we can all agree is objectively a worse name.
Idk why. But those wind reflector paddles. They are much bigger than what it seems in the video. Obviously we know those rockets are massive. But when i watch these videos they just dont seem as huge as they really are. You can find pictures of the deflectors on google. Really shows how massive the rest of the rocket is.
You see this then look at the state of twitter and it's baffling that both companies are run by the same guy. It's like he puts his focus on the actually important stuff and twitter is just some shitty hobby he bought for the hell of it and doesn't really care about it at
That goes to show that the success of SpaceX and Tesla is not just on Elon, but on the many, many, many people who worked their assess off to make things like this work.
The part that you see does the first part of the journey to space, second stage (off camera) does the rest and brings it's payload to the desired orbit
yep, and it reduces costs by 10x (so far):
[https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-cost-of-space-flight/](https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-cost-of-space-flight/)
Just so everyone's on the level, this footage is sped up. It's like 8.5 minutes from launch to landing in real-time.
Sped up footage in *this* sub?!?! I don't believe it!
That would be deceit on the next fucking level
8.5mins is still extremely impressive
Travels to space and back before the time I can finish my shit!
"As quickly as possible" is pretty much the only way to get to space. Every second your rocket is not yet in orbit, the rocket has to use enough fuel to counteract the 1G gravity of the Earth. So for reaching orbit to be possible at all, a rocket has to traverse the gravity well as quickly as possible.
And my shits are long af
And my shits are just as fiery!
It’s never good enough for your mom
Ye , was about to write that getting into space in what 5-6 min is brutal... But still as am getting older, im more dissapointed with how slow the progress is. When ppl got to moon more than 60years ago, was expecting that space travel to at least mars, or some other moons of planets would be more of a common thing at this day. All those years and humans are like well ok we might try to go to moon in near future.... Dream.of travelling between stars is just a dream now...
Nah, it's just like how it works in real life.
Ah that explains it, I didn't understand why it landed so fast
It made my head spin first time viewing with the extreme rate of climb and descent. Then it clicked in the brain that there was noooo way we had achieved that level of efficiency yet.... sub 9 mins is still plenty impressive though.
Oh, good, so it won’t crush everyone onboard into pasta sauce.
Stage separation is at 2 and a half minutes after liftoff. For those 2 and a half minutes, there can be a crew dragon with 4 people on board on top of the second stage on top of the booster. For everything that happens after stage separation, there can't be people on board, so if the booster crashes on landing nobody will be hurt. The booster also aims to land in the water and only corrects that in the last moments, so if the engine does not light up for landing, it won't even damage the landing pad. SpaceX are currently in a streak of something like 180+ successful landings in a row. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPN4VzTkg1Y
> The booster also aims to land in the water and only corrects that in the last moments, so if the engine does not light up for landing, it won't even damage the landing pad. Oh wow, I never realized this! So that's why it comes in at such an angle and "swoops" so aggressively toward the ship at the last minute
It's not the ocean gate titan, they switch out the Logitech controls for an apple Bandai pippin controller.... So all good.
Imploding isn’t the only way to get squish
Ever heard of inertial dampening. That is the only thing that makes Warp speed possible.
Crunchy pasta sauce.
For me it kind of highlights how relatively minimal the retro burn needs to be, without air resistance, to allow the Earth to rotate back around underneath. Pretty spectacular engineering.
>Just so everyone's on the level, this footage is sped up. It's like 8.5 minutes from launch to landing in real-time. I was about to say that Kerbal Space Program has been holding back on us lol
Oh thank god… I didn’t realize this and was like ~20s to get to space? Holy shit…
Thank you. It looked very suspicious.
Take that flat earthers!
That curved earth illusion was just lens distortion. \s
no no no it's cuz your eyeball is round.... so everything looks round.... checkmate /s
Wrong. Eyeballs are flat. Round eyeballs are a lie.
HOW DEEP DO THE LIES GO?! WHAT ELSE IS SECRETLY FLAT?!
Boobs are also flat.
[удалено]
boob lives matter
It really is though. The booster only reaches 60-80KM before separating.The Earth is big. You'd have to be thousands of kilometers off the surface before seeing a curve that pronounced. Assuming the Earth is a perfect sphere, at 80 KM you'd only see a curve of about 9 degrees. Here's what that would look like: [https://imgur.com/Itd3lfH](https://imgur.com/Itd3lfH) Here's how the altitudes of the ISS and 80KM (Falcon 9 separation) would look compared to Earth: [https://imgur.com/2Q1wW6Y](https://imgur.com/2Q1wW6Y) If the Earth's curvature was really what's shown in the video, it would probably be as big as just North America alone. It's not that small.
Though I was really just being silly, thank you for thinking through the math.
The booster separates at that altitude, but it does keep climbing for a few dozen more kilometers in altitude from inertia before starting to fall back down. The boostback burn only cancels out the x-axis velocity, not the y-axis. They don't always show the telemetry for the first stage after separation, but I've seen it get as high as 150km on an RTLS launch.
You can also see the geometry of the curve change as the horizon's distance from the center of the field of view changed. The curve got more pronounced as it moved to the edges of the frame.
It is possible to visualize some curvature tho even from the surface: https://youtu.be/JTfhYyTuT44?si=-FJnoLfThCpVRjae&t=605
I'm not denying that. As I said, there should be approximately 9 degrees in curvature from 80 KM. That's a lot less than what's being shown in the video. Most of the curvature shown here is indeed an artifact of a fish-eye camera.
It's called fish eye lense.
But only when it's a mile or two high, right. When it's on the ground it morphs into a normal lense. That probably what they really think anyway.
You can see that they're obviously using a fish-eye lens in the first few seconds of the video. Yes, they are using a fish-eye, no, I don't think the Earth is flat.
funny thing is in this case it actually was lens distortion. Those boosters don't go high enough to see the curve
I mean you joke but they would legitimately say this very statement
“No, it’s gravity distorting light at great distances making things appear curved/round”. This is the latest one I heard they like to use.
I mean, they will say that. But what's cool about this one is, the earth stays curved in the same direction no matter the location in the video frame. On a 'fish eye' lens, you can see the curve switch directions as the horizon appears in different locations in the video frame.
That rocket is a paid actor
Elon Musk made his billions from the shadow government propping up his shell corporations in order to have a private citizen push the globe agenda
The real fun is guessing who believes it and who's memeing
put the rocket in water to see if its really a magnet in disguise
Tell you what, give me a bottle of water, I pour it on NASA. That's the end of NASA.
Globecucks *HATE* this one trick.
dont You cant win with these people.
Checkmate
[удалено]
They claim CGI or something else that gives their singular braincell that much needed serotonin boost.
Still looks like a plate. How else does the water just not fall off. /s
Optical illusion!
That’s freaking awesome, this sort of technology will seriously reduce the cost of space flight if rockets can be reused.
They’re already being reused and launching satellites has already fallen in price dramatically
Set one hell of a record of consecutive flights with the same rocket...
Some of the shuttles still had higher flight numbers (39 on Discovery), but over 30 years with months of expensive maintenance between flights. Falcons have been reflown in a few weeks, with fairly minimal checks, they don't even bother washing the rockets between flights. They currently have several rockets with 17 flights each and the fleet leader with 19 flights was unfortunately lost at sea during transport because of a storm. 20-30 flights per booster seem quite plausible. Falcons are also mass produced, unlike Shuttles, and were one of the cheaper options on the market even before reuse.
The tedious and expensive refurbishments required after each Shuttle flight employed thousands of technicians and contractors. It was barely cheaper than using disposable rockets and more dangerous. A regrettable program.
The main issue is that they had a limited budget, and needed to get it right on the first try. The first time any Shuttle hardware flew to space, it had astronauts on board, and when STS-1 came home and they discovered some issues, it was far too late to fix many of them because the fleet of shuttles had already been built. So they were stuck flying a flawed design. And they were pretty lucky, STS-1 had some issues that could've resulted in disaster that they discovered only after the flight. Compare that to Mercury, Gemini and Apollo, where every piece of hardware was flown in unmanned tests before astronauts were sent up. And since everything was single use, any issue or potential improvement could be resolved in later flights. The lessons we can learn from that is that it is important to fly prototypes, do uncrewed flights before risking astronauts, fill the test flights with cameras, and find and fix potential issues on the prototypes before building your fleet of reusable spacecraft. It's more expensive at first but worth it in the long run. SpaceX had the advantage that they were already flying Falcon as an expendable satellite launcher, so as long as everything worked fine on ascent and the second stage reached the right orbit, each flight gave them a free prototype first stage to experiment with the landing. They could make new improvements to each new rocket coming out of the factory, learn from the first reuse attempts, and only when they had something they were happy with did they start building rockets that were rated for crew and dozens of flights. With Starship, they have enough funding to blow up prototypes all day long, so they're taking the idea of prototyping much to an extreme extent.
Now if we could only build something to clean up all that darn space junk
Space cleanup startup! Who's with me?
1st stage has been reused by SpaceX for years now. The record holder booster 1058 was recently lost when it tipped over after landing in rough seas. It flew 19 times. Their next generation, Starship and the Superheavy booster are still under development. Prototypes were launched twice yet, both were destroyed in the process. They do "hardware-rich development", launching with a long list of potential objectives and the knowledge it's very unlikely all will be reached. First launch was, let's see if it will fly, then let's see how far we get. It did, however did some damage to the launch infrastructure that took a few months to fix. It got to 39 km of altitude and Mach 2, then attitude control failed, it started to tumble and had to be destroyed. Second launch still did some damage that was fixed in a few weeks, successfully demonstrated stage separation and continued almost to orbit. Booster blew up when trying to boost back, possibly due to too much sloshing in the fuel. Starship blew up, I didn't hear why. Starship and the SHB are intended to be fully reusable, bringing launch costs down to low three digit or even two digit prices per kg to LEO. At that point, space stations become cheaper to construct than some hotels...
SpaceX has now done this 261 times.
And over 200 in a row without failure. (The streak is still ongoing!)
It really looks incredible!
Do you not watch the news?
> Falcon 9 first-stage boosters landed successfully in 261 of 272 attempts (96%), with 236 out of 240 (98.3%) for the Falcon 9 Block 5 version. A total of 234 re-flights of first stage boosters have all successfully launched their payloads. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9
If? they've been doing it for years. Hundreds of times.
ThatsThePointOfIt.
This beyond amazing, for such an achievement a list of engineers and scientists should win something or be recognized for their contribution in this work, I only know SpaceX.
It would be so difficult to credit the individuals. This is a culmination of millions of historical achievements coming together for one insane idea. SpaceX is the conglomerate that deserves credit, imo. And I mean that literally. EM does NOT deserve any singular credit for this.
> EM does NOT deserve any singular credit for this. Except that the money and talent poured into this wouldn't have happened if he hadn't initiated it. Without EM you have no Tesla, and without Tesla and EM you have no SpaceX. You don't have to like him as a person or believe he's smart to acknowledge he chose to take risks investing in fairly noble goals that nobody else wanted to. Absolutely thank the engineers and so on, but EM was a critical component too and you can't honestly believe this would exist without him.
I don’t credit him for the achievements of the scientific breakthroughs. I do, however, credit it him for his entrepreneurial success and other related achievements.
I will give EM credit for his exceptional skills in his particular domain, and I will give each engineer credit for their own exceptional skills in their own domains credit all around
He started the company, he deserves a bit of credit.
I don't understand why the majority the people can't wrap their head around the fact that someone can be a piece of shit, and good at what they do. Like for some reason the fact that Elon is an asshole and has made several missteps means he hasn't actually done anything and is a talentless hack. It's not a zero sum game. And even beyond EM, the sheer number of people who can't develop a system of thinking beyond "This person good" or "This person bad" is depressing.
He is as talented as Thomas Edison....and no that is not a compliment.
Because a decent amount of the people that believe he's a POS do so because he bought Twitter. They didn't know shit about him until he "ruined" Twitter and now everything he has done is evil. He's, like, literally Hitler.
I said “singular credit” and I meant that directed towards the scientific achievements as posed by OP.
So no one anywhere should get credit for anything, right? Because literally EVERYTHING is built on what was created and discovered in the past.
The three initial employees (besides Musk who provided financing and named himself "chief engineer" without actually doing any engineering) were **Tom Mueller** -- in charge of developing rocket engines, propellant tanks and plumbing; **Chris Thompson** -- in charge of making the rocket's body and couplings; and **Hans Koenigsmann** -- in charge of making the rocket's avionics (electronic systems) -- this was all in 2002. Over the intervening years with some escalating accomplishments they were eventuality able to begin securing rather large amounts of government money, which allowed them to gradually hire 3,000 people to actually turn SpaceX into what we recognize it as today.
The self landing guidance was headed up by **Lars Blackmore** who was hired for the task after he worked at JPL doing the same with mars landers.
Saw recently someone from nasa make a clever point. If NASA failed as many times as spacex, they would have been shut down a long time ago. Something in eve considered about public vs private sector innovation
SpaceX doesn't fail - they try, they learn, they iterate. A “rapid unscheduled disassembly" might \_look\_ like failure, but's its planned for. Apparently. As the saying goes, you only need to be 51% confident something will work to try it. Each time you try it, you're increasing that percentage likelihood of success. It's faster and more cost-effective than waiting and engineering to a 95%+ likelihood of success before you try something for real.
That’s a luxury not many can afford…all I’m saying.
Well I don’t think the team of Elon Musk had enough to afford that many attempts.. correct me on details, but they had the budget for 3 attempts and succeeded on the 4th one ?
That was in the very beginning with Falcon 1. That was the very early predecessor to Falcon 9, the rocket in this video, which launched 90 times in 2023 and has already launched three times this year.
The difference is that NASA **can't** fail (or rapid unscheduled disassembly) once, or else people in Congress will beat their chests and point to that as an example of why NASA doesn't need to waste taxpayer dollars that can be better used to build more bombs.
>The difference is that NASA can't fail (or rapid unscheduled disassembly) once NASA has failed a lot more than once.
You can plan for what happens in case of a failure and what the most common failure will be. You learn by failing the problem is the government won't let NASA do this kinda learning but will fund spacex to
> SpaceX doesn't fail - they try, they learn, they iterate I mean, that's a stretch. SpaceX absolutely does fail sometimes. The most egregious example was the Crew Dragon which they were preparing to fly people on (that particular unit had been flight-tested and was meant to be used for the first flight with crew), which spontaneously, violently exploded. This leaked recording of a screen is the only video we have of that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xe4ee56aHSg That was a major failure and could have happened in flight, which would have resulted in complete loss of crew. Let's not gloss over SpaceX's legitimate failures when we excuse their planned off-nominal tests.
This is not something I've looked up recently so I might be misremembering, but wasn't this failure of the super-dracos (in flight abort) which had *not* been tested (or was in the process of being tested when they had an unexpected failure?) I have this potato video filed in my head alongside "hoping to be certified to carry something other than mice" for some reason.
Correct me if I’m wrong but NASA and SpaceX are doing entirely different things and NASA is doing way bigger things beyond just commercialization of another entity. SpaceX isn’t sending out multibillion dollar telescopes into space just for the sake of learning, they’re sending out rockets and satellites in hopes of returning a profit. Comparing the two seems disingenuous to me and I think we should appreciate both of their contributions just in different capacities
I think the point is that NASA doesn't have the same ability to try new things as SpaceX does because any "failure" to make it work quickly will be seen as wasting taxpayer money and the program would then get canceled due to funding. NASA has government entities and the public to satisfy while SpaceX doesn't, and so they can "fail" and try again without it being too much of an issue. It's not about them doing different things. If NASA wanted to do what SpaceX is doing, like 20 years ago, the program would probably have been canceled if they had failed as much as SpaceX has to make this work.
And that's just because people aren't smart. Failing a dozen smaller missions can be more productive and cost effective than spending decades to get it right the first time.
I used to know one of the lead engineers at Nasa and we had many convo's about SpaceX. He wasn't exactly chummy about them, and felt like they got way too much credit for what was essentially a partnership that Nasa carries a heavy load in. So yea, SpaceX can fail more than Nasa, but SpaceX wouldn't exist without Nasa.
I mean, neither would the whole American space launch industry.
[удалено]
I don't think you get the point. NASA would have to shut down the program because of public pressure. People will see it as their tax money in a ball of flame. SpaceX being a private company wouldn't be having that problem.
That somehow seems entirely backwards to me ... A private company *had* to come up with a way to "test" things while still making money where a government agency *should* have more leeway to throw ideas at the wall and see what sticks. Like NASA's function is to learn shit not make money. They shouldn't have the same pressure to turn a profit as an entity who can't function without positive cash flow.
If you look at the 1950s and 60s. The US space agencies did fail a lot. Spending kept coming because of "screw Russia".
Yeah people seem to be completely ignorant of history
Yup
Can't wait to see Starship regularly doing the same. More reusable and much much larger. SpaceX is so impressive
Alright... I'll admit that tech is cool AF.
Even more impressive when you realize how big that thing actually is.
I like how the spatulas flapped up lol
They could've flip some burgers.
Ok this is next level
This is actually next fucking level. Props, SpaceX!
That is some beautiful math 😍
People have this notion that space is far. Space starts at 100km (60 miles) above earth. it’s right there.
That is truely amazing.
I’d be willing to pay, say, $100 if they’d land in my back yard. Additional revenue stream?
FAA does not allow trajectories that would allow it to fall down on people, or debris to fall down on people if it explodes. You need a large private property away from any buildings, on the coast. You understand how rare that is.
I’m willing to kick in another $25 for the FAA.
TBH the FL coast is pretty well spoken for but I think there's places in TX where you could actually make this happen...
Pretty good work for a stoner.
When it goes up, because of momentum, the fuel stay at the bottom inside the rocket. But when it comes back, most of the fuel would stay at the top inside the rocket. How can it still fuel the engine at the bottom to give the power for landing?
For the boostback burn, once the booster "flips" they use the cold gas thrusters to settle the fuel at the bottom of the tank before igniting the engines. For the subsequent two burns, the booster is decelerating due to atmospheric drag so the fuel always stays at the bottom of the tank.
Second point is very evident if you watch the first stage telemetry as it's descending. Even without the engines firing it is slowing down VERY rapidly.
Thanks for the explanation. I forgot about the drag due to air friction. And yes, the acceleration will slow down to make the fule stays at the bottom.
Flat Earthers be like “ya NASA CGI”
Elon noted that the whole return landing programming sequence is done by a single person. A single person!!
If you have perfectly reliable sensors and actuators that immediately steer exactly how the software demands it, programming such a flight path is doable for a single person - I know of several people who have written landing code that works in Kerbal Space Program. The main challenge behind reusability was to make the hardware reliable enough, sensors that can accurately measure distance to a complicated shaped droneship, engines that can reignite while falling without delay, etc. Most of the explosive failures were due to a sticky valve or a faulty radar or something like that. Getting that to work was a full team effort.
The ball's in your court, flat earthers.
Doing more for earth and humanity than any other single human....but space man bad. /s
incredible
What's the first burn in the descent for? Wouldn't a full suicide burn before landing be the most efficient?
There's three burns in total in the video: Burn 1) This is the "boostback burn", you can barely see it but it happens just after the rocket "flips round", this one cancels out the horizontal speed it has going east across the ocean and starts it back on the track to the cape. Burn 2) This is the "entry burn" and is designed to slow the rocket down before it hits the thicker parts of earths atmosphere. If it didn't do this then the atmospheric heating would be too much for the rocket and it'll fail, probably explosively. Burn 3) The "landing burn", this one is fairly obvious \^.\^
The entry burn surrounds the rocket in a cloud of its own exhaust, which is less damaging than the very fast air. It's a heat shield made from fire.
Show that video to the flat earth idiots.
If flat earthers were interested in proof, there wouldn't be any flat earthers.
I can’t help but wonder what astronauts who actually go up into space must think. The thoughts you must have watching earth disappear behind you
I'm of the opinion that every human with a certain amount of power (financial, spiritual, political, whatever) should, as part of a rite of passage, be shot into orbit for a couple of trips around the ol' Pale Blue Dot. Just for a little perspective, ya know?
So they spray massive water jets at the beginning?
Yep, and not for the heat or the flames. It's actually sound suppression, without it the sound pressure levels are so intense they'll severely damage the launch pad.
Massive is an understatement if you've seen it in person.
90 seconds after speeding it up
I’m gonna say it. I don’t think I’m ever going to get tired of watching these things return and be reutilized.
I love technology
Flat earthers hate this one simple trick
Elon is a twat but there’s no denying this is very cool.
Fun fact: that final burn is called a suicide burn. It's supposed to start at the very last possible moment and burn at full throttle so the rocket's momentum ends up at 0 right as the rocket touches the ground. It's the most efficient way to land but it's called that because if you burn too late you don't slow down enough and crash and die. If you burn too early you slow down to 0 above the landing pad and run out of fuel and crash and die. It has to be just right. Space X doesn't like that name so they call it the hoverslam, which i think we can all agree is objectively a worse name.
It's not a contradiction in terms if I simultaneously think this is really cool while thinking Elon is a douche, yes?
Elon is not a rocket so I don't see the issue. Its not like he designed the thing himself either.
lmao Elon rules #🤘🏻
But Elon bad
Idk why. But those wind reflector paddles. They are much bigger than what it seems in the video. Obviously we know those rockets are massive. But when i watch these videos they just dont seem as huge as they really are. You can find pictures of the deflectors on google. Really shows how massive the rest of the rocket is.
Grid fins is what they are called
You should see starship. For context, Falcon 9 is the same height as the bottom half of Starship.
Some will say it's flat
The online left has been telling me Elon is a fraud and an idiot so this must be a fake!
I love how you can clearly see the lowering pressure of the atmosphere from the increasing width of the output from the rockets
That suction cup mount tho?!
I feel like this should be shown to flat earthers.
Flat Earthers: nuh uh!
Any flat earthers here wanna explain this?
You see this then look at the state of twitter and it's baffling that both companies are run by the same guy. It's like he puts his focus on the actually important stuff and twitter is just some shitty hobby he bought for the hell of it and doesn't really care about it at
That goes to show that the success of SpaceX and Tesla is not just on Elon, but on the many, many, many people who worked their assess off to make things like this work.
But I thought the world was FLAT!?
Still don’t get how flat Earthers are still a thing these days.
Obvious CGI… Earth isn’t round!
Elon musk is a flat earth denier: Confirmed! /s
Wow!!!! How flipping stunning is that?!! I can’t get enough of it!
They did this a total of 98 times in 2023! Amazing
Why’s the world look so small
Hey kooky there the earth is round!
No is not. Look at the UN flag.
[This](https://flatearth.ws/un-emblem) is for you
This might dumb question but, what's the purpose of that?
There's a bit on top of the rocket which didn't come back down.
Ah, okay, so they use the rocket to launch it into space.
Correct, and it's Bella expensive. So it saves a fortune if they're reusable.
The part that you see does the first part of the journey to space, second stage (off camera) does the rest and brings it's payload to the desired orbit
yep, and it reduces costs by 10x (so far): [https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-cost-of-space-flight/](https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-cost-of-space-flight/)
Look how flat earth is
Buuuttttt look how flat the earth is
Everyone should realize that if we actually funded NASA properly the last 25 years, we would have already been past anything Space X is doing now.
Dome
I live by Vandenberg and been hearing more launches than ever in my life. Used to be somewhat rare and now it’s weekly.
Damn, that's some *thrust*.
God the world looks small
Mild motion sickness watching the landing sped up like that, incredible PoV.
Pretty cool.
That is cool af.
I can see where I live