/sci/ - Science & Math

>>6546693
>The current price of $10000/pound or whatever, is holding solidly.
SpaceX is advertising launch prices at $1154/pound, without reusability. They've already made roughly one order of magnitude improvement, they have another lined up with their booster flyback reusability, another one with all-stages rapid reusability, and one more after that with a giant methane-fueled rocket.

The general lack of effort to lower launch prices has been based on the presumption that the only market is satellite launch, and the reality that satellite launch demand does not increase much with lower prices.

The difference between traditional launch services and things like SpaceX, Blue Origin, XCOR, and Virgin Galactic is that the new companies are more speculative. They're gambling that new customers will emerge to take advantage of their dramatically lower prices.

The old launch companies were simply not trying to drive prices down. They were investing in capabilities and reliability, but not in dramatic cost reduction. Lack of progress resulted from lack of willingness to invest in making that progress.

>>6524648
>Unless you classify "reusable space rockets" and "robot quadrupeds that won't fall over even if you kick them" as "technological advancement and innovation" you're thinking of the wrong field.
Your failure to understand what programmers are doing in the world doesn't invalidate it.

Programming is like writing, drawing, music, or math: anyone can learn to do something with it, but few can do it for a living.

>>6319841
Yeah, I'm "just a cynic". I'm pointing at one project and it's idiotic sequel as bad, so I must hate all orbital launch efforts.

Nope. The shuttle pretty much takes the cake. Only the SLS has potential to surpass it in sheer cost-ineffectiveness.

Saturn V was expensive as fuck, but it provided amazing new capabilities. Atlas, Delta, Titan, all doing it right -- solid value, each of them. Proton and Soyuz, excellent. Energia -- damn good super heavy launcher, if they only used it for something more sensible than launching a paranoia-motivated shuttle clone. The Ariane rocket family has generally worked out pretty well.

Atlas V and Delta IV from the EELV program have been pretty questionable. Again, the goal was cost-cutting, and again, the goal was not achieved. They might have managed to reduce the cost of big launches compared to the Titan IV (debatable), but at the cost of taking proven smaller rockets off the market (notably Delta II, a favorite for NASA's more productive unmanned scientific program) and replacing them with big rockets that cost several times as much for no added benefit to small payloads.

What I'm excited about is SpaceX. They're doing everything they should be doing. They're keeping costs down and focusing effort on what matters. With their incremental reusability development plan, they've got real potential to finally bring orbital launch into the realm of the routine and affordable.

>>6292954
...except that SpaceX already has experience with reusing the rocket engines on F9R. They're all tested before being used. They don't require extensive maintenance between firings.

And I've already pointed out that SpaceX isn't depending on amortizing rocket costs over many flights for viability, the way Skylon would. When something goes wrong with the reusability plan, they can tolerate the loss and build a new vehicle with a fix for the problem.

Skylon depends on each extremely costly vehicle in a small fleet lasting for 200 flights. Any vehicle loss is a disaster, as it was for the space shuttle program.

>>6277128
Oh, so now it needs to be "multitudes" of "groundbreaking" ones, does it?

The point isn't that math is all being done by computers now, it's that the stuff that doesn't necessarily require lots of computing power already will soon be encompassed by the function of new software on powerful hardware. A thousand mathematicians will find they might as well have been spending their time committing sudoku when someone's program does everything they were all working on, and a million other things they didn't even think to work on, as part of a general function of advancing mathematics.

It used to be that you could just work on stuff, and count on it contributing to the future of humanity as long as it was original and significant. Now you also have to be sure that the same work won't be covered by someone's program before anyone finds a practical purpose for it.

How satisfied can you be with being the first to reach the top of a mountain five years before the helicopter is invented, making all peaks trivially accessible?

While you're fiddling with pen and paper on something that's never going to matter, programmers will be making orbital rockets land on their tails and reducing heroic spaceflight endeavors to routine airline operations. They'll be comprehensively unravelling the mechanisms of life. They'll be building seeds that grow into factories.

Do you want to matter or not?

>>6268145
>That's nonsense. SpaceX's rockets are not revolutionary.
Only true if you assume that their reusability plans won't work out.

The current plan is to send one up with deployable legs on the lower stage *in February*, and try to land it so it can be reused.

The goal is airliner-like operations, with lower stages that can be gassed up with cheap propellant and reflown more than once per day, and upper stages and crew vehicles that work in much the same way, aside from requiring occasional replacement of inexpensive ablative heat shield panels.

With airliner-like operations will come airliner-like flight prices. That's revolutionary.

>>6206032
It's good enough for SpaceX.

They just loaded mechjeb into a conventional expendable rocket, and now it's reusable.

>>6175592
Space pencil is the privately-developed (with some juicy NASA subsidy contracts) Falcon 9 1.1, a rocket that's both cheap as a single-use design and designed to be reusable by flying home and landing on its tail.

The reusability aspect is still under development, but if they get it working, it's going to dramatically cut launch costs.

This is just their first try at it, too. They're planning to follow it up with a bigger reusable rocket that runs on ultra-cheap, self-pressurizing methane/oxygen propellent, where both the upper and lower stages are reused, and they can be gassed up and flown again about as easily as an airliner.

This is something several other companies are trying to do in similar ways. The future of orbital launch is looking pretty bright.

SpaceX's Grasshopper reusable rocket test program has flown again, this time to a 744 meter height.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZDkItO-0a4

This is the first Grasshopper, used mainly for hovering and landing tests. The Grasshopper 2 will be flying soon, and is intended to fly at supersonic speeds and go beyond the karman line.