The Falcon has landed. Wow!
USA—darn right!
In a brilliant display of engineering and recycling, SpaceX launched a two-stage rocket from Cape Canaveral last night, placed eleven OrbComm OG2 communications satellites in orbit, and soft-landed the first-stage booster rocket back at Cape Canaveral. The rocket reached 6,000 kph at an altitude of 75 kilometers in two and a half minutes, then returned to zero, upright, intact, seven minutes later.
If you don’t think that’s awesome, go get your pencil, throw it over your local grain elevator on a windy prairie day, and see if you can get it to land in a shoebox on the other side… upright on its eraser. Oh, and attach a second pencil to the tip of the first one that will detach at the top and release eleven tiny sticks that will arrange themselves to spell USA on the elevator roof.
I’d suggest Governor Daugaard pitch South Dakota as a site for a SpaceX spaceport, but lower latitudes offer rockets more built-in eastward velocity (although we can match or beat the four Russian cosmodromes on that metric, and the energy-cost advantage isn’t that great), and Florida offers a nice wide launch-abort crash space in the Atlantic. A South Dakota spaceport would probably make Minnesota nervous.
Space.com offers some awesome photos of the human ingenuity that just moved us an important step forward toward colonizing Mars and doubling humanity’s chances for survival. You can also watch SpaceX’s full launch broadcast, including great tech details in the pre-launch show and in-orbit footage of the satellite deployment.
Absolutely fantastic! This will mean so many things in the big scheme of exploration and science itself. Children will view this as something they can dream of being involved in while the rest of us hope that we can find some way out of the deteriorating world we have created for ourselves. Democrats and republicans refuse to debate the facts of climate change even when we open our doors here to see and feel the difference. Maybe with this science and engineering achievement, we can start believing we can solve our problems here.
Weather would be too extreme in South Dakota and a very limited seasonal launch window. Quite an achievement though!
Gotta get them folks to drop the 18th century nationalism and start chanting “science! science! science!!” in the celebratory mode.
Richard, I will excuse the outburst of noisy national pride, but I do wonder how many SpaceX engineers came from overseas on H-1B visas.
And let’s not forget our debt to Wernher von Braun and the Nazi V-2 program from getting us to the Moon.
Lynn, good point about the weather… but you know, South Dakota’s not as bad as Mars! Landing rockets here in a prairie blizzard might be good practice for Martian dust storms!
While very cool, the Falcon 9 v1.1 rocket sacrifices about 40% of it’s payload capacity due to the additional weight of the extra fuel needed for the second stage to achieve orbit and for the extra fuel needed for the first stage landing. Also economically viability is predicated on a fast turn around prepping the rocket for a return flight which verges on the impossible with several daily flights.
Didn’t the first vehicles have wooden axles and rock tires and were propelled by cavemen using their feet? After a little trial and error,didn’t vehicles improve?
Landing rockets in winter would help clear WalMart parking lots of accumulated snow in a jiffy. Defrost frozen foods and livestock,too,
Rocket landings for snow removal—probably not cost efficient, but awesome!
Don, good point about trade-offs. Do we have numbers? What’s the dollar value of payload they can’t carry on a single launch due to that extra fuel? What’s the dollar value of the savings on a reusable launch vehicle?
And on turnaround, how much demand is there for launches? If SpaceX had unlimited launch capability, just how many rockets would various industries pay to launch each day? (Of course, I’m ignoring the fact that the more rockets SpaceX can offer at an affordable price, the more demand for launch capacity there will be, as entrepreneurs will find more reasons to launch things and people into space.)
Mr. Coyote pointed out some obvious thoughts I had about landing back again with the empty husk. You would think cheap and disposable would be better, but I guess they tried that. I have to ask, though, how do we know they didn’t fake it like the first moon landing?
South Dakota Space Port? um? Yeah!
This is great news, I know it seems the space program has stalled after the Space shuttles were grounded. it is still moving forward.
As far a clearing the snow; It might be just a wee bit of overkill
Coyote – pretty sure multi-billionaire Elon Musk (the man behind Space-X) has a handle on doing cost/benefit analysis of various approaches.
Remember the Stratobowl.
http://www.stratobowl.com/stratobowl.html
But if we mention it, I imagine the Native American professionals of ethnic superiority will be demanding a name change.
“1st scalp for Custer” william cody, july 1876, trespassing and murdering in the Great Sioux Nation. Spencer Cody, 2015, somewhere east of pierre, “Crazy Horse was a Butcher.”
good ole SD, eh wik? only racist comment in the entire thread is yours. trolling now? if you don’t understand by now the immense need to rename Harney Peak, the center of the Indian spiritual universe, self esteem and mental well-being, then you likely still live in a shame-based little world of your own.
my white and brown grand kids hike that frozen trail above Spring Creek most xmas days. :) have fun in winner
I am just not in favor of geographic name changes in the name of political correctness. I still think the best idea is to leave it Harney Peak, but have a very large brass information memorial there indicating the history of the place and the carnage that Harney inflicted on Native Americans. That will do more good than changing the peak name to an unpronounceable Native name in a language doomed to disappear if there is ever to be progress by the SD Native Americans.
@Richard S: Yah,yah, yah. Over budget and behind schedule. Plus Musk sucking at the government teat for over $4.9B.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hy-musk-subsidies-20150531-story.html
I don’t know what Musk is planning to fly into space on a daily basis but millionaire tourists but here is a an interview outlining his “cost/benefit” analysis. Glad the American citizens are subsidizing the rich flying into space for sheetz and giggles.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/rockets/a7446/elon-musk-on-spacexs-reusable-rocket-plans-6653023/
Doug: the name Hin Han Kaga was not proposed. It slid in by a fluke when the board seemed incapable of sailing passionate seas of public input heavily positive in support. Then, the board heavily publicized it’s OWN choice, Hin Han Kaga, and of course an extremely heavy negative reaction followed from the unsympathetic public. your complaint (what will the Indians try and take next?) was only one of an avalanche of similar fear-mongered misinformation. the governor’s cabinet then proclaimed fear of tourist confusion, so the board flip flopped, forgetting to even consider the original Black Elk proposal.
a brass plaque is not going to do much for a 13 year old contemplating an impulsive act of suicide because of what is going on in life that seems insurmountable. alcohol, drugs, acting out and suicide are all about low self esteem.
take the “Indian” out of the Indian, I believe was the politically correct theory your predecessors in title murmured as they scooped up Indian land for all they were worth.
The “Wasciu Wakan” plaque that has been up there since Agent, Dr., Mayor and Tech President McGillycuddy (who died in California), “discovered it” first, is not highly regarded by any Indians I know. Whites got it wrong TWICE, naming the peak Harney, then dedicating it to McGillicuddy. Hopefully Rapid City’s recent support of restoration of his sandstone home on South St. will be accompanied with reliable, unbiased historical account of this peer of Crazy Horse and Red Cloud.
“Correcting” the peak’s name will do NOTHING to the white world, except perhaps reflect a degree a graciousness that may well help every kid born on the rez. if the governor got his head out of his ass like you have shown capable, this matter could be handled in a way that would be a Black Hills/South Dakota marketing masterpiece.
but if you and spencer keep up the bullshit race-baiting legacy, South Dakota will be assured of remaining the poorly run pretty little state it is until all of Colorado, Wyoming and Montana over-run us for cheap land after everything further west is gone.
Ok. So how did a thread on Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocket morph into an Native American naming controversy??
you suggest public investment in space exploration should not benefit private capitalization; doug raised that point in the context of 12:41. why, i can’t say? snark, maybe, or redneck racism as he mulls the similarity of a space port in SD (making lynn from minnesota, downrange, nervous) to the stratobowl’s historic adaptation as a natural feature. doug, grasp jerry’s exuberance! oh, nice photo, btw. what purpose does beauty serve in modern society, anyway?
lynn from Minnesota? cool! Where at?
I posted the Stratobowl link to suggest that at one time, South Dakota had a part in early space exploration which is related to the idea that modern space exploration might take place here…a rather slim possibility however.
I am not a psychologist or psychiatrist, but I don’t think changing place names is going to do a damn thing to reduce tragic suicides by Native American youth. It is up to parents and community to let children know they have a future. I don’t think there is much future in staying on the reservation and studying a stone age culture and a language mostly unsuited for the modern world. Trying to convince children of the value of such culture study would seem to be more likely to generate despair of the kind that leads to suicide.
The problems on the reservation are not going to be solved by place name changes. That may fit in with naive notions of primitive wonderfulness, but it is too simple and simply diverts people away from real solutions.
Changing the name of Harney Peak will just aggravate most residents of the Black Hills and do nothing whatsoever to actually help most Native Americans…adults or children. It might boost the income of those professionals of ethnic specialness who can make a living by promoting a stone-age culture and language at the expense of real progress.
who cares if most bh residents are aggravated? Indian land base , though considered the worst land in the west (except missouri river bottom land taken by eminent domain) is extraordinarily valuable and non-indians, like daugaard are slaving all over themselves for it, so of course they will fight the name change.
let me take you to the rez and show you how it will indeed do what i say it will do. i will not expect you to change, but perhaps you’ll stop raising more young people to ignore the stupid aggravation you suggest.
and who cares about those professionals you keep talking about. is that like daugaards’ professional class that rapes the state coffers from Regents on down to less liberal types than darla?
Today there are 2 cars parked near the RV gas station place, as people are hiking the short easy lazy hike in to peer down into the hole which is called by all the “Strato-Bowl”
get denny to shoot rockets out of the bowl in downtown lead. then he can hob-knob w/Richard Branson. if SD is going to truck/rail/pipe in nuclear waste as has already been decided, load it onto rockets solar-bound. better could be an elevator to orbit tied into homestake’s winch.
as suggested, landings will help out the waltons
jane fonda said tonight cynicism makes one old/she isn’t at 78. I learned something. I may be nicer to grudz if it matures beyond racism/misogyny.