SpaceX Capsule Returns To Earth With Lab Results 60
An anonymous reader writes SpaceX's unmanned Dragon spacecraft has splashed down in the Pacific Ocean carrying NASA cargo and scientific samples from the International Space Station. A boat is ferrying the spacecraft to a port near Los Angeles, where NASA said the 1.5 tons of materials will be removed and returned to the space agency by late tomorrow for scientists to pick apart. "This mission enabled research critical to achieving NASA's goal of long-duration human spaceflight in deep space," said Sam Scimemi, director of the International Space Station division at NASA headquarters.
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Re:Curious economics of private spaceflight (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem appears to be a lack of profitability. There's just nothing to do for money in space beyond geostationary orbit. It's just a big empty nothing, in the most literal way possible. The only resource to be had is energy, which is cheaper to make down on earth. There are potentially valuable rocks far away, but no economically-viable means of getting at them. The ISS is doing some useful research, but it's not there to run a profit. The only reason any private enterprise would want to go into space is to run a satelite or because someone in government is footing the bill for science or military purposes.
Suborbital transport would be nice, but you're looking at a very limited market - the only advantage over first-class flights on a conventional aircraft is trip time, and who has enough money to pay that much extra to save a few hours? If that business model was viable, Concorde would have been updated and continued.
Re:Curious economics of private spaceflight (Score:4, Interesting)
Space tourism has emerged as an unexpected market, at the same time as the increasing difficulty of mining on Earth is leading to interest in extracting valuable minerals from asteroids. And the more satellites we put into orbit, the more servicing is needed to maintain them. Meanwhile, NASA finds itself, perhaps intentionally, with no domestic way of getting astronauts and material into LEO. Why not exploit this opportunity to develop and sell both materials ferries and manned craft? Once the private sector develops a man-rated craft, there will be no limits to what we can do.
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Even if a space tourism market exists, there is no guarantee it will survive. A Concorde market existed and it went bust nonetheless.
This is always my argument about suborbital travel. It is not seriously faster than Concorde was, and Concorde was so hideously expensive to operate that even the elite could not keep it going. Until there is a revolution in air travel that enables hypersonic flight at current prices, suborbital travel will not become a thing.
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This is always my argument about suborbital travel. It is not seriously faster than Concorde was, and Concorde was so hideously expensive to operate that even the elite could not keep it going.
That's something of a misrepresentation, the elite never lacked the money and the rich have only gotten richer so it was more that they wouldn't than that they couldn't. Improved communication lowered the demand to send bigwigs between Europe and the US, I imagine the ~2*4 hours saved on a business trip was a key selling feature for the Concorde. That's fast but video conferencing is even faster. As for leisure travel I think the standard has gone up, travelling first class on a subsonic plane can be quite
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>Until there is a revolution in air travel that enables hypersonic flight at current prices, suborbital travel will not become a thing.
I don't follow - would not suborbital flights obviate the need for hypersonic ones? You get to your destination faster, and spend most of your travel time is spent in near-vacuum where concepts like "hypersonic" and "air resistance" are largely irrelevant.
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Yes, but to get out of the atmosphere you need to be going hypersonic speeds. Today it can only be done with rockets. In the 90's Aerospike egines was supposed to make hypersonic, suborbital and even SSTO flights possible. There is no commercially produced Aerospike engine yet.
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Not at all, you only need to be going hypersonic speeds within the atmosphere if you are assuming a ballistic path or only air-breathing engines - there's no reason a winged plane couldn't climb to the edge of the atmosphere at relatively sedate speeds before beginning serious acceleration. The only reason orbital launches don't do such a thing is they need ~20x as much energy to get to orbital speeds as they do to get to altitude, and no plane can carry that kind of weight. A sub-orbital rocket plane wou
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Even if a space tourism market exists, there is no guarantee it will survive. A Concorde market existed and it went bust nonetheless.
Concorde wasn't a destination, it was a way to get there. And it was still doing OK until 9/11. AFAIR, it was finally killed when the manufacturer refused to support such old hardware any more.
The only question about space tourism is how fast we can ramp down the cost and ramp up safety. If anyone could go into space for a week for a few thousand dollars with no more risk of dying than a modern cruise liner, there'd be a vast market.
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Cruise liners are full of old people, fully aware that they are dying of old age, enjoying the hell out of precisely that, QA.
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"Concorde wasn't a destination"
Neither is space. It's baffling to me how you space fans can't grasp that.
Space is not a destination, it is a universe of destinations. Obviously, only a few destinations are within near future reach such as Earth orbit, the Moon, Mars, some asteroids, etc. And even on the slim basis of what we currently know, there are a lot of people who are interested in visiting those destinations or in creating new destinations (such as orbital space stations). These are the space fans.
As I see it, peoples' wealth continues to grow while the cost of access to space declines. Eventually, i
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"it will get to the point where some of modest means can save up for a trip to space" ...or you're 80 and never got over the gee-whiz Space Age propaganda. Do you really think there's just this massive amount of people of "modest means" (How? I thought we're all getting so wealthy?) waiting to go to space?
Well,
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"it will get to the point where some of modest means can save up for a trip to space" ...or you're 80 and never got over the gee-whiz Space Age propaganda. Do you really think there's just this massive amount of people of "modest means" (How? I thought we're all getting so wealthy?) waiting to go to space?
Well, yes, of course. People are getting wealthier, space is a very attractive lure for some fraction of people (I'd say at least 1%), and there's a lot of people.
The popularity of just taking a ride on a MIG is an indication of this latent demand.
You're a loon. Very likely an under-35 programmer with no kids. You'll see how "wealthy" you are after marriage, kids, and a house. See how much you have left over for your "universe of destinations"! Bahahahahaaaa!!!!
The obvious rebuttal is learn basic finance.
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Right. Because nobody would ever want to experience weightlessness, see their world as a "blue marble" with their own two eyes, or fly around a lunar dome by flapping wings strapped onto their arms. There's just nothing there to compare to sitting in a giant sandbox next to a large frothy pool of brackish water, like hundreds of millions of people pay good money to do all the time.
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I'm sure lots of people would want to. Few of them could afford it. You need people able and willing to throw a few million dollars away on a recreational experience - the number of people who fit those criteria is rather small.
Some estimates I've seen put the minimum cost at a quarter-million, but that's just for a brief suborbital flight in a single craft - no orbital hotels or zero-gravity baseball.
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Space tourism at even 250,000 dollars a flight has a really limited market.
Until we can get the cost per pound into orbit down to a couple of dollars space tourism isn't going anywhere. private enterprises aren't really going to take off. We need radical engine and power designs.
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We need radical engine and power designs.
I'll call you once I get my hands on some radical laws of physics.
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How about just using the [wikipedia.org] existing [wikipedia.org] ones [wikipedia.org]?
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You nailed the idea that it is economics that impacts spaceflight, but it really is the marginal cost of getting anywhere which is part of the equation. The other part is the legal ability to do anything in space is also similarly limited... by virtue of the Outer Space Treaty and the sentiments behind the Moon Treaty.
In other words, it is far more than simply valuable rocks too far away without the means to get them. It is also getting those rocks and having them immediately confiscated when you bring th
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Those in power... you mean the people when their representation still had a modicum of integrity?
Honestly - one non-sequitur leap to another - what is it that you are saying?
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Those in power... you mean the people when their representation still had a modicum of integrity?
Of course not. He's no doubt instead referring to bureaucrats, politicians, and businesses able to sell access for wealth and opportunity. I doubt most people feel the urge to fantasize that sort of power doesn't exist just because there is a "modicum of integrity" and someone said "libertarian".
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Well, SpaceX (and other launch providers) do have paying customers besides NASA in the communications industry, and there are also companies that pay to launch smaller satellites (e.g. CubeSats) in the "mass margin" of bigger launches. Earth observation (in all spectra) is basically being revolutionized right now -- for relatively low costs, a company or university (or a consortium of the same) can launch dozens of small satellites to achieve continuous visibility of the entire Earth. The bottleneck now i
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Um, looking at the list of SpaceX customers there's MDA Corp, SES, Thaicom, Orbcomm, AsiaSat with several others planned in the future so there seems to be quite a bit of private satellite business. I guess it's less newsworthy than replacing the Shuttle as we've been launching satellites for decades, but it's there. There's not much else though as the costs are too high and outside LEO/GEO/polar satellite it's all just one-off missions so far.
What I'm hoping for is that SpaceX will eventually use their "re
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Re: Curious economics of private spaceflight (Score:5, Interesting)
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Flynn, an ardent libertarian,
Ardent libertarian is the term used in polite society for "emotionally immature and intellectually unsophisticated". A libertarian society replicates the current status quo in terms or taxes and tariffs but with the difference that now you have no power over the revenue collector, which is as private corporation.
In a libertarian society I can simply refuse you to drive on my highway because I don't like your face.
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Ardent libertarian is the term used in polite society for "emotionally immature and intellectually unsophisticated".
No, you're confusing 'libertarian' with 'liberal'.
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Contrary to what you say, many studies have found that the better educated and informed you are the more likely you are to be a liberal.
Of course it makes you feel better to state the opposite opinion as if it were a fact, which is yet another confirmation of the studies above.
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Contrary to what you say, many studies have found that the better educated and informed you are the more likely you are to be a liberal.
Well, yes, because 'educated' people have spent years being taught liberal dogma, and being told how wonderful they are for doing so.
'Education' has very little to do with intelligence. Quite the opposite, in most cases.
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Right now, there's simply no market for that kind of delivery, and launches are not able to be set-up and made in that short of a duration either.
There's literally almost nothing on this world that is both so unique as to exist singularly and so instan
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"There's literally almost nothing on this world that is both so unique as to exist singularly and so instantly-needed potentially anywhere to justify the expense of launching that one thing into a suborbital flight on a rocket for delivery."
That all depends on how much the rocket flight costs. But, yes, suborbital delivery is unlikely to ever make financial sense if you can have those parts in 24 hours on a jet. Particularly if both then spend hours in customs waiting to be cleared once they arrive.
Exactly. It's weird that the same people gushing over 1960s space propaganda also support 3D printing, without realizing they contradict each other utterly!
3D printing is also likely to be one of the technologies that lets us expand across the solar system. No-one's going to be doing overnight shipping of replacement parts to Mars any time soon... if ever.
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Even if they're *free*, why go through the trouble?
Are you even smart enough to have any idea how retarded that comment is?
Damn, Slashdot has gone downhill since Betageddon sent most of the smart posters elsewhere.
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SpaceX has flown missions for the Canadian, Taiwanese and Turkmen space agencies, and is contracted for the new versions of both the Iridium and Orbcomm satellite networks, among numerous other commercial payloads. NASA is currently their biggest single customer, but they're rapidly losing that status (Iridium has seven launches contracted, NASA only four).
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Bennett said he appreciates your interest in his opinion, but now he wants you to shut up.
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Yup. There isn't any in there. I put the so-called "ice trays" in there and there's still no ice.
I think mine's broken.
The Real Question (Score:2)
That's all well and good, but will they earn enough science points to unlock the next tier of equipment?
I vote bigger rockets. All Perhaps love bigger rockets.
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All Perhaps love bigger rockets.
Fuck.
You.
Autocorrect.
That should say "Kerbals " not Perhaps. Joke ruined.
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The Blob! (Score:1)
We all know it returned with The Blob! (Or will it be the Andromeda Strain?)