Elon Musk Releases Supercut of SpaceX Rocket Explosions (hardocp.com) 61
Eloking shares a report from HardOCP: Elon Musk is demonstrating how one should not land an orbital rocket booster: the video, currently trending on YouTube, is essentially a blooper reel of SpaceX rocket tests that went explosive. While the company has more or less perfected launching Falcon 9 rockets, it is still working hard on recovering as much of the multi-million-dollar system as possible.
Onward and Upward, SpaceX! (Score:2)
Gotta love free PR, especially when it is styled as a "look how far we've come" / "look at how much we have figured out" celebration.
Looking forward to FH later this year and the start of some proper accumulation of mass in usable orbits!
It's about lowering expectations (Score:5, Insightful)
My take on the blooper reel, as funny as it is, is that it's supposed to lower expectations for Falcon Heavy. Falcon Heavy was originally supposed to launch in 2013, but the date has been pushed back multiple times in the recent years. Part of the reason is that it never was the top priority -- the Falcon 9 upgrades meant that more payloads could be launched using a single booster instead of three. And SpaceX has to keep NASA happy and fulfill their Commercial Resupply Missions to the ISS & the upcoming Dragon flights (first manned flights).
But part of the reason why Falcon Heavy was delayed so much is because it is hugely complex. You can just stick two boosters to the side of a core booster and keep it together with some struts, like in Kerbal Space Program. The structural loads are all different and must be accounted for.
So, I think the timing of the video so close to the scheduled launch of Falcon Heavy in November of this year is supposed to carefully counter the high expectations that the public has, given SpaceX's recent successes. Rocket science is hard, and failures are to be expected. But if you work on the problem for long enough, you eventually get it right. That's the message of the video.
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What? "Moar boosters" isn't the solution to everything?
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Not without moar struts
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Just mod the physics and you should be fine. Why isn't Elon doing that? It's way easier than rebuilding the whole rocket.
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So it's definitely going to blow up? Cool...
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That's true, and it's totally okay. The video was a blast. I laughed, I cried. The lesson in this is that being willing to fail is how you succeed.
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It's so sad that we're so risk-averse as a culture. Nothing worth doing is easy, and with engineering there's no substitute for real-world tests.
Musk is ambitious, perhaps overly so, but he's getting stuff done. He's pretty the only person really pushing innovation in space in the west; politicians aren't interested; national space agencies don't have the funding and the big aerospace companies are quite happy with their giant profit margins for routine launches. If we're ever going to get off this rock, we
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Randian theoretics are not the reason why progress in manned space missions requires privatization. It's because private enterprise can tolerate failure. It's inevitable that crews will be lost out there, but government cannot tolerate this without years of soul-searching, political assignment of blame, and the incessant input from Luddite yammerheads.
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Rocket science is hard
...but not exactly brain surgery, is it?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
"unscheduled rapid disassembly" (Score:5, Interesting)
"unscheduled rapid disassembly" love it.
seeing the final two successful landings is really poignant after seeing all the failures.
go team SpaceX!
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Betting against musk is a fools game... fool.
So AI is never going to happen then? Good to know.
Re: Musk is great at spinning (Score:2)
It already has, but it's more hype than reality.
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Well they are ramping up, which is hugely capital intensive. And so far demand for Tesla cars has been very high relative to the supply. So what's the problem?
Tesla might still fail but they're just following the same plan they've had all along for growing the company and producing a more affordable (but good) electric car.
That plan is why investors have put in the money necessary for Tesla to try this out which enables them to operate at a loss for several years.
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And none of his fanbois actually look at the car market and ask, "But what make you think you are going to sell them?"
Maybe because he already has 455000 pre-orders and we stopped asking pointless questions when we were 10.
oh yeah? (Score:2)
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They may use this video to show their people how bad Americans are at making rockets, followed by videos of their own launches played in reverse.
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Did u ever know a guy named "Elon" that was't gay?
That name has "hair stylist" written all over it.
He fucks a lot of women for someone you're intimating is gay.
But even so, a lot of guys have to suck his cock - those who want to be him, those who work for him, those who said he'd never succeed & those who want him to create jobs in their states.
Liberty Bell March (Score:2)
Re:Liberty Bell March (Score:5, Informative)
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If you're to fail.... (Score:5, Funny)
If you're to fail, fail hard and with style!
Who doesn't like playing with rockets? (Score:2)
He does it with real ones, we do it with KSP... the videos are oddly similar.
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Is it that surprising that he can be all of those things? No one's perfect.
Re: Never sure whether Elon Musk is a decent bloke (Score:1)
He's considered a tough/demanding boss - and his companies make it clear upfront that they'll be demanding and the hours are rough. I think it's important to consider that he's doing legitimately important work -- There's reason to believe the world will be worse-off if his projects/companies fail. To put it in perspective - I'd forgive a hospital boss for expecting more from their doctors+nurses. It's more than just a job - and they don't want to hire anyone who can't see that. Elon shares they sentiment.
Propaganda or Love (Score:1)
But damn, I love Elon and SpaceX.
Not rocket tests - landing tests (Score:5, Informative)
There are failed landing attempts, not rocket tests. There's a big difference. All of the primary missions of these flights succeeded.
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There are failed landing attempts, not rocket tests. There's a big difference. All of the primary missions of these flights succeeded.
Test-landing a rocket is a rocket test.
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One interesting omission is the pad refueling incident with the earth shattering kaboom. Now, it wasn't supposed to even make a spark at that point but it was a failure.
But you have to give SpaceX some credit. I've not seen an official NASA, Russian or NK 'blooper' reel done in house. Somebody has a sense of humor and proportion.
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I did an internship at JPL in the 90s and have family that currently work there.
If someone internally at NASA made a blooper reel like this that would be the end of their career.
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NASA was taxpayer-funded. The tax payers would have not tolerated videos of the sort. However, the general public likes the self-deprecation of showing failures (without the loss of human life) with a plan to grow beyond them and not give up.
Re: Not rocket tests - landing tests (Score:2)
I thought that too, but then the difference is that it's easy to be light hearted about losing boosters that would have been lost anyway, whereas being light hearted about destroying customer's payloads doesn't come across so well.
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There are failed landing attempts, not rocket tests. There's a big difference. All of the primary missions of these flights succeeded.
Came here to point this out.
I know some NASA sub-contractor types who are rabidly contemptuous of SpaceX, saying things like "he doesn't even have the mission success rate of North Korea!"
Oh really? True SpaceX has probably blown up a bigger percentage of its rockets than anyone, but I wasn't aware that anyone had a reusable self-landing booster.
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What bullshit is this?
SpaceX has lost one rocket during launch and one in a pad accident. Success rate is around 93% which is normal for a launcher. The failure rate is not "bigger percentage than anyone" - it is actually quite low, especially for a new rocket family.
The number of boosters that blow up after delivering primary mission for every other provider is 100%. For SpaceX it is rapidly getting to be less than 50%. They have so far recovered 16 first stage boosters from 41 Falcon 9 launches without bl
Skywriting (Score:2)
Awesome! Now do it with Teslas! (Score:1)
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/... [zerohedge.com]
Good sense of humor at least (Score:2)
What I like about the reel is they took the trouble to print the root cause of each of the failures that were captured. It is really intimidating the number of things that can and have gone wrong with a machine like that.
You have to wonder what potential failures they haven't caught yet. Sticky throttle valve? Failed landing strut? You would think those failures should never have happened in the first place.
One question: is that landing barge manned? How would you like to have that job?
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I think the landing barge is a drone (they might have an intern with a err "Manual Power Disconnect" device on board but i think his instructions are Swing and BAIL
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They are drone ships, both of them. People still do have to come on board after the landing to secure the rocket so it can be brought back to port. That's not exactly a safe job either. But they're testing a robot to do that job.
Cool and humble (Score:2)
It is also motivational for others to see that even highly specialized companies need some learning too. And succeed in the end.