One of the benefits of living in central Florida is the chance to see rocket launches in person, and yesterday was a good one. The Falcon Heavy shook the ground pretty strongly, and we could hear it even from Melbourne. There were sonic booms when the boosters landed, after which I went back inside and watched the replay on my computer. The simultaneous landings of the outer boosters elicited a gasp of astonishment. The Starman dummy in the passenger seat of Elon's personal Tesla Roadster (an old 2008 model which was probably worn out anyway) was a humorous touch, as was the "DON'T PANIC" written on the display. You can't say that Elon doesn't have a sense of humor. In an interview just before the launch, he said that the rocket had a 50% chance of blowing up. Au Contraire, Elon, all went perfectly, with the exception of the center booster failing to land correctly on the drone ship. Oh well, it was still an extremely impressive engineering accomplishment. Congrats, SpaceX.
Jerry
UberDork
2/7/18 7:14 a.m.
It's been done though.
In all seriousness that twin booster landing was amazing.
I'm extremely impressed by SpaceX's dedication to the "let's see if it blows up" style of engineering. They're making huge leaps my making mistakes and collecting data. It's cool.
tuna55
MegaDork
2/7/18 7:30 a.m.
mazdeuce - Seth said:
I'm extremely impressed by SpaceX's dedication to the "let's see if it blows up" style of engineering. They're making huge leaps my making mistakes and collecting data. It's cool.
Agreed, but with a caveat, they are funded by rampant speculation. From a guy who's mature company is suffering despite making profits, it's a bit hard to watch people just shovel money into a burning pile of cash just because someday they might be profitable. I wish I could also be funded by rampant speculation. My stuff would be cooler, too.
In January 1986 my family took me to watch the space shuttle launch. The previous day we toured the space center. I was so excited to see the launch. We waited for a while and then got word that they had postponed the launch. I was very disappointed. When the launch was finally a go I was back at home watching it with my classmates on the TV. Unfortunately we all know how that ended.
Nick Comstock said:
In January 1986 my family took me to watch the space shuttle launch. The previous day we toured the space center. I was so excited to see the launch. We waited for a while and then got word that they had postponed the launch. I was very disappointed. When the launch was finally a go I was back at home watching it with my classmates on the TV. Unfortunately we all know how that ended.
Ouch - yes, we do. Worst of all (for me), Jan. 28th is my birthday.
In reply to jstein77 :
As much as I wanted to see a shuttle launch I'm kinda glad I missed that one. I live close enough to space X that we often feel it shaking the house when they test, which is often. I want to take the boy for a tour out there one day.
I heard the Tesla got totalled when a piece of space dust put a nick in the rear clamshell
mazdeuce - Seth said:
I'm extremely impressed by SpaceX's dedication to the "let's see if it blows up" style of engineering. They're making huge leaps my making mistakes and collecting data. It's cool.
Realistically, this is likely the same approach as other companies, they just don't admit it.
I think the approach is "rocket science is hard and we'll do the best we can, but stuff happens so let's learn from it". I don't think it's "let's see if this blows up". They just admit that this can happen sometimes. We as a society have come to expect every test to be perfect when that's really not the case. SpaceX just doesn't have the ability to do much testing in private because, well, rockets.
Do you realize it's only been a bit over two years since they first successfully landed a booster?
In reply to Keith Tanner :
You think that's impressive? It's been less 10 years since SpaceX actually made it into space. The Falcon9 has a 95.9% complete mission success rate, 1 mission that was a partial success, and only 2 missions have resulted in lost payloads. SpaceX maybe not perfect, but they are damn good.
I was impressed by the large number of young people involved with the project. I guess there are some good millennials out there. I remember the old days of NASA with all the crew cut white guys all with skinny ties smoking Luckies at their control panels.
Keith Tanner said:
I think the approach is "rocket science is hard and we'll do the best we can, but stuff happens so let's learn from it". I don't think it's "let's see if this blows up". They just admit that this can happen sometimes. We as a society have come to expect every test to be perfect when that's really not the case. SpaceX just doesn't have the ability to do much testing in private because, well, rockets.
Do you realize it's only been a bit over two years since they first successfully landed a booster?
After reading Elon's quote about "it will either be awesome or it will blow up", I got to thinking about how much it would cost to get up to T-5 minutes and having to cancel the launch. Perhaps they looked at the financials and the likelihood of success and there is a certain "worth it even if it blows up" kind of break even point.
spitfirebill said:
I was impressed by the large number of young people involved with the project. I guess there are some good millennials out there. I remember the old days of NASA with all the crew cut white guys all with skinny ties smoking Luckies at their control panels.
For the most part, the actual age of the people doing that work hasn't changed.
Back then, they were the upstart, never do anything good, hippie, baby boomers running things. Now they are the upstart, lazy, tech fascinated millennials.
Which is to say, nothing has changed. Other than the average color of skin and the sex.
There are driven people in every time period born. And I envy the excitement they have for their work.
In reply to spitfirebill :
They may have gotten the air time, but it wasn't just crew cut white guys...
https://www.nasa.gov/content/katherine-johnson-biography
Patrick said:
I heard the Tesla got totalled when a piece of space dust put a nick in the rear clamshell
Actually a "floating" chip of paint in orbit could cause catastrophic damage to satellites/spacecraft.
T.J. said:
In reply to alfadriver :
Found her! Bottom right corner
In reply to NEALSMO :
I think I see Lionel Richie and Bill Clinton in there too.
Another fun game to play: Count the women applying for these jobs.
Yet another fun game: Count the women in the engineering / science programs at the university.
I suspect the Twitter post that TJ linked to is intended to shame SpaceX, when it actually shames women (if you consider the lack of relative interest in science / engineering shameful).
Seriously. Want to do something about it? Become a woman engineer.
I can't, I'm a white guy. According to her Twitter profile, Taylor Preston is a "Visual Designer (aka PowerPoint Whisperer)" at IBM. Her website says she has an interdisciplinary degree with concentrations in both art and history. So she's actually part of the problem 
I'm not sure there were a lot of hippies working at NASA in the 60's. I'm pretty sure all the young guns - and there were a LOT of them, it was a young man's game - were not of the tune in, turn on and drop out mindset. And if you watched the whole launch, you saw a whole lot of a very excited female flight engineer. She was the host, and did a great job of it.
Keith Tanner said:
Seriously. Want to do something about it? Become a woman engineer.
I can't, I'm a white guy. According to her Twitter profile, Taylor Preston is a "Visual Designer (aka PowerPoint Whisperer)" at IBM. Her website says she has an interdisciplinary degree with concentrations in both art and history. So she's actually part of the problem
I'm not sure there were a lot of hippies working at NASA in the 60's. I'm pretty sure all the young guns - and there were a LOT of them, it was a young man's game - were not of the tune in, turn on and drop out mindset. And if you watched the whole launch, you saw a whole lot of a very excited female flight engineer. She was the host, and did a great job of it.
The "hippie" thing was just an example of how the older generation always thinks less of the younger generation. And most of the time, the generalizations are crap. Both the millennials and the baby boomers have some very driven people in them. Just like both have "hippies."
Rocket scientists are rocket scientists regardless of what generation they are binned in.
Hippies were an actual subset of the boomers, though, the very visible anti-establishment minority. I guess that's what I picked up on.
I agree that there's a lot of "kids these days!" crap, always has been. Just like the kids are always convinced they're a special, unusual generation because of some reason. Heck, I'm GenX. We were apparently all overeducated slackers who couldn't get jobs because we couldn't be bothered, now we're the ones who have the jobs so the millennials don't.
