SpaceX Falcon 9 reaches orbit | Hacker News Reader

SpaceX Falcon 9 reaches orbit

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174 pointsaidenn045 comments

I've been waiting for this for months. Go Elon!

The funny thing is everyone calls him a 'Internet billionaire'. But he's never BEEN a billionaire! He only got $200 mil from Paypal. It's a bit ridiculous to throw that term around.

[Additional] Heinlein would have been proud to see this.

I am always fascinated by Elon Musk. A little bit like a Bond villain.

Even if he has "only" $200 mil, I think he will be a billionaire soon, with the SpaceX thing working out, and Tesla,too.

He recently said he was broke, but that was during a divorce, maybe he is hiding his loot.

Ah yes... His ex is actually blogging, on livejournal of all places. Cool to get a view from the other side.

http://moschus.livejournal.com/141570.html

4. Seek distraction. Take up a new hobby. Or a really cute personal trainer.

Cute personal trainer = new hobby?

The whole post stunk of bratty entitlement. This is one of those cases where hearing the other side of the story actually makes you side with Elon a bit more.

Looking at her earlier posts, there was one in mid-May "Is blogging innately narcissistic?". I almost left a comment that Hers sure is.

I thought his assets were just frozen until the divorce was complete?

He said he ran out of cash, which is different than having no net worth. He probably just has his money tied up in illiquid assets.

Solar City will probably pay off the best for him.

A little bit like a Bond villain.

More like a mini Tony Stark, which is the bit part he plays (as himself) in Iron Man 2. I think Bezos would make an excellent Bond villain. Ballmer too. Craig Venter has the gravitas. Scarily, I think he has Bond-villain level technology too.

Isn't Elon is part of the "Paypal Mafia", with billionaire Peter Thiel as its Don?

From Wikipedia: Musk has described himself as a workaholic who routinely puts in 100-hour work weeks, primarily on his businesses Tesla Motors and SpaceX. In his rare free time, he says he plays with his five children

Guess that's what it takes to reach the stars.

It is fascinating. I can't believe this is the same guys that is "broke", and is doing Tesla at the same time and co founded pay pal. Any of this would be a fantastic achievement. Unbelievable guy. I'm sorry I wasn't fully aware of him until recently, this is probably old news for many of you.

He likes Windows better than Unix. That sort of put a damper on his hero status for me.

This is fantastic news! Hopefully this means that the price of taking things to orbit will fall rapidly (relative to what governments could achieve, at least), allowing all kinds of new developments that couldn't otherwise have happened.

I read that there's a contract with the government for $1.6 billion for 12 flights to the ISS. I think this means they have NASA and the Shuttle beat by a factor of 7.

Details and citations in case anyone is curious...

"December 23, 2008 – NASA today announced its selection of the SpaceX Falcon 9 launch vehicle and Dragon spacecraft for the International Space Station (ISS) Cargo Resupply Services (CRS) contract award. The contract is for a guaranteed minimum of 20,000 kg to be carried to the International Space Station. The firm contracted value is $1.6 billion and NASA may elect to order additional missions for a cumulative total contract value of up to $3.1 billion."

http://www.spacex.com/press.php?page=20081223

and:

"The $1.6 billion contract represents a minimum of 12 flights..."

http://www.spacex.com/dragon.php

A little over $50M to put up to 10000kg in LEO: http://www.spacex.com/falcon9.php

Similar prices for GTO of up to 4500kg, but presumably a lot of that is going to be fuel to move from GTO to GEO; since the Delta IV can (and does) take multiple satelites to GTO at up to 12000kg, I'm not sure how favorably that is going to compare (nor do I have any first hand knowledge of launch prices for something as big as a delta IV.

[edit] Just noticed the footnote on above page that at $45M for <3000kg to GTO they want to book a co-passenger, so presumably the ~4500kg limit is enough for at least 2 satelites + fuel.

Supposedly there is also a "Heavy" configuration that uses 2 additional boosters for a larger mass payload than the shuttle. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9

It's untested and has no pricing information or schedule that I've seen though.

http://www.spacex.com/falcon9_heavy.php

Not so different from a Titan IV heavy lift. One difference: Falcon boosters are liquid fuel. They are copies of the 1st stage.

This is, AFAIK, the same route a Delta IV Heavy takes.

I don't really buy this argument. The price of taking things to orbit is reflected in the reliability of the launcher. If you have a launcher that fails unreliably, your cost of launching is going to be rather uncertain. No company is going to risk putting their cargo into space at this early stage of development. The only entity that has the cash to burn is the government, which is why NASA is footing the bill [1]. Oh, and by the way, NASA doesn't like failures all that much and they are going to send out their team of inspectors and demand a bunch of revisions be made to the launcher in the event that it fails. Guess what happens to the cost of launching? Yup, goes up. Pretty soon you're going to end up with another company just like all the other ones operating at exactly the same cost. Then NASA will find a new "SpaceX" in 10 years that satisfies their "entrepreneurship" specifications in their contracts and the whole process begins anew.

The only way to break this cycle and bring down costs is to 1) Not deal with the government and find a private company willing to take on the risk of development. 2) Change the model of the program entirely and operate like the Russians--i.e, Pick one launcher and make that one as efficient as possible.

[1]. http://www.spacex.com/press.php?page=20081223

This is really amazing considering that Atlas took 13 launches before it reached orbit successfully.

Edit: It's also good for Obama's space plan - putting a new rocket into orbit on it's first launch is a pretty powerful way to demonstrate competence.

It helps that the design is similar to that of the Falcon 1, which has already been successfully launched a few times. It uses the same engines, and I think it has a lot of the same electronics. (Fun fact: they use Ethernet for their avionics, replacing what would have been horrible tangles of wires in older rocket designs.)

SpaceX has had at least one crash before:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5315156

It's normal that the first test flight of a rocket fails. What happened today is unusual.

Atlas was also 50 years ago.

The balloon tanks are still impressive.

I don't see how this has anything to do with politics, since SpaceX is a private company. Also, it's not SpaceX's first launch. It may be the first launch of the Falcon 9 rocket, but there have been others that SpaceX has undoubtedly learned a lot from.

According to the other comments (and SpaceX[1]), SpaceX has a contract with the government to deliver cargo to the ISS when the shuttle retires. It has plenty to do with politics.

[1] http://www.spacex.com/dragon.php

Obama unveiled a plan in February to end the Orion spacecraft program and use private companies to launch US assets into orbit, for which he received copious amounts of criticism, from all sides. (He announced a scaled-back version in April that still relies primarily on private companies to provide transit to space.) That's what the parent is referring to — it's not just blind politicization of an irrelevant topic.

In the scaled back plan, IIRC, the Orion was kept, while Ares and Alair were axed.

Oh, thank you. That does make sense then.

> This is really amazing considering that Atlas took 13 launches before it reached orbit successfully.

Not at all. They have data from those 13 launches and the rest of the space program, 50 years' worth, to work from.

The people footed the basic research, now it is time for the private sector to cash in.

I'm a little puzzled from the news - while good, it doesn't really seem to clearly state that they put the thing into orbit. Did it go up and circle the earth at least once? Did it just obtain a given altitude (because orbital altitude != orbit)....... they seem to be saying it was "hitting an orbital bulls-eye" and "close enough" and that kind of thing... so it sounds like an engineering success, but it didn't actually go into orbit.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9_Flight_1

Regimine: Low Earth Orbit

Apoapsis: 155 miles (249 km)

Awesome.... thanks!

Awesome - big congrats to SpaceX and the team there!!

He actually is broke, liquidity issues as I understand it. http://www.laobserved.com/biz/2010/06/elon_musk_is_broke.php

I think this is the first time I have seen an (almost, I know, not complete) dupe on the front page.

A justified dupe. The older one was originally a link to the live stream, now it’s a link to a YouTube video of the launch. This report contains additional details you won’t get by just watching the stream or video.

http://biditserver1.appspot.com/homepage.png

Isn't this a big enough news???

There is a case where we think news that interest us is more important than anything else. That's why we are on HN, isn't it?

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