Hacker News Reader

Comment by blackswan | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.)

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.

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.

> 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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com