There was something doubly awesome about the two falcons landing at the same time right next to each other!
When I saw the first successful booster landing on a drone ship I realized I was again watching history.
Live Webcam from Spaceman:
I'm not sure what happened that was new here other than the PR of putting a car into solar orbit. They landed their 20 something rocket vertically. They crashed another one or something.
It just seems like a lot of expense and science to stop at a normal camera.
Do you even begin to appreciate the challenges in getting a 4-8k feed from space to earth?
I've been in the video business from '95 to 2015 and there is so much going on behind the scenes from even a simple live stream from a spacecraft to earth that I am wondering what it would have taken for you to be satisfied. FWIW I've personally done the Internet portion of two Space shuttle launches live-stream to earth and I can tell you that nothing about such an event is 'simple' by any stretch of the imagination. 2.5 million people watched that stream and it 'just worked'.
This never was about the quality of the feed (which is nothing short of amazing by the way), but about testing a new rocket. The fact that only one of the three first stages didn't make it is also quite impressive.
Yes, it was PR. But given the amount of work that went into this I figure they were entitled a bit of leeway.
This comment is totally out of place on a site like this, and it makes me wonder (1) what incredible stuff you've been up to today and (2) whether or not you are even remotely aware of any of the complexity a feat like today's launch entails to put you in a position to criticize any of this rather than to accept it in gratitude and wonder.
Keep in mind that according to Elon Musk there was a 50% chance the whole thing blew up on the pad I'd say they got their priorities right and spent what time and budget they had on the main item rather than on the PR bit.
Then again he calculated it, which is more than we can say for the countless teenagers trying to flip bottles in on their tables for views.
(...yes I do know it is the ol Sol)
Nevertheless :) FH first launch is an impressive feat.
[0] https://www.space.com/17307-neil-armstrong-one-small-step-qu...
Hopefully we will get a corrected version for the official movie!
The live (uncorrected) version for comparison: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8wxV-lUsZg
I hope one day to be as good at both engineering and PR as SpaceX is.
My non tech interested wife was cheering for both boosters to land safely. “What world am I in!?”
Thanks SpaceX for making us excited about space again.
> Space opera is a subgenre of science fiction that emphasizes space warfare, melodramatic adventure, interplanetary battles, chivalric romance, and risk-taking
> A science fantasy is a cross-genre within the umbrella of speculative fiction which simultaneously draws upon and/or combines tropes and elements from both science fiction and fantasy
Star Wars is 100% science fiction.
Star Wars is not science fiction, it is fantasy or mythology in a science-fictional setting. It is fusion cuisine.
> teleological view of the Universe.
Almost all fiction is almost completely teleological. Nothing ever happens by accident in fiction, everything that happens has a human motivational cause. The characters' incredibly improbable and complicated schemes almost never fail by accident as they very likely actually would but always due to confrontation or betrayal. (See also: political narratives.) The human brain just cannot help but pay attention to sex, alliances, confrontation and betrayal.
The Force being with you by birth is a bad theme because it takes away the humanity of the people that have it. They succeed or fail in part not because of their intentions but because of magic stuff they happen to have that you cannot have. It's painful to watch.
A great deal of success or failure in real life comes down to legacy, genetics and random chance, or "non-magical stuff" other people have that you cannot.
Also, 2001: A Space Odyssey is a great movie about a great example why you do not pilot your ships with computers all the time.
Also, you do not know what the future holds. You are living in the present, not the future, where we very well may have pilots piloting ships.
Star Wars is not science fiction and it does not take place in the future. We are not living in the future either.
No, it merely illustrates why you want your AI properly bottled up and airgapped that way the flight computer will follow your instructions after you consult with the AI (assuming an AI is ever built...).
Computers can control spacecraft just fine in the present without AI so really there does not seem to be a pressing need for this.
Source: Andrew Howard of SpaceX, who is in charge of this software and has to endure the stress of each rendezvous. Screwing up could kill the ISS crew.
Unless your connection confirmed that the onboard computer of the SpaceX Dragon capsule is sentient.
I was just providing evidence against the claim of the last paragraph of your previous message.
While you are waiting for AI that meets your specs, the world is flying real spacecraft with software that most people are happy to call AI right now.
Instead of a daemon, call it a djinn?
I didn't say that at all. It is in the past, and also, it is not science fiction. Star Wars is quite fantasy, offering no explanation in science for the force, hyperspace, lightsabers, etc.
I love Star Wars with all my heart. But it is not about the future and it is not science fiction. It takes place "a long time ago" and it centers around magical, unexplained powers.
Edit:
And,
> Isn't the key part of Sci-fi that it contains a society that has in some way advanced beyond our own?
No, I don't agree with this at all. I would even say that in nearly all science fiction published, the societies have not advanced beyond our own that much - or if they have, they are also demonstrated to be far behind us in other ways. Science fiction is a lot of things, but certainly there is no requirement for it to show a more advanced society than ours.
Likewise the key part of Romance genre fiction is the Happy Ending. It doesn't matter whether they sleep together (a lot of Romance aimed at older and Christian readers doesn't have any sex at all), or get married, but there must be a Happy Ending.
The original Star Wars was made in 1977, and based heavily on World War 2 combat films (much of the space combat and the trench run on the Death Star was lifted - sometimes shot for shot - from a film called "The Dam Busters.") For reasons of continuity and tone, that mechanical aesthetic can't ever change much throughout the franchise, or else it wouldn't "look" like Star Wars.
But the point is that it's exciting, it's visceral, the archetypes of the fighter pilot and joystick and of buttons that do important things make sense to the audience, and as a result those scenes can convey emotion though the use of familiar visual language.
Sci-fi was never "connected" to the future, and it was never (or at least, never explicitly) about attempting to accurately describe or predict the future. Yes, you could have replaced the ships and pilots in Star Wars with remote or AI controlled drones, not colored in the blasters, etc, and it might be more realistic, but no one would enjoy watching it.
People do enjoy dogfights (and spaceships that bank when they turn) and space wizards with laser swords doing flippy shit and punching each other with telekinesis, though.
Or maybe software technology was lost and they are only able to use extremely rudimentary systems...
Except that fully sentient AI is already commonplace in the form of droids, including battle droids.
This is a universe where a small robot that only speaks in clicks and whistles had to physically transport holographic "data tapes" about a moon-sized space station that can travel faster than light. A lot of it doesn't make sense when you think about it, but then it's supposed to be Flash Gordon with the serial numbers filed off.
I've almost lost hope around the end of the Space Shuttle program. I thought it will be only satellites, ISS and occasional science probe launches. SpaceX single-handedly restored my faith in the future of space activities again, and with other player on the scene, we now have realistic hope of seeing an actual industry in space within our lifetimes.
Arianespace has spent years developing new rocket engines specifically for reusability, and has started building prototype rockets.
Bezos’ company has mastered landing, and is directly building their mars rocket.
In 5 years we’ll likely see at least 3 major companies up there with SpaceX, and true competition in space.
Moreover, there's lots of companies in every vertical needed for bootstrapping the industry - ground services, satellites, in-space manufacturing, asteroid prospecting & mining... all in the early stage, all betting on cheaper access to space than it was just few years ago. We're in a critical moment where things suddenly start adding up and - I hope - will form something great!
It rather looks as if the tail-landing reusable booster stage is a "steam engine" type of eureka form factor, and everyone's going to be doing it. Yay!
Wonder what success of FH would do to works on BFR? If BFR would be as successful as Musk writes, would SpaceX make two rockets - or optimization will lead to just one?
If BFR is actually fully reusable it would be cheaper to launch than the F9 (due to the non-reused second stage).
BFR/BFS will come online as a self-competitive offering from SpaceX initially and both lines will be out in the market together (BFR vs. F9/FH). If and when BFR attains sufficient maturity, reliability, and market trust then the Falcon line of rockets will be phased out. BFR will have much greater capabilities (higher payloads, etc.) but will be substantially cheaper because it'll be 100% reusable and the reusability longevity for its parts will be much higher than for F9/FH, so there won't really be much reason to keep Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy around.
However, the FH uses RP-1-O2 Merlin engines, whereas the BFR will use Methane-O2 Raptor engines, so they might not learn too much.
Edit: RP-1 fuel.
I'm not trying to be negative, just trying to understand how you came to the conclusion you did.
In a theoretical world where we could just beam anything into earth orbit, unmanned interplanetary spaceflight would likely be an expensive hobby instead of something only governments attempt.
Maybe you could argue the Falcon 1 was an expensive hobby, but interplanetary spaceflight is certainly not.
If by "hobby" you mean doing something for fun or personal growth, with only vague - if any - expectations of future usefulness, then no. SpaceX was aimed at getting us to Mars from the day 1; it's their entire raison d'être. Musk bootstrapped it with his own cash because he also set this goal - getting humanity to Mars.
If by "hobby" you mean doing something meaningful instead of just making moar money - then sure.
And the landing shots are just damn cool.
And yet, some call him "visionary" or "genius" :)
The launches are cheaper because of the breakthrough in being able to reuse the rockets by landing them.
That's the exact opposite of copying.
It is much too easy to disparage an optimisation as unimportant compared to some hypothetical "original" idea of which it is a refinement, and we should not do this, especially to try to claim credit for people we know at the cost of those far away we've never heard of.
The "original" inventions behind recorded music, the telephone, the incandescent light bulb, and numerous other obvious examples are poor shadows of the commercially successful item that means we know them today. We honour many of the people who refined these items as "geniuses" today, often pretending to ourselves that they invented them rather than merely refining the work of others, this does everybody involved a disservice, and it disparages the real contribution of people (in China and elsewhere) optimising today's inventions. The flat panel display you're almost certainly reading this on is the product of _millions_ of such optimisations.
Maybe 1000 years from now, people look at us and say god damn it. I wish they had stayed there and learned how to live in earth well. We are now speared all over the place and we all hate hate each other; and just right now I hear Martian went ahead and annexed Venus and they also seem to be interfering in Andromeda elections.
When I saw that, all I could think about was seeing hundreds of those and that scene being as mundane as a plane landing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbSwFU6tY1c&feature=youtu.be...
If it were two different cameras we'd see two different landing pads. In the end of the video both feeds are coming down on the northern pad.
Edit: Here's the sat image from december with notes added https://imgur.com/a/u6sLs
Since they are on the same rocket, you see them land on the same pad.
The rockets have redundant cameras, and through a probable misconfiguration we saw two feeds from two cameras on one rocket.
Wasn't intentional, but oops.
I think you're right.
https://youtu.be/wbSwFU6tY1c?t=37m10s "even though those look very similar those ... are representative of different boosters"
The live (uncorrected) version for comparison: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8wxV-lUsZg
So, whats to stop them attaching an additional two (or more) to the existing rocket now that they have the basic synchronization worked out.
No better way to learn basic orbital dynamics out there.
(Hell, I might even be among them.)