SpaceX receives first-ever FAA license for commercial reentry | Hacker News Reader

SpaceX receives first-ever FAA license for commercial reentry

space.com

67 pointswidgetycrank23 comments

This is quite simply amazing news. The implications are astounding, beyond the mere selfish prospect of one day travelling to space as a tourist.

Considering a loose estimate on the value of the asteroid belt is like $5(10^20), it could literally be a new gold rush. It would be awesome (to the true definition of the word) if one day our manufactured goods are being landed from space rather than shipped across the ocean.

Beyond that, I envy my offspring that could one day live in space as if it were mundane.

Brings new meaning to carbon footprint?

One thing that I have learned in the past is that large problems can often be completely absolved simply by growing beyond them. As an example, during the industrial revolution, cities were covered in soot. They were a mess. But we plowed ahead instead of saying "gee, we should stick with current technology and stop expanding until we fix the soot", and look where we are now. Today's power makes 1800's power look like a pigsty, purely as a side effect of our growth & development.

What I mean to say is, if past experiences are any indicator, supposing we push on into space, carbon footprints will probably become a concern of the past- most likely due to some development we couldn't possibly have foreseen from our current vantage point. (what 1800's coal plant worker could have foreseen nuclear reactors?)

The classic example of this is the 'manure crisis' at the end of the 19th century. Since commerce and transportation over land and in cities usually required horses at that time, a simple calculation in 1894 by the Times of London forecasted that every street in London would be covered in 9 feet of horse manure by 1950. http://ibloga.blogspot.com/2010/04/weve-recently-had-some-di...

Even just from the ideas we're already aware of, expanding into space could render global warming irrelevant. Things like solar energy collectors, space industry, tethers for transporting raw materials.

Humans have a very big problem with paying attention to the bigger picture. Carbon emissions are only relevant if we still need fossil fuels to run our industry. In space, without oxygen we'll be using nuclear or solar as power sources not hydrocarbons.

I'm pretty sure Carbon Footprint will go the way of Nuclear Winter. While still technically true, the politics and trends will move on and the term will fade into obscurity. There are just too many things to fret about in the world, and humans, constantly exposed to anything eventually assimilate it into background noise.

I agree with the sentiment, but there are some practical problems.

Barring a machine intelligence explosion in the next half-century, we'll probably be getting to orbit on rockets.

Nitrous oxide and methane are two big greenhouse gasses. So to get to space, we're going to have to dump a whole lot more of this stuff into the atmosphere.

Note, I haven't run the numbers, so I may well sound like an idiot by noon.

Not all rocket fuels are the same. Falcon 9 appears to run on kerosene and LOX, which combusts into H2O and CO2. H20 is all but a noop (technically a greenhouse gas but cycles very quickly and you're not going to affect the net balance with a rocket), and while the CO2 may be a concern, bear in mind that as big as a rocket may be visually it isn't necessarily a big contributor relative to the rest of the industrialized planet as a whole.

Also, remember that one of the things a practical commercial space program will do is start mining the asteroid belt for rare earth metals, many of which are needed for green technologies. For instance, one problem with fuel cells is that there isn't enough platinum on Earth to make them for everybody. It is not hard to spin the math such that private spaceflight could be one of the greenest things to ever happen to industry. (And I felt I should be honest about the word "spin", but there is a truth there too. One must make full accountings to decide whether something is good, not count up the costs, ignore the benefits, and make grand pronouncements.)

I firmly believe that SpaceX is the best chance humanity currently has at achieving space travel for the general population. They are one of the few companies I can get honestly excited about these days.

Agreed. Them and Virgin Galactic seem like they're the next logical step. I'm especially excited because they have the opportunity to succeed where the supersonic jetliners failed: Imagine if any spot on the globe was within 2 hrs travel time...

I wonder, though, if the same problems will apply : high per-passenger-mile costs and restricted takeoff/landing sites. Eventually the Concorde overcame the per-passenger-mile costs but they could never evade the takeoff and landing restrictions. If they had flown the LA/NY route it would have been much more successful. I can see any type of space transportation coming across the same issues.

While flying twice as high as passanger aircraft, the sonic boom would still be a problem with the Concorde. The restriction would be greatly reduced with a suborbital plane, which cruises outside the atmosphere.

This. There are some real benefits to not having to fly through air the whole way.

> I firmly believe that SpaceX is the best chance humanity currently has at achieving space travel for the general population.

No. Although they're technically impressive, they have spent defense contractor amounts of money to get where they are today. There's almost no chance that this will help the general population get into space, except perhaps by testing the regulatory system.

Check out XCor, Masten, Armadillo, Scaled Composites if you're interested in personal access to space.

> hey are one of the few companies I can get honestly excited about these days.

Agreed.

Congrats to them. The FAA seems to be doing a good job not getting in the way of space travel.

Why does a company need a licence from the FAA to perform re-entry? The FAA doesn't regulate all of the earth's outer atmosphere, right?

The FAA regulates non-governmental manned spaceflight.

No, but they regulate the part where a chunk of white-hot metal and composite plummets into an area of the sky they're responsible for. That extends well beyond U.S. territorial airspace--by international agreements, much international airspace has been assigned to various nations to control. If SpaceX were to conduct their entire reentry out in the middle of the pacific in completely uncontrolled areas then they probably wouldn't need a license, but recovering the capsule would be a whole lot harder.

Do they also require a license to exit the planet through said airspace? Is it possible to receive one but not the other? i.e. If by some clerical error SpaceX received their "Exit License" but then forgot their "Re-Entry License", would the capsule then be stuck in the outer atmosphere?

Pedantic, I know, but still oddly intriguing to me. The fact that such a legacy organization like the FAA has to stretch to fit into this business space is interesting to me.

They do need a license to launch, and such licenses are very common: commercial satellite launches happen all of the time. The FAA needs to be involved because those rockets pass through controlled airspace on the way up and the FAA needs to take measures to keep aircraft away from them. This is news because, for the first time, a commercial entity is going to attempt to bring something back from orbit instead of just sending it up and leaving it there.

Reading between the lines, SpaceShipOne apparently didn't need a re-entry license, probably because they never achieved orbit and so their return didn't meet some technical criteria to be considered a "re-entry" by the FAA. They probably had some sort of special license from the FAA, though.

You think every country is going to apply for an american license to send their tourists in space?

It rather sounds like a joke. Like a license to drink.

I would assume if the re-entry was in US airspace, then you would need FAA approval.

Launch too.

Just try launching/landing a space vehicle without informing air controllers in any country with a functioning government. I'm pretty sure black helicopters would be near you in minutes, and stern-faced guys in battle gear would start yelling questions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com