No clouds great view of it going up, second stage separation, turning around and rocketing back and landing! What next for SpaceX acheivements? 1. Flight of their Falcon Heavy, with 2 land landing and one barge landing at sea, simulatnously 2. Flight of their crewed Dragon 2/rider 3. A flight of some billionaires around the moon at the end of 2018 (at earliest) 5. Commercial mars probe landing in 2020. 6. Launch of 4000+ satellite network for world wide high-speed internet connection 7. Interplanetary Transport Vehicle to Mars
That is f***ing impressive! This is something the USA does really well. Terrific stuff. I don't fancy N Korea's chances if it comes to a missile war, I really don't. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Straight out of Thunderbirds - or Fireball XL5 if you are old enough....... Gerry Anderson would be proud.
I love this! SpaceX has almost single-handedly brought back the old 1960's space travel excitement. (Which I'm old enough to remember.) It will even get better when they start flying manned Dragons, probably later this year. I really do want to see human beings get up to the Moon again, even if they don't immediately land on it. It's the return of the old "We have the technology!" engineering audacity that NASA seems to have lost a generation ago. The willingness to 'go for it', even if it's a huge stretch and it's risky.
If (and this is a big if) they can launch a mission around the moon before the end of 2018 it will be the 60th anniversary of the first manned flight around the moon. NASA lost that audacity (at least for manned flight) because decades of hair-brained politicians pushing and pulling the agency in multiple directions, tearing it to shreds. Capitalism is space may be our only hope for a US return to space glory. The Chinese have just docked a resupply ship with there test space-station and are preparing to launch their own mir class station, they clearly have plans for the moon as well.
https://www.spaceintelreport.com/has-the-spacex-steamroller-finally-arrived "If the launch occurs on schedule, it would offer proof that despite the September 2016 on-pad failure, Falcon 9 operations are approaching the kind of launch rhythm that SpaceX has long promised and its competitors have long feared. “We don’t know when it will arrive, but the steamroller is on the horizon and when it arrives it’s going to be a real challenge for us,” said a French government official in 2014, referring to SpaceX’s launch capacity. It was this kind of anxiety that caused Europe’s space-launch sector, which has ruled the global commercial launch-service roost for more than two decades, to pivot to the low-cost Ariane 6 rocket, scheduled to enter service in 2020. Ariane 6 is designed to be 40-50% less costly to build than the current Ariane 5 vehicle and come close to, if not exactly match, today’s Falcon 9 prices of around $65 million for a 4,000-to-5,000-kilogram telecommunications satellite headed to geostationary orbit." The Dinosaurs Rocket Industry is still at least 3 years behind SpaceX and IF SpaceX suffers no more setbacks will likely still be behind spaceX forever. Simply put every time SpaceX resuses a rocket their potential launch cost goes down and they have 3 years where they can charge marginally less then full prices on these, enough time to make a profit and then undercut their competitors with the real reusable cost. Unless the dinosaurs try something radical like a SSTO their present attempts to barely match SpaceX now is doomed if SpaceX competes it up. All this is depend on SpaceX achieving their mythical 2 launches a months, consistently, for years on starting now. And in the future achieving even more rapid turn around, Musk's ITS design if it ever flies, with its landing directly back at the launch pad and on pad assembly could make the laughable idea of a 24 hour turnaround actually a reality.
