SpaceX News

[NotAPhysicist]

Success then
Watching the first stage come all the way down to a succesful landing was pretty impressive, the feed only cut out for a second or two.
Getting the satellites up was good too of course..
Webcast link here in case you missed it.

[Tom Ligon]

Neatly done!

Now, for about ten more in a row to prove it was not a fluke. I'm not trying to be harsh, but this is a fix after a catastrophic failure, the second in an upper stage oxygen tank, and it needs repeats to increase confidence that they really caught the cause.

[NotAPhysicist]

Not harsh, they really do need to put up a long string of successful flights to prove reliability & preferably hit that twice a month cadence they keep talking about.. I'm a believer but I would rather like delivery. Still, a good start to the year & fingers crossed for the rest.

[ltgbrown]

Way to go SpaceX! A bunch more and then we are on to something.

[jnaujok]

Am I the only one who thinks that Elon's latest kick -- The Boring Company -- has nothing to do with avoiding traffic and everything to do with building smaller, faster TBMs for drilling underground habitats on Mars?

[paperburn1]

I think you may be on a good track. It would be a way to develop a better TBM without every thinking he is a wack job.

[hanelyp]

If Elon Musk does develop a better TBM, not only is that helpful digging tunnels for a colony on Mars, it's a profitable venture on Earth.

[kunkmiester]

I was looking at tunnels, someone pointed out moving material on the surface is easier, so just half bury your habitat at most, and put material on top of it. You only need a few feet for most radiation, iirc it was like ten feet at most.

A decent robotics presence and it's be move in ready before you get there.

[Skipjack]

I was looking at tunnels, someone pointed out moving material on the surface is easier, so just half bury your habitat at most, and put material on top of it. You only need a few feet for most radiation, iirc it was like ten feet at most.

A decent robotics presence and it's be move in ready before you get there.

If you burry the habitat, it needs to be able to carry the weight of the soil. That means heavier structures.

[paperburn1]

Also we are talking scale of economics, tunnel borer will be cheaper in the long run ,could work while the city is growing, also could potentially work in a shirt sleeve environment. two or three layers down low risk of blowout

[krenshala]

CRS 10 launch should happen this morning in a bit over an hour. Not sure who all will see this before then, but just in case:

http://www.spacex.com/webcast -- SpaceX webcast (which will start showing stuff at ~0900 central)

https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/ ... tml#public -- NASA TV website (not sure when it starts showing the launch but it is about the same time SpaceX will)

--
Edit: Launch abort at T- 0:13 due to second stage thrust vectoring control system issue. They had been looking at it for the last 10 to 20 minutes, and apparently decided to not risk it due to not fully understanding what was causing the problem they were seeing. As they put it "It might have worked fine, but we don't know for sure". Next launch window is tomorrow at 0938 eastern.

For those that are interested, the NASA TV link is the one with most of the operations side voice data (and NASA commentator), while the SpaceX link is the one with all the fancy graphics, talks, etc. Personally, I had both up, but volume on the SpaceX webcast just loud enough to barely hear, and the NASA webcast where I could hear it clearly. The NASA one appeared to be about 20 to 30 seconds behind the SpaceX broadcast, though that could just be some relaying delays.

And now I return to my regularly scheduled boring work day.

[ltgbrown]

Launch aborted due to problems with Thrust Vector Control problems in second stage. Next launch opportunity is tomorrow at 0938 EST.

[NotAPhysicist]

Apparently a last second call be Musk himself, you can understand that, I'd want to be sure too..

Fingers crossed for tomorrow.

In terms of webcasts I'd add that SpaceX usual does a 'technical' webcast along side their 'hosted' one that they show on spacex.com.
The technical webcast has the chatter from mission controllers and also tends to have more feeds from the rockets - the last one had the feed from the rocket descending and from the barge at the same time for instance. This is typically up on their youtube channel at https://www.youtube.com/user/spacexchannel.

[krenshala]

Ah, thank you for that. That SpaceX technical channel was the one I was looking for this morning.

[ltgbrown]

Successful launch and landing! (Fun to say.)