re: SpaceX Falcon Heavy Launch Thread

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We didn't catch the core. She landed just off the side of the barge.

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Also, the absurdity of the whole thing is really sinking in now that they actually pulled it off. There currently exists a dummy wearing a spacesuit sitting in a convertible with the top down attached to a rocket that is hurtling away from the Earth and if the rocket survives the trip through the radiation of the Van Allen belts, it's going to orient itself, and light again. The dummy in the spacesuit in the convertible with the top down attached to the rocket will then be injected into an orbit where it will just hang out for the next billion or so years.

V'ger is going to have so many questions when it comes back and finds that.

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There were a lot of Elon Musk haters in the other thread, wondering if any still feel the same.

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I'm glad he's mastered the art of unmanned space flight. My only question is when does he plans to strap a man on top of one of his rockets? He doesn't seem to have the confidence to do that just yet.

They are recovering the fairings to reuse as well using this thing

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I'm glad he's mastered the art of unmanned space flight. My only question is when does he plans to strap a man on top of one of his rockets? He doesn't seem to have the confidence to do that just yet.

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I know many here don’t like to admit it but the future of spaceflight is unmanned

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There were a lot of Elon Musk haters in the other thread, wondering if any still feel the same.

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Not really feeling any different.

Tail-first landings have been a thing we've been doing for over twenty years now. It's still not proven to be cost-effective.

Elon Musk is still pretty fraudulent.

Did they state how much force was needed to slow down those rockets during the landing burn?

That in its own right deserves a thread.

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Im on the fence of whether he’s a snake oil salesman or visionary.

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How is it snake oil?

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DavidTheGnome

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That looks like the claw from a giant crane game

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Im on the fence of whether he’s a snake oil salesman or visionary.

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I'm going with "visionary who has no qualms using available public monies and subsidies (or other people's money) while risking complete failure to reach his goals".

I don't think there's anything snake oil about what he tries to do, but most of it is extremely technologically daunting and is at the very outside edge of possibility, has very high risk of failure, but is not impossible to do. After all, the man and his company just launched a heavy lift vehicle that is eclipsed in lifting capability only by the friggin' Saturn V and the damned thing lands itself. When he first started SpaceX, everything he does now was science fiction. A private company started by one dude ends up with launch capabilities that not only large military contractors can't touch, but no nation on the planet can touch? Yeah, right. Reusable rockets? Get the frick outta here, crackpot!

Yet here we sit after witnessing the first flight of his new heavy lift rocket. Not only was the hardware on this maiden flight of a brand new lift system mostly USED PARTS (the two outside cores were flown before), but most of it landed itself safely (the two used parts, come to think of it) and there's a dummy in a spacesuit in a convertible with the top down attached to a rocket on its way to Mars' orbit because of that launch vehicle. Without Elon Musk, that dummy never gets to ride out there with the top down, but because Elon Musk did it, it makes the chances THIS dummy gets to do it, too, before he dies better.

Musk, though, is not without fault. He gets in his head a way that he might be able to do something and he's off, but he doesn't always succeed as well as he has with SpaceX or Solar City. Tesla is a glaring example of this. His notorious overconfidence paired with the difficulty of what he tries to do and the ways he funds it definitely can make him look less-than-squeaky-clean and in some cases, I definitely think he was playing fast and loose with what could be considered moral or ethical.

The biography that Ashlee Vance wrote about him does a very good job of shining some light on why he is the way he is and letting that light show you his warts, too.