A chapter in mankind's history to be made tonight/this morning

ButteredToast.

ButteredToast.

Active member
At 4:15 AM EST, if all goes as planned, the first private spaceflight to the international space station will be made by Space-X and its Falcon-9 rocket.

Unfortunately this is kind of being overshadowed by Facebooks IPO... priorities, right people...?

For those of you who don't understand the enormity of what this represents:

http://gizmodo.com/5911244/spacex-falcon-9-the-future-of-commercial-space-flight-blasts-off-tomorrow

It will be streamed live in HD here:

http://www.spacex.com/webcast/

Please tell me I'm not the only one thats staying up for this...

MANKIND FUCK YEAH

SpaceX-Falcon-9-Rocket-Successfully-Completes-Pre-Launch-Tests-2-500x355.jpg
 
so does everything have to be like perfect for it to take off?

i'm just wondering how "slight" the pressure change in engine 5 was? serious question.
 
that rocket looks really sketch. and dont worry OP, i understand the magnitude of this, this is the first step into not only privatized but also commercial space exploration. We'll be taking march break trips to the moon in no time!
 
From what I've read, they have had several glitches that have had to do with the range for aborts being set pretty strict in order to avoid having the thing blow up. Also, their launch window is basically a second in order to get to the ISS, so if they have to abort, they can't launch that day. The ISS is moving at something like 7700 m/s and if you're a second late, you are already like 8 km off target already.
 
exactly this. i'm on another forum with a spacex dude on there and thats what he said. he even went as far as less than a second.
 
pretty much this.....and for us americas thats 17230 mph or 4.786 miles per second. there is a an incredibly small window for this thing to launch through.

i actually forgot all about this so pretty happy i saw this to remind me
 
i couldn't read the text cos all i could pay attention to was the fact your icon dances perfectly in time to the music i'm listening to. i'll come back later and try again
 
A lot of people are saying that SpaceX will replace NASA but I highly doubt that.

I think what SpaceX will do is make space travel routine with stuff like this. They will go on routine grocery runs to the ISS, and maybe even repair missions. In the event that we have a moon base, they'll probably take on the task of resupplying the base. I'd venture to guess this is how they will make money.

As for NASA, it will probably coexist with SpaceX. NASA will still be doing most of the scientific research, and will still be undertaking the big risky ventures such as pushing the frontier. I don't think SpaceX will do that for two reasons, the first being it is a terrible business model. With such a high risk and so little monetary reward, how do you turn something like that into profit? When you're doing something that literally no human has ever done before, there's an enormous amount of risk involved and its extremely difficult to get companies to invest in that. Extremely difficult.

Reason two being that literally all it takes to end a private space company is for one manned misson to go kablooey too early in the life of the company. NASA is resilient when things like this happen because they're backed by government money and can fix the problem and can keep chuggin' forward. Elon Musk has a shitload of money - and I mean a shitload - but it is not infinite, and with a private space company, one thing goes wrong and a few people die and suddenly you have investors that are backing out and private space becomes the zeppelins of our time.

On another note, a lot of people are calling SpaceX a failure because they aborted which is not true at all. The instantaneous about function is absolutely a groundbreaking innovation in space travel. The onboard computer is able to check literally EVERY system that is on board that vehicle in the very last second before launch, and kill the launch if anything is even slightly wrong. The engines in the rocket are able to reach full thrust within one second, and the onboard computer checks all the systems before that happens. This is a much better success than having a launch that ends up exploding and destroying an unbelievably expensive rocket. Eventually SpaceX will sell this kind of technology to NASA, and events like the Challenger disaster will be nearly eliminated.
 
Yeah sorry about the metric. Those were the numbers I remembered from what I had read and I didn't feel like going and converting. Either way, it shows you how precise they have to be.

I think this is a huge step forward though when they finally launch and get to the ISS.
 
This is really neat. I kind of want to freeze myself for 100 years and live in 2112. I wonder how my iPhone 4 will compare
 
the government (nasa) goes out into a frontier first, shows that it is possible to make a profit in that frontier, and then the private corporations follow and really flush it out. for example, Christopher Columbus and other conquistadors were sponsored by the king and queen of spain and they only checked out a few remote areas. after they came back with slaves, cocoa, gold, etc. the west indies trading company was formed. the WITC was responisble for the majority of exploration, trade, and communication between europe and america for nearly 200 years.

so companies like spaceX, Planetary Resources, and Vigin Galactic are (hopefully) going to replace NASA and be able to do a hell of a lot more. Since NASA is a government project, it is entirely funded by taxes and produces no monetary profit. these private companies are capable of generating a profit and a product to sell, so a lot more people will invest, there will be more competition, and they will actually have something to produce, as opposed to NASA which has done very little besides say "there is a lot out there that we dont know about, but were too underfunded to go find out." in fact, the next space race will most likely not be between nations but between companies. moral of the story: buy stock in a space exploration company.
 
So they're trying again tonight/tomorrow morning. They replaced a faulty valve in the engine, so hopefully everything is fixed and they can lift this thing off.
 
because if everything isn't perfect, they could die. space shuttles have over 1 million moving parts, the challenger exploded because of a shrunken o ring
 
<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/lFoe0oBalAc" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
 
Can you imagine the future spins one could conjure on the moon? Bishop needs to get Branson and Tammy Whamnips on a conference call.
 
i dont know why i thought I'd be able to fall asleep having gone to bed at 2:30am, knowing this was coming up.

So here i am, wide awake, watching nasaTV waiting for it.

I live for this kind of stuff
 
6 minutes!

Just thinking about how nerve racking it is to watch one of these launches...can't imagine what it must be like for the guys who've committed years of their lives to this rocket.

And on that note, good to see us launching rockets again. Shuttle got boring and was too small.
 
^This. Jeeze I have a pit in my stomach and I have nothing invested in this. Being an engineer in the project has got to be crazy.
 
it looks like it's coming to life with all the steam and everything come off it in every direction.

I like it.
 
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