spacemarauder.com — Falcon 9, the future of cargo flights for NASA has been under construction at the Cape for a while now, with a planned launch later this yet. Yesterday afternoon teams worked for 30 minutes to get it vertical, this was the “critical” step according to Space X so it looks like Falcon 9 is up and ready to go.
Jan 11, 2009 View in Crawl 4
crazlunaticJan 11, 2009
space tech is always really cool - i think we should be spending more money on getting our own world sorted out rather than go and explore but this is still cool so I dugg itbut what's the purpose of the Falcon X? :S
mosuembiJan 12, 2009
I wonder what the captain of this spacecraft is called.....................
gt35rJan 12, 2009
Its not that misleading. If you look at the submission for more than 1/20 a second you'll get it.
williamcrandallJan 12, 2009
"One planet, one experiment." -- Edward O. WilsonRight now, humanity is conducting a singular experiment in one ecosystem.This experiment, which could be called "technoscience," is a few hundred years old and includes a massive rise in our species' population, the devastation of huge swaths of Earth's preexisting ecosystem, a global transformation of weather patterns, and, perhaps of most consequence, the introduction of millions of evolutionarily unprecedented molecular materials with unknown ecological consequences into the environment (see: "Children of Men" -- "Due to an unexplained infertility pandemic...").It is uncertain if humanity will survive this experiment. If we build a number of solar-orbiting, spinning habitats from near-Earth asteroids, each housing a few thousand or tens of thousands of human individuals, and a self sustaining ecosystems of other lifeforms, we can multiply the instances of the experiment, thereby increasing the likelihood that one or more of the contained human populations will collectively discover a set of social and technological choices that are viable, given the physical and biological facts of terrestrially evolved DNA life. Life on Earth is one such experiment.(Parenthetically, these habitats spin in order to precisely simulate Earth-standard gravity, which seems essential for Earth-evolved life: In one experiment, 90% of examined immune system genes failed to express themselves in microgravity environments. Given DNA life's constant exposure to our home planet's "1 G," environment, the moon and Mars may never be generationally habitable. Planetary gravitational fields cannot be adjusted; the moon and Mars offer only one-sixth and one-third Earth-normal gravity, respectively.)How might we do this? By following the existing contours of economic development (supply and demand) and mining near-Earth asteroids for terrestrially valuable metals and building stocks for space-based solar power systems. See: AbundantPlanet.org
btspmJan 13, 2009
Don't wet your panties just yet kiddies. Falcon 1 failed in 75% of its 4 test launches. Now you're telling me a design with 9x as many Merlin engines in the first stage is ready for prime time?And any fair economic analysis of their costs should factor in the accumulated knowledge they bought by hiring engineers away from Boeing, Lockheed, Aerojet, and Rocketdyne. They're the beneficiaries not only of NASA COTS funding, but of the both government and company funded research that has been conducted at the major aerospace contractors for the past 40 years.It's a fine business model in the short term, but it's foolhardy to think that similar efficiencies can be created for leap-ahead technologies like moon flights or heavy-EELV launches.
prometheusbornJan 13, 2009
I think we in the US ARE shielded from that. All we have to do is turn off our TV. Isn't it nice being an American? Don't even need rockets to shield us from reality. Just a button.Unless you're saying my TV reception would suck and I can't watch Lost from space. Then there's no way I'd want to live there.