I don't think that most people realise what an achievement this is. This is major, three boosters landing simultaneously and one of them is landing on a moving object in the middle of the ocean. And they will reuse the two side boosters for the next FH launch.
Why is happiness a factor in what people ought to know?
Humanity just took a picture of a black hole with a multinational telescope array, predicted by decades old math and all that jazz.
All a few (educated) friends had to say is that the image looks like garbage, what is this bullshit on my frontpage.
I was surprised about how upset these reactions made me. But then I figured there must be a multitude of important things of which I do not have even the tiniest understanding or care.
I flew several thousand miles to be on Cocoa beach that fateful day to witness it for my own eyes. It's one of the things I'm most proud of having accomplished. I cannot imagine what it feels like to actually work on the project.
Nothing to add here except I'm completely impressed as a software engineer and a human. Congrats to all who made this happen -- you have done important stuff.
Watched the video w my 10 year old kid and tried to explain how impressive this is and relate it to my own experiences watching space shuttle launches.
Not to denigrate what's going on now, arguably it's far more important technically and possibly a bigger achievement, but it doesn't _feel_ anything like as exciting as the first shuttle launch. And to be clear, I was pretty pumped to watch the first booster landing and the roadster launch.
Pretty much the whole (western) world stopped to watch it. It felt very much like returning to space for the first time since the end of the Apollo project (it wasn't, but it felt like it), it was such a step change from the previous generation of rockets. This was science fiction in action, it was going to revolutionise space travel. It even looked like a new form of transport, and the speed with which it cleared the gantry was amazing to people used to a Saturn 5.
We taped it off the TV, and I remember going back to watch it again multiple times.
This is more of a commentary on society than anything else. There are much more pressing things happening on facebook these days than autonomously-landing robot rockets.
Maybe, and certainly if we'd seen an unmanned booster land on after completing a successful launch in the early 80's we'd have been very excited, but the shuttle just caught the imagination that bit more. Justifiably or not.
Anyway, the question was, "how do they compare?". Personally, emotionally, they're pretty damn cool, but way less exciting. More so than can be hand-waved away as simply being older and more cynical.
It equates to comparing landing a 14 storeys high broomstick with landing a flying brick.
Both are impressive, but spacex' achievement is making their booster truly reusable. The shuttle required way too much refurbishment to be commercially viable.
These vehicles are also completely different in their purpose so it's hard to really compare, I find them both inspiring really.
Seeing the boosters fly back and land themselves reminded me of watching the shuttle boosters detach and fall away from the shuttle.
The shuttle boosters would parachute and land in the ocean where they were retrieved and could be reused.
Back then, the thought of those boosters precisely flying themselves back to the launch site would seem like science fiction -- now it is science fact.
Just watching that video brought back memories of watching the shuttle launches -- as swish_bob says those were a BIG DEAL back then both for the engineering achievement but also culturally. It was something to admire and be proud of even if your only contribution to the project was "being born in a time and place where people do things like this".
If my memory is not playing tricks on me, when the MTV music channel started (which was also a pretty BIG DEAL in my world back then) they used animations of the shuttle (landing on the moon, I think) as part of their branding because it was hard to get any cooler than the shuttle.
The shuttle impressive part is that they are landing the second stage, which is an order of magnitude harder than landing a booster.
The Falcon (9/heavy) impressive part is that they are flying a reusable rocket in an way that is commercially viable (which, BTW, is what the shuttle hoped to achieve).
The shuttle was essentially just a glider once you got it out of orbit. Not a very good glider, but still an object intend to "fly".
I think the best analogy I've heard for the boosters is that it's equivalent to throwing a pencil over the Empire State Building and having it land on it's eraser.
I think most people are just focused on other things. I'm sure there are plenty of other great achievements we never took time to appreciate. The discovery of CRISPR is probably one of those things. We just have a different focus. Life moves on...
* Two boosters landing (mostly) simultaneously, the center core landing later downrange due to the higher altitude and velocity it commenced reentry at
They do this to prevent the two boosters from interfering with each other's guidance systems, which I believe uses radar. I recall from the first FH launch that the two boosters landed almost simultaneously and that was a fluke, they wanted to land then staggered a little bit. Thankfully the guidance systems still did their jobs.
Being 'amazed by it' isn't equivalent to fully realizing what SpaceX's achievements imply: specifically tracking the progress of SpaceX means counting down the years until you can buy a ticket to Mars.
Do most people realize that these launches are primarily done to create Mars colonies? Do most people realize that the goal of SpaceX is to terraform Mars into a planet livable like Earth? Do most people really grasp all this?
I haven't met a single person (aside from existing friends) IRL that understands any of this. It seems to be mostly "cool, rockets!" to most people - none of the full understand of what each success is to SpaceX: money in the bank for Mars development and experience launching rockets to colonize space.
The vertical landing via rocket is to make it easy to launch and land on any solid surface in the solar system. Do most people realize the impact of this? I would be shocked.
The only thing that kind of annoys me in the back of my mind, is that these guys are aiming to save humanity, but the average Facebook engineer figuring out how exploit users better is probably being paid 2-3x as much as the average SpaceX aerospace engineer. But that's what the free market is rewarding right now.
Save humanity? From what global warming? Global warming is nothing compared to Mars. If we can terraform mars into a beautiful landscape then climate change isn't really an issue on earth...
Going to Mars for scientific research would be an incredible step forward for man kind. But the feasibility of space still holds a lot in question. It is exciting, but let's not call it "saving humanity".
Save humanity from an extinction level event. Think asteroid impact or global nuclear war rather than climate change. Musk has been pretty explicit about his intention to make humanity a multi-planetary species. [0]
What nightski is saying is that achieving a truly independent colony on Mars, which can survive the destruction of Earth, is much harder than just putting people there.
Mars might an interesting playground for testing climate engineering, since it'd be hard to mess it up more than it is now. That said though, it's hard to imagine fixing things like the lack of atmosphere without a lot of investment.
While I agree that less effort should be spent on what Facebook wants to achieve, there are way more engineers that would rather work on space stuff than positions so of course they are going to pay less. So the market is functioning as it should.
Also, just FYI, your comment comes across as incredibly elitist as well, which is made even worse because the so-called "implications" don't actually follow from what we saw today, or do so only barely.
Oh I agree, it won't be soon! But that's the real goal of today's launch: to learn more about the technology that will enable the technology to terraform Mars (and to bank money to fund it).
I think that is lost on most people. There's no point in today's launch for SpaceX if they don't get closer to colonizing and then terraforming Mars. They don't care otherwise - that is the goal.
Edit: Not sure what you mean by elitest, but okay. Every SpaceX launch, including today's, works towards this goal: this is what watching SpaceX launches is about for a lot of people, maybe most who watch.
Your comment sounds like you're calling "most people" stupid for failing to grasp the "true significance" of this launch (but you and your friends, obviously, were able to). I'd suggest tweaking it if that wasn't your intention.
I think the comment is pretty spot on and I also think most people are stupid and they don't grasp the significance of what Musk is trying to do. I don't know the OP but wouldn't mind being his/her friend.
What can be done to get more people to grasp the significance here? Or is this pattern just human nature?
I'm a big SpaceX fan, and I don't think most people are stupid. For more people to care, SpaceX needs to launch more significant payloads. A communications satellite is humdrum. Shooting a car into space is about as cool as dumping a car into the ocean.
Space telescopes, Mars rovers, Moon missions, these are the cool parts. Exploration! If SpaceX lowers costs enough to give of us more of these missions, then people will care. They've only maybe just started to make an impact, with Beresheet.
Sure, not my intention - I think most people don't care. It's not a judgement about them. I just think they don't grasp it because they don't care and that's okay.
There may be a large group that does care, does grasp it, but is skeptical because the claims are fantasy. Consider that terraforming Mars is way harder than terraforming Earth's deserts, and yet even that is not being done. Also consider the little bit of terraforming mankind managed to do since the start of the industrial revolution, and what kind of resources it took to do it. It doesn't really translate to Mars.
I think that fundamentally people are conservative when it comes to new technology. That's all.
If the rocket puts a car into space, we have the ability to put a car into space. If the rocket lands and is reusable and cheap, we have that ability. If we send colonists to mars, we can send colonists to mars.
Until it's done, people won't worry about it or incorporate it into their worldview. Short of offering to help, what's the point in worrying about it until there's something new that I can do? There are way too many things to worry about them all, I just care when a new thing is actually available.
It is extremely short-sighted, how we have treated our planet. With oil and gas companies lying to the public about their research for 50 years, and politicians intentionally taking stances that we should pollute more (just because we can), the main issues on Earth are around decision making.
It will not be technology that solves climate change; it will be a reigning in of externalities, correctly pricing pollution into corporate development and taxation, and the recovery of truth into politics and decision making.
It should be common knowledge that most corporations are trading our long-term health for short-term profits; if only the corporations could wait 5-10 more years for profits, they could be had sustainably for centuries, rather than all in a burst today.
We need better decision making on Earth - and better technology. But it's hardly SpaceX's fault that we haven't solved our Earthly crises yet.
Sorry, but no. Musk said he wants to go to Mars and thus he founded SpaceX (and the other companies). Musk has already delivered - it's not there yet but you can't deny the guy's wide-ranged success in his mission.
I went to (a lot) of school for science and engineering. I’m on the internet all the time. I’m hip to this. I know I should be blown away by this kind of thing, but this, and the recent black hole pic for that matter, don’t do it for me. A really good movie, band or even a show like rick and morty will. I’m terms of science/engineering - the theoretical work or ingenious experiments do it for me. I guess what really amazes me is pure novel/creative thinking. The application of that thought is just a lot of work - and unless it’s s moon landing or nuclear fusion or curing a major disease or something like that I’m just like whatever.
I think most people realize it thanks to the very good communication by SpaceX.
Personally, from a technology standpoint, I am not that impressed compared to what we have done in the past when it comes to space exploration. Moon landings, space shuttle, Mars rovers... The current state of rocketry all but highlights how awesome it was before.
The awesome part about SpaceX is not that their rockets are the best humanity can do. What's awesome is that it may very well make the first reusable rockets that make economical sense. Unlike NASA in the past, they don't have unlimited money, they are a private company, and even if they have help from the US government, they have to work with a budget.
If anything the achievement is not the rocket itself but how it creates a regain of interest in rocketry, both popular and economic. I mean, our workhorse rocket (Soyuz) dates back from the 50s, and all of the awesome (and too expensive) stuff like the Saturn V and shuttle are now lost.
62 years after the first flight would have been 1845. The Montgolfier brothers flew in a balloon in 1783.
It's entirely possible that chemical rockets will turn out to be the "hot air balloon" of space travel. Whether this perspective increases or decreases your pessimism is up to you.
Many people overestimate the environmental impact of air travel.
It's "only" about 2% of global energy consumption. Not nothing, but also not that significant. There are much bigger energy wasters that can be targeted.
It's the other way around unfortunately, people underestimate it: The effect of air travel on global warming is much higher, due to emissions effects in the upper atmosphere. Eg WP says 'Emissions weighting factor (EWFs) i.e., the factor by which aviation CO2 emissions should be multiplied to get the CO2-equivalent emissions for annual fleet average conditions is in the range 1.3–2.9'
And air travel is growing at a steep rate because air travel has gotten so cheap and big populations in developing countries take up air travel.
I wonder what sparked interest in rocketry in the USSR enough that they launched Sputnik, etc with no immediate military benefit. As berated as communism is, they had vision enough to see past the capitalists in that moment...into space.
Indeed, it was always a military application, v-1, v-2, launching sputnik was demonstrating the ability to put a warhead anywhere on earth. It was called the 'red scare' for a reason.
All the early Russian and US space launch systems were modified ICBMs. The US started their ICBM program immediately after WW2 the same as the Russians. It’s just that with the US developing the atomic bomb firsts, Russia had a stronger incentive to get a really big technological ‘First’ of their own.
I’m not in any way denigrating the Russian achievement, but it’s not as though the US had no rockets of it’s own at the time and the military benefits were clear to both sides.
The original statement: that most people don't realize how awesome it is.
At face value, I've observed that less than 50% of people I know are even aware this is happening. So on that observation alone the statement is true. Among those that do know, when I've explained that there are something like 10 dimensions to solve (x/y/z velocity, x/y/z position, pitch/roll/yaw, and time) and that you have to solve all of them using only 4 inputs (lower booster, and 3 lateral boosters), they are more amazed.
In my experience, almost everyone I meet has the potential to be more impressed by this event by just learning a bit more about it. Therefore "most people don't realize how awesome this is".
To be fair it is only a small, incremental improvement to the first FH launch which came within a whisker of doing exactly the same thing, if only for a small lack of fuel on the way down.
