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How pathetic has the American space industry become?

No biggie. We can just pay Russia a couple billion to carry our re-supply crap up there.
 
Kids don't want to grow up to be astronauts any more. This is not a recent occurrence. The sad thing is that so many great devices and products gave come from NASA. Innovation in the US space program has come to a stand still.
 
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ericram said:
Kids don't want to grow up to be astronauts any more. This is not a recent occurrence. The sad thing is that so many great devices and products gave come from NASA. Innovation in the US space program has come to a stand still.
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My kids and I watched the launch, went into our backyard and saw the rocket and then we saw the ball of fire when the initiated the termination procedure. My youngest son wondered why they would blow a rocket up w/ someone inside it. Had to explain it was unmanned.
 
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Rockets 'splode sometimes. It happens.

The commercial guys are now taking their lumps, but I bet they'll get there.
 
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FSUTribe76 said:
So pathetic we can't even resupply our old station after THREE attempts. This isn't JUST on Obama, Bush did his best to kill the public space agency and then Obama did nothing to revive it. The glorious outsourcing of space has resulted in the same sad outcomes as our outsourcing of manufacturing, college students, etc....

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...lon-musks-spacex-to-attempt-historic-landing/
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It seems you don't know that one of those 3 resupply attempts was a Russian rocket. I guess your college student quip is coming home to roost.
 
YogiNole said:
Yea how dare they mess up the launches. It's not like it's rocket science or anything
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I can tell who didn't RTFA. It's not a simple one time occurrence, we've had three failed attempts to resupply instead because we no longer have NASA do it themselves they outsource it to the lowest bidder.

SpaceX in particular has a horrible track record. Of its five Falcon 1 launches only two ended up NOT in pieces. On its current Falcon 9 launches there were 19 missions, EIGHT had total or partial loss of the vehicles (sometimes only one stage was destroyed whereby they deemed it a "success") and another was scrubbed at launch. So basically SpaceX is at 50-50 as to whether something would go horribly wrong.

Meanwhile NASA had only two failures out of 135 shuttle missions and two failures of 33 other manned flights all of which were done decades ago. Of the previous 600 Delta 2 unmanned launches which was the NASA predecessor to the Falcon 9s, they had only ONE lost rocket.

SWFNole said:
It seems you don't know that one of those 3 resupply attempts was a Russian rocket. I guess your college student quip is coming home to roost.
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Uh no. That was part of our outsourcing I was referencing, we provided funding to the Russians for that failure. So pay attention to details.
 
January 19, 2006 (just ~103 years since the Wright Brothers first flight) New Horizons spacecraft was launched and almost a decade and 3 Billion miles later it will reach it's closest point to Pluto on July 14. Then it will be on it's way from to the Kuiper Belt. What an amazing century.
 
I was trying to find exactly how much the U.S. paid for the Russian outsourced Progress resupply vessel but all I could see was that earlier Russia had demanded we pay triple the actual costs of the flights as a fit of rage over various things we've done against them recently and that as they're the only way to send our astronauts up and down we're paying almost $160 million per person for a round trip (one up and one back). The actual costs were about $50 million as it was a smaller unmanned vessel, so we probably paid somewhere around $150 mil for that.
 
321Nole said:
Rockets 'splode sometimes. It happens.

The commercial guys are now taking their lumps, but I bet they'll get there.
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This. It's not like they moved in to NASA and just continued, this is a new enterprise, I give them another 10 years to catch up and then exceed the govt model. I took the kids outside to watch, I just hope pieces don't land on my house.
 
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FSUTribe76 said:
The actual costs were about $50 million as it was a smaller unmanned vessel, so we probably paid somewhere around $150 mil for that.
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If true, I'm guessing they made $140 million profit on that one.

rMuOh8.gif
 
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ericram said:
Kids don't want to grow up to be astronauts any more. This is not a recent occurrence. The sad thing is that so many great devices and products gave come from NASA. Innovation in the US space program has come to a stand still.
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Well, Math.

My daughter is going to Auburn in a month. She just surprised me and said she wants to be an engineer. As a STEM proponent I was so happy. But so few are doing it any more.
 
The problem is that neither NASA nor the politicians have any idea what they want NASA to do. There must be a consensus and then political will power to stick to the plan for more than a minute.
 
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Bubbz said:
We have a secret space program- that's the legit one.
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There is no doubt that we are developing and using hypersonic spaceplanes of the manned and unmanned varieties for everything from "tactical" strikes using lead mass drivers with the power of tactical nukes but little or no fallout, stealth penetration and reconnaissance. But! We have no where near the scientific exploration cabability of previous decades even with substantially better materials and tech.
 
Bubbz said:
We have a secret space program- that's the legit one.
Click to expand...

There is no doubt that we are developing and even currently using hypersonic spaceplanes of the manned and unmanned varieties for everything from "tactical" strikes using lead mass drivers with the power of tactical nukes but little or no fallout, stealth penetration and reconnaissance. But! We have nowhere near the scientific exploration cabability of previous decades even with substantially better materials and tech.
 
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PoopandBoogers said:
Maybe in R&D and applications, but it's still ULA and SpaceX rockets that deliver the NRO, DARPA, NSA, DOD payloads.
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Meanwhile the Invisos that live in Brian and Casey's backyard have an unlimited supply of invisible rockets and to make matters worse intelligence confirms their alliance with COBRA.
 
SpaceX in particular has a horrible track record. Of its five Falcon 1 launches only two ended up NOT in pieces. On its current Falcon 9 launches there were 19 missions, EIGHT had total or partial loss of the vehicles (sometimes only one stage was destroyed whereby they deemed it a "success") and another was scrubbed at launch. So basically SpaceX is at 50-50 as to whether something would go horribly wrong.
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If someone is interested in the details of the Falcon launches wikipedia has a well put together rundown. There's a bit of hyperbole in the comments above.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_1_launches
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_and_Falcon_Heavy_launches

Meanwhile NASA had only two failures out of 135 shuttle missions and two failures of 33 other manned flights all of which were done decades ago.
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Earlier you counted a 'scrubbed launch' as a failure, and if you want to do that you're going to ruin the shuttle's record. I gave up trying to catch a shuttle launch in person because of the commonplace of launch scrubs. I think that is a silly criteria for 'failure'.
The efforts by SpaceX are in no small part developmental, and if you read through the launch history you can see the evolution in action. I'm not sure why you think any of NASA's earlier contractors didn't go through the same teething process.
Look at the failure rate when the Thor/Delta program started: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Thor_and_Delta_launches_(1957–59)

Of the previous 600 Delta 2 unmanned launches which was the NASA predecessor to the Falcon 9s, they had only ONE lost rocket.
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Where did you get the '600 Delta 2 launches' number from? Wikipedia lists 153 launches and 2 failures for the Delta 2.
The Delta 2 was developed by McDonnel Douglas (now owned by Boeing), so I'm not sure why you call it 'NASA's predecessor'. The Air Force and NASA contracted for these to be built.


At the end of the day we're only sticking our toe in space until it becomes profitable, and I'm glad companies like SpaceX are working to make that happen.
 
FSUTribe76 said:
There is no doubt that we are developing and even currently using hypersonic spaceplanes of the manned and unmanned varieties for everything from "tactical" strikes using lead mass drivers with the power of tactical nukes but little or no fallout, stealth penetration and reconnaissance. But! We have no where near the scientific exploration cabability of previous decades even with substantially better materials and tech.
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I know we're getting out there but if we do have something like the TR3B that people claim to see (like they did back before we knew about F-117), I wouldn't be surprised if it has space capability.
But as far as exploration and research, not much seems to be trickling down to us.

If you believe the alleged Ben Rich quote or the Don Phillips interview, we're out there.
 
Bubbz said:
I know we're getting out there but if we do have something like the TR3B that people claim to see (like they did back before we knew about F-117), I wouldn't be surprised if it has space capability.
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We do have a unmanned "space plane" the X37, well actually 2 of them, that have been in orbit 4 times, with the most recent one launched last month on an ULA Atlas. It went from operated by NASA, to DARPA, and now to the AF. Supposedly just research into reusable orbiters, but rumored to be an anti-sat, recon, nuke platform.

x37-b_landing.jpg
 
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Bubbz said:
I know we're getting out there but if we do have something like the TR3B that people claim to see (like they did back before we knew about F-117), I wouldn't be surprised if it has space capability.
But as far as exploration and research, not much seems to be trickling down to us.

If you believe the alleged Ben Rich quote or the Don Phillips interview, we're out there.
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Oh we have multiple spaceplanes in various stages of development, the most open of which is the X-37B project which astronomers observed for a solid year and a half in space. The TR3B I don't believe is a spaceplane but gravity "wave" vehicle aka "UFO" which I don't really understand the point of. Assuming aliens aren't real (which I believe, not that life doesn't exist out there just why would they expend the massive amounts of energy to be here) and the TR3B project isn't just a cover to say "look over here, we humans use Gravity propulsion" I don't really see much advantages to them. Sure they "stop on a dime" and can do things that even helos can't follow, but they also seem very very slow relative to our other aircraft. MAYBE they are intended as close support? I just read an article saying that the F35 not only sucks at dogfighting and has been repeatedly tooled by even F16 not to mention the F15 and F22s AND that it has internally hardwired targeting systems a decade out of modernity that will need to be completely redesigned as they are not interfacing with modern weapons BUT that they have zero equipment (even the marine version) to do ground support which makes their intended replacement of the A-10 laughable. So MAYBE the TR3B is an intended A-10 and AH-64 replacement but it certainly looks like a big dumb target in the leaked videos.
 
PoopandBoogers said:
We do have a unmanned "space plane" the X37, well actually 2 of them, that have been in orbit 4 times, with the most recent one launched last month on an ULA Atlas. It went from operated by NASA, to DARPA, and now to the AF. Supposedly just research into reusable orbiters, but rumored to be an anti-sat, recon, nuke platform.

x37-b_landing.jpg
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As I said in my last post the X-37B is the most benign spaceplane currently in the arsenal and is the public face of the secret fleet. A lot of really interesting things came out of the Aurora project not the least of which is the older actual "Aurora" four engined, manned recon spaceplane.
 
FSUTribe76 said:
Oh we have multiple spaceplanes in various stages of development, the most open of which is the X-37B project which astronomers observed for a solid year and a half in space. The TR3B I don't believe is a spaceplane but gravity "wave" vehicle aka "UFO" which I don't really understand the point of. Assuming aliens aren't real (which I believe, not that life doesn't exist out there just why would they expend the massive amounts of energy to be here) and the TR3B project isn't just a cover to say "look over here, we humans use Gravity propulsion" I don't really see much advantages to them. Sure they "stop on a dime" and can do things that even helos can't follow, but they also seem very very slow relative to our other aircraft. MAYBE they are intended as close support? I just read an article saying that the F35 not only sucks at dogfighting and has been repeatedly tooled by even F16 not to mention the F15 and F22s AND that it has internally hardwired targeting systems a decade out of modernity that will need to be completely redesigned as they are not interfacing with modern weapons BUT that they have zero equipment (even the marine version) to do ground support which makes their intended replacement of the A-10 laughable. So MAYBE the TR3B is an intended A-10 and AH-64 replacement but it certainly looks like a big dumb target in the leaked videos.
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Could be, Tribe. If the TR3B is a close support platform what a huge disappointment. It would be one huge floating target, it makes no sense.

That makes me tend to think it has a different mission.

There would be no reason to reinvent that wheel. I think the CAS role will go to the small UAVs.

What makes the TR3B a spaceplane in my mind is it's alleged propulsion because you're right, there's really no point. Chemical propulsion won't get people to other worlds so this could represent the development of a new space propulsion system. The way I understand it however, that would require a new way to produce energy.

As an aside, I believe that life is out there. Maybe they've been here, who knows? Maybe it isn't that much of an expenditure of their energy to be here at all.

If we do have a second (secret) space program I hope I'm alive when we finally see the rewards of the technology.

If the rewards are that they're keeping the aliens from invading, keep on truckin' :D
 
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