• This is a political forum that is non-biased/non-partisan and treats every person's position on topics equally. This debate forum is not aligned to any political party. In today's politics, many ideas are split between and even within all the political parties. Often we find ourselves agreeing on one platform but some topics break our mold. We are here to discuss them in a civil political debate. If this is your first visit to our political forums, be sure to check out the RULES. Registering for debate politics is necessary before posting. Register today to participate - it's free!

SpaceX landed their first stage!

One of the great achievements of the modern era of spaceflight.
 
beefheart said:
We lost 2 our of 5 space shuttles.....that is 40% of the fleet, and 14 dead astronauts. That is not safety. That is not reliability. The entire program shut down for over a year each time we lost an orbiter. Even in the heyday, we only had a maximum of 9 launches in a year. In those times, before Challenger, there were some near misses, there was leakage from SRB's and extensive damage to tiles on many missions...NASA got lucky. The Russian launchers have a much better record for safety and mortality. They lost 3 cosmonauts on re-entry from decompression in 1971,one death due to a faulty parachute in 1967, and that is it for deaths in space from them. Contrast the huge number of flights they had, and one incident where the cosmonauts were saved by an escape rocket on launch, and you have a system for delivering humans into space on an economical and highly reliable basis.

The shuttle was an overly complicated, very very expensive and unreliable way to do a mundane task that can be done much more easily. Spend the money on the big picture, the big manned missions....not on every launch. Think of all we could have done with the shuttle money, had we just kept launching with the Saturn 5 for heavy lift and the Saturn IB for putting astronauts up to the station.
Click to expand...

Lol 1

2 out of 5 ? Ridiculous. Try 2 failed missions out of 135. That IS the definition of reliability.

The crap you Elon Musk fanboys make up to denigrate a highly successful and reliable program like the Shuttle program goes beyond the pale.
 
Fenton said:
Lol 1

2 out of 5 ? Ridiculous. Try 2 failed missions out of 135. That IS the definition of reliability.

The crap you Elon Musk fanboys make up to denigrate a highly successful and reliable program like the Shuttle program goes beyond the pale.
Click to expand...

Where did I say missions? We lost 40% of the freaking fleet! Not a success, just piles of wasted money, you just can't see that can you? Shuttle, no escape system, manned flight on a solid booster, and a crappy set of overly complicated compromises...
 
Fenton said:
Lol 1

2 out of 5 ? Ridiculous. Try 2 failed missions out of 135. That IS the definition of reliability.

The crap you Elon Musk fanboys make up to denigrate a highly successful and reliable program like the Shuttle program goes beyond the pale.
Click to expand...

Our previous launch vehicle (Saturn V) was far more reliable and nobody died using them and no payload was lost. If we had kept them instead of the space shuttle we could have gone to Mars by the 1980's.
 
My take is "cool I guess, but lets find out how reusable these tubes really are, and how much it costs to reuse them". Remember that the whole point of the Shuttle was supposed to be that reusing would save money, when it turned out that it was more expensive per launch than old fashioned rockets would have been. I get the RAH RAH from the geeks, but this plan may very well never go anywhere other than the cool show of landing the tube.
 
PoS said:
Our previous launch vehicle (Saturn V) was far more reliable and nobody died using them and no payload was lost. If we had kept them instead of the space shuttle we could have gone to Mars by the 1980's.
Click to expand...

The Shuttle was a complete disaster on any practical scale I think. The worst is that 30 or so years onto the program they never figured out how to keep the tiles on, or at a reasonable cost.
 
Hawkeye10 said:
The Shuttle was a complete disaster on any practical scale I think. The worst is that 30 or so years onto the program they never figured out how to keep the tiles on, or at a reasonable cost.
Click to expand...
I agree, it was supposed to be a low cost reusable launch vehicle that would make space travel routine but it became very costly and risky- they practically had to rebuild the shuttle's engines after every launch.
 
PoS said:
I agree, it was supposed to be a low cost reusable launch vehicle that would make space travel routine but it became very costly and risky- they practically had to rebuild the shuttle's engines after every launch.
Click to expand...

Born of a problem that we run into over and over and over again.....trying to make stuff before the technology is ready, assuming that it is ever ready. The military wastes tons of money doing this constantly. NASA: "We use airplanes over and over so we will just build us a space plane! It will be CHEAP!" they said, and tried to do, without knowing what they were doing. And they try to figure it out on the fly. And even after it was long clearly a bad idea to build this space plane they never could suck up their pride and alleged expertise and admit that they messed up.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom