SpaceX successfully launched almost a dozen satellites in one shot this week. Then they slowed the first stage booster, which was going several thousand miles per hour relative to the Earth’s surface, reversed its course, brought it back to Kennedy Space Center, and landed that booster upright on its tail (which you can see video of below the fold):
This is a big deal because rockets are expensive. The Falcon 9 that SpaceX uses costs around $60 million to build, the company told NBC News. Fuel costs per launch are about $200,000.
Most rockets are designed to burn up during re-entry. That means rebuilding a $60 million rocket for every single space mission— not exactly the most cost-effective system. Reusable rockets, however, would mean cargo could be sent into space with only the fuel and maintenance costs to consider.
"If one can figure out how to effectively reuse rockets just like airplanes, the cost of access to space will be reduced by as much as a factor of a hundred," Musk said.
So, the reason this is important to future space exploration is twofold. First, the hope is it will drastically lower launch costs and allow quicker turnaround on reusing first stages. But more importantly for us dreamers, the kinds of places we want to one day land large payloads on, including crewed capsules, have no substantial atmosphere we can use to slow those vehicles down on descent. We’re not going to be able to land people under giant parachutes and big sky-cranes like we did with Mars Curiosity, or bounce them high into the rarefied air twenty or thirty times padded by giant airbags like we did with the two rovers before it. Refining that technology in Earth’s relatively substantial gravity field and surface winds is an excellent way to develop landing vehicles for future worlds large and small.
Piketty sees money as talking even louder in politics than it used to and thus preventing, with increasing strength over time, the implementation of policies that might redistribute wealth and so keep the social-democratic political-economic order alive. In Piketty's view, we are now more than a full generation into this process of the passing away of North Atlantic social democracy.
- If you’re looking to make someone’s life brighter, consider the seniors around you. For some reason this story from a year or two ago always haunts me this time of year:
Coming home today from the shops and leaning heavily on my cane, I am wondering if old age is a blessing or a curse or purgatory.’ … These days I feel like a half dried rug, with all its purpose wrung out and I feel no blessings in being alive.’