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SpaceX completed the last big test of its crew capsule before launching astronauts in the next few months, mimicking an emergency escape shortly after liftoff Sunday.
No one was aboard for the wild ride in the skies above Cape Canaveral, just two mannequins.
A Falcon 9 rocket blasted off as normal, but just over a minute into its capsule catapulted off the top 12 miles (20 kilometers) above the Atlantic. Powerful thrusters on the capsule propelled it up and out of harm's way, as the rocket engines deliberately shut down and the booster tumbled out of control and exploded in a giant fireball.
The capsule reached an altitude of about 27 miles (44 kilometers) before parachuting into the ocean just offshore to bring the nine-minute test flight to a close and pave the way for two NASA astronauts to climb aboard next time.
Everything appeared to go well despite the choppy seas and overcast skies. Within minutes, a recovery ship was alongside the capsule and preparing to pull it from the water.
"I'm super fired up," Elon Musk, the company's founder and chief executive, said at a news conference. "It's just going to be wonderful to get astronauts back into orbit from American soil after almost a decade of not being able to do so. That's just super exciting."
NASA astronauts have not launched from the U.S. since 2011 when the space shuttle program ended.
[...] Last month, meanwhile, Boeing's Starliner crew capsule ended up in the wrong orbit on its first test flight and had to skip the space station. The previous month, only two of the Starliner's three parachutes deployed during a launch abort test.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 21 2020, @05:06AM (2 children)
Not sure where you read this but much of it is plainly false. For instance when Musk joined Tesla something like 7 months after it was first conceived. And up til then they had some good ideas, but hadn't achieved anything. So "buying them" translated to something like a $5 million investment in their first funding round. At that point the company still had no product, and was burning through money like crazy. He took on two roles from that point. The first was to develop the Roadster, which was his brainchild - and the second was to keep the company from going bankrupt at the same time. He took on numerous more funding calls, and with the company still falling short of funds - he ended up dumping literally all of his money into the company and was left borrowing just to pay rent. The company was only saved by it finally turning its first profit around 2010. The two "real" founders had left the company a few years prior. Incidentally SpaceX was also in the exact same situation at the exact same time. It also ended up getting saved by hitting a major success with a launch concept which brought in a big contract from NASA.
In more recent times Tesla has recently just gone supersonic. You mock the efforts to increase the assembly rate but it's actually critical. For years Tesla has been unable to meet demand of their products which was basically just leaving billions of dollars on the table. Seriously, at one point they had a waitlist of something like 400,000 and a quarterly production of 25k vehicles. 'Thank you for your purchase, your new vehicle will be delivered in [3 years]'. Since 2017 he's more than quadrupled Tesla's production capability and they also just outperformed the market by a crazy high margin. 'Wallstreet analysts' (lol) were expecting a loss of 40 cents per share. Tesla hit a profit of $1.60 per share.
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The pedo guy stuff is true, though you're misrepresenting the issue. Pedoguy didn't "describe problems with Musk's system". He just threw out random slurs telling him "stick his submarine where it hurts" while claiming it was all "just a PR stunt." Musk retorted with his name calling which he thought he had verified. He didn't have the life experience to understand that a Thai person will tell you whatever they think you want to hear, especially if they perceive you to be of a higher class. The country is hardcore hierarchical to the point of having an invisible caste system, not dissimilar to places such as Korea where they've literally had fatal plain crashes because a copilot didn't want to question the pilot's judgement.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 21 2020, @12:34PM (1 child)
Amen to that. If Musk does fuck-all with the rest of his time on Earth, he already did more with SpaceX and Tesla than most of the rest tech-rich-billionaires.
Amazon got us packages. SpaceX makes space flight affordable. I'm not sure how delivered stuff is important to us, but getting off this single point of failure (Earth) is vital for our survival. Musk brought hope to some of us about our future. And that more important on whether he makes more or less money now.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 21 2020, @08:21PM
If the stuff isn't delivered to you, then you need to expend effort and time to get the stuff yourself. Is your effort and time important to you?