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Over at Ars Technica is a story, SpaceX proves it's not afraid to fail by releasing a landing blooper reel:
SpaceX is famously not afraid to fail. "There's a silly notion that failure's not an option at NASA," company founder Elon Musk has said in the past. "Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough."
In recent years, others in the aerospace industry have come to see the sense of this ethos, as SpaceX has tinkered with its Falcon 9 rocket to make it a mostly reusable booster, finally achieving reuse of the rocket's first stage earlier this year. To go further in space, at a lower cost, new things must be tried.
Even Gene Kranz, who famously said that failure was not an option as a NASA flight director during the Apollo lunar missions, has recently enthused about SpaceX, saying, "Space involves risk, and I think that's the one thing about Elon Musk and all the various space entrepreneurs: they're willing to risk their future in order to accomplish the objective that they have decided on. I think we as a nation have to learn that, as an important part of this, to step forward and accept risk."
To that end, SpaceX has put its failure on display in a new video showing the company's (often explosive) attempts to first return the Falcon 9 first stage to the ocean, then to an ocean-based drone ship, and more. Along they way the engineers have clearly learned a lot about rockets, propellants, and the pitfalls of trying to return a very large rocket from space.
Note: the apocryphal saying was not from the actual Apollo 13 mission. It was a line from the movie based on the mission. See this section on the Wikipedia entry for Gene Kranz.
With that out of the way, I find it absolutely amazing that just a few short years ago, the concept of a rocket that could land upright was science fiction. Now, it happens so routinely for SpaceX that they feel comfortable releasing a "blooper reel"!
(I'm curious, though, how many millions of dollars does that video show going up in flames?)
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday September 16 2017, @01:11AM
Limited is nonsense here. All the money in the world is limited. NASA has at its disposal an enormous sum of money, other resources, valuable infrastructure, and considerable political power. You should be wondering why it isn't getting more done.
For example, to develop the Falcon 9 (and three different rocket engines and the Falcon 1) cost in total about $300 million dollars. That's less than 10% of the current NASA equivalent the Space Launch System (SLS) and Orion development budget ($3.7 billion for 2017). The Falcon Heavy development costs are unknown, but appear to me to be well shy of a billion dollars presently despite the mistakes and delays of past years (particularly the cross feed approach which they gave up on a couple years ago). It may require more work to become viable, but I don't see it going anywhere near the ridiculous development costs of the SLS, somewhere north of 60 billion dollars in present money funding. The SLS is using modified Shuttle infrastructure for most of its design. That money should be going a lot further than it is.
NASA though is one of the institutions that can easily afford to do that. But you need a far more efficient organization and a leadership willing to take risks.