International Military Discussion

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ldev
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Re: International Military & Space Discussion

Post by ldev »

In other related controversial Bezos/United Launch Alliance news:

ULA exec resigns after controversial comments about Blue Origin, SpaceX and U.S. government
The VP of Engineering at United Launch Alliance (ULA), Brett Tobey, has resigned after comments he made in a Tuesday talk at the University of Colorado-Boulder were made public.

In his talk, Tobey referenced other space companies including Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, and Aerojet Rocketdyne, as well as the U.S. government — ULA’s biggest client. ULA is a joint venture of Lockheed Martin Corp and Boeing. Prior to joining ULA last September, Tobey was with Lockheed Martin for 32 years.

First, Tobey said that the reason ULA did not bid on a launch service contract for the U.S. military’s GPS satellite was because it was hoping to avoid a “cost shootout” with SpaceX, contradicting the reason ULA gave last year for skipping the bid.

Then, Tobey accused Sen. John McCain of working with Elon Musk of SpaceX to ban the use of a Russian rocket engine for military space launches to purposefully hobble ULA.

Finally, he compared two of ULA’s business partners, Blue Origin and Aerojet Rocketdyne, to “a super-rich girl” and “a poor girl” that ULA was going to have to woo until it found out which would offer a better deal for its new rocket engines — a comparison many found sexist. Tobey also said ULA was more likely to pick Blue Origin, despite the company having made no public announcement about who it will award the engine contract.

The CEO of ULA, Tory Bruno, yesterday distanced himself from Tobey over Twitter, saying that ULA values competition and describing Tobey’s comments as “ill-advised.”
If the ULA exec did not want to get into a "cost shootout" before today, even more reason to avoid one in the future with today's successful SpaceX 1st stage recovery. And Bezos is the "super rich girl" they are likely to partner - How embarrassing for Bezos!!
TSJones
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Re: International Military & Space Discussion

Post by TSJones »

ldev wrote:In other related controversial Bezos/United Launch Alliance news:

ULA exec resigns after controversial comments about Blue Origin, SpaceX and U.S. government
The VP of Engineering at United Launch Alliance (ULA), Brett Tobey, has resigned after comments he made in a Tuesday talk at the University of Colorado-Boulder were made public.

In his talk, Tobey referenced other space companies including Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, and Aerojet Rocketdyne, as well as the U.S. government — ULA’s biggest client. ULA is a joint venture of Lockheed Martin Corp and Boeing. Prior to joining ULA last September, Tobey was with Lockheed Martin for 32 years.

First, Tobey said that the reason ULA did not bid on a launch service contract for the U.S. military’s GPS satellite was because it was hoping to avoid a “cost shootout” with SpaceX, contradicting the reason ULA gave last year for skipping the bid.

Then, Tobey accused Sen. John McCain of working with Elon Musk of SpaceX to ban the use of a Russian rocket engine for military space launches to purposefully hobble ULA.

Finally, he compared two of ULA’s business partners, Blue Origin and Aerojet Rocketdyne, to “a super-rich girl” and “a poor girl” that ULA was going to have to woo until it found out which would offer a better deal for its new rocket engines — a comparison many found sexist. Tobey also said ULA was more likely to pick Blue Origin, despite the company having made no public announcement about who it will award the engine contract.

The CEO of ULA, Tory Bruno, yesterday distanced himself from Tobey over Twitter, saying that ULA values competition and describing Tobey’s comments as “ill-advised.”
If the ULA exec did not want to get into a "cost shootout" before today, even more reason to avoid one in the future with today's successful SpaceX 1st stage recovery. And Bezos is the "super rich girl" they are likely to partner - How embarrassing for Bezos!!
naw, bezos has got a hide that's an inch thick. his buy out of the washington post brought tons of criticism. he never broke his stride.....

you know what bugs him? accusations that his company is not a nice place to work.

he's still writing rebuttals...... :D
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Re: International Military & Space Discussion

Post by SriKumar »

ldev wrote:
brar_w wrote:Image
Simply astounding. I knew my man Elon would do it!! Boo to Bezos....the wannabe Musk :P
Indeed, it is astounding. But mere bhai, give some credit to the engineers who did it...it was an engineering problem (controls and dynamics really) that was solved effectively, for it to land and stay landed in a sea that was not calm. You can see the white tops of waves...it was windy and atleast 1 meter height waves and that thing stayed stuck.

THe platform started moving laterally as the rocket exhaust hit it, and after touch-down the platform was still rocking (pitching). Definitely a credit....I dont think NASA has done anything like this....may be unprecedented. (Reminds of the Tintin comic).

Any idea why Musk went for a sea landing? Was it due to safety reasons that the rocket was not permitted (by NASA perhaps) to be aimed at land (but other companies are doing that). A sea landing means that the rocket is at a more remote and inacessible location to retrieve and re-service for the next flight. Land-based facilities are much cheaper and effective. Plus it is a much more complicated landing.....more prone to failure as compared to land which is a rock-solid (literally) platform.
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Re: International Military & Space Discussion

Post by brar_w »

Any idea why Musk went for a sea landing?
About 50% of all future Space X missions would require sea-landing simply given the type of missions they see themselves executing in the future with reusable rockets. Its all about the orbit you are putting the payload into.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/ ... ting-drone



SpaceX expects to send the same rocket back up again in May or June. They ran ground tests on the first rocket that returned but kept it to display at their HQ.
Last edited by brar_w on 09 Apr 2016 17:51, edited 2 times in total.
brar_w
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Re: International Military & Space Discussion

Post by brar_w »

Darpa Experimental Spaceplane Moves Ahead ; Aerospace Daily and Defense Report
Darpa’s program to kick-start a commercial responsive launch capability by demonstrating aircraft-like reusable launcher operations is to move into a second phase, to build an experimental spaceplane.
The Pentagon’s advanced research agency will brief industry of Phase 2 of the Experimental Spaceplane (XS-1) program on April 29 in Washington. Phase 2 aims to fly the vehicle 10 times in 10 days to demonstrate routine, responsive and affordable space operations.

Phase 1a and 1b contracts were awarded to three teams of manufacturers and launch providers: Boeing with Blue Origin; Masten Space Systems with Xcor Aerospace; and Northrop Grumman with Virgin Galactic. A single team will be selected for Phase 2, with industry cost-sharing expected.

“During Phase 1 of the XS-1 program, the space industry has evolved rapidly and we intend to take advantage of multiple impressive technological and commercial advances,” says Jess Sponable, Darpa program manager.

“We intend to leverage those advances along with our Phase 1 progress to break the cycle of escalating Defense Department space system launch costs, catalyze lower-cost satellite architectures, and prove that routine and responsive access to space can be achieved at costs an order of magnitude lower than with today’s systems,” he says.

The XS-1 demonstrator will be required to accomplish an immediate responsive launch of a 900-1,500-lb. representative payload. Darpa’s goal for the operational system is to launch 3,000-lb.-plus payloads for approximately $5 million per flight. The system will combine a reusable first stage with an expendable upper stage to minimize costs.

The technologies the agency expects to be used include autonomous operations to reduce the logistic footprint and enable rapid turnaround; structures, cryogenic tanks, thermal protection and modular subsystems than enable rapid reuse; and reliable reusable propulsion for recurring flight capability.

XS-1 is structured to directly transition the technology to the commercial launch sector, with the goal of enabling the sale of national-security launch services back to the government at lower costs and more rapid time-frames than are possible today, Darpa says.
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Re: International Military & Space Discussion

Post by Viv S »

Take your partners
Defence firms look to joint ventures to boost exports and profits

Apr 9th 2016 | BARROW-IN-FURNESS AND STEVENAGE | From the print edition


Image

Astutes prepare to go out and down


INSIDE the Devonshire Dock Hall in Barrow-in-Furness, the mottled black fin of Britain’s latest nuclear-powered submarine is just discernible above a mass of scaffolding. Seven storeys high and about 100 metres long, HMS Audacious, the fourth in the Astute class of attack submarines, is expected to emerge from the shed for sea trials early next year.

At around £1 billion ($1.4 billion) apiece, these are among the most advanced weapons systems in the world, capable of firing cruise missiles and torpedoes out of their four silos. The subs are so stealthy, their makers claim, that one could pass five metres behind a diver underwater unnoticed. The secret is in the propulsion system, the only part of the boat entirely sheathed in tarpaulin to keep it from prying eyes.

The seventh, and last, such boat should be finished in around 2020. Then BAE Systems, the biggest defence contractor in Britain and the world’s third-largest, expects to move straight into producing the four new submarines that will carry Britain’s Trident missile nuclear deterrent. The government has set aside £41 billion to develop them: it will be, by some way, the country’s most expensive defence procurement ever, and one of its biggest construction programmes of any kind. Already BAE Systems has engineers looking at the successor to the Astute class.

Unsurprisingly, BAE is enjoying the continuity at Barrow, boosted by the government’s renewed pledge to keep defence spending at 2% of GDP. Not every British defence contractor is doing so well.

Rolls-Royce, which makes the reactors for the nuclear submarines, among many other things, has issued five profit warnings in 20 months. Defence still makes up a sixth of its business, down from one-half during the cold war, and Rolls blames its woes partly on falling demand for military-jet engines and other equipment. QinetiQ, a defence-aviation testing agency, is another firm that has suffered. It almost ran out of cash in 2010 when military spending began to drop. Defence budgets are beginning to recover now, but as its companies search for models to sustain them in the future, Britain’s aerospace and defence industry—with a turnover of £56 billion that makes it the world’s second-largest—is being reshaped.

At one end of the spectrum BAE Systems relies almost entirely on big orders from a few sources: America’s Department of Defence (DoD), by far the world’s largest defence spender with some $585 billion requested by the president for this year; Britain’s Ministry of Defence (MoD), the fifth-biggest spender; and several others, principally Saudi Arabia, with the third-largest budget. Over one-third of BAE’s buoyant group sales in 2015 came from its American subsidiary, which operates under a Special Security Agreement there and has privileged access to the market. The contract to supply Typhoon and Hawk aircraft to Saudi Arabia generated almost as much in sales for BAE as Britain’s MoD.

At the other end are companies such as MBDA, a quintessentially pan-European firm that makes missiles. MBDA was born of the merger in 1996 between a division of BAE and a French company, to which German and Italian outfits were later added. Headquartered in Stevenage, it builds missiles in the four countries of its constituent parts. MBDA argues that it achieves economies by concentrating different functions—research or testing, for example—at one or other of its sites. Because it lacks BAE’s special status in America it has failed to make headway in that notoriously closed market. This has forced it to be more nimble in others. With a product range that includes the Brimstone missile used by British forces against Islamic State, MBDA sells strongly in Europe. In 2015, for the first time, it won more orders elsewhere.

In between BAE Systems and MBDA lies unhappier territory. Rolls is neither a niche manufacturer like the missile-maker nor, as its managers admit, big enough to compete in military engines against larger rivals such as America’s GE and Pratt & Whitney. Rolls plans to increase all engine production by 50% over the next five years, but efforts to expand are burdening its balance-sheet and using up its cashflow. As the British government has retained a controlling “golden share” in BAE, Rolls and QinetiQ, it is hard for these firms to grow through outright mergers or to raise capital from investors. BAE’s state shareholder did approve its attempted merger in 2012 with EADS (a European conglomerate known today as Airbus) but the deal was scuppered by the German government.

Holding hands

As the cost of weapons escalates—each new military-jet engine costs over $1 billion to develop—even the biggest defence firms are looking at forming alliances. Many will be determined case-by-case depending on the systems involved. Such deals would allow companies to gain scale by pooling resources with other firms, without straining financially or becoming dependent on one product.

The civil business of Rolls has said that it is looking for partners to develop an engine for narrow-bodied aircraft in the 2020s, and such a partnership could be a model for future military projects. BAE points out that its Typhoon fighter jet is a pan-European aircraft produced with Airbus and Finmeccanica of Italy. At an Anglo-French summit in March the governments pledged to spend a further £750m each on a drone project principally between BAE Systems and Dassault Aviation of France. MBDA’s success owes quite a lot to the Anglo-French defence treaty signed in 2010.

Such alliances might also help exports, increasingly Britain’s weakness. Francis Tusa, a defence expert, says that although British defence firms are now “very competitive on cost” compared with their American rivals, this does not help them much elsewhere. The exacting requirements of America’s DoD and Britain’s MoD force suppliers dependent on them to build only top-of-the range equipment that other countries cannot afford to buy.

BAE’s Type 26 frigate, for example, has so far failed to elicit firm global interest and could end up as a very expensive bespoke Royal Navy vessel. “Developing countries are being offered ships at half the price and they are much better than half as good,” says Mr Tusa. Defence firms in Germany and France now export more than British ones and to a wider spread of customers. But if British companies come to see their European counterparts more as partners than as rivals, that could change.

From the print edition: Britain
TSJones
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Re: International Military & Space Discussion

Post by TSJones »

Any idea why Musk went for a sea landing? Was it due to safety reasons that the rocket was not permitted (by NASA perhaps) to be aimed at land (but other companies are doing that). A sea landing means that the rocket is at a more remote and inacessible location to retrieve and re-service for the next flight. Land-based facilities are much cheaper and effective. Plus it is a much more complicated landing.....more prone to failure as compared to land which is a rock-solid (literally) platform.
for the first stage to fly back to Cape Canaveral after it has separated from the stack in order to land, requires more fuel, thus reducing payload capacity.

far better to be able to drop straight down to the ocean and land on a barge.

blue origin/ula plans on detaching just the engine component of their first stage after it separates from the stack, letting it parachute down and grabbing it via helicopter, then landing on ship.
Last edited by TSJones on 09 Apr 2016 18:10, edited 1 time in total.
Viv S
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Re: International Military & Space Discussion

Post by Viv S »

Devonshire Dock Hall. Gorgeous picture. Click to enlarge (2.6 MB).

Image
ldev
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Re: International Military & Space Discussion

Post by ldev »

The SpaceX barge landing. This view from an onboard camera as it comes down on the barge. Look at those legs constantly adjusting to take into account the pitching barge deck in the heaving ocean. Very fast real time data communication between the rocket stage and the barge. Wow!! Just wow!!
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Re: International Military & Space Discussion

Post by Dennis »

ldev wrote:The SpaceX barge landing. This view from an onboard camera as it comes down on the barge. Look at those legs constantly adjusting to take into account the pitching barge deck in the heaving ocean. Very fast real time data communication between the rocket stage and the barge. Wow!! Just wow!!
Those are not the legs constantly adjusting. The legs are the ones that pop out at the 5-second mark in the video and lock into place.
What you see constantly adjusting are what SpaceX calls 'X-wings' - They are used to manoeuvre the flight vehicle onto the barge. AFAIK, these 'x-wings' cannot adjust for the motion of the barge itself.

As an aside, the 'X-wing' concept (called grid fins) was copied from the Soviets/russians, and is used on the R-77 missile.
Grid Fin

This SpaceX video shows the landing legs and the grid fins during launch and recovery clearly.
ldev
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Re: International Military & Space Discussion

Post by ldev »

^^
Thanks for the clarification. I thought that the grid fins were connected to the landing legs and controlled the deployment of the landing legs. Also notice the splaying out of the landing legs...the wider the diameter, the more stable the rocket on touchdown....part of it could be to provide a cushion on landing.
ldev
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Re: International Military & Space Discussion

Post by ldev »

SriKumar wrote:
Any idea why Musk went for a sea landing?
Musk walks you through the rationale behind water vs land landings in this post launch press conference.



Essentially for low earth orbit launches such as to the International Space Station, the first stage will be able to come back to land, because it's velocity at stage separation will not be very great and so it will have enough fuel left on board to execute that 180% turn and come back to the launch site or close to the launch site.

For Geo Launches or for his eventual dream of launches to Mars, the 1st stage will be travelling at far too great a speed, will be very far east of the launch site, and will have burnt up almost all of it's fuel at stage separation, for it to be able to come back. And so it will land on the barge at sea.

For the Falcon heavy launches SpaceX will attempt to land 3 stages, I don't know if they will attempt that at the first Falcon Heavy launch or whether that is their eventual goal.
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Re: International Military & Space Discussion

Post by brar_w »

B-52's arrive in Qatar...

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Re: International Military & Space Discussion

Post by Sid »

It's hard enough to to land a chopper in rough sea with high winds, and they did it with a space ship.
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Re: International Military & Space Discussion

Post by SriKumar »

ldev wrote:
SriKumar wrote:
Any idea why Musk went for a sea landing?
Musk walks you through the rationale behind water vs land landings in this post launch press conference.
EmN9IJyzBG0

Essentially for low earth orbit launches such as to the International Space Station, the first stage will be able to come back to land, because it's velocity at stage separation will not be very great and so it will have enough fuel left on board to execute that 180% turn and come back to the launch site or close to the launch site.

For Geo Launches or for his eventual dream of launches to Mars, the 1st stage will be travelling at far too great a speed, will be very far east of the launch site, and will have burnt up almost all of it's fuel at stage separation, for it to be able to come back. And so it will land on the barge at sea.

For the Falcon heavy launches SpaceX will attempt to land 3 stages, I don't know if they will attempt that at the first Falcon Heavy launch or whether that is their eventual goal.
Informative video and press conference. I think I now understand why this launch was 'landed' on a 'barge' in sea. The first stage separated about 2 min 44 s after launch from Cape Canaveral (?). This is seen at 3:22 in the video below. At that point, the altitude of the rocket is 77 km, and must be no more than about 50 to 100 km down-range i.e. due east of the launch pad- this is Atlantic ocean and no land below it. The video below shows a shot of stage 2 after separation ( at 3 min, 22 s) and you can actually see the coastline (Cape?), but it is well over the sea, and no land nearby further down along its trajectory.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xN3CSgNbf8Y

Perhaps future rockets that go faster and further may be able to land on land, provided it is above land either in the Europe/Asia (or over the US if it completes one orbit).

Some other interesting information from the press conference video you posted:

1. He expects about 1/3rd of future landings to be over the ocean and rest over land.
2. The 'barge' itself is really a self-propelled, self-controlled ship. It has 4 engines and has control systems to position it via GPS at a specific location, and also modify its attitude (in real time, I would think) to counter the rotation and translation (as he put it).
3. He said that at about the landing time the wind speed was 50 miles per hour!! must be 15 mph (I hope I heard this right). SO, the rocket has to counter the motion of the wind as it lands. As I understand it, the rocket is being targeted to a specific point on earth- land or water, (directed determined by GPS).
4. Someone asked about the pitch angle at the time of landing- it was about 2 to 3 degrees ( remarkably low number seeing the waves and the white-tops- maybe it was the 'barge' that was doing the heavy lifting in terms of keeping horizontal and steady). He also added that the rocket would be able to land on a platform pitching upto 2 times that, and perhaps 3 times that.

So, for this rocket, just the stage 1 was returned to earth and re-usable. Stage 2 went on its way after separation.
Last edited by SriKumar on 10 Apr 2016 05:50, edited 2 times in total.
brar_w
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Re: International Military & Space Discussion

Post by brar_w »

Here you go...



You couldn't convince me 10 years ago that popular culture and tech lifestyle would be talking about Space launch..Thats one big impact of Musk and SX.
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Re: International Military & Space Discussion

Post by brar_w »

Here you go...



You couldn't convince me 10 years ago that popular culture and tech lifestyle would be talking about Space launch..Thats one big impact of Musk and SX.
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Re: International Military & Space Discussion

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Perhaps future rockets that go faster and further may be able to land on land, provided it is above land either in the Europe/Asia (or over the US if it completes one orbit).
if you mean the stack and not a space plane or capsule, then you've got atmospheric reentry problems.
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Re: International Military & Space Discussion

Post by SriKumar »

Yes. Musk mentions that the biggest issue with landing larger (and therefore faster) rockets is the heat generated during re-entry. Related to this is another point- a little while after landing, personnel come aboard the platform and weld the legs of the rocket to the platform- to keep it stuck. Rocket cannot be hot while this is happening.
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Re: International Military & Space Discussion

Post by Sid »

This landing was a bit different. Unlike all previous attempts it landed at an angle, maybe that provided some more control then previous flights. Given height of the rocket it must have been a struggle to keep it upright on a yawning/pitching platform.
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Re: International Military & Space Discussion

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Apparently the Saudi Air Force has the Boeing/RC SE wide panel displays installed on their new SA's currently completing testing in the US. Qatar will also most likely go with a similar SA/SE hybrid configuration.

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Re: International Military & Space Discussion

Post by ldev »

TSJones wrote:
naw, bezos has got a hide that's an inch thick. his buy out of the washington post brought tons of criticism. he never broke his stride.....

you know what bugs him? accusations that his company is not a nice place to work.

he's still writing rebuttals...... :D
That is why I say that a man who life's mission for the last 20 years has been to ruthlessly exploit workers in his Amazon "fulfilment" centers, cannot just hypocritically turn over a new leaf and suddenly profess his love for space. If he had all those dreams about space, he should have followed them years ago like Musk, instead of appearing on endless business shows touting Amazon, which even after 20 years of incorporation and ruthlessly exploiting its workers around the world, barely ekes out any profit. That is some achievement!!

Furthermore, he has not even reached sub orbital flight, let alone orbital velocity and flight which Musk has mastered long ago. Just sending up a rocket vertically to the edge of space and back straight down is nothing for him to crow about. But his paid hacks crow about his "achievements". As Musk says in his latest post launch press conference, there is a big difference between going to space vs reaching orbital velocity. For Bezos to do that, firstly he will have to launch from the Cape. So far he is launching from some place in Texas?? Let him start launching from the Cape to be even considered seriously.

Also, if he is not going to be in the cargo launch business, as he says he will not compete in that business, how on earth is this space business of his going to make any money? It will be like Amazon, perpetually making losses!!
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Re: International Military & Space Discussion

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^ I see this clash of personalities and companies an idea borrowed from the tech industry (Gates v Jobs for example) while its nothing really important or relevant to the space-launch industry as both Bezos and Musk's decisions are grounded in economic realities and considerations that are driving investments. Moreover many of their competitor's decisions are grounded in national security and strategic realities unlike the consumer electronics industry. What this sort of does to both is give them earned media and keeps a fairly boring topic (space launch) centered in popular culture through the various millennials-frequented sources of media consumption which is great to foster interest in careers related to this.

Bezos is a smart businessman and like many now, he realized early on that Space X is simply skimming the surface of re-launch and there is a humongous hill to climb between simply launching and bringing a rocket back to actually making space travel and/or exploration an economic reality. This is true for both commercial space ventures, and supporting NatSec needs. In that larger context, SpaceX's lead is rather insignificant and Bezos, and other SX competitors around the world know this. What Space X has successfully done is execute Musk's vision, and bring light to the fact that reusability, a widely recognized precursor to affordable space access, is doable in a relatively short amount of time (in aerospace context) and in doing so shut up a lot of high profile critics including established players in the space launch business including influential governments. Of course this doesn't have to mean that now that Musk has shown the way everyone can join the party and outcompete him. There will always be organizations and teams that are better run than others simply because they have a better culture and leadership and access to talent. But the point is that Bezos isn't really fighting a loosing battle for SpaceX's accomplishments are only the start of a long, multi-decade journey in making space travel a reality that is likely to take a hundred or more years. These guys are setting their companies up for the long haul much like the Boeing's and General Electrics did back in the day.
Last edited by brar_w on 10 Apr 2016 22:18, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: International Military & Space Discussion

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Musk is just as ruthless as Bezos. He gets rid of the bottom quartile of reviewed workers every year. I think he has been sued several times over it,

space x has motto: can't come to work saturday? then don't bother coming in sunday....(or presumably monday for that matter)......
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Re: International Military & Space Discussion

Post by ldev »

TSJones wrote:Musk is just as ruthless as Bezos. He gets rid of the bottom quartile of reviewed workers every year. I think he has been sued several times over it,

space x has motto: can't come to work saturday? then don't bother coming in sunday....(or presumably monday for that matter)......
That is true. However, the young techies who work for Musk in SpaceX & Tesla do it because they want to work there, to get that cutting edge experience and expertise and to be part of Musk's dream. They have the skills to work elsewhere but choose to work at Musk's companies. And those who do not meet Musk's exacting standards to help execute his vision, are culled and go on to work for companies with less exacting standards. In his biography there is this telling story of his assistant who worked with him during the start up days and literally held both companies together during those precarious years, but Musk did not hesitate to fire her because after a certain disagreement he did not believe her heart was any longer in it so that she could contribute towards reaching his goals.

However, those who work at Amazon, especially the overwhelming majority who work at their warehouse delivery centers are generally workers without specific skills, they are made to work like cattle and paid the bare minimum necessary, with bad working conditions. They have no dreams or hopes, just want a decent job. To treat them the way they are treated IMO is exploitation.
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Re: International Military & Space Discussion

Post by Neshant »

ldev wrote: Also, if he is not going to be in the cargo launch business, as he says he will not compete in that business, how on earth is this space business of his going to make any money? It will be like Amazon, perpetually making losses!!
Personally I think its just a publicity stunt but what do I know.

The US space program will be privatized over the next decade.

As NASA gets de-funded by the govt, perhaps he hopes to pick up some of the govt contracts.

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Re: International Military & Space Discussion

Post by TSJones »

NASA is a technology generator and a major employer in certain areas. It won't get cut out of the budget.

It's almost important as DARPA and indeed may morph eventually into something similar as DARPA, but NASA is not going away.
brar_w
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Re: International Military & Space Discussion

Post by brar_w »

The US space program will be privatized over the next decade.

As NASA gets de-funded by the govt, perhaps he hopes to pick up some of the govt contracts.
While commercialization of space launch business would continue to occur, there are many many things that NASA is tasked to do that aren't commercially viable or profitable. NASA is not going anywhere, during our lifetime. Beyond, you better hope that there is plenty of incentive for the private sector around the world to work things out on their own since it can only bode well for space exploration in general that the business case is strong enough for private financial institutions to fund what previously could only have been funded by sovereign governments.
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Re: International Military & Space Discussion

Post by Austin »

Head of space agency: Russia is undisputed leader in launch services market
MOSCOW, April 11. /TASS/. Russia ranks second to none in the world on the launch services and engine market as it administers more than 40% of all space launches, according to the Head of Roscosmos State Corporation Igor Komarov speaking with RT TV news channel.

"There are areas where Russia is an undisputed leader, particularly launch vehicles and launch services. This is where we are number one by a large margin, administering about 40% of all space launches worldwide," Komarov said.


Also, Russia leads the pack on the engine market, and in the area of manned space programs, he said, adding though that there are areas where "we’ve got room for improvement, and we could certainly learn a thing or two from our competitors in areas such as spacecraft quality, communications, or earth remote sensing systems."
Karan M
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Re: International Military & Space Discussion

Post by Karan M »

deejay
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Re: International Military & Space Discussion

Post by deejay »

Thanks Karan. Very exciting stuff.
brar_w
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Re: International Military & Space Discussion

Post by brar_w »

Footage from Royal Netherlands Air Force Operational Testing -

member_22539
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Re: International Military & Space Discussion

Post by member_22539 »

First, thank you so much for the wonderful article.

Incredible, brilliant and admirable. The guy privately built a light attack plane for use in low-intensity warfare, the same thing that is actually one of the planes (crop duster modification) being considered by the US military for the same role. It is even hinted here that the idea was first proposed by Mr. Prince.

All I see here is concern (and thus propaganda) because he is going out of control of the western powers (his affair with the chinese). He was priceless when he was doing dirty work for unkil in Iraq.

Also, as in the last para of the article, "logistics" in Africa was a dream of Mr. Viktor Bout as well :D. I wonder if he will end up like him.
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Re: International Military & Space Discussion

Post by NRao »

NRao
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Re: International Military & Space Discussion

Post by NRao »

brar_w
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Re: International Military & Space Discussion

Post by brar_w »

^ Hopefully the sailors won't resign this time.
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Re: International Military & Space Discussion

Post by ldev »

Reaching for the stars:Across 4.37 light years

Amazing project, Yuri Milner, Stephen Hawkings and Mark Zuckerberg, announce the Starshot project. The goal to launch a swarm of chip sized spacecraft to the Alpha Centauri star system, the closest stars to earth, with the goal of getting there in 20 years travelling at 20% of the speed of light. Each chip sized craft would to launched into orbit conventionally and then unfurl a sail which would catch photons from a laser beam. The laser array would generate 100GW for 2 minutes and accelerate the tiny spacecraft to 20% of the speed of light in those 2 minutes. This nano craft will get to the moon in 8 seconds!! That acceleration will subject that tiny chip to a force of 60,000g. In comparison the fastest spacecraft today will take about 30,000 years to get to this nearest star system.

Now, this project is called original and inspiring.

Their website:

http://breakthroughinitiatives.org/
TSJones
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Re: International Military & Space Discussion

Post by TSJones »

brar_w wrote:^ Hopefully the sailors won't resign this time.
I wonder if their SM-3's wanted to resign also. :)
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