What's going right. What's going wrong.
What should be done?
2017 current space developments thread.
Ron Garan, a former NASA astronaut, believes we should not be abandoning hope for continued life on planet Earth in favor of rubbing shoulders with Martians. He has spent time on the International Space Station (ISS), done four spacewalks, and has been awarded both the NASA Exceptional Service medal and the NASA Space Flight medial. Back on land, Garan spends his time focusing on bettering the home we already have. “Being so far away from Earth makes you see how similar and interconnected everything is,” he says, “rather than us compartmentalizing home.”
To be clear, Garan isn’t opposed to exploring the notion of colonizing Mars: It’s just that we should be using the innovative technologies we’re developing to live up there to make life better down here. Human curiosity is one of the biggest drivers for space exploration, and it “keeps us hungry to continuing wanting to innovate and solve these problems,” he says.
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Final Falcon 9 has a lot of minor refinements that collectively are important, but uprated thrust and improved legs are the most significant.
Elon thinks the F9 boosters could be used almost indefinitely, so long as there is scheduled maintenance and careful inspections. Falcon 9 Block 5 – the final version in the series – is the one that has the most performance and is designed for easy reuse, so it just makes sense to focus on that long term and retire the earlier versions. Block 5 starts production in about 3 months and initial flight is in 6 to 8 months, so there isn't much point in ground testing Block 3 or 4 much beyond a few reflights.
Zubrin was struck by many good and powerful ideas in the Musk plan. However, Musk’s plan assembled some of those good ideas in an extremely suboptimal way, making the proposed system impractical. Still, with some corrections, a system using the core concepts Musk laid out could be made attractive — not just as an imaginative concept for the colonization of Mars, but as a means of meeting the nearer-at-hand challenge of enabling human expeditions to the planet.
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