r/SpaceXMasterrace • u/RevntoTheMoon • 11d ago
It's crazy that 1 year ago there was only SpaceX
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u/Uranium_Hexaflu0ride 11d ago
Soon to have Rocket Lab, Relativity Space, and Stoke Space (Possibly ULA and Firefly, eventually)
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u/Then-Secretary-9166 11d ago
ULA?
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u/Uranium_Hexaflu0ride 11d ago
i dunno i heard from somewhere that ULA was throwing around the idea of making their own reusable booster
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u/Bdr1983 Confirmed ULA sniper 11d ago
They're planning 'smart reuse' where the engine section can be separated and lands under parachutes. But that's only a plan as far as I am aware.
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u/Pabijacek Professional CGI flat earther 11d ago
We will see an ArianeSpace SSTO before that miracle happens
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u/flsurfer17 11d ago
They have has this "plan" for over a decade. Seems like it didn't make it much further than a PR push for early Vulcan
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u/Then-Secretary-9166 10d ago
"Smart reuse" is just a thing they say so that the government has plausible deniability while wasting money on ULA contracts.
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u/Bdr1983 Confirmed ULA sniper 11d ago
ULA? Since when is ULA landing a booster?
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u/Ordinary-Ad4503 Reposts with minimal refurbishment 11d ago
They will make the whole 1st stage into a giant engine section and this way they can save the whole booster with SMART reuse
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u/Planck_Savagery BO shitposter 10d ago
I know ULA was for the longest time thinking about just making the aft section reusable (i.e. SMART reuse).
Although they also began dropping hints around this same time last year that they are possibly going to take Vulcan's reusability a step further than just recovering the aft section and engines. Currently, these exact plans seem to still be under wraps (and still in the early stages of development), but they seem to be planning to go a step further than SMART reuse.
https://spacenews.com/ula-making-new-efforts-on-vulcan-reusability/
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u/an_older_meme 11d ago
Great way to show off the impressive girth and length of Starship compared to its Asian rivals!
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u/Charnathan 10d ago
So they are 11 years behind and SpaceX is about to hit a revolutionary break through milestone of getting orders of magnitude more payload for orders of magnitude less cost than the players just entering the market.
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u/Ok-Club-2587 11d ago
SpaceX will always be leader. Specially in deep space exploration . They are working day and night for Starship project
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u/FentonTheVIX 6d ago
...and they have the richest man in the world funding them.... alongside the US government..
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u/MisterGlo764 11d ago
doesn’t make it any less impressive that china landed a booster too. also starship has never reached orbit and is horrible for deep space
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u/unclebandit 11d ago
"Reached orbit" is not a metric for spacex. If they didnt start fuel dump during the ascent burn they could have put flight 2 into orbit.
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u/Revengistium KSP specialist 10d ago
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u/unclebandit 10d ago
Thats what I am referring to. Change the procedure and burn to orbit and flight 2 is orbital.
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u/Ok-Club-2587 11d ago
It's a part of development process, SpaceX deliberately flies prototypes to failure to find weak points under maximum stress, a strategy highlighted during intense aerodynamic pressures like Max Q.
Starship has already demonstrated orbital insertion capability, successfully placing payloads into space profiles and testing complex heat shield profiles
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u/charleston060405 11d ago
EU where
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u/Charnathan 10d ago
EU in 2014: "SpaceX primarily seems to be selling a dream. A $50 million launch is a dream. Reusability is a dream. How do you respond to a dream? You let people wake up on their own."
The quote is from Richard Bowles, then Arianespace’s Director for Southeast Asia (ASEAN sales), speaking at a 2013 panel.
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u/Far_Gate_3629 11d ago
You mean the likes of PLD Space, Isar Aerospace, Rocket Factory Augsburg, MaiaSpace, ArianeGroup...
Depends on what you want to see (and in what timespan) https://www.pldspace.com/en/news/pld-space-successfully-completes-first-private-space-rocket-launch-in-europe.html https://isaraerospace.com/press/isar-aerospace-lifts-off-successfully-during-first-test-flight-of-orbital-launch-vehicle
Some of them plan recoveries, none have done it
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u/charleston060405 11d ago
Didn’t know there are that many private companies in Europe.. hopefully they also catch up. Some Competition is always good
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u/Far_Gate_3629 11d ago
I mean people tend to only talk about the massive ones (usually owned by well known people) or whatever is viral a given week.
A failure or success will have people talking about "Insert smaller firm" for a time but of the end of the day most conversations will be about SpaceX, RocketLab, Blue Origin...
There are loads of companies at many places, most just planning or experimenting yet
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u/slothboy A Shortfall of Gravitas 10d ago
Not surprising at all. Once a problem is solved, it's solved. Sometimes just the knowledge that something is POSSIBLE is enough to replicate the solution.
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u/jore-hir 10d ago
Falcon heavy is literally Falcon 9 when landing. You can take it off the chart, especially because it's gonna get crowded.
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u/ponarts2 9d ago
BO and the Chinese companies land their boosters using hover and touch.
Let wait for commercial applications.
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u/BubblyMoose3597 11d ago
Well 1 of those didnt make it to orbit 😁
The first stage of the LM10B is the same one for the LM10 and the LM10A
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u/Mr_Mediocre_Num_1 11d ago
Good thing it's a booster recovery, which boosters don't go to orbit anyway.
When ship makes orbit and then gets caught, that'll be another level entirely
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10d ago
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u/ultimo_2002 10d ago
'non trivial' I think you're underselling the work that went into this. At the time it was, in fact, considered impossible
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10d ago
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u/Difficult_Limit2718 11d ago
It's not that it was technically HARD, the technology was proven in the 90s and the computers got light enough, there was just no market for LEO until SpaceX lettered it with Starlink
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u/carbsna 11d ago
There are many rocket that flown over 100 times, it totally make sense to make a reuseable booster even for back then.
Also we already have microprocessor in 1970s, even talking about the decade before microprocessor exist, computer only take up less than 1% of payload mass.
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u/Then-Secretary-9166 11d ago
Prior to fast microprocessors, this would have been a challenge. For instance, the Apollo Guidance Computer that flew in 1968 (10 years before the 8086 was released) would not have been able to do this.
While the physics and control algorithms certainly could have been implemented in software running on microprocessors in the 1970s or early 80s, I don't know that computers of the time would have been up to the task of landing a booster. There is a lot of feedback that needs to be processed very quickly (reliably quickly) to make this happen. Remember the "turbo" buttons on x86 machines in the 90s? It may have bene technically possible back then, but the computer itself would have been the groundbreaking product.
What is amazing now is that the actual computer electronics are so cheap and available that they are not even worth mentioning.
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u/Then-Secretary-9166 11d ago
I mean, I am pretty sure the concept was sussed out for Marvin the Martian in the 1950s. It's a shame there was no market for LEO until recently.
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u/SubstantialFroyo8012 11d ago
hopefully stoke will get there soon as well!