The article mentioned in the future the capsule will use thrusters to land on the ground. Is this something that has been done before or is that a new advancement?
The idea is for Dragon to have engines that would allow the crew to abort mission at any point (launch included) and land anywhere in the solar system (e.g. I read [1] that because of thin atmosphere on Mars they're making Super Dracos capable of firing when the vehicle is supersonic).
"The escape system's motors will allow the capsule to land anywhere in the solar system, whether it has an atmosphere or not - and that's pretty cool. These motors can even fire supersonically which is important for Mars: in the higher altitudes of Mars the atmosphere is so thin that parachutes are completely pointless. So retro thrusters have to be able to fire when you are supersonic so they have to be very high thrust."
The elaborate floating crane isn't as Rube Goldberg as it seems. It's pretty similar to the Mars Phoenix mission, but with the engines on the other end. The only real difference is that SpaceX is eliminating the need to pack a parachute by developing engines that can fire reliably and predictably in a supersonic flow. (And Dragon doesn't throw the engines away after landing).
Curiosity isn't required to use the elaborate floating crane, but I'm guessing some feature or requirement of the mission made placing the engines above the craft more appealing than placing them below.
For the first video, I get "Unfortunately, this video is not available in Germany, because it may contain music for which GEMA has not granted the respective music rights.". What an absolutely boneheaded, irrelevant, infuriating reason to block a video of a rocket landing. :(
Hey, Blue Origin looks pretty cool, and I go on the job market tomorrow. I might like to ask you some questions about Blue Origin if you don't mind, but your HN profile doesn't have any contact info. Would you mind adding contact info to your profile or emailing me to start a chat? (My contact info is in my profile.)
There will be inspiring stuff happening in this industry for the foreseeable future. No point in waiting even a week, that's just one more week of amazing work you could have been a part of :)
That Blue Origin ship was amazing, if they could send this into orbit and then land it like this with no parachutes, that would be incredible? No one else has done that, not even Space X?
Is blue origin going to compete with Musk? I don't think Jeff will leave Amazon and focus on this 100%?
If you believe SpaceX's concept videos they're gonna do it without parachutes. I have no idea why, though. Parachutes are good. Perhaps they're just thinking ahead, because they want an all-purpose capsule that can land on the Moon just as well as the Earth.
Soviets used to land manned capsules on land, but I believe they just used parachutes. I don't really see the advantage of landing on thrusters alone.
A combination, though, to aim your parachute to a precise location, would be cheaper than thrusters alone, and less chancy than a parachute alone ("Sir, sir, calm down, what do you mean, 'a space ship just landed on my car'?")
The advantage of a powered landing is significant.
First, precision: landing on a pad is operationally vastly superior than landing in a several mile drop zone. The latter must be in some depopulated area for safety, which has obvious downsides. Being able to land without bringing into play a whole search and rescue aparatus is huge.
Second, turnaround time. Parachutes are fussy, and re-installing new, carefully packed chutes along with all the pyro bolts and whatnot and verifying the whole system checks out is an expensive and complex thing to do for each flight. Landing on rockets means that you only need to inspect and refuel before the next flight, which you would need to do regardless, is very much streamlined compared to the use of parachutes.
They'll probably still be landing in depopulated areas --- you want to minimize damage on the ground if the propulsive landing system fails. (In which case, by the way, the plan is to still use parachutes as a backup.)
However, in case of a normal landing, it lets you land near pre-positioned processing facilities, and saves you the currently long transit time from the landing site to decommissioning that the spacecraft is currently on. (A couple of days at sea to the docks, and then trucked to SpaceX facilities elsewhere for propellant off-loading and other processing.)
As to not repacking parachutes --- the 'chutes will still be there, as a backup system, and I expect that at least the first few times a reused Dragon is launched, they'll have inspected everything pretty thoroughly to determine that it was still operable. Economy starts with not building another one completely from scratch; further measures can come later.
Off topic. Why is bad_alloc's comment marked [dead]?
bad_alloc 42 minutes ago | link [dead]
NASA is (more or less) using the same technique with the Mars Science Lab, currently en route to Mars. The only differences are that the rover is smaller and that they use a sky crane (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4boyXQuUIw&feature=relat...). Landing on Earth however is always done by parachute, as we have enough atmosphere to slow down the lander. So you can say it's a new advancement for landing on earth. As we have quite a lot of gravity here (compared to Mars or the Moon) SpaceX will probably have to sigificantly improve the technology required for a powered landing, especially when they intend to land their first stage (http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v...).
Considering he's not hellbanned, the most likely explanation is that he posted the same comment twice. HN will automatically kill the duplicate, which is what you see. Then, realizing he posted twice, he deleted one of the copies... but chose the original. It doesn't appear [dead] on his screen so he didn't realize he deleted the wrong one.
Because you've enabled 'show dead' in your profile and so you see posts from accounts that are not normally shown.
One of the reasons why it is helpful to put a contact email in your 'about' section of your profile is that if your posts are showing up dead, folks can contact you.
NASA is (more or less) using the same technique with the Mars Science Lab, currently en route to Mars. The only differences are that the rover is smaller and that they use a sky crane (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4boyXQuUIw&feature=relat...). Landing on Earth however is always done by parachute, as we have enough atmosphere to slow down the lander. So you can say it's a new advancement for landing on earth. As we have quite a lot of gravity here (compared to Mars or the Moon) SpaceX will probably have to sigificantly improve the technology required for a powered landing, especially when they intend to land their first stage (http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v...).
