Catching up on some space news

With all this political stuff, it's time for a change of pace.  If for no other reason, to relieve the angst of watching those bozos.

Anyway, I was wondering what happened to the Falcon Heavy.  I thought they were going to have their first test flight this year, and now this year is nearly over.  What happened?  Well, I found no explanation.  But it is on for next year, so there's that.

Ah, but before that I started looking at the so-called SLS.  It has remarkably few flights proposed for it.  The pace is glacial, to say the least.  Besides, it's expensive as hell.  The first flight is scheduled for 2017.  Actually, that's not a terribly long time from now, but they have to stay on schedule in order to do it.  We'll see.

Bach to Spacex:  they've retired the Grasshopper.  There was some regret about that because they hadn't broken it, so sayeth their spokeswoman.  It reminds me of the movie "The Right Stuff", I think it was.  There was a scene in there where Chuck Yeager gets into a plane and crashes it.  You wonder what kind of craziness is this?  But it isn't crazy.  Engineers don't think they've tested something until they've made it fail.  So, he was just doing his job as a test pilot.  He pushed the plane into failure mode to test its limits.

Anyway, they are going to move to a location in New Mexico in order to continue tests on the new version.  It won't be called the Grasshopper anymore.  It's going to have more engines and it is going to go faster and higher, I suppose.  With that, it will most likely have some failures, and thus, it will get broken.  I think that is why they are moving to New Mexico.  More open space for the crashes.  You don't want to crash on top of somebody's house.

Anyway, there's a picture of an actual flight where the stage they are trying to recover was filmed just 3 meters above the surface of the water where it crashed.  Spacex was attempted to soft land on the water after delivering the payload to space.  It wasn't expected to succeed and it didn't.  However, the stage did survive up to that point, which is something.  Plus they got some data to play around with.  The engineers got a failure mode to learn something from.

One other thing on this post.  I noticed that there will be a lot of flights in 2014 for Spacex.  It looks like they are on their way to dominating the space business.  Let's see if I am right about that.

You know, if it weren't for Spacex, we'd be dead in the water as far as the space program is concerned.  Thank goodness they are having some success.

I'm going to watch the Right Stuff.  That's when this was a real country.  Not the way it is now.