[QUOTE=Dubslow;454564]It's less about finding bugs and more about the fact that development resources are being continually diverted. It was six months away in 2013, and now four years later it's still six plus months away. The two "anomalies" haven't helped, especially when one of those destroyed a pad... not to mention the constant iteration of the base F9.[/QUOTE]
Still, even a down payment on the ticket price helps the project in one way or another. And, every Falcon 9 flight adds to the knowledge base on the way to Falcon Heavy. It is hard for me to fault Musk when he has already driven so much progress toward space travel.

[QUOTE=kladner;454568]Still, even a down payment on the ticket price helps the project in one way or another.[/quote]

Agreed, hard to say no when someone is doing this:

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QfSzgV1q5g[/youtube]

[QUOTE=kladner;454568]
And, every Falcon 9 flight adds to the knowledge base on the way to Falcon Heavy. [/quote]

Not much consolation to those paying customers whose revenue generating payloads have been delayed 4 years. At least one cancelled a FH launch contract and moved it to a Russian rocket, and another recently cancelled an F9 payload after 2 years of delays, including another recent delay of several months [*after* their return to flight!]. SpaceX scheduling has a looooonnnnngggg way to go.

[QUOTE=kladner;454568]
It is hard for me to fault Musk when he has already driven so much progress toward space travel.[/QUOTE]
At the end of the day, yes indeed, if you aren't a paying customer waiting in line for missed contractual promises, then no one has *any* right to complain about just how far Musk as moved the industry -- and there's so much still left to accomplish.

[QUOTE=Dubslow;454573]Agreed, hard to say no when someone is doing this: [YouTube vid]

Not much consolation to those paying customers whose revenue generating payloads have been delayed 4 years. At least one cancelled a FH launch contract and moved it to a Russian rocket, and another recently cancelled an F9 payload after 2 years of delays, including another recent delay of several months [*after* their return to flight!]. SpaceX scheduling has a looooonnnnngggg way to go.


At the end of the day, yes indeed, if you aren't a paying customer waiting in line for missed contractual promises, then no one has *any* right to complain about just how far Musk as moved the industry -- and there's so much still left to accomplish.[/QUOTE]
I understand all you say. The delays are frustrating, or, in the cases you mention, deal-breakers.

I do consider some delays justified when there is a prospect of putting people on top of the rocket. As far as that goes, it's not good business practice to blow up multi-million dollar satellites, either.

There is certainly a long way to go. We still have to get some ability at intra-system transport. Ion drives look promising in this area. Interstellar, of course, is pretty fantastical at this point. I grew up with Sci-Fi stories about generational sub-light ships, besides the obligatory trans-light "jump" and "hyper" drives. I don't think interstellar can happen until there are means of extracting resources from space. Some kind of asteroid presence, with the skills it would take to get there and survive, seems like a logical precursor, even to the outer planets.

[QUOTE=kladner;454576]There is certainly a long way to go. We still have to get some ability at intra-system transport. Ion drives look promising in this area. Interstellar, of course, is pretty fantastical at this point. I grew up with Sci-Fi stories about generational sub-light ships, besides the obligatory trans-light "jump" and "hyper" drives. I don't think interstellar can happen until there are means of extracting resources from space. Some kind of asteroid presence, with the skills it would take to get there and survive, seems like a logical precursor, even to the outer planets.[/QUOTE]
Another possibility is to lengthen human lifespan. If we could reasonably expect a healthy life of a million years or more, we probably wouldn't find the concept of a thousand-year journey too daunting. Back in the good old days of ocean navigation many people devoted one percent or more of their lifespan to a single journey.

[QUOTE=kladner;454576]
There is certainly a long way to go. We still have to get some ability at intra-system transport. Ion drives look promising in this area. Interstellar, of course, is pretty fantastical at this point. I grew up with Sci-Fi stories about generational sub-light ships, besides the obligatory trans-light "jump" and "hyper" drives. I don't think interstellar can happen until there are means of extracting resources from space. Some kind of asteroid presence, with the skills it would take to get there and survive, seems like a logical precursor, even to the outer planets.[/QUOTE]
We're only a 0.7 type civilization on the Kardashev scale. So we've got a long way to go towards galaxy domination. Unless we find wormholes or other 'short-cuts' in physics, intra-star travel is going to take a very loooooooooooong time. Even if there is intelligent space faring life in our galaxy, they might not have found us yet (galaxy is a big place). Maybe they don't find us interesting enough (we're like ants to them). Or they could have some sort of Star Trek like directive to not communicate with species under a threshold (warp capability). Even if life is abundant, intelligent life could be rare (or always wipe themselves out at some point). But my favourite future is Cylons/Borg/AI that wipe their parents out (humans) and go on to dominate the galaxy.

SpaceX to relaunch an orbital F9.
 

Fingers crossed...

SpaceX plans to launch an [URL="http://www.space.com/36005-spacex-test-fires-rocket-for-march-14-launch.html"]EchoStar 23 satellite on a "flight proven" (read: pre-flown) rocket[/URL] very early Tuesday morning.

[QUOTE=VictordeHolland;454617]We're only a 0.7 type civilization on the Kardashev scale. So we've got a long way to go towards galaxy domination. Unless we find wormholes or other 'short-cuts' in physics, intra-star travel is going to take a very loooooooooooong time. Even if there is intelligent space faring life in our galaxy, they might not have found us yet (galaxy is a big place). Maybe they don't find us interesting enough (we're like ants to them). Or they could have some sort of Star Trek like directive to not communicate with species under a threshold (warp capability). Even if life is abundant, intelligent life could be rare (or always wipe themselves out at some point). But my favourite future is Cylons/Borg/AI that wipe their parents out (humans) and go on to dominate the galaxy.[/QUOTE]Take a look at a recent paper which considers the possibility of [URL="http://buff.ly/2msbChC"]FRB's being leakage from light-sail powered interstellar spacecraft[/URL].

[QUOTE=xilman;454631]Take a look at a recent paper which considers the possibility of [URL="http://buff.ly/2msbChC"]FRB's being leakage from light-sail powered interstellar spacecraft[/URL].[/QUOTE]

[URL="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mote_in_God's_Eye"]The Mote in God's Eye[/URL] anyone?

We're already considering using this kind of technology to send exploratory robots ourselves in the near future. Why wouldn't others? Very interesting times.

[QUOTE=chalsall;454636][URL="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mote_in_God's_Eye"]The Mote in God's Eye[/URL] anyone?

We're already considering using this kind of technology to send exploratory robots ourselves in the near future. Why wouldn't others? Very interesting times.[/QUOTE]One of the problems with the science in TMiGE is that the leakage, green light if I remember correctly, was visible for a long period of time. The recent paper specifically points out that the rotation of the impelling beam needed to track the spacecraft would result in only brief bursts of radiation being received at most everywhere else. On the other hand, perhaps the green leakage was from a deceleration beam when the craft was closer to the target. I (a) can't remember the source material well enough and (b) haven't performed the analysis of how long the beam is likely to be easily visible from the target solar system.

On the gripping hand, it's most unlikely that a spaceship launched a gigaparsec from us would be directed directly at us to within the requisite nano-arcsec precision so we likely wouldn't see the deceleration beam anyway.

[QUOTE=xilman;454639]On the gripping hand, it's most unlikely that a spaceship launched a gigaparsec from us would be directed directly at us to within the requisite nano-arcsec precision so we likely wouldn't see the deceleration beam anyway.[/QUOTE]

LOL. I'm impressed; you've actually read the book. I shouldn't be surprised. :smile:

Just to throw this out there... The only planets we humans have so far detected happen to be on our plane (or very close to it; either a transient or a red-blue shift).

[QUOTE=chalsall;454640]Just to throw this out there... The only planets we humans have so far detected happen to be on our plane (or very close to it; either a transient or a red-blue shift).[/QUOTE]There have been observations of microlensing events too. I'm not sure whether any of the dozen or so seen in the Andromeda galaxy are due to planets.

Direct imaging has found a number of planets with orbital planes greatly tilted from our line of site.

Some astrometric observations of stellar proper motion have been explained as planetary perturbations. The most notorious case is that of Barnard's star. I believe that particular case has been mostly discredited but I'm not up to date on the status of other candidates. A quick look at [url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methods_of_detecting_exoplanets[/url] suggests that several are believed to plausible or better. That page also has links to other discovery methods suitable for finding highly inclined orbits, some of which have been successful.

Al the above concerns only exo-planets. Personally I believe that Sedna, Pluto and Ceres should also be classified as planets but we seem to have lost that argument for the time being. Assuming Planet-X exists, it will be difficult to claim that it's not a planet, despite having ~10 Earth masses, because it hasn't yet cleared its orbit --- a hypothesis I think is quite likely.