Actually yes, your job prospects are quite great. Most universities here have a quite shining international rep.

Just because YOU don't pay for it doesn't mean nobody does. I do. My taxes do. By far not enough if you ask me, and they keep cutting back on money for education to bail out a few banks, but my taxes pay for education here.

Just because public schools are completely fucked up in the US doesn't mean that it can't be done right. All it takes is people in control who actually WANT public schools to succeed rather than enjoying watching them fail because they themselves come from expensive private schools and don't like the idea that someone could get for free what they had to pay through the nose for.

Oh, food sure is a problem around here, too, but tuition fees are not. I don't know what's the current going rate, but back when I went to university, they wanted somewhere around 400 bucks a semester from me.

That's manageable with a part time job, trust me. Just work through the 3 months of breaks you get per year and you should be golden.

Yeah, yeah... what said the philosophy major with a job to the one without? "Want fries with that?"

Getting to the point? We're there. We passed that threshold a while ago. We're already on our way of getting to the point where you cannot recover your college fees during the rest of your working years.

That is "recover" as in "having it land in once piece so we can perform engineering analysis on what worked and didn't work in our engines" (from the perspective of SpaceX).

The earlier recovery systems that SpaceX tried to put into place were some parachutes into the upper parts of the 1st stages. SpaceX doesn't talk all that much about their failures, but apparently the parachute recovery systems were an utter and miserable failure for SpaceX, which is one reason why they have gone to the active thrust recovery system that was tested yesterday. Gwynne Shotwell talked briefly about the parachute system in her interview with David Livingston on the Space Show, when trying to explain why SpaceX is using this particular approach.

The earlier approach would have been more like the Shuttle SRB recovery approach, where some salt and seawater would be flushed out of the system after an at-sea recovery. They really did try to do this, but the dynamic loads on the parachutes were simply too much and even a multiple drogue chute system wouldn't work... at least in terms of being able to fit within the rocket equation at the same time and being able to deliver a usable payload.

Just a bunch of oil companies who want to make claims all over the Arctic Ocean. Are you sure that nobody wants to fight over ANWR? Ever hear about Prudhoe Bay?

Yeah, nobody wants to go into the Arctic as obviously there is nothing to find there.

Don't even get me started about Antarctica. Oil and mining companies would have boom towns of over a million people crawling all over that continent if it wasn't for the current international ambiguity over property rights in that part of the world... an ambiguity that everybody involved is putting off in the hopes it doesn't trigger World War III so they try to give it a nice face by saying it is exclusively for scientific research. I don't mind the current state of affairs in Antarctica and I think all of the natural resources which can be found there are better found in some asteroid instead from an ecological viewpoint, but using the argument that we should settle Antarctica first before going to the Moon or Mars is a false argument to make because doing so is currently illegal and the governments of the world are active in preventing people from doing so.

Worse, the editors at Slashdot thought it was a separate flight rather than the same thing. That this 1st stage also performed a landing attempt is what makes this news. The "also" of what SpaceX did last week was to take yet another Falcon 9 launch core and do a point to point hop at their test facility in McGregor, Texas.

The engineers at SpaceX have been very busy this week, and I doubt any of them are on vacation except for family emergencies or because they are in the hospital for an illness themselves.

Right, telecom satellites are totally useless and not needed, so the several billion dollars each year those companies make from those satellites are just imaginary. Ditto for things like Google Maps and other surveying satellites.

BTW, there is a company who is setting itself up for asteroid prospecting too, by the name of Planetary Resources The interesting thing is that they have a business plan that essentially makes them a profitable business just from other space-based activity for equipment they plan on using for their prospecting.

I could name a dozen other space-based activities that make LEO profitable... indeed it is already profitable for quite a few companies. That you seem to be ignorant of commercial activity in space right now, you can continue to have your luddite dreams.

If SpaceX gets their spacecraft to become reusable, they have announced formally that their price will ultimately be $7 million per launch of the Falcon 9... with an assurance that the payload to orbit will remain the same. BTW, that is 10 metric tons of stuff to LEO and about 5 metric tons to GEO. If all they get going is just the reuse of the 1st stage, it will still be about $40 million.

Russia can't be cheaper through reduced labor costs or economies of scale through mass production to get to these figures. You have the rocket equation that really stops you from doing much in terms of a substantially cheaper piece of unobtainium from which you could construct the rocket and real world physics starts to push back at any significant weight reduction that they haven't already done. At that $7 million per launch, it is starting to strain the raw material prices, which implies they could only compete if the launches were heavily subsidized as a national policy. I could see Russia trying to do that simply to maintain control of the launch market, but that isn't a realistic long term prospect if the launch industry really takes off due to these much lower prices to orbit.

The only thing they can do is once SpaceX gets a viable reusable rocket system going, RKK Energia is by necessity going to start their own reusable rocket program and try to duplicate the efforts that SpaceX has done so far. Arianespace and the Chinese Space Agency is also going to need to do this as well simply to stay in the commercial launch market... or give up that market completely to SpaceX and perhaps other American companies.

They are returning to the launch site, not an oil rig. The only point of a barge would simply be for logistics of moving the stage from one launch site to another or from the factory in the first place.

The odd proposal I've heard is for SpaceX to fly the stage from the factory in Los Angeles to the launch sites prior to full integration. It would save them the hassle of trying to get wide load permits and limits due to the size of an overpass... something that currently limits the maximum diameter of the cores. This has been suggested for the MCT 1st stage, which is going to be one huge beast of a vehicle and likely won't even make the trip through the Panama Canal if put on a barge. The MCT 1st stage is also supposed to be eventually a recoverable/reusable stage.

The current plan is to return the rocket to a place near the launch pad where it left (depending on the launch site, there will be some designated landing zone which will be built... might even be under construction right now at all SpaceX launch locations).

The speculation about the oil rig centered on the fact that SpaceX will soon be launching from southern Texas (assuming that they have made up their mind about that location in spite of already spending nearly $100 million on real estate and infrastructure at that location). Since the path going eastward from Texas is over the Gulf of Mexico, there are literally thousands of oil rigs that can be used for this purpose if they decided to use one of those spots instead of going all of the way back to Brownsville.

An advantage of going that route is simply no extra delta-v is needed to reverse course and cancel the horizontal momentum that was earlier used to send the rest of the spaceship into orbit. Such a recovery system doesn't help with launches from KSC, so it makes no sense to build a special rocket that can be used in Texas and another one that is needed for Florida.

SpaceX has a series of tests going on in New Mexico at Spaceport America (they've already built the launch/landing pads at this spaceport) that will do gradually higher flights until they anticipate going to 300k feet (technically the Kármán line). These are sub-orbital (mostly just up and back), but they will test the flight procedures and give confidence to regulators that flying the Falcon 9R (for recoverable or reusable) back to Florida won't end up in Miami and sit on somebody's breakfast nook. This is a part of the Grasshopper series of tests, but they have a fully functioning Falcon 9 core that they are testing right now rather than the somewhat smaller Grasshopper that was shown earlier. A video of a test performed last week by SpaceX can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UjWqQPWmsY

I agree that the engineering data that can be recovered from one of these stages is more than worth the effort from a pure R&D perspective alone. It took decades before Jeff Bezos recovered the F1 engines used on the Apollo missions, and those were in pretty sad shape when they were recovered (having hit the ocean at terminal velocity... likely bell end first). SpaceX has been trying to recover the 1st stage of their rockets since the first Falcon 1 launch many years ago, and this particular launch is the closest that they've been able to get in terms of one that has soft landed.

Here's a phone, call someone who gives half a shit.

Fortunately there are still countries where it's not possible to patent every fart you pass.

You sure that's not missing a few 0s?

Why would people in the future abandon patents? Because they "learned their lesson"? Because they "got more socially intelligent"? Look back in history and show me one example where we learned from our lessons or where we became more socially intelligent.

Man is a greedy asshole. And the greediest assholes are also the ones that have the power to build something big. Something like, say, some time travel device.

So if anyone ever came up with something like that, what he would bring along is the blueprints of everything that had been invented between now and then and they'd make a beeline for the patent office.