Good coders copy, great coders outsource.

Party on, Wayne!

Whichever serves the best booze!!

Sure smells like appeal from authority logical fallacy in here.

Getting the remains of things to orbit is not getting things to orbit. There is a difference in pointing out valid problems with the premise of cost as the only issue, and trolling.

It is all about cost. How inexpensively can you get people and cargo to orbit? That is the only question I'm concerned with.

The space shuttle was ultimately a vehicle for delivering crew and cargo to orbit.
This task is accomplished for less money by the falcon rockets.
Granted, If you put a ping pong table on the shuttle, its ping pong capabilities would be incomparable to the falcon rockets.

The Falcon Heavy has two side boosters, which detach after liftoff, presumably grasshopper gear will be fitted to these, and they will each vertically land, while the main body of the falcon heavy continues on.

Space Shuttle:
Payload to GTO: ~3000 kg.
Average cost per flight: 1.5 billion (cost of shuttle program / number of launches)


Falcon 9 rocket:
Payload to GTO:~2000 kg
Average cost per flight: 50m (cost of expendable rocket)


Falcon 9 rocket with grasshopper gear:
Payload to GTO:~1000 kg (rough estimate)
Average cost per flight: ~200,000 (expected figure for fuel + incidentals)


You can do the math to figure out why this is a big deal.

I don't see the point of reusing 747s all the time? Why don't we just make new ones for every flight? Everyone knows that its much more fun to fly in a brand new plane.

They haven't had any failures since the advent of the falcon 9 rocket. The first three falcon launches failed, and if the fourth hadn't worked, spaceX would've folded. Luckily, the fourth did work, and they learned a lot from it. (mostly that 9 > 1)

You beat me to the enders game reference, you sonofabitch.

This has been done before, many, many times. Every time the story breaks as if its some new technology to control things with your mind, when it really isn't anymore.

Fisker does not represent what electric vehicles are capable of- they represent what you get when you combine lots of money with shotty engineering. So who does it better? Well, if you haven't heard of them- Tesla motors is making a lot of headway.

I think that every engineer on planet earth should have -A mechanical pencil -A Protractor -An engineer's scale ( those three sided rulers) -Calipers - TI83/84 I'm not one of those old school flannel wearing engineers, I do most everything on a computer, but there is a lot of value in having a traditional drafting desk with tools like this, regardless of what type of engineering you do.