On Tue, 27 Apr 2010 09:34:24 -0400, "Jeff Findley"
wrote:


No, they put expensive (at least to the owner) payloads on top of
them, until no one would risk it anymore. Falcon 1 was not a private
X-vehicle.

That was possibly a mistake. But that mistake is not unique to Falcon 1.
There have been payloads lost on the first flights of other launch vehicles.

That's what I meant about not learning. SpaceX dumped payloads into
the ocean ten years after Arianespace sent Cluster into a million
pieces on A501, and eight years after Delta III dealt Galaxy X a
similar hand, and these were launched by companies with decades of
space launch experience.

Being the new kids on the block and trying to do things on the cheap
is not an excuse to be foolish. A decade after the Cluster fiasco,
SpaceX had to learn that error again? What mistakes and lessons
ignored will SpaceX present us with Falcon 9?

All this to save a few bucks?

That's the sort of history re-writing that really annoys me. NASA,
ULA, Orbital, and Arianespace don't get away with that crap, but we're
talking about SpaceX, so they get a free pass, because they're the
good guys going after the big evil conglomerates.

This is b.s. I've consistently had lower expectations of SpaceX because
they're a startup. I'm not rewriting history in any way shape or form.

I was too harsh with that. I apologize.

You'd rather complain from the very beginning that SpaceX is a failure
because they're not immediately as successful as ULA or Arianespace with
their multiple previous generations of launch vehicles to draw upon when
designing the next one.

I wouldn't have if they had treated their first flights as test
flights. They didn't. They carried an expensive satellite on top (just
because it was cheap for a satellite doesn't mean it was cheap) and
therefore demanded they be judged relative to ULA (well, LockMart and
Boeing then) or Arianespace. They don't get to have it both ways just
because they're cheaper.

Note that Orbital went through *a lot* of initial
growing pains and suffered many failures before it was accepted into the
"big boy's club" that you refer to. Orbital's launch vehicles were unique
in many ways and therefore failed in unique ways. That's to be expected.

But after the first Pegasus XL, the first Ariane 5, and the first two
Delta IIIs went kablooey, SpaceX felt it right to put our tax dollars
and years of hard work by some rather unfortunate guinea pigs on top
of the first Falcon 1. And we let them get away with it. And then they
did it again.

SpaceX is currently paying its dues and obviously isn't fully accepted into
the club yet.

Possibly because SpaceX hasn't paid its dues and seems to ignore
history in the name of saving a few bucks. The NASAs, ULAs and
Arianespaces of the world had to go through years of pain, and they
were called on the carpet when things didn't work out (remember the
criticsim heaped on Space Shuttle, Atlas I, Titan 34D and Titan IV
during their myriad and varied failures?) But not SpaceX. SpaceX dumps
an expensive satellite in the lagoon when the maiden flight fails, and
critics are chided for calling them out on it. Then SpaceX calls
Flight 2 a success despite failing in stage 2 and dumping another
assortment of payloads in the sea, and that is met with disgustingly
little challenge from the fanboys. Now we're being told to shut up and
color when we point out that Falcon 9 is an order of magnitude more
complicated for a company with a dubious success record to date and
maybe, just maybe, we shouldn't be depending on them to keep ISS alive
for the next 10 years.

But if it keeps making progress and keeps its costs low, it
will make it into the club.

Which is as it should be. The problem is that we are being asked to
admit them into the club YESTERDAY, before they've demonstrated said
progress. We're basically betting the ISS farm on them, with very
little justification for doing so.

Brian