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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (850078)	4/15/2015 4:09:03 PM
From: PKRBKR	Respond to of 1576275

That's the temptation with these wickedly complex systems, to just think that you're one fix away from something that is production-worthy. The AMD way...

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (850078)	4/15/2015 4:24:33 PM
From: combjelly	Respond to of 1576275

Possibly. But these things are instrumented, so they know what is going on inside. Plus, when you watch the video, you can see that it did land properly and tipped over. Remember, this isn't the first time they've tried this. Now it very well may be that there are some other gotchas. Musk is saying 80% chance this year. Given they have a launch every 3 weeks or so, that means they have a lot of tries. Granted, not all will have an attempted landing. They scrubbed one attempt because they needed the full fuel load to get the satellite into orbit. Another was scrubbed because of weather conditions in the landing zone. So it may be that all launches will have a landing attempt. But, still... ULA has a tough row to hoe. Their announced Vulcan rocket will allow for recovery of the engines, pumps and accessories for the first stage, loosing only the tank. It will be parachuted and caught by a helicopter mid-air. Just like they studied doing 30 years ago... This is a great illustration of exactly what plagues ULA. They could have been doing this for decades. Now I do understand the need stick with the tried and true for reliability reasons. But at some point, they need to use new(er) technologies. SpaceX is totally different. They are big believers in continual refinement. I haven't studied each and every launch, but they have made changes to most launches. Usually small, like the tanks might be a bit longer. Sometimes big, like changes to the engines for more power, changing the arrangement of the engines or adding legs. That needs to change at some point.