SpaceX cleared for US military launches

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-32894760

by jamesmoss • 11 years ago

197 116 11 years ago

bbc.co.uk

Fuxy• 11 years ago

So really this is a more of necessity not to encourage competition.

They need a replacement for the Russian rocket engines and SpaceX is the only good alternative.

dimitar• 11 years ago

Competition is about alternatives - the Air Force could have just trusted the Lockheed-Boeing venture to do it. F-35 comes to mind and not in a good way.

engi_nerd8• 11 years ago

I'm not seeing the connection to the F-35. I guess you know there was a competition for the right to build the JSF. Both aircraft met all the requirements for the competition. So can you please clarify?

gexla3• 11 years ago

I believe at first, SpaceX was squeezed out. SpaceX sued the government as choosing a monopoly. The government then went back on that to allow SpaceX to play.

There has been a lot of commentary in the news as to why SpaceX may not have been chosen. They don't have the track record that the current "monopoly" has. Even though SpaceX can deliver cheaper, these loads aren't nearly as price sensitive as commercial loads. SpaceX hasn't yet shown they can deal with increased load of launches.

nraynaud5• 11 years ago

I like the old school dogma underlying the whole thing. Russia is bad, private enterprise is good, the US wants to put weapons in space, and Michael Jackson is rocking the world with Thriller.

smanuel2• 11 years ago

Russia is bad

Putin's Russia is bad.

nraynaud5• 11 years ago

Yeah, Putin, Andropov, Chernenko, same stuff.

gexla3• 11 years ago

The article doesn't go into much detail. In this case, Russia is "bad" because of the uncertainty of the relationship relying on something so important to be considered national interests. The decision to develop rockets at home was made around the time when someone in Russia made a comment to the effect of "maybe they should use trampolines to get into space."

drzaiusapelord10• 11 years ago

This. If this article was about China or Russia doing something to get off a US product or service, HN would be cheering. When the US protects its own interests, especially its world class space programs, suddenly the tone turns towards, "EVIL US NOT PLAYING NICE!" Sadly, that narrative is upvote heaven here on HN.

drzaiusapelord10• 11 years ago

Russia is bad, private enterprise is good

Considering Putin is playing politics with space, namely limiting critical RD-180 sales after the west criticized his illegal annexation of parts of Ukraine, as well as funding and arming rebels who are purposely targeting civilians, well, what exactly do you want us to say here? Engage in more mindless political correctness? Sing kumbaya around the campfire as to not offend Russiophile HN'ers?

Putin's Russia is bad. They're dishonest partners and the US should keep its space policy under its national borders for sanity reasons. Look at the early retirement of the ISS. Russia is taking its modules and leaving the project in a few years, again as punishing the west for criticizing their illegal annexations. Previous to this the ISS was thought to be a project with a decade or two of service left.

Also, Putin's mismanagement of his economy means he just cut the Russian space program by a third and what's left is good at flying Soviet-era Soyuz and building Soviet era RD-180's but can't keep post-Soviet Proton-M's from exploding. From a practical stand-point, ignoring everything else, we simply don't need or want their tech now that the RD-180 based rockets are being made redundant/replaced and Orion/Dragon flying astronauts in the next 3 or so years.

nraynaud5• 11 years ago

the US invaded Iraq, and kill people everywhere in the world on a regular basis too, overthrow governments, helps dictators and lie to people all the time. Nobody gets ahead when you only look for scapegoats and with Manichaeism as a policy.

We are bringing back the world into the 20st century, this will be a big problem.

shit_parade214• 11 years ago

Are you aware of the extensive US driven sanctions against Russia? We pressured the French to reneg on a hardware contracts with Russia, why would they not return the favor?

higherpurpose• 11 years ago

I would've preferred if SpaceX didn't become a Defense contract. Now I'm worried about military/NSA influence (in order to get these contracts) spilling over into Elon Musk's satellite Internet business.

ourmandave• 11 years ago

Or battery powered tanks and troop carriers.

alexcroox• 11 years ago

I see it more as using some of that outrageous budget on space tech advances, relevant (old) image: http://f.cl.ly/items/1x2y2m1Q421H0B0g0Y1P/Screen%20Shot%2020...

neolefty• 11 years ago

I assume this is for the Falcon 9 especially; will they need to certify the Falcon Heavy as well, and will it take as long as the F9 certification?

ohitsdom• 11 years ago

Could be wrong, but I thought it was approving SpaceX as a company- evaluating their methods and processes.

throwaway12357• 11 years ago

Somewhat ironic that Elon Musk's SpaceX whose ultimate goal is to make life multi-planetary, is now collaborating with agents that may as well be responsible for triggering a Kessler syndrome. Not to mention the fact their business very much implies the termination of human life -- if for the greater good that is left for discussion on a case by case basis.

datamingle5• 11 years ago

"their business very much implies the termination of human life" .. you are assuming a perfect world where no other entity wants to harm human life. Also, GPS satellites were created for the military. They are fundamental for our daily lives around the world now.

stefantalpalaru6• 11 years ago

Don't forget how much better the GPS could have been without the military putting the breaks on civilian uses and competitors: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_%28satellite_navigation...

stefantalpalaru6• 11 years ago

Pecunia non olet.

drzaiusapelord10• 11 years ago

Kessler syndrome

The largest and most optional cloud of space junk was a propagandist military display by the Chinese Communist Party in 2007 to show the world where their missile tech is going.

http://www.space.com/3415-china-anti-satellite-test-worrisom...

The satellite's destruction is now being viewed as the most prolific and severe fragmentation in the course of five decades of space operations.

SpaceX works for the CCP now? Oh, right, mindless anti-US hyperbole that is upvote bait for anti-US HN'ers.

kaolinite2• 11 years ago

Is anyone else becoming a touch bothered by the large number of BBC news articles that are being submitted to Hacker News? I love the BBC and BBC News is - for the most part - very good. However, the articles on their website are often lacking in detail and when talking about technology, they are often wrong or show a misunderstanding on the behalf of the reporter. The BBC News definitely has a place - I'm just not sure that it's on Hacker News.

I don't mind one or two articles - and I don't mind articles from mainstream news publications - but there are a lot of articles being published from the BBC. Here's the past 24 hours:

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=bbc&sort=byPopularity&prefix=f...

All of that said, they keep getting upvotes - so enough people clearly want them on Hacker News.

butwhy• 11 years ago

Well go and submit something better.

icebraining• 11 years ago

Well, in this case, I think the news are relevant, and you're unlikely to get anything much better (unlike, say, in the announcement of a new scientific discovery).

That said, here's the original report from the Air Force: http://www.af.mil/News/ArticleDisplay/tabid/223/Article/5897...

gexla3• 11 years ago

Right, submitting them isn't so much an issue because they can get flagged or just not up-voted. I don't often view the "new" articles list anymore. Most often, I feel like I'm wasting my time unless I want to help by up-voting the relatively good articles.

ColinWright2• 11 years ago

Not necessarily statistically significant, but of the past 1000 articles submitted:

      8 (bbc.co.uk)
      9 (techcrunch.com)
     10 (arstechnica.com)
     14 (nytimes.com)
     14 (theguardian.com)
     16 (washingtonpost.com)
     16 (youtube.com)
     18 (wsj.com)
     32 (medium.com)
     46 (github.com)

Of the past 10,000:

     40 (kickstarter.com)
     40 (reddit.com)
     40 (theatlantic.com)
     44 (forbes.com)
     46 (bloomberg.com)
     46 (securityaffairs.co)
     47 (theverge.com)
     56 (bbc.co.uk)
     62 (washingtonpost.com)
     68 (arstechnica.com)
     69 (bbc.com)
     70 (businessinsider.com)
     74 (wired.com)
     82 (wikipedia.org)
    102 (wsj.com)
    105 (theguardian.com)
    157 (nytimes.com)
    159 (techcrunch.com)
    163 (youtube.com)
    339 (medium.com)
    485 (github.com)

In case you're wondering, I have a file of all submissions listing ID, userid, URL, and title. Then I did this:

    $ tail -n 10000 records   \
        | gawk '{print $NF}'  \
        | sort                \
        | uniq -c             \
        | sort -n             \
        | grep -n .           \
        | tac                 \
        | head -21

Ntrails• 11 years ago

Could we get some kind of simple mean/variance analysis on "upvotes" by site.

Clearly the BBC isn't being spammed to generate upvotes

kaolinite2• 11 years ago

Wow, thanks Colin - really cool information. Where do you get the contents of 'records' from? Do you have a script that crawls occasionally?

If we merge bbc.com and bbc.co.uk, we end up with 125 / 10,000. I suppose that isn't that many compared to others, but it's still higher than I think it should be. ArsTechnica (which often runs the same articles, such as this SpaceX one) only has 68 / 10,000 and the articles are written with a lot more technical detail.

Nevertheless, I'm not really sure what can be done about it. We can't ban the BBC from HN, as with BuzzFeed, because that's over the top - there's some good content. A nice solution might be to remind people, on the submission page, that it's better to go to the source - or at least a good, technical write-up - rather than a news post that is written for the general public.

chinathrow• 11 years ago

Welcome to the military/industrial complex. Something you can be really proud of!

wahsd3• 11 years ago

This seriously compromises the integrity of SpaceX.

Even if they were to only support "national security" there is absolutely zero chance they can know whether they are actually supporting national security or global surveillance and oppression of human rights.

What people don't realize is that we, SpaceX and Musk, are really no different whatsoever than any of the companies that have been chided for "working with the Nazis" or "supplying the Nazis". The US Government and military are nothing remotely even close to "a force for good". A force for good does not support totalitarian dictators, overthrow governments, spy and surveil their "friends", assassinate scientists, support racist regimes, invade and collapse societies leading to the formation of ISIS, use government powers to support corporate private interests, shield, hide, and protect tax evaders, etc. The dirty laundry list is looooong.

mikeash9• 11 years ago

There's no comparison. The US is not trying to conquer the world and the US is not committing genocide.

Yes, the US government does lots of bad things. It also does lots of good things. It's a vast collection of sometimes loosely affiliated organizations with lots of competing interests and there's no reason to expect consistency. But there's no sensible comparison to the Nazis.

shit_parade214• 11 years ago

How many deaths constitute a genocide because hundreds of thousands of middle eastern civilians have been killed during our 14 year war on Islam.

EDIT: down votes? Can't argue the truth so better to bury it.

wahsd3• 11 years ago

Just because you cannot comprehend the nature of America's conquest of the world does not mean it is not so. The specific characteristics of something does not determine the nature. What, does world conquest only happen when it comes with characteristics you have been trained to understand like sailing in wooden boats that fly the union jack or the spanish crown and killing many millions upon millions of people around the globe, or does it only come in tanks with red flags that have a black swastika in the center?

You should try peering beyond what you have been told to know. Because as NSA whistle-blowers have stated the expressed goal of the NSA is total global surveillance and population control dominance. It seems like the only and singular example of real global domination that humanity has ever even come close to. Do we really have to wait for a robot army to exterminate the masses of humans that serve no purpose once AI and robotics takes hold before you will start understanding the dire circumstances you are facing at far too late of a point in time?

skinofstars• 11 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law

mac01021• 11 years ago

assassinate scientists?

wahsd3• 11 years ago

Iranian scientists at the very least, quite possibly others for which there is less evidence. Whether you agree with what those scientists may of may not be doing, they were assassinated, at the very least with our government's approval.

shiggerino• 11 years ago

What exactly are the national security implications of using Russian engines? That it will combine and burn fuel and oxidizer like a stinking, dirty commie?

sparky_z• 11 years ago

http://www.nytimes.com/1988/11/15/world/the-bugged-embassy-c...

It's not wise to trust Russian-built anything, especially with diplomatic relations in their current state. Just like how foreign intelligence services shouldn't trust American-built computers.

What could go wrong? I'm not sure. But why make your attack surface larger than it has to be?

seanflyon2• 11 years ago

Or Russia could abruptly decide not to sell us any more. Relying on a foreign government to keep our military functioning is not ideal and our relations with Russia, while generally friendly, are somewhat strained the last few years.

ianstallings• 11 years ago

The ban is for a specific engine, the RD-180. It's a response to the action Russia took in Crimea, so it's political and they're not hiding that fact. It's related to the national security the same way that waving the flag is. Not at all. Or completely. Depending on your viewpoint.

tsotha2• 11 years ago

It's a question of supply reliability. You don't want to depend on a system which may or may not be available depending on things beyond your control. That's true of any supplier, foreign or domestic.

SpaceX cleared for US military launches

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