glumbert

You know me to well !

That's what she said!

A horny Scottish farmer isn't chasing the rocket.......

....right...they're trying to outrun it.

You wouldn't volunteer your monkey??

Do you play golf in orbit?

I thought it was cool, but I'm a professional geek. I think of all the incredible engineering it took to get to this point.

Plus, I wanted to roast marshmallows on that exhaust nozzle.

AFAIK so far they spend less than a single Space Shuttle flight costs.

The company was founded and initially funded by Elon Musk, the guy who founded PayPal and later sold it to Ebay for 1.5 Billion $.

Using liquid oxygen, and launching from the equator always causes ice to form on the skin, and then ablate on the way up. I don't think there will be a solution for the ice problem. But that cable or gasket that was flying around did seem reckless.

So will the government now need to create laws, to limit the amount of space debris generated by private companies?

The parts that came off the nozzle seems to be some stabilizing part that is used to protect the nozzlr during stage separation. Just like the lower stage and the fairing this will not stay up there for long, at this point of the flight the rocket has not reached orbit, it is still on a ballistic curve.

BTW: Space-X has won a NASA contract to fly cargo to the ISS starting nect year.

But what happens when lots more civilian rockets and satellites start going dead in space, kinda like that whole satellite phone venture already did? Eventually accumulated space junk reaches critical mass, and just starts colliding into orbitting debris.

That will be interesting to see if Space-X can live up to that contract.

Sattelites are usually either deorbited or moved to very high orbits at the end of their life. It actually takes a rather small amount of fuel to deorbit a low earth orbit sattelite. Tha bigger problem are the parts that have been around for a while, like space junk from the 60s and 70s. Back then it was thought for a while that blowing up upper stages would be a good idea...

The large chunks are rather easy to track and avoid, but the small stuff is nasty.