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" In the long run, it's impossible to make progress without sometimes having setbacks, although people who get lucky on their first attempt sometimes forget this. "
Henry Spencer
Long
People
Progress
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" In the first few years, it was at least plausible to come in in the morning and read all the Usenet traffic that had come in, and 15 minutes later be off doing something useful. "
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" Since SpaceX's very beginnings, they have talked about recovering and reusing at least the first stages of their rockets. "
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" The Moon may not be quite as appealing as Mars, but it's still a complex and poorly understood world, with many questions still unanswered. "
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" The key virtue of orbital assembly is that it eliminates the tight connection between the size of the expedition and the size of the rockets used to launch it. "
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" Solid-fuel rockets can't easily be shut down on command. "
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" If your goal is to change the world, you can't start by doing things the same old way because it sells better. "
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" Testing a parachute drop of a heavy object is not simple. "
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" Claiming that solid rockets are necessary for a heavy-lift launcher is obvious nonsense. "
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" Progress requires setbacks; the only sure way to avoid failure is not to try. "
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" The Apollo programme of the 1960s had some weight problems, too; in particular, the lunar lander needed some fairly drastic weight-reduction work. "
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" SpaceX does seem to have had a run of bad luck, with its first three launches all failing. "
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First
Three
" Past experience, on the shuttle and the Titan rockets, suggests that large multi-segment solid rockets have a probability of failure of 0.5 to 1 per cent. "
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Past
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" Trying to build a spaceship by making an aeroplane fly faster and higher is like trying to build an aeroplane by making locomotives faster and lighter - with a lot of effort, perhaps you could get something that more or less works, but it really isn't the right way to proceed. "
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Fly
Trying
" Sometimes a malfunctioning test setup actually gives the tested system a chance to show what it can do in an unrehearsed emergency. During a test of an Apollo escape system in the 1960s, the escape system successfully got the capsule clear of a malfunctioning test rocket. "
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Test
Chance
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" Whether solid rockets are more or less likely to fail than liquid-fuel rockets is debatable. More serious, though, is that when they do fail, it's usually violent and spectacular. "
Henry Spencer
Serious
Spectacular
Fail
" Technically and financially, it might still make sense to give up on Ares I and simply write off the money spent on it, but politically, that's probably impossible. "
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Money
Impossible
Off
" The Orion capsule uses an escape system quite like that of the Apollo spacecraft in the 1960s and 70s: an 'escape tower' containing a solid-fuel rocket that will pull it up and away from Ares I in a pinch. "
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Up
Rocket
Space
" In 1960-61, a small group of female pilots went through many of the same medical tests as the Mercury astronauts and scored very well on them - in fact, better than some of the astronauts did. "
Henry Spencer
Group
Tests
Small
" Not until the space shuttle started flying did NASA concede that some astronauts didn't have to be fast-jet pilots. And at that point, sure enough, women started becoming astronauts. "
Henry Spencer
Enough
Women
NASA
" Sometimes people wonder why aeroplanes are so cheap and rockets are so expensive. Even the most superficial comparison shows one obvious difference: aeroplane engines use outside air to burn their fuel, while rockets have to carry their own oxidisers along. "
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Wonder
Burn
Space
" In a small spacecraft, it was hard for the other two guys to sleep when the on-duty man was talking to Mission Control regularly. "
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Sleep
Mission
Small
" NASA has never had a problem finding capable people to be astronauts. NASA's problem was, and still is, finding ways to cut the list of capable applicants down to a manageable length. "
Henry Spencer
People
Down
Finding
" Reusable rockets promise much easier testing because you should usually get them back, and you can debug as you go rather than having to get everything perfect the first time. "
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You
Space
Perfect
" The communications delays between Earth and Mars can be half an hour or more, so the people on the ground can't participate minute by minute in Mars surface activities. "
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Earth
" Liquid oxygen is one of the cheapest manufactured substances on Earth. In large quantities, it costs pennies per kilogram - cheaper than milk or beer. "
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Than
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" One of the headaches of high-tech test programmes is having to debug the test arrangements before you can start debugging the things you're trying to test. "
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Before
" My one concern is that when money gets tight, it's easy to cut R&D funding that isn't tied to a specific project - look at what's happened to NASA's aviation research. "
Henry Spencer
Money
Easy
Look
" Developing expendable rockets is always going to be painful and expensive. Throwing the whole rocket away on each attempt not only costs a lot, it also hampers figuring out just what went wrong because you don't get the rocket back for inspection. "
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Always
Going
Painful
" It's true that Apollo 10's lander was overweight. Late in the craft's development, it became clear that its ballooning weight was endangering the whole mission. "
Henry Spencer
True
Development
Craft
" Foul-ups in testing are not uncommon, especially when the test setup is being tried for the first time. "
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First Time
Test
Testing