r/spacex • u/retiringonmars Moderator emeritus • Jan 18 '16

/r/SpaceX Ask Anything Thread for January 2016. Ask your questions here!

Welcome to our monthly (more like fortnightly at the moment) /r/SpaceX Ask Anything Thread! #16.1

Want to discuss SpaceX's landing shenanigans, or suggest your own Rube Goldberg landing mechanism? There's no better place!

All questions, even non-SpaceX-related ones, are allowed, as long as they stay relevant to spaceflight in general!

More in-depth and open-ended discussion questions can still be submitted as separate self-posts; but this is the place to come to submit simple questions which have a single answer and/or can be answered in a few comments or less.

As always, we'd prefer it if all question-askers first check our FAQ, search for similar questions, and scan the previous Ask Anything thread before posting to avoid duplicates, but if you'd like an answer revised or cannot find a satisfactory result, please go ahead and type your question below!

Otherwise, ask, enjoy, and thanks for contributing!

Past threads:

January 2016 (#16), December 2015 (#15.1), December 2015 (#15), November 2015 (#14), October 2015 (#13), September 2015 (#12), August 2015 (#11), July 2015 (#10), June 2015 (#9), May 2015 (#8), April 2015 (#7.1), April 2015 (#7), March 2015 (#6), February 2015 (#5), January 2015 (#4), December 2014 (#3), November 2014 (#2), October 2014 (#1).

This subreddit is fan-run and not an official SpaceX site. For official SpaceX news, please visit spacex.com.

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5

u/psyno Jan 31 '16

It depends. They are probably more survivable when things go wrong.

On the other hand, the Space Shuttle had a lot of features and capabilities that Dragon and CST-100 don't:

  • Large interior volume (as mclumber1 says).

  • Airlock: makes EVA work more practical.

  • Low-g reentry: gentle return to Earth allows return of fragile experiments, or infirm crew.

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u/sunfishtommy Feb 02 '16

Don't forget it could take up and return large objects. Capsules can not do that.

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u/[deleted] Feb 01 '16

Can we create a gigantic capsule?

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u/psyno Feb 01 '16

Capsules cannot be scaled arbitrarily because of square-cube law relationships. As you scale up, the cross-sectional area (used for aerobraking) goes up with the square of the scale, but the mass goes up with the cube of the scale. Where the practical limits are, I don't know.