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SpaceX Conducts Full Thrust Firing of Falcon 9
Posted by
Soulskill
on Sat Aug 02, 2008 12:57 AM
from the ahead-of-schedule dept.
from the ahead-of-schedule dept.
Toren Altair sends us this excerpt:
"Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) conducted the first nine engine firing of its Falcon 9 launch vehicle at its Texas Test Facility outside McGregor on July 31st. A second firing on August 1st completed a major NASA Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) milestone almost two months early. At full power, the nine engines consumed 3,200 lbs of fuel and liquid oxygen per second, and generated almost 850,000 pounds of force — four times the maximum thrust of a 747 aircraft. This marks the first firing of a Falcon 9 first stage with its full complement of nine Merlin 1C engines. Once a near term Merlin 1C fuel pump upgrade is complete, the sea level thrust will increase to 950,000 lbf, making Falcon 9 the most powerful single core vehicle in the United States. The Falcon 9 will launch SpaceX's spaceship Dragon with up to 7 humans from 2009 on."
We discussed SpaceX when it won the NASA competition to provide low cost commercial transport to the ISS, and also when it launched an earlier design. Basic specs for Falcon 9 are available, as well as a more technical paper (PDF).
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the_other_chewey writes "At their test facility in Texas, SpaceX, the privately funded space-flight company, have successfully tested their nine-engine cluster which is planned to provide the heavy lifting capability for their Falcon 9 and Falcon 9 Heavy rockets.
The firing lasted three minutes (a full 'mission duty cycle,' i.e. a simulated launch) under full power, delivering 3.8MN (or 855,000 lbs.) of thrust. SpaceX have made a video of the test available. The Waco Tribune has a short report about it, with comments by locals."
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So...only a year to go? (Score:2)
The Falcon 9 will launch SpaceX's spaceship Dragon with up to 7 humans from 2009 on.
I bet it won't.
Launching human beings into orbit is hard to do. For a start you need to demonstrate that your launch vehicle is reliable enough to be considered man rated. Then you need to develop your lander and validate that.
They may get there eventually but I doubt they can do it in one year.
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Ya.. that's just a straight up lie. If a Falcon 9 launches in 2009 at all, it will be carrying nothing but ballast or, at the best, some commercial payload.
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Note that they said "up to" seven humans. An unmanned launch of Dragon in 2009 would qualify.
Oh, and you can develop/qualify your lander at the same time you qualify your launcher; they don't have to be done serially.
Re:So...only a year to go? (Score:5, Informative)
Well no, because seven really is the upper limit. They just don't specify the lower limit.
And you don't need to use the operational launcher to test the lander, you can use something else. It's not like the Apollo program used a Saturn V (or even Saturn IB) to develop the Apollo capsule. For some of the drop tests they didn't use a rocket at all.
Parent
Re:So...only a year to go? (Score:5, Interesting)
In any case, thorough testing of the launch vehicle is absolutely necessary if for no other reason than to know the weight limit for the manned payload. But the design of the launch vehicle is robust (it can withstand various failures without scrubbing). Also, they'll be using these same engines (the Merlin 1C) in smaller launch vehicles, so they'll have plenty of reliability information.
To top it off, they're running a couple months early. As far as I see, they shouldn't have too many difficulties for a 2009 launch. *
* - God willing and the creek don't rise. **
** - Er, that is, God willing and the funding don't dry up.
-fsh PS - Although I don't have personal experience in the aerospace industry, I'm doing research at an observatory right now. Not that that means anything, I just like telling people that I'm working at an observatory right now!
Parent
Re:So...only a year to go? (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah but NASA are fantastic engineers. Their interface design and validation are orders of magnitude ahead of anybody else.
NASA didn't design the LEM, Northrop Grumman did. Spacecraft are designed by aerospace companies (like Northrop-Grumman, Boeing, Rockwell, and now SpaceX), and then NASA picks the design they like best. The best engineers are typically at the private companies because the pay is better than at government run NASA.
Consider the first shuttle flight. [...] And it worked first time. They were hot at the time, coming off the experience of Apollo.
Well, the first space shuttle, the Enterprise, never went to space. It's easy to have a successful first flight when you have the resources to build a full size scale model to 'test' with. And they weren't coming hot off Apollo; the space shuttle was about a decade later.
The most complex and unlikely machine (pretty much) ever built.
They made it needlessly complex. This is why they have had, and continue to have, so many problems. The designers promised several launches each month and a payload cost in $50-$100 per pound range.
The scientific community at the time said much the same things about the shuttle design that they currently say about the ISS; that it's too much money for too little return. Some even go so far as to suggest these overly-complex plans, pushed on the unsupportive science community are essentially aerospace company welfare.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
I have to be honest here and I think it is my age that makes me get this frustrated. I want to have the chance to fly, as a civilian, into space.
We all know how problematic it would be but I'm sure we all have our fantasies about how we could accomplish it but I really want to fly into outer space just to have sex there. The idea of weightless sex has made me curious for years.
I freely admit that would be my primary personal goal in space.
With my luck we'll get there just after the period where I'm no longe
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
And they weren't coming hot off Apollo; the space shuttle was about a decade later.
Actually they were coming hot off the Apollo. Nixon gave the go-ahead for the shuttle project while still being in office. It's just that by the time the first shuttle was finally launched into space, after many setbacks and delays partly due to the needless complexity (mandated by the military who wanted greater glide capability), Apollo started to become a distant memory.
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No, those were just drop tests to see how the shuttle glided. The shuttle is notable in NASA history for bei
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Don't forget China ...
http://www.wired.com/science/space/news/2006/12/72276 [wired.com]
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I realize how close the day is that I may be forced to really think about it but, so help me, I'm a Marine (not active in a lot of years) and the day the United States of America outsources their space program will be the day I give serious consideration to relinquishing my citizenship.
Yeah, yeah... I know... I am just really hopeful that we don't.
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Back to correct as I know people can be pedantic. I mean "off shoring" instead of outsourcing.
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I'd rather get quality goods. ;)
hehehe (Score:1)
Re:hehehe (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
I've been there. =) (Score:5, Interesting)
It was really exciting to see real rocket work going on in person. The "mission control" room was such a nerd fantasy. There was a big swath of giant flat screen monitors, each glowing with thin, phosphorescent lines of data. The glut of wires, tubes, ratings, warning signs, and big pieces of scary looking equipment made it a fantastic afternoon overall.
I wish Elon Musk all the luck in the world, and I hope someday I can afford to drive around in a Tesla Motors car.
Oh, and the test site is located at an old weapons test site. There are all these weird looking bunkers peppering the surrounding countryside. It felt like a scene from a Marvel comic or something. Unfortunately nothing went wrong and I failed to develop super powers due to radiation exposure.
I fully realize this comment contributed almost nothing to the discussion of the article, except to brag that I've been there and to share my excitement over all the loud, large, and complicated stuff they have.
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Oh, and the test site is located at an old weapons test site. There are all these weird looking bunkers peppering the surrounding countryside. It felt like a scene from a Marvel comic or something. Unfortunately nothing went wrong and I failed to develop super powers due to radiation exposure.
Brings to mind the novel Rocketship Galileo [wikipedia.org] by Robert Heinlein. Maybe Elon is actually going to the moon to battle Nazis.
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I'll admit it... This is a hearty and VERY jealous, "Fuck you." ;)
Green with envy is not applicable. Maybe neon green.
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I'm pretty sure that it is actually the site of a (long demolished) WW-II era munitions plant, and the "weird looking bunkers" were for the storage of the completed bombs while they await transport. So an old weapons factory rather than an old weapons test site.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Oh, he peed off the top. He was just saying he was glad to have something to aim at!
Duh (Score:2)
WHAT "single engine competitors"?? No U.S. to-orbit vehicle of which I am aware has EVER been "single-engine"!
Kind of like saying, "Our plane flies better than any other wingless vehicle!"
Re:Duh (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
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Quote: "Much like a commercial airliner, our multi-engine design has the potential to provide significantly higher reliability than single engine competitors."
WHAT "single engine competitors"?? No U.S. to-orbit vehicle of which I am aware has EVER been "single-engine"!
How about space ship two, if you only count the first 50km of the launch?
Well... (Score:2)
Oops (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I just realized, Spaceship Two is not orbital anyway, so it doesn't count.
Thats right. I was thinking in terms of the powered ascent from 15km to (say) 50, then they coast.
Re:Duh (Score:5, Informative)
They're talking about single point of failure. The space shuttle, for example, has a single point of failure: if either of the two engines fails, the whole thing fails. The result is that the overall reliability is the square of the reliability of the two engines. 99% reliable becomes 98.1% reliable. If it were the other way around, it would be the square root: 99.99% means it fails one in every thousand launches, as opposed to one in every fifty.
So what he's saying is, they can afford to have engines become nonfunctional (obviously not explosively so.) So even if each engine is only 80% reliable, if it only takes four to get to orbit, they can use nine, and get 99.9% reliability. If each engine is 99% reliable, you're talking way better than six sigma.
Parent
Not obviously, actually. (Score:2, Interesting)
So what he's saying is, they can afford to have engines become nonfunctional (obviously not explosively so.)
Actually, from what I read, the Merlin 1C engines are protected with respect to the catastrophic disassembly of one of their fellows. I'm not sure how big a boom the Kevlar shielding can take in terms of preventing a multi-boom situation, but it's there to stop debris from a failed engine from turning into a chain-reaction failure.
Yes, but that's not what he SAID. And... (Score:2)
So until our technology gets much better, we will still have to accept some risk. I daresay that the actual reliability is well below 99.9%. But one can hope that it is at least in the high 90s.
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So you put 16 engines on it and you can accept three failures and two partial failures, or whatever. The point still stands even if you choose to create strawmen with the numbers I gave. So you add an extra tenth rocket and you can succeed with two failures. Or an eleventh and you can succeed with two failures and two partials, or whatever.
The whole point is that they don't have a single point of failure that wrecks the whole thing.
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One problem the aerospike has suffered from has been common to all single-stage-to-orbit engines: a nozzle of one shape may give optimum thrust at rest, at sea-level pressure, but be relatively inefficient at high velocity in the upper atmosphere. Optimize for one situation and you lose efficiency at the other. I know of an innovation or two that just might help the aerospike overcome this limitation,
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a nozzle of one shape may give optimum thrust at rest, at sea-level pressure, but be relatively inefficient at high velocity in the upper atmosphere.
Perhaps they should ask Scaled Composites to help them with the first 15km of the launch. And yeah I know they would need something beefier than WhiteKnightTwo.
True (Score:2)
And let's not forget... (Score:2)
hehehe (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Absolutely!
Don't forget the number of launch failures that happened at Cape Canaveral / Cape Kennedy. Some of the more spectacular ones happened when the Gemini missions were going, and they had some fairly spectacular aborts / KATOs with the early Saturn I test launches, along with some equally spectacular engine failures for both the F1 and J1 engines, along with the early tests of the STS Engines - the bells were apparently not as robust as planned, and the engine bells went into a harmonic coupling that
Actually (Score:2)
I am not trying to slam SpaceX. On the contrary. More power to them, and to anyone who thinks they can make this whole thing work better than it does. May they have the courage to try and keep trying.
But let's not forget the failures, lest they be repeated. For many Americans, Challenger still burns. And NASA may never have fully recovered.
Fantastic! (Score:2)
Those guys are getting busy. There's this and a Falcon 1 launch any day now. I'm all giddy with excitement.
SpaceX newletter (Score:2)
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This is awesome news. But why did I sign up for the newletter if they always release their stuff to spaceref or spacedaily first? Just saying...
They have a mailing list? Haven't they heard of RSS?
They haven't got falcon 1 right yet (Score:2)
Although there is murmuring it will have another test launch today.
I think the idea of them launching a 7 man capsule in 2009 is, to be honest, fantasy. So far they've shown an unrealistic view of their own capabilities even in the face of repeated failure. I wish them luck, but I am keeping my skeptical hat on until at the very least the third falcon 1 pulls off a successful flight.
Re:Screw Ares (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Mod parent up (Score:5, Interesting)
America NEEDS spacex (and Orbital Transport as well). So does the rest of the ISS team.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
The Ares V is planned to have nearly five times the lift capacity to LEO than the Falcon 9, with a planned 130 metric ton capacity compared to the latter's 27 metric tons. The Falcon 9 will be a direct replacement in terms of payload mass for the shuttle (itself a heavy lift launch system at a little over 24 metric tons), but does not really compare to the Ares V.
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When it stops being fun.