SpaceX's Falcon Launches... Sort Of

JHarrison writes "Spaceflight Now is running a story on the SpaceX Falcon 1 launch yesterday. Those of you watching the stream will have no doubt noticed the telemetry failure at 04:50, and turns out that was more than them turning the webcast off.. "A year after its maiden flight met a disastrous end, the SpaceX booster lifted off at 9:10 p.m. EDT (0110 GMT Wednesday) from a remote launch pad on Omelek Island, part of a U.S. Army base at Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands. Controllers lost contact with the Falcon during the burn of the second stage that would have placed the rocket into orbit around Earth. "We did encounter, late in the second stage burn, a roll-control anomaly," Elon Musk, founder and chief executive officer of Space Exploration Technologies Corp., said in a post-launch call with reporters. Live video from cameras mounted aboard the rocket's second stage showed increasing oscillations about five minutes after liftoff, just before the public webcast was cut off. The rolling prevented the necessary speed to achieve a safe orbit, instead sending the stage on a suborbital trajectory back into the atmosphere.""

That's how it works

[dreamchaser]

More is learned from failures than successes in most engineering endeavors. Hopefully they'll continue to refine their systems and will enjoy more success next time around.

Re:

[fbjon]

They will. In fact, Elon stated that all the difficult problems were surpassed, another test launch probably won't be needed, and the next launch will have actual payload.

Re:That's how it works

[khallow]

Or it means that he's out of money for more test launches. He has demonstrated two difficult aspects, liftoff and stage seperation. So I'm optimistic. But as I recall, he's said in the past that he'll evaluate the program after the first three launches. So far, he's had one utter failure and one that lost control in the second stage. He still needs to put something in orbit.

Re:

[WindBourne]

If I had cargo for the next launch, I might be a bit concerned, but not much. I have little doubt that they will make it work.

Re:

[khallow]

It depends on the value of the payload. I doubt the odds of a successful deployment are better than 50% right now. But if I had multiple cheap payloads and could afford the loss rate, then I'd go for it.

Re:

[Megane]

If the cost of launch goes down as much as they say it will, then if the cost of a second payload and second launch is on the order of the insurance costs, it's a no-brainer.

Why build one when you can build two for twice the price?

Re:

[khallow]

If the cost of launch goes down as much as they say it will, then if the cost of a second payload and second launch is on the order of the insurance costs, it's a no-brainer.

Pretty much, but only if you have multiple payloads to launch.

Why build one when you can build two for twice the price?

Because they don't have the money for two? And frankly, I'd like to have three at this rate.

Re:

[fbjon]

I did see a rumour somewhere that he was considering pulling the funding. As I see it, however, they did reach the finish line, just didn't get to cross it. But that's what test flights are for, right?

Re:

[elrous0]

Yeah, it could mean that you've just got to work out some kinks. Or it could mean that your engineers and fundamental design suck ass. Only time, and a lot of money, will tell.

Re:That's how it works

[Keebler71]

Did anyone else watching the video notice the apparent contact between the 2nd stage nozzle and the interstage? I wonder if a TVC actuator was damaged leading to the nutation...

Re:

[Keebler71]

I just watched it again and there was certainly contact between the interstage and the 2nd stage nozzle. You can even see the nozzle deform and spring back to shape. Now I am wondering if this altered the shape of the nozzle or damaged the ablator material on the inside which could have caused misaligned thrust.

Re:

[pjt48108]

Interesting, because towards the end of the video, the bell appears to begin glowing red in some areas. It could be the lighting, but Iswear it appeared to be heating radically.

They should have had a servo engineer

[BroncoInCalifornia]

If this was just due to a control system oscillation, then this may have been easily avoided. There is a body of knowledge called control theory [wikipedia.org]. It is about the analysis of feedback control loops. An engineer applies this to the desired control system performance and guarantee control loop stability.

This control theory stuff is abstract, somewhat difficult and time consuming to learn. But if you have feedback control in a mission critical application it is essential to bring this body of knowledge

Re:

[AndersOSU]

Control theory is great, but the difficulty doesn't just lie in applying the concepts - it isn't really that hard once you understand Laplace transforms sufficiently well. I'm not going to pretend to be an expert, but I learned enough to put a bit into practice in undergrad mechanical engineering.

Anyway, like I said the problem isn't in concepts it is anticipating and modeling all the spurious inputs and having a fast enough controller. If control theory were as easy to put into practice as you make it so

Re:

[Billosaur]

This is not trial and error; they didn't simply go to a junkyard, wled a bunch of pieces of interesting stuff together to make what they thought was a rocket, and then fired it off hoping it would work. They started from first principles, used known technologies and augmented them, then attempted to launch the thing, and will use the telemetry to improve the design. Trial-and-error was more what Robert Goddard was doing in the New Mexico desert.

Re:

[The Dobber]

"Failure is not an option"

Haven't we been sending rockets up into space for quite some time now. I'd think the fundementals should be down pretty pat now, the time for spectacular failures has past.

Re:

[fotbr]

And Ford had been building cars for the better part of a century and they still produced the Pinto.

The Pinto actually was a pioneering effort, sorta

[elrous0]

In all fairness, Detroit had mostly produced giant land barges in the past. The Pinto was an early effort at actually producing a car that didn't snort gas faster that Nicole Ritchie with a paper bag. When they were cutting the car down, it just never occurred to them that the bracing between the bumper and the fuel tank wasn't just there to support fins.

Re:The Pinto actually was a pioneering effort, sor

[fotbr]

Thats pretty much my point. Saying "they've done this before" doesn't mean a new design will be perfect, or that "spectacular failures" are impossible.

Re:

[elrous0]

And both were safer than Dodge's ill-conceived "Dodge Diecast: The car made from cheap zinc alloy!"

Re:Insightful...?

[ePhil_One]

Haven't we been sending rockets up into space for quite some time now. I'd think the fundementals should be down pretty pat now, the time for spectacular failures has past.

And yet we've lost two Space shuttles in recent memory. Space is not easy, rockets are enormously powerful devices that require light weight and experience a vast array of environments. Here a relatively minor thing went wrong, too much rotation, and the whole thing is now gone. Knowing how to do something and actually doing it are radically different things...

Re:

[ePhil_One]

I remember the argument I read in the 80's regarding using the Shuttle vs Large Soviet-type rockets to launch the components for the space station, that went something like this: If the goal is to get chunks of this thing into orbit, why build the most complicated machine known to man, with myriads of potential points of failure, when you can use something big and stupid to man-handle stuff into LEO?

1. National Politics. The Shuttle was ours, we had fallen behind on behemoth launchers, and if I recall, ef

Re:

[khallow]

Haven't we been sending rockets up into space for quite some time now. I'd think the fundementals should be down pretty pat now, the time for spectacular failures has past.

SpaceX hasn't been doing that for decades. And the latest failure wasn't spectacular. And "Failure is not an option"? As I understand it, the phrase means that if you have a choice between doing one more thing and failing, you do the one more thing. It says nothing about eliminating failure. You can and will continue to experience fai

And yet

[WindBourne]

nearly every new rocket in history has one or 2 failures. That is the track record. Take a look at Brazil, EU's Aris, or even china's copy of the souyz. All in all, it is common to have at least one failure. Most also have a 2'nd failure.

Re:

[bberens]

Sorry to burst your bubble, but this is the way every real engineering project works. Some call it prototyping, some call it beta testing... Those are the breaks. You work really hard, you run all the tests and simulations but eventually you gotta light the fuse and let that thing take off. Having your empty test rocket not make orbit is a success because you hopefully have learned from the failed attempt and you managed not to get pressured into putting people or other valuable payloads on your rocket b

Re:

[The Dobber]

Sorry to burst your bubble, but this is the way every real engineering project works. Some call it prototyping, some call it beta testing.

You must be one heck of an engineer.

Re:

[iamlucky13]

This is a pretty common misconception, usually brought up whenever NASA has a problem, but history shows it's misbegotten. In fact, there are only a few systems that have the kinks worked out really thoroughly (Soyuz is one, and believe it or not, the shuttle is another with 92 consecutive successful launches, 116 total. I'm counting re-entry seperately), but others still have occasional launch problems.

The Ariane 5 program, Europe's most successful heavy launcher, almost perfectly mirrored the Falcon on

Re:

[khallow]

No, it's a statement of the obvious. If a mission succeeds flawlessly, you just know that the combination worked that time. Ie, you're in the envelope where things work. A failure means the mission was outside that envelope. That's usually new information unless you're hapless enough to repeat an old failure.

Re:

[dreamchaser]

NASA has had plenty of failures too, and I am not one who would start screaming that the sky is falling when they have another.

This is real life, and the reason one has test flights. Of course understanding real life involves leaving mom's basement, something a lot of the armchair would be rocket scientists here are hesitant to do. I'm not referring to you in particular, just a large portion of the slashbot crowd.

Re:

[Bozdune]

I'm not referring to you in particular, just a large portion of the slashbot crowd.

Hey, this is slashdot. Best to refer to him in particular, get with the program.

pfft

[djupedal]

I roll-control anomaly in your general direction!

Re:

[C0rinthian]

Press R twice to do a Roll-Control Anomaly!

What kind of comment is "Sort of"

[Shivetya]

Hell they made it higher than anything Rutan has put forward and the way people act Rutan is the second coming.

Look, they are doing a great job. Second flight at they reached 200 miles! Thats beyond the ISS.

Re:

[morgan_greywolf]

Hell they made it higher than anything Rutan has put forward and the way people act Rutan is the second coming.

I, for one, welcome our new suborbital rocket plane-making overlord.

No, but seriously, Rutan has more hype. He's flamboyant, knows how to work the press, and well, SpaceShipOne just looks cool. If actual results were all that mattered, nobody would be talking about Vista; hence Rutan and Scaled Composites get all the hype, while SpaceX has actually produced the better result.

Re:What kind of comment is "Sort of"

[jezor]

Different result, not "better result." Rutan's Spaceship One is good for one valuable task (human suborbital flights); SpaceX's rockets for a totally different one (cargo lifting orbital flights). Both were formerly the sole province of the governments, so both add to the possibility of private exploration of space. {Prof. Jonathan}

Re:

[ausoleil]

Considering that the Rutan/Scaled Composites and the SpaceX efforts had two completely different sets of objectives, and that Scaled met their objectives completely, that is, winning the X Prize, while the SpaceX second attempt failed in its own mission, what exactly is the point here?

To be sure, Rutan and company had setbacks in their early efforts. They engineered around them and ultimately met their goal and took home not only the prize but also the investments necessary for funding another generation o

Re:

[elrous0]

It's hardly just hype. Rutan, did something NEW. He actually built a truly REUSEABLE spacecraft (what the original shuttle was actually sold as). SpaceX is just a cheap conventional rocket. SpaceShipOne can take off, land, refuel, and take off again--with minimal time and expense. You don't lose the vast bulk of SpaceShipOne every time it takes off (like the shuttle and conventional rockets), nor do you have to virtually rebuild the damn thing it every time it lands (like the shuttle).

Re:

[khallow]

SpaceX is just a cheap conventional rocket.

In other words, Falcon I is something NEW.

Re:

[elrous0]

In the sense that conventional rockets have generally not been cheap, yes. In the sense of "This is a design that does things in a truly novel new way," no.

Re:

[khallow]

But cheap is what is truly novel here. And that's really what's exciting about Rutan's design as well. If the Falcon 9 can deliver on the order of magnitude lower price per kg than the EELV's, then you have a revolution in launching stuff into space. Rutan's design promises similar level of savings for manned launch over similar time frames.

Re:

[drinkypoo]

He actually built a truly REUSEABLE spacecraft

Wake me up when it can orbit.

I agree that the shuttle is a stupid design, but this thing doesn't do what the shuttle does, either. Which is to say, go to space and stay there for a while.

I do agree that it is a stunning achievement, but it's not useful for anything other than space tourism. If that. The second generation should be more useful...

Oh the irony.

[devnullkac]

Comment:

Hell they made it higher than anything Rutan has put forward...

Sig:

Winners compare their achievments to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others

Re:

[khallow]

Life would be so boring if I weren't brazenly displaying my hypocrisy. The grandparent though, he can't do that.

Re:

[Darth_Foo]

ISS has a higher nominal orbital altitude than 200 miles. And altitude isn't the issue - sounding rockets having been going up higher (and falling back down) for decades. What matters for orbital flight is velocity.

Re:

[wjsteele]

The Space Station varies it's orbit depending on a lot of factors. It's in a continously decaying orbit (intented) which will always make it return to Earth at some point. It's orbit is occasionally boosted by the Space Shuttle or by the various Russian cargo ships. For example, right now, NASA is letting the orbit decay to around 205 miles so that the Shuttle can bring up the largest (and heaviest) component without having to push it all the way. With ISS in a lower orbit, less fuel is needed to get th

Re:

[elrous0]

Height wasn't the issue. This isn't SpaceShipOne. They are selling this thing as a cheap, reliable vehicle for putting satellites into orbit. It doesn't matter what altitude they reach, if they can't consistently deliver the payload to the right place, no one is going to trust them with their satellite (and they go out of business, the end).

Why shutdown at that point?

[nietsch]

There was something unexpected happening, so they shut down the engine and it plunged back into the atmosphere. What I don't get is why let some potential problem (ok maybe it didn't much of a chance) ruin the whole flight? You are up high/fast enough anyway so why not take every chance you got and just ride it untill it breaks. Stopping will surely break it so you have nothing to loose. Or do they?

Re:

[Scutter]

Stop it *while they still have control* you mean. A rocket tumbling out of control back to earth is a danger.

Re:

[nietsch]

If you only shut down the engine during unexpected roll events, you basically have a rocket tumbling out of control. They did. What was your point again?

Re:

[Goaway]

You know where it will land at that point.

Re:

[khallow]

Remember that to get permission to launch from the Feds, they need to demonstrate that the rocket has an extremely low chance of killing anyone. In particular, they need to know where it could possibly go when things go wrong. So having the rocket shut off when it goes out of control like this is part of the reason they were allowed to launch in the first place.

Re:

[voice_of_all_reason]

There was something unexpected happening, so they shut down the engine and it plunged back into the atmosphere.

While that makes sense now, I would hope this protocol will change by the time they get around to human passengers.

Re:

[khallow]

Why should they change anything? A 100% failure rate is more than good enough for any manned program. It's perfect actually.

Re:

[Teancum]

If an event like this (the roll control issue) happened on a manned spaceflight (it did BTW, with Gemini 8 [wikipedia.org]), there would be abort procedures to get people out of this. In other words, this is a "survivable" accident. The earlier launch, where the 1st stage blew up 35 seconds into the flight, would have been quite a bit tougher to get out from on a manned spaceflight. Not impossible, but it would have required an automated abort system and something like a launch escape tower.

Let's just say I would rather

Re:

[pipatron]

For safety. If it goes out of control near the ground, you don't want it to just accelerate into any inhabited areas. 200 miles up in the atmosphere, it probably doesn't matter that much.

Re:

[nietsch]

It was five minutes into the firing of the second stage. You'd think it would be a bit highere than close to the ground...

Re:

[hmbcarol]

They never said they intentionally shut the engine down. The shutdown was an unavoidable side effect of a strong roll. Their quote was "If you have a significant roll, what could happen is that the propellants can centrifuge out."

If the spacecraft is spinning, all the fuel is pushed to the outside walls of the tank and away from the fuel outlet at the center of the tank bottom. This leaves the fuel pumps with nothing to pump. Engine shut down. Rocket fall, go boom.

Re:

[fotbr]

Doesn't take very long at all. There's friction between liquid molecules as well.

Re:

[Ihlosi]

Stopping will surely break it so you have nothing to loose. Or do they?

Yes, they don't want to have a large piece of space junk loose in a random orbit. This isn't the first space race - putting something into a random orbit doesn't win prizes, but might smash things that are already up there on purpose.

Re:

[glitchvern]

Stopping will surely break it so you have nothing to loose. Or do they?

The first stage is designed to be recovered and reused. The rolling motion caused the propellent to act like a centrifuge potentially damaging the engine. Considering it was the second stage which was not designed to be recovered damaging the engine is probably not a problem, but the control software was probably designed similarly to the first stage where not damaging the engine may be a higher priority than a successful flight if you

Videos are up

[savuporo]

For those of you who didnt catch the webcast:
YouTube : launch [youtube.com]
SpaceX official, high-res: http://www.spacex.com/video_gallery.php [spacex.com]

Five minutes of fame !

Cup half full

[toupsie]

Just change the description of the vehicle from a spaceship to a ballistic missile and its a successful launch.

Look on the bright side.

[Rob T Firefly]

Maybe it landed on Chris Kattan.

Engine bump and second stage control

[decaym]

Did anyone else notice the bump the Kestrel engine took during stage separation? On the 40MB video [spacex.com] from SpaceX, it happend at 3:28 in or at T+00:02:52 on the screen clock. Maybe this is normal for the engine, but it was rather odd looking to me.

Also, there was a story [space.com] earlier that the 2nd launch was delayed "due to concerns over a thrust vector control pitch actuator on the Falcon 1 booster's second stage". I wonder if this came back to bite them?

Finally, I'm impressed as hell that they could experience an abort after engine start yet still cycle back and launch in just another hour! When the Shuttle once aborted after engine start it took them a month to change out the engines and try again.

Re:

[WolfWithoutAClause]

Did anyone else notice the bump the Kestrel engine took during stage separation? On the 40MB video from SpaceX, it happend at 3:28 in or at T+00:02:52 on the screen clock. Maybe this is normal for the engine, but it was rather odd looking to me. So far as is known, it didn't materially affect anything. The nozzle is made of Niobium which is quite malleable, and small dents only mildly modify the efficiency of the engine, and that's one of the known advantages of Niobium over other high temperature metals, a

Re:

[decaym]

I had read about the Niobium nozzle being able to take a dent. I'd be more concerned about the bump damaging the vectoring hardware for the engine. It was also really interesting to see the glow coming through the nozzle. I was really worried we'd see a burn through of the nozzle, but I guess the glow is just the normal behavior.

Some of the early comments by Elon talked about spin causing centrifuge effect on the fuel supply to the 2nd stage engine. In the video, although the nozzle is oscilating back

Re:

[WolfWithoutAClause]

On the arocket email group the consensus seems to be that it looks like fuel slosh being driven by the control system moving the nozzle in a circular mode. Eventually the magnitude of the control inputs seems to have created a roll angle, and that's what killed the telemetry and the engine apparently is likely to have shut down shortly afterwards.

Re:

[decaym]

Interesting. Guess it is time for some slosh baffles in the fuel tank.

Re:

[khallow]

Or perhaps bigger baffles. It would be somewhat surprising to me if they didn't put baffles in. I wouldn't be surprised if I didn't do so, but then I don't have that experience.

Re:

[decaym]

Shouldn't they use a separation ring between the stages? Drop the first stage, ignite the second, then release the ring. Seems more prudent, no?

Seems like it, but weight may be an issue. Two separation points means more hardware which means more weight. I wonder if something simpler, and lighter, such as guide rails could be used to direct the first stage past the second stage nozzle. The rails could drop after the stage is away and should be less likely to impact on the nozzle than what we saw last nigh

Re:

[decaym]

There is another point, which is right before the second separation events (from the nose; I don't know what it's called and can't get a timecode right now), there's a ring that comes off of the 2nd stage engine. Anyone know if this was normal?

In the transcript from a post flight interview it was said that these rings are titanium and applied to the edge of the nozzle with a bonding agent. The rings are there to protect the nozzle during the first part of the firing. Once the rings heat up the bonding

Re:

[decaym]

I've looked at that video something like 10 times now. After the bump the second stage did skew sideways a bit. As soon as the second stage motor fired, it straightened back out. You can use the falling away first stage as a directional guide. The oscilation didn't start up until about a minute later. After that the ocilation built for about a minute until the signal cut out.

You can tell the craft is trying to compensate. Remember that the camera is mounted on the 2nd stage body. You can see a very

Incoming message from Slippy:

[dosle]

Do a barrel roll!

So then, ummmm....

[AugstWest]

Where did it land?

Babelfish of limited use here...

[jpellino]

"We did encounter, late in the second stage burn, a roll-control anomaly"
=
"Rocket fall down go boom."

Actually I think I know what the problem was. As it is son-of-paypal-entrpreneurism, the actual button for turning on the roll control was tiny and at the bottom of a large screen offering to upgrade to super turbo rocket engine pumps and 3% off your next tank of LOX.

From the Website...

[Mizled]

Falcon flew far beyond the "edge" of space, typically thought of as around 60 miles. Our altitude was approximately 200 miles, which is just 50 miles below the International Space Station. The second stage didn't achieve full orbital velocity, due to a roll excitation late in the burn, but that should be a comparatively easy fix once we examine the flight data.

This is awesome.

[xx01dk]

Yep, nay-sayers be damned, but to think this isn't a big, government corporation undertaking this, wasting our tax dollars with endless beaurocracy. This is the product of back yard and garage tinkerers (albeit several generations removed). Who can't look at that webcast and imagine seeing that for real, in the 1st person, someday? It gave me chills when the curvature of the earth came into the frame. I've seen dozens of rocket launches and shuttle launches, but that was pretty unique. Reminds me of when I was in grade school back in the eighties, watching the shuttles go up.

Regardless of the success or failure of the launch, this is mightily impressive. My hat's off.

Next time, don't have an open mic :^)

[Pvt_Waldo]

Perhaps the most amusing part of the live webcast was just after the last second launch halt, when someone on the open mic was heard saying "Ah fuck" and a few other utterances.

Makes you appreciate NASA

[heroine]

When you see how hard it is for the private companies to do anything, it's hard to believe NASA actually launched the first space shuttle with humans in one attempt. Maybe it's a statement of how devestating government pension plans and entitlement programs have been, since private individuals are now taxed so severely that they can't achieve anything close to what their government can.

Re:

[Teancum]

NASA hardly has a good track record here themselves. When the test rockets were being developed for the original Mercury Project flights, there was some serious concern that a rocket would even get launched at all. Dozens of flights occured where the rockets literally blew up just seconds into the flight or in a few cases even before the rocket could leave the tower. That is why "the rocket has cleared the tower" is such a huge deal for most rocket launches: They have already beat some of NASA's earlier

Re:Rocket Science?

[Aladrin]

Maybe they just need to keep like they are doing. The whole reason that these guys exist is that 'NASA or Lockeheed or somebody' aren't good enough at it. They are slow, extremely cautious, and amazingly expensive. Outsourcing to them would be the same as doing nothing and is definitely not going to get them where they want to be, business-wise.

Re:

[aadvancedGIR]

Maybe Rocket science is like computer science. You can have your payload on orbit, still working or for cheap, choose at most 2.

Re:Rocket Science?

[Teancum]

You got the quote wrong, and I would say that this is a general engineering principle as well:

You can have your product done:

1. reliably
2. quickly
3. cheaply

Please choose only two of the above options!

In the case of Boeing and Lockheed-Martin, they choose options 1 and 2. In the case of SpaceX, they have instead choosen options 1 and 3. This is where they are indeed doing something different than the more traditional companies. That Mr. Musk has deep pockets helps some, but he is trying to do it on the cheap and is willing to have some delays before he can have his dream. For government operations, they have to get results in four years or their budget will be cut (in the USA).

If SpaceX were run like a government agency, they would have had their funding cut already, or some congressional oversight committee that would have mucked up the process by demanding more "oversight" in the form of increased paperwork and bureaucratic Bu**s***. Lucky for them, they only have to answer to one person who nearly everybody in the company knows on a first name basis... and he knows them too.

Re:

[drooling-dog]

They are slow, extremely cautious, and amazingly expensive.

Just maybe... That's the formula for success in space flight?

Re:

[Aladrin]

If nobody tries, we'll never know. Personally, I don't believe it IS the formula.

It may just be that we don't have the technology needed to do it cheap, yet, though. We also won't know that unless they try.

Telling them 'go ask the old guys how they used to do it' is NOT the answer.

Re:

[badasscat]

Telling them 'go ask the old guys how they used to do it' is NOT the answer.

Bullshit. That's always the answer.

What you're saying is exactly the same thing as all those "new media" types who in 2000 said "oh, the economy works different now" and "we don't need profits to be successful" because that was the old way of doing things.

I mean, not to equate economics with rocket science (although they actually are similar in some ways) but the point is in almost every field you get people who come in and think t

Re:

[khallow]

I mean, not to equate economics with rocket science (although they actually are similar in some ways) but the point is in almost every field you get people who come in and think they can do better with no experience and only a little knowledge than guys who have been doing it for decades and have both extensive knowledge and tons of real-world experience. But real life does not work like that. Experience does count, almost certainly more than even book knowledge.

The mistake often made here is to assume

Re:

[Billosaur]

How do you figure? They got their rocket off the ground and up 200 miles, and had some control problems that kept them from getting into orbit. That's pretty good, considering the myriad other ways this thing could have turned out. I think you're not giving them enough credit -- NASA was blowing up rockets pretty regularly in the early days of theie space efforts before they got the hang of it. These folks seem to be doing all right.

Re:

[GooberToo]

And these guys are standing on the shoulders of what NASA previously did. If they were still blowing up motors at this point, they should pack up and go home. When NASA was blowing up rockets all this stuff was pretty new. At this point, you can get an education which teaches you most everything NASA had to figure out at they went. In other words, these guys are starting several legs up from where NASA was inventing and discovering how not to blow up a rocket.

While this is rocket science, they are trave

Re:

[Aladrin]

We are still, to this day, building better light bulbs. How many do you think they destroyed before they managed to make the compact fluorescent work?

When you are exploring new ways to do things, you can't stick to the old ways! You have to try things, and trying new things almost always means failures and setbacks. They aren't blowing up 50 year old rockets. They are blowing up new rockets that are purposefully designed differently.

Re:

[savuporo]

No, its plain old engineering. There is hardly any science in building a two-stage liquid rocket in 2007. They arent doing something that isnt done before. What _is_ novel here is that for the first time, an orbital space launcher is built primarily with the profit motive in mind. No other company has really attempted that before ( or they have, but never gotten so close to pulling it off ). Thus also different design choices, different incentives and ultimately a price tag couple of times lower than your

Re:Rocket Science?

[Rei]

It's not really the fact that it's not from one of the bloated aerospace giants that makes this cheap (although I'm sure it doesn't hurt). It's also not true that they're not doing something that hasn't been done before. For example, I'm having trouble thinking of any rockets that use their particular mix of pressure and structural stabilization. For example, some Atlas stages use "balloon tanks" that will outright collapse under their weight if not kept pressurized. Most other rockets are structurally stable that, were it not for the lack of propellants, they could launch without being pressurized and remain intact. Pressurization is just added support. The Falcon concept is a hybrid of this: it has enough support that it can be transported and erected unpressurized... barely. This makes transport and handling costs cheaper and less error prone than for balloon tank-based rockets, but gives a higher payload fraction than rockets which have better structural support.

It's not without it's risks, of course. For example, it made the Falcon vulnerable to an accident a while back on Kwaj in which a reduction of pressure when draining a tank caused the tank to buckle. But in general, I think it makes for a nice design.

Falcon really is, for the most part, a "from scratch" rocket, so there's a lot of new ground covered. Not everything is from scratch, of course; I seem to recall, as an example, that their pintle injectors for the Merlin were pretty much borrowed as-is from Apollo. They're also not having to do much materials science, although they helping pioneering some fields (for example, friction-stir welding; a few older rockets have switched to using it as well, but it's still pretty new to rocketry).

Re:

[Overzeetop]

Bad news - there are no rocket scientists left at NASA (okay, not many). Ronald Reagan made sure that all NASA corporate knowledge was transferred to the contractors which service NASA. The administration is not mostly a few scattered PIs and engineers, with the bulk of the workforce in contract administrators (though many of those still have engineer in their titles).

NASA as an innovative entity is not really in existance anymore, except in very limited areas.

Re:

[khallow]

They apparently have already hired a lot from Lockheed and Boeing. I think much has been said elsewhere of the relative immaturity of their operations and the resulting failures (eg, running out of lox and having to abort a launch, lost first mission to a fuel leak caused by human procedural error). SpaceX probably should steal someone to tighten up that aspect. It's too early to say whether this failure was a "get your act together" error or not.

Re:What was it carrying?

[decaym]

It was carrying a demo sat, which is just a simlulator for an actual sattelite. There was no paid cargo on this flight. They did have a couple of small test packages from NASA for relaying flight data through the NASA tracking network and testing in flight destruct commanding (not to an actual destruction package I believe). Nothing was going to be in permanent orbit and the Falcon 1 i snot intended to go to the space station.

Re:

[Glock27]

I started writing a reasoned explication of the pointlessness and irrelevance of this whole story, but I made myself too angry with the uncritical "private space colonisation" fanboy mentality that says we'll all be living on Starship Enterprise in a century's time. To those people (probably everyone on this thread) I say this: turn off the damn Star Trek DVDs and get a life. Colonising space is an infantile fantasy.

Full of sophomoric cynicism today are you?

You sound a lot like the folks back when who s

Kids, don't waste your fortune

[iamlucky13]

Congratulations to SpaceX, and kudos to Elon Musk for doing something worthwhile with his fortune!

I wholeheartedly agree. Every now and then the Powerball jackpot hits $300 million and everybody starts asking each other what they'd do if they won (I guess I'd have to buy a ticket first...). Until I heard about SpaceX, I really didn't know. Everybody else just spends it all trying to fill their time since they quit work. I don't think I could stand more than a couple months of no responsibility and no acco

Re:

[OriginalArlen]

I propose we invest a trillion dollars in constructing huge candy-striped balloons at the bottom of the ocean. We can all go and live there! It's a pointless waste of money and will never work, true, but if you disagree you're a Luddite!

You sound a lot like the folks back when who said we'd never drive at 60 MPH 'because it will suck all the air out of your lungs', or the engineer who claimed that 'rockets will never work in space because there's nothing to push against'.

Those assertions were trivially disprovable when (if) they were made. However, the balance of proof is reversed when it comes to space colonisation, because the first railway engine didn't cost trillions of dollars, was economically viable, (which was why it was such a

Re:

[decaym]

What or where are the "SA forums"? Link, please.

Re:

[mcguyver]

Most likely here: http://www.saforum.org/home [saforum.org]
Or maybe somethingawful...not sure