Paypal Founder's Merlin Rocket Engine Fires Up

Baldrson writes "Wired News reports that after 2 years of development, Space Exploration Technology Corp ('SpaceEx') successfully test-fired their new LOX/Kerosene Merlin rocket engine for the 160 seconds required for orbit. SpaceEx was founded by Elon Musk from the proceeds of the 2002 sale of his prior start-up, Paypal, to Ebay. According to Musk, 5 Merlins bundled with the first stage of SpaceEx's powerful Falcon V booster will launch 5 people to orbit by 2010, thereby winning America's Space Prize which was endowed by Robert Bigelow."

Wow!

[TheOriginalRevdoc]

Amazing! They managed to get sixty-year-old technology to work!

This is great news. Now, if only they can get their valve radios to work, they'll be in business.

Re:Big rockets?

[cmowire]

Right, but the history of "let's do better than a standard rocket by .... because we've got $x billion" hasn't been so good.

Case in point, space shuttle.

The big thing to remember is that the Falcon boosters should be signifigantly cheaper than the current crop of launchers and at least partially reusable. So, even though it's not revolutionary, there's much jumpstarting of the launch biz with what he's got.

The problem is that most of the time, you don't need a revolution, just a little evolution.

Conventional but exciting

[Spy Handler]

See, you don't need exotic new technologies for cheap(er) space access... just cut the NASA fat.

Getting up is only the first part

[Shadow Wrought]

Any word on how they get the lucky orbiters back down? I thought NASA had great difficulty with heat shield design, implementation, etc.

Re:Big rockets?

[Chairboy]

Rockets might not 'feel' right to you, but they exist, are a known technology, and there's over 60 years of large scale design and construction experience behind them.

$1.5 billion is a lot of money when you're looking at buying groceries, but it's peanuts compared to the cost of developing a whole new technology (carbon nanotube, for example which might be needed for space elevators), then testing and building the new technology (literally) from the ground up.

In regards to the 'some new technology that nobody's invented yet' comment, I'd rather take one rocket now versus a hundred ephemeral fairy dust ideas of things that may or may not happen in the future. This isn't the only money that will ever be spent on private aerospace. If new technologies become promising and affordable to develop, then other companies will do that in the future.

These guys may succeed, they may fail. That's a great thing about America, you can take risks with commensurate payback. If every company needed the public to vote on whether to let them do their thing, we'd be where the USSR is. Oh yeah, they don't exist anymore.

Re:Big rockets?

[Tackhead]

> I'm surprised that with a $1.5 billion budget they couldn't find a better way to get people into space. Rockets don't seem like the "affordable" answer to me. Maybe a space elevator, or maybe some new technology that nobody's invented yet. ...but big rockets? They seem so dated...

Rockets are cheap.

Space elevator? Start thinking about building a space elevator when someone has built a carbon nanotube footbridge.

Something not yet invented? The probability of discovering a new physics is not directly proportional to the number of dollars spent.

So - we're back to rockets. Which are cheap.

NASA's rockets are expensive, because NASA doesn't care where the money comes from. (And NASA's funders in Congress don't care whether NASA's rockets even fly, so long as every district gets its piece of the pork pie.)

If you're Boeing or Lockmart, that's fine -- shuttling rich tourists to orbit and back will barely net you pocket change. So you build big expensive vehicles and you sell 'em to people who don't give a rat's ass about the cost of their ride, because they're using other people's money.

Thanks to Rutan, Bezos, and Musk, there's the possibility of a new market niche for those of us who prefer to use our own money.

A company doing this??

[TK2K]

It seems to me the original idea of NASA is actualy going to work! NASA was created in the begining to combine all of the branches of the government's space research in one location, to pionere new technologies, then, after a few decades, transfer the exploration of space over to the privite sector. Needless to say, NASA is stil in existance. What is impresive about this is the fact that someone from a company is doing a project like this. The problem with the idea of space being exploited by companies is that the inital cost is too great, and the payoffs too little. So what if it is 60 year old technology? They are still financing something that has little or no consivable payoffs for them in the short OR long run, appart from getting Paypal's name out there. True, a big rocket isnt that creative or inovative, but its better then nothing right? (also, the comparitive size of the rocket is much smaller then the older ones) Just the fact that he could actualy use that much (1.5 bill)money on something like a space flight is impresive. Its a good thing money from companies is going towards space, dont complain that its just a rocket, remember, NASA makes the new stuff! (scramjet)

Re:Getting up is only the first part

[Chairboy]

NASA had trouble making cheap, low cost, light weight re-usable heat shields.

For each of those requirements you scrap, you save a boatload of money. If you equip your capsules (no need for big wings like the shuttle) with one use heatshields, you might incur a weight penalty, but you can use 40 year old Apollo or Soyuz technology. If you can squeeze an extra half a percent of efficiency from your engines or start with more boost then you think you'd need, you can chuck the light weight requirement.

Commercial space flight will be different from government in a few important ways. I suspect that being able to design your craft without congressional 'input' will help. A lot of the things that make the shuttle complicated and expensive to run are leftover from 1970s requirements that it serve everyone, from civilian NASA to the NRO (spy sats) to the Air Force (dropping bombs on USSR using once around orbits and landing back at Vandenburg).

It just occured to me...

[Anonymous Coward]

It just occured to me that the guys doing these space ships are like the rich guys a few centuries ago mounting ocean expeditions, as much for the exploration and adventure as for profit. We all complain about rich people, but many of them tend to be philanthropists and use their money for some kind of public good.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Big rockets?

[snuf23]

Yeah they got it right. So right it flew only one test orbital flight and unmanned at that.
Ok so that's related to economics BUT you can't really judge a launch vehicle's performance and call it "right" if it never really got a chance to do its job.

Re:WWW -- Space

[randall_burns]

Just because someone has money, doesn't mean they have a lot of respect from anyone except other folks with money. Musk is young enough, he probably wants to do something _memorable_ with his life.

I'd also be curious to know if his interest in space predated his dotcom activities. One early microcomputer pioneer is reputed to have motivated his employees with claims that if his company was successful, they'd intest in space development. He even invested in a couple of rocket companies-and then retreated to other interests. The technology has improved since then, but frankly, I think a lot of folks are less trusting of the rich and powerful now than they were then.

Quite a few rich folks find their money brings them neither happiness or satisfaction.

I personally have a strong distrust of concentrations of wealth or political power. However, I would suggest that if humanity doesn't develop real, physical frontiers, the future for humanity is pretty dim-maybe just a high tech replay of ancient Egypt--a highly developed but stagnant culture that gradually drifts into oblivion.

The future for humanity with frontiers could be quite an interesting adventure.

Re:Getting up is only the first part

[DerekLyons]

Commercial space flight will be different from government in a few important ways.

Yes. High on the list is economics... And tossing your heatshield after each flight is not economical at all.

I suspect that being able to design your craft without congressional 'input' will help.

When we have a spacecraft designed with Congressional input, we'll have a data point to compare to. As it is, all Congress contributed was a budget cap... Which pretty much everyone has to live with inside and outside the Beltway.

A lot of the things that make the shuttle complicated and expensive to run are leftover from 1970s requirements that it serve everyone,

Umm... No. It's complicated and expensive because Congress declined to produced Saturn's for cargo delivery and then declined to fund a space station in paralell with the Shuttle. This forced the Shuttle to become a cargo craft (as opposed to the passenger craft it originally was) and then forced it to have a far higher degree of self-sufficiency to support free-flight missions. It's also complicated and expensive because in many ways it's a first generation system. It's also complicated because it operates in a series of harsh enviroments. It's also expensive because NASA kept trading R&D costs for operational costs - rather than admitting the thing could not be done and that a massive redesign and delay was in order.

The Shuttle was never *required* to 'serve everyone', that was a NASA creation in order to build political support for the craft. The only real impact of that was the wing (for high cross-range) and to some extent the tiles. (A tile system was already baselined long before the design was mutated from a short duration passenger taxi into the ungainly thing it became.)

What if you used simple physics instead...

[Nefarious Wheel]

...basically build the elevator on the ground, make it long enough (say, would 500 miles long do it? 1000? I'm thinking in terms of Pak Protector scale projects here) -- presupposing you could get that much land to lay it out, etc. could you just anchor one end, weight the other, shorten the cable and let the change in the moment of intertia fling the sucker up?

Re:It just occured to me...

[FleaPlus]

Yup.

In the wake of the dot-com days, we have a odd situation where we have a large number of very rich individuals who are also quite clueful and interested in technology. Many of them read lots of sci-fi books when they were kids, and are hoping to make a mark on the future by funding space endeavours.

Re:WWW -- Space

[John Miles]

If I had the type of money these guys have, there's no way I'd waste it on something ... risky and untested

Wait. I think I see why you don't have the type of money those guys have.

Re:Big rockets?

[dabigpaybackski]

The only place that might work well for this would be in Hawaii. Any guess how the greens would scream if you tired to bulldoze that track in paradise?

Check the website. There's are good arguments in favor of candidate sites, which include Vandenburg, White Sands, which both have acceptable mountain slopes, and yes, Hawaii. Carlton Meyer of skyramp.org thinks building a ramp on the barren slope of Mauna Loa may not be as big a deal with environmentalists as detractors think, and there is also the jobs issue in favor, as there aren't a lot of high-paying jobs on the big island.

Now, with respect to your point about launching rockets over water rather than land, don't space launches from Vandenburg AFB in California cross the continental United States? And now that Bezos guy from Amazon intends to start launching rockets from West Texas; those will spend at least some portion of their flight over land.

As for the old argument in favor of siting spaceports as far south as possible, what we have learned since building the installation in Cape Kennedy is that launching from sites with a lower air density (as in higher altitude) is more important than getting a little boost to velocity from a more southerly location's better angular momentum. This is why the Russian launch site in Kazakhstan is arguably better than Cape Kennedy, even though it's at like 40 degrees north. Of course, best of all would be a mountainside in Ecuador, but politics would never allow for a U.S.-funded site to be built there.

Re:Big rockets?

[cmowire]

See, the Russians are perfectly capable of making safe, well-engineered stuff. It's just that we don't always recognize it.

A F-16 has a jet intake under the cockpit. Thus, it's awfully easy for it to suck up any debris on the ground while taxing or taking off. Therefore, debris control is important. They need to scout the airport every morning. Our jets need a whole mobile maintenence facility to keep them flying.

A Mig-29? It's got a screen that deploys in front of the engines and auxiliary upward-facing intakes. So they don't need to wory about operating from poorly-prepared fields. They make it such that everything needed right now for an aircraft fits on a single truck. If it's more important than that, you make sure it won't need to be replaced in the middle of your campaign.

The Soyuz has primitive components, yes. But they've got stuff that won't stop working. Like a primitive optical periscope that gives you enough margin to do a re-entry without guidance. They make sure that the systems that are important just won't fail.