SpaceX Lands Falcon 9 Rocket At Cape Canaveral (planetary.org) 373
Rei writes: At 8:40 PM today, SpaceX successfully launched and relanded the first stage of its Falcon 9 rocket at Cape Canaveral, as well as delivering to orbit the last portion of ORBCOMM's communication satellite constellation. This also marks SpaceX's return to flight and the first launch of the "Full Thrust" Falcon 9 v1.1 with densified (extremely chilled) propellants. The company will now shift its efforts toward catching up on its backlog, investigating and refurbishing its landed first stage, and preparing for the maiden flight of the Falcon Heavy rocket this spring. Congratulations to everyone at SpaceX!
Congratulations to the SpaceX team! (Score:5, Insightful)
I actually cheered out loud. I've been a space fan since the shuttle program began. This is great news, and great progress.
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For enthusiasts, the most relevant part of the live feed: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... [youtube.com]
Re:Congratulations to the SpaceX team! (Score:5, Informative)
Twitter comment of the night. (Score:4, Funny)
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what is U-L-A?
Re:Congratulations to the SpaceX team! (Score:4, Informative)
United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing, who launch the Delta and Atlas rockets. They're considered the primary competitors to SpaceX - the Falcon 9 is about on par in lifting power with the Delta IV and low-end configurations of the Atlas V, and Falcon Heavy will be competing with Delta IV Heavy more than anything else.
Re:Congratulations to the SpaceX team! (Score:5, Interesting)
the Falcon 9 is about on par in lifting power with the Delta IV and low-end configurations of the Atlas V, and Falcon Heavy will be competing with Delta IV Heavy more than anything else.
Actually the Falcon Heavy is aiming to be much heavier at 53,000 kg to LEO vs 29,000 kg for the Delta IV Heavy, which probably means it can match capacity in reusable mode. Imagine both boosters (essentially headless stage 1s) and first stage returning to land like one-two-three and ready to get back in action. Somebody at ULA is going to have kittens when they realize where SpaceX is going.
Re:Congratulations to the SpaceX team! (Score:4, Interesting)
It doesn't take anywhere near losing half of a rocket's capacity to be reusable. Once the lower stage has burned through its propellant and lost its upper stages it's incredibly light and thus very easy to change its direction.
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>Once the lower stage has burned through its propellant
It's liable to land with a severely damaging thud if all it's propellant has been lost.
Re:Congratulations to the SpaceX team! (Score:4, Insightful)
It doesn't take anywhere near losing half of a rocket's capacity to be reusable. Once the lower stage has burned through its propellant and lost its upper stages it's incredibly light and thus very easy to change its direction.
Isn't that one of the biggest challenges? Throttling your engines down that far and maintaining control?
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True, but there's not anything else that comes close to that range. Well, SLS Block I will be 70Mg to LEO, but I honestly don't think SLS will ever fly, and it will definitely never launch commercial payloads. So yeah, Falcon Heavy would be a lot more capable, but it still "competes" because it's the closest there is.
Re:Congratulations to the SpaceX team! (Score:4, Informative)
Were they changing U-L-A or U-S-A after the landing? Couldn't really understand why they would do either.
How about because the plant happens to be physically located in the USA, specifically Hawthorne, California.
They are showing how American manufacturing from raw metal can still happen in the USA and doesn't need to be outsourced. Literally every bolt, nut, and line of software (minus some Linux kernel code.... and yes the OS for the rocket subsystems is running under Linux) was made in the USA. They are using some commodity integrated circuits likely not made in the USA, but the boards using those chips were made in that same plant too.
If you are critical about patriotism, you can go to hell.
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> and they could just as easily used many other OS's in place of Linux, so long as they were capable of getting the job done.
I think not. The flexibility of the full "stack" with Linux allows freer modification of many core principles, with a broader range of drivers and alternative technological approaches for similar projects. MacOS would not run on the wide variety of hardware nor is it well supported for micro-instances, nor does it provide access to the same range of hardware CAD tools. Neither do
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If you are critical about patriotism, you can go to hell.
Patriotism; the well-dressed, smiling sociopath brother of xenophobia, racism, and intolerance.
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This is not brainless political fluff patriotism. This is "our guys" advancing the state of the art in a significant way. I like this a lot better than when the Chinese do it becasue I know it helps the future for the people I care about in a tangible way. Nothing wrong with that.
Re:Congratulations to the SpaceX team! (Score:4, Informative)
(Did I side-step Godwin's law?)
Not really, except in the most technical sense where you get real close comparing me to Goebble.
The thing about Nazi Germany is that it was a very advanced technological country who had some very brilliant scientists in the 1920's and 1930's that were the leaders of the world in so many areas and laid the foundation for many of the scientific ideas we use today. From country-spanning super highways (Autobahn) and computers (The Z3 made by Konrad Zuse) to even rockets capable of spaceflight (the V2.... which was copied by both the USA and the USSR for their respective space programs). Almost every advanced technology today has at least some roots in engineering and scientific developments that happened in Nazi Germany, even if you hate the racist bigotry and genocide that country also produced during the same time period.
Of course it is useful to point out that the rocket equation itself that made it possible for SpaceX to even land this rocket in the manner that happened was only possible because of the mathematical equation derived by a Russian, notably Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. Together with Hermann Oberth (who even met Werner Von Braun and was one of Von Braun's early teachers & mentors) and Robert Goddard, those three men basically started modern concepts of rocketry.
Still, you come off as envious and jealous rather than being very serious when you start complaining about Americans displaying pride about things their fellow citizens have accomplished.
now on to the next question (Score:4, Interesting)
How many times can they reuse the rocket?
Re:now on to the next question (Score:5, Informative)
No one knows, this booster will probably be dissected to see just where the wear/tear occurs. After that, SpaceX will probably have to mod/update future boosters to ensure it can fly multiple times. It may be that the cost to mod/upgrade/refurbish will be more expensive than just rebuilding, but we'll have to see.
Re:now on to the next question (Score:5, Informative)
No one knows, this booster will probably be dissected to see just where the wear/tear occurs. After that, SpaceX will probably have to mod/update future boosters to ensure it can fly multiple times. It may be that the cost to mod/upgrade/refurbish will be more expensive than just rebuilding, but we'll have to see.
Actually I think SpaceX got a pretty good idea, they've tested burn/reignite cycles staticly and found the engines can be reused 40 times [aviationweek.com], since that's likely to be the most expensive component that'll probably be their target. And if the reliability stays high there's a good chance that 1 in 40 launches will require a full burn, no reuse booster so there's no waste. They've said the first stage is roughly 70% of the cost and just refueling the rocket costs about 0.3% of a full launch, so the cost savings potential is huge.
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Re:now on to the next question (Score:5, Informative)
Insurance is 10%, paid by the payload owner. Fuel is 0.3%. 70% is the 1st stage.
This is huge.
Re:now on to the next question (Score:4, Interesting)
If nothing else I'm sure they could do "liability only" insurance for early re-launches, which should be relatively cheap since they're launching the things out over the ocean. I'm sure there's plenty of people who would be eager to get their uninsured payloads into orbit at half or less of the launch cost, considering that for many satellites the launch is by far the most expensive part. Even if they had to pay in advance and just take their chances they stand a good chance of coming out ahead.
As such, I imagine the insurance agencies would be more than happy to step in quickly, and be the ones that rake in the profit. They play the long game after all, with a scrupulous eye to the odds.
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Now that they've proven they can do it with LEO, I want them to continue to go bigger. Could yo
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They already test fire all rocket engines multiple times before launch. They've fired these kinds of engines through multiple simulated full-length launch duration burns on the ground. They already have a very good idea of whether or not it is feasible to use them, and obviously the mechanical side indicates that it warrants recovery of the hardware. So the "we'll have to see" part is pretty much already been determined.
Re:now on to the next question (Score:4, Informative)
According to SpaceX this booster will be reused for static fire tests, then retired to a museum.
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Wrong question, unless you are thinking of failure rates. With a bit of luck, these should eventually go down to a number small enough to not matter.
The right question is how much effort and wow much cost in parts they have to invest to re-use it _after_ they have optimized parts for durability.
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It would not be unreasonable to destructively test this unit, or now that the rocket is essentially paid for, to launch it again with a dummy payload, and even to possibly keep refurbishing and launching to see how long it is good for, depending on the cost, and to prove that they can continue to reliably set
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Destructive tests of entire structures or machines maybe, but for components they can often supply the information you need.
Nasty! So when I was testing weld joint designs by doing destructive tests on the test plates made up at the same time as the actual welds I was not a competent engineer :)
Physical objects are a little different to coding kids!
Destructive test does not mean 'blow it up'. (Score:3)
Re:now on to the next question (Score:5, Informative)
How many times can they reuse the rocket?
I read that the engines are being designed for about 10-20 flights before performing major overhauls of the engines. That means the intention is to literally take the lower stage core, bring it directly to the integration building like it came fresh from the factory, and put it together with another rocket several times in a row with only a cursory inspection of the engines themselves.... at about the level that jet engines get between flights at a typical major airport for an airliner.
At about 10 flights, they plan on performing a major tear-down and overhaul of the engines, but I don't know how many flights they think can be pushed out of them. I would guess they are hoping at least for about 30-50 flights before the engines are simply retired. It is a far cry from the RS-25 (aka the SSME for the Shuttle program) that had to be rebuilt completely after each flight.
In the meantime, SpaceX plans on sending the rocket to New Mexico for some extensive testing where the engines are going to be pushed to see if the anticipated engineering limits are going to hold true to actual engine performance where the rocket is going to be flown into space (aka above 100 km) as a part of those tests. Mostly straight up and down testing though and not with the intention to put something into orbit. The launch pad in New Mexico has already been built, but SpaceX didn't want to build another test vehicle when they figured they would simply get one of the recovered cores to perform the testing.
I guess SpaceX got their test platform today :)
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>In the meantime, SpaceX plans on sending the rocket to New Mexico... :)
>I guess SpaceX got their test platform today
Are you sure about that? I would have suspected that the first one would be dissected and studied in detail to inform ongoing production decisions. It is after all the very first data source they have on the effect of real-world stresses. And now that they've landed one it's good odds they can get another one pretty quickly to test to destruction.
Then again, I suppose a lot of analys
Re:now on to the next question (Score:4, Informative)
> How many times can they reuse the rocket?
More than once.
Solid ground landing (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Solid ground landing (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Solid ground landing (Score:5, Interesting)
There were some comments made about the entire barge being pushed down into the water by the force of the rocket landing.
That said I don't think the barge was ever the target landing location. I think the barge was necessary to get regulatory approval to come in over the land. Prove you can hit your target first where you won't hurt / destroy anything then you can try it here.
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Re:Solid ground landing (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, but the New Shepherd was launched essentially straight up and came straight back down, all in the middle of the desert. Falcon 9, going orbital and coming back near population, had significantly higher range safety considerations.
Re:Solid ground landing (Score:5, Informative)
Just to be clear, the Falcon 9 first stage went nowhere close to going orbital - altitude accounts for only about 5% of the energy difference between orbit and the Earth's surface, the rest is kinetic energy, or speed. And Stage 1 only got up to what, 5800km/h? That's only 1.6km/s. Meanwhile Low Earth Orbit velocity is 7.8km/s. Stage 1 barely reached 20% of the necessary speed, which translates to barely 4% of the necessary kinetic energy. It's job is mostly just to get above the efficiency-robbing atmosphere and give Stage 2 as much of a boost as its fuel budget allows. Most of its energy is wasted fighting aerodynamic drag and providing a support force against gravity. It's Stage 2 that can really pour on the speed, and it did, reaching 7.22m/s at an altitude of 630km (orbital speed falls with increasing altitude)
Re:Solid ground landing (Score:4, Funny)
Yeah, but the New Shepherd was launched essentially straight up and came straight back down [...]
"The Rockets go up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department," says Wernher Von Braun.... [youtube.com]
Re:Solid ground landing (Score:5, Informative)
Here's what I don't understand. I think stage 1 landed about 10 miles from where it launched. It was travelling almost exactly 6,000 kph at separation. Did it really slow down to zero and actually fly back the way it came to land at the Cape? I guess it takes much, much less fuel to go from 6,000 to zero on an empty first stage in vacuum versus 0 to 6k, fully loaded in the atmosphere.
No, it didn't stop and turn around as such, the primary direction is up and it just reversed the slight horizontal component and slowed itself down as it fell to earth. This infographic [imgur.com] is pretty good, it's not at all like a plane turning around.
Re:Solid ground landing (Score:5, Interesting)
The "primary direction" is most certainly *NOT* up; the first stage gets many times as far downrange as it gets in altitude. However, the boost-back burn is indeed pretty much entirely horizontal; the rocket is high enough that there's very little air, and what little there is, the mostly-empty stage attempts to ride by angling itself as a (really bad) lifting surface.
So yes, the rocket is forced to largely reverse its forward velocity. However, with its tanks empty and no second stage or payload, it weighs very little. Three of it's nine engines are quite sufficient to turn it around and put it on course for home.
Re:Solid ground landing (Score:4, Informative)
Blue Origin was also a much, MUCH smaller rocket. Each of the nine engines on the Falcon 9 first stage is about 50% more powerful than the single engine propelling New Shepard. New Shepard is actually more akin to SpaceX's Grasshopper test rocket - which made several low-altitude flights and ground landings, without problem. SpaceX just didn't bother sending it up on a suborbital launch because, well, they've already proven that they can do orbital launches, and suborbital is pretty much pointless save for bragging rights. Blue Origin only did it because they were starting to seem like vaporware, and to nab a record on a technicality.
Re:Solid ground landing (Score:5, Informative)
That said I don't think the barge was ever the target landing location. I think the barge was necessary to get regulatory approval to come in over the land. Prove you can hit your target first where you won't hurt / destroy anything then you can try it here.
I read some comments by Elon [spacex.com] from earlier today that mentioned the F9 could get the payload/2nd stage to 100km and 5000m/s and land back at the launch site, OR to 100km and 8000m/s and land on a sea platform. So it sounds like the barge/platform might still be in the cards at some point.
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Unless they get a private island, the barge is going to stay for heavier payloads. The burnback maneuver will cost far less if you don't need to fly back where you came from.
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The sea platform landing only has the first two energy burns, so shou
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I suspect a solid foundation landing platform built in the ocean in the future.
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A surprising amount of the work can be done by aerodynamics. If you tilt the falling booster at high speed, the air resistance pushes it sideways
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That said I don't think the barge was ever the target landing location.
I think the barge may still be used in the future. This particular launch of the Orbcomm satellites also happens to be the least massive (meaning the smallest payload) ever flown on a Falcon 9 to date with the highest margins on fuel load with a number of enhancements that actually even improved performance for the rocket compared to previous launches. Due to the large margin and reserve fuel available, it made a terrestrial landing possible.
If in the future a customer wants to have more mass flown to orb
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Re:Solid ground landing (Score:4, Informative)
It's not really clear there's one in the right place. Or if there is, it's covered with resort hotels.
We launch from Florida, in part, because the path to orbit isn't over other countries. Mexico got annoyed back when we launched equatorial orbits from Vandenberg.
Re:Solid ground landing (Score:4, Interesting)
The barge is required for recovery after GTO. You can only do a return-to-launchpad for lightweight GEO deliveries. Lightweight GEO deliveries will require the barge, as will heavy GEO deliveries. Return to launchpad is going to be pretty rare, typically only for end-of-life rockets running high risk or lightweight payloads. Just a guess but I'd say 70%+ of recoverable launches will be on a barge.
land provides more options for workarounds (Score:5, Interesting)
With airplanes, a carrier landing is quite a bit more difficult than landing on land. You can land with a stuck rudder OR with a stuck elevator OR you can land on an aircraft carrier. I wouldn't want to try to land on an aircraft carrier with a stuck rudder.
I don't know the details of the SpaceX controls, but I suppose it's possible that a glitch like a stuck valve would be easier to work around with a larger landing zone, and one that's not moving. In theory, with the stuck valve they might have had the option of manipulating the controls differently to land 300 yards away and upright.
Re:land provides more options for workarounds (Score:4, Interesting)
The reason that a carrier landing is harder is because the runway is shorter. With a vertical landing vehicle, it's a non-issue.
That said, I'm pretty sure that Space X's position is - if something's stuck, you can't land.
there are three issues, and try landing a helicopt (Score:5, Informative)
It appears you've never landed an aircraft. You did mention ome of three major challenges, though.
> The reason that a carrier landing is harder
There are at least three reasons that a carrier landing is harder .
1. The runway has been relocated, so you have no approach landmarks. The first thing is that you actually start lining up for landing many miles from where you intend to touch down. To land in Baltimore, you might learn that you need take a right at Atlantic City, NJ. With a carrier, your turns and altitude changes are never in the same place. This one doesn't apply so much to the rocket.
2. Wave motion (AGL keeps moving). The magic to a smooth landing is to make it so that you reach EXACTLY zero altitude at precisely the same moment when your forward motion puts you at the beginning of the runway, at the same instant that your lateral adjustment, with wind, puts you in the middle of the runway, while at the same instant you have ceased lateral motion against the wind and brought the yaw exactly parallel to the runway, at the same time roll goes to zero, while maintaining proper flare (pitch). In other words, the craft is moving in six dimensions* and you try to hit just the right mark in all six dimensions at precisely the same time. It's awfully tough to hit zero AGL at exactly the right time when the ground is moving up towards you, then down away from you. Too difficult for me to try in real life. SpaceX has had much trouble with this. They had the rocket perfectly vertical, and they were able to reach 0 AGL, but they couldn't do both at the same time - touch down while the vehicle was vertical. It's much easier to do that of zero AGL remains constant, rather than having the ocean move the barge up and down.
3. The landing area is much smaller. Factors 1 and 2 can easily cause the landing to occur 40 feet to far to the right, or 400 feet to far down the runway. An ocean-going landing area isn't big enough to allow any margin of error.
> The reason that a carrier landing is harder is because the runway is shorter. With a vertical landing vehicle, it's a non-issue.
The best way to really understand this is to try landing a model helicopter smoothly. Not a drone that flies itself when you let go of the stick, but an old-fashioned model heli. If you can't try that, imagine a perfect, frictionless air-hockey table - the puck glides absolutely perfectly across the table. The lightest feather touch will send it to the other side of the table because there is no friction. That's hover - there is no friction keeping you in the same spot over the ground. Your job is to position the puck at an exact spot on the table and keep in there by tossing pebbles at it.
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Six degrees of freedom, not six dimensions. Still only the boring old 3 dimensions.
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take a right at Atlantic City, NJ
I'm not putting you in charge of navigation. You're supposed to take a left toin at Albuquerque.
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Re:Solid ground landing (Score:5, Insightful)
I wonder how much of this was due to learning from the past misses and updating to version 1.1, and how much was from deciding to land on the ground and not on a barge at sea. Hell, learning from past misses and deciding not to land on a barge might be the same thing.
Landing on the barge the first few times was a good idea in spite of the wiggly landing pad in case they were way off target - they wouldn't hit anything but water.
They showed they could get it within the radius of the barge consistently, so now it makes sense to land it on a solid platform where it's easy to go get it.
Absolute badasses (Score:3)
KB 125241 (Score:3)
Everybody knows you wait until the first service pack comes out before launching.
Perfect Launch AND Landing! (Score:2)
Great job SpaceX! My wife and I kept the kids up to watch and we were cheering like we won the Super Bowl! Awesome!!!
Re:Perfect Launch AND Landing! (Score:5, Informative)
Here is a great post from Elon with background on tonight's launch: http://www.spacex.com/news/201... [spacex.com]
Congratulations (Score:4, Insightful)
Wow, what a sight to behold. It was pretty hard to stay quiet while watching that streak of light come down with everybody cheering. Probably the first "USA! USA!" chant I've ever heard that was both entirely well-deserved and not even a little bit sarcastic. An historic occasion indeed. :-)
Congratulations SpaceX, this is like that 4th launch where everyone suddenly went from doubt to astonishment.
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You live in such a sad, caustic world if you've never had an occasion to celebrate your own kind.
What are you talking about?
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Many listeners considered that to be in poor taste. Elon Musk was originally from South Africa, and half the people SpaceX employs are not from the USA. People from many countries contributed to this.
If the US won the World Cup, we'd have the same chant. Wouldn't matter if none of the players were born here.
Re:Congratulations (Score:5, Interesting)
I literally cringed when I heard the USA chants... leave it to USAians to make it about them when so many from many countries worked so hard to make it a reality.
What are you babbling about? SpaceX manufactures the entire rocket in Hawthorne, California. All of the metal bending, all of the welding, everything except a handful of chips is made in that plant. There were zero other countries involved in designing, building, launching, and performing the only first stage rocket recovery in history. Due to ITAR, all SpaceX employees are US citizens or permanent residents (green card holders). The vast majority are citizens. Even the company that paid for the launch, Orbcomm, is a US company.
In a time when such nationalism is frowned upon, their USA chant was entirely justified. It was solely a US effort, and solely a US success.
Video (Score:2)
Here's a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Watching it over and over (Score:2)
Wonderful accomplishment (Score:2)
Congratulations to Elon and co. A feat of engineering!
Hoping this becomes a regular event (Score:2)
Hopefully it will be one of many such successful launches and recoveries in the year(s) to come, It'll be nice to get some video of day landings as well as while I'm sure a night launch/landing is great for those actually witnessing it on the ground you can't really see much on video. I'm also curious as to how closely to center it landed on its pad, would it have been successful if they had gone for a ocean platform landing or did a larger pad make all the difference.
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I'm also curious as to how closely to center it landed on its pad, would it have been successful if they had gone for a ocean platform landing or did a larger pad make all the difference.
Check out the landing image [livestream.com]. I believe the appropriate phrase is "nailed it!"
Anybody has a non-Flash link to the video? (Score:2)
And congrats to SpaceX, this is a very important step in the right direction!
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Ah, found it above. Thanks to those that posted the Youtube link.
All I could think about while watching this was... (Score:4, Funny)
1. How Native American lands in Florida were used without permission to
2. Help elites leave the planet to create a poor-free utopia while
3. Destroying the environment as they leave.
Won't SOMEONE think of the children!!
Re:pix or it didn't happen (Score:4, Informative)
If you'd been paying attention... There was a live video feed of the attempt. Here's a recording:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Yes, and if you read about that, you'd see some of Blue Origin's personnel came from that project. So Bezos only just did the same thing his people were capable of 20 years ago.
Musk's SpaceX just put a rocket into orbit, delivered a payload, and brought it back down safely. That's never been done before. That's an order of magnitude more difficult than what we've been discussing. This is the biggest advancement in space flight since the first shuttle landed.
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It's a big development, but the space shuttle did re-use everything except the fuel tank. The solid rocket boosters were recovered and reused, and the expensive bits (the main engines and support equipment) were mounted on the orbiter itself.
I think that the main promise of the SpaceX recovery is that the simpler, more reliable, and cheaper traditional rocket stack can now be used in a way that is much more reusable - making it even cheaper than it already was.
Re:Yawn (Score:4, Informative)
Not really splitting hairs. Both the Shuttle and Falcon 9 discard and lose a good part of their spacecraft - the Shuttle loses the whole (huge) LF tank, F9 loses the whole (big and pretty complex) second stage. Apples to apples, Falcon 9 loses more, "percentage-wise".
The real difference though is in cost of refurbishing of what is recovered.
Refurbishing the shuttle and preparing it for a launch (800mln) costs about 10x more than building the Falcon 9, both stages, from scratch (80mln)!
And then recovery of Falcon 9 first stage about halves these costs.
So, the real difference isn't really in what, how much is recovered, how it flies and lands. The real difference is the absolutely vast reduction of costs. 80mln was already something very competetive. Halving it is a total game-changer!
Re:Yawn (Score:4, Insightful)
Bezos's launcher only reaches 62km altitude, at mach 3. It's less than half the height of Falcon 9 stage 1. It does not do a gravity turn due to the fact that it doesn't get to orbit. All of these make sticking a landing much much easier. If you want Space X to just go up, back down, and land it (like bezos did), then look at 2013, when they did that. Now they've also beaten Bezos to landing the launcher for an orbital space craft.
Note, things like the launcher being twice as tall as Bezos' isn't a case of "well, Space X made a poor design choice to make it that tall"... Instead, it's a case of "if you want to reach orbit, you need low drag, so you need a long thin space craft".
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You are right that the return of a Falcon first stage is a lot more impressive than what Bezos managed. But the part of Falcon that returned is not the part that attained orbit. I believe it did not even reach 5000 m/s, which would not be enough to reach orbit.
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U-S-A! U-S-A! A reminder that space travel is 10% science and 90% nationalism. Take that, foreigners!
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Ah, yes. If you US people keep at it, then in a few years you may again have a reliable launch vehicle. You know, like ESA and the Russians have and a few other countries are working up to.
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The US already has a reliable launch vehicle called the X37-B. It can reach orbit, stay in orbit for extended missions, change it's orbital positioning, and when the mission is complete it can land back on earth for re-use. The US is also developing the Space Launch System (SLS). A heavy-lift booster that can carry humans farther than they've ever been, to an asteroid, Mars, and beyond. Why waste money and resources on rockets whose sole purpose is to launch satellites into orbit or play taxi for the ISS?
Re:America (Score:5, Informative)
The US already has a reliable launch vehicle called the X37-B. It can reach orbit (...) The US is also developing the Space Launch System (SLS). (...) Why waste money and resources on rockets whose sole purpose is to launch satellites into orbit or play taxi for the ISS?
Not sure if troll or serious, but since your posting history looks rather sincere... The X37-B is not a launch vehicle, it launches on top of an Atlas rocket. As for the SLS program it will cost $20-35 billion to fully develop and hideously expensive to launch, just throwing away four RD-25 engines will cost around $900 million alone. Given the extremely few launches that are planned, estimates for the amortized cost has been as high as $5 billion/launch. When you compare that to SpaceX's fixed $60-130 million per launch that also covers their R&D expenses it's a bargain.
When the Falcon Heavy launches you get 70% of a SLS Block 1 for a small fraction of the cost and you can assemble 50+ ton modules in LEO if you need to. Like you could launch the whole Apollo mission (CSM+LEM) in one go, then add engines, then add fuel and break orbit for TLI. Looking at delta-v charts there doesn't seem to be any significant penalty for doing so and docking in space we've done many, many times now with the ISS. The only downside is if you genuinely need an even larger monolithic module due to structural integrity or something.
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Refresh my memory... when was it that the ESA launched humans into space, again?
There was the Hermes spacecraft that was going to fly on the Ariane 5 rocket, but it never actually launched. That said, ESA astronauts have flown on both Soyuz and the US Space Shuttle over the years and have definitely gone into space.... and the ESA still maintains an astronaut corps to this day. If it was necessary, the Hermes could be restarted again even though the ESA doesn't see the point of doing that right now.
Because the USA has never been without a "reliable launch vehicle" since the 1960's.
There has been two times in the USA without a reliable crew launch vehicle though. On
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Wrong even for non-crewed launches. The key-term here is "reliable". Of course, that gets downplayed by the media and is never repeated later. "Patriotism" (a.k.a. targeted stupidity) at work.
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Ah, yes. Ignorance of the facts is a side-effect of patriotism.
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I'm sure they could have done this by the 70's if that were their goal.
I think the thing is that never would have been their goal. I'm not speaking of corruption (nor suggesting anything like it) but the thing with NASA is that their pockets have always been very deep. Thus they kind of just looked at discarding a stage 1 rocket a necessary cost of doing what they do and figured the funding would just be there anyways. The problem though is a high cost means that something is impractical, even if you can do it (such as the moon landing in the 60's.)
This is exactly where the pr
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NASA is a contracting organization, not an engineering and production organization. Rockets, space probes, they contract them out to private companies. That has been true since the moon landing days. Their new SLS is being designed and built by Boeing, ULA, and Rocketdyne.
In that way NASA "can do" whatever they pay other people to do, so they could do this if they wanted to just by contracting out to SpaceX to do it for them.
Re:A psycological issue? (Score:4, Informative)
If your goal is reducing launch costs, it's hardly unnecessary.
The shuttle program showed that the shuttle was impractical. A large part of that impracticality was due to Congressional meddling.
A rocket that either burns up or lands in the water is a rocket that is no longer reusable.
Re:A psycological issue? (Score:4, Insightful)
The shuttle program has nothing to do with this... virtually every design decision for the shuttle was different from the falcon 9.
The shuttle carried a huge non-reusable external fuel tank and the SRBs (which produced 70% of takeoff thrust) were also non-reusable. The 'main' engines were not really designed for re-use and had to be completely rebuilt after each flight. The decision to use heat tiles instead of an ablative coating meant the risk of heat tiles falling off and required very expensive refurb after each flight. The weird shape of the shuttle meant that the aerodynamics were complicated and hard to understand; Columbia was destroyed partly due to aerodynamic forces. There was no escape system in the event of failure. Much of the design was literally based on "let's get the initial program cost down so that it can be approved by congress and let people pay for our mistakes later."
The shuttle proved zip about re-usable spacecraft. It did, however, prove just how much can go wrong when you have a flawed design process based on impossible and conflicting design requirements and a manufacturing process based on pork and congressional approval.