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Space

SpaceX Makes Record-Breaking 16th Flight With a Falcon 9 Booster (spaceflightnow.com) 65

Posted by EditorDavid from the blastoff dept.
The booster just touched down on the droneship. "The Falcon 9 first-stage has now successfully launched and landed for a record-breaking 16th time," announced SpaceX's feed on YouTube. It was also SpaceX's 206th landing of an orbital-class rocket.

Long-time Slashdot reader Amiga Trombone quotes Spaceflight Now on how SpaceX tested "the limits of its reusable Falcon 9 rocket on Sunday evening." The booster, tail number 1058, made its historic debut on May 20, 2020, carrying the first astronauts to ride atop a Falcon 9 aboard the Crew Dragon capsule Endeavour. The first stage is distinctive in the SpaceX fleet as it is the only one to display a red NASA "worm" logo on its fuselage. It went on to fly 14 more times, including the launches of South Korea's Anasis 2 military communications satellite, a space station cargo delivery run, two Transporter ride-share missions and ten batches of Starlink satellites. With 15 flights already accomplished, it is the joint fleet leader with booster 1060.

Originally, the company hoped to reuse each Falcon 9 first stage 10 times.

"We got to 10 [flights] and the vehicles were still looking really good, so we started the effort to qualify for 15," Jon Edwards, SpaceX vice president of Falcon launch vehicles and Falcon engineering, told the trade publication Aviation Week & Space Technology in an interview last year.

SpaceX is now further pushing the envelope by going beyond the previously certified limit of 15 flights. It has been over 200 days since booster 1058 last flew. During that time it is likely SpaceX conducted extensive inspections and refurbishment work to clear the rocket for additional launches.

For its 16th ride to space, booster 1058 will carry 22 second-generation Starlink 'V2 mini' satellites into orbit, on a mission designated Starlink 6-5.
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SpaceX Makes Record-Breaking 16th Flight With a Falcon 9 Booster More

SpaceX Makes Record-Breaking 16th Flight With a Falcon 9 Booster

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  • Nobody can compete with SpaceX (Score:5, Interesting)

    by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Monday July 10, 2023 @12:12AM (#63672745)

    We know SpaceX poached the best engineers from DC-X and Space Launch Initiative but why is it no other space agency (government or private) will have a re-usable launch system for at least 5 years if not a decade, and when they do get one .. it'll be competitive with Falcon 9 .. not Starship which will be operational by then. They sat on their asses while the whole thing played out.

    • Re:Nobody can compete with SpaceX (Score:5, Insightful)

      by AlanObject ( 3603453 ) on Monday July 10, 2023 @12:29AM (#63672761)

      ... why is it no other ...

      The answer is that there is no committee, management group, investment group, governing body, appointed oversight that will take the insane level of risks that Elon Musk is willing to take.

      Love him or hate him. That's still true.

      Even if the engineering team thinks it can be done, there are always too many "experts" around that say why it can't be done. Or won't be profitable. Or won't have a market. This always applied to his electric cars, his tunnels, his orbital network, and certainly his rockets. All those enterprises endured any amount of derision, scorn, naysaying, during their development and in fact still do. Just look at his ventures that have yet to prove themselves.

      No elected official could survive that level of sustained, public opprobrium over that time period, particularly when there is that much money at stake. So no, you won't see anything out of any other aerospace company like this until SpaceX makes it look like well established tech. As they already have.

      • Re:Nobody can compete with SpaceX (Score:5, Insightful)

        by timeOday ( 582209 ) on Monday July 10, 2023 @12:48AM (#63672781)
        I agree with all that except I don't think SpaceX has faced its graduation exam - an accident in which people are killed. It will happen sooner or later. Critics will retroactively re-evaluate all this rapid progress as reckless and the "incident" (whenever and whatever it may be) as "inevitable." I remember how the Shuttle accidents threw ice water on the space program and turned it into what it is today.

        • Re:Nobody can compete with SpaceX (Score:5, Interesting)

          by greytree ( 7124971 ) on Monday July 10, 2023 @03:19AM (#63672939)
          The Shuttle's Achilles' Heel was that it could not fly unmanned, which made it a development dead end and held the space program back for decades.

          Starship, like Falcon 9, will be tested and tested and tested unmanned before people's lives are risked.

          Doesn't mean there won't be a deadly accident, but it's a lot less likely.

          • Re:Nobody can compete with SpaceX (Score:4, Insightful)

            by Brandano ( 1192819 ) on Monday July 10, 2023 @04:56AM (#63673053)

            The Shuttle's Achille's Heel was that it did not make sense as a vector. It was less efficient and more expensive per payload weight than any other rocket, it never really was reusable as intended, and was only useful for a handful of military missions. The great advantage of the shuttle was that it could change orbit, deploy or recover, or service a satellite, and land without giving immediately away its orbit, which can be really useful for spy satellites. But it could never reach higher orbits so it needed to carry a small booster stage to place any payload in geostationary orbit. And it was was complex, which means it has a lot of things that can break, and they often did. The X37 can now do the same job better, cheaper and indeed with a lower risk of a PR disaster, and I guess the Starchaser will cover the same role for the civilian market once it is ready.

            • "It was less efficient and more expensive per payload weight than any other rocket, it never really was reusable as intended"

              Yes, and that is BECAUSE it could not be further developed, because it could not ( or would not ? ) fly unmanned, to test new hardware.

              Starship will make the X37 and Starchaser redundant.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by twosat ( 1414337 )

              "The X37 can now do the same job better, cheaper and indeed with a lower risk of a PR disaster, and I guess the Starchaser will cover the same role for the civilian market once it is ready."

              I believe you are referring to the X-37B and the Dream Chaser mini-shuttles respectively.

          • greytree [slashdot.org]: “The Shuttle's Achilles' Heel was that it could not fly unmanned, which made it a development dead end and held the space program back for decades.”

            The Shuttle could fly totally autonomously. It's Achilles' heel was the external fuel tank and the solid rocket boosters. The rockets build in sections as they had to be transported from Utah. Utah being chosen as part of a deal to provide funding.
            • Well, it was never flown unmanned, so if it was even possible they were never confident enough to test it, so it amounts to the same problem for its development and made it the same dead end.
              • > Well, it was never flown unmanned, so if it was even possible they were never confident enough to test it

                Funding, the politicians didn't vote funding for an unmanned craft. There were a number that booked trips for themselves, at least up to the first disaster.

        • I'd agree, and how Musk might react to such an accident could very well inflame the situation to a point where even his supporters in the military/NASA have to distance themselves. I see this as one of the biggest risks SpaceX faces. I'd just hope that Shotwell, who seems to know how to contain Musk, would be able to guide them through. She does appear to be a very competent leader.

          Having said that, I don't see any reason why a tragic accident is inevitable. Compared to the Shuttle, they way SpaceX is doing

        • I agree with all that except I don't think SpaceX has faced its graduation exam - an accident in which people are killed. It will happen sooner or later.

          Given that it was political and managerial types who repeatedly ignored the engineers and pushed for publicity over safety... I'm going to say this risk is far lower with SpaxeX than NASA.

        • ...except the shuttle was publicly funded, putting the entire program at the mercy of vote-seeking, public-posturing politicians. Thus the glacial pace of resolution and the ultimate death of the shuttle program (good riddance, imo, but that's another post).

          When - as I agree, not "if" - one of Musk's goes up and kills someone there will be massive lawsuits.
          What I see is that this will be an acid test not just for Musk, but for capitalism in the US.

          If left to settle the suits and move on, I expect Musk will

          • It's pretty much inevitable that the first time a SpaceX rocket does something that harms humans, the entirety of the old-space industry will stand up as one with the "SEE! SEE! WE TOLD YOU! SEE!" picket signs and Musk's SpaceX will be slinking off to another country if it wishes to continue at all. There is zero chance that the US will allow SpaceX to continue to negatively impact the old leaders of the space industry if there's any sign of harm to humans. The risk-adversity of the entire country to space

            • Wasn't the case for the Apollo accidents. It was for the Shuttle. I think a certain amount of risk has to be accepted for something as complex as space vehicles. You'll never get to zero risk. Same with cars.

        • I agree with all that except I don't think SpaceX has faced its graduation exam - an accident in which people are killed. It will happen sooner or later. Critics will retroactively re-evaluate all this rapid progress as reckless and the "incident" (whenever and whatever it may be) as "inevitable."

          Critics already think all this rapid progress is reckless, they can't re-evaluate it and find that, they already evaluated that and "found" it.

          But testing unmanned ships to destruction is a wise solution to this problem, because it finds problems you can't find any other way. I'm very anti-Elno but this is not something he's done wrong. (Now, the big test, with the big chunks of launch pad getting airborne, THAT was wrong. But that's another subject, kinda.)

          I remember how the Shuttle accidents threw ice water on the space program and turned it into what it is today.

          BOTH shuttle launches were due to KNOWN problems w

        • The reason NASA faced this so-called "graduation exam" in the first place was the human organization of NASA and the engineers. It is well documented that the engineers were telling corporate and NASA management that the shuttle had various problems (such as the o-rings), but their upper management and NASA refused to listen and launched anyways. I don't believe this is the same human organization framework that SpaceX is working under now.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by kwerle ( 39371 )

          While that's a fair point, I hope we've past where that matters. It looks like there were 135 shuttle flights. 2 of which ended in disaster.

          There have been more than 170 falcon flights - though very few of those crewed. Looks like 1 failed mission. No deaths.

          There are a lot fewer crewed missions than there used to be. I guess that's mostly because there don't need to be. Letting folks do the work on the ISS for longer periods works well. And spacex (and others) can launch satellites from uncrewed.

          At

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by tragedy ( 27079 )

          Critics will retroactively re-evaluate all this rapid progress as reckless and the "incident" (whenever and whatever it may be) as "inevitable.

          Plenty of critics have evaluated Musk and SpaceX as reckless without fatalities based on the recent Starship test, with massive chunks of concrete being hurled large distances and a whole town being covered in concrete dust. Probably quite rightly so, because there are inescapable risks in developing new rocket tech, but there are also completely unnecessary ones that stem from making obviously bad choices and that fell into the second category.

      • Re:Nobody can compete with SpaceX (Score:4, Interesting)

        by monkeyxpress ( 4016725 ) on Monday July 10, 2023 @06:18AM (#63673147)

        The answer is that there is no committee, management group, investment group, governing body, appointed oversight that will take the insane level of risks that Elon Musk is willing to take.

        I actually disagree that Musk is taking big risks. Commercial risks yes, but engineering risks not so much.

        It was obvious that you could build a decent EV with laptop batteries in the late 90s. Any EE grad could do the calcs and figure it out. My engineering school had a long term post-grad project to convert a gas car into one (they'd started with Lead Acid in the 80s, then NMH in the early 90s). It was also horrendously expensive to do so.

        A more experienced engineer could have worked out the materials costs of the vehicle, and estimate the improvements in power electronics that were occurring and come up with a pretty accurate analysis for whether it could be feasible to build a car that competed with gas cars in the future. Again, at my EE school people would openly talk about this.

        But to actually do it? To be able to convince an increasing number of investors that this plan will work, even when you're making toy cars for rich enthusiasts at a loss for years; that you'll be able to take on the automobile companies (which are some of the biggest in the world) and the oil companies at the same time. No, nobody at my engineering school had a clue how you'd do that, and none of us believed it would happen anytime soon.

        That's really the secret sauce Musk (and similarly, people like Jobs/Gates bring). They are businessmen who at least have a bit of an appreciation for the design/engineering of their product. But mostly they have excellent business skills - which includes massive self-belief and bullshitting ability - the stuff that everyone likes to criticise Musk for. But go try to fund your world changing plan by being realistic and humble.

        Back when companies made most of their money from selling stuff, rather than stock price movements, most tech/engineering businesses were run by business people who came from a technical background. And those people wouldn't have considered investing in stuff like re-useable rockets or battery cars particularly magical. It's just we live in an era where the entire board of an engineering company (ahem, Boeing) is comprised of lawyers and accountants, that we consider companies that do more than update the interior trim, colour scheme, or pricing structure each year as anomaly.

        TLDR, Musk is a very impressive businessman, but he is made more impressive because most 'tech' leadership is done but lawyers and accountants these days. 30 years ago, among the Hewletts and Packard types, he would have been doing the marketing while the real engineers kept delivered the advances everyone is so amazed by today.

        • But to actually do it? To be able to convince an increasing number of investors that this plan will work, even when you're making toy cars for rich enthusiasts at a loss for years; that you'll be able to take on the automobile companies (which are some of the biggest in the world) and the oil companies at the same time. No, nobody at my engineering school had a clue how you'd do that, and none of us believed it would happen anytime soon.

          That's really the secret sauce Musk (and similarly, people like Jobs/Gates bring). They are businessmen who at least have a bit of an appreciation for the design/engineering of their product. But mostly they have excellent business skills - which includes massive self-belief and bullshitting ability - the stuff that everyone likes to criticise Musk for.

          Generally agreed.

          I think a big part of Musk's talent at this point is that he's proven he'll keep pushing his companies forward and getting future investment. He's less a risk to current investors because they're confident that future investors will come along to keep the ball rolling.

          That's not to undersell what he's doing. There's a lot of innovative companies that do X and then get bogged down and never really go any further. Musk's companies keep on innovating even if the ideas aren't always so great (l

          • Yes, I didn't consider that part of the hype machine is about sustaining that investor pipeline. That's a good point.

            At all the engineering companies I've ever worked, your regular engineer would always complain about how easy the job of management or marketing was. I did too when I was younger, until I had to do those things myself and just realised how mind numbingly tedious they can be. The media, for example, is like a 2 year old child and requires constant attentions and talking to in a way that makes

      • Re:Nobody can compete with SpaceX (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Eunomion ( 8640039 ) on Monday July 10, 2023 @07:50AM (#63673277)
        Don't forget the active resistance of politicians from all the jobs connected with over-costed expendable launch, not to mention from aerospace executive suites where the absurd profit margins of expendable launch look good to stockholders despite far lower total profit than reuse allows.

        This industry has been practically buried alive in perverse incentives and corruption from birth. What SpaceX is doing to bring it into the light is nothing short of Promethean.

      • The other part: ruthless engineering.

        I recall some video/slides about batteries. The problem: internal resistance. Tesla's engineers looked at this, and found that one factor was the length of the path charge carriers took from connector to active site (well that, and the usual electrochemical nastiness of course).

        Most cylindrical batteries are made of strips of material, which are cut, stacked, rolled up, and shoved into a can. Electrons have to run the length of those strips in order to reach their 'work

    • DC-X (Score:5, Informative)

      by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Monday July 10, 2023 @12:42AM (#63672773)

      For those of you that never heard of DC-X .. the following video shows what it could do back in 1995 just before a short-sighted Congress wussed out on the program: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by ArmoredDragon ( 3450605 )

        That was a small scale run. I don't know why you keep insisting that it's the first reusable rocket, aside from the fact that you just hate Elon. Contrary to what you believe, scaling up isn't simply a matter of adding more material. Physics just doesn't work that way. Let's go off of your dumb shirt analogy you gave last time I saw you post this -- if you were to make a shirt big enough for Godzilla, simply adding more material than a regular human sized shirt would more than likely cause it to rip apart u

        • Re:DC-X (Score:5, Insightful)

          by sjames ( 1099 ) on Monday July 10, 2023 @03:47AM (#63672963) Homepage Journal

          Probably because as we see in the video, it took off and then landed intact in much the way Falcon does. It wasn't a practical booster but it was a working demo.

          Space-X did have to do significant work and some innovation of it's own to take that proven principle and turn it into a practical commercial launch vehicle, of course.

          Kinda like the Wright brothers are credited with the airplane even though Kitty Hawk was far from practical as anything but a demonstration.

          I think it's fair to say that the modern 747 represents a great deal of additional engineering development.

          • Space-X did have to do significant work and some innovation of it's own to take that proven principle and turn it into a practical commercial launch vehicle, of course.

            Here's his post that I'm referencing:

            https://slashdot.org/comments.... [slashdot.org]

            The very first sentence is this:

            There is no innovation to simply scaling something up.

            He claims I misconstrued that. Would you agree with him?

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by sjames ( 1099 )

              I disagree that Falcon is a "simple" scale up. I was only addressing DC-X being the FIRST. It literally is the first.

            • Well I hope sjames agrees with me because that's the only place logic can take him.

              1. In the case of the DC-X the autonomous landing was THE actual orbital class rocket engines - the RL-10. -- and not a scaled down version of it. That same engine, the RL-10 has been in use since the 1970s. It is used on Artemis and going to be used in the Vulcan launch system launching in late 2023. So your BS about how they have to redesign the engine for orbital class is just false.

              2. For decades, the patent office hasn't

              • 1. In the case of the DC-X the autonomous landing was THE actual orbital class rocket engines - the RL-10. -- and not a scaled down version of it. That same engine, the RL-10 has been in use since the 1970s. It is used on Artemis and going to be used in the Vulcan launch system launching in late 2023. So your BS about how they have to redesign the engine for orbital class is just false.

                Oh boy...that's a pretty good fuckup on your part. So let's educate you a bit: First, RL-10 has only been used as an upper stage engine. Second, for Vulcan they're using two of them, which don't even do anything until after the boosters and the first stage have already done most of the work. Third, DC-X used four of them. Fourth, DC-X was an SSTO rocket, where those engines worked due to its smaller size, and even then they didn't take it to orbit or anywhere close to it, more like 2 miles.

                And we haven't ev

      • OK, the first actually commercially usable ORBITAL launch/landing! The obvious difference is that DX-X test is at least an order of magnitude or more less difficult than an orbital launch/landing (sorry Jeff). It proved the concept but it was not even close to a commercially viable launch vehicle.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by BigFire ( 13822 )

      Actually they didn't poach many engineers from DC-X if any. In terms of RTS games, they really went down a different tech tree.

  • New equipment has a high failure rate, usually due to faulty parts. Over time, the failure rate drops, as the faulty parts get replaced, then gradually trends upwards as the parts wear out and get damaged.

    Since all single-use rockets are by definition brand new, I'd still bet that a 15-launch Falcon 9 is more reliable than an Ariane/Atlas/Long March.

  • refurbishment (Score:3)

    by ZipNada ( 10152669 ) on Monday July 10, 2023 @01:17AM (#63672815)

    "it is likely SpaceX conducted extensive inspections and refurbishment work to clear the rocket for additional launches"

    I'm wondering how much of the rocket actually gets reused as opposed to replaced. It seems like they could need to swap out most or all of the engines for example over the course of 10-15 flights. If that happens it would be less impressive than keeping them all in place.

    • aka "Ship of Theseus"

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    • Re: refurbishment (Score:4, Insightful)

      by beelsebob ( 529313 ) on Monday July 10, 2023 @05:00AM (#63673061)

      The price of their launches says the answer is âoenot muchâ. They couldnâ(TM)t be undercutting everyone by as much as they are if they had to replace the expensive components of the vehicle.

      • They price hasn't appreciably changed on the Falcon 9, it's basically the same price now as it was back in the days before reusability where they built a new rocket for every flight. They could and did replace all of the expensive components on every flight, and did so profitably.

        • And now they are paying hundreds of millions, if not billions, to create and blow up Starship / BFR prototypes. That margin had to come from somewhere or else they're on the road to a fund raise or bankruptcy.

          It doesn't take a whole lot of thinking calories to figure out they can raise launch margins to pay for that R&D through deeper re-use of Falcon 9, lowering launch costs while leaving the launch price the same.

          • Long with the fact that they *can* increase margins because theyâ(TM)re now operating by far the most reliable medium and heavy launch vehicles on the market.

            I did some Googling, and came up with SpaceX figures of various types saying

            - A falcon 9 booster costs about $30m

            - A falcon 9 second stage costs around $15m

            - Fuel for a falcon 9 launch costs about $200,000.

            - Refurbishment of a Falcon 9 booster costs about $1m

            Thereâ(TM)s several other anciliary costs like renting the launch site, and paying fo

    • "it is likely SpaceX conducted extensive inspections and refurbishment work to clear the rocket for additional launches"

      I'm wondering how much of the rocket actually gets reused as opposed to replaced. It seems like they could need to swap out most or all of the engines for example over the course of 10-15 flights. If that happens it would be less impressive than keeping them all in place.

      It *completely* doesn't matter. What does matter is the *cost* of such refurbishment. If you're replacing 95% of the rocket's internals but it costs few hundred thousand bucks, you're in better situation than the guy who replaces 2% at the cost millions. And the nice thing about cost is that it's a very objective hard metric that's impossible to cheat on too.

      • Well it matters to me, in terms of how much of the original rocket is actually present after 16 flights. If they had to swap out all 9 engines one or more times leaving just the fuel tanks and the shell I am a lot less impressed.

        Also "costs few hundred thousand bucks" appears to be incorrect, the engines reportedly cost about $2 million each.

        • Well it matters to me, in terms of how much of the original rocket is actually present after 16 flights. If they had to swap out all 9 engines one or more times leaving just the fuel tanks and the shell I am a lot less impressed.

          Also "costs few hundred thousand bucks" appears to be incorrect, the engines reportedly cost about $2 million each.

          Yes, I was pulling numbers out of my... thumb, for purposes of gendakenexperiment. Still - why would, dunno, percentage of replaced matter or something be more meaningful to you than the cost of such a replacement?

          • Because he's chasing a false premise - he made a comparison to a classic car, which are collectible items that people very much care about how much original content is present in the artifact.

            Nobody besides museums collects rocket boosters, and the museums don't give two fucks if it's the "original" fuel pump, or the 7th fuel pump - they're probably stripping most of that shit out anyway so it doesn't weigh nearly as much and it's easier to transport and display. They want the artifact itself in whatever c

        • As long as the refurbishment cost is 100% of a new rocket and the rocket is still reliable after refurbishment, there's a margin to exploit. Even a 1% savings on a $100m launch is still $1m you didn't have to spend in order to make the same amount of revenue from the paying launch customer.

          These are the only things that matter. The only people that would care about if it's "original" or not are the tens of people on the planet that are obscenely rich enough to collect such things for ego stroking purposes

          • Should read "less than 100%" - Slashdot's shitty text parser apparently doesn't allow for less-than punctuation without thinking it's an open-ended HTML tag or something.

            Why is this site so shitty still?

            • Of course it is an open ended HTML tag.
              You could look below the text input field what HTML tags are allowed.

              If you need a less then sign, then use entity encoding: ampersand-lessthan-semicolon.

          • I'm interested in knowing how much of their rockets get swapped out or rebuilt between launches. That's my personal bias, you betcha. I don't care if you are interested in it or not.

    • The SRBs on the Shuttle Launch System were reusable. They were disassembled, examined, and reassembled. We don't have a percentage for either system, so it's hard to make a comparison.

    • The question would be what happens to the replaced parts - are they in turn refurbished and reinstalled on a different refurbished rocket body? For example, do they take the engines off this vehicle and send them to be refurbished, while bolting on engines that just came back from refurbishment?

      The more you can reuse, the less you pay for subsequent launches of that vehicle, and it would outwardly appear that SpaceX is interested in reusing as much as they can get away with, if they're chasing down fairing

      • I haven't ever seen where someone working at SpaceX (or having left there) publicly described the process for refitting the rockets between launches. It does seem like there would be engine swaps at least. SpaceX must have a powerful NDA.

  • That's not possible (Score:5, Funny)

    by systemd-anonymousd ( 6652324 ) on Monday July 10, 2023 @02:44AM (#63672899)

    The news told me that African American Man Bad and that he's actually losing everything he ever failed-upwards into building

  • This is incredible news. How a booster can survive 16 atmospheric re-entries mystifies me. It's almost like something out of Star Trek, and definitely shows how much ground SpaceX has broken with its tech.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by BigFire ( 13822 )

      They figure out how to do reentry burn so that the booster doesn't get melted on its way down. The burn not only slow the booster down, but also creates a plasma shield protecting it. This is something that engineers have theorized and simulated to the nth degree in computer for years. But until someone actually go and does it, it's still just theoretical. All 4 of Falcon 1 and the first couple of Falcon 9 have parachutes installed on the first stage in hope of using that. Parachutes does not work in s

  • Sorry, I still can't believe spacex is landing boosters on their hind legs a la flash gordon. Must all be a deep fake.

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