SpaceX Delays Falcon 9 Launch 41
stoolpigeon writes to tell us that Elon Musk recently announced a delay to the projected summer launch for SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon capsule. "Falcon 9 is the centerpiece of SpaceX's project for NASA's Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) project. NASA is hoping to be able to draw on new and cheaper commercial rockets to service the International Space Station once the shuttle fleet retires in 2010. If the trial flight of Falcon 9 early next year is a success, payload-carrying COTS missions could follow in quick succession. But the delay is worrying some observers who note that SpaceX's other rocket project, the Falcon 1, has failed during its only two launch attempts. The first Falcon 1 caught fire and crashed, and the second failed to achieve orbit due to problems during stage separation. A third Falcon 1 launch is planned for April."
And you call that bad? (Score:3, Informative)
It's not like Musk has a whole governments space programs budget to throw at it. (Which is pitifully small BTW.) He is being careful with his money. That sounds wise, and certainly not something I'd be worried about.
Jeesh, It's not like it's Rocket Science to understand it...
Re:And you call that bad? (Score:4, Interesting)
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In my experience, Canaveral and Vandenberg are the least forgiving at these negotiations, while more remote ranges (like Kodiak, Kwaj, and PWMR) are more liberal.
Re:And you call that bad? (Score:5, Informative)
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For a practically from-scratch, they've done a heck of a job, and I like their design. And I was very impressed by how rapidly they're able to turn around on launch attempts. Here's to the next Falcon 1 launch!
Questionable Failure Analysis (Score:2)
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Two failures and one delay? And one of the failures wasn't that bad? For a brand new company and new rocket tech? Considering how many outright explosions and multiple failures NASA and all others did before they got it right, I'd say they are doing just fine. I bet NASA wishes they had that success rate!
The most recent launch vehicle developed by NASA the space shuttle, which was successful on its first 24 launches. After the first failure, it succeeded on the next hundred launches before the next failure.
Before that, the previous vehicle developed by NASA was the Saturn-V, ten launches, no failures.
Before that, the Saturn 1/1b, nineteen launches, no failures.
Why in the world would NASA "wish they had a success rate" of 0 successes?
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Indeed, the Saturns were designed by Von Braun's team that in NASA's early days had been working out of the Redstone Arsenal. The rockets that NASA was designing on its own at that time were blowing up with depressing regularity; if Eisenhower had let them, the Von Braun team could have put somet
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The Saturn V and Saturn I(b) rockets were designed by a team that had more than twenty years' experience, going back to before the V-1.
Actually, V-1 wasn't a rocket, it was a pulse jet; and it wasn't the Von Braun team; it was their competitors
...Indeed, the Saturns were designed by Von Braun's team that in NASA's early days had been working out of the Redstone Arsenal. The rockets that NASA was designing on its own at that time were blowing up with depressing regularity;
I expect you must be thinking of Project Vanguard. That predates NASA-- it was a NRL (Navy Research Labs) project. if Eisenhower had let them, the Von Braun team could have put something in orbit before the Russians did.
Shuttle may have made its first few launches successfully, but they blew up their fair share of hardware during testing (the SSMEs in particular were a bitch). They had c
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You're right, that was a brain spasm. Of course I meant V-2.
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Had the Saturn rockets gone on to fly the equivalent of the number of flights that the Shuttle program has gone through, you would have seen perhaps a similar level of rocketry failure. It may not have been as catastrophic in terms of loss of human life (the Shuttle is particularly awful on th
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SpaceX has made some mistakes, but they are sitting in a much better position than NASA was in the early 1960's. I'll also have to admit that the reason SpaceX is in the position they are in is due to the knowledge gained by NASA and the U.S. military back in the 1950's and 1960's as well (not to mention other rocket developers), but I wouldn't condemn them for not trying.
I do want to emphasize that at no point have I condemned Space-X, and most certainly you can't criticize them for not trying. My respect for Space-X goes up a notch every time they follow up a failure with a commitment to learn from their mistakes and keep on working. This is something to be admired, not condemned. They are out there proving that they've got what it takes.
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Cool!
BTW, Geoff, I'd love having you back at Norwescon one of these years. You were a great Science GoH.
Of course I was making some generalizations. The paragraph about NASA would have gotten rather unwieldy very shortly.
SpaceX did not integrate every possibly lesson from every possible launch vehicle program by all of the various groups.
They did not take into account that hot, humid, salty sea air + aluminum nut with a scratch it its paint = possible failure of said
Slippage (Score:2)
space *exploration* (Score:3, Insightful)
We are eight years into the new millennium. We chose to go to the moon forty-six years ago. I want you to think about that. Not a decade ago. Not even a generation ago. Forty-six years. In some places, two full generations have been born, lived, and passed into history since John F. Kennedy spoke those words to a packed crowd in Houston. And yet here we are, nigh on a half a century of unimaginable innovation later, and we have lost our courage and our way. Not when the stakes were high, not when the risk was great, but now, when bolder men than we have already faced the greatest challenges, we find that we no longer dare to set foot into the void.
It isn't that we don't have the technology. And certainly no newfound danger has emerged to lend credence to the sophists' snivelling. We have, indisputably, the technology, the capital, and the infrastructure to once again walk among the stars. Butt he truth is that we have shrunk away from it, that our collective cowardice and the braying of the bean-counters has emasculated the quintessentially human pursuit of the unknown in its most compelling form. I hate to see what it has done to our country, to our stature in the world, and to the dreams common to all men whose eyes behold the stars- that space seems no nearer to us today than it did on the eve of Apollo 1. I fear that somewhere above us, in the cramped tube that has become the locus of all our space-bound endeavours, those dreams have gone to die. I can say no more than that it appalls me, and that for all the world our hopes are that much less bright for having abandoned the challenge of our age.
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We don't need to go into space, apart from re-living the plots in old Heinlein books. I want to go, you may want to go, but neither of us can afford to go. Some people have paid to go to orbit and in 20 or 30 years it may be possible to pay to go to the moon.
By the standards of history, that is pretty fast progress. Consider how long it took to colonise America and Australia after it became clear that there was land out there somewhere.
It will happen. In a hundred years or so I expect some
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Don't worry, men will once again walk on the moon and beyond. They just probably won't be Americans. We've dropped that ball *big time*.
Last year's *total* NASA budget was $16.8B. The cost of the Apollo program, adjusted for 2006 dollars, was about $135B ($25B 1969 USD). We're not going to the moon again any time soon, unless there's a drastic change in our spending priorities. Regardless of what any politician tries to sell you.
The change is coming soon. (Score:3, Interesting)
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Another prediction is that either Carmack (with
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2008: The Large Hadron Collider is powered up.
2009: Jeff Bezos, John Carmack, and Richard Branson announce the merging of Armadillo, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic into the 'Union Aerospace Company'.
2010: The LHC detects the Hi
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If the Chinese are conducting aggressive LEO operations, this might be quite a bit more believable. Doing docking rendezvous or other orbital actions that would demonstrate equipment capable of
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As to them having
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I am underwhelmed at this huge revelation. Especially for a major national government that prides itself as a superpower which is a peer to Russia and America.
This is exactly what I thought was more legitimate in terms of something that China might try to pull off. It wouldn't surprise me if John Carmack might team up with Elon Musk and try something like that as a demonstration flight either, and produce something that could stick aroun
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Hm... so the Apollo program went from 1961 to 1975, 14 years total. $135B/14 = $9.6 billion/year, which seems to be substantially less than NASA is getting now. Am I missing something in my calculations?
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Not so fast. (Score:4, Interesting)
Bigelow is using not just the transhab that sprang from the ISS, but is looking to use NASA's Life Support System. In the end, like spacex, his system costs will be very low. Bigelow first design is to operate in LEO, and will operate a multiple of these. But the design is to be used also for transportation as well as lunar and possibly Martian habitation. He is hoping to use these to carry ppl to the moon/mars , which is why they are so big. And his group is actively working on ideas and designs on mining and farming on the moon.
Even others are getting in on cheap access. Richard Branson's Virgin Galatic is looking to initially provide low orbital shots into space, followed by HOPEFULLY, even cheaper access to LEO. It is not likely that they will be able to put 100K KG worth of cargo up cheap, but they will hopefully be able to carry up the most difficult load (life) up cheap. I would not be surprised to see Branson decide to purchase a bigelow system to use as a hotel and perhaps a couple of falcon 9's.
Yes, through my lifetime, only 1 president has had a great vision of space, and that was kennedy (johnson simply followed his policy and all others have either been neutral or have taken us backwards). But Griffin's push on COTs made spaceX profitable. That policy has allowed Musk the chance to be profitable enough with this company that he is relatively risk free to work on bigger plans. Bigelow bought the rights to Transhab, a development from ISS, and he is now pushing to make even LMart do a large number of low-costs rockets.
Combine the cheap access, habitation with all the groups working on space access, mining, and innovation, and I now have hope that my kids will be able to settle on Mars. THings are looking to be back on track.
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Bush('43) at least set the vision that Mars should be a long-term goal of NASA, and set in motion a series of actions that IMHO will make this irreversible in terms of future presidents. Nixon first suggested Mars as an eventual goal for manned spaceflight, but then did nothing at all to make it happen. At least Bush has specific programs being worked upon at NASA that are specific for an eventua
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Realistically, the challenge of our age is feeding everybody(not so much now as in 2
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There are only so many ways to combine basic elements in order to provide a chemical energy source, and the combination of hydrogen+oxygen is a tough reaction to beat in terms of rapid exothermic reactions, or its availability in large quant
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My comment about chemistry and anti-gravity was a bit tongue in cheek; neither has advanced, nor are they particularly likely to advance, a great deal from the state of the art in 1960(so, decent fuels and no anti-gravity), so advances in other areas aren't going to have an enormous impact on the basic operational economics of space faring. And other than satellite launches a
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Fortunately there are more than a few of us out there that feel the same, and some are doing something about it. Whether or not that turns out to have been too little and too late, we shall see.
Sigh. In the late 1980s I had a reasonable expectation of being able to retire on the Moon, but NASA not only screwed their own pooch, they went out and started screwing everyone else's too (see the fate of DC-X for example). L5 merged with the NASA Fan Club, er, National Space Society,