In Daring Plan, Tomorrow SpaceX To Land a Rocket On Floating Platform 151
HughPickens.com writes "The cost of getting to orbit is exorbitant, because the rocket, with its multimillion-dollar engines, ends up as trash in the ocean after one launching, something Elon Musk likens to throwing away a 747 jet after a single transcontinental flight. That's why tomorrow morning at 620 am his company hopes to upend the economics of space travel in a daring plan by attempting to land the first stage of a Falcon 9 rocket intact on a floating platform, 300 feet long and 170 feet wide in the Atlantic Ocean. SpaceX has attempted similar maneuvers on three earlier Falcon 9 flights, and on the second and third attempts, the rocket slowed to a hover before splashing into the water. "We've been able to soft-land the rocket booster in the ocean twice so far," says Musk. "Unfortunately, it sort of sat there for several seconds, then tipped over and exploded. It's quite difficult to reuse at that point."
After the booster falls away and the second stage continues pushing the payload to orbit, its engines will reignite to turn it around and guide it to a spot about 200 miles east of Jacksonville, Florida. Musk puts the chances of success at 50 percent or less but over the dozen or so flights scheduled for this year, "I think it's quite likely, 80 to 90 percent likely, that one of those flights will be able to land and refly." SpaceX will offer its own launch webcast on the company's website beginning at 6 a.m. If SpaceX's gamble succeeds, the company plans to reuse the rocket stage on a later flight. "Reusability is the critical breakthrough needed in rocketry to take things to the next level." SpaceX announced the plan in December.
After the booster falls away and the second stage continues pushing the payload to orbit, its engines will reignite to turn it around and guide it to a spot about 200 miles east of Jacksonville, Florida. Musk puts the chances of success at 50 percent or less but over the dozen or so flights scheduled for this year, "I think it's quite likely, 80 to 90 percent likely, that one of those flights will be able to land and refly." SpaceX will offer its own launch webcast on the company's website beginning at 6 a.m. If SpaceX's gamble succeeds, the company plans to reuse the rocket stage on a later flight. "Reusability is the critical breakthrough needed in rocketry to take things to the next level." SpaceX announced the plan in December.
Deja Vu (Score:2)
Re:Deja Vu (Score:5, Informative)
delayed. Rocket launches get delayed often. If you're new to this, get used to it.
Stratolaunch does kind of makes sense from the delay perspective, if we're gonna aim at something like daily orbital launches in the future (although of course in this case, the delay wasn't weather-related). Jets are much more tolerant of bad weather than rockets, so being able to fly above the weather or move away from it is pretty appealing.
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And the Skylon [wikipedia.org] is looking to build a genuine spaceplane, single stage to orbit, with its funky jet/rocket combined engines,
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And the Skylon [wikipedia.org] is looking to build a genuine spaceplane, single stage to orbit, with its funky jet/rocket combined engines,
Trouble is, from the numbers I've seen it won't cost much less per pound to orbit than a reusable Falcon, but will cost many times more to develop than a resuable Falcon. The high development cost of SSTOs is why Musk is far more likely to be the one who slashes the cost of getting things into orbit. Obviously, at some point, the cost of recovering and reassembling the stages becomes such a high proportion of the cost of a launch that SSTO will start to make sense.
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The numbers I've seen say that Skylon will cost the same for the first launch. But in being completely reusable, and not needing to carry oxygen on the way up, will become orders of magnitude cheaper once you account for several launches per vehicle.
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The wiki says it'll be completely reusable within 2 days of landing because of ceramic tiles that protect it from the heat of re-entry. Sounds like a space shuttle. Doubtful that practice will work as well as theory.
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The numbers I've seen say that Skylon will cost the same for the first launch.
I haven't been following Skylon for a few years, but the last claim I remember was around $100 per pound into orbit ($250 per kg? Or maybe it was $250 per pound?)
Falcon Heavy is supposed to start around $1000 per pound, and around $100 per pound if and when it becomes fully reusable. So they're in the same ballpark, and probably both have a similar chance of actually making their cost predictions, but one won't cost $10,000,000,000+ to develop.
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If air breathing doesn't reduce the cost of the first launch, it won't reduce the cost of the second, and reuse works at least as well at reducing costs for Skylon's competitors. Actually considerably better for SpaceX and those who choose to take their approach, due to the efficiency gains of staging as well as a much less extreme reentry for the first stage (which constitutes the great majority of the vehicle).
not quite accurate (Score:2)
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Not really. One shuttle launch I attended was cancelled due to bad weather in Africa, because it would have gone splat if it had to abort and tried to land there. Many landed in California because the weather was too bad to land at KSC, and you only got one chance to land or go splat.
I don't remember how Skylon is supposed to work, but every pound of excess fuel carried to allow it to abort a landing and try again is a pound less it can carry to orbit. And its payload capacity is already small.
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Skylon works by scooping up the oxygen it will need for orbital flight while still in the atmosphere. Because the oxygen is about 95% of the launch mass that means you can launch with much much much less weight. Even if you need twice as much fuel to land again, you still have a craft that weighs 10% of the original.
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Check your math.
O atomic weight 16. H atomic weight 1. 16/18 = 88% of 'fuel' weight.
But it still needs to carry O2 for burns above the atmosphere.
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It doesn't need to carry it when it launches though - this is the big benefit. A huge amount of the fuel that rockets carry is for the sole purpose of lifting the fuel and oxydiser for everything after 20km up by 20km. That's when the rocket is heaviest, and when it's having to push through the thickets atmosphere, and when it's travelling slowest (yes, counter intuitively, rockets are more efficient the faster they travel).
By not having to carry the oxygen for 20km onwards at launch time, you reduce the
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There is no space savings. You can't put oxygen in the hydrogen tank. In fact, Skylon has to carry extra hydrogen for cooling, and the extremely low density of liquid hydrogen makes it an enormous vehicle. This coupled with the need to stay in the atmosphere to breathe air vastly increases losses from aerodynamic drag...something that is actually almost insignificant for a non-airbreathing rocket (only around 100 m/s total, considerably less in some cases) becomes a major loss. There's also the little probl
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Skylon also launches with all the oxygen it needs to reach orbit, it does not extract oxygen from the air or store it for later use. Doing so would require even more machinery to extract and liquefy the oxygen, even more hydrogen to cool and power the machinery, etc.
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That's often cited as an advantage, but jets that have to take off and potentially land (in the case of an abort) while carrying extremely heavy, hazardous, fragile, billion-dollar payloads are not particularly tolerant of bad weather.
Rockets can be *more* tolerant due to their excess of power, rapid ascent, and lack of large aerodynamic surfaces, but rocket operators have been far more risk averse due to the cost of failure. Even so, they've launched in conditions such as heavy snow that might have grounde
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A rocket ought to be fairly resistant to bad weather --- they have many more times the control authority that an aeroplane has, due to sodding huge engines, and will be above it very quickly. They already have to deal with very strong winds blowing them sideways as they pass through the jetstream (at 100km/h plus), and they don't have air intakes to suck in rain.
Does anyone know whether the Falcon 9 can't take off in bad weather, or whether they won't do a launch in bad weather because they'll lose visual
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Does anyone know whether the Falcon 9 can't take off in bad weather, or whether they won't do a launch in bad weather because they'll lose visual contact with the vehicle, which is critical for monitoring the performance of what is fundamentally a prototype?
Isn't it usually because the range safety entity has to be able to see where the rocket is to decide whether they should blow it up?
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They want to maintain visual on the 1st stage. The aerodynamics of the high altitude, high Mach number deceleration burns is probably the most important thing they want to study. They need to understand this well for the present objective of controlling and landing the stage, but the aerodynamics is relevant to semi-powered descent of the Dragon spacecraft onto Earth and especially Mars.
Here is some footage of their last landing attempt
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UFjK_CFKgA [youtube.com]
This is what SpaceX ulti
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I don't know about other reasons, but I imagine they would be disinclined to take off in bad weather simply because even a slight increase in the risk of a launch failure translates to a high expected dollar loss. Lets say they estimate a 1 percentage point higher chance of a catastrophic failure during bad weather. The rocket alone is worth $55 million, multiply by 1% to find the expected loss per launch over time, that's $550,000 they should expect to lose, on average, every time they launch a rocket in
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Re usability (Score:2)
Even if they can recover the engine intact how many times can it be reused. Saving a few million on a higher chance of blowing up multi billion payloads is not exactly wise economically.
Re:Re usability (Score:4, Interesting)
Their engines are already reused "sort of". They test fire their engines before launch. One time they evens scrubbed a launch after the engines were lit. They fixed the problem in a few hours and launched after that.
One of the reasons payloads cost multi-billion dollars is because the launchers cause near that amount. Cheaper launchers will lead to cheaper payloads..
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I'm sure that customers with astronomically expensive or critical payloads will always have the option to specify a "new" booster if they're willing to pay more.
On the other hand, if you need to launch a constellation of 20 satellites, it might be much cheaper to budget for 22-24 cheaper "used" launches than 20 more expensive but more reliable new ones.
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Assuming the first flight is the most reliable one. They may instead start offering a discount to those willing to risk a payload on a vehicle that's never flown before.
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Re:Re usability (Score:4, Informative)
The nice thing about SpaceX's approach is that a Rocket launches, flies and lands like a rocket. The shuttle, spaceplane aproach attempts to build something that is both a rocket and an airplane. The result may be both rocket and plane but it is neither a very good rocket nor a very good plane.
Space shuttle pilots use to refer to the lander as a "flying brick". That was not a compliment!
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It's worse than that. It's a rocket, an airplane, and an orbital re-entry vehicle. A suborbital craft [wikipedia.org] is much better at being both a rocket and an airplane.
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Almost makes me wonder if they could make them just that little bit tougher to begin with
Tougher means heavier. Every additional pound used for toughness is one less usable pound for payload.
I still await the day that a multi-stage re-usable comes back, like the Shuttle.
Except that the solid rocket boosters and fuel tanks were not reusable. Only the engines were re-used and that after expensive overhauls.
This coupled with space-mining will hopefully bring a calm to the human race that we haven't seen since, well, ever.
We can not return land or food from space so we will still have conflict on Earth.
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Tougher means heavier. Every additional pound used for toughness is one less usable pound for payload.
That's Shuttle-think: 'to minimize cost, everything must be as efficient as possible to get the maximum payload on each flight'.
In reality, if making the engine 10% heavier would allow you reuse a stage twice as often before you had to throw it away, you'd probably find you saved money. In particular, the mass of the first stage engines has little impact on the payload, as they don't go anywhere near orbit.
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It is almost like you have never played Kerbal Space Program.
In the real world, the mass of the first stage is usually mostly fuel, so a 10% increase in the mass of the engines doesn't make much difference to the amount of thrust you need to launch. This is why, for example, most of the weight-saving work to increase the Saturn V payload was in the second stage, where it made a much larger difference than the first.
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The solids were partially reused...they used heavy steel casings that survived recovery. You couldn't exactly say the same booster flew twice, though, and the casings were probably one of the cheapest components of the entire system (being steel drums wrapped around a low-performance solid rocket motor that just got the vehicle off the pad and was dropped off early in the launch). The Orbiter was heavily refurbished after each flight, but was reused. The external tank could have been brought into orbit and
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Except that the solid rocket boosters and fuel tanks were not reusable. Only the engines were re-used and that after expensive overhauls.
The Shuttle's SRBs were reusable, and they reused them (or at least parts of them) pretty much every launch.
The big orange liquid fuel tank was not reused, though.
=Smidge=
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Well, no. The Shuttle's SRBs were a lot more than just a tube full of explosives.
They had thrust vector control; hydraulic power units, gimbal nozzles, control hardware. Electrical subsystems. Self contained navigation hardware. Range safety hardware. And of course everything was triple or quadruple redundant for reliability.
=Smidge=
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Firstly, the capsule is a tiny fraction of the cost of the launch - the vast majority is the rocket itself.
And where the rocket is concerned, you currently have that whole "high-speed collision with the ocean" thing going on after every launch - you're not going to "out tough" that without taking drastic payload-robbing measures, so there's no point in trying. Once the whole "return and reuse" part is mastered though, then the economic incentives will shift dramatically. You have to be able to get a second
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Plus rocket reuse has not happened yet.
Except by NASA from 1981-2011.
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SpaceX wants to soft-land the whole first stage in a way that won't require a lot of reconditioning. If it works, it would be a different sort of thing than the shuttles.
Re:Re usability (Score:5, Informative)
The external solid boosters were sort of reused - the entire rocket needed to be disassembled, and about 5k parts were refurbished and reused. The shuttle engines themselves were pretty much the same thing, they were taken apart and refurbished every mission.
SpaceX wants to only partially disassemble key components of their 1st stage in a way that they could potentially send up the same 1st stage within a week. Some parts will be replaced, most others inspected, but they are not all getting rebuilt/refurbished every single takeoff.
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I thought the only rocket-related thing reused from the shuttles was the fuel tank, and that only after reconditioning it post-ocean swim.
No, actually it was the Solid Rocket Boosters that were reused. After burnout, they were jettisoned at a (relatively) low altitude. The external tank, which stayed connected to the orbiter to a substantially higher altitude did not survive reentry.
Re:Re usability (Score:4, Interesting)
The SRBs were re-used as well as the engines connected to the Shuttle itself.
The external tank is jettisoned too high to recover. It was thought that it could be used in space to construct something but that was never done.
Re:Re usability (Score:5, Informative)
The external tank is jettisoned too high to recover. It was thought that it could be used in space to construct something but that was never done.
As much as this played out in various types of fiction and so forth, the reality is that the tanks wouldn't have been all that useful in orbit. The foam insulation would have off-gassed significantly and dumped all sorts of crap into your orbital environment, and the tanks themselves had nowhere near the shielding required to be used for human habitation (both radiation, and micrometeorite).
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The foam insulation would have off-gassed significantly and dumped all sorts of crap into your orbital environment, ...
Originally they were to be painted with a coating that would have kept the foam together, etc.
Then somebody looked at how much that coating weighed. (It comes right out of payload.) And they decided not to paint the tank after all and let the foam get shredded a bunch on the way up (after it wasn't really needed if you weren't going to re-use the tank for anything).
They actually burn some
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the tanks themselves had nowhere near the shielding required to be used for human habitation (both radiation, and micrometeorite).
So you collect them into a cluster and store consumables (like water) that perform shielding in the outer layers.
Also: You really don't WANT shielding most of the time - unless you're up there for years. Primary cosmics mostly go right through you, while shielding produces lots of ionizing secondaries that tear you up. Then you need a LOT of shielding to block the secondaries
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Is not the insulation *outside* the tanks? While any pressurized environment you wanted to create would be *inside* those tanks. You're not going to get any outgassing through the walls of an aluminum pressure tank. And if fuel the baffles and such outgassed - so what? You probably want to rip that stuff out and polish the tank clean before you move in anyway. Problem solved. Ditto if you were disassembling them for construction components - aluminum isn't going to absorb all that much gas, especially c
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Actually you'd inflate a bag inside of them, and then you wouldn't have to worry about getting them surgically clean. But Bigelow thinks you can just use the bag, so perhaps the tanks weren't important.
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Why? You already have a tank designed to hold pressure, and they held hydrogen and oxygen, hardly high risks for incidental exposure. You'd want to make sure your welds were up to snuff, but that would be true for bag seams as well.
And what Bigelow is working on are hardly "bags". Inflatable perhaps, but it seems like that's mostly a space-saving feature so that they can get a better surface(mass)-to-volume ratio on a module that can be sent up in one piece.
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The SRBs were re-used as well as the engines connected to the Shuttle itself.
The tin cans around the SRMs were reused. There's still debate as to whether it saved NASA any money, since most of the cost of the SRB was the SRM inside it, which had to be replaced every time.
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Reuse of the shuttle took several months of costly refurbishing for each launch, though.
If I remember correctly, wasn't the fastest turnaround about six weeks between flights? I think that was two flights of the same payload, though, so they didn't have to change out much in the payload bay.
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That was the first thing that jumped to my mind. Kind of reminds me of retread tires -- a lot of the truck tire fragments you see by the side of the road are from retread tires that self destructed. A lot of companies buy them because they're cheaper, but the chances that they'll fail is far higher.
But the consequnces of your first stage failing are much worse than the consequences of your tire shredding on the freeway. And those are bad enough.
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That was the first thing that jumped to my mind. Kind of reminds me of retread tires -- a lot of the truck tire fragments you see by the side of the road are from retread tires that self destructed. A lot of companies buy them because they're cheaper, but the chances that they'll fail is far higher.
But the consequnces of your first stage failing are much worse than the consequences of your tire shredding on the freeway. And those are bad enough.
Yes, rockets go through more extreme forces and environments, but that does not mean that rockets can not be made to safely survive multiple fights.
It could be that due to the bathtub curve [wikipedia.org] that some number of flights after the first flight are the most reliable. Right now every rocket flight is a maiden voyage (also known as a shakedown cruse). Brand new rockets fail on occasion.
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depends. But in the case of SpaceX merlins, a lot. They were designed with reusability in mind and also they don't throttle it up to max capacity for longevity. What exactly is a lot? Nobody knows, not even SpaceX. They'll know after they try it a few times. But a dozen reuse doesn't seem unreasonable at this stage.
Today most P-51 and Corsair owners don't use WEP (war emergency power) on their precious warbirds to save engine wear... same principle.
Re:Re usability (Score:4, Informative)
Even if they can recover the engine intact how many times can it be reused. Saving a few million on a higher chance of blowing up multi billion payloads is not exactly wise economically.
I have heard they have already put engines through 40 or more simulated launch cycles. These engines were designed to be reliable. To a certain extent, having tested an engine through previous launches might imply more reliability, at least up to a certain point. In any case, if they recover the rocket, they will be able to analyze how the launch has affected the structure and systems.
These rockets do not use hydrogen, and thus do not have the problems of embrittlement that the shuttle engines had. I suspect one of the bigger problems will be coking from using kerosine fuel, but I also suspect that can be mitigated using solvents to clean the fuel systems.
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Coking is largely a problem with a high olefin content. The cut of kerosene they're using has a very low percentage of olefins in order to cut down on coking. This was established way back when we first tried to use the JP series cuts of kerosene as RP.
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Honest question: You have a ticket to the ISS. You can choose a rocket that just came out of the VAB* or one that recently launched and returned whole and was turned around for this flight. Which do you trust more?
* Yes, I know SpaceX isn't using the VAB now but you get the idea...
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With a used rocket you risk faulty assembly as well. They have to take the whole thing apart and inspect every bit of it. But hopefully that inspection would reduce the wear and tear risk. As long as the recovery, inspection, and reassembly is cheaper than building an entire new rocket, everybody wins.
It's just like when I work on my car, there are always a few bits left over...
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I am hoping that if I working on my car a few more times I will end up with enough spare parts to build a second one.
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Also I English good.
Re:Re usability (Score:5, Interesting)
So, let's look at history for a (possible) answer. The Apollo flights were all "just came out of the VAB" flights. There were 40 of them, including a loong unmanned test series (17 manned flights). Counting Apollo 13, two of them failed. Which gives you 5% failure rate (including 13), or 2.5% failure rate (not).
Shuttle had 135 missions, with two failures. Failure rate ~1.5%.
So, shuttle, which "returned whole and was turned around for this flight" had a better safety record than Apollo, which "just came out of the VAB".
Note that if you substitute Soyuz for Apollo, you get similar results. Yes, Soyuz had two loss-of-crew failures, just like Shuttle, but in fewer than 135 flights....
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Clearly, you should take the option that has just crashed twice.
Re:Re usability (Score:4, Interesting)
Even if they can recover the engine intact how many times can it be reused. Saving a few million on a higher chance of blowing up multi billion payloads is not exactly wise economically.
Think of it this way: if they can fly the first stage 20 times, that along with some cost optimizations of the upper stage could cut the cost per pound by a factor of ten. Then it would become economical to launch mere multi-hundred million dollar payloads. That would dramatically reduce the economical risk of any single launch, as long as the rocket is not ten times as likely to blow up, but rather only maybe twice as likely.
Of course, anyone who launches a lot of rockets of the same type is likely to become really good at getting that type to orbit in one piece. Just look at the Russians and their now ancient Soyuz rocket.
Keep cutting costs and you might one day have a system where you could launch a ten million dollar payload, which you could easily insure at your local insurance company.
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Re: Re usability (Score:2)
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What kind of payload would be multi billion dollars?????
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SpaceX's goal isn't to be merely reusable, it's to be fully and rapidly reusable, with no refurbishment. If they require a substantial amount of refurbishment betwen launches, they will consider themselves to have failed.
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The engines in these things operate not terribly far from the limits of materials technology
The whole Space-X strategy from the start has been to use a lot of little less complicated interchangeable engines instead of a big one. A Falcon 9 is 9 engines, the heavy is 27 engines. And because there's so many of them, they don't have to be used at a full burn. It appears likely to be a lot easier to recover and reuse these.
YES, you'd be stupid to not build disposable ones. Like the Soyuz... fifty years and a
In other news for tomorrow .. (Score:2, Informative)
A hi-tech engineering company will continue on with its plans to test a well-engineered aspect of its product that, that after rigorous R&D, is expected to reduce the costs to end users.
It's not Daring. Its business as usual for a company that is doing actual R&D on leading edge products.
But that doesn't mean that I don't want to see it work. Vertical landing rockets are the next step to the world of Tom Corbett, Space Cadet [wikipedia.org]
Re:In other news for tomorrow .. (Score:5, Insightful)
In all honesty, from looking around me these days ... I conclude that doing actual R&D on the leading edge of stuff is itself daring.
Increasingly, companies want to make a "me too" product or do things based on what focus groups tell them is good.
Hell, even some tech companies seem to be retreating from meaningful R&D and focusing on "leveraging and monetizing their IP portfolio".
Nobody is willing to invest in R&D any more unless it gets them a tax break. And in that case, they'll try to tell you to categorize a ton of unrelated stuff as part of the R&D effort so the accountants can maximize the write off.
So, me, I'll still stick with daring. Saying you figure you have a less than 50% chance of success these days is pretty bold.
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You know, I have personally watched tech companies become less willing to invest in pure R&D, less willing to make new things that someone hasn't already made, and be much more beholden to whatever the heck the CEO thinks is the Next Big Thing.
I have been at companies where we went from being innovators to imitators, and where the CEO would routinely make moronic predictions which didn't happen based on what the trends were. And then in six months make an entirely new set of moronic predictions, based
Re:In other news for tomorrow .. (Score:5, Insightful)
" I conclude that doing actual R&D on the leading edge of stuff is itself daring."
In the 1960s, companies hired you and they paid YOU to do R&D.
Today, universities are the R&D branch of corporations. Universities soak up public money (most of it funneled into textbook companies and top-heavy administration) and students pay the university,.
Then the students can get some nice debt, and go begging for the few technical jobs left out there.
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A lot of that's true, but I'm not sure how you think public money passes through universities to textbook companies? (In reality, it's students paying textbook companies directly.)
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A lot of that's true, but I'm not sure how you think public money passes through universities to textbook companies? (In reality, it's students paying textbook companies directly.)
In reality, public money passes through government default subsidized student loan programs to allow students to borrow money at favorable interest rates to allow many students to pay textbook companies that otherwise could not afford to pay textbook companies. But I digress...
Fortunately, student funding/debt has very little to do with how most universities are funding their research. In actuality, most prestigious research universities are pretty much directly funded by public money (including private i
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The money tends to go to the companies that focus on streamlining their production systems and leave the "research" up to their competitors. This kinda worked when there was lots of government funded research (which any company coul
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Increasingly, companies want to make a "me too" product or do things based on what focus groups tell them is good.
We won't mention that vertically-launched multi-stage rockets powered by RP-1/LOX are pretty "me too".
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Yep, that's why everyone lands their boost stage and cuts their costs by a significant fraction... right?
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Yep, that's why nobody lands their boost stage and cuts their costs by a significant fraction... right?
FTFY. Might be true someday, but not today...
Other planets (Score:2)
Is this maneuver easier or harder to do inside the atmosphere of Mars, as compared to Earth? It sounds like a possible plan for return trips from Mars, if the rocket is re-usable.
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Most likely this is a step towards general reusability from a cost perspective, as there are advantages to doing recovery on water (generally less problems if you somehow screw it up I would think).
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The reason for doing recovery on water is that when you launch eastward from Florida the rocket will come down over water unless you expect a ton of fuel to get back to land.
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Also in your favor on Mars, your landing pad isn't pitching up and down on waves. On the other hand, the ground is not necessarily a smooth, flat, level pad. SpaceX has demonstrated the ability to hover, so as long as you have decen
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Dragon does not have enough fuel to both land and launch again. SpaceX hasn't demonstrated that it has sufficient capacity to even do a powered landing. I'm not saying itcan't, but you can't look at a Dragon capsule and consider it a vehicle capable of powering itself to orbital launch velocity, even on Mars.
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This is almost meaningless in terms of Mars. Mars surface gravity is low enough that, for instance, a Falcon 9 first stage could land from orbit and take back off without even having to refuel.
That said, you probably want a different shape to your rocket on Mars - shorter and broader across the base, to minimize surface area per unit volume. It's not like air resistance there is enough to need the skinny pointy things we use here....
A great idea, but... (Score:4, Funny)
The lawsuit will of course be filed in the court of East Texas.
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Jeff Bezons' Blue Origin is already suing SpaceX based on a patent for landing a rocket on a sea platform.
The sea isn't very stable. (Score:4, Insightful)
Trying to balance a big pencil on a postage stamp that's moving unpredictably and simultaneously in 4 axises (pitch, roll, yaw, altitude) doesn't seem to have very high odds of success. And the worse the sea is running, the lower the odds.
If it works, though, count me really impressed by what would surely be a Crowning Moment of Awesome.
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The sea platform isn't the end-goal. This is just to prove that they can safely land it, so they can be approved for it to return to US airspace for a ground landing.
It only has to work a few times, then it'll get mothballed. Or maybe shelved, to use whenever they need an emergency landing platform for some reason.
Re: The sea isn't very stable. (Score:2)
Obligatory Python Variation (Score:5, Funny)
"We've been able to soft-land the rocket booster in the ocean twice so far," says Musk. "Unfortunately, it sort of sat there for several seconds, then tipped over and exploded. [...]"
"Everyone said I was daft to land a rocket in the ocean, but I did it all the same, just to show them. It sank in the ocean. So I built a second one. That sank in the ocean. So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, then sank in the ocean. But the fourth one stayed up!" [imdb.com]
I think I'll go for a walk now...
Re: (Score:3)
This attempt is probably going to fail.
You're probably right but they have data from two other water landings, so it's not like this is completely cross your fingers territory.
It's still amazing and I hope they pull it off. Elon Musk is the man.
Re: (Score:2)
The water landings had accuracy measured in miles, while this landing will require accuracy measured in feet. They hope to achieve that accuracy using the new fins, which have never been used at hypersonic velocities before. There's a lot of never-been-done-before for SpaceX going into this launch.
Re: (Score:2)
Except it wasn't really much of a reusable.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
The shuttle was a complete failure in terms of reusability. It was supposed to cost $657 per pound to launch, and be refurbished for launch in two weeks. Instead it cost $27,000 per pound, and the speed record for refurbishment after Challenger was 88 days.
It ended up costing more than expendable launch systems.