SpaceX To Test Recovered First Stage, Then Put It On Display (floridatoday.com) 108
schwit1 writes: Rather than re-fly it, Elon Musk suggested that, after some testing, SpaceX will likely put its first recovered Falcon 9 first stage on display instead. '"[We will] do a static fire at the launch pad there, to confirm that all systems are good and that we are able to do a full thrust hold-down firing of the rocket," Musk said after the stage landed. The static fire will also test the modifications SpaceX has made to Pad 39A to support its rockets.
After that though, the stage will become a display piece. "I think we will keep this one on the ground for tests that prove it could fly again and then put it somewhere — just because it is quite unique," Musk said.' Since they already have a satellite company, SES, willing to buy that first stage, this only underlines how this last Falcon 9 launch changes everything. I don't think the change has sunk in with most people, yet. The last launch was not a one-time event. SpaceX intends to recover as many of its first stages as it can in all future launches. Their Falcon 9 first stage is no longer expendable. Thus, they can afford to put this first recovered stage on display because they expect all future first stages to fly again.
After that though, the stage will become a display piece. "I think we will keep this one on the ground for tests that prove it could fly again and then put it somewhere — just because it is quite unique," Musk said.' Since they already have a satellite company, SES, willing to buy that first stage, this only underlines how this last Falcon 9 launch changes everything. I don't think the change has sunk in with most people, yet. The last launch was not a one-time event. SpaceX intends to recover as many of its first stages as it can in all future launches. Their Falcon 9 first stage is no longer expendable. Thus, they can afford to put this first recovered stage on display because they expect all future first stages to fly again.
That's Ridiculous (Score:5, Interesting)
You can't just take an amazing piece of expensive kit like that and essentially throw it away! Oh wait - that's what we've been doing with the first stage of every launch forever until just now. Carry on then.
More seriously, congratulations, SpaceX, for taking such a big step forward for humankind.
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It would then become the first ever re-usable first-stage to ever be launched twice successfully.
I agree.
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That can be the 2nd one. And hopefully that one flies a dozen times or more before being put in a museum.
This one is already "first payload booster to make a controlled landing", which is really the most critically important part.
What if there's an accident and it blows up on its 2nd flight? Just lost a piece of history.
Re-using it is just standard engineering and maintenance at this point, it's the first landing that's really the historical accomplishment.
Re:That's Ridiculous (Score:5, Interesting)
There's a couple side effects of this capability that I haven't seen discussed in regards to abort as well.
1) First stage partial failure abort to ground: If there's a non-catastrophic problem on the first stage that will prevent the payload from being injected into the proper orbit (for example, multiple engine failure), there's the potential to abort to ground. Now, this isn't exactly the same - they've still got a rather lot of weight on them (and correspondingly a lot of fuel inside); it'd help if the second stage were able to jettison its propellant (otherwise the nitrogen gas jets and grid fins have to work harder). But it might be possible to re-land the whole rocket, payload and all, so that they can fix it and then re-launch.
2) Second stage hard abort to ground/sea: If there's a catastrophic problem on the first stage but successful separation of the second stage intact, they could try to "land" the second stage and provide partial potential for recovery of the payload. This is more difficult - the second stage has no grid fins, no nitrogen gas thrusters, no landing legs and only one engine. But burned out of propellant it's quite light, it probably has enough thrust, even with the payload attached - and if it just separated from the first stage, it certainly has enough propellant to get back to the pad and line itself up for a gentle, fully vertical descent. The lack of nitrogen gas thrusters would make stability much more difficult, they'd have to land just from gimbaling... but it's probably doable if crosswinds aren't too strong. And they have no landing legs, so they're going to damage the nozzle, and the thing may well fall over. But it's only 1/3rd the length of the first stage, so maybe not, it depends. At sea it'd fall over into water. In short, you could actually get your payload back not at a speed of "500 meters per second smack into the ground", but either "less than 1 meter per second" or "less than 1 meter per second, then a secondary lateral thud at several meters per second followed by the explosion of whatever residual propellant remains" Depending on the payload and how it's stowed, it could potentially be partially or completely reusable.
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I think post CRS-7 mission, all Dragon capsules are capable of performing an emergency soft landing in the event of booster failure. Second stage anything recovery isn't really on the drawing board for another 18 months at least, at this point.
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multiple-engine failure = not enough engines left to stop it from crashing into the ground. and it's also much harder because the rocket is top heavy. and there is also all the extra fuel from the shutdown engines. lottery ticket time.
second stage with an unplaneed return to water = lost rocket. you gonna make the thing float as well as make it waterproof [water in satellite = new satellite] and also make the satellite support sideways forces. and when do you do this? if you get the thing to separation
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Falcon 9 can take off on 89% thrust (one engine down). If it loses a second engine *immediately* on takeoff, it might crash. However, remember that those engines are burning through the rocket's fuel, lightening the load considerably. Typically, the fuel is exhausted after 3 minutes of flight; call it 27 engine-minutes. At that point, (or rather, right before that point, when there's still a tiny bit of fuel) the first stage is so light that even throttled all the way down, a single Merlin 1D engine produce
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It seems like the chance of messing up whatever cargo it was (say, a commsat) is pretty high with an aborted mission to the point it's better to avoid damage to the pad and other stuff on the ground. If you are taking fuel, food, or supplies up then the cargo is only worth something when it's in space. A tank of oxygen can be replaced easy enough.
But if you have people on board, there is good reason to get the vehicle over land where ejection seats can be used at low velocity and decent height.
Getting s
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Re:That's Ridiculous (Score:4, Informative)
Exactly. If they want the stats on their rocket to be comparable to SpaceX's, they need to reduce it to a quarter of its current weight (to match the wet/dry mass ratio of Falcon 9's first stage) and have it reverse about a thousand meters per second of lateral momentum and land without the ability to hover. Because these things are the consequences of SpaceX having to make something that functions as an actual first stage of a launch vehicle, rather than a joy ride for rich people.
Good luck with that, BO.
Bue Origin may yet prove relevant (Score:3)
Or alternately, they launched and soft-landed a re-tuned second stage, as an admittedly much simplified test of the landing technology. As I recall their original plan was to use this kind of engine for their second stage, and one based on an entirely different fuel for the first stage.
Now, wouldn't it be interesting if there were eventually multiple companies producing different second stages all designed to be lifted to sub-orbit by Falcons? Blue Origin may yet prove more relevant than it initially appea
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What about DC-X and Armadillo Aerospace designs then? Both flew and landed using their rockets.
Don't know about Armadillo but the DC-X was more of a technology demonstrator. It significantly lacked payload capacity to act as a first stage for anything useful. If McDonnell-Douglas were to continue on, the DC-X would probably evolved into something quite different. However, McD-D had cash flow problems and were eventually bought by Boeing.
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Not only that, in the process of studying this and tearing it down to look for flaws they will probably ruin it, or at least make it very expensive to refurbish. They're making lemonade out of a lemon.
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Did they hire someone from NASA? (Score:2)
>> SpaceX will likely put its first recovered Falcon 9 first stage on display instead
Hey wait, did SpaceX just hire someone from NASA?
Wouldn't the smarter thing to do be to fly it over and over and over again until it broke to test whether the tolerances (included expected wear/lifespan) specified in the design are accurate or not?
Re: Did they hire someone from NASA? (Score:1)
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Pretty much. I don't know where I'd heard this but, in the original thread discussing this, I made mention of this same thing. In that thread, I mentioned that they'd be testing it, checking for wear, tearing it down in a non-totally-destructive fashion, and rebuilding it so that they could put it on display at their HQ or, perhaps, in a museum.
I don't know where it was that I'd heard this but I think it was someone from SpaceX - probably not Musk personally, in an online news blurb video or maybe some smal
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It was all so very exciting and, really, it has been rather dull for the last few decades. Sure, there were great things - like ISS, Hubble, and the likes. There were tragedies and much was learned. I remember the first time the Shuttle went up and hoping that was going to usher in a new age, it did not.
Yet, seeing that "simple" thing of the first stage not only landing but landing so perfectly and so close to exactly on the X brought back some of the same feelings and levels of excitement (and dreams, and
Re:Did they hire someone from NASA? (Score:4, Insightful)
That would indeed be the "smarter" thing to do in terms of pure engineering. In terms of company morale though, possibly not. It may be a much smarter management decision may well be to help everyone to realise how awesome an achievement they were just part of, and to keep company morale up, because it will increase productivity enough to offset the engineering benefit.
Re:Did they hire someone from NASA? (Score:5, Insightful)
Or, they've found a bunch of things they don't like and they are going to fix it before next flight. Like engineering.
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They made this decision before they'd even looked at the returned rocket.
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The debate kind of suprised me, I always thought the first one would end up a promotion piece. After all he finally accomplished a vertical powered landing of a 'spaceship' reminicent of the 1950's silver needle spaceships that always landed upright and powered. He just showed us all a reality strait out of our childhood fantasies. Hell, I would have kept it too.
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lovingly hand-crafted by Space-X's engineers... (Score:2)
So much for economies of scale...
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Not really, for a number of reasons.
1) Recovery is only possible on launches where there's enough capacity left over to compensate for the altitude/velocity of the stage at separation (it's not a simple mass issue, lighter payloads that need more delta-V end up with the first stage moving faster than heavy / low delta-V payloads).
2) In theory, vastly reduced launch prices mean a vastly larger market growing for long periods of time.
3) Rockets don't last forever.
4) Updates to the design provide better safety
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Not really, for a number of reasons.
1) Recovery is only possible on launches where there's enough capacity left over to compensate for the altitude/velocity of the stage at separation (it's not a simple mass issue, lighter payloads that need more delta-V end up with the first stage moving faster than heavy / low delta-V payloads).
Actually, tell me more about this! They had previously been trying to recover their first stage rockets by landing them on the sea platforms, which is understandably much harder. Has SpaceX given up on this? Or did they just backpedal a bit and send up enough extra fuel during this last launch to return to the launch site just to keep Blue Origin from sucking up the limelight and snagging a relatively "easy" stationary pad landing? Not a bad move, considering the past two failed attempts at a sea landi
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I think the sea platform was a different issue. My understanding was that they weren't authorized to try a land recovery because it's they hadn't proven the technology, and no one wanted to be the scapegoat when the rocket blew up an orphanage full of nuns.
While this summer's sea landing failed, it was still successful enough to justify letting SpaceX use a land-based landing point.
Caveat: I have no idea where my brain got this information, but it was probably from reading uninformed posters like me. I co
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Landing back at the Cape requires more fuel, too. One of the reasons this happened on an Orbcomm launch is the payload was relatively light, leaving more fuel to turn around. After separation the first stage is going 3000 m/sec in the wrong direction.
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I'm sure they have a lot of former NASA employees on their payroll, not sure what that has to do with anything.
They're scheduled to make roughly one launch a month, so if all goes to plan they should soon have plenty of rockets to run tests with, they just want to keep the first one as a souvenir.
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They're scheduled to make roughly one launch a month, so if all goes to plan they should soon have plenty of rockets to run tests with, they just want to keep the first one as a souvenir.
I think the more interesting souvenir would be the first rocket to be reused.
Maybe they'll fly the next one twice and then put it on display.
Send it to Mos Eisley or Mos Espa? (Score:3)
Re:sentimental crap (Score:4, Funny)
Yeah! And let's dismantle those stupid pyramids in Egypt, too! Surely someone in that area could use those huge rectangle rocks!
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They already did that. The pyramids used to be faced in polished white limestone, as well as topped with gold points. The facing was stripped for other buildings and the gold points were melted down.
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Color me confused, but if it does on its 10th launch then how are they supposed to store it? Do you mean "store the wreckage"? Rockets aren't like cars that just break down on the side of the road.
Blue Origin's Response? (Score:2)
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Bezos didn't start the club, it started with the DC-X, SpaceX continued it with the Grasshopper (followed by the F9R Dev1 rocket), then Bezos arrived with the New Shephard rocket for the first suborbital flight, and then SpaceX has the first 'stage1 of an orbital mission' to land safely.
Each of these are milestones, but it's hardly fair to say that Bezos started the club.
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...and while you're at it close all the museums, and those public spaces. They're kind of wasteful too. Education is just an intellectual pissing contest, so maybe we should close all the schools and colleges! Imagine all the money we'd save! Within a generation or two we wouldn't even be aware of the history and culture we've sacrificed.
Or, we could just put that sucker in a traveling museum and let lots of people get interested and excited about space again.
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Not everything must, or should, be done for an "economic purpose." Some things, like pure theoretical physics research or even space and space related things, should and can be done without the need for it to be an economical purpose. In this case, there's a quasi-economic purpose. Mostly, by outsourcing launches to SpaceX, we may end up with less expensive launches and the, perhaps, see economic purposes or even just scientific purposes.
Frankly, it's still being paid for by the government and the governmen
Let's not get too excited... (Score:2)
... until we see what kind of percentage of successful landings they get. Doing it once doesn't automatically 'change everything'. Let's see how robust this really turns out to be...
Great Moments in Private Enterprise Space History (Score:5, Funny)
2015: Space X recovers the first reusable rocket stage and doesn't reuse it.
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Someday, I'll have to give my lecture on irony. There seems to be a need.
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Knowing a little about you and what you've publicly disclosed, well... Umm... It'd be ironic if, when you gave your lecture, you got it wrong.
I'm assuming that you're not going to get it wrong. There are, on the other hand, lots of people who chime in to claim, "That's not irony!" Even though it is irony. Oddly, I'm not sure that's ironic. Having a desire to learn and improve my writing skills has led me to actually read the dictionary and some additional information about the definition of ironic.
A cardiol
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The song... Hmm... I forget all the lyrics (or most of them) but rain on your wedding day is not ironic. However, if she had had some history of weddings and they all went off without a hitch and then said that this next one wouldn't be canceled because... Wait, what? I'm wasting too much time here. ;-)
Ahh, yes the Alanis Morrisette ironic paradox. If the song is supposed to be about ironic things and actually called "ironic", yet none of the examples given in the song are actually ironic, that is ironic itself. The paradox is that if the whole title and song is ironic, then the title of the song is appropriate again and the song is not ironic anymore, and then you start back at the beginning :D
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The song... Hmm... I forget all the lyrics (or most of them) but rain on your wedding day is not ironic. However, if she had had some history of weddings and they all went off without a hitch and then said that this next one wouldn't be canceled because... Wait, what? I'm wasting too much time here. ;-)
You got it wrong. If it rains on your wedding day, that's just a bummer. If you change your wedding day because it's supposed to rain, and then it doesn't rain on the original date but does rain on the date to which you change, that is Irony. The free ride when you've already paid might be ironic, if you bought a day pass instead of a transfer specifically because you were going to have to pay for that ride. Basically every example in the song is almost ironic. And then, well, see the other reply to this co
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LOL I believe I said that it wasn't irony which is what you said... The second, I did not actually reach any conclusions and state if it was ironic or not. You said I got it wrong and then said what I said.
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Since we're coming up on a holiday, I'll give the very short version of the lecture:
"If an AC rando uses the word 'irony' I'll give you evens that it's used incorrectly."
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Hmm... You're more generous than I. Ah well... No holiday here yet. It's raining. Saturday night there's gonna be party. Everything is set to go. Even a couple of /.ers are to be in attendance.
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Re:Recovery != Reuseability (Score:5, Insightful)
You know nothing about rocketry.
A rocket doesn't become damaged and non-recoverable just because it flew for five minutes through the air. The only reason people haven't been able to recover rockets up to now is because the actual act of taking a large moving object at 5000 km/h, decelerating it, maneuvering it through the atmosphere, and landing it gently is really really hard. That, and the thermal stresses on the engines mean that most rocket engines up to now have not been able to sustain multiple full-length firings without refurbishment.
SpaceX has _already_ demonstrated that it has solved both of these problems. The Merlin rockets that SpaceX uses are actually fired around 10 times before even getting mounted on an actual launch vehicle! And no, they aren't 'refurbished' after test firing. The engines have been designed with full re-usability in mind - fill up the tank again and go. The launch vehicles themselves go through static firings before being launched through space. In static firings they get most of the vibration and thermal stresses that they would get if they were actually flying (most of these stresses come from the rocket engines). The point is that SpaceX is already 're-using' its stages. It's just that it has never re-used one that has not been strapped down to the ground. Given all of this, it would be MIGHTY strange if boosters that had flown could not be re-used.
If you're betting on this being the case, don't. You'll probably lose the bet.
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If you think that a static test exposes an airframe to the same stress as an actual launch and bringing it back down, you know nothing about rocketry. In fact, you are delusional.
Re:Recovery != Reuseability (Score:4, Insightful)
It's easy to pretend to know stuff. Everyone and their mother nowadays seems to be an expert on rocketry.
It's harder to actually know stuff. The most important causes for failure on rockets are engine failures, software failures, and structural failures, in that order. Engine failures are typically caused by excessive vibration, thermal stress, combustion containment failures (hot gases touching the walls), turbopump failures, and a few other reasons, and these will often show up in static tests. In fact this is the whole point of static testing. As for software, it's the same whether you're re-using an airframe or not. Finally, as for structural failures, they are caused by vibration, thermal stress, and aerodynamic stress. Of these, a pretty good picture can be constructed from static testing, with only aerodynamic stresses left out. Granted, a single-engine test isn't very accurate for diagnosing problems; full-rocket static tests are better.
While flying through the air in a normal mission profile puts a lot of stress on the airframe, it doesn't do any irreversible damage on the airframe, unless the rocket is very badly designed. Going outside the mission profile (facing the wind the wrong way) can and will do irreversible damage, but spacex are very careful to bring their rockets down gently. If you want to bet that a recovered falcon 9 first stage can't be used, the only way that argument will work is if you argue that the airframe somehow suffers irreversible damage during the recovery maneuver. Other than this, it would be extremely strange.
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If you want to bet that a recovered falcon 9 first stage can't be used, the only way that argument will work is if you argue that the airframe somehow suffers irreversible damage during the recovery maneuver. Other than this, it would be extremely strange.
The real question is how much work and labour will it take to re-certify the systems for flight. If it costs $70 million to re-certify a $60 million rocket, it becomes a case of "it's possible but not worthwhile." What people forget in a lot of these situations is that the biggest ticket item in most of these projects is the labour involved, not the cost of the hardware itself.
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It would be very, very strange if it cost $70 million to 're-certify' a falcon 9 first stage. I can't find the source right now but I remember reading that refurbishment costs are estimated around $0.5 million, and it would be strange if the certification cost were greater (or even equal to) the refurbishment cost.
The current Merlin engine design can go through about ~20 full-duration firings without any issues. I wouldn't be surprised if they could eventually get it up to ~100 firings or more.
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> A static test does not expose an airframe to the same stress as an actual launch and bringing it back down.
Yes that's completely true and I never said otherwise. But the fact that SpaceX can test fire a rocket stage multiple times, launch it, and recover it again give high confidence to their ability to be able to re-use a launched rocket, simply because so much of what could go wrong in an actual mission could also go wrong in a test firing.
Re: Recovery != Reuseability (Score:2)
You do know that's why they are doing a static test with it right?
Basically nobody would want to put a payload on top of it as is - they want to make sure it would light and burn without spontaneous unplanned disassembly. Which is exactly what they are doing.
My opinion (Score:2)
They should follow the procedure for some experimental aircraft (well, somewhat). Go ahead and keep the first recovered stage as a souvenir. The next one that comes down though should be torn apart down to its last bolt for testing on each and every component, including destructive tests like testing the shear force of bolts, the pressure limits of tanks, break points of struts, etc. If everything looks good and there is no unexpected wear and tear on the stage reuse the next one after intensive non-des
Like the Spirit of Saint Louis (Score:4, Insightful)
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His ass probably hurt too much to fly back.
On a more serious note, flying non-stop across the Atlantic was a stunt. Doing it once had very little value; doing it twice none at all. But the modern launch market is very different - if SpaceX can re-launch the first stage without rebuilding it that's tens of millions right to
Misleading/Inaccurate comment. (Score:2)
After landing in Paris, Lindbergh flew the Spirit of St. Louis through various European countries. Then, after it was returned to the US (via steamship), it was flown on a goodwill tour of North and Central America.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
My grandfather saw the Spirit of St. Louis after it crossed the Atlantic and always talked about how it was a "real airplane", not something that just did a stunt once.
Space is already full of crap (Score:2)
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True, but if launches get cheap enough that this risk becomes significant, somebody (probably NASA) will probably start looking at ways to clean up space. Send up a small spacecraft (unmanned, of course) with a couple of big catcher nets and the rest of it engine and propellant. Match velocities with particularly risky junk (or at least, get close to matching) and overtake it slowly, so the stress on the catcher isn't too great and you aren't creating more debris. Collect as much as you safely can on each f
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