NASA Uses Its First Recycled SpaceX Rocket For a Re-Supply Mission (nypost.com) 93
An anonymous reader quotes the New York Post:
SpaceX racked up another first on Friday, launching a recycled rocket with a recycled capsule on a grocery run for NASA. The unmanned Falcon rocket blasted off with a just-in-time-for-Christmas delivery for the International Space Station, taking flight again after a six-month turnaround. On board was a Dragon supply ship, also a second-time flier. It was NASA's first use of a reused Falcon rocket and only the second of a previously flown Dragon.
Within 10 minutes of liftoff, the first-stage booster was back at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, standing upright on the giant X at SpaceX's landing zone. That's where it landed back in June following its first launch. Double sonic booms thundered across the area. At SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, cheers erupted outside the company's glassed-in Mission Control, where chief executive Elon Musk joined his employees.
The Dragon reaches the space station Sunday. The capsule last visited the 250-mile-high outpost in 2015. This time, the capsule is hauling nearly 5,000 pounds of goods, including 40 mice for a muscle-wasting study, a first-of-its-kind impact sensor for measuring space debris as minuscule as a grain of sand and barley seeds for a germination experiment by Budweiser, already angling to serve the first beer on Mars.
Also onboard were several hundred Star Wars mission patches created by a partnership between Lucasfilm and the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (the non-profit organization managing the ISS National Lab). Space.com reports that Elon Musk named the Falcon X after the original Millennium Falcon in Star Wars.
Within 10 minutes of liftoff, the first-stage booster was back at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, standing upright on the giant X at SpaceX's landing zone. That's where it landed back in June following its first launch. Double sonic booms thundered across the area. At SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, cheers erupted outside the company's glassed-in Mission Control, where chief executive Elon Musk joined his employees.
The Dragon reaches the space station Sunday. The capsule last visited the 250-mile-high outpost in 2015. This time, the capsule is hauling nearly 5,000 pounds of goods, including 40 mice for a muscle-wasting study, a first-of-its-kind impact sensor for measuring space debris as minuscule as a grain of sand and barley seeds for a germination experiment by Budweiser, already angling to serve the first beer on Mars.
Also onboard were several hundred Star Wars mission patches created by a partnership between Lucasfilm and the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (the non-profit organization managing the ISS National Lab). Space.com reports that Elon Musk named the Falcon X after the original Millennium Falcon in Star Wars.
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Get up off Momma's couch! There's a job waiting for you with these guys:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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The budget of NASA is but a tiny fraction compared to the budget of the US military, which is engaged in conflicts all around the world that do not concern the US at all.
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Still, the ISS has very little science in comparison to the enormous costs. The money would have been better spent on 50-100 smaller missions.
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Bullshit. Being contrary just for the sake of it is pathetic. People are actually living in space, motherfucker... You want to go to mars and beyond? First you learn to live in space.
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You want to go to mars and beyond?
Hell no. It makes zero economic or scientific sense.
If we had used all of the money that was flushed down the ISS to build a bunch of robotic space bases on Mars, by now we'd already have all of the science results that any human mission would ever hope to accomplish.
The only thing we'd be missing out on is the flag planting ceremony and selfies that the public always seems so focused on.
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Robotic missions weren't possible back then. Now they are.
A robotic mission to Mars would also advance the state of the art for many other technologies right here on earth, and more cost effectively. Automation is also more generally applicable to real-word problems than figuring out how to keep people alive for a couple of years in a tin can.
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How about all the years of experience in launching from earth and docking in orbit?
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And Spacelab ...
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And how did the scientists get into it?
And out again?
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The best way to get experience is to do the things you actually want to do. Practicing stuff you don't need makes little sense.
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It's worth it just to piss off the flat-earthers, the luddites, and the science-deniers. But we shouldn't be thinking of it just as a science mission. The eventual purpose is to get human colonies going off of earth permanently. Got to get the baby out of the cradle.
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It's worth it just to piss off the flat-earthers, the luddites, and the science-deniers. But we shouldn't be thinking of it just as a science mission. The eventual purpose is to get human colonies going off of earth permanently. Got to get the baby out of the cradle.
Not any more than going to the North Pole will let us colonize the North Pole. We could potentially manage to build a permanently manned outpost, rotating staff every 2-3 years. We simply don't have the technology to turn an environment like Mars into a self-sufficient colony nor do we have the technology to go interstellar. And it's far too simplistic to say we'll create that technology by going or that it's even a stepping stone. Like maybe we need a breakthrough in fusion power here on earth and sending
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I didn't say anything about stars. That's not for this century. The solar system, though, isn't so science-fictional.
If electric power is what you want, we have the technology. It's just too dangerous to keep around on Earth.
I know a few people who have wintered at the South Pole. It's not a self-sufficient colony, but it doesn't need to be.
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...US military, which is engaged in conflicts all around the world that do not concern the US at all.
Ahhh, yet ye forgets all of those 'Industrial War Complex' corporations that need clients for their products, which keeps Americans employed. Right?
Re:Seems like a huge waste of taxpayer money (Score:4, Interesting)
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It's hard to say what a remade Saturn V would cost per flight. But the original Apollo program had an average cost of 1.5 billion $/Saturn V launch (in, IIRC, about 2010 dollars). Including test flights in the denominator and 'full'* dev cost.
* Government contracting accounting, so take with grain of salt. But don't assume it will be any better.
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Everything looks cheap next to the shuttle.
Proton is cheaper per pound to LEO unless you can get the new Saturn V to under 0.5 billion/launch.
Sure you save a bunch on docking adaptors, and save a bunch of EVA time hooking things up. But that isn't going to cut your weight enough.
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But that isn't going to cut your weight enough.
It doesn't? I would have assumed that larger modules are going to have measurably better surface/weight ratio (Skylab had 350 cubic meters of internal volume - about 38% of ISS's volume - at 18% of ISS' mass, i.e., about twice as much internal volume per mass). Not to mention the possibility of using large inflatable modules in the future.
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We're looking backwards at putting up the station. No fair assuming future technology...
You have to make a bunch of assumptions to get maximum Saturn V 'weight to LEO'. Why the maximum weight is an estimate today. It's more than Skylab's all up weight.
You'd be building the station out of repurposed 3rd stage tanks, specially prepared. The 'wet lab' version of skylab that never flew. Which brings up it's own issues. Sure you get a giant mostly empty tank on orbit, with a hardware package on the top. The
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If we zero the NASA budget I guarantee you 100% we stagnate into hopelessness.
The what falcon? (Score:2)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3F1d3QWsyk0
But... (Score:2, Insightful)
NASA said reusable rockets would not work!
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To be fair NASA has tried to create a reusable spacecraft several times (Space Shuttle, Venture Star, DC-X) but each time congress in their "wisdom" butted in. SLS is a perfect example, instead of giving NASA a simple mandate (build a reusable orbital launch vehicle) and a fixed budget a bunch of old politicians proceeded to give NASA a bag of parts (old shuttle hardware) and told them to make a rocket out of it somehow. Now NASA has its managerial issues to be sure, but the current management has done wo
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I wish someone would give me a bunch of old shuttle parts. I bet I could make a car scoot with the engine from a turbo pump.
With all the greenie 'progress' I might even be able to find Hydrogen, but LOX is a problem. Noise might be an issue, I've got cool neighbors and all, but that's a little beyond breaking in a hopped up V8. Tires...drivetrain, gonna cost a fortune, top fuel parts, maybe tank parts, gonna break them. Still worth a try.
For the street of course. They wouldn't allow that monstrosity on
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I bet I could make a car scoot with the engine from a turbo pump.
Well, if you enjoy having a 70,000 hp car...
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Who wouldn't? Be right of a Rush song, two lanes wide...road destroying.
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Well, if you enjoy having a 70,000 hp car...
With a car like that, I could stay with traffic on Arizona 101.
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I wish someone would give me a bunch of old shuttle parts.
Andy Griffith did this on American television at the end of the 70's: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
You might want to watch that to pick up some ideas and pointers.
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I'm old, I watched it on initial release.
The good news and the bad news (Score:5, Informative)
The good news is that it seemed like NASA would be one of the last groups to use reused rockets because of their deep-seated bureaucracy. That they've used both a reused first-stage and a partially reused Dragon shows how far this has really come. And this sort of thing adds up to massive savings for the taxpayer, as well as making satellite launches cheaper for everyone else. Moreover, easy back of the envelope calculations also show that reusing first stages takes drastically less energy than throwing them away and so less CO2 is produced. (When SpaceX switches to their next rocket type which they intend to use the Raptor rocket engine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raptor_(rocket_engine_family) [wikipedia.org] which will use methane, which can be produced using the Sabatier process https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabatier_reaction [wikipedia.org], which will allow in the long-run actually carbon neutral rockets.
The bad news is that as far as it seems, this sort of thing hasn't stopped the Space Launch System from continued to being funded https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System [wikipedia.org]. The SLS is essentially a massively expensive, very large rocket that can only be used once. It has cost billions of dollars and will cost billions more, and it isn't going to be ready for a very long time, and may end up launching only 2 or 3 times. In contrast, SpaceX continues to work on the BFR (Big Falco Rocket https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BFR_(rocket) [wikipedia.org], yes, "Falcon" can also stand for something else), is costing far less to develop than the SLS, will likely have a higher payload to low-earth orbit, and will be fully reusable. What this should be is a wake-up call to stop funding the SLS which is primarily massive pork for a small number of big defense and old space companies rather than a serious development of a useful launch system.
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When launching stuff into space, CO2 is the least of our worries. It's a rounding error compared to everything else.
Re:The good news and the bad news (Score:5, Informative)
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For example, the Falcon 9 uses around 25,000 gallons of kerosene per a launch, which is about the same CO2 output as a moderate sized US town.
As a moderate-sized US town launched into space? Or how exactly are you comparing it to a town?
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They're switching to methane-LOX anyway. And you can consider that the reduction in CO2 from Teslas and solar panels still means Elon Musk is Carbon-Negative. :-)
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Google 'bunker oil' and 'container ship'.
> Yes, as a fraction of total pollution these are small, but we do better by reducing pollution from all sources in general
No, we reduce Co2 by going after the few and worst offenders, like coal powerplants and car emissions, not 1% in the long trail. CO2 producers follow a Pareto pattern, so better use sorting algorithm optimized for it.
>One of the reasons that SpaceX avoided using solid rocket boosters is because
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My understanding was SpaceX avoided SRBs because they are not easily reusable. You can return them for full refurbishment and relaunch but ultimately the SpaceX concept/goal is launch, land, refuel, launch - more like a plane. You can't do that with a SRB.
Pollution is a very minor worry. The rounding error statement is accurate. The amount of CO2 contributed by space launches (not just SpaceX) as a whole is minuscule in a global sense.
While reducing pollution is good, focusing those reductions on the la
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One of the reasons that SpaceX avoided using solid rocket boosters is because they are terrible from a pollution perspective.
Um, no. From the start, they wanted reusable boosters. You can't easily throttle down or start/stop solid rocket boosters. If you're going to try to land a rocket, solid is about the worst choice. Pollution has nothing to do with it.
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There's almost always a tradeoff somewhere. Could be efficiency, could be complexity, could be some other emissions that get increased. In automotive ICEs, for example, there is a direct tradeoff between efficiency increases (and CO2 reduction) via increased compression ratio and combustion temperature, and the increase in nitrogen oxide emissions that results.
"Every little bit helps" is an incredibly wasteful way to approach things, prone to generating unnecessary additional costs while achieving less. The
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The good news is that it seemed like NASA would be one of the last groups to use reused rockets because of their deep-seated bureaucracy.
Not so much NASA. They've tried re-usability on a few programs with varying degrees of success.
Space Launch System
This is where you need to look for the biggest roadblocks to re-use. The traditional aerospace suppliers have been in the business of selling disposable crap. Because that's how they know to make money. And they were not willing to step up and meet SpaceX's benchmark. I imagine that executives at ULA and it's minions are hoping for the next generation of pragmatists to step into Musk's shoes. They will be more lik
Can't compete without reuse (Score:2)
Nobody's going to be able to sell non-reusable rockets, with SpaceX and Blue Origin competing. Unfortunately, ULA's current re-use strategy, so-called "SMART reuse" isn't going to be competitive and they are going to have to come up with another plan, but both ULA and Arianne understand that they can't compete without reuse
ULA's so-called "SMART reuse" is the wrong kind of efficient. It's actually more efficient in use of fuel and lifting power than SpaceX, but because they throw away the tanks and booster
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You do realize NASA used reusable rockets for manned spaceflight for 30 years? The Space Shuttle's main engines were reusable, as well as the solid rocket boosters (they would parachute down into the sea, where they were collected, disassembled, cleaned, repacked with fuel, and reassembled).
NASA's problem with reusable spacecraft has always been cost, not engineering.
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The Space Shuttle's main engines were reusable, as well as the solid rocket boosters (they would parachute down into the sea, where they were collected, disassembled, cleaned, repacked with fuel, and reassembled).
The main engines were more like repairable than reusable, and the only thing recovered from the SRBs was the steel cores, everything else was predictably scrap by the time it was fished out of sea water after being submerged while still hot.
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NASA's problem with...almost everything...isn't cost. Well not directly. It's bureaucracy - which leads to cost.
They're really GOOD at engineering. Amazing even. But like often happens, you can't just let the geeks play. Someone(s) have to oversee them and "manage" them. Not to mention, NASA is one of the larger chunks of the budget that is available to be spent whatever way the political wind blows.
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You're assuming the primary mission of SLS is to put stuff into space instead of distributing money to a large number of voting districts so that politicians can brag about bringing high-tech space jobs to that area.
It's the same as the F-35. The fact that the plane actually flies (well, most of the time it does) is just a bonus.
NASA's Mom is Sooo Broke. (Score:3)
Hundreds of Mission Patches? (Score:2)
So they launched hundreds of Lucas Film|Star Wars Mission Patches [purch.com] into space for what? To hand out to the visiting aliens?
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Maybe [nytimes.com].
Anyone else misinterpret "patches?" (Score:2)
Why are you spreading misinformation? (Score:5, Informative)
First you ask how much of it is replaced and then you immediately claim it's 'practically completely rebuilt'?
Here's a direct quote from the prelaunch press event:
Jessica Jensen: Sure thing. So, the biggest thing is insuring that all the hardware is qualified for multiple flights. And basically we do that with test units that are built to the same specification as the flight hardware, and make sure those can go through multiple life cycles. So for example, we will take one of our engines and fire it in Texas over and over and over again to simulate multiple flights. In between flights, the goal is to not swap out hardware. Basically, every piece of hardware has a service lifetime, based on that testing I just talked about, and if it's still within its service lifetime, we verify that all of the environments on the previous flight were good, then you can just continue to reuse it. We do, in between flights, do very thorough inspections, to make sure that something off-nominal didn't happen on the previous flight. So we go through, we look at critical areas, we inspect welds, but we do not, generally, replace engines. If we need to, we can do that, but in general, we do not do that. So, it's mostly just inspecting everything and making sure we're good to go. One of the other things we do, as you know, our stages go to Texas prior to each mission, where we do a stage firing. And after that we do a series of pressure tests and all kinds of avionics checkouts on the vehicle afterwards. We do that same set of tests now after each flight. And what that is, it gives us high confidence moving into the mission, like Kirk said, we're basically at an equivalent level of risk as we were on the first flight.
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So far, it looks like the booster is substantially reused, and the block 5 will be even more reusable. However, SpaceX said the first reused Dragon was stripped to the pressure vessel and completely rebuilt, due at least in part to salt water intrusion. This cost as much as a new one. It's not clear how much they can save on the Dragon without ground landing, and NASA pretty much shot down the path that SpaceX was taking to develop that when they rejected having legs pass through the heat shield.
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Well, parent was talking about 'the rocket' which I take to currently mean the booster, and has a much broader impact on accessibility to space than Dragon.
Here's another quote from the press event:
"...Some of the initial ones we flew, a lot of those components on those vehicles were only going to fly one time. One of the biggest things we did, starting on roughly the CRS-8 mission, is we significantly increased the water sealing capability of the vehicle. And that allowed for a much easier refurbishment pr
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This capsule flew on CRS-6. We have yet to see the new sealing capacity result in reuse. SpaceX took a while to tell us that the first reused Dragon cost as much or more than (their words) a new one. I would assume this one's the same. Hopefully when they fly a later Dragon the'll tell us something of how much was reused.
NASA (Score:2)
Has no more excuses for failing now.
Just write the check to SpaceX from now on.