SpaceX Successfully Launches Falcon Heavy Rocket With Two Flight-Proven Booster Cores (techcrunch.com) 107
SpaceX succeeded in launching its third mission with the Falcon Heavy high-capacity rocket it first launched successfully last year. "The rocket's STP-2 mission took off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida towards the end of a four-hour launch window that opened at 11:30 PM EDT on Monday, with liftoff taking place at 2:30 AM EDT on Tuesday after the launch was pushed back so that the ground crew could complete 'additional ground system checkouts,'" reports TechCrunch. From the report: The launch was a first for SpaceX in a number of different ways -- it's the first night launch for Falcon Heavy, which treated observers to a unique light show. It's also the first time SpaceX has launched the Falcon Heavy with flight-prove boosters, and it used two: The boosters on either side of Falcon Heavy's central rocket were used on the Arabsat-6A mission that launched on April 11. Finally, it's the first time that Falcon Heavy has carried a payload for crucial SpaceX customers -- including the U.S. Air Force, the Department of Defense, NASA and more. To accomplish its mission, it'll continue carrying out a series of maneuvers over the next several hours to deploy its payload of 24 different spacecraft into their three separate target orbits. UPDATE - UTC 7:19: The center core narrowly missed landing on the "I Still Love You" drone ship by a few feet. We're still waiting to hear the status of deployments for the 24 satellites onboard.
Two out of three boosters landed okay (Score:5, Informative)
Re: Two out of three boosters landed okay (Score:5, Insightful)
Agreed, it was close.
And comparing this center core landing to April's, the drone ship in April was only 25 miles off the shore (i.e. close to the initial launch site). This launch, 700 miles off-shore. That's a heck of a tiny target to hit when this center core started back much, much higher than April's. And at night.
I really am continued to be in awe of how fast this company advances the tech. They're not afraid to blow up a core, since they'll learn from the data and adapt quickly.
Re: Two out of three boosters landed okay (Score:5, Insightful)
Say what you will about Musks unfulfilled promises... but what he does deliver is still leagues above and beyond what my cynical adult heart dreamed possible a decade ago...
Re: Two out of three boosters landed okay (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep, he's single-handly rebooted public interest in space flight.
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...and electric cars. ...and brain interfaces. ...and mars.
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And for the first time, they caught one of the fairing halves in the net! (Elon tweeted about it).
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Most importantly for the long term: private manned missions will be able to assume far more risk than NASA manned missions.
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Everybody who gets sent up by any agency and nation knows the risk factor, and willingly assumes it. But when NASA loses a crew, the whole space program stops dead for two years of public recrimination and accepting inputs not just from people who can fix the problem but from outright Luddite trolls. They too are voters, so NASA is required to listen to them. But in the private sector, engineers can just fix the problem so life can go on.
For a historical comparison, look at the early history of commercial a
Re: Two out of three boosters landed okay (Score:5, Informative)
To be fair, blowing up a core is normal for all other space launch companies. The space shuttle main tank, for example, actually had an explosive charge inside that would be detonated as it fell back to Earth, to ensure it'd sink to the bottom of the ocean.
The important thing is that it didn't damage the drone ship, since they don't currently have any spares on the east coast. If it were damaged, they'd have to dispose of all boosters/cores that would otherwise have to land on it, until it were repaired/replaced.
Re: Two out of three boosters landed okay (Score:5, Informative)
The important thing is that it didn't damage the drone ship, since they don't currently have any spares on the east coast.
The descent path targets a spot just off the ship and then corrects at the last minute to pin a landing.
That way if the booster runs out of fuel or hypergol the ship is spared. So far none of these near-misses have been a guidance problem (at least since the first droneship landing was successful.
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For landings out in the ocean, the incoming trajectory intentionally targets a point away from the droneship. If the on board computer determines a drone ship landing is possible and within safety margins it executes a maneuver in the last leg of descent to target the ship - that way if something bad happens midflight it can just follow momentum down to a watery grave and not need to execute a last minute maneuver to avoid damaging the ship.
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For landings out in the ocean, the incoming trajectory intentionally targets a point away from the droneship.
It's the same with landing on land, they aim a bit off the coast then course correct to the LZ if everything looks good. Or nominal, as SpaceX would say.
At least they showed the crash this time. (Score:1)
They said the center core was moving 20% faster than the last one they landed, and I'm not sure all the engines that were supposed to be on were on; I'll have to look at the recording later.
They're still booting out satellites now, so I'll wait to rewind, lol.
Well Done, Elon!
NASA's SLS is Years late, and Billions over budget; They should give You their Budget, we'd be on the Moon, and Mars by now.
How's it feel NASA, to have to hitch a ride to orbit due to incompetency?
Re:Hey don't blame NASA. Blame Congress. (Score:5, Insightful)
NASA isn't allowed to cut back (on staffing, facilities, etc), or even reshuffle significantly, which essentially guarantees that everything they do will be expensive. The way that they historically had been contracting things out (cost-plus) just made it worse; cost-plus contracts unsurprisingly led to companies just billing hours for other overbudget projects onto NASA contracts.
There's a lot of brilliant people working at NASA, but it's organizationally broken by design - because congress sees it at a jobs programme.
SpaceX Needs Back-up Beepers! (Score:2)
The two side boosters landed okay, but the center core missed the drone ship -- looked pretty close though.
Seriously, it's starting to look like a skilled driver backing a truck into a loading dock.
When is Elon going to add back-up beepers to these things?
Do rocket engines count as white reverse lights?
Congrats on another successful launch and mostly successful recovery. Inverted pendulum indeed. I am awestruck.
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Looks like it was on target then at the last second tipped over.
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Suck it, NASA! (Score:2, Interesting)
SLS is how many billions over budget, and how many years late?
By the time you get your shit together, Elon will be selling you Ice Cream when you land.
Remember when NASA did cool things, that weren't RC cars?
I do, It was the 60's.
Re:Suck it, NASA! (Score:5, Insightful)
The only reason SLS exists is to keep a bunch of workers who used to make parts for the shuttle project (the solid rocket boosters in particular) employed (and voting for the politicians who keep their jobs going)
Re:Suck it, NASA! (Score:5, Insightful)
SLS is how many billions over budget, and how many years late? By the time you get your shit together, Elon will be selling you Ice Cream when you land.
I don't think anyone at NASA will be sad about having a working heavy lifter.
Re:Suck it, NASA! (Score:5, Interesting)
If you can only afford to launch it a couple times, what's the point? And the way things are going, the larger, more capable, and many-orders-of-magnitude Starship may well launch ahead of than even SLS Block 1. The Block 1 test flight date is currently penciled in for June 2020, but they're now "reassessing" that, and yet another pushback is expected. Block 2 isn't even supposed to begin work until the late 2020s (read: Block 2 will never happen ;) ). Meanwhile, Starship Hopper is just about to start its untethered flight tests (already did a tethered test) and orbital test craft are being built at crazy speed at two separate sites. Multiple, of course, so that you can risk losing them in testing in order to iterate faster. The production line for Raptor engines is designed to make an average of 500 per year (2 per day with an expected average 70% uptime). That's enough for a little more than 1 complete stack (Starship + Super Heavy) per month.
Re:Suck it, NASA! (Score:5, Interesting)
And remember that Block 1 is a SLS first stage and boosters, and a slightly modified Delta IV upper stage. It's a half-done SLS, a configuration originally intended for a single booster test flight, being given its own configuration name more for appearances (kind of like how Ares 1-X involved no actual Ares 1 hardware, but was instead a Shuttle SRB with a dummy segment and mass simulator upper stage).
Re:Suck it, NASA! (Score:5, Insightful)
You deserve to be modded into oblivion for comparing rovers to remote control cars.
But I get it, you only think something is cool technology if there's fire coming from its arse.
Elon doesn't do Gimme Jobs... (Score:2)
For No Talent Engineers.
NASA is a huge suck at the tit of government tax dollars, while providing the occasional WOW! photograph that costs 100 million each.
They could have actually done something in the 60's, but the fire went out a long time ago, and they are satisfied with someone else doing the work, while they watch from the sidelines.
Building RC cars at a million apiece isn't getting space exploration anywhere a manned mission couldn't go, and would relight that fire.
I can hear the bitterness and age
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For No Talent Engineers. NASA is a huge suck at the tit of government tax dollars, while providing the occasional WOW! photograph that costs 100 million each.
Oh just fuck off.
I can hear the bitterness and age in your voice that tells me you know I'm right, lol.
right to the asylum where they can treat those strange voices in your heard.
But hey, look how "right" you were. The mods have spoken.
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Half right.
NASA actually does do cool things. You got that part right.
But SpaceX is pushing the state of the art for rocketry by making re-use normal and actually saving costs that way, unlike the Shuttle which was "reused" but required so much refurb that it was still monstrously expensive to fly it.
There is a strong benefit to driving down launch costs.
Re: Suck it, NASA! (Score:4, Insightful)
"Nothing new is happening!", says the person responding to a rocket launch that simultaneously landed two huge fast-turnaround low-refurb-cost first-stage boosters of a 64t-to-LEO private rocket that just launched 24 different payloads to three different orbits, for peanuts, as well as catching its fairing in a net on a moving ship, following up a mission that simultaneously launched 60 mass-produced comsats in a single launch (and landing), which can provide lower latency and higher bandwidth than most broadband connections - again, for a launch cost a small fraction as much as every other launch provider on Earth.
Yeah, totally mundane. ;)
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Each of the rockets you linked to would require four launches to loft the same payload, making for a $400M price tag. Way to prove his point for him. :)
Re: Suck it, NASA! (Score:2)
> Everything they have done has already been achieved before by nasa.
Hmmm. I guess I missed the video of NASA rockets doing controlled vertical landings onto concrete pads near the launch site. Care to point out the videos I overlooked on YouTube?
Or, being REALLY mean... please show us the tastefully-appointed interior of a NASA launch vehicle designed to look like a high-end sports car. Seriously, The designers behind Boeing's Starliner probably died a little bit inside & cried the first time they
Landed by skilled pilots, lol. (Score:2)
Idiot.
This made me Lol. (Score:2)
Great post. :)
Re:Suck it, NASA! (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, one reason to be impressed is that SpaceX is doing it at a far lower cost, with a far higher mission cadence than any other company or organization out there. And, simply by existing and "just putting up communications satellites" it is forcing ULA to get off their ass and do something meaningful instead of kicking back and soaking taxpayers for stupidly expensive launch vehicles that do the same thing.
Cheap and frequent access to space literally makes everyone's lives on this planet better. The world as we know it would not exist if it wasn't for "just putting up communication satellites."
Get a fucking clue.
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This flight required the maximum performance from a Falcon Heavy with booster recovery...perhaps slightly more than that, considering what happened to the center core. It delivered 24 satellites to multiple orbits involving 4 upper stage burns. It could not have launched on a Falcon 9.
SpaceX is making possible huge boost tomorrow (Score:2)
NASA actually DOES do cool things. Like actual research.
That's nice, but the work SpaceX is doing will lead directly to humans on Mars, possibly visiting other planets - which means a few orders of magnitude greater amounts of science that will be done.
What NASA has done (especially on Mars) is indeed impressive, but sending even just a handful of humans anywhere for a month would equal decades of what robots could accomplish and the variety of research that could be done would be staggering.
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That's nice, but the work SpaceX is doing will lead directly to humans on Mars, possibly visiting other planets - which means a few orders of magnitude greater amounts of science that will be done.
At cost that will also be a few orders of magnitude higher, plus decades worth of engineering to get humans there in the first place. And the things humans can do will still be limited by the instruments they bring.
Not orders of magnitude more expensive (Score:2)
At cost that will also be a few orders of magnitude higher,
The mars rover mission we all know and love was 2.1 billion alone.
For that figure Musk can easily get a supply ship to Mars ahead of people, then a crewed ship later.
Even if it ended up costing a bit more, it is still way under "orders of magnitude" more than Mars missions today - which would be 20 billion. The cost of developing the BFR and all of the launches will be well south of that.
I love NASA but lets not pretend they have costs that cannot
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Remember when NASA did cool things, that weren't RC cars?
I do, It was the 60's.
In the Sixties, Apollo was operating as a quasi-military element of Cold War rivalry, so the operating constraints were very different from today. NASA should stick to science probes, which it is really goood at, and leave manned missions to the private sector where the flat-earth lobby has no input.
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I am replying to overwrite my accidental downvote, and there is no undo on modding. Funny is right next to overrated.
Re:How unscientific (Score:5, Informative)
If it'd been within a few feet, the explosion would've damaged the ship. Fortunately it looked a fair distance off to me. (In metric that's also "fair distance".)
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There's still a little fuel left, apparently, because it made a nice fireball.
Teslarati describes it as "a relatively small explosion/fire what looked like 100-200 meters away from drone ship" (source [teslarati.com]) and while it's true that it's relatively small compared to launchpad rocket explosions, in absolute terms it's still pretty impressive and would certainly damage the ship if it were within a few feet.
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It's basically a Hollywood explosion, a spray of fuel that makes a nice bright fireball but can't do much real damage. It's happened on the deck before: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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So we all mass-imagined that fireball shown live on the camera from it impacting the ocean?
You know that it's impossible to completely remove all liquid fuel from a tank while in flight, right? First, if it's 100% empty when it lands on the pad, there's a chance you run out of fuel before you land and you don't land. Second, the helium that is pumped in to replace used fuel and keep the tank pressurized just might escape due to a tank rupture from impacting the ocean, and the oxygen-rich air that replaces
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Previous landings have included a rocket falling over and exploding on deck, and another one slamming into the ship at high speed and exploding on deck. IIRC the first one was a matter of bulldozing the remains and touching up the paint. The second one needed hull repairs.
Close explosions would mainly take out soft stuff like antennas. The important bits are covered in thick steel plating.
Fairing Half Caught (Score:4, Informative)
For the first time, they (supposedly) have managed to catch a fairing half on their net-equipped boat. Now called Go Ms. Tree, it was formerly named Mr. Steven.
It seems they're now willing to reuse fairings that have landed in the water, presumably after some modifications to make them more waterproof, so it's unclear what the benefit of catching them is now. Regardless, still an accomplishment, although it took twice as long as Elon Musk predicted when he first announced the aspiration.
Re:Fairing Half Caught (Score:4, Informative)
The water landed fairings are only useable for internal SpaceX projects (so StarLink). The net caught ones will be re-usable for other customers.
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I think I saw an article that said the cost of the fairing was somewhere from 6 to 10 percent of the overall launch cost.
Certainly enough there to figure out how to do it.
Re:Fairing Half Caught (Score:4, Insightful)
Saw a quote this morning where Elon said the fairings were $6 million each.
Says something about him, NASA sees a fairing fall into the ocean says "Glad it didn't hit anyone"
Elon sees a fairing fall in the ocean and sees dollar bills falling from the sky, wants to collect as many as possible.
Go Ms. Tree! (Score:2)
Musk has been living The Culture a little too much in the last year, so they made him stop.
Pulsating (Score:2)
What's the pulsating I can see in the "foil" sheet around the second-stage engine (e.g. the top view at around T+00:03:55s)? It appears to happen every second or so.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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I've wondered that myself, as it looks like it's inflating. Someone asked on r/spacex, and a few people responded that it was either due to venting of gas, or vibrations caused by the RCS.
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Cgi
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You can tell because some of the pixels.
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It's inflating from gas leakage, or from frozen atmosphere/propellant boiling off.
Rocket engines leak a bit from all the shaking they experience, even tho they're the best gasket/seals available; deformable copper knife edge type stuff.
They also burn propellant to run the turbo pumps, so you see that just before they light back up.
The Saturn V F1 turbopumps used 33,000hp to feed fuel, for example, made by burning fuel. :)
Metal moves a bit during that kind of energetic motion, lol.
Head gaskets on high power
Newspeak update (Score:1)
Used boosters are now flight-proven boosters. Used cars are now drive-proven cars.
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Mars (Score:1)
Next stop Mars. Right after they deploy the next communications satellite. It is coming real soon now. Right, Rei?
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Yeah, because clearly they should just stop all revenue-generating operations so that other people not involved in those operations can continue doing R&D on a larger rocket system. Oh, and lay off all the people doing ongoing operations since they aren't doing anything any more, and you don't have any revenue coming in.
You have no idea how to run a business, and should probably just stop posting.
Near Miss Planned (Score:4, Interesting)
The center core missing by a "few feet" is expected. That's exactly where it aims as it's coming down. It shifts the last little bit over with the very last burn. They do it that way so that if something goes wrong and it's traveling too fast, the rocket doesn't smash into the drone ship and damage it.
I don't know the exact details on this one, but it sounds like it didn't have enough fuel to complete the last landing burn. This is similar to the first Falcon Heavy launch where it ran out of the ignition fuel used to start the last burn, but my guess is that it was the main propellant this time, since they would have needed more with the velocity involved.
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It was hard to tell what happened. It almost looked like it was commanded to move away from the barge - like it calculated that it wouldn't have enough propellant left to null out its velocity, so instead used it to avoid a collision. But it's possible that what was seen was due to something else - for example, one engine failing to relight, or whatnot.
I'm sure we'll find out in a few days via tweet :)
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Flight-Proven TM (Score:1)
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Yes, and used cars formerly known as "pre-owned" will now be known as "road-proven."
Re:Elon Musk and Rei (Score:5, Informative)
Cite a source please. Plenty of Model S out there with over 100k on the clock and plenty of battery life left. So as not to be a hypocrite, here's an example of a Model S with 100k on the clock, and it has lost a whole 10 miles of range [insideevs.com].
This isn't the battery pack from a Nissan Leaf. They actually engineered a proper charging circuit with consideration of battery longevity.
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Hybrids are a great idea, but the current implementation is not. You don't want the ICE connected to the drive train - all electric drive trains are just so much simpler and more efficient. For cars, you only need about 40 HP in the gas burner to keep up with power draw on long freeway trips.
A 40 HP engine is small enough that you can go crazy with efficiency at the cost of weight, and still come out ahead. You also have no need to throttle up or down quickly. Heck, you can do a constant-speed external
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Not since 2015 for GM.
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Huh? A vast majority of data puts Tesla battery packs lasting to 200k-300k miles. And even after that they have a healthy amount of storage capacity, which last I heard Tesla still intended to utilize for grid storage projects. The only cases of rapid degradation of packs that I have heard of are those where the battery is severely abused (daily supercharger usage, draining the battery pack to zero routinely, etc) or packs from other EV manufacturers that have an almost comically poor design (little to n