Falcon 9 Rocket Overcomes Engine Failure To Deploy 60 Starlink Satellites (spaceflightnow.com) 87
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket overcame a rare in-flight engine failure soon after launch from Florida's Space Coast Wednesday to place 60 satellites in orbit for the company's Starlink Internet network. Spaceflight Now reports: One of the rocket's nine first stage engines shut down prematurely around 2 minutes, 22 seconds, after liftoff from pad 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, an event visible in a view from a camera streaming live video from the Falcon 9 as it climbed into the upper atmosphere. Elon Musk, SpaceX's founder and CEO, confirmed in a tweet that the Falcon 9 experienced an "early engine shutdown on ascent, but it didn't affect orbit insertion." The rocket's other Merlin engines fired a little longer to compensate for the loss of thrust. The rest of the Falcon 9's climb into orbit appeared to go according to plan, and the upper stage deployed the 60 Starlink satellites into orbit around 15 minutes after liftoff. "Shows value of having 9 engines!" Musk wrote on Twitter.
The first stage missed a landing attempt on SpaceX's drone ship parked in the Atlantic Ocean northeast of Cape Canaveral, the second time SpaceX has missed a rocket landing in the company's last three missions. It was not immediately clear whether the engine shutdown on ascent affected the recovery attempt. Musk promised a "thorough investigation" of Wednesday's early engine shutdown before the next Falcon 9 launch, and it was not immediately clear whether the inquiry might prompt launch delays.
The first stage missed a landing attempt on SpaceX's drone ship parked in the Atlantic Ocean northeast of Cape Canaveral, the second time SpaceX has missed a rocket landing in the company's last three missions. It was not immediately clear whether the engine shutdown on ascent affected the recovery attempt. Musk promised a "thorough investigation" of Wednesday's early engine shutdown before the next Falcon 9 launch, and it was not immediately clear whether the inquiry might prompt launch delays.
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Cocky little short, aren't you
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Cocky little short, aren't you
Not anymore.. Covered....
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Of course any of us who lose our own jobs will have bigger things to worry about. Let alone a parti
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Who said anything about Mars?
Colonizing Mars is a long-term project not entirely unlike building old cathedrals - nobody who starts the project will live to see it finished, and the goals are rather esoteric.
The asteroid belt is where the immediate wealth is at to pay for developing space - mountains of relatively high-purity raw materials just waiting to be harvested. A single modest-sized metallic asteroid likely contains enough platinum, gold, etc,etc,etc to completely destroy the market value on Earth,
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As for your analogy, Christ was persistently indifferent to cathedrals and the equivalent. His priority is help, here, now.
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What does Christ have to do with the Church? They were the ones building cathedrals, not him.
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I thought I kind of implied that already. Though whether Mars (or cathedrals for that matter) is a priority is very much a subjective choice. It's not like the rich people who would be funding a Mars colony are terribly likely to fund anything of value to the Average Joe either way.
The practical application of space is mining the asteroid belt for wealth beyond the dreams of avarice.
Mars is a more esoteric goal - to put humanity and human civilization on a path toward long-term survival, rather than event
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All fair points. But while we're on the subject of Mars and quasi-religious...
"How do you like your women? Blonde? Brunette? Redhead?"
"Brunette."
"Slim. Athletic. Voluptuous."
"Athletic."
"Demure. Aggressive. Sleazy. Be honest."
"Sleazy. ... Demure."
I'm ready to compare ROI in 150 years.
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Depends. If you're in the terrestrial platinum business, and I'm not, then there's great benefit to me to sell my cheap asteroid platinum at considerably lower cost than you can afford to mine it for, and seize the entire market for myself.
Of course, I could try to maximize my total profit by just barely undercutting your price and milking the slowly falling market price - but I'd need to collude with all the other asteroid miners to do so, or they'd just undercut me. In a free market price=cost of produc
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But as you've said, the market for platinum would immediately collapse, rendering the value virtually nonexistent.
The second part of your argument is stronger, if still dubious. You'd have to show specific ways that platinum or other raw materials are not substitutable in producing other goods, to the degree the extraordinary costs of asteroid mining still makes it viable.
Personally, I don't think that is economically realistic. However, anyone who feels otherwise is free to pursue it, as long as -they- a
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Sure, but you won't collapse the market right away, just send it into a downward spiral.
Consider gold - at a rough guess there's a total of somewhere around 200,000 tons of mined gold in circulation. Increasing that amount by 10% probably wouldn't change the value dramatically. But would amount to roughly 1 trillion dollars for whoever was producing it. Add platinum, silver, and other "rare" metals to the mix, and there's LOTS of money available to get asteroid mining off the ground.
Of course, eventually
Re:BREAKING NEWS (Score:5, Informative)
I'm reminded of one of Professor Carolyn Crawford's lectures about Saturn. One of the audience members asked the question, "But what is it good for?" She paused, looked pained, and said, "Sir, have you no soul?"
For those who actually like to learn about the universe I highly recommend her lectures on YouTube. The camera work tends to be dreadful but the content and delivery is worth staying for.
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If you want to advance science, take that Mars misadventure budget and apply it to exactly the type of lecture production you're talking about, or any of a million other more efficient and beneficial ways to expand our collective science knowledge.
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Your life has been greatly advanced in many ways due to us sending someone to the moon. Your health and our collective knowledge of your body is being greatly advanced right now through scientific research related to travelling to Mars. If it weren't for the COVID-19 virus I would right now be sitting in a plane to Milan that is built using a lot of propulsion and material knowledge as well as simulation and construction methods which has been learnt from experiments in space travel.
You are utterly failing
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No, not in the least. 100x the innovations would be found by targeting this money better.
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You can't "target" basic research since by definition you don't know what you're going to find, to steal a phrase from a past Secretary of War, basic research is investigation of the "unknown unknowns". Much of what NASA does now is basic research, since the likes of Bell Labs have been extinguished in the chase after short term profits. At this point China spends more on basic research than the US government and industry combined, and we're going to pay for it over the next couple of decades.
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Yes, you can target basic research.
Company R&D departments have done it by the billions, for decades. This distinction being they have to have a plausible return on the effort. And yes, China has to as well, if only to stay in power. There are infinite things to spend money on, and if this does something other than line Musk and company's pockets by the involuntary forcing of taxpayers, let them pay for it.
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For anyone else googling for her: her name is Carolin Crawford. Carolyn Crawford is a disco singer - and there's also Cindy Crawford but she is also no astrophysicist.
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Thanks for the correction, you're right.
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Re:BREAKING NEWS (Score:5, Insightful)
The market indexes are down to around 2017 levels. The stock I bought in 2008 (post crash) is just fine thanks. Also, any "long" worthy of the name is looking at the markets now and wondering when to buy, not rushing to sell.
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wondering when to buy
Not yet. It's not over until the fat lady sings. In this case the fat lady will be some bank caught with their pants down and going bankrupt. The market goes up and down and it doesn't really matter. But when people fuck up and take jobs with them and other people's money with them, that's when shit gets real. And human greed being what it is, I'm expecting an announcement any day now...
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some bank caught with their pants down and being bailed out by the government yet again, the same as the airlines, yet again. This White House has as many Goldman Sachs alumni as the previous three.
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I expect things to really crater when the US is in Italy's current position. I'm sure there will be some investment banks that got a little too aggressive that go down with that ship. I like 50% off sales.
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SpaceX says they've taken early steps to address the complaints of amateur astronomers. I think with this batch, they spray painted "Ha ha!" on the bottom of each satellite, but they promise in the future that each one will have a little mirrored "beach umbrella", which they can focus to burn your retinas out.
Re:BREAKING NEWS (Score:5, Funny)
I think with this batch, they spray painted "Ha ha!" on the bottom of each satellite,
Obviously, for the Astronomers, the message on the Starlink sats should say, "Objects in mirror are closer than they appear."
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I think that's what they have on the handful of test sats they de-orbit onto the houses of complainers!
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From the actual article (Score:4, Insightful)
" SpaceX has added 360 satellites to the Starlink fleet since beginning dedicated missions last May."
Screw you soon cable companies, REAL SOON.
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Not soon enough!
Re:From the actual article (Score:4, Informative)
It won't have the bandwidth to cover cities. But it will be a godsend for people out in the boonies, wondering why the cable and phone companies took all that public tax money to "bring broadband to Rural America" and never delivered.
https://arstechnica.com/inform... [arstechnica.com]
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For the most part, the low density areas are the ones most screwed by cable monopolies, so that could work out well. Heck, if Starship ever actually works, launch costs will be so low that we could have multiple competing low-latency sat providers.
What I want is the company that takes the next step, and offers on-demand orbital power. Few minor engineering details to work out of course, but you could actually do this (beaming enough power to run a typical house into a 1 m^2 receptor wouldn't be much brigh
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They won't be low latency.
They can have however much bandwidth you want to fantasize about, but they can't be low latency.
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The latency numbers they are offering are better than most cable systems I have been on. Remember this is low earth orbit not Geo orbit. I think the numbers they were running were less than 20, it appears that it's the bandwidth that they have the trouble with in congested areas,
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who gives a fuck about latency?
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Depends on the distance. The entire reason Starlink exists is to provide significantly lower latency between New York and London. That alone will pay for Starship, if they get it working. Everything else is gravy - all the rural internet is just sats that have to be up there to make the market-to-market link reliable, so might as well let people use them.
Remember, these are in a 500 km orbit, not the 35,700 km of traditional telecom satellites. So if the servers you're talking too are in the same city,
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(blah blah blah) but still just an added 3 ms
Right, if you just make up a fake number, that number is as good as you want it to be.
If everything goes according to plan, it will "only" add 20ms to your connection.
I get ~15ms pings to popular US sites with regular cable. (40ms to slashdot.) It would more than double latency to well-connected servers.
Musk may indeed succeed at making it fast enough for gaming, but it won't be "low latency" compared to existing networking. It adds latency.
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It will be the lowest available latency between NY and London markets. They may add latency for subscribers not paying millions per month (certainly the finance guys will get absolute priority). We'll have to see when the network actually starts working. But the laws of physics only insist on an extra 3.4 ms for the 1000 km hop to space and back, and of course the signal propagates faster through vacuum than plastic. For where I am to the primary Amazon data center, that saves about 3 ms, so it balances
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The laws of physics cannot operate on imaginary devices, nothing happens.
That isn't some minimum the laws of physics require; that is a broad, big claim on what is actually only a tiny claim. 3.4ms is the oversimplified calculation that doesn't take into consideration realworld considerations like; the target isn't a mirror or a photon detector, the target is actually the coupled transistor circuit. The laws of physics do not allow for infinite rise times on those signals, as supposed by the simplificatio
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>Right, if you just make up a fake number, that number is as good as you want it to be.
They're not making up numbers. 500 km to orbit = 1000km round trip
1000km / 300,000km/s (speed of light) = 3 ms round-trip transmission lag time to orbit. Probably a safe bet that the electronics themseves won't be any slower than those on Earth.
So, you'll add 3ms talking to the house next door by way of Starlink instead of just sharing wifi.
And when communicating with more distant destinations your ping time drops,
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Exactly, you're just making up numbers about a distance, they're not numbers based on a simulation of a device operated over that distance.
I don't doubt that it beats fiber to the other side of the planet, but that doesn't make 3ms a number that is relevant to this technology. It is just made-up, and it is considered at the level of a high school physics lesson.
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Devices aren't operated over a distance - devices are operated within the shell of the device. *Signals* operate over a distance, and signals don't give a damn about the devices that create and receive them.
Like I said - there's no reason to believe the signal delays within the hardware would be any greater in a satellite than in a terrestrial router. Changing the kind of transceiver between fiber-optic and phased-array radio (microwave?) transmission doesn't affect the internal delays in the slightest.
Ju
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there's no reason to believe the signal delays within the hardware would be any greater in a satellite than in a terrestrial router
There are lots of reasons to believe that they would be slightly worse, but that's not the point. The point is that those delays dominate the latency and so you can't just use distance an electron travels as a stand-in for transmission time; except in high school.
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mass of people on the internet), who give a fuck about latency?
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Musk bragged 20ms on twitter, but it is still overhead.
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" SpaceX has added 360 satellites to the Starlink fleet since beginning dedicated missions last May."
Screw you soon cable companies, REAL SOON.
They already are screwed, royally.. There has been a long running problem of "cable cutters" who have been dumping their most profitable products and they've been struggling to keep afloat. Why do you suppose Verizon sold off a lot of it's FIOS infrastructure? It was losing money hand over fist.
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Well, they screwed themselves. Provide a good product at a reasonable price and most customers will just stay. Screw your customers, be screwed as soon as alternatives become available.
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Well, they screwed themselves. Provide a good product at a reasonable price and most customers will just stay. Screw your customers, be screwed as soon as alternatives become available.
Perhaps, but things have changed for cable operators and ISPs. They used to be cash cows, generating positive cash flow without much effort. Now, they are squeezed between the content providers and consumers and when saddled with the huge infrastructure development costs and debt loads. They have few options for making ends meet, which only leaves cutting support costs and customer service expenses. Yea, it's short sighted to ignore your customers, but in the short term, it may be the difference between
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Yea, it's short sighted to ignore your customers, but in the short term, it may be the difference between bankruptcy now or pushing it off a couple of quarters.
I think that is nonsense. I have seen some large-scale fiber-laying here (Europe) and the prices still seem to be lower for fast Internet than in the US. I cannot imaging that laying fiber is that much cheaper here. I think this is just corporate greed that backfires now.
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Will be interesting to see how well that will work. Since these are LEO, ping time could be acceptable. Satellite endurance will be a possible concern.
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Spoken like someone with no concept of what astronomy really is.
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That's not astronomy, that's Religion.
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oneweb in a couple of days (Score:2)
Not a bad failure rate (Score:5, Informative)
This is the first failure of a Merlin 1D engine (the only other time a Falcon 9 had an engine failure, it was a very different early version with older Merlin 1C engines). Considering there have been 81 launches of rockets using 9 or 27 of the engines each, even with one failure it's probably statistically the most reliable rocket engine ever flown, or at least one of the most. It's flown something like twice as many engine-missions as the Space Shuttle Main Engine, which also suffered in-flight failure.
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This was also the rocket's fifth flight. This piece of hardware launched a second stage, then turned around and navigated to a landing pad the size of a small parking lot, FOUR TIMES before this 'failure'. And as we all remember, in ULA terms this is not a failure as the primary mission objective of launching the payload was achieved.
Is it a star, is it a plane ... ? (Score:2)
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No, it's another damned satellite, spoiling the night sky. Talk about light pollution!
Bitch bitch bitch. It's amazing how many people who haven't looked up while outside in a decade suddenly care about something they literally can't see anyway because they live in a city.
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WOW (Score:1)
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High pucker power! (Score:2)
Indeed... balls-y pushing onward under engine fail.
Definitely people in the room making decisions had a moment of " Damn! the Falcon anyway - full power ahead"
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Re:High pucker power! (Score:5, Interesting)
No people are involved, it's all computers.
Each engine is relatively compartmentalised and is chock-full of high speed sensors. If you look at the footage, it's barely a flash in the exhaust stream before there's only 8 engines running.
In that time, the control system has sensed a failure, shut down fuel and oxidiser to that engine, gimballed the other engines to compensate for asymmetric thrust, and ramped up power to those engines to ensure that performance at main engine cutoff will remain adequate. (Engine thrust is lower near the end of the burn to keep acceleration down to acceptable levels, so there's plenty of spare capacity across the other 8)
Before someone on the ground could say, "oh shit!", all action has been taken.
Re: High pucker power! (Score:5, Funny)
You know that's not true. There's somebody in mission control pressing WASD to keep the vehicle on track. I'm sure they saw that engine starting to glow redder than the others and right clicked on it to shut it down.
The impressive thing is they didn't screw up the staging. That's the really trick part...
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Check yo stagin'!
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>Indeed... balls-y pushing onward under engine fail.
Or not. What's the alternative? Try to turn around and perform the first-ever non-separated dual-stage landing on a rocket that already has one bad engine? Even if the landing miraculously succeeded, trying to keep the 2-stage stack balanced with all that weight of fuel and satellites up near the nose would be a real trick - normally the center of mass after landing is way down near the engines. And it's not like the second stage is capable of landi
Passed over NZ (Score:2)
Saw the satellites, all lined up in a nice bright row, passing over head a few hours ago here in New Zealand.