A SpaceX 'Falcon 9' Booster Rocket Has Launched 18 Times Successfully, a New Record (arstechnica.com) 86
Ars Technica reports:
In three-and-a-half years of service, one of SpaceX's reusable Falcon 9 boosters stands apart from the rest of the company's rocket inventory. This booster, designated with the serial number B1058, has now flown 18 times.
For its maiden launch on May 30, 2020, the rocket propelled NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken into the history books on SpaceX's first mission to send people into orbit. This ended a nine-year gap in America's capability to launch astronauts into low-Earth orbit and was the first time a commercial spacecraft achieved this feat... Over the course of its flights to space and back, that white paint has darkened to a charcoal color. Soot from the rocket's exhaust has accumulated, bit by bit, on the 15-story-tall cylinder-shaped booster. The red NASA worm logo is now barely visible.
On Friday night, this rocket launched for the 18th time, breaking a tie at 17 flights with another Falcon 9 booster in SpaceX's fleet... It fired three engines for a braking burn to slow for reentry, then ignited a single engine and extended four carbon-fiber landing legs to settle onto a floating platform holding position near the Bahamas. The drone ship will return the rocket to Cape Canaveral, where SpaceX will refurbish the vehicle for a 19th flight.
Other interesting statistics from the article:
For its maiden launch on May 30, 2020, the rocket propelled NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken into the history books on SpaceX's first mission to send people into orbit. This ended a nine-year gap in America's capability to launch astronauts into low-Earth orbit and was the first time a commercial spacecraft achieved this feat... Over the course of its flights to space and back, that white paint has darkened to a charcoal color. Soot from the rocket's exhaust has accumulated, bit by bit, on the 15-story-tall cylinder-shaped booster. The red NASA worm logo is now barely visible.
On Friday night, this rocket launched for the 18th time, breaking a tie at 17 flights with another Falcon 9 booster in SpaceX's fleet... It fired three engines for a braking burn to slow for reentry, then ignited a single engine and extended four carbon-fiber landing legs to settle onto a floating platform holding position near the Bahamas. The drone ship will return the rocket to Cape Canaveral, where SpaceX will refurbish the vehicle for a 19th flight.
Other interesting statistics from the article:
- This single booster rocket has launched 846 satellites into space. (Astrophysicist/spaceflight tracker Jonathan McDowell calculates there are now over 5,000 Starlink satellites in orbit.)
- A SpaceX official told Ars Technica the company might extend the limit on Falcon 9 booster flights beyond 20 for Starlink satellites.
- Friday's launch became the 79th launch so far in 2023 of a Falcon rocket, with SpaceX aiming for a total of 100 by the end of December, and 144 in 2023 (an average of one flight every two-and-a-half days).
- Since 2016, SpaceX has now had 249 consecutive successful launches of its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets
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This is not "an achievement done by Elon Musk". The achievement is of all those NASA engineers and technology he got nearly for free when your right decided the US doesn't need its own space program and fired them. Plus, don't forget the tens of billions of free government money he got to "boostrap" himself, the racist Afrikaner Galt.
I guess you were just busy the day the government was giving out tens of billions of free government money.
So close, you could have been "Elon Musk" instead.
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Re: It's really too bad (Score:2)
Lots of people have exactly this issue with Von Braunâ¦
The trolls... (Score:4)
The trolls are weak with this one.
Re:The trolls... (Score:5, Interesting)
But their hate and loathing for Elon Musk is as intense as ever.
It is really weird. I run into this type of person -- often a reasonably mature trained engineer --- and the subject of Musk comes up and they go off like a roman candle. And you try to question them about it and it turns out they are railing against things they imagine he did rather than what he actually did. It is like talking to a MAGA type about Obama or Hillary. It is the same behavior. Utter rejection of any fact that doesn't support their world-view and total embrace of any snarky meme or unfounded rumor that does.
And of course any attempt at objectivity will look to them as an act of an abject, brainless devotion of a cult member.
Personally I don't give a damn if you like Musk or not. Certainly there is a lot to criticize there. But true adults should be aware of when they are revealing more about themselves than whomever they are denouncing.
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Well, against the wishes of most Tesla engineers as well as all us other automotive-related techies, Musk removed both radar and sonar from the latest cars. That's pure ego and very very wrong.
Somehow SpaceX has avoided any such blind allegiance to him or to his giant machine-learning algos (that are still not working for Tesla's FSD)
Engineering and Ego (Score:2)
I also strongly questioned the decision to remove those sensors from the design when that was announced.
However, I did not immediately assume that a) it was motivated by "ego" or b) nobody at Tesla thought of raised the obvious objections for that design decision or c) if they did they were disregarded by edict.
It is also notable that nobody goes around insisting that the solution to L5 autonomy is LIDAR LIDAR LIDAR in all the other designs out there is an ego-driven decision.
As a result as I did more
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I look at that decision this way: all passive sensors, if you can make it work, are the way to go. Any active sensor can be jammed or spoofed - LIDAR, RADAR, ultrasound, you name it. May be intentional, unintentional, or environmental, but it can - and will - happen.
What happens with a highway full hundreds of different models of cars, at highway speeds, all depending on their LIDAR? I sure as heck don't know.
Cameras can't be spoofed or jammed - they don't emit.
does Starlink pay for the space it uses? (Score:2, Interesting)
(Astrophysicist/spaceflight tracker Jonathan McDowell calculates there are now over 5,000 Starlink satellites in orbit.)
Legit question. Does Starlink pay rent for the space orbital real-estate its statellites sit on? Once you have that many satellites up there I don't think it qualifies as a hobby anymore.
Is there an international body that manages the rental agreements or is it a national business? And if Starlink stops paying, who can shoot the satellites down?
Re:does Starlink pay for the space it uses? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:does Starlink pay for the space it uses? (Score:5, Insightful)
Does Starlink pay rent for the space orbital real-estate its satellites sit on?
Who would they pay the rent to? Nobody owns that space. You might as well ask where to send the rent check for keeping a boat in the middle of the ocean.
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>You might as well ask where to send the rent check for keeping a
>boat in the middle of the ocean.
to me, of course!
I accept USD and Euros, no crypto or ChiCom currency.
hawk
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Does a boat pay rent to float in the ocean?
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No, but if you park it in international shipping routes, you shouldn't be surprised if it doesn't float there for long.
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No, the space around Earth is the new commons, free for all. Those who get there first on large parcels of government money will eventually get it all. You are and will be paying for it.
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Legit question. Does Starlink pay rent for the space orbital real-estate its statellites sit on?
Legit question. Does Musk pay rent to occupy your thoughts, or does he live... RENT FREE.
Martin-boundary be tardin' hard when triggered by Musk.
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who can shoot the satellites down?
Remember, it's easier to ask forgiveness than ask for permission...
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There are fees for some usages. For example oversight bodies like the ITU, which many people here are familiar with. They will allocate only only orbital slot assignments (often GEO) but also frequency and transmission domain usages to keep interference to a minimum.
Individual governments are responsible under the agreements. I am not sure if there are actual treaties involved, but the control point are launch facilities and local airspace.
For example, the FAA currently has a hold on the next Spac
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They pay for the frequency from FCC. Thus far the only orbital slot that people care about is the GSO, which are first come first served.
18 times, Next stop 20? (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, this is certainly an achievement compared to the earlier paradigm of "throw away rocket after use" or for the shuttle solid boosters "spend more to refurbish them than it'd cost to just build new ones".
While as a private company they don't need to publish how much it costs them to refurbish a rocket, it doesn't seem to be much. By pushing the limits with Starlink satellites, which is a subsidiary of SpaceX, they avoid external risk exposure for satellite customers. They can much more afford to lose a load of Starlink satellites, which are relatively cheap and replaceable anyways, than more traditional sats. In my opinion at least.
If you can reuse the rocket 20 times, and it costs 5% of the rocket's build cost to refurbish, that means that the "rocket" part of the launch cost is only 10% of traditional.
Given that a Falcon is estimated at $40-90M, but the fuel for it is only ~$500k (very rough estimate), it should be obvious that there's a LOT of cost savings when you can reuse. Even if SpaceX seems to still be charging "disposable" rates for launch because, well, lack of competition.
To swap high and low: $9.5M for a reused rocket launch(20 launches + 5% rebuild cost between) vs $40.5M for a new "disposable"...
Musk may have dipped into insanity, but isn't that actually pretty traditional for brilliant disruptive people?
Consider the person his EV company is named after. Tesla, in my opinion, was brilliant early on but descended into wild imagination bordering on fraud late in life.
Re: 18 times, Next stop 20? (Score:2)
Re:18 times, Next stop 20? (Score:4, Interesting)
Elon Musk totally flipped to the dark side around the time of the pandemic when the Fremont government/California asked him to shutdown his Fremont plant. From there, he descended to tribalist hater of humanity and anti-vaxxer. He went from helping to manufacture the vaccine for Curevac to colluding with total vaccine deniers. It also didn't help that the ultra-left got jealous of his companies becoming super valuable. Also, he got mad that Biden cozied up to the unions, that was probably the last straw. He forgot all the good things he got from the government and California back when he needed the help. He now (falsely) claims Tesla didn't actually need the $450 million loan he got and bailouts are bad.
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Not just the $450 million loan but the $7500 tax credit helped Tesla pull through its (now forgotten) darkest days. They'll never admit it, but at one point Tesla was nearly going to go bankrupt .. obviously the tax credit helped them sell more cars and get through that.
Re:18 times, Next stop 20? (Score:4, Insightful)
A loan carries interest, which they paid back, and early. It was no gift, as you imply.
And the tax credit was for all EV makers.
Re:18 times, Next stop 20? (Score:4, Insightful)
A loan carries interest, which they paid back, and early. It was no gift, as you imply.
It's kind of a gift.
The government gave them loans because no bank would because of the risk of default.
And the tax credit was for all EV makers.
And Tesla was one of the biggest (and only major pure EV brand). They may not have survived otherwise.
That's not to say that the loan or the credit were bad, in fact they were good policy. But it's hypocritical of him to go alt-right now that he no longer needs that government intervention that helped his company survive.
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He's not "alt-right," you're just an idiot.
And he isn't changing his views on any of this.
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I'm not saying it's a gift, I'm saying they bailed him out. It's like if someone screamed for help while drowning in a lake and then got rescued by a fisherman. Afterwards, they claim they really didn't need the fisherman and could have swum out on their own.
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1. He benefited from the tax credit, now he wants tax credits blocked to prevent others from coming up to compete with him.
You are being disingenuous. Elon Musk has consistently stated that: (1) he thinks all government incentives should be abolished, not just for electric car companies, but also for ICE car companies and the oil industry; and (2) but as long as their are government incentives being offered, he would be a fool to turn them down. Views (1) and (2) are compatible, and Elon Musk holding both views does not mean he is hypocritical.
2. Tesla without the loan would have died.
Incorrect. The loan in question was not a special loan available only to Tesla. Inste
Re: 18 times, Next stop 20? (Score:3)
Never admit it? Musk has talked about when both Tesla and SpaceX were almost out of money and he split the last of his fortune between them in the hopes that one survives.
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He won't admit he got bailed out by the government.
Re:18 times, Next stop 20? (Score:5, Informative)
At the time that Musk ordered the Fremont factory to be re-started:
1. They had met all the pandemic-related requirements laid out by the State of California. They had sign off from the state.
2. Every other factory in the state had been re-opened.
3. The Fremont factory had a lower Covid transmission rate than the surrounding urban area (Fremont, where I live).
4. The hold on re-opening Tesla was in the hands of a single county-level official (Alameda country) who refused to state when and how the county permit would be re-issued. The attitude was she would get to it when she felt like it and you are no better than anybody else.
5. Tesla and Musk were under tremendous pressure to make their numbers. There were no end of short-sellers and others giddily crowing about how Tesla was going to be in ruin in a few months and they were never going to survive. Musk was sleeping at the factory under his desk on the shop floor.
6. There were thousands of workers at Tesla who would be out of a job if that one county commissioner had her way.
So if Musk has a negative perception of corrupted government regulation I would say he had ample reason. And his decision to ignore the county was more than justified.
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My recollection of events is very similar to yours, except regarding point 5. I know Musk had been sleeping at the factory during the "Model 3 production hell" ramp up that had almost caused the company to go bankrupt, but that hell had ended the previous year, that is, in 2019, and Tesla had been profitable since Q2 2019. As such, I am not sure that Elon Musk was still sleeping at the factory.
Regarding point 4... At the time, I was surprised that the media's sympathies lay with the bureaucracy that was del
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Now this has me curious. Given some of the other government corruption issues involving tech companies in the bay area (e.g. Apple and concealed carry licenses), was this a case of misplaced safety ideals? Or was the official looking for a
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In this case I am not aware of any corruption the sense of someone wanting a bribe. Given the visibility at the time I just don't see how it would even be possible. It was a big deal and everyone local was watching.
More likely what it was is a county health office was a) given poor and not-well-thought-out instructions which, b) tried to carry out those instructions to the letter, and c) completely overloaded with the number of oversight cases they were expected to instruction.
It would not be surpr
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Elon Musk totally flipped to the dark side around the time of the pandemic when the Fremont government/California asked him to shutdown his Fremont plant.
Your portrayal of events is inaccurate. All auto factories had been closed down due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Then all the auto factories except for Tesla's Fremont factory were permitted to re-open, and some bureaucrats seemed to be deliberately delaying giving permission for Tesla's factory to re-open. That's when Musk publicly got annoyed at his Fremont factory being closed. In addition, Tesla already had experience of dealing with a factory closure and then taking safety measures to be permitted to re-o
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"since Tesla was a profitable company at the time"
Only by Enron style accounting.
The max TOTAL possible revenue from the Roadster program was $300 million - not annual, TOTAL.
There's no way they were profitable when they'd already been operating for about 6 years, had to spend a lot of money in R&D and most of it was for stuff that couldn't be bought off the shelf so had to be hand built in-house.
Even the glider bodies from Lotus weren't much help - both Elon & Straubel have said they needed so many
Re:18 times, Next stop 20? (Score:4, Interesting)
"Consider the person his EV company is named after. Tesla, in my opinion, was brilliant early on but descended into wild imagination bordering on fraud late in life"
Nikola Tesla was a brilliant inventor who actually made original things he dreamed up.
Elon mostly takes ideas from sci-fi & gets others to do the work. He's smart & driven but not a brilliant inventive engineer.
Most of the genius work at SpaceX was done by Tom Mueller, an actual legit rocket scientist who built & tested several of his own designs in the desert before being discovered by Elon.
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Nikola Tesla was a brilliant inventor who actually made original things he dreamed up.
Well, yes, I more or less said that, didn't I? Well, with the caveat of "early on". Later in life he got fixated upon wireless power transmission, but never quite got it worked out.
AC - Great, though not what Edison wanted. Though I wouldn't really give him credit for "AC" itself, as many people were working at it at the time. What Tesla did was produce a working framework for transmitting and utilizing it.
Tesla Turbine - The article I found completely misunderstands this, but while it was supposed to b
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I was trying to rebut the widely held belief among Elon's fanbase that he's a fabulous engineer, bolstered by his 2022 award from the National Academy of Engineering, which they claim is given only to "real" engineers.
My rebuttal is that "real" engineers, regardless of academic qualifications & titles, are passionate of building things, with their own two hands.
Being a technical visionary is wonderful but doesn't make one, in my opinion, an engineer.
Tesla is a very famous example but Tom Mueller is more
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I was trying to rebut the widely held belief among Elon's fanbase that he's a fabulous engineer, bolstered by his 2022 award from the National Academy of Engineering, which they claim is given only to "real" engineers.
Well, that confused me because:
1. I'm not an Elon fanboy, though my opinion of him is higher than his haters. I view him as having his ups and downs.
2. I never accused him of being an engineer. His "brilliance" is in making projects happen, making ideas a reality. He's a bit* of an ass otherwise.
Basically, he's good at finding the right people, getting them the right resources, and getting things to happen. Management, in other words.
*To use an understatement.
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I wasn't directing criticism at you; it was more of a clarification of or expansion on what you wrote.
But I think Elon would be very offended as being dismissed as just a manager; he wastes no opportunity to play up his love of "hard core engineering" & "designing from first principles" or "order of magnitude improvements".
I'm puzzled as to why no one, afaik, has asked why such a hard core engineer chose to pursue an non-sceince degrees as TWO different universities
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I'm puzzled as to why no one, afaik, has asked why such a hard core engineer chose to pursue an non-sceince degrees as TWO different universities
Let's see, BA in Physics and a BS Economics. He started college at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario (working odd jobs at a farm and lumber mill). Then transferred to UPenn. He got both degrees from UPenn. If you see "Wharton", it's a subdivision of UPenn.
The transfer seems to be in line with the difficulties of immigrating to the USA.
It's pretty traditional for CEOs of breakthrough tech firms to be "under-educated", for example, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Dell, Ellison, and more are
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"He started college at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario (working odd jobs at a farm and lumber mill)"
If he didn't have enough Canadian status to receive student loans & bursaries or didn't win a scholarship, there's no way he could have supported his education at Queens on just odd jobs unless he'd saved up for years beforehand.
Here's the official fees listing for International Students going back to 1996
https://www.queensu.ca/registr... [queensu.ca]
On top of those fees, he'd have to also earn enough for rent
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If he didn't have enough Canadian status to receive student loans & bursaries or didn't win a scholarship, there's no way he could have supported his education at Queens on just odd jobs unless he'd saved up for years beforehand.
Not sure whether it would count or not, but it looks like he had Canadian citizenship through his mom, and the time working odd jobs could have been to satisfy other requirements.
He also had at least some support from his mom.
He was heading for Stanford for a Master's, but dropped out for internet stuff. Like is pretty usual, see Gates, Jobs, etc...
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My point is that he gets - and takes - a lot of credit for "engineering" when he's never personally done the kind of things one would expect from a "hard core engineer".
The electric car stuff? That's JB Straubel who was converting ICE to EVs before he met Musk, who reportedly was the one who convinced Elon to look at the AC Propulsion Tzero prototype when they met at the Mars Society & whose idea it was to use 18650 cells for battery packs.
Even Straubel's replacement, Drew Baglino was recruited, trained
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When the ISS cargo flight contracts were renegotiated, the rumor mill indicated SpaceX was charging "disposable" rates not because of a lack of competition, but so the competition would at least be in the same ballpark. The 2016 number had SpaceX is $100 million per flight cheaper than Orbital and with a more capable vehicle. NASA (and non-NASA space nerds) don't want to be in the position of only having a s
To be fair, that is basic pricing strategy (Score:2)
After reading this, I realized that I was forgetting my basic pricing strategy stuff.
It's like bidding in an auction. You don't actually want to bid your maximum price, at least not right away. You want to barely beat the next highest bidder. Not like in some (mainly Korean) comics where in order to flex the protagonist will bid like 100X the last bid.
In this case, in order to maximize profitability, if your production costs are less than your competition's, and you have the production capability to meet
replaced everything? (Score:2)
That many reuses is impressive, but I bet they have replaced everything on that rocket multiple times except the fuel tanks and the skin. Okay might have replaced the fuel tanks.
Re:replaced everything? (Score:4, Informative)
They do occasionally replace engines, but we know it isn't that often - every new engine, and every reworked engine, go to the stands at McGregor to be tested. And the geeks at NasaSpaceFlight have that site under 24 hour video surveillance, and count every engine test.
Because of that, we can count how many Merlin engines are tested, and we also know how may new rockets, with 9 engines each, have been made. When we account for engines that fail their first test and needed to be re-tested, there aren't that many spare to do replacements.
Oh, and rockets don't have separate fuel tanks. The outer skin is the tankage - the rocket is two tanks stacked on each other.
Re: replaced everything? (Score:2)
Re: replaced everything? (Score:2)
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I assume that anytime they have a disposable launch, they swap in older engines. For Falcon Heavy launches, that's about all they can do, but when they have a disposable Falcon 9 launch, it's usually an older booster. But SpaceX doesn't disclose the details of which engines are on each flight, so we don't know. Swapping engines increases the refurbishment time, so I expect the majority of launches use the same engines as the previous one.
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It seems like those engines would take an extreme beating. Seeing as how passive reentry capsules require sophisticated heat shields, I don't understand how the engines can hold up under reentry temperatures and pressures.
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Orbital reentry requires a heat shield because they're using the atmosphere to bleed off the horizontal velocity. The booster gets into space, but nowhere near orbit. And it does a three-engine burn right before entering the atmosphere to slow way down. The soot that builds up on the outside is not from the heat of reentry; it's from flying through the exhaust of the engines on the reentry burn.
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The refurbishment cost is $250k. That's not close enough to do what you suggest. Their internal cost for these launches is $15 million, mostly for the new 2nd stage they have to build for each launch, plus the cost to tow the rocket back from the barge.
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$250k sounds suspiciously low. Do you have a link?
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It's tweets by both Gwynne Shotwell and Elon Musk. Most of the internal cost for the Starlink launch ($15 million) is with the new 2nd stage and the MVac engine.
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If each one saves a ton of money and represents an advance in rocket technology, yeah I celebrate each one, or at least each milestone.
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Whether it saves a ton of money depends mostly on what they deliver up there. Because technically, it would save even more money to not launch the rocket.
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We could just cancel the whole danged space program and save it all!
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Like I said, depends on what we launch. There are valid reasons to put stuff into orbit.
It's been X days since the last accident. (Score:2)
Re: It's been X days since the last accident. (Score:2)
Well, the good news is that the second integrated flight test of their moon/Mars rocket should happen within 2 weeks now.
The cool part is the costs (Score:2)
The SLS has a re-usable door hinge (Score:2)
Isn't that a great achievement for $40 billion USD that never gets mentioned in the media?
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Artemis I uses a launch pad that's not suitable for Artemis III+. Bechtel is building the newer mobile launch pad that's currently overcost and late. Mobile Launch Pad 1 is going to be retired.
Origin story (Score:1)
Although I dislike Bezos' punlic persona and admire Musk and SpaceX, I am concerned that SpaceX will become spoiled sooner by unchallenged success, a la Google.
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For ULA's sake, Blue Origin better get their act together and build out these engines at a pace Vulcan-Centaur needs. They got 1 Delta IV Heavy left to launch the really massive NRO satellites and then they're down to nothing. Not even SpaceX can launch those things as it require vertical integration (mating the cargo to the rocket vertically) and requires faring larger than what SpaceX currently have. SpaceX is working on addressing both of those requirements.
Congrats! (Score:1)
144 target in 2024, not 2023 (Score:1)