Slashdot Mirror
Falcon 1 Ready to Launch
DarkNemesis618 writes "SpaceX's new rocket, the Falcon 1 is set to launch February 8. Twice now it has been delayed for technological problems and then for structural. It's payload is set to be the FalconSat-2 satellite. What's interesting is that this satellite was built by the cadets at the USAF Academy. The satellite is going to be studying the effects of space plasma. It appears NASA & the shuttle are not the only ways for the government to launch satellites anymore."
I guess if it launched 4 years ago, it could have been called the New-Millenium Falcon
Slow Down Cowboy! It's been 1 hour, 47 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment
Falcon-1 was built by SpaceX, which is not a part of the Sea Launch consortiun. See this wikipedia entry.
It appears NASA & the shuttle are not the only ways for the government to launch satellites anymore
Ever hear of Lockheed Martin, Boeing, or Orbital Sciences? The government hasn't launched any major satellite besides ISS on the Shuttle for a decade. Satellite launches are contracted out.
Worst...sig...ever!
Uhm no. Nowhere in the Wikipedia entries for either SpaceX or Falcon 1 is there an association with the Sea Launch consortium. SpaceX was founded by Elon Musk and he is fronting all of the costs associated with the development and launch from his own personal fortune.
Also given the nature of his lawsuit against Boeing and Lockheed, I doubt that he would want to be part of an organization that is run by Boeing. Secondly, the launch is from a facility in the Kwajalein Atoll on solid ground, not from a SeaLaunch platform.
I thought astronauts were meant to gather valuable research data about humans living and working in space.
Space exploration is a job for probots, not people.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
Secondly, we've had satellites, space stations, and an assortment of space probes out in space for over 40 years, so why are they only sending one up now? Wouldn't the "effects" of this space plasma already have made itself obvious with it's impact on military satellites already in existence? So what are they really testing, hmm?
Obviously I have a lot of questions, but something seems out of place with this mission. Shouldn't they have done this before they sent up human beings to the moon? I'm obviously totally uninformed or totally paranoid. Maybe both!
Authority questions you. Return the favor.
Actually, I'm of the opinion that, to the extent that humans were "meant" to do anything, we're certainly meant to fly in space. You and I share the same dream.
But I differentiate between "exploration"--something best done by probots--and "adventure"--something best done by humans.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
The only satellites that NASA has launched recently are the Chandra Space Telescope and the ISS itself.
The most recent US Government non-NASA, non-Military satellite was NOAA-18, launched May 20, 2005 on a Boeing Delta Rocket.
If you don't believe me, check the Launch Log.
There is no requirement that NASA must launch all US government payloads. The parts of the ISS, unfortunately, were designed to fit exactly in the Shuttle Cargo Bay. There is no law stating that they must be launched by the shuttle, however, it will be expensive to modify them to take launch loads from another launcher.
There are many launch providers in the world, including Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Orbital, China, Russia, India, Ariane, Japan... and others I can't think of right now. Elon Musk thinks he can do it much cheaper than the competition. Let's see how it goes first. Personally, I think he is going to run into a lot of unexpected costs and techinical problems as the Falcon 1 evolves into the Falcon 5 and 9. I'd be happy to see him pull it off, but I have my doubts.
If by recycled oil rig you meant "self-propelled, semi-submersible drilling rig" then yes ;).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_Odyssey
"He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep in order to gain what he cannot lose."
There's practically nothing up there but plasma. The only places in the universe that aren't practically all plasma are planets and bits of space junk, a negligible fraction of the universe's (observable) mass. Maybe you're confused because you think plasma is some sort of exotic substance. Compositionally, the only difference between a gas and a plasma is that some fraction of the atoms in a plasma are ionized. That just means one or more of the electrons that, at lower temperatures, would be bound closely in orbit around the nucleus are instead banging around loose.
That seems like a small difference, but oh! what a difference. In a familiar gas, the atoms only interact when they collide, so at very low pressures nothing much happens. In a plasma, particularly at very low pressure, the particles interact with immediate neighbors, via the electric force, at distances of centimeters, and with large masses, via magnetic forces, at distances up to light years.
Plasma dynamics, the description of how masses of plasma behave, is fiendishly complex, largely because the positive particles (nuclei) are all at least 2000 times more massive than the negative particles (electrons). As a result, anything that accelerates a nucleus at X cm/s/s blasts any electrons at more than 2000X cm/s/s the other way. Furthermore, plasmas can be neutral, or biased positive, or biased negative. When a biased plasma moves, it produces a magnetic field, and any magnetic fields it moves in affect the its motion.
Even an ionization of one in 10 000 particles is enough to make celestial stuff behave by plasma-dynamical rather than ordinary gas laws. Under rather weak electric fields, the ions accelerate enough to ionize and re-ionize the neutral atoms, a process called "entraining". Motion of biased plasma amounts to an electric current, which self-generates a magnetic field that, in turn, concentrates the current (and particles of the conductive medium) into flux tubes, called "Birkeland currents", that span solar systems (e.g. producing the Aurora) and galaxies.
The equations that describe real plasma dynamics are fiendishly complicated, and the observed behavior exhibits so many fundamental instabilities, that nobody can solve typical problems mathematically. Serious researchers fall back on computer simulations and extrapolation from vacuum-lab observations. Most fall back, instead, on a (usually) distinctly unphysical approximation known as "MHD".
Typical astronomers and astrophysicists have had a semester of MHD, where they were misled about how little it resembles any phenomenon they will ever observe. As a result, most astronomers are ill-equipped to evaluate such observations. They tend to ignore them, instead, and to discount explanations that depend on awareness of actual plasma-dynamical phenomena. This causes them two problems: they have to explain what they see using only gravitation, stellar-core fusion, and shock waves; and they have to explain why plasma dynamics has no effect on the system. Their colleagues generally give them a pass on the latter. Such common plasma-dynamical phenomena as ultraviolet and x-ray emission have traditionally been easy to ignore.
Most of the working plasma dynamicists are not involved in astrophysics, and their contribution isn't generally welcome in astrophysical journals. Of course the most vocal of the ones interested in astronomy, and thus most easily found in web searches, are highly-motivated and ... interestingly quirky. Nonetheless, there's a lot to learn even from those of the catastrophism cultists who are also working physicists.
And Zenit, and Proton, and Soyuz, and Long March, and Pegasus, and Shavit, and Ariane... (need I keep going?) Even if you're only going to count US launch systems, there are half a dozen *families* of launch vehicles that we can use.
Seriously, Slashdot: quit adding ignorant taglines to your articles.
Son, a woman is a lot like a refrigerator. They're six feet tall, 300 pounds... they make ice... umm...
I'm a big fan of Elon Musk, who started SpaceX with the money he got from selling PayPal to eBay. He's a pretty good example of someone who grew up with dreams about space who's trying to make those dreams a reality. I think his efforts with towards dramatically decreasing the cost of space launch are quite important, and crucial for his (and my) long-term goal of making humanity a multi-planet species.
...
...
...
...
...
...
This set of notes by Michael Belfiore from their pre-launch press conference for their launch attempt last year is a pretty interesting read and gives great insight into what Musk wants to do with SpaceX. Some excerpts:
SpaceX's second Gen rocket engine will be the biggest rocket engine in the world, though not the biggest in history. The F1 engine that sent people to the moon is no longer in production, so Musk doesn't count that.
Q: What customers will you put on Falcon 9?
A: We haven't thought a lot about it because it's speculative, but big customers would be NASA, Bigelow Aerospace, which is launching its first subscale space station module next year, and potentially people who just want to go to orbit and just spend some time on orbit. Also we could do a loop around the moon, which actually wouldn't require a huge rocket. [Space Adventures recently cut a deal with the Russian Space Agency to do just that, so that may be what inspired Musk to say that.]
Q: When will you go to space?
A: I'm not doing this to go into space myself, per se. I want to help build a space faring civilization. It would have been very easy for me to pay to go to the International Space Station myself. I want to help other people get to space.
Musk: The expansion of life on earth to other places is arguably the most important thing to happen to life on earth, if it happens. Life has the duty to expand. And we're the representatives of life with the ability to do so.
Q: When will you fly cargo missions to the space station?
A: I hope in the next 3 to 4 years.
Another question from me: Are you developing a manned vehicle right now, or have you thought that far ahead yet?
A: I can't comment on that right now.
Q: What's next in the entreprenurial space field?
A: Lots of people doing things--Paul Allen [who funded SpaceShipOne], Jeff Bezos with Blue Origin, John Carmack with Armadillo Aerospace...Musk thinks we're heading toward a Netscape moment, when someone turns a profit, and hopefully it'll be SpaceX, and then investment capital will start to flow in.