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SpaceX Successful Static Fire
ron_ivi writes "SpaceX's website is announced that they had a "
great static fire today" where their Falcon rocket successfully had 3 seconds of thrust. Nice pictures and video of the test; and if analysis shows all was well, they'll be launching Thursday."
It used to be a guy wouldn't brag if he only had 3 seconds of thrust.
I think we would leave all the Anonymous Cowards behind. There's enough garbage in space. :P
I'd though a static fire would be bad for the ICs?
sounds like someone needs to start using dryer sheets...
for a minute there, i lost myself...
I think this is great. I love Scaled Composite's X-prize winner, but this company is actually shooting for orbit! If you don't already know; it is a hell of a lot harder to reach orbital speeds as it is to only reach the outer limits of the atmosphere and descend.
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
Does anyone else find it sad that the founder of Paypal has a better rocket company than the creator of DOOM?
Ah well, at least they are both fellow geeks.
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
But it is only 45 more years until we get to see 100 year old I Love Lucy re-runs!
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Your username is uniquely well suited to your post.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Doesn't anybody else think it's odd that the picture of this rocket being fired (very cool, BTW) has a couple of tanks in the foreground. Not sure what's in the tanks (probably fuel), but I'm sure they don't want to be next to an firing rocket if the rocket has an unfortunate explosition.
It's hard to tell distances in the picture -- there could be a mile separating the two. But having these in the foreground just struck me a little bit odd.
--Lance
Coming from the petrochem industry, I'm not used to seeing the words great, static and fire all in one sentence
Pfft...I bet they can harness the server heat for fueling the launch!
"It used to be a guy wouldn't brag if he only had 3 seconds of thrust."
Now he breaks out the cigarettes and asks, "was it good for you too"?
Today is red jello day - all workers must eat all of their red jello. Failure to comply will result in five demerits.
Somehow, in some way this proves that Microsoft sucks.
Does this sig remind you of Agatha Christie?
As the first link mentions, the launch is scheduled for Thursday, 1PM PST (4PM EST). According to RLV News, here's a few good sources for real-time commentary and info about the launch:
* Mission Status Center - Falcon Launch Report - Justin Ray
* Out of the Cradle
* NASASpaceflight.com - LIVE: SpaceX/Falcon 1 - 23rd March: launch coverage thread
Also, it was recently revealed that SpaceX has been secretly developing their SpaceX Dragon orbital capsule, which will be able to carry up to 7 people to and from orbit. A full-size prototype of the capsule has already been constructed, and the capsule is expected to enter service by 2009 (several years before NASA's CEV).
The proposed bigger model, the Falcon 9-S5, is comparable to the modern Atlas V. 6 launches to date, 100% success rate. About 2x the price the new guys claim, but then, the Atlas is a proven product.
But the commercial launch market has collapsed. Iridium is done, and nobody wants to launch that many sats again. The geosync comsat market is saturated; everybody is going fibre optic. There's just not that much going up.
Recently Sam Dinkin of the Space Review had a chance to tour SpaceX's facility, and wrote a 4-part article series about it. It's a pretty neat read, and gives you a good idea of the culture of SpaceX and where it's headed. Also, they're apparently looking for good people to hire. ;)
*Part 1
*Part 2
*Part 3
*Part 4
Also, an interesting bit of recent news: Apparently the President of Sea Launch, which is "arguably the world's most successful commercial launch company," has left Sea Launch to join SpaceX. Anybody care to speculate about why he would leave such a cushy position for a start-up?
I gotta disagree with that statement. They certainly still go boom.
/.)
The recent (October 2002) photon M2 launch failure is a good example (there's a truly spectacular video of it floating around, but I'm not gonna subject the only host I know of to
Or the zenit launch failure in the '90s that left a big smoking hole where the launch pad was. Both these involved the rocket failing shortly after liftoff, basically falling out of the sky fully fueled. When the tanks break up, you get many thousands of pounds of fuel and oxidizer nicely mixed. What happens after that is usually "Boom!"
Most US, European and Japanese launchers have range safety (aka self destruct) systems, which help if the vehicle is actually flying, but they aren't likely to make difference if the failure happens very near the pad.
I suspect the tanks that the OP asked about are actually quite far away, and just look close due to the
foreshortening effect of a long lense.
Some moderator seems to be on drugs.
It was Salvage 1
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
So they can colonize a new world and the rest of us can die from exposure to unsanitized telephones? No thanks.
On a more practical note, with the number of competing vendors and the number of technologies in play, it's not a question of if but of how. Will the laser drives beat the chemical boosters but lose out to the space elevator?
Unless the dimwits with the guns and bombs manage to foobar our entire world, somebody's getting systems running in the next fifteen years or so. As an old L5 member I say, it's about damn time!
-Rustin
Data is the lever, rigor the fulcrum, brains the force that drives it all.
No, they probably fire it horizontally into a huge load sensor with brackets to keep it facing forward. At least, that's how the test the solid rocket boosters for the shuttle. I've had the opportunity to watch a test fire and it's a quite impressive 120s burn time.
Thrust is measured in Newtons, Newton seconds is a measure of impulse.
I watched it, and I'm using Fedora Core 3. I'm using MPlayer with win32 binary codecs. Check it out here.
w2^7me out.
The launch is taking place on a 7 acre island near Kwajalein Atoll. The island is evacuated before the rocket is fueled. You can read about it here. I wish these guys luck. There're going to need it.
an ill wind that blows no good
Elon is copying technology that already exists and making a fairly conventional rocket - single engine pintle motors. He's also funding a full-scale production facility.
John is not. He is funding it by selling off his collection of cars. His development team is a group of friends. His idea is a little different - a VTVL with a hovering tail setdown, not a splashdown. He's working on four throttled throatless engines on his stage - a radically different beast. Control law between multiple engines is a pain. Quite frankly it hasn't been done yet - Apollo used 1 single gimbleable engine, and even that was in reduced gravity! Much easier since your closing velocities will be slower. Etc.
Long story short, Elon is repeating history but trying to cut costs and make it manageable. John is trying to do things a new way.
This was a final systems check of the whole rocket. This is (as far as I know?) a unique ability that they have in being able to clamp down the rocket and test it in a completely ready to launch condition. If nothing wrong shows up in the data from this test then they have a good indication that they are really ready to launch.
And as you tread the halls of sanity, You feel so glad to be, Unable to go beyond. I have a message, From another time..
He's made both normal and throatless engines, and has gotten no decent ISP with either. The reason he's working more with throatless engines now is because he kept damaging his engines before ;) I swear, the armadillo aerospace blog is one disaster after another, half of which would have been resolved simply by reading history and the other half of which would have been resolved by doing the math first.
John is not "innovating". He's repeating the mistakes of the past. Remember his doomed experiments with thrust vectoring? How long did it take for him to give up what has been shown time and time again to not work well in rockets? How long did he stick with peroxide?
People said I was dumb, but I proved them.
200 isp with no throat = a cf (coefficient of expansion) of 1. IIRC (im at work) a 1.4 cf is very conservative. That puts him at 280, right now, no design changes other than slapping a nozzle on the end.
;) Carmack is going nowhere near orbit; he's just wrecking low performance engines based on 1930s to 1950s technology after taking every other wrong turn that's been taken before.
Except for the little fact that I just pointed out that he hasn't been able to get engines with nozzles and any sort of reasonable thrust behind them not to damage/destroy themselves, which is why he's working without a nozzle in the first place.
He's a tinkerer. He isn't in a race with anyone. He's said that before. He puts 1% of Id's revenue into it (not much) and then his own personal money. This is a diversion for him.
Thank you for repeating my initial point.
Peroxide's virtue is quick turnaround time and handleability.
Quick turnaround, kind of. If you want to change designs, most of the time that's going to involve your catalyst pack. Much of the time, your catalyst pack is clogged by the HTP's stabilizers. You also need to scrub anything that's ever going to touch the HTP extremely well; it's time consuming.
Handleability, definitely not. Not only is HTP horribly corrosive, not only do you have to scrub down your tanks extremely well to prevent the tiniest big of particulate contamination, not only do its stabilizers pose problems, but it also has this nasty habit of exploding: heat increases the rate of decomposition, and the faster it decomposes, the more heat it releases. Ask the sailors on the HMS Sidon and the Kursk what they think of the stability of HTP. Oh wait..
He was able to turn around engines quickly and perform quick experiements. That level of playing around and discovering truths is not available when you move to a cryogenic/pressurized oxidizer/fuel combination.
What "truths" has he discovered that weren't discovered in the 30s through 50s that haven't already been extensively discussed? My biggest critique is with those who pretend that it's a serious rocketry project when it's just a repeat of every other mistake in the book.
(IE: they may be further ahead of the game than if they started with LOX/Ethanol.
You mean, by starting with the fuel that they're *actually* going to use? What sort of rocket program would do something as silly as that?
I wish Elon well but you have to realise they are doing the same thing Boeing and LM and Raytheon have all done before. Pintle engines are old: he's not even getting that good of performance out of them.
He's pretty much optimized the economic side of it. I like his approach of partially pressure-stabilized vehicles as well: they have enough structural strength that they can be erected without having to be filled first. It makes transport a lot easier. Yet they're built light enough that they need pressure stabilization to launch, which gets you a better mass fraction.
All of the aspects of the Falcon seem to be economically optimized. Sure, they're not advancing any tech, but at least they're not playing back in the 1930s like Armadillo.
VTVL hasn't been done yet
Major distinction: VTVL to orbit hasn't been done
People said I was dumb, but I proved them.