Falcon 9 Is Now Fully Integrated At Cape Canaveral

RobGoldsmith writes "SpaceX's Falcon 9 is now fully integrated: an update from Elon Musk states 'Falcon 9 is now fully integrated at the Cape! Today we mated the 5.2 m payload fairing to the Falcon 9 first stage. This was the final step in the integration process — one day ahead of schedule.' New images are now available showing the first fully integrated Falcon 9 Rocket. Once the launch mount and erector are complete, SpaceX will transfer Falcon 9 on to the erector and raise it to vertical early in 2009."

Comments

Out of order?

[Paladin_Krone]

I thought it was proper to erect first, then integrate?

Re:Out of order?

[davester666]

50 years of design and the best shape that rocket scientists can come up with is penis shaped?

Re:Out of order?

[MichaelSmith]

I thought it was proper to erect first, then integrate?

Well thats how NASA does it anyway.

Re:Out of order?

[MichaelSmith]

50 years of design and the best shape that rocket scientists can come up with is penis shaped?

There is a reason for that.

Re:Out of order?

[Schemat1c]

50 years of design and the best shape that rocket scientists can come up with is penis shaped?

They experimented with a vagina based design but none of the rocket scientist nerds could figure out how to make it work.

Re:Out of order?

[Jarik C-Bol]

Not really, Russia builds its rockets lying down. At one point, and i've not checked to see if they still use it, there integration building was a mile long. and honestly, its easier that way, as you don't have to lift heavy pieces as high, and then place then with precision. you just lift them a *little* and then place them with precision.

Re:Out of order?

[MtViewGuy]

The R-7 rocket and its descendants the the Russians developed was designed to be assembled on its side because it was easier to assemble the final rocket that way. The only downside to this method is you need big and heavy rigs to move the rocket to the vertical launch position (if you've seen the launch pads at the Baikanour cosmodrome they have a lot of erecting machinery at the launch pad to move the rocket to the vertical position).

That's why for the Saturn V rocket, NASA decided to assemble the rocket vertically, but that needed a very large building to do this, hence the very tall Vertical Assembly Building (VAB) not only to accommodate the height of the rocket but the overhead cranes to lift the various rocket components.

Spam

[Jurily]

Once the launch mount and erector are complete, SpaceX will transfer Falcon 9 on to the erector and raise it to vertical early in 2009.

Sounds like some spam I've been getting.

It's a space salesman race!

[cmowire]

Will Elon Musk, second in reality distortion only to Steve Jobs, be able to convince the new president and congress to cancel Ares I / Orion in favor of Falcon 9 / Dragon, even though it's pretty much guaranteed to wipe out a network of pork barrel projects that ensured NASA's funding built up since the sixties? If so, will we be four launches deep into the campaign with nothing to show for the Falcon 9 / Dragon effort in 2015? If not, will Elon & co shrug and sell endless DragonLab missions to the open market, thus actually delivering on the promise that the Space Shuttle was built with (cheap cost/lb to orbit so that anybody can just buy some lab time instead of needing to buy off politicians and political appointees)?

Things might actually get interesting.

Or maybe that volcano in Yellowstone will blow up tomorrow and we'll never find out.

Either way, SpaceX engineers are so studly that they don't need to get erect before they can mount and *cough* integrate!

Re:It's a space salesman race!

[MichaelSmith]

I think there is an opportunity for a small aerospace firm (Scaled?) to build a capsule similar to Gemini, or a small Apollo. Maybe you could sell single use capsules for a million bucks a go, ready to integrate with a Falcon 9.

I also think it should be possible to build an ultra light capsule to fly on a Falcon 1. The mass budget is about 500kg which should be enough in this day and age.

Re:It's a space salesman race!

[Aglassis]

If the Ares I design is to be replaced, it would be by the Delta IV Heavy, not the Falcon 9 Heavy. The Delta IV Heavy is already flying, its payload fairing size is an almost perfect fit for the Orion spacecraft, and it uses the RS-68s that are planned to be used on the Ares V. NASA would also be extremely skeptical of the Falcon 9 Heavy because it would be using a total of 27 Merlin engines in its first stage! The failures of the N1 rocket (with 30 engines) would make any high engine rocket a tough sell. The Falcon 9 may work, but I'd be very surprised if the Falcon 9 Heavy is ever built. Man-rating a rocket like that would be well-nigh impossible.

Re:It's a space salesman race!

[cmowire]

Please read my comment again.

I said Ares I / Orion replaced by the Falcon 9 / Dragon. Not the Falcon 9 Heavy being used to lift the Ares I.

And actually, it's not even necessary to launch the Ares I design on the Delta IV Heavy, just an Atlas V, according to some.

I suspect there's a longer-term plan to swap out the 9 Merlins on the bottom of the Falcon 9 with two bigger rockets. Except that nobody inside of SpaceX is going to breathe a word about it until the right time.

Re:It's a space salesman race!

[cmowire]

Um, SpaceX is also working on their own capsule, called the Dragon, to be launched atop the Falcon 9.

Re:It's a space salesman race!

[strack]

yes, the falcon 9 heavy *does* use 27 engines in total. thats the freaking point. if a any one of the few engines on a delta IV fails, the rocket is a goner. if a engine, or even a few, fail on the falcon 9, it can still complete its mission, the other engines just have to burn a bit longer. its engine redundancy, in the fine tradition of rockets like the saturn 5, which had no failures, despite a engine failure mid-flight on apollo 13.

Re:It's a space salesman race!

[khallow]

And actually, it's not even necessary to launch the Ares I design on the Delta IV Heavy, just an Atlas V, according to some.

Jon Goff is a great rocketry blogger. He pushes the orbital propellant depot hard and this is why. Once you have it going, it boosts the capabilities of your launch infrastructure considerably. Since you no longer have to launch fuel with lunar missions, you can fit a lot more vehicle on smaller rockets. The Ariane 5 is another rocket that can carry an unfueled Orion or propellant. Another important aspect is that this approach is highly scalable. You can use the same tricks to fuel other big missions, manned or not. It's a shame that NASA has done almost nothing with this concept.

I suspect there's a longer-term plan to swap out the 9 Merlins on the bottom of the Falcon 9 with two bigger rockets. Except that nobody inside of SpaceX is going to breathe a word about it until the right time.

It would be a natural continuation in the sequence of engine designs they've done. My take is that they're focusing on launching falcon 9 right now. They need that to go well. But there's no reason they couldn't have bigger engines on the drawing board.

Re:It's a space salesman race!

[Richard W.M. Jones]

if a engine, or even a few, fail on the falcon 9, it can still complete its mission, the other engines just have to burn a bit longer.

The failure(s) on the N1 was in the complex pipework leading to the 30 engines. This caused the whole rocket to fail (3 or 4 times IIRC - the Wikipedia article has more details).

Also even if a engine itself fails, you have to remember that the failure is not necessarily a clean shutdown, but likely a large explosion, taking out adjacent engines.

Rich.

Re:It's a space salesman race!

[Spotticus]

The failures of the N1 were more related to lack of sufficient funding, poor quality control and lack of any test stands (The first time the N1 fired it's 30 engines was during its first flight attempt). There was nothing inherently flawed in the approach they Soviet's took, it's just that the engineers were forced to do it on the cheap The first flight failed due to the engine control system shutting down all engines on the first stage after a problem was detected with one of the engines (an engine fire). Second flight was almost the same problem, except one of the first state engines exploded after it ingested a wrench that someone left in the fuel line. During the third flight an unexpected interaction between the engine thrust and prevailing winds resulted in a roll that exceeded the command authority of the rocket and it broke up. The Last flight almost successfully completed it's first stage burn, but a few seconds before shutdown the N1 was designed to shutdown 6 engines to keep thrust within design limits. The shutdown resulted in unexpected pressure transients, the fuel lines ruptured and the vehicle broke up.

Re:It's a space salesman race!

[goodmanj]

Also even if a engine itself fails, you have to remember that the failure is not necessarily a clean shutdown, but likely a large explosion, taking out adjacent engines.

Falcon 9's design includes armored enclosures for the engines, to keep them from taking out their neighbors if they blow up.

I agree that 27 is a whole lot of engines, but if you're going to cite the N1, you'd better also mention Soyuz, which has 32ish engines firing at launch, depending on how you count, and is one of the most reliable man-rated vehicles out there.

Re:It's a space salesman race!

[cmowire]

32 chambers, not engines. Not the same thing.

Re:It's a space salesman race!

[cheesybagel]

The N1 had several problems. Namely they did not do much testing. This was due to budget and time schedule pressures. The engines were very advanced, working at extreme pressures for their time and had teething problems (they were the first staged-combustion LOX/Kerosene engines ever made, the USA still has not made one native LOX/Kerosene engine even today, the only staged-combustion USA engine is the Space Shuttle Main Engine which uses the easier to get working LOX/Hydrogen combination). The engine designer was used to making aviation engines rather than rocket engines which did not help either. It took another iteration to get the engine working properly. So engines exploded a lot more than they should, setting off a chain reaction in the whole structure. Then manufacturing defects in piping meant it had catastrophic vibration issues, leading to broken pipes not to mention things like loose bolts due to shoddy quality control getting into the fuel intakes and so on. Last but not least, they decided midway along testing to completely change the control system with an analog computer which was bugged and took a long time in fixing. In short, each test flight was flying a completely different vehicle, making it hard to isolate and fix issues.

Compare that with SpaceX which did a separate 9 engine first stage testing with a full burn prior to launch and uses more advanced digital flight control systems and you see the problem is not quite the same. Heck, the Saturn I did not have any launch failures, and it used 8 first stage engines.

Re:It's a space salesman race!

[goodmanj]

Like I said, "depending on how you count": counting engines on shared-turbopump engines like Soyuz is a little tricky.

Still, any way you count, Soyuz has a ridiculously large number of "parts with fire in them that could explode", which is the key parameter here, and it seems to do just fine.

In fact, since Falcon 9 heavy can lose one or more turbopumps and keep going, a failure mode that would doom a Soyuz, you could claim that Falcon might be *more* reliable.

Yes, it's ridiculous to compare the reliability of vehicles which haven't even been built yet with historical hardware, but that's my whole point here. When it comes to launch failure, the devil's in the details, and IMO the reliability of Falcon 9 heavy will depend a lot more on getting the details right than on how many engines it has.

Vertical but not launced

[mrcaseyj]

It seems like I heard Musk say a couple months ago that they're thinking they might launch Falcon 9 this summer. I think maybe this whole thing about integrating it by the end of the year and putting vertical on the launch pad are all about meeting certain milestones to get money from their NASA contract. I think they've got to take it down and finish getting everything ready before they launch. They may be waiting on NASA to get a payload together. Notice that the web site gives no suggestion about a launch date. The "launch manifest" has an asterisk that gives the strange definition of "target date" as "Target dates are for vehicle arrival at launch site".

Re:Vertical but not launced

[QuantumG]

I expect they've cut a deal with someone for that ballast. There's lots of people who are willing to "hitch a ride to orbit" no matter how low the odds are of the vehicle making it. Not that I think this launch will fail.. but, ya know, it'll be fun to watch either way :)

Interesting Question

[AKAImBatman]

Here's a question for those of you who know more about the details of space engineering than I: One of the changes made to the STS during the early days of flight was that the main tank was left unpainted. This gave the Shuttle launch stack its trademark rust-orange color. By making this simple change, NASA realized they could shave off hundreds of tons of launch weight, thereby increasing available payload. (Not that the shuttle ever used it, but that's another issue.)

Yet I can't help but notice the shine of a fresh coat of pain on the Falcon rocket. They even went through the trouble of stenciling "SpaceX" in large letters along the length of the craft. Is there any particular engineering reason why rockets are still covered in paint, or is this entirely an aesthetics issue?

Re:Interesting Question

[cmowire]

Oh, no, the shuttle did take advantage of the weight. It's just not hundreds of tons. And they needed to make the tank even lighter to send the ISS up.

I suspect the big reason why the shuttle tank's paint took up so much weight is that the paint is going on rough insulation, not a slick metal skin. And the tank is also fairly huge, given it holds liquid hydrogen.

So I suspect that the weight cost for painting something like the Falcon 9 isn't nearly as bad, given it's an aluminum skin. And there may be some engineering reasons too.

Re:Interesting Question

[goodmanj]

In addition to the factors already mentioned:

Extra weight on a spacecraft is more problematic the longer the weight sticks around during launch, because the faster the extra weight ends up going, the more energy (i.e. fuel) is needed to accelerate it -- and the more fuel is needed to accelerate that fuel, and so on.

The shuttle external tank is carried almost all the way to orbit. Every pound of weight saved on the tank is roughly equal to an extra pound of payload, so leaving it unpainted makes a lot of sense.

But the Falcon 9 rocket's fancy paint job is on its first stage. This drops off long before orbit is reached, so it doesn't impact the cargo capacity nearly as much.

Actually not that much weight saving

[pgfuller]

You are out by several orders of magnitude - 600lbs / 272kg was the weight saving from not painting the ET. Later structural design changes reduced the ET weight by a more significant 17,000lbs.

Not Reusable

[mrcaseyj]

Reusability isn't mentioned on their Falcon 9 page anymore. I originally got excited about SpaceX because I thought reusability would be the breakthrough in space launch we need. But unfortunately Musk said they haven't come up with a way to protect the boosters from reentry yet. They're looking at aerodynamic methods to keep the heat shielded top of the booster coming down first. Some engineers say they're crazy to think they can make them reusable.

But even if they can't get them reusable, I think it would be a great advance if they can just make them 1/4 or even 1/2 the cost. I don't think Musk started SpaceX because he thought it was the best way to make money. He probably did it in part for the fun of it, but I think primarily he's truly driven to make it cheaper. Falcon 1 has proven Musk a capable entrepreneur. I hope so much that he can get Falcon 9 into orbit.

Re:Not Reusable

[cmowire]

I think he was quite smart in designing the Falcon boosters for reuse but not actually building that into the business model, leaving it as an eventual improvement.

Especially given that he has yet to recover any Falcon 1 first stages, even though they were supposed to be reused.

Re:Not Reusable

[dj245]

What continues to amaze me about the SpaceX folk is not really the technology and engineering anymore, although that is impressive. What is great about their organization is the project management. They continually deliver on their claims on time (or ahead of schedule) and mostly stick to the budget. They are making steady steps toward being a massive player like Lockheed. Very few companies run this smoothly.

Re:Information.com Considered Harmful

[MichaelSmith]

Do people still type watches.com when they want to find watches online?

Yes, but into the google search field.

Actually

[WindBourne]

I am more interested in seeing if they recover this rocket. IIRC, they have not been able to recover the falcon I's. I am surprised that they do not choose to launch several more 1's and get the recovery correct. But have to make the 2010 deadline.

On a side note, I do wish that he would pull in a partner or two and get the escape tower built. It would be nice to see human rated by the time the shuttle is over.

Actually, the pain ways alot

[WindBourne]

American Airlines used to fully paint their birds. Back in the oil crisis of late 70's, crandell asked employees how to save money. My dad was one of the pilots who suggested losing most of the the paint and doing much smaller amounts of it. They figured that added something like 1-2% to the bottom line.

Spacex will likely drop the paint job down the road unless it is found that it helps against the salt in the air as well as in the ocean upon landing.

Integrated?

[linebackn]

Integrated? Does that mean it can no longer be uninstalled?