SpaceX Announces Dragon As First Falcon 9 Payload

BJ_Covert_Action writes "SpaceX announced recently that it would be integrating a stripped-down test version of its own Dragon cargo capsule as the payload for its first Falcon 9 test launch. The Falcon 9 rocket is currently scheduled to launch on November 29 of this year if everything goes according to plan. However, Elon Musk admits that launch day will likely slip to sometime early next year. The Falcon 9 is the heavy launch vehicle designed by SpaceX to be used as a cheap, commercial alternative to existing United States launch platforms. Having launched a few successful light missions with the Falcon 1 rocket, SpaceX is going to launch the Falcon 9 as its next milestone in commercializing the space industry. Utilizing its own cargo capsule as the first Falcon 9 payload will effectively give SpaceX double the tests for one launch slot on the Cape Canaveral range. The capsule that will be used is a test version of the full Dragon capsule that encompasses primarily the structure and a few components of the full version. It served originally as a ground test platform for the Dragon design team and now will double as an orbital testbed. If nothing else, the announcement upped the ante in the commercial space market by showing the SpaceX is capable and willing to push the envelope on its development schedules. It should serve as a proper motivator for other commercial competitors such as Orbital Sciences with their Cygnus capsule, which is also under development."

Comments

Space station supply

[amightywind]

This makes sense. Falcon 9 is uninsurable without a successful launch, so it cannot be used to launch a valuable satellite payload. Furthermore, NASA's space station supply contract is potentially far more lucrative than participating in the competitive market for satellite launch services. Good luck to them. They are going to need it

Re:Space station supply

[0123456]

Why are they going to need good luck? You sound a little pessimistic about their efforts.

The first launch of any new rocket is likely to run into unforseen problems which can cause it to fail, particularly when it's been developed quickly on a low budget. SpaceX have some experience now with the earlier Falcon launches, but the odds of a failure are significant... that's just rocket science for you.

Re:Space station supply

[0123456]

Well, getting into space despite the problems and then fixing them for the next launch is better than not getting into space at all; but, yes, the important element of the first launch of any rocket is to find the problems and fix them.

NASA, for example, had numerous problems on the early Saturn launches which could have lost the launcher and payload (POGO being the most obvious), but redundancy and some good luck saved those flights.

Re:Space station supply

[Rei]

Bzzt, sorry! If you don't have a direct ancestor, you're not taking an evolutionary approach, and you have to debug full systems integration from scratch. None of their failures would have occurred if it were an evolutionary rocket -- the salt/metal incompatibility failure would have occurred on the parent rocket, the separation kick would have occurred on the parent rocket, and the slosh roll risk would have at least been hinted at by the parent rocket.

there's nothing particularly revolutionary or new about it's design, construction, or manufacture.

Examples: hybrid isogrid/balloon tanks for a "best of both worlds" combination of high payload fraction and ease of handling on the ground; one of the first rockets to use friction-stir welded tanks; an level of automated production unprecedented for orbital rocketry; an almost unreal turnaround time on aborted launches, and the highest performance gas generator cycle engine ever built.

There be dragons?

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't read the article, but wouldn't it make more sense to transport smaller lizards or even some amphibians?
I know dragons are fun and can light your space-cigarettes with their fire-breath, but lets be practical here.
Think, people... THINK!

Re:There be dragons?

[dangitman]

Oh, yeah, what are you gonna do? Release the falcons? Or the dragons? Or the falcons with the dragons in their mouth, that shoot dragons at you?

But is it...

[Covalent]

...an African falcon or a European falcon?

Re:But is it...

[K. S. Kyosuke]

After launch, it is going to alternate between these two with a period of cca. 90 minutes.

NASA Restructured As Space-Based FAA.

[Xin Jing]

I originally wanted to post this here http://science.slashdot.org/story/09/09/25/2328247/NASAs-Space-Plans-Take-Another-Hit, but an unknown error prevented me from doing so. My commentary is still relevant for this article:

I think that NASA should be stripped down and restructured. All manned missions and support operations with a military application should be converted to their respective military counterparts, the whole thing headed up by Joint Chiefs of Staff. From Wikipedia, "their primary responsibility is to ensure the personnel readiness, policy, planning and training of their respective military services for the combatant commanders to utilize." The President and Secretary of Defense can tap the manned space capability of the respective military branches, and the JCS maintains training, policy and readiness. Oversight for military applications already has a process, which would remain in place.

NASA would be reduced or redesignated from it's current role to that of managing and conducing operations for unmanned space missions such as deep space probes and telescopes, establishing rules, standards and accident reviews for commercial space activities just like the FAA. NASA would also continue to provide tenantship to fixed orbital platforms such as the ISS, in conjunction with other participating nations. Every manned application is auctioned off to civilian corporations that meet specific minimal requirements. NASA would become the space analogy of the FAA, allowing a vacuum to exist allowing other responsible and qualified fair trade entities to step in and compete for the best possible road to commercial space business.

Re:NASA Restructured As Space-Based FAA.

[ColdWetDog]

You're forgetting the "Aeronautics" part of NASA. They do an awful lot of in atmosphere research (often in conjunction with the FAA and other agencies such as NOAA.) They have a multi decade history of doing quite a bit of basic, low key, often boring things that could be fobbed off to another governmental agency but would likely just get subsumed in the flotsam of fiefdoms and budgets.

From your original article, the biggest problem isn't NASA, it's the shortsighted, braindead, slimy, backhanded, hypocritical, nonsensical, bat-shit-insane, idiocratic and just plain old corrupt congress.

Re:NASA Restructured As Space-Based FAA.

[edumacator]

braindead, slimy, backhanded, hypocritical, nonsensical, bat-shit-insane, idiocratic and just plain old corrupt congress

Why did you use all those extra words? Just saying congress would have been enough.

The difference between failure and screwing up

[voss]

The difference between NASA and spacex is spacex is doing their test launches without taxpayer money. If a rocket fails it fails on their own dime so they better learn something from it...and they do. Thats why launches 4 & 5 worked fine..duh!

It should not bother anyone to have failures BEFORE success, how many times did Edison fail with the light bulb? several thousand. How many years did it take the wright brothers to perfect glider control with three different glider models before they created the first airplane (four). The Apollo 1 fire was an example of a catastrophic failure, however it paved the way for later success.

Now compare that with the challenger and columbia diasters both times NASA knew about the design problem ahead of time and failed to act. Management both times ignored the warnings of the engineers.

When something doesnt succeed its a failure, if you knew it might fail and you didnt do anything about it thats screwing up

Re:The difference between failure and screwing up

[Teancum]

In fairness here, it should be pointed out that there was some public money that went into the earlier SpaceX test flights for the Falcon 1. Yes, Elon Musk did put up a whole bunch of his own money and it should be pointed out that neither NASA nor the U.S. Department of Defense put up any money in terms of the R&D on the Falcon 1, but there was some DARPA money spent on most of those early launches with SpaceX.

The main difference between what SpaceX is doing and what the other rocket companies like Boeing and Lockheed-Martin have been doing is that SpaceX is offering a vehicle for a more or less fixed price... a sort of "cash and carry" if you want to be a customer. Previous government contracts had been on what is called a "cost plus" contract where all of the R&D costs were included and very little financial incentive was in place to drive down the costs involved.

Essentially, earlier spacecraft development projects had all of the costs paid for by the government, and once the project was completed there was a guaranteed profit at the end (hence the "plus"). Of course that requires an army of accountants to keep track of where every penny goes and leads to bureaucratic bloat on even trying to keep track of where the money is being spent to keep embezzlement from happening on such a project. For example, on each space shuttle booster that is used on the Shuttle program (mind you, not even R&D here, but just production work in this case) has a mountain of paper work that is almost double the weight of the booster itself before it gets shipped to KSC to be attached to the orbiter for the next flight. There are dedicated cargo planes just for shipping this paperwork to Washington D.C. where it gets tossed into warehouses and sits for years afterward. I've had friends who worked for ATK and their only job was just to get signatures on this paperwork.

While SpaceX still has to deal with a mountain of paperwork, some of that can be culled out through employee trust and more conventional business structures that don't come from a government program. That is the huge difference that SpaceX is offering here, and the fact that SpaceX is still just a few hundred employees.

Potential Payload

[drbuzz0]

My understanding is that they will be launching the Dragon as basically a test item, not a fully capable version of the capsule intended to dock with the space station. The first Falcon-1 launch carried a "mass simulator" - basically a chunk of metal to act as ballast. The reasoning is, as mentioned, it's uninsurable on the first launch and there is a high probability of failure on the first full launch of a new space vehicle.

Still, I can think of one group that would love to send up a ton of cargo, even if they knew it was risky: AMSAT. The ham radio satellite organization. Launch costs tend to limit their potential satellites to being tiny cubesats, which can be hard to fit much capabilities into. Their satellites are built very cheaply compared to other satellite producers and their biggest cost tends to be launching them. They could build one hell of a satellite with the kind of mass that the Falcon-9 could put up there, and given the possibilities, they may very well be willing to accept that there is a large risk it won't even make it. It could be the one realistic opportunity to have any chance of launching a really big payload.

Re:And what do you know, I *do* have a point.

[ClayJar]

Which, given the fact that fairings don't particularly represent a difficult design or development problem, indicates that something (major) is wrong at SpaceX.

So, you're saying that fairings are, to use the phrase, "not rocket science"? It's certainly true that a fairing design and implementation is not nearly as difficult a nut to crack as designing a new liquid-fueled engine completely from scratch, but fairings and fairing separations aren't something so inherently mundane that they can be ignored.

The aerodynamics are not so trivial you can just say, "Eh, that looks about right..." and be at an energy-optimal solution. Additionally, while it's trivial to overbuild a solution that will protect the payload during ascent, reducing the mass of the fairing system is not so easy. (Like most things in engineering, the first bits are easy, with additional improvements coming with greater and greater effort.) Having additional time to shave off a few more kilograms from the fairing is certainly a net positive.

Now, as for fairing separation incidents, there have not been many, but a quick check does turn up three of note in the last decade or so:

• KSLV-1 (South Korea): Faulty fairing separation identified as main cause in failure of Narohoâ(TM)s satellite launch
• Taurus/OCO (Orbital Science): The Case Of The Fairing That Would Not
• Athena 2: Futron Design Reliability study (See table on page 4)

I cannot speak to the failure potential of a new fairing design on a new launch vehicle as compared to existing fairings on well-traveled vehicles, but if I were to go with a "feeling", I would certainly doubt that it is less.

(By the way, your ad hominem song and dance routine was hardly mature. Will you be coming to Geowoodstock next year up in your area? I'm thinking of possibly heading up for the event and some cold water diving next year, and I wouldn't mind betting a batch of my homemade chocolate chip cookies on SpaceX -- perhaps you can bet a family-restaurant-level dinner? I don't drink, so it shouldn't be expensive.)