SpaceX Conducts First On-Pad Test-Fire of Falcon 9

FleaPlus writes "On Saturday, SpaceX successfully conducted a launch dress rehearsal and on-pad test firing of their completed Falcon 9 rocket, with the 15-story tall rocket held down to prevent launch (videos). SpaceX is one of several likely competitors (ranging from the upstart Blue Origin to the more experienced Boeing) in NASA's new plans for commercial crew transportation to low-Earth orbit. SpaceX has been cleared by Cape Canaveral for the Falcon 9's first orbital launch next month, carrying a test model of the company's Dragon cargo/crew capsule, although CEO/CTO Elon Musk has cautioned that they're still in the equivalent of 'beta testing' for the first few flights."

Comments

Great! Keep (slowly) driving down the cost...

[wisebabo]

...of getting to space by making incremental improvements in technology (and substantial cost reductions through cutting bureaucracy).

Let NASA do the high risk/high return investments in fundamentally new technologies (aerospike engines, composite fuel tanks, hypersonic ramjets hell even laser beamed launchers or space elevators!). That, in a nutshell, is Obama's plan isn't it? To me, just a space enthusiast, it sounds good if not ideal. ("ideal" would have been to not have invaded Iraq and instead, COLONIZED Mars. They cost about the same.).

I just don't want to someday have American astronauts make their first landing on Mars and have to order Chinese food from the restaurant there. (It's okay, they can have the Moon).

Re:Great! Keep (slowly) driving down the cost...

[Kjella]

2) Will NASA do the research on fundamentally new technologies? I suspect not here either, since that would require handing NASA money year after year with no real return. (when you're getting money to do research, you have a powerful incentive to never actually finish your research)

With your last remark this sounds like an attack on doing research in general, every researcher has that interest even in the private industry, unless they're stock holders rather than normal wage takers. The mechanism to solve that is exactly the same too, there's not an infinite amount of research money neither in the private nor public sector. Your program is a lackluster like Constellation? It gets axed. It's a huge success like the Mars Rovers? You can bet there'll be another round of grants for those. Oh there's a lot of pork and politics rather than science that decides what gets funded, but that's equally true everywhere. In fact, I'm fairly sure that this happens much more in the applied sciences where they claim the big profits are right around the next bend, only a little more research is necessary...

Re:Great! Keep (slowly) driving down the cost...

[vlm]

1) Will the bureaucracy actually be reduced? I suspect not.

You could staff 30 SpaceX companies with the number of people downsized by the shuttle program ending. Or in other words, its not a good time to be an aerospace engineer. (Has it ever been a good time to be an aerospace engineer?)

Downsize 27000 jobs as regards the shuttle shut down. Note that is a delta, for the industry not just NASA.
I know its an industry wide figure because NASA only employs 17900 people per wikipedia.

http://app1.kuhf.org/houston_public_radio-news-display.php?articles_id=1267053819

SpaceX employs 900 people

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX

Re:Great! Keep (slowly) driving down the cost...

[Teancum]

Is that necessarily a bad thing to have 30 companies the size of SpaceX who productively each perform roughly the same amount of work that the one bloated agency milking government largess to do the same thing?

Yes, I do realize that even comparing Constellation to the Falcon 9 isn't quite comparing the same thing, but it does help that SpaceX is starting from a clean sheet in terms of building up a new organization that is avoiding bureaucracy that even exists in more established private companies like Boeing or Northrop-Grumman. That is called competition, and I think it is a good thing.

From a public policy standpoint and from the perspective of a company trying to get started in the aerospace business, now is a fantastic time to be an investor in a new aerospace start-up company with thousands of very hungry engineers that have decades of experience. From what I've seen, it is actually a good time to be an aerospace engineering graduate, as there are job opportunities out there.... especially for entry-level engineers that may be willing to work for a relatively low salary to get their feet wet.

All this said, yeah it would suck to be an employee of one of the major spacecraft firms that are connected to either Shuttle parts production or to the Constellation program. This does disrupt lives, families, communities, and even whole states when substantial shifts occur. That is why it is important to really evaluate the programs carefully before you shut down something like Constellation or the Shuttle program. Still, just because some program or government project is going, does that mean we as taxpayers need to keep that program going just to employ these workers, even if whatever they are making can't possibly be used affordably even once it is completed?

Whens the IPO for spaceX

[vlm]

Whens the IPO for spaceX?

I check finance.google.com and its all BS paper shuffling worthless shells of a company. All either struggling, dying, living off the government teat, or all of the above. Its like watching a bad season of survivor and the only ones left on the island are the biggest crooks and cheats so you wish none of them would win.

On the other hand, I'd like to invest in a company doing something interesting, like spacex. Even if they fail, I'd much rather throw away $$$ on a cool rocket than a bunch of thieving financial industry crooks.

I found one article from Dec 2007 stating they might IPO in the next two years, aka Dec 2009

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN0344600420071204

So, wheres the IPO? I was reading slashdot in the Redhat IPO era and I suspect the combined slashdot readership would probably enjoy buying some SPACEX even more so than RHAT.

If 50K slashdotters alone, each bought $1K of SPACEX at an IPO, that would be enough for one Falcon 9 launch right there.

Re:15-stories?

[vlm]

I know americans have problems with units for length but really "15 story tall"? Exactly how tall is a story?

How tall are you? A story is a bit taller than that, to account for ceiling mounted HVAC ducts and lighting. Intuitively its going to be about 10 feet per story, to one sig fig. Or about 3 meters. So, figure around 150 feet, or around 45 meters.

I agree that it is about as annoying as specifying all computer related measurements in "libraries of congress".

It would have been much more interesting if the journalist compared it to the size of a common launcher, like a space shuttle stack. Its 25% taller than a ready to launch shuttle stack or whatever it turns out to be.

Re:15-stories?

[b0dge]

A story is typically about three bears. Fixed.