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World's Most Powerful Rocket Ready In 2012, SpaceX Says
Velcroman1 writes "Elon Musk, the millionaire founder of private space company Space Exploration Technologies Corp (SpaceX for short) said the long-planned Falcon Heavy vehicle would be ready for lift off at the end of 2012. The rocket, which he called the most powerful in the world, would be capable of taking men to the International Space Station, dropping vehicles and astronauts on the moon — and maybe even cruising to Mars and back."
What an amazingly inaccurate summary. The rocket will be left to fall back into the ocean/atmosphere, while it has enough cargo capacity (2X that of the space shuttle to LEO) to launch something that could, conceivably, go to Mars and back.
Personally, I'm expecting Bigelow to be the first customer.
Necron69
How can one not know whether his/her rocket is capable of making it to Mars? Are we talking superpositions here or what?
Call me when we have something that can out lift the Saturn V. Yes I know they say this will cheaper but still I expected us to be much farther along than we are.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
"Space Exploration Technologies Corp (SpaceX for short)"
Later to be renamed Weyland Yutani (WY for short)
the Soviet N1?
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
it's a very small crowd, so that's not a problem? almost nobody on this planet cares where they go, as long as it's far away forever. could their big rocket be ready any sooner? the real 'aliens' may have other plans for them, seeing as they were the ones who originally suggested that we not hurt/kill each other.
which just makes the increasingly popular/populated genuine native americans for president campaign become just that much more appropriate/relevant/timely.
Elon Musk? Is that really his name? Sounds more like the name of a perfume.
Urban legends aside, NASA did not throw the plans for the Saturn V away.
Falcon Heavy is cool, but it's still a factor of two away from the LEO capacity of a Saturn V.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
The Fox article is a little sparse on info, so for the curious, there was some pretty good liveblogging (live-foruming?) of the press conference here. You can see official details (and a neat video) on SpaceX's site here.
Looking through the forum and the website, here's a summary of all the most interesting stuff:
paying development costs internally, strong commercial + gov customer interest
As an aside, it'll be quite fascinating to see what impact this has on the heavy-lift debate currently going on in Congress. For those unfamiliar with it, Congress is currently trying to pressure NASA to spend several billion dollars of its funding over several years into building a 70mt rocket from shuttle-legacy components/infrastructure. It's now looking like SpaceX will build a rocket with nearly the same capability using its own funding, which will be ready to launch several years before the Congress-mandated rocket. Hmm.
Hello I have read the site page for falcon heavy on the spacex site. I am a bit confused as to how they can take men / women to ISS and safely return them. I understand the entering of space and docking. However I do not see a craft that can renter safely and land somewhere on earth. Please enlighten me.
It actually makes it somewhat easier to get to the moon though, since 2 launches of the Falcon Heavy (what you need to get enough mass for a moon landing) are going to be cheaper than one Saturn V.
You could launch the capsule with one launch and the EDS/lander with a second one, then rendezvous in orbit.
Urban legends aside, NASA did not throw the plans for the Saturn V away.
Then they just SAID they couldn't find them any more when private space industry startups tried to get them when NASA was designing the shuttle and Congress was wondering why they couldn't continue to do launches with the proven technology rather than having to fund all this new stuff, including new big engines?
(I heard that "urban myth" from one of the players in private launches at the time.)
Please enlighten us with the details, if you have them.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
This is about half a Saturn V class rocket in terms of payload. Development costs are likely to be remarkably low, around a few billion dollars (Elon Musk has claimed $2 billion before to develop a Saturn V class rocket which would be larger than the SpaceX Heavy). What is interesting is that they seem intent on developing the vehicle using the current Merlin engines rather than than a new F-1 class engine (the rocket engines used on the Saturn 5, five on the first stage and one on the second stage). A cluster of 27 engines (!) will power the first stage. This technique of small rocket clusters is known to have caused trouble for the Soviets when they tried it (four launch failures in a row). With modern technology, the odds are probably better, both because an engine failure that is about to wipe out some of its neighbors can be detected and a shutdown attempted. Second, control systems are much more sophisticated. One can design a system with random engine outs (that is, engines that aren't firing for some reason) that can still fly. We'll see if that's good enough.
The interesting thing from a development perspective is that this means a good portion of the testing is already done since the Merlin engines have been successfully flown on four flights (two Falcon I and two Falcon 9). They already claim that they are the top manufacturer of rocket engines by number (though I don't know if they are by total thrust). They also have some success firing Merlin engines in clusters and on the successful Falcon 9 flights. They'll probably have to make a more sophisticated avionics and control system, plumbing/pumping to supply the much larger engine cluster, and the vehicle frame, but I suspect that they won't have to do much more than that. My guess is that the 27 engine cluster and its plumbing will be fairly tricky as will the control system (which has to be able to handle several engine outs), but the rest won't be.
Now compare it to the Shuttle derived Space Launch System (SLS) that Congress wants NASA to research. For one or two years of funding of the SLS (and incidentally, about the same amount of funding just to maintain the current Shuttles!), SpaceX probably can develop the SpaceX Heavy. It doesn't have quite the capability that the SLS would have (at least on paper!), payload is a bit over 50 metric tons to LEO (low Earth orbit) while even a minimal SLS design is required to be able to carry 70 metric tons (at least as NASA read the Congressional directive) to LEO) Yesterday, there was gnashing of teeth because the last Space Shuttle was coming up with a possible end to the US's space program in the works. Now we have a rocket that not only would be vastly cheaper, but capable of carrying far more payload than the Shuttle. This may be our chance to get our space program back on track from when it derailed in the 70s.
Someone that was on the Colbert Report the other night, claiming to be a ``historian`` of the American space program, was saying something like Space X could build everything needed to launch a rocket into space for the same price NASA spends on building just a launch tower, but NASA also needed $12 billion and a decade to make a pen that worked in 0 gravity... and the Russians just used a pencil, classic.
It's like the mind going AWOL, it's there somewhere
Urban legends aside, NASA did not throw the plans for the Saturn V [CC] away.
Revisions to urban legends aside, most of the expertise to easily leverage the Saturn V designs have long since left NASA and/or died. And what those plans fail to account for, Saturn V was designed in such a way where it was common for revisions to be made on the actual product and designs were changed later. As a result, its acknowledged, a modern Saturn V is very likely to differ from the original Saturn Vs which previously flew. Specifically because modern fixes to the elements which are unknowingly broken in the those designs are very likely to find different solutions given different sets of constraints and minds.
So technically, yes, we have plans for something called a Saturn V. And yet, we have MOST of the plans for what actually flew.
Yep. My father worked on every Saturn (guidance and control, especially the LVDC on the IU) except SA-1 (and then Shuttle, X-33, and now Ares). He retired from civil service a few years ago and now works part-time for a contractor, but if Congress/Obama can't get a budget passed and Dad goes home for a while due to a shutdown, he might not go back. There aren't many others left around from that era.
Even if you had the knowledge and the people, you wouldn't build another Saturn V anyway. You couldn't rebuild the same computers, so you'd update the computers and programs, at which point you might as well upgrade the engines, which leads to changes in the structure (since you have to build new dies and jigs anyway), etc. The test a few weeks ago at Marshall showed that the consensus for structural strength (that even SpaceX and such have used) was off by about a factor of 2 (the rocket structure was about twice as strong, and thus as heavy, as it needed to be).
Even the second run of Saturn V vehicles (if they had been built) would have been different, with upgraded engines (the J-2X was developed during the Apollo program, and then pulled out for Ares I), similar to the changes the Space Shuttle underwent during its 30 year run.
Can't we do anything besides rockets?
Been doing the rocket thing for like thousands of years.
I think it is time for something a little less clunky and more elegant.
Rockets suck.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
Let's just hope it's before December 21st, or no one will get to see it happen.
-- http://www.doczayus.com/
The Saturn V was funded involuntarily (by government). At the time, there was nobody willing to fund such a project out of their own pockets -- otherwise it would have happened. Government made it happen only because government had the power to force everyone else to pay out of their own pockets, particularly those who would never have chosen for themselves to support it.
The SpaceX program, by contrast, is funded through voluntary means (if you ignore the government contracts). We have finally reached an era where space travel/exploration is ready for voluntary investment. But government space programs did have a half-century head start, and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that we cannot compare the private space industry with the public space industry until the private space industry has reached maturity.
Just like in Star Wars, the SpaceX rocket defies physics and makes rocket noise in the depths of space (1:08 in the video). Maybe the biggest breakthrough yet!
Not bad for a dude that toiled in college for an economics degree (and then some kind of physics minor afterthought as a flip side; might only be topped by the select few journalism + applied math doublets).
Just imagine if he had been a technical major.
True, their supply of captured German scientists ran out. ;)
Of course, for it to not be "most powerful", Angara (even more modular... much more late) would have to be on time, also with its heavy variant, at the least.
... most frequently used launch vehicle in the world" (and one of the least expensive ones; too bad Zenit isn't given much of a chance)
Anyway, such payloads aren't even strictly necessary for Mars sample return - not with our automatic rendezvous & docking capability (which we've done in the 60s, making the Shuttle obsolete before it seriously made its way to drawing boards)
At least those new launchers take an approach of very high modularity & semi mass-production - seems to be working fine for R-7 family, "the most reliable
One that hath name thou can not otter
I'm impressed that the Falcon-9 rocket can lie on its side, supported at only two points. Many large US rockets don't have enough strength in torsion for that, and must be assembled vertically.
This reduces cost. The thing can be built in a factory bay of reasonable size, then barged and/or trucked to the launch site. There's no need to do final assembly near the launch pad.
This is a good sign. One of the big problems with US rocketry has been that fanatical weight reduction resulted in overly fragile vehicles. This thing looks tougher.
and thought it looked amateurish?
Seriously, the guy stuttered for the whole duration and the promotional video was momentarily interrupted by a flash plugin popup.
Anyway as long as he can sell the stuff...
SpaceX stated it was the most powerful rocket since the Apollo era. They also said a larger rocket would be needed for a Mars mission. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12975872
...will it be powerful enough to get Duke Nukem to the alien mothership?
Wow! "the millionaire founder".
Sorry I wasn't paying attention in basket weaving, sorry I mean economics, as Mr. Musk was, but given that Delta, Atlas, Titan, Ariane, ...are existing and flying designs, I not sure how the Falcon can be substantially cheaper than these systems.
It's like claiming the Tesla is substantially cheaper than the Prius, oh right, it isn't.
Maybe this will be the rocket that attracts the attention of nearby space beings!
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Cheap is also better for long-term sustained exploration and presence. Set up regular supply & equipment drops and you can "easily" keep a lunar base a going concern and have a lot more space/easier construction (dig tunnels!)
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
The two shuttle solid rocket boosters (combined) have more thrust than the Falcon Heavy.
They damn well better name it the Millennium Falcon.