Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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.
What you're looking for is not a capability of the Falcon Heavy, but their Dragon spacecraft which launches on the Falcon 9. They recovered it from orbit in December, so I'll let them show it to you: Specs, Mission update. Short version is that it's your basic capsule design with water landing, they're hoping to have the next version be a rocket landing on ground, using the abort motors.
There's pretty much nothing true in that statement besides the claim that "the Russians just used pencils" - NASA did too, until after Fisher developed the space pen (without government funding) and asked NASA to try it. In fact, after NASA adopted the space pen, so did the Russians.
And there's problems with using pencils in space - wood pencils are flammable, and the graphite in mechanical pencils can snap off more easily and damage vulnerable equipment (it's conducive, after all) or the astronauts themselves, if they accidentally inhale it.
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.
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.
Then he would have been stuck in a dead-end position as a glorified draftsman being told by his superiors that, "you can't do that." His econ degree let him see how to make PayPal work, his dabbling in physics inspired him to go ask "why not" when told it couldn't be done. The money he made from PayPal let him put his arguments to the test (his money where his mouth is.) Had he gone into technology... we would still be buying stuff on ebay with money orders, and the Constellation project would be $15B over budget and 8 years late.
Life, the Universe, and Everything... in my image.
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