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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."
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.
I don't see how it's Fox's fault, all TFA said was that Elon Musk said the craft could be used to complete the Mars mission. Summary was way off from reality, but the article seemed to be done without hyperbole or bias.
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.
He stated that the rocket will be ready i.e. ready to launch by the end of 2012.
But the actual launch would probably be in 2013 depending on final regulatory hurdles plus any final technical issues encountered with the pad integration.
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.