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SpaceX Tries Out Its New SuperDraco Rocket Engine
cylonlover writes "SpaceX, the California company that is developing the reusable Dragon spacecraft, recently test-fired its new SuperDraco engine. Presently, the Dragon capsule is equipped with less-advanced Draco engines, which are designed for maneuvering the spacecraft while in orbit and during reentry. The SuperDraco, however, is intended to allow the astronauts to escape if an emergency occurs during the launch."
Seems like several times a year now we are hearing about SpaceX successes - and few if any failures. They are scheduled to begin testing and then delivering cargo to the Space Station within the next year. It will be able to launch cargo to the space station at about 1/10th the cost (around $50 million as opposed to nearly $500 million) as the space shuttle.
Perhaps all that talk of a moon base, trips to Mars, etc. aren't that far-fetched after all.
Great warrior...hrmph! Wars not make one great.
My dad works at the airforce base where they are going to try to launch and land this thing, apparently the goal is to land it right back onto the launch pad it started from, or at least thats what they guys on base are saying.
Summary misses the point... yes, they need a launch-abort system to meet NASA's human-rating specs, but the real goal of the SuperDraco engines is to enable propulsive landings with pinpoint accuracy. They claim that a Dragon capsule so-equipped will be able to land on "any surface" in the solar system.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
It's really interesting that if you look at the arguably real shot of the test firing, it seems to look almost like a rendering from a game! It probably means that fire/smoke rendering in games is getting good, or perhaps nature is just recently slacking in presenting itself to us :)
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Is that you, Hipster Cat?
If the only locomotives in the past were built by huge government programs, cost way too much to operate, and primarily carried just a few select government employees then, yeah, it would be interesting.
It's not the technology (althogh Space X *is* advancing that even if you are unable to recognize it) being reworked here so much as the business case.
If you're so bored, go get an appropriate degree and help advance things.
You'd be amazed to learn, then, that there coal-fired boilers have improved quite a bit over the last century, in terms of thermal efficiency (the percentage of heat extracted at high temperature), combustion efficiency (the less CO out the stack, the better), cost of operation (autofeed systems, diagnostics), and durability.
Now, since SpaceX is the only company that has ever made space launches so cheap, I'd hardly call it a "modern anachronism". It has never been done that affordably, ever. They are the first ones who apparently grok how to run an integrated aerospace manufacturing and launch business to control costs and schedules.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Well, if that Coal-Fired Burner is producing Power at 1/10th the price everyone else (producing it using Nuclear, or whatever they have), I would damn well be impressed. Of course we've been to the Moon already, shot stuff to Orbit a quadrillion times over.. but if we can do it again, affordable this time.. Take for example travel.. sure we could do London - New York in a single trip 50,100, 200 Years ago.. only difference is, 2hundred years ago, it took 2 weeks, cost a fortune, and was not very safe. 100 Years ago, it took four days, still cost a fortune, was safer, but still. Today it takes roughly eight hours, and I can actually pay for a return ticket with two weeks of my pay - if I wanted to, I could do that trip easily every two months and possibly survive every one of them. SpaceX is currently not doing something new - they are trying to build and improve upon what has been done in the past - namely getting stuff and people from A (Earth) to B (LEO, GEO, GSO), and at the same time build the foundation for much more ambitious missions. Like it says in the Article - if the SuperDraco system works as intended, you have a pinpoint-accurate lander that can touch down and - depending refuelling and the gravity of the body - launch again on it's own, without any expendable stages. also, Falcon 9 and Falcon 9 Heavy are only stepping stones on the way to something bigger - Falcon X, XX, XX Heavy are all on the drawing boards already. And with that much lifting power - and that at more or less affordable prices - building a structure in orbit for manufacturing larger crafts which in turn can be serviced, piloted, and left/rejoined with one and the same capsule: Dragon. As soon as you have a cheap means of getting stuff up there, you can really start looking at persistence - NASA is planning for developing "Space Tug" Systems, that can take stuff in LEO, and shuffle it to higher orbits, even GSO at little to no extra cost, since it is in all possibility a system based on VASIMR and solar power.. and if you actually have a means of getting fuel, repair crews and the crafts themselves up at a cost that actually makes making them reusable and not "one-shots" feasible, you suddenly have a complete infrastructure up there, actually gaining manufacturing capabilities after a few years of building.. Imagine if you have a Launcher like Falcon X/XX, a standardised Flottila of Crafts like Dragon..and the means to actually build ships in space instead of just one-shots that you partially drop piece by piece on your way and then throw away. Want to go to the Moon? Build a ship, fuel it, fly it, do your mission, return it, refuel it, refly it.. Of course this is all more or less science fiction right now, but it all is technically doable - the only things blocking us from actually doing them with what we have now is cost and effort, since most stuff for spaceflight is designed from the ground up for each specific mission - if you start having a reliable, high-volume and cost efficient base to bring stuff up, a lot of other stuff will follow.. and SpaceX is doing it's babysteps right now of course - hell, that Company is only a few years old and already on the edge of being the first gig that launches a 21st century man-rated Space Transportation System - hell it is a capsule, it looks retro, apollo did it, yadda yadda. But with thar Argument take your Ford Model T and your Ford Fusion 2012.. they both still look like cars no? Somewhere along the way we figured out that "four wheels and an enclosed capsule for the people inside" is a more or less optimal form for a car, so we stuck with it. I want my Spaceplanes as much as everyone else (REL, go on with Skylon, quickly!) - but for now SpaceX is doing a darn good job at what they do. I've seen their plans for powered ascent for 1st/2nd Level rocket stages - and I'm highly sceptical it will ever work. But oh boy, if they would make it work, that would be one of the sweetest feats I've ever seen launched from a Launchpad..
Coal locomotives are dead because they were supplanted by much better designs. Space Age rockets are dead because they weren't. Huge difference.
If a private company unveiled a locomotive engine whose performance-to-price ratio was an order of magnitude better than the current state of the art , everyone would be rightly excited.
Almost everyone would be excited, I mean; there's never been a shortage of idiots. I'm sure there were 19th century equivalents of this AC, demanding to know why everyone was getting so excited about putting a two-millenia-old technology like an aeolipile on wheels.
Yes, meaningless letters and numbers are way cooler. My mistake. If I have a daughter, I'll name her ZX-32, not something stupid like Jennifer or Lizzy.
Oh don't be stupid. ZX-32 is a boys name, she'll be teased.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
I grew up in Akron, Ohio, where one of the local heros was Art Arfons. He raced jet cars on the Bonnieville Salt Flats, and several times held the world land speed record. He may have eventually raced jets, but his earlier cars used aircraft piston engines.
He named is daughter "Allison" after an aircraft engine maker that he liked, and presumably because he thought it an acceptable girls name. I believe she goes by the name "Dusty", but have no idea if was because she didn't like "Allison", or some other reason. (Yep, just checked that on wikipedia.)
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Is SpaceX really advancing the technology? I've gotten the impression that much of what they've done is pick up NASA research and bring it to fruition. That plus they've applied more modern management practices to bring something to market quickly, cheaply, and efficiently. None of that is to denigrate them at all, simply making space access more affordable is a tremendous achievement.
But "cheap" and developing new technologies from scratch don't generally mix well. Once they're established and have a regular revenue stream, I certainly do hope we'll see some new technology development. But that development will probably always be a mix between cost and capability, as opposed to "biggest, fastest, farthest, regardless of the cst."
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
But cost is what's keeping more ambitious plans on the drawing board. As Heinlein said, once you're in LEO you're halfway to anywhere in the solar system. We've known how to get to LEO for 60 years now, but we don't do it very often because it costs so damn much. If SpaceX can actually get the cost per kg as low as they plan, it's going to have more effect on human spaceflight than anything we've done since Apollo.
Dude! SuperDuperDraco is a looooong way off. Duper technology isn't even out of university research labs yet!
The enemies of Democracy are
You mean like when he had yet to get Falcon 1 reliable, yet to even build Falcon 9 and he was talking about building Dragon? I scolded him similarly when he first announced dragon for just what you said, but i was wrong.
He did deliver on those promises, now he's planning the next phase and talking about it. Would you prefer he kept things secret?
As an example in the branch of engineering I work (ASIC design) it can easily take 4 years from "hey this is a cool idea, let's draw it on the whiteboard" to it being in a product I can buy in a shop. SpaceX are doing proper mechanical engineering and safety critical stuff to which takes a lot longer; yet they are delivering in about 6 years from "hey this is a cool idea" to selling it to customers. Personally I'm impressed with how fast they are doing it and so far they have yet to fail to deliver the product, they've been a bit behind schedule sure but they have delivered (but with modern NASA involved, a bit behind is early) .
"The weirdest thing about a mind, is that every answer that you find, is the basis of a brand new cliche" -