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SpaceX Awarded First Military Contract
An anonymous reader writes "Ars reports that commercial space company SpaceX has gotten its first launch contracts from a military organization. The United States Air Force has hired SpaceX to launch the NASA DSCOVR satellite aboard a Falcon 9 rocket, and several other satellites aboard a Falcon Heavy. (The Heavy isn't finished yet, and SpaceX currently has no place to launch it, but the contract gives them three years to do so.) 'According to the mission requirements, the Falcon Heavy must carry its payload up to an orbit of 720 km and deploy a COSMIC-2 weather- and atmospheric-monitoring satellite, up to six auxiliary payloads (probably microsats), and up to eight P-POD CubeSat deployers. The rocket should then restart and continue all the way up to a 6,000 x 12,000 km orbit and deploy the ballast, more science experiments and more microsats.'"
Some engineers at NASA must be very sad right now. SpaceX is doing what they couldn't: More economical space flight" .
Then again they might've set their sights a little bit further, but still opportunity missed.
Sounds like a bus route.
That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.
I'm sure this is the satellite's true function.
I'm pretty sure their goal is the still the same:
Do as much as possible with the funds they have, while simultaneously defending themselves from an incompetent legislature who believes it's more important that we spend money on bombing brown people instead of investing in the future of not only our own country, but our very existence as a species.
That aside, hell yes, SpaceX. While I'm not an idiot who believes the "free" market is the answer to everything, commercial enterprises becoming involved in actual spaceflight is perhaps one of the most important things that will occur during my own lifetime. (I'm still bitter, though, because it's 2012 and I should be living on the Moon by now.)
Amazing what you can accomplish when you get Congressional pork-barrel politics out of the way.
We should try that for other failing agencies.
oh dear, did I just say that out loud?
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
OK rocket scientists or astrophysicists, what does "6,000 x 12,000 km orbit" mean for us lowly Earth-bound folk?
Is it just me, or does deploying 20 satellites with 1 rocket sound like we're still actually getting somewhere, even when it sometimes feels like space tech progress stopped 30 years ago?
Of course, this is thanks to microelectronic revolution, not thanks to advances of rocketry, but still...
And yeah, I hope even those microsats have means to deorbit... Shouldn't take that much hydrazine (or whatever) to change the orbit to be elliptical enough to get them burn up (or down, as it were).
Yeah, it is somewhat easier to do things economic when a government institution has already done decades of legwork for you.
Though yeah, not being sattled down with requirements for who to buy what from does SpaceX, but really it just puts them in the same spot as all the other commercial launch outfits, so they will likely become just as much a part of the problem as all the others.. their newness and geek attention is unlikely to change this.
"The second, a Falcon Heavy launch, will put up several satellites and a 5 metric ton ballast, in an effort to demonstrate the Falcon 9 Heavy for the Air Force."
Why don't they just say "we're going to launch a 5 ton spy satellite and several decoys", it's not like anyone who follows this doesn't know.
public heath care -> try to save money -> goal, make people healthy so they don't need health care
private health care -> try to earn money -> goal, keep people sick so they need health care
I used to think like that. I have worked for a defense contractor now, and they are wasteful entities. Not as wasteful as government entities, but damn close. Elon did an interview with Wired, it was good. He looked for ways to do things cheaper better faster. In the world of defense contractors, that's very easy pickings. He also put up his own money to start.
I think you would be suprised how cheap a lot of big government purchases could be, if done the same way. We have the examples, SpaceX rockets, Predator drones, Wright Brothers.
The only reason government contractors complain about requirements is they are taking government money to do the DESIGN, PROTOTYPING, and production. If you do it all on your own, you get to do it your way; but if it fails, you get nothing.
andy
What you actually meant to write:
1) public heath insurance -> try to provide money for campaign contributors -> goal, make people sick so they need health care and are dependent on the government
2) public health care -> try to provide money for campaign contributors -> goal, try to provide the greatest quantity of the most expensive treatments
3) private health insurance -> try to earn money -> goal, pay the least amount for health care (can be through either refusing to cover things, negotiations, and/or keeping clients healthy)
4) private health care -> try to earn money -> goal, try to provide the greatest quantity of the most expensive treatments
1 and 2 are in collusion with each other (bad), 3 and 4 are in opposition to one another (good).
I don't know why everyone is all happy and gleeful about this...
Here I was hoping that SpaceX wouldnt become another Lockheed Martin/Northrop Grummen/General Dynamics/ etc.. defense contractor.
In 10.. 20 years will we all be applauding the 'success' of the free market when these guys are just as slimy and nasty as any of the other contractors who will gladly make any weapons system you want ?
Yeah, it is somewhat easier to do things economic when a government institution has already done decades of legwork for you.
People keep saying this, and yet they miss their own point... everything SpaceX does was already available to NASA. So... why can't NASA build their own rocket and capsule, SLS/MPCV, for less than $3b per year for more than fifteen years? SpaceX spent less building multiple versions of an entirely new rocket engine, building and flying two entirely new launchers into orbit (~$300m) than NASA spent modifying a single existing shuttle SRB for a stand-alone sub-orbital test launch (Ares-1X, ~$450m).
The annual development budget for Merlin, Falcon 1, Falcon 9 and Dragon-cargo would contained entirely with a single minor NASA research program. While a single flagship program, like SLS, ISS or JWST, could fund dozens of parallel programs in the same scale.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
Bleh... my link didn't work. http://reporting.sunlightfoundation.com/2012/spacex-blasts-literally-and-politically/
Weird example for you to pick. Health care is the one area where you do have clear examples of the superiority of government run systems. Such as countries with government health care having half the costs per person as US health care. Such as government programs even in the US being more efficient/effective healthcare than rival private systems.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
Given how expensive it is to lift anything to space, lifting ballast to space is a sin. Lift another satellite in its place.
Ballast is always a necessity in rocketry. In order for the thing to fly in a straight line, the thrust vector must be aligned with the vehicle's centre of mass. The upshot of this is that if your spacecraft (Rocket and payload) doesn't have the center of mass precisely down the centerline, you need to add ballast weights in order to keep the thing from coming apart. If you look closely of an image of the shuttle at launch, the exhaust from the main engines (not the solids) is on an angle compared to the rest of the vehicle. As the fuel is burned off and the SRBs jettisoned, the center of mass changes, and the engines will gimbal to keep things on course.
On traditional rockets, the same thing is accomplished by adding weights so the whole thing is balanced. Back in the day, the way that most amateur radio satellites got launched was as ballast on a launch with some larger payload. That's getting tougher and tougher in the modern era due to competition for that space, and also, to put it bluntly, it's a lot easier to certify a lump of concrete for flight than it is to certify a satellite built by a bunch of guys you don't necessarily trust, sometimes int heir basement.
Launching a big lump of nothing also makes sense, given that this is really just an all-up test of the launch platform. Are you going to entrust a $500,000,000 payload to an unproven launch vehicle? If they did and it went boom (which tends to happen in rocketry a lot), we'd here no end of their choice of an untested vehicle. If the test passes, then there is more confidence in the subsequent launches being safe enough.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
And you would be right. A "6000x12000 km" orbit is 12000 km from the center of the Earth at closest (since the Earth's radius is about 6000 km), and 18000 km from the center of the Earth at farthest. The energy of the orbit is defined by the average distance, which is 15000 km. The initial orbit is about 6300 km, so it's 2.4 times as energetic as the final, meaning a large burn by the rocket's upper stage to loose that energy and change orbits.
On top of that, the final orbit is also inclined at 45 degrees to the equator, compared to 28 degrees for the intial orbit. That requires another big out-of-plane burn which means more fuel.
Really, this is an orbit that you would only go to if you had big powerful hot rod of a rocket that you wanted to try out...
What you actually meant to write:
I'm pretty sure he actually meant this: "Studies evaluated in this systematic review do not support the claim that the private sector is usually more efficient, accountable, or medically effective than the public sector; however, the public sector appears frequently to lack timeliness and hospitality towards patients." (low and middle income countries)
Or this: "Despite having the most costly health system in the world, the United States consistently underperforms on most dimensions of performance, relative to other countries. This reportâ"an update to two earlier editionsâ"includes data from surveys of patients, as well as information from primary care physicians about their medical practices and views of their countries' health systems. Compared with five other nationsâ"Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, the United Kingdomâ"the U.S. health care system ranks last or next-to-last on five dimensions of a high performance health system: quality, access, efficiency, equity, and healthy lives. The U.S. is the only country in the study without universal health insurance coverage, partly accounting for its poor performance on access, equity, and health outcomes."
But do please continue to spout ideology-addled "corrections" that contradict reality. It amuses the hell out of the rest of us to watch you do it. And keep on losing those elections while you're at it!
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
AMSAT is very experienced in putting together satellites at low cost, and having them integrated successfully. What they need is a ride. The same is true for many universities. Figure out the launch cost for 5 tons. There would be a long line of folks who would want a discount on that.
Bruce Perens.
"NASA has shown that it isn't even remotely interested in doing cheap space flight" because the powers at be have decided to privatize that aspect of the process.
Back in 1984, I might add. And it's proven to be a good idea since.
My point was given X launch vehicle specs who can produce a system to safely deliver hardware to space for Y amount of dollars. You will see no price improvement from commercial space flight companies until A) you see multiple companies doing it regularly and competing for a wide customer base. B) There is surplus payload capacity available on most vehicles entering orbit. As of now the only thing accomplished was subcontracting out for profit something once handled in house by NASA while also basically subsidizing space x to allow them to develop the hardware and techniques on the tax payers dollar.
Point A) is wrong. There are three US companies with orbital launch capabilities and four or five foreign commercial space launch organizations as well. The competition and the market is there, even if it's not as vigorous and large as we would like.
And point B) is irrelevant. It is rare that a payload exactly fills a vehicle, and there's all sorts of tricks for what to do with that wasted space and mass, including just ballast and secondary payloads. But such issues are irrelevant to whether or not NASA should be in the launch business. One merely needs to look at the entire history of NASA to see that it has never launched a cheap vehicle. Never since its birth in 1957!
SpaceX has in the span of less than ten years and less than half a billion dollars achieved things that would take NASA, under tradition government costing methods, about ten times as much to do (that link discusses a NASA study which apparently got a deep look at what SpaceX actually spent on developing three rocket engines, Falcon 1 and 9 rockets, and about half a dozen launch attempts).
To summarize that last sentence (since there is a lot there), SpaceX has already demonstrated that it can develop rockets for an order of magnitude less than NASA can. This already happened. That is why I claimed in my previous post that you are already being proven wrong bit by bit.