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SpaceX Falcon 9 Blasts Off From California
An anonymous reader writes "SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket completed a successful first launch today, taking off from California and putting a Canadian science satellite in orbit. 'The beefed-up Falcon 9 that blasted off on its maiden flight from Southern California's Vandenberg Air Force Base, carrying a small Canadian government communication and research satellite, went through a seemingly picture-perfect countdown and performed on ascent as engineers hoped. The changes to the rocket are aimed at improving capacity and reliability, while simultaneously speeding up manufacturing. Historically, the initial launch of a new rocket has as much as a one-in-two chance of failure. Early this month, Elon Musk, the company's founder, chief executive and chief designer, seemingly tried to play down expectations by sending out a Twitter message emphasizing that the revamped rocket 'has a lot of new technology, so the probability of failure is significant.''"
"so the probability of failure is significant"
After all of these years of rocketry experience, one would think that much new technology would be added to decrease the probability of failure, yes?
Time Bomber the Book coming soon.
Who the heck posted this here? An employee of the Wall Street Journal? Get this crap off here or at least provide links you don't have to pay to access. There's only a hundred or so other news sites carrying the same story. Ridiculous.
Better known as 318230.
I had some virgin Perl code be part of this launch. It worked!
You wouldn't know what gay was if Poison, Motley Crue, Bon Jovi, Def Leppard and the Quire Boys jumped out of your wardrobe whistling the Archers theme tune, shouted "rodeo" and gave it to you up the bum all night so that you could never sit down ever again.
I watched the webcast live. The qualification of the upgraded Falcon 9 seemed to have gone very well, with payloads deployed in nominal orbits. They were also supposed to do some first tests for recovering the first stage. The only thing that I could find was that the second of two burns after separation sent it into a spin, after which it crash-landed in the ocean. Anyone has some more news about that?
karma police: arrest this man, he talks in maths; he buzzes like a fridge, he's like a detuned radio. [radiohead]
Historically, the initial launch of a new rocket has as much as a one-in-two chance of failure.
Historically, new rockets have been of an untested design, without much in the way of previously-tested designs to use as a reference. The SpaceX Falcon 9 is built largely around previously-tested designs, on top of solid engineering. One would suppose this would give it a better than 50/50 chance of success. In fact, the space shuttle program, viewed over its total life, had something like 93% success rate for its engines. Much of the SpaceX projects' development is based on the results of those tests, designs, and engineering expertise.
It would be highly suspect of their rockets had a failure rate much higher than that -- one would expect a higher success rate due to incremental improvement, not worse.
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Space-X has four more Falcon 9 launches on their launch manifest for 2013, and ten scheduled for 2014. This is the first launch of the volume production version. Now they start cranking them out. With 9 engines per rocket, Space-X has to build over a hundred engines a year, which means they can set up an assembly line and get economies of scale.
Next year is the first flight of the Falcon Heavy, with 27 engines. Biggest rocket since the Saturn V.
Here's the Space-X price list. Pricing is about half of other launchers.
Historically, the initial launch of a new rocket has as much as a one-in-two chance of failure.
Just ask Germany, North Korea, Japan, India. . .
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFefasS6bhc
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At the risk of enraging automatic supporters of bloated government programs like the old Space Shuttle, it doesn't surprise me that lean, privately funded space-exploitation outfits do so well.
I'm impressed by Elon Musk and his organizational and marketing abilities. That said, to give all credit to the success of the program to privatization is a little silly. The company is significantly funded by goverment funds albeit through progress payments on contracts.
Privatization didn't work that well with the Apollo lander. That was contracted to Grumman (simlar to the SpaceX contracts). Original LEM contract $350 million, final cost $2.2B
More reasonably, what you're seeing is a maturing of the technology. Submarines, once the unique province of governments, are now widely available from private vendors. Computers likewise.
Someone has to put in the "bloat" of basic research and it's rare for a private organization to invest in technology that will only yield results in 15+ years, if ever.
Here's a much better link: SpaceX successfully launches debut Falcon 9 v1.1.
Then, this F9 "v1.1" was much more of a version 2.0. It had its engines uprated from 95,000 lbf (sea level) to 140,000 lbf (sea level). They also are arranged in different way (from a 3x3 grid to a circle of 8 with one engine in the center) which meant a new thrust structure. It also has its fuel tanks stretched by 60% making it much heavier. This is as far as you can go from the 1.0 and still keep the name. Succeeding with this in the first try is good.
There's no news though on them recovering the first stage. It was meant to brake and reenter intact and try for a "landing" on water. Or maybe they just want to tow it home first (but its hard to imagine Musk not bragging about it).
Thank you for pointing this out. People astound me with how ignorant they are of NASA contracts. Private industry has been involved in every NASA project, including the bloated ones that break the budget (LEM, JWST, etc.).
Slashdotters love to drool over SpaceX successes, but just ignore all of Lockheed Martin's bloated contracts. The big step isn't private versus public, it's smart versus dumb.
I wouldn't exactly call the LM "privatized", it was a typical Cost Plus contract, just like every other component of Apollo. Boeing build the S-IC stage, North American built the S-II stage and Apollo CSM, Douglas built the S-IVB stage, IBM the instrument unit, etc. All to the governments exact specifications Cost Plus is the traditional method of government procurement for "new" things. It's typical for most weapon systems, rockets, satelites etc. The contractor charges the actual "cost" of developing and manufacturing what ever it is the government wants (including all of the overhead required to deal with the government) "plus" an agreed upon profit margin. The government provides detailed specifications and the contractor provides the bodies and facilities. Under this model, there really isn't any incentive for the contractor to bring things in under budget or schedule. The government assumes all of the risk. What is different with the new commercial space agreements is that they are all milestone or service based. NASA pays a pre-set amount of money when specific milestones are achieved or service is delivered. Doesn't matter how much it actually costs SpaceX or Orbital to deliver that service. In this case the government assumes very little risk and the contractor is highly incentivised to achieve its goals efficiently.
Slashdotters love to drool over SpaceX successes, but just ignore all of Lockheed Martin's bloated contracts. The big step isn't private versus public, it's smart versus dumb.
That's a little simplistic. The government uses cost-plus contracts to develop new technology and craft that is being designed as they go, you can't buy an F35 off the shelf and it'd be a crazy risk for a private company to promise delivery of specific features and performance on a specific schedule at a specific price. Nobody would agree to that, so instead the government says here's a running tab to cover costs and a reasonable profit margin - if you fail to show good progress we might have to abort but the risk is all on us, you get your money anyway. Of course as a company that's a dream project, it can't fail and the normal rules of business doesn't apply so they're more like a heavily protected semi-government agency.
SpaceX shows delivering payloads to orbit is no longer the kind of exotic experiment it was in the 60s, the technology and risks are sufficiently known that you can do it on normal commercial terms where NASA pays a fixed price for a service and SpaceX delivers, taking the risk of profit or loss. It's nice that we get there, but it's very hard to get there without these "bloated contracts" to pave the way. The alternative would be for NASA to do all the bleeding edge projects in-house, which would probably get just as many complaints of public inefficiency and become a monopolist without any choice. True there aren't many candidates for such government contracts either, but you can at least pick your poison.
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It is also the difference between fixed price contracts where SpaceX says they will deliver a satellite to orbit for a given price and then SpaceX will eat any cost overruns themselves vs. stuff Lockheed Martin does with a cost-plus contract where their profit is guaranteed but the price that taxpayers will pay can vary if "problems" arise.
Just try, if you will, to find out how much money was spent on the last Atlas V rocket. Reportedly the Canadian government paid $10 million dollars for this particular launch. Yeah, that is a bit less than what even SpaceX will typically charge for a Falcon 9 flight, but they certainly didn't screw over the Canadian taxpayers or expect Canada to pay for any cost overruns.
Yeah, I'd say there are a bunch of people very ignorant of these NASA contracts you are talking about. Those Grumman contracts in the previous post certainly had no similarity to the government contracts that SpaceX has been using.
I absolutely agree, Boring day to day launches should be done by companies like Space X and the private market. NASA should focus on new designs and space exploration and not launching more communications satellites.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
It's not about government funding, but about NASA and government earmarking. NASA-designed rockets optimize for having a key part build in the home district/state of every congresscritter involved in funding (every wonder why SRBs need O-Rings in the first place?). SpaceX optimizes for effect.
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I think the point is that just because its a private industry doing the job doesn't make it magically cheap. What makes it cheap is 1) it being a mature technology and 2) having a smart company do it. SpaceX has both of those going for it, and it's very impressive. However it just pisses me off when people rail against NASA for expensive tech when they fail to realize that cutting edge stuff is going to be expensive even when it involves private industry (hence the cost plus contracts you refer to)
Economies of scale kick in when you are able to keep your staff fully occupied and you tools continually in use. That will happen at different productive outputs depending on what you're building and how you are building it. You can't just say "Economies of scale don't kick in all that much when your annual production is that tiny." It's not that simple.
Privatization didn't work that well with the Apollo lander.
Why do you consider that privatization? Paying someone with a lot of public funds to build a landing vehicle for you is not privatization. Instead, privatization is when you take a public asset or bit of infrastructure and sell or give it to a private party to run.
SpaceX is not a case of privatization because SpaceX never was a public asset or infrastructure in the first place.
Someone has to put in the "bloat" of basic research and it's rare for a private organization to invest in technology that will only yield results in 15+ years, if ever.
My view is that basic research of today is much more useless than basic research of the past because there is no interest in "results" any more. I've played this game with basic research proponents where they name a basic research field which has turned out to be useful in the long run, be it electromagnetism, integrated circuits, evolution, or category theory and I explain the short term benefits (which need not be explicitly monetary) of the research in question from the point of view of the people who were conducting the research in question.
I think the whole point of the argument is to evade accountability. In the past, I'm sure that researchers had to occasionally deal with funders who thought producing science was something like shoveling manure (with proper micromanagement, of course, resulting in faster shoveling of said research). Nowadays it seems an excuse to rationalize public fund of rather useless research (both now and in the future). Note in the above post, that it is claimed that private organizations don't invest in long term technology. There's plenty of counterexamples such as recent thorium reactor research in the US or a large number of astronomical observatories from around the beginning of the 20th Century.
And merely spending money on research doesn't make it an "investment". For example, the governments of the world spend quite a bit on fusion research, but they aren't anywhere near producing a fusion reactor that would be commercially viable. This is in large part because the approaches they employ just don't make sense economically. For example, a reactor with the aspects of ITER just is too expensive for the mundane task of producing power. Even if they could somehow make an optimal machine with the cost of ITER, it wouldn't be able to compete with normal power plants. It just doesn't produce enough power to justify the cost of the reactor.
My view is that if basic research is useful over any reasonable time frame (including up to centuries) then private organizations can be created to do it. Government hasn't shown any notable competence in this matter and I haven't seen any particular utility to government funded research to rationalize the expenditure of funds in that way.
63 million all to study "space weather".
5 minutes into mission, someone at the Canadian Space Agency just lit up a cigarette and exclaimed "Mon Dieu, der is no weder in space eh, zut alors!".
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
However it just pisses me off when people rail against NASA for expensive tech when they fail to realize that cutting edge stuff is going to be expensive even when it involves private industry (hence the cost plus contracts you refer to)
Hence, why SpaceX spent a factor of ten less than NASA would for the same rocket development. It's not more expensive when you focus on the main goals of your project, not just add expensive tech willy nilly.