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.''"

Comments

Wall Street Journal

[Dan East]

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.

Re:Wall Street Journal

[harperska]

Here's a good one:
http://www.space.com/22996-spacex-launches-falcon-9-rocket-test-flight.html

Re:Wall Street Journal

[rasmusbr]

And here's a detailed write-up with lots of background and pictures: http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2013/09/spacex-debut-falcon-9-v1-1-cassiope-launch/

Re:Wall Street Journal

[multimediavt]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24326413

Re:so the probability of failure is significant

[mosb1000]

I take it you are not an inventor.

Re:so the probability of failure is significant

[harperska]

The MO of SpaceX is to under promise and over deliver. But adding new technology on top of more new technology increases the probability of failure rather than decreasing it, until that technology has been tested and the bugs are ironed out. Today's launch was one of those tests. They were testing new technology that will let them relight the first stage after separation and bring it back for a controlled landing. That new technology adds additional complexity that had a nonzero chance of making the rest of the rocket fail due to untested redesigns.

Re:Obama is a nigger

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Ah, small overlooked fact

[girlintraining]

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.

Re:Ah, small overlooked fact

[Teancum]

The Falcon 1 rocket had two successful launches out of five attempts. Still, in the case of this particular version of the Falcon 9, so much had been changed that it was essentially a whole new rocket.

Typically most aerospace engineers try to do incremental changes rather than having so many like is being done here today. If anything, the historical trend is to use very old designs and just do very minor tweaks a little at a time. Examples including the Atlas rocket, which first flew in December 1957 and is still flying today (with admittedly a bunch of revisions over the years that make the current rocket bear almost no resemblance to the original rocket). The same could be said about the Soyuz spacecraft, which also has had numerous revisions over the years but rarely very many changes on any particular flight. Most of even the American rockets are using very old Russian engines (like the RD-180) instead of newer engine designs.

It is far more unusual for a new clean-sheet design, especially a brand new engine design like SpaceX did with the Merlin engine. Most of the time when new designs like this are made, it is mostly an academic exercise and the rocket almost never actually flies. Frequently companies who come up with new designs simply go bankrupt before the hardware leaves the ground, assuming that any sort of hardware testing was ever done in the first place. In other words, for actual flying hardware, it is mostly very well tested and very old designs with at best very minor tweaks.

This particular flight is especially unique not just because of the larger rocket, but most especially the new Merlin 1-D engine where this was the first time that particular engine design had ever been used. From a study done by the Aerospace Corporation around the year 2000, there were several critical areas where rockets would most likely fail, and the #1 cause was a failure with the engine design itself. As a matter of fact, even with this particular flight that was no exception as the Merlin 1-D engine on the 2nd stage apparently did fail. Luckily for SpaceX, if failed after all of the payloads had been deployed so it won't impact their bottom line.... but there was a spectacular test they were going to do (it was rumored they were going to try to fly the raw 2nd stage past the Moon with the remaining propellant). Instead, this stage is going to crash into the Earth eventually as just another piece of random space junk.

There were also new avionics that had never been used before, a new faring design (also a common failure point for many rockets), and a brand new launch site that had never been done along with an orbital profile that this particular rocket had never been proven with doing either. The only other rocket that I'm aware of that did this many firsts all at once was the Saturn V, and that was done simply because the NASA officials involved didn't want to waste several launches proving new technologies and decided to do everything at once. The "space race" was also a major factor with the Saturn V as NASA was under some extreme time pressure to perform and get people to the Moon.

Production version

[Animats]

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.

Re:Production version

[OzPeter]

Here's the Space-X price list. Pricing is about half of other launchers.

Given that I don't have a few hundred million to drop on some satellite projects, I'm more interested in Space-X careers
 
And you have gotta love a company that advertises a position as:
 
  SOFTWARE DEVELOPER (BORG)

Video of the launch

[Ivan Stepaniuk]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFefasS6bhc

Re:The Manifold Hinderings of Mind

[Art Challenor]

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.

Re:Reusable first stage?

[Maddog Batty]

Elon Musk @elonmusk

Rocket booster relit twice (supersonic retro & landing), but spun up due to aero torque, so fuel centrifuged & we flamed out

Elon Musk @elonmusk

Between this flight & Grasshopper tests, I think we now have all the pieces of the puzzle to bring the rocket back home.

Re:The Manifold Hinderings of Mind

[notanalien_justgreen]

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.

Re:so the probability of failure is significant

[Teancum]

Rocketry is something that is sitting on such a fine line between success and failure that just a tiny mistake that would be ignored in most other human endeavors is likely to destroy the vehicle when trying to put something into orbit. For example, the first Falcon 1 rocket simply disintegrated because a simple three cent nut was made out of the wrong kind of metal and fell off at a most inappropriate moment. The salty air + moisture from sitting just a few hundred feet from the Pacific Ocean at the time didn't help either.

Another problem is that to improve technology, you need to experiment and try new things. Far more often experiments tend to be failures rather than success as you try these new ideas... hence if you are using new technology, especially for the first time like SpaceX was doing today, the likelihood of failure would actually increase and not decrease. Only when it has been used many times and has been "proven" can you even remotely say that the likelihood of failure would drop.

And no, in spite of nearly a century of rocketry and nearly a trillion dollars spent by everybody involved, we still are just beginning to understand the technology and what it can do. There still are some amazing ideas that have yet to be tried.

Re:so the probability of failure is significant

[khallow]

Eh, I say this as an enthusiastic supporter, but they've been quite short on their predicted launch frequency. That's a critical part of their business model.

Re:so the probability of failure is significant

[Teancum]

Next year is going to be the year for SpaceX to put up or shut up. Their manifest is absolutely huge, and Elon Musk made some rather bold predictions at the after-launch press conference today. He made the bold claim that he will actually launch a used Falcon 9 1st stage by the end of next year. I'd like to see him try.... seriously!

The video tour of the SpaceX plant in California (given just before the launch on the webcast) showed the plant being extremely busy and practically at capacity with a half dozen Dragon capsules already under construction, a whole row of completed Merline 1D engines, and a whole bunch of rockets all lined up at various stages of completion. Whatever problems SpaceX has with their rockets right now, it isn't a supply problem at the moment. All of that hardware certainly costs a whole bunch of money, so they've definitely dumped some serious cash on trying to meet that huge manifest.

Re:so the probability of failure is significant

[Austrian Anarchy]

I don't quite believe that we do not have the ability to build kerosene powered Saturn Vs all over again, it would just be a very expensive proposition. Nor is the ability lost to build something new with the same thrust and duration that is perhaps less expensive (inflation adjusted of course).

Re:so the probability of failure is significant

[Electricity Likes Me]

The really compelling thing about the reusable concept SpaceX are going for is that observation that rocket fuel is only 3% of the cost of a launch. That's utterly crazy - even if you wouldn't want to use them for manned launches right away, the savings when you can put up 10 or 20x the number of satellites for the cost of a launch is going to lead to some big changes if they can pull it off.

Re:OK

[Guspaz]

The basics of the first stage recovery were that it re-lit fine for re-entry, and re-lit for the deceleration burn, but developed a spin that exceeded the ability of the attitude control thrusters to counter, causing the fuel to be flung against the walls of the tank, starving the engine. It broke up on impact. SpaceX believes that the data gathered will be sufficient to solve the puzzle.

Re:Economies of scale.

[ron_ivi]

For a rocket, economies of scale kick in after you have *a* successfull one.

Suddenly your costs go from "damn, we need to figure out something new, build it, and test it" to "cool, let's do it again".

And the latter is far cheaper.