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SpaceX Launch Achieves Geostationary Transfer Orbit
SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket this afternoon in a bid to deliver a large commercial satellite into geostationary orbit. The flight was successful: "Approximately 185 seconds into flight, Falcon 9’s second stage’s single Merlin vacuum engine ignited to begin a five minute, 20 second burn that delivered the SES-8 satellite into its parking orbit. Eighteen minutes after injection into the parking orbit, the second stage engine relit for just over one minute to carry the SES-8 satellite to its final geostationary transfer orbit. The restart of the Falcon 9 second stage is a requirement for all geostationary transfer missions." This is a significant milestone for SpaceX, and it fulfills another of the three objectives set forth by the U.S. Air Force to certify SpaceX flights for National Security Space missions.
The United Launch Alliance, at its heart, is just a way for Boeing and Lockheed to monopolize the defense launch market and then charge whatever the hell prices they want. Having at least one competitor in the space is important, if you as a taxpayer don't like getting ripped off.
Yes, yes, whatever.
The United States relies too much on ULA for its space-launch, ULA has easily raised its price and the tax-payers ended up having to cough up the dough.
FTFY. This is the first commercial satellite launched in the US since November 23, 2009 when Intelsat 14 launched on an Atlas V from LC-41.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
> What if one day Russia or Iran or China ends up owning SpaceX ?
What if one day large corporations could pay-off american politicians, on a large and wide scale, with many people knowing it happens. And those people end up determining how the country is run?
We both know that already happens, and *this* is what your worried about?
What does it even matter if Russia or the Chinese own SpaceX, they dont, but who cares. They have their own space agencies... ones that actually still operate.
that existing space providers are in big trouble.
Even the Chinese are quaking in their boots, as they can't do it as cheaply as SpaceX. And EADS is frantically redesigning their new Ariane 6 to try to be more cost competitive with the Falcon.
SpaceX has completely rocked the space industry upside down, and A LOT of naysayers need to eat crow now. As recently as 2012 (see this article), managers at NASA were poo-pooing Elon saying rockets are hard and noobs shouldn't try.
Doubtful. For services of this kind, who else is able to pay and needs these services? There are a few, but losing US contracts would kill them.
This is more akin to the mutually beneficial relationship between China and US sovereign debt. Sure, they could divest, but *where*, exactly, would they get a safer investment vehicle? The only reason one party would pull out is for non-economic reasons, because it sure isn't beneficial to do so.
No one wins if SpaceX starts trying to milk the US too hard. And in the end, the US government could always play the national security card with the IP and incubate another company or bring it back inhouse.
I have no idea why the NSA/USAF requirements is such a big deal, as it really doesn't have much of anything to do with a private company (in this case SES... an operator of GEO telecommunications satellites) is spending its money on another private company (SpaceX) to accomplish an otherwise very public mission. People are going to be pointing their satellite dishes at this satellite for crying out loud and watching television coming from it. I don't know how more public you can make such a flight.
The USAF is simply throwing up some BS that SpaceX needs to fly a few more missions and prove it can deliver satellites into various kinds of orbits before they are able to tell Boeing and Lockheed-Martin lobbyists where to go when the next round of launch contracts come out. Those two companies (in the form of the United Launch Alliance... jointly owned by both companies) want to pretend they are the only people in America capable of launching anything into orbit at all.
SpaceX could easily raise its price 100-fold and the tax-payers will end up having to cough up the dough.
What the heck are you talking about? Why would Boing or Lockheed (the current owners of the US govt launch monopoly) be and different? How is *more* competition from SpaceX going to lead to price increases and fewer options?
What if one day Russia or Iran or China ends up owning SpaceX ?
And what if some day Russia or Iran of China owns General Dynamics, Lockheed, Honeywell, Northrup, etc? Then those companies will no longer be US defense contractors, and others will *happily* step up to take over their cushy multibillion dollar cost-overrun laden US military contracts. So it's a totally absurd concern that would be no different 30 years ago than it is today.
When your #1 customer spends more than the rest of the world combined, you don't piss them off.
When you accomplish something of this complexity for near half the price of the competition the media better be extolling the accomplishment.
No, he's suggesting that all government satellites be launched directly by the government.
You know, the way all government ground vehicles are built by the government, the way they make all their own computers, their own lightbulbs, their own paper, the way all government cafeteria food is grown by government workers.
I believe what the AC is saying is that the government should design, build, and launch its own rockets rather than contracting out (and presumably design and build the satellites in-house also) and that without Boeing/Lockheed/TRW/etc. lobbying Congress to buy "necessary" satellites and the rockets to hang them up, there would be substantially fewer launches.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
You're being deliberately obtuse. Computers, lightbulbs, paper and cafeteria food are all commodities produced by companies who thrive from supplying a wide range of customers.
Lockheed in particular, and Boeing in great part, are doing custom round-trip design to deployment work often exclusively for the US government. There is no reason not to employ engineers directly, except (from a political PoV) ideological and (from a pragmatic PoV) that Uncle Sam is private business' bitch.
There is one similarity between Lockheed+Boeing and the businesses you list: all these enterprises began their work decades ago, using their own expertise. SpaceX started merely as a loss-making venture poaching ex-government and contractor employees, and taking government money - it really had nothing meritocratic to bring to the table.
(Also, "she".)
Merlin vacuum engine ignited to begin a five minute, 20 second burn that delivered the SES-8 A 20 second burn that lasted 5 minutes - truly awesome.
Rocket engine efficiency is measured in seconds, so it is entirely possible to have a 20 second burn that lasts 5 minutes.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Five minutes twenty seconds is a clumsy way of saying 320 seconds, or five and a third minutes..... Mixed units are a disaster, whether in engineering or in stories. How much is a liter? Oooh... about one quart and 1 and a bit ounces....
SpaceX started merely as a loss-making venture poaching ex-government and contractor employees, and taking government money - it really had nothing meritocratic to bring to the table.
You call it poaching, I call it free job market. You call it "nothing meritocratic", I call it an exciting work environment. Work for legacy space transport providers is outright boring and mindnumbing, like work for any big corporation these days. SpaceX cares about their employees a bit more.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Forrest M. Mims, III. Caught a NASA satellite's instrument mis-calibration. Very much an amateur when it comes to astroscience anything. A rather decent educator, and man, does he have good handwriting or what.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Yes, SpaceX is cheap, and yes, they could trivially match the Indian Mars probe price. You know how I know that? The Price Sheet says a Falcon 9 launch is $56.5 million. Leaving plenty of slack to build a little Mars probe. Considering a ULA launch costs literally 10 times as much, cheap is an understatement.
They've been profitable for 5 years and their price has never been higher than that. Since they're profitable, they're obviously not loss leaders. Why would it go up now? Especially considering SpaceX has already won the lucrative government contract that was available, namely Space Station resupply.
But no, the Chinese are not quaking in their boots. Long March rockets do cost more to build than Falcons, probably a lot more, but the Chinese don't care. They're building them for national pride, not customers, and they're damn well going to make absolutely certain they work, no matter how much it costs. They have to.
Near half? Closer to one tenth. A Falcon 9 costs $56.5 million. The last ULA launch cost $465 million. I don't know that the price difference is all that much of an accomplishment though. How hard is it to beat a bloated cost-plus military-industrial complex dinosaur that exists mainly as welfare for mediocre engineers? The short fabrication and assembly times, the incredibly short integration time, the miniscule size of the launch crew, all while conducting rocket surgery—now those are accomplishments worth extolling.
SpaceX started merely as a loss-making venture poaching ex-government and contractor employees, and taking government money - it really had nothing meritocratic to bring to the table.
You call it poaching, I call it free job market. You call it "nothing meritocratic", I call it an exciting work environment. Work for legacy space transport providers is outright boring and mindnumbing, like work for any big corporation these days. SpaceX cares about their employees a bit more.
I'm pretty sure it's more a case of you'd have to do significant work to stop those employees from building rockets with company resources.
>
SpaceX started merely as a loss-making venture poaching ex-government and contractor employees, and taking government money - it really had nothing meritocratic to bring to the table.
Very good point. I'd just like to clarify two minor things...
1. I agree with you, that it is very easy to start a business putting stuff into space that makes money from the outset. There are plenty of real-life examples where real innovation is achieved without any requirement for up-front capital (loss-making business models), usually it's funded from initial sales.
I forget the example business models and companies.... can you remind me of them?
2. Prior to getting "poached" by SpaceX, which "really had nothing meritocratic to bring to the table.", there have been DECADES of intense innovation in the space industry thanks to an overwhelming support and encouragement from government. This intense innovation has been _so succesful_ that NASA have recently retired their last government owned space shuttles.
Elon Musk was just standing on the shoulders of giants by proposing the incremental innovation of having rockets land intact...
Wikipedia has let me down... are you able to point me in the direction of the space innovation that's recently come out of the US government organisations, making Space-X's work redundant?
(sarcasm is often lost in text, so let me be direct: IMHO, private companies like Space-X are facilitating innovation in space travel. This is their contribution to society. You can piss & moan because private people are making money out of it, but it's better than government money being wasted on useless bureaucracy supporting (or causing) scientists resting on their laurels.)
I remember congress preventing middle eastern interest from purchasing a couple of east coast ports.
If they can prevent sale of ports, then why couldn't they prevent sale of a company that produces ITAR protected equipment ?
If the US govt can't be trusted to step in, then it can't be trusted for launching their rockets.
For the SES-8 and Thaicom-6 launches SpaceX commited 100% of the rocket's capabilities to boost the rocket into a super sync orbit.
A GTO orbit is less than 36000Km x 185Km.
SES-8 was inserted into a 80000Km x 295Km orbit.
It reaches apogee when the moon is close by.
This trick helps save fuel to allow SES-8 to live much longer. Typically satellites useful lives are limited by fuel used for station keeping maneuvers.
In this sense, SES-8 and Thaicom-6 launches are even more valuable to their operators than a typical GTO launch.
GEO satellites are responsible for circularizing the orbit, and this consumes a lot of their precious on board fuel.
Isn't it amazing how people will fail to use wikipedia or even dictionary.com before disagreeing with some point that they know nothing about? Shocking.
There's plenty of room for misunderstanding or just plain being wrong but jiminy.
I'm not sure what you're referring to, but on the off chance that you're referring to me:
Specific impulse (usually abbreviated Isp) is a way to describe the efficiency of rocket and jet engines. It represents the force with respect to the amount of propellant used per unit time.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_impulse
If the "amount" of propellant ... is given in terms of weight (such as in kiloponds or newtons), then specific impulse has units of time.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_impulse
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Bottom line is STS was as much as ULA pork/jobs programs is today.
I wouldn't put up much of an argument on that point. However,the costs don't compare very well directly. If SpaceX also designed a human-compatible orbiter capable of reentry and providing life support for two week missions, and factor in the safety factors and all the extra regulations that comes with a manned mission, then their costs would go up significantly. If you got rid of the orbiter and converted it to a dead lift vehicle, then I imagine the STS costs would come down quite a bit. It isn't clear to me how well they'd compare. The comparisons with the Delta 4 is more straight-forward given that you're talking about payload mass and desired orbit.