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SpaceX Falcon 9 Rocket Blasts Off From Florida
An anonymous reader writes After two months of delays, SpaceX was successful today with its launch of six Orbcomm telecommunications satellites. All six satellites have been successfully deployed in orbit. The 375-pound satellites will offer two-way data links to help customers track, monitor and control transportation and logistics assets, heavy equipment, oil and gas infrastructure, ships and buoys, and government-owned equipment. From the article: "SpaceX plans to use Monday's launch to test a landing system it is developing to fly its rockets back to the launch site for refurbishment and reuse. During Falcon 9's last flight in April, the first stage successfully restarted some of its engines as it careened toward the ocean, slowing its descent. The rocket also was able to deploy stabilizing landing legs before toppling over in the water. The booster, however, was destroyed by rough seas before it could be retrieved by recovery ships. Monday's launch was the 10th flight of Falcon 9 rocket, all of which have been successful."
The article is pretty vague about potentially the most important part of this launch - the reusable landing system. The article says they were going to "test" this. First, they're unclear as to whether that's a full return-to-launch test, or another "soft landing in water" test. Then they don't say whether that test was successful - they switch weirdly from past tense when describing the launch to future tense when describing the test, despite them being pretty much the same event.
Again, SpaceX spent about the same amount of money to build a new rocket engine and two new rockets and launch them into orbit as NASA did to put a fake upper stage onto a Shuttle SRB and launch it into the ocean. They've also probably spent less developing their stage recovery system than NASA has spent over the years on studies of how they might think about recovering rocket stages.
But, yeah, it's all Reagan's fault. Or something.
"Man-rated" is not on SpaceX's advertising brochure. Yet.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
It wasn't on the Shuttle's, either. But killing the crew less than one time in sixty can't really be that hard, can it?
Actually it's quite hard. That's why only 3 countries have managed to do it.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
exploded the instant it touched the water.
How would that not make the highlight reel for the launch?
Because nobody was there to film it?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
It seems to me that NASA should simply contract those basic research payloads on top of SpaceX rockets, if SpaceX can get them into orbit for fewer dollars than NASA's own internal teams can. Why waste resources?
That's the way NASA currently does business: launch services are purchased.
SpaceX developed Falcon-9 on a NASA contract, specifically in order to be a vehicle that can be purchased for launch services. ("Commercial Orbital Transportation Services" was the name of the contract.)
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
It wasn't on the Shuttle's
Yes it was.
The Shuttle was never 'man rated'. It kiled its crew one time in sixty and had long periods during launch when an abort was not survivable. There's no way in Heck that NASA would put astronauts a SpaceX launcher that was as dangerous as the Shuttle.
"Man-rated" is not on SpaceX's advertising brochure. Yet.
The brochure is printed with toxic ink? ;)
Ezekiel 23:20
3.6.1.2 The space system shall provide abort capability from the launch pad until Earth-orbit insertion to protect for the following ascent failure scenarios (minimum list):
a. Complete loss of ascent thrust/propulsion (Requirement 58613).
b. Loss of attitude or flight path control (Requirement 58614).
Rationale: Flying a spacecraft through the Earth's atmosphere to orbit entails inherent risk. Three crewed launch vehicles have suffered catastrophic failures during ascent or on the launch pad (one Space Shuttle and two Soyuz spacecraft). Both Soyuz crews survived the catastrophic failure due to a robust ascent abort system. Analysis, studies, and past experience all provide data supporting ascent abort as the best option for the crew to survive a catastrophic failure of the launch vehicle. Although not specifically stated, the ascent abort capability incorporates some type of vehicle monitoring to detect failures and, in some cases, impending failures.
SpaceX is not competing with NASA, because NASA doesn't make rockets. NASA has input on the design requirements, but all the real work is done by private contractors, like Lockheed and Boeing. SpaceX is just a new contractor and they operate just like the others. They have some interesting new engineering approaches that may reduce costs, but it's not any fundamentally new business model.
Has no bearing on the man rating of shuttle.
It demonstrates that the Shuttle can't meet the only man-rating standard NASA has issued.
Russia as a country has assumed all treaty obligations and considers itself to be the legitimate heir to the Soviet Union. Very few people really disagree.
Besides, the Soviet Union really was a greater Russian empire anyway. The language, the culture, and in many cases the people at the top were all from Russia. That is also one of the causes of the issues in the Ukraine as the "Russification program" to deliberately wipe out whole cultures was occurring there to transplant culturally Russian peoples into the conquered areas (like Ukraine) and then do a similar transplantation of the "locals" to other areas still so they would lose their cultural identity. They expected this would take several generations, and was incomplete, but in areas where it was done there are now ethnically Russian people (like the Crimea) who want to "return home".
So yes, "Soviet Union" == "Russia" for all practical purposes. Especially in the realm of spaceflight.
unless Elon Musk turns out to be amazingly altruistic in his old age
He just donated another $1M to the Tesla Museum.
Okay, so $1M isn't exactly going to bankroll the next Hubble, but he's only 43 years old, not exactly "old age" yet. I'd say he's on track to be amazingly altruistic, sure.
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
SpaceX is not competing with NASA, because NASA doesn't make rockets. NASA has input on the design requirements, but all the real work is done by private contractors, like Lockheed and Boeing. SpaceX is just a new contractor and they operate just like the others. They have some interesting new engineering approaches that may reduce costs, but it's not any fundamentally new business model.
Actually, it is a fundamentally different business model. You are correct that it was always private companies that did the final design and construction of the rockets, but historically Congress forced many decisions on NASA based largely on spreading the money around. For instance, NASA wanted the Space Shuttle to use liquid fueled boosters, but Congress insisted on the SRBs specifically so Thiokol Corporation of Utah would get the business. The same thing is happening with the STS under development now. Congress is forcing NASA to use Shuttle components in the first generation STS specifically to funnel money into certain congressional districts. Under the non-commercial contracts, Congress and NASA actually make design decisions that may not be optimum from an engineering perspective.
The rules under which SpaceX performs NASA missions, are much different. NASA does not get involved in the design of the rocket/spacecraft beyond listing requirements that must be met. Some seed money is provided, for companies that win bids to compete. But ultimately the winners are paid a fixed price - which is also a big difference. Historically, these contracts were cost plus. This new approach does appear to be saving money and it is also leading to competing designs which is interesting as well. For instance with commercial crew, Boeing is building a fairly conventual capsule that lands under parachute, Sierra Nevada is building a lifting body that will reenter and glide like the shuttle, and SpaceX is building a capsule that will land propulsively (parahutes will only be deployed if there is a malfunction in the engines.)
Some privacy policy Slashdot.
There was only 1 loss on ascent and 1 loss on decent with too few flights to show if those single losses had a probability of greater than 1 in 500.
Columbia was doomed by the time it finished ascent, it just took until descent for the scope of the damage to become apparent. Arguably both losses in the shuttle program can be considered "on ascent".
This
The Challenger accident. It would have been difficult to exploit an LAS with the normal Shuttle configuration. But if instead the Shuttle had been on top of the central oxygen tank rather than piggybacking, then an LAS would have been quite feasible - especially if NASA was using liquid fuel booster engines instead of solid fuel ones.
He donated some money to a "museum" dedicated to advertising one of his products, no samples of which are so unique or old that they deserve to be in a museum. And that suggests an altruistic tendency? I'm not saying he doesn't have any but that is NOT an example of one.
You ought to read links before spouting off drivel that you don't understand. The museum is one dedicated to Nikola Tesla, the namesake of Tesla Motors to be sure, but somebody of very significant historical interest. The building that the museum is housed in happens to be formally recognized already as a National Historic Landmark. There will not be anything in this museum (except very tangentially) about Tesla Motors or any other Elon Musk company except perhaps a small note listing donors to the museum on a plaque.
I don't suppose you've heard of Nikola Tesla? Thank Thomas Edison for that (if you believe the stories).
No, what's relevant here is that it launched from Kennedy. It's the first SpaceX launch from that location.
That and they're going to try to recover the booster. That's new too, but you covered that under 'launch technology'.
This is not the first time that SpaceX has launched from Cape Canaveral (technically no longer Kennedy.... that is only the VAB and the NASA facility itself although Florida at one time did call it Cape Kennedy... and changed that back in the 1990's).
The facility at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station (who actually "owns" the property... although SpaceX does have a long term lease) is known as SLC-40... the pad just next to LC-39 A&B where the Space Shuttle and the Apollo rockets all were launched from. This launch was number nine from that same location BTW. The Florida government is also trying to encourage other private launch companies to launch from that general location, and United Launch Alliance also has flights from there as well, including a pure commercial launch fairly recently (even though most of their stuff is national security payloads for the NRO, NSA, and other alphabet soup agencies).
Even the booster recovery is not really that remarkable as it is the third time they've tried, and technically they've tried on nearly every launch since the first Falcon 1 went boom about a thousand feet above the launch pad due to insane levels of galvanometric corrosion that wasn't anticipated. The earlier attempts tried to use parachutes, which ended up not working very well and have since been abandoned by SpaceX.
On the whole, at least for SpaceX, this was a rather ordinary launch. The 1st stage recovery attempt (or at least testing the recovery systems... which is a more accurate description of what happened with this OrbComm flight) is certainly impressive and can eventually lead to cheaper prices for future customers.
The really remarkable thing though, and what makes this get hardcore geeks excited for this flight, is that customers can go to SpaceX and drop a bag of cash to get a launch slot to go into space. It really is that simple. SpaceX will deal with all of the government red tape and flight clearances, so all you need to do is drop off the payload. Some other minor things like telemetry and some bus configurations are available for the engineers building satellites for Falcon 9, but that is technical and not legal issues. EELV payloads still need government permission if you want to fly one of them. Of course Arianespace has been doing this for customers as well for a couple of decades, so even that isn't all that remarkable.
I suppose it helps that you can obtain SpaceX media under the terms of the Creative Commons licenses (I think it is CC-by-SA) and are quite open about what it is that they are doing.