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In Daring Plan, Tomorrow SpaceX To Land a Rocket On Floating Platform
HughPickens.com writes "The cost of getting to orbit is exorbitant, because the rocket, with its multimillion-dollar engines, ends up as trash in the ocean after one launching, something Elon Musk likens to throwing away a 747 jet after a single transcontinental flight. That's why tomorrow morning at 620 am his company hopes to upend the economics of space travel in a daring plan by attempting to land the first stage of a Falcon 9 rocket intact on a floating platform, 300 feet long and 170 feet wide in the Atlantic Ocean. SpaceX has attempted similar maneuvers on three earlier Falcon 9 flights, and on the second and third attempts, the rocket slowed to a hover before splashing into the water. "We've been able to soft-land the rocket booster in the ocean twice so far," says Musk. "Unfortunately, it sort of sat there for several seconds, then tipped over and exploded. It's quite difficult to reuse at that point."
After the booster falls away and the second stage continues pushing the payload to orbit, its engines will reignite to turn it around and guide it to a spot about 200 miles east of Jacksonville, Florida. Musk puts the chances of success at 50 percent or less but over the dozen or so flights scheduled for this year, "I think it's quite likely, 80 to 90 percent likely, that one of those flights will be able to land and refly." SpaceX will offer its own launch webcast on the company's website beginning at 6 a.m. If SpaceX's gamble succeeds, the company plans to reuse the rocket stage on a later flight. "Reusability is the critical breakthrough needed in rocketry to take things to the next level." SpaceX announced the plan in December.
After the booster falls away and the second stage continues pushing the payload to orbit, its engines will reignite to turn it around and guide it to a spot about 200 miles east of Jacksonville, Florida. Musk puts the chances of success at 50 percent or less but over the dozen or so flights scheduled for this year, "I think it's quite likely, 80 to 90 percent likely, that one of those flights will be able to land and refly." SpaceX will offer its own launch webcast on the company's website beginning at 6 a.m. If SpaceX's gamble succeeds, the company plans to reuse the rocket stage on a later flight. "Reusability is the critical breakthrough needed in rocketry to take things to the next level." SpaceX announced the plan in December.
delayed. Rocket launches get delayed often. If you're new to this, get used to it.
Stratolaunch does kind of makes sense from the delay perspective, if we're gonna aim at something like daily orbital launches in the future (although of course in this case, the delay wasn't weather-related). Jets are much more tolerant of bad weather than rockets, so being able to fly above the weather or move away from it is pretty appealing.
Their engines are already reused "sort of". They test fire their engines before launch. One time they evens scrubbed a launch after the engines were lit. They fixed the problem in a few hours and launched after that.
One of the reasons payloads cost multi-billion dollars is because the launchers cause near that amount. Cheaper launchers will lead to cheaper payloads..
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
And the Skylon is looking to build a genuine spaceplane, single stage to orbit, with its funky jet/rocket combined engines,
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
In all honesty, from looking around me these days ... I conclude that doing actual R&D on the leading edge of stuff is itself daring.
Increasingly, companies want to make a "me too" product or do things based on what focus groups tell them is good.
Hell, even some tech companies seem to be retreating from meaningful R&D and focusing on "leveraging and monetizing their IP portfolio".
Nobody is willing to invest in R&D any more unless it gets them a tax break. And in that case, they'll try to tell you to categorize a ton of unrelated stuff as part of the R&D effort so the accountants can maximize the write off.
So, me, I'll still stick with daring. Saying you figure you have a less than 50% chance of success these days is pretty bold.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Even if they can recover the engine intact how many times can it be reused. Saving a few million on a higher chance of blowing up multi billion payloads is not exactly wise economically.
I have heard they have already put engines through 40 or more simulated launch cycles. These engines were designed to be reliable. To a certain extent, having tested an engine through previous launches might imply more reliability, at least up to a certain point. In any case, if they recover the rocket, they will be able to analyze how the launch has affected the structure and systems.
These rockets do not use hydrogen, and thus do not have the problems of embrittlement that the shuttle engines had. I suspect one of the bigger problems will be coking from using kerosine fuel, but I also suspect that can be mitigated using solvents to clean the fuel systems.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
Long term that is what they will have to determine. Reuse of rockets has been a thing for a long time, but in most cases it ends up not being economically viable. Right now SpaceX has some very optimistic estimates regarding reuse and its associated costs, but so did NASA. It generally ends up being worse than they hope, but sometimes it still works out well enough. Though if they continue to move towards human cargo that will change the equation significantly.
" I conclude that doing actual R&D on the leading edge of stuff is itself daring."
In the 1960s, companies hired you and they paid YOU to do R&D.
Today, universities are the R&D branch of corporations. Universities soak up public money (most of it funneled into textbook companies and top-heavy administration) and students pay the university,.
Then the students can get some nice debt, and go begging for the few technical jobs left out there.
Mostly random stuff.
You know, I have personally watched tech companies become less willing to invest in pure R&D, less willing to make new things that someone hasn't already made, and be much more beholden to whatever the heck the CEO thinks is the Next Big Thing.
I have been at companies where we went from being innovators to imitators, and where the CEO would routinely make moronic predictions which didn't happen based on what the trends were. And then in six months make an entirely new set of moronic predictions, based on whatever the trend was then.
So, I don't know if this has changed in my lifetime (as I perceive it), or if it's cyclic, or what.
If I could answer these questions ... well, I'd be charging vast sums of money for those answers. Like Gartner does.
Only Gartner is just as full of shit as I am, so maybe I'm just doing it wrong, and need to find out how to charge people vast sums of money to identify emerging technologies which will never go anywhere.
Because, I think that's where the real money is.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Sadly, we have only consumers to blame for this. Companies that invested lots of their resources in R&D tended to suffer in the market. Patents, which were designed to try to even things out, have become such a clusterexpletive that they are utterly failing at doing that.
The money tends to go to the companies that focus on streamlining their production systems and leave the "research" up to their competitors. This kinda worked when there was lots of government funded research (which any company could benefit from) but that has been scaled back, twisted, and privatized so that it is not really making up the differnce either.
Increasingly, companies want to make a "me too" product or do things based on what focus groups tell them is good.
We won't mention that vertically-launched multi-stage rockets powered by RP-1/LOX are pretty "me too".
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Honest question: You have a ticket to the ISS. You can choose a rocket that just came out of the VAB* or one that recently launched and returned whole and was turned around for this flight. Which do you trust more?
* Yes, I know SpaceX isn't using the VAB now but you get the idea...
Defending IP by destroying access to it? That makes sense, RIAA/MPAA. Go to the corner until you can play nice!
Once SpaceX has worked out the kinks and has implemented this as a good way to reduce costs, some patent troll will step forward showing that he patented the very concept of this in 1998. "Elon Musk stole my invention".
The lawsuit will of course be filed in the court of East Texas.
The external solid boosters were sort of reused - the entire rocket needed to be disassembled, and about 5k parts were refurbished and reused. The shuttle engines themselves were pretty much the same thing, they were taken apart and refurbished every mission.
SpaceX wants to only partially disassemble key components of their 1st stage in a way that they could potentially send up the same 1st stage within a week. Some parts will be replaced, most others inspected, but they are not all getting rebuilt/refurbished every single takeoff.
Trying to balance a big pencil on a postage stamp that's moving unpredictably and simultaneously in 4 axises (pitch, roll, yaw, altitude) doesn't seem to have very high odds of success. And the worse the sea is running, the lower the odds.
If it works, though, count me really impressed by what would surely be a Crowning Moment of Awesome.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
I thought the only rocket-related thing reused from the shuttles was the fuel tank, and that only after reconditioning it post-ocean swim.
No, actually it was the Solid Rocket Boosters that were reused. After burnout, they were jettisoned at a (relatively) low altitude. The external tank, which stayed connected to the orbiter to a substantially higher altitude did not survive reentry.
That little bit tougher adds weight and cost to the rocket. May pay off in the long run but not on the first launch.
The nice thing about SpaceX's approach is that a Rocket launches, flies and lands like a rocket. The shuttle, spaceplane aproach attempts to build something that is both a rocket and an airplane. The result may be both rocket and plane but it is neither a very good rocket nor a very good plane.
Space shuttle pilots use to refer to the lander as a "flying brick". That was not a compliment!
With a brand new rocket, you risk faulty assembly. With a used one you risk wear and tear. Hard to say which one is better. It all depends on the other parameters that you're not saying.
"We've been able to soft-land the rocket booster in the ocean twice so far," says Musk. "Unfortunately, it sort of sat there for several seconds, then tipped over and exploded. [...]"
"Everyone said I was daft to land a rocket in the ocean, but I did it all the same, just to show them. It sank in the ocean. So I built a second one. That sank in the ocean. So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, then sank in the ocean. But the fourth one stayed up!"
I think I'll go for a walk now...
The SRBs were re-used as well as the engines connected to the Shuttle itself.
The external tank is jettisoned too high to recover. It was thought that it could be used in space to construct something but that was never done.
They've already managed a vertical takeoff/vertical landing on the ground: www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxKWh7kLDzw
Most likely this is a step towards general reusability from a cost perspective, as there are advantages to doing recovery on water (generally less problems if you somehow screw it up I would think).
Even if they can recover the engine intact how many times can it be reused. Saving a few million on a higher chance of blowing up multi billion payloads is not exactly wise economically.
Think of it this way: if they can fly the first stage 20 times, that along with some cost optimizations of the upper stage could cut the cost per pound by a factor of ten. Then it would become economical to launch mere multi-hundred million dollar payloads. That would dramatically reduce the economical risk of any single launch, as long as the rocket is not ten times as likely to blow up, but rather only maybe twice as likely.
Of course, anyone who launches a lot of rockets of the same type is likely to become really good at getting that type to orbit in one piece. Just look at the Russians and their now ancient Soyuz rocket.
Keep cutting costs and you might one day have a system where you could launch a ten million dollar payload, which you could easily insure at your local insurance company.
The external tank is jettisoned too high to recover. It was thought that it could be used in space to construct something but that was never done.
As much as this played out in various types of fiction and so forth, the reality is that the tanks wouldn't have been all that useful in orbit. The foam insulation would have off-gassed significantly and dumped all sorts of crap into your orbital environment, and the tanks themselves had nowhere near the shielding required to be used for human habitation (both radiation, and micrometeorite).
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
This attempt is probably going to fail.
You're probably right but they have data from two other water landings, so it's not like this is completely cross your fingers territory.
It's still amazing and I hope they pull it off. Elon Musk is the man.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I'm sure that customers with astronomically expensive or critical payloads will always have the option to specify a "new" booster if they're willing to pay more.
On the other hand, if you need to launch a constellation of 20 satellites, it might be much cheaper to budget for 22-24 cheaper "used" launches than 20 more expensive but more reliable new ones.
So, let's look at history for a (possible) answer. The Apollo flights were all "just came out of the VAB" flights. There were 40 of them, including a loong unmanned test series (17 manned flights). Counting Apollo 13, two of them failed. Which gives you 5% failure rate (including 13), or 2.5% failure rate (not).
Shuttle had 135 missions, with two failures. Failure rate ~1.5%.
So, shuttle, which "returned whole and was turned around for this flight" had a better safety record than Apollo, which "just came out of the VAB".
Note that if you substitute Soyuz for Apollo, you get similar results. Yes, Soyuz had two loss-of-crew failures, just like Shuttle, but in fewer than 135 flights....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
That was the first thing that jumped to my mind. Kind of reminds me of retread tires -- a lot of the truck tire fragments you see by the side of the road are from retread tires that self destructed. A lot of companies buy them because they're cheaper, but the chances that they'll fail is far higher.
But the consequnces of your first stage failing are much worse than the consequences of your tire shredding on the freeway. And those are bad enough.
Yes, rockets go through more extreme forces and environments, but that does not mean that rockets can not be made to safely survive multiple fights.
It could be that due to the bathtub curve that some number of flights after the first flight are the most reliable. Right now every rocket flight is a maiden voyage (also known as a shakedown cruse). Brand new rockets fail on occasion.
Some privacy policy Slashdot.
They want to maintain visual on the 1st stage. The aerodynamics of the high altitude, high Mach number deceleration burns is probably the most important thing they want to study. They need to understand this well for the present objective of controlling and landing the stage, but the aerodynamics is relevant to semi-powered descent of the Dragon spacecraft onto Earth and especially Mars.
Here is some footage of their last landing attempt
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UFjK_CFKgA
This is what SpaceX ultimately is aiming for - a spacecraft that can utilize drag and propulsion in varying proportion to land on any body in the solar system, no parachutes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cf_-g3UWQ04
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
A lot of that's true, but I'm not sure how you think public money passes through universities to textbook companies? (In reality, it's students paying textbook companies directly.)
In reality, public money passes through government default subsidized student loan programs to allow students to borrow money at favorable interest rates to allow many students to pay textbook companies that otherwise could not afford to pay textbook companies. But I digress...
Fortunately, student funding/debt has very little to do with how most universities are funding their research. In actuality, most prestigious research universities are pretty much directly funded by public money (including private institutions in the USA) in the form of research grants. The tuition they charge their student (esp at the undergraduate level) generally is a small part of a typical schools budget and generally could easily be covered by a fraction of their endowment income. Most grant money *includes* overhead for operations.
However, student funding has very much to do with how universities fund their non-research operations that aren't covered by grant overhead. This is especially true at institutions that do no research at all and of course most acute at diploma mills.
The reason that prestigious research universities charge students so much is that it conveys a sense of value to the education they are providing and is easy to get the students to take out loans (esp publically subsidized loans) for their education and once they max out loans, they often discount the remainder to cover the difference. The reason less prestigious universities charge so much is that more prestigious universities set the price point high (basically a type of comparative level-set pricing collusion).
Sadly, the way it is set up now, by making it so easy to borrow, the government is essentially tax/spending the students future income to transfer this wealth to universities. Is it fair that only students are burdened with this "tax" rather than the public at large? The universities are charging more because it's easy for the students to borrow the money and the students are caught in the middle. Why is the government making it so easy for students to go into massive debt (esp for diploma mill paper)? Well that's a political question...
Textbook money is also a drop in the bucket at any research university. Other than undergrads, who's using textbooks for research anyhow? Instead, researchers are reading and writing papers for journals that are probably 10x worse at gouging money than the worst offending textbook companies.
Well, no. The Shuttle's SRBs were a lot more than just a tube full of explosives.
They had thrust vector control; hydraulic power units, gimbal nozzles, control hardware. Electrical subsystems. Self contained navigation hardware. Range safety hardware. And of course everything was triple or quadruple redundant for reliability.
=Smidge=