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SpaceX Details Its Plans For Landing Three Falcon Heavy Boosters At Once (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: As part of the process to gain federal approval for the simultaneous landing of its Falcon Heavy rocket boosters in Florida, SpaceX has prepared an environmental assessment of the construction of two additional landing pads alongside its existing site. The report considers noise and other effects from landing up to three first stages at the same time. After undergoing a preliminary review by the U.S. Air Force, the document has been released for public comment. As part of the document, SpaceX also says it would like to build a Dragon capsule processing facility on the landing zone to support refurbishment of the Dragon 2 spacecraft, designed to carry crew into orbit. The 130-foot-long facility would provide a "temporary" facility for vehicle propellant load and propulsion system servicing. When it originally designed its Landing Zone 1 facility at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, for the single Falcon 9 first stage booster, the company envisioned the need for one main pad approximately 200 feet across, and four smaller contingency pads, each approximately 150 feet in diameter. The chosen site had enough acreage to accommodate all five pads. Improvements in the rocket's landing navigation guidance system obviated the need for the contingency pads with the Falcon 9, however. So now the company wants to use the additional space to construct two concrete landing pads, each with an approximate diameter of 282 feet surrounded by an approximate 50-foot-wide hard-packed soil "apron." This would give SpaceX three landing pads and the ability to bring back all three Falcon Heavy boosters to land while also retaining the option to land one or two on drone ships in the Atlantic Ocean. In addition to the potential for a dozen Falcon 9 launches and landings each year, the document says SpaceX may eventually make six Falcon Heavy launches a year, potentially returning an additional 18 boosters to the Florida-based site. The new pads and crane sites would be configured to allow parallel processing of landed boosters. With U.S. Air Force Approval, construction could begin as early as this spring.
First post!
How does this affect anyone's life at all? I see no way that anyone benefits from doing this. It seems like a total waste to me, just like anything else involving space exploration. Now, I'm sure I'll be modded troll for asking the tough questions, but someone needs to justify this massive waste. Can anyone explain why this matters at all? I expect not! But I'm sure I'll be censored to -1 by moderators who prefer to dodge the important questions.
are under NCAA review
Maybe we should paint "OF COURSE I STILL LOVE YOU" on the roof of Trump Tower and hope for the best.
"This would give SpaceX three landing pads and the ability to bring back all three Falcon Heavy boosters to land while also retaining the option to land one or two on drone ships in the Atlantic Ocean."
I can imagine scenarios where you'd want to land zero, one or three boosters on drone ships. I can't imagine any scenario where it makes sense to land two boosters on drone ships. One way would be to have the center booster and one side booster landing at sea - but if one side booster can return to landing site, so can the other (and landing on land is both cheaper and safer if you can do it.) The other way is to land both side boosters at sea but return the center booster to land - but the center booster is always going to be much harder to return to land, as it burns longer and so is higher velocity and further down range when it has finished boosting.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
I've fulfilled my greatest lifelong goal by getting first post on a Slashdot story! FP! Yay! I win! You can all bow before my superior first posting skills! FP! FP! FP!
This FP is dedicated to my favorite TV show, Star Trek: Voyager!
FP! FP! FP!
This is what I hate from SpaceX. They refuse to acknowledge their problems.
Not one single Falcon has landed without mayor damage today. But they want to push without fixing the problems they already have.
And that alone is worth the admi$$ion!
If you want to view the launch live, instructions are here.
Bruce Perens.
Anyone here tried it?
I heard Rob MAlda gave timothy AIDS so they both promptly died and kdawson didn't know how to log into his Windows machine without timothy to guide him through typing his user name and password. Only time can tell how long this site will stay up. Will the lone T1 go down, or will the scrappers find the Pentium Pro running the Mandrake Linux server and scavenge it for gold?
Only time will tell.
All of Musk's businesses lose money every year. Where exactly do they get the funds for all this expansion, or for the Gigafactory or the Tesla 3 tooling and production?
Not only have they landed a number of them, but the launch of comsat SES-10, currently expected sometime in February, is being done on the booster that flew ISS resupply mission CRS-8, and was the first successful landing on the droneship at sea. Another used stage is undergoing conversion to be used as one of the boosters on the Falcon Heavy launch that will use these pads.
The main reason why crossfeed isn't being worked on is that the extra capacity it would deliver isn't needed by any customers. The heavy is already a beast of a launcher without it. But, if someone came up with a mission that required the extra capacity and was willing to pay for its development, then they would restart work on crossfeed.
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
They have enough polar-orbit launches on the manifest that every two weeks means once per month per coast. Polar at Vandenberg, equatorial at Canaveral.
Bruce Perens.
... does any of this matter? Where is the 4K footage of any of the 'landings' of Falcon? By a strange coincidence, they keep having drop outs in the video because of alleged problems beaming the video signal to whatever is picking it up - so presumably they have numerous 4K cameras mounted on the barges, that don't transmit video, they just record it. So where is the 4K footage? You would think they would want to see, in great detail, every part of the landing, would you not?
I know how they fucking did it.
THey ZIP Stripped those punk ass rockets together!!!
Do you have the same issue with professional sports, network television, and shopping malls? Each is a huge money sink, with not much of lasting value to show for them.
Not much of lasting value? Only to the naive who look at it from a very narrow and wrong headed perspective. Each of those examples are multi-billion dollar industries which employ millions of people and provide valuable goods and services to many more millions. If I go to my local shopping mall and buy a wrench which I then use in my workplace and maybe stop at the local sports bar and watch the game on the TV there absolutely is lasting value there. Bank accounts were enriched, work was facilitated, tax revenues were generated, people were employed, and the economy has grown. In what universe does that not qualify as lasting value? Might not be as sexy as sending rockets into space but it's no less important in the big picture.
Actually, all of the ground landings take place right next to the ocean.
It's not that hard to conceive of a rocket booster coming back to Earth going off course by a fair distance and "landing" where it shouldn't. Definitely less chance of harm to property if this happens over the ocean than over land. It's not a worry that keeps me up at night or anything but it's certainly among the possible outcomes.
Cape Canaveral isn't anyone's back yard.
Cape Canaveral is just a few miles from quite a few people's literal back yards. It's not terrible hard to imagine a returning rocket booster (or parts of one) going off course by a few miles. Not likely I'll admit but not entirely impossible either.
All of Musk's businesses lose money every year
Except that they don't. Tesla has lost money to date but periodically shows a small profit and is approaching breakeven despite investing heavily in new products and technology. So far investors have liked what they have seen. Paypal was hugely profitable. SpaceX is private but there are rumors that it is profitable from credible sources.
Where exactly do they get the funds for all this expansion, or for the Gigafactory or the Tesla 3 tooling and production?
The Gigafactory is a joint venture with several partners, primarily Panasonic. Money for Tesla 3 development and tooling comes from sales of the Model S and X as well as loans and stock sales. (you are aware that the entire point of going public is to raise money to build the company right?) Plus Musk has put a lot of his own personal fortune into the ventures. It's no mystery where all these ventures get their funding. When you've started numerous successful businesses like Elon Musk has it's not terribly hard to get funding.
What the hell are they planning to launch that requires 3 - 5 Rockets Simultaneously. That's how I read this article.
Cool shit is on the horizon people.
This way SpaceX can more efficiently smash rockets into the ground to get those NASA and US taxpayer dollars even faster!
This definitely seems like a "Hey hold my beer, and watch this!" type of scenario with predictable results... Though you never know with these guys, landing a rocket on end, on a floating platform in the ocean also seemed a bit nuts yet they did it anyway.
There are two types of countries. Those that use meters and those that elected a reality TV conman as president.
TFTFY
What you said.
Point is with a sea landing, you can make it physically impossible for the booster to land in someone's backyard.
This is Florida we're talking about.
Or maybe Texas.
Come on.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
They should be focused solely on delivering the first F9H payload to a precise orbit, like ULA is.
That's still five landings more than ULA, right?
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Go die in a fire, you soccer pedo.
Uh, spacex WAS profitable. At the current moment there is doubt.
It will take more than one rocket blowing up to make it lose money unless you are looking at a very short time scale. There is nothing about the economic big picture of SpaceX today that is meaningfully different than it was a few months ago. Now if they start having a lot of disasters then that might be a different story. But every company that builds rockets loses a few sooner or later.
Have you ever been to Cape Canaveral?
Several times. Been on a tour to the VAB as well.
Then you have a nice long causeway with a lots of water as a further buffer before you get to anything like privately owned land.
According to Zillow there are over 100 houses for sale on Cape Canaveral just south of the Air Force Base as I type this. There are thousands of homes just a few miles to the west of the launch sites. A very reasonable safety buffer but not so far away that one could reasonably claim zero chance of something heading the wrong way.
I am pretty sure that SpaceX has some means to destroy the returning booster before it gets close to the ground the 10+ miles off course it would need to be before getting close to private property.
As am I. However the mere fact that such a thing would be necessary indicates that it is possible (however unlikely) for the rocket to miss by multiple miles. I doubt I'll live to see it happen but it isn't impossible.
Yes, that would be twenty years before Apollo. The V-2 rockets used alcohol/water and liquid oxygen, and the Rocketdyne F-1 engine used LOX and RP-1 (kerosene, more or less). The gas generator which drove the turbopump for the F-1 engine had almost exactly half the thrust of the V-2 rocket, and that was just the fuel pump. The actual Saturn V rocket of course had five of the F-1 engines. I'm not sure it's particularly meaningful to compare the V-2 program with Apollo, and I don't think it's particularly reasonable to consider the former a step in the development of the latter, or if so, then one would also have to include the work of Goddard as well. I'd say that the history of early modern rocketry falls fairly neatly into a few eras: Goddard's work (20s-30s), the V-2 program (40s), the "Wild West" era described by John Clark, and the Apollo era (1960s). Yes, each era led to each subsequent era, but to lay all of this at the feet of Von Braun misses lots of important contributions from other people. Von Braun had the army funding to build big missiles, but as far as I know he did little or no research on propellants, and the general principles of liquid propelled rockets came from Goddard. If Von Braun is the only rocket scientist you've heard of and you don't care about the actual history involved, sure, your statement makes some sort of sense. Mostly not though. But do check out the linked PDF, aside from a regrettably necessary proliferation of chemistry terms it's a pretty interesting story.
4chan is that way ->
For a forward-looking company, they seem to think that the last 40 years of space travel never even happened.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.