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SpaceX Livestreams Sunday's Rocket Launch (space.com)
An anonymous reader quotes Space.com:
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the 10 satellites for Iridium Communications is scheduled to liftoff from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California at 1:25 p.m. PDT (4:25 p.m. EDT/2025 GMT). The live webcast is expected to begin about 1 hour before the opening of the launch window, and you can watch it on SpaceX's website, or at Space.com. This is the second of eight planned Iridium launches with SpaceX. The launches will deliver a total of 75 satellites into space for the $3 billion Iridium NEXT global communications network. "Iridium NEXT will replace the company's existing global constellation in one of the largest technology upgrades ever completed in space," according to a statement from Iridium. "It represents the evolution of critical communications infrastructure that governments and organizations worldwide rely upon to drive business, enable connectivity, empower disaster relief efforts and more."
After the mission the booster rocket will attempt to land on a droneship. The droneships name is "Just Read The Instructions."
After the mission the booster rocket will attempt to land on a droneship. The droneships name is "Just Read The Instructions."
If they are hungry why would you want to give them cancer?
We should be spending this on food for the hungry and cancer instead.
Getting food and medicine to those most in need requires reliable communications to remote locations in places like central Africa, and rural India. One why to do that is with communication satellites designed for exactly that.
Anyway, spoiling it for those who didn't see it: nice clean landing (despite the stormy weather at the landing ship and the new experimental titanium grid fins), SECO completed as nominally, awaiting startup 2 after the S2 coast phase (40 mins).
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
Not sure if you are joking, but Iain Banks died in 2013.
Slow news day.
Maybe for you. I find launches like this to be Must See TV. Doesn't matter if it's SpaceX or someone else. If you don't find satellite launches fascinating then you are either impossible to impress or you don't understand what is happening. Or maybe you are just being snarky for no good reason.
It's unlikely that Mr Banks is going to be writing books faster. (He's dead Jim)
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He's still faster than George R R Martin
And there is goes, all 10 satellites successfully deployed. Another nice mission.
Can't wait until the first Falcon Heavy launch... now that's going to be something that Slashdot ought to have an article on ;)
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
and far, FAR, FAR more interesting.
because yeah, there's been 0 comm sats up there before today, and STILL there's millions starving.
There are many, many fewer people starving, and better communications is a big part of the reason. African economies are growing at over 4%, and growth is far better in areas that have cell coverage. With reliable communications, logistics is way more efficient, people can compare prices, report corruption, lookup information, and even do internet banking. Collectively, these things make a big difference.
Indeed. Personally, I'm impressed by the constant stream of new innovation work - it seems every other launch is trying something new, even if minor - some new part, some new extreme in the flight or landing envelope, some new attempt to work towards additional parts recovery or reusability, etc. I love how they're experimenting with fairing recovery. If they keep improving the durability of their F9 stages like they've been doing incrementally (e.x. in this launch, the titanium grid fins), we may well get to the point of seeing second stage recovery. SpaceX used to dismiss it as unlikely but now talks about it as a long-term goal.
I imagine it will be a while, but I look forward to seeing how their reuse cost savings works out. We should be able to get a rough sense by tracking how quickly they're turning around stages, as that corresponds with man-hours. There's all sorts of tangential things they're ultimately going to need to reduce in price as well related to ground and communication services, things that used to be an insignificant fraction of the total cost but become more relevant the cheaper the rocket cost-per-flight gets. I'm an optimist on this; I think they're going to ultimately get turnaround very cheap indeed. I see no fundamental reason why turnaround must cost seven figures, or even six, per flight. Orbital rocketry is a tougher flight envelope than aircraft, but ultimately, you adjust your hardware to make maintenance turnaround as cheap as possible, just like aircraft designers do, based on your experience flying the craft. That which you can make last, you make last; that which you can't, you make it as cheap to swap as possible. You determine how much you can fly each part before it needs service, and build a maintenance schedule around that which minimizes labour and downtime. Etc.
People often point to Shuttle reuse as a counterpoint to reusability economics, but the Shuttle program couldn't do the above. The orbiters were made once and then production stopped, versus the Falcons which are designed to be affordable even in a disposable, series-production flight mode. The Shuttle tanks were never reusable, and the SRBs (by nature of being solids) fundamentally required a full disassembly/recasting/rebuild each time. This is all ignoring how the program was economically compromised from the beginning due to budget cuts, difficult imposed design requirements, and a few bad decisions. The short of it, the Shuttle never had the option to make its engines or TPS maintenance-simpler, it never had the option to get rid of the side-mount that caused so many headaches (weight, vibration, debris strike, etc), couldn't change that the SRBs got seawater soaked after a highway-speed crash into the ocean, and on and on. SpaceX can continually change anything that hinders their reuse economics. It's a massive advantage, and I think ultimately it'll pay off massively.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."