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SpaceX's First Falcon Heavy Launch Will Now Take Place In 2018 (engadget.com)
The launch of SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket has been delayed to 2018. In an email to Aviation Week, SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said, "We wanted to fly Heavy this year. We should be able to static fire this year and fly a couple of weeks right after that." Engadget reports: The static fire test will be the first time that all of Heavy's 27 Merlin engines will be fired at once. And if all goes well there, Falcon Heavy should be ready for launch within the first few weeks of 2018. There have been multiple launch delays with Heavy, which Elon Musk has attributed to the development of such a large and powerful rocket being "way, way more difficult" than SpaceX expected. "Falcon Heavy requires the simultaneous ignition of 27 orbit-class engines," Musk said at the ISS R&D conference in July. "There's a lot that can go wrong there." And because of that, Musk has been very clear about where everyone's expectations should be going into Falcon Heavy's first launch. "There's a real good chance that it does not make it to orbit. I hope it gets far enough away from the launch pad that it does not cause pad damage -- I would consider that a win," he said.
There's a Morton's Fork for project managers: give repeated updates to a changing schedule, slips and all, or to give a vague window that conceals these schedule slips. The benefit of the former is that onlookers can get an increasingly precise estimate of final delivery, whereas the benefit of the latter is that it appears more professional. The downside of the former is a constant request for updates (which one feels obligated to answer) and doom and gloom from onlookers every time the schedule slips; for the latter, it's that few people know when the project will be completed until it's almost done and a release date is easy to nail down, and it's difficult to plan around such a nebulous release window. Those who choose transparency often are stressed out by the scrutiny, sometimes wishing they maybe hadn't been so transparent.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Nobody was launching 64-tonne-to-LEO rockets in 1942. Ask Wernher von Braun about the difficulty of scaling up rockets to that stage and about the huge chain of embarrassing failures along the way.
Pinkypants -- my favorite!
Anyone lining up to criticise SpaceX for the delays to Falcon Heavy needs to be reminded that the current iteration of the standard Falcon9 rocket is now more powerful on its own than the original specs for Falcon Heavy.
Several of the payloads that were originally booked with FH have already been launched on single F9s.
So the Falcon Heavy that is being rolled out now is a substantially more significant piece of hardware than it would have been if we'd been watching this event two or three years ago.
The lessons learned from developing Falcon Heavy will also pay forward into the development process for BFR. Even if FH never flies again, the process was still worth it.
As Elon stated in the quoted comment, the complexity of this launch is pretty significant. Although it must be possible to measure the respective thrust output from 27 different rockets simultaneously [i.e. torsion gauges across your rocket superstructure], translating that in to real-time simulation that balances thrusts for both trajectory and vehicle integrity are going to be hard.
Whilst this launch is certainly experimental, SpaceX will want to get the maximum possible return on that investment - it's their USP after all - and that means having a good degree of confidence that it will work. Something that blows up on the pad after giving half a second of telemetry isn't much use to anyone except the afternoon news shows and YouTube. Well, and ULA.
This is all about balancing the need to test [in order to get data] with the need to test successfully [in order to get data]. And although the cost of an F9 Heavy launch [to SpaceX] certainly won't be three times the cost of a regular F9 launch, it won't be cheap, either. If regular F9 launches are $60MM, then the cost of F9H must be at least in the order of $120MM or so.
Worth taking the time to give it a reasonable chance of success.
Most launches aren't to the space station at all but just satellite launches.
the SaturnV was doing 140 tonne payloads into LEO in the 60s and 70s.
It wasn't very good at soft landings, though.
If you think rocket launches use a lot of fuel, you're probably underestimating the amount of fuel burned in road vehicles. Just the USA alone burns 1.5 million gallons of gasoline per hour (extrapolated from https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php)
Tesla's push to electrifying road cars will save many orders of magnitude more fuel per year than SpaceX will burn in total.
Yes, because GPS, weather forecasts, telecommunications, global warming science, astronomy and so on are anything but useful for mankind?
Think again. And also think scale: a small town and it's cars burns more fuel daily than a big rocket bringing sattelites into orbit.
If you want to fight pollution, aim your arrows against military uses. Coal fuel plants. The slow adoption rate of renewals. The power of oil companies. Inefficient use of heating & cooling. Air freight. Datacenters. Hell, aim your arrows against bitcoin or so for wasting energy if you wish so.
Almost anything you can think of makes more sense than complaining about space launches.
>because he wants to cut pollution and save the planet
He wants to go to Mars.
Space-X gets him there, Tesla powers the planet, Boring Company builds living space and connective tunnels, Hyperloops gives him transport (and easier, since Mars' low pressure means you probably don't even bother evacuating the tubes).
If Musk next starts in on magnetically confined plasma shielding technology and closed-loop environmental systems... you'll know for sure. He will want to get to Mars without the elevated cancer risk and survive there without constant resupply from Earth.