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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.
The statement is clearly preemptive damage control. That said, given the track record of "first launches of new rocket systems" around the world, probably well warranted.
I'm sure if SpaceX could turn back time they would have skipped the development of FH altogether and focused entirely on BFR; the development process turned out to be much harder than they anticipated. But, they've come this far, so it's time to get this bird in the air.
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The things they learn from launching FH will probably help them a lot putting BFR together. The fact that it turns out to be this hard for them to develop FH means that they probably could use the experience before scaling up.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
As the head of the German rocket program in WW2, Walter Dornberger, said:
"We might well have been daunted by the multiplicity of the task before us. Luckily the difficulties were for the most part still entirely unknown to us. We attacked our problems with the courage of inexperience and had no thought to the time it might take us to solve them."
Satellite launches that improve quality of life here on Earth. Mainly communications and monitoring.
Also, expect a significant decrease in emissions per unit mass launched to orbit over time. BFR, for example, will burn methane rather than RP1, and will have a much higher payload fraction. And as for the ground operations, I strongly expect SpaceX to be a major early customer of the Tesla Semi once they're available. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if one of the first megacharger routes to go live connects SpaceX facilities with their Florida launch pads.
So long as natural gas is cheap, they'll probably continue using it for methane supply for BFR. But if its price ever rises enough and/or the cost of producing it from electricity and CO2 ever drops enough, I'd strongly expect them to switch to synthesized methane. We're far from that at present, however - you'll need to see natural gas disappearing from baseload grid power generation first, as an early indicator.
Pinkypants -- my favorite!
This is an interesting read:
https://history.nasa.gov/SP-4206/contents.htm
if SpaceX could turn back time they would have skipped the development of FH altogether and focused entirely on BFR
The deciding factor seems to have been second-stage recovery. About a year ago, I recall Elon saying something about trying to recover a 2nd stage "next year" (2018). Then, a few months later, he announced his intention to reveal a new, scaled-down version of the BFR at this year's IAC.
Like Falcon Heavy, recovering that second stage turned out to be a lot harder than expected. Meanwhile, they'd just completed a ton of work on figuring out the BFR's lifting-body spaceship, which is a combination of 2nd stage and payload all in one vehicle. Why waste time and resources on 2nd stage recovery when you've already got the whole reusability enchilada figured out?
I think the real "light-bulb moment" for Elon was realizing that his grand vision for Mars didn't have to be so grand as to be impractical for the existing space market. Instead of building "old fashioned" stick-and-capsule rockets to pay for the development of the BFR, a slightly smaller BFR could eventually pay for itself.
That said, however, they really need the FH to be successful. They've sunk a lot of time into it, and they already have several customers lined up for it. Assuming it works, it will still be a huge step forward, both in payload capacity and launch costs. With F9 and FH, they can lead the market quite comfortably for the next few years as they work on the new BFR.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
You assume that an engine failure dooms the mission. The whole point is engine-out capability that doesn't. In such a case, the reliability increases the more engines you have.
The problem with the N1 was a combination of A) its engine-out failures tended to be cascading (aka, the engines were not properly protected from each other), B) its rate of engine-out failures was huge, C) lots of miswiring, and D) overcautious software that killed missions it shouldn't have, and outright destroyed a launch pad when it didn't need to.
Pinkypants -- my favorite!