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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.
Pinkypants -- my favorite!
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.
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...
Most launches aren't to the space station at all but just satellite launches.
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."
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.
Did "that"? What is "that"? Made things explode frequently? Yes. Yes they did.
But "that" is not just a "fifty years ago" thing. "That" continues up to the present. Even today, launches of new rockets are extremely risky. The problem is that there's a lot that you really can't test properly except in flight; there's only so much you can do on the ground.
Pinkypants -- my favorite!
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!
** Ed: also connecting Vandenberg AFB. Vandenburg through LA (access to Hawthorne), out on I-10, through Texas (passing 150mi from McGregor), along the Gulf Coast to Jacksonville, then down I-95.
Obviously they'll also be running Semi between Gigafactory and Fremont, but you don't really need a megacharger network in there. Perhaps one station.
Pinkypants -- my favorite!
The Saturn V was also a hand built assemblage of unique components for each launch. Yes, there were no S5 launch failures but that could have easily become the case had they continued to launch. The manual brazings for on the injector & nozzle for the F1 were impressive feats that I really wouldn't want to count upon for high reliability.
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
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.
This is an interesting read:
https://history.nasa.gov/SP-4206/contents.htm
Well, as was shown on the TV show "Young Sheldon" on Thursday night, NOW we know how Musk got the technology to do what he's doing. LOL
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
Elon Musk: 'I'm planning to retire to Mars'
https://www.theguardian.com/te...
If each engine is x% reliable against kabooming the whole mess, then the chances of success are:
% Chance of success
99 76%
98 57%
97 43%
96 33%
95 25%
There is a rather dismal history on many-engine rockets. The USSR's attempt at that failed rather miserably.
>Why waste time and resources on 2nd stage recovery when you've already got the whole reusability enchilada figured out?
I don't know that they've got it figured out, but yeah, at least they have a plan. I'd be interested to see if they try a scaled-down prototype designed to ride the Falcon 9 or Heavy
As for the value of the Heavy - you left out the technology would also likely scale to the BFR, which would let you lift *really* large payloads. I recall pretty much all the early interplanetary launch plans involving not just 2, but 8 auxilliary boosters, and I doubt he's abandoned that vision entirely. IF they can get it to work reliably, then it's a wonderful way to dramatically increase your payload using existing hardware. Until we've established the full mining, refining, and manufacturing chain in space (which I don't see happening any time soon, especially for advanced composites), the ability to launch, say, an entire mining platform in one go is going to be quite useful.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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!
On the other hand, I don't think the Soviets get enough credit, and the Germans get too much.
The US swept up most of the important rocketry figures with Operation Paperclip; the Soviets got a lot fewer, and most were line workers; only a couple had any positions of significance in the Soviet program. Also, while the US integrated the Germans into its rocket program, the Soviets mainly just collected information from those that they gathered up, and as soon as they felt they knew everything they needed to from them, shut them out. Yet the US program kept stumbling while the Soviet program moved forward by leaps and bounds. The US didn't take the lead until the sheer force of far higher levels of investment made it possible (the Soviet N1 program was horribly rushed and underfunded; even a comparably small amount of extra funding could have made the difference for it)
Pinkypants -- my favorite!
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.
From what I have read, what they learned was adding outboard boosters is a bad idea. They thought they could just strap three Falcon 9's together and get a massive increase in capacity. Turns out that's really inefficient. Most of the complexity is in the need to consume all of the fuel in the outboard boosters without using the fuel in the central booster in order to get the efficiency they wanted.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
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.
Yep. Turns out that a very good way to make a new vehicle is to just try it, see what goes wrong, and fix it.
This means that failures should be expected: they're part of the process. That's how you learn.
But the publicity and public outcry around a launch failure doesn't allow for the fact that failure is an important part of the process. So it's good to "preemptively" remind people of that beforehand.
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