NASA Uses Its First Recycled SpaceX Rocket For a Re-Supply Mission (nypost.com)

An anonymous reader quotes the New York Post: SpaceX racked up another first on Friday, launching a recycled rocket with a recycled capsule on a grocery run for NASA. The unmanned Falcon rocket blasted off with a just-in-time-for-Christmas delivery for the International Space Station, taking flight again after a six-month turnaround. On board was a Dragon supply ship, also a second-time flier. It was NASA's first use of a reused Falcon rocket and only the second of a previously flown Dragon.

Within 10 minutes of liftoff, the first-stage booster was back at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, standing upright on the giant X at SpaceX's landing zone. That's where it landed back in June following its first launch. Double sonic booms thundered across the area. At SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, cheers erupted outside the company's glassed-in Mission Control, where chief executive Elon Musk joined his employees.

The Dragon reaches the space station Sunday. The capsule last visited the 250-mile-high outpost in 2015. This time, the capsule is hauling nearly 5,000 pounds of goods, including 40 mice for a muscle-wasting study, a first-of-its-kind impact sensor for measuring space debris as minuscule as a grain of sand and barley seeds for a germination experiment by Budweiser, already angling to serve the first beer on Mars.
Also onboard were several hundred Star Wars mission patches created by a partnership between Lucasfilm and the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (the non-profit organization managing the ISS National Lab). Space.com reports that Elon Musk named the Falcon X after the original Millennium Falcon in Star Wars.

Comments

Re:Seems like a huge waste of taxpayer money

[DontBeAMoran]

The budget of NASA is but a tiny fraction compared to the budget of the US military, which is engaged in conflicts all around the world that do not concern the US at all.

The good news and the bad news

[JoshuaZ]

The good news is that it seemed like NASA would be one of the last groups to use reused rockets because of their deep-seated bureaucracy. That they've used both a reused first-stage and a partially reused Dragon shows how far this has really come. And this sort of thing adds up to massive savings for the taxpayer, as well as making satellite launches cheaper for everyone else. Moreover, easy back of the envelope calculations also show that reusing first stages takes drastically less energy than throwing them away and so less CO2 is produced. (When SpaceX switches to their next rocket type which they intend to use the Raptor rocket engine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raptor_(rocket_engine_family) which will use methane, which can be produced using the Sabatier process https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabatier_reaction, which will allow in the long-run actually carbon neutral rockets.

The bad news is that as far as it seems, this sort of thing hasn't stopped the Space Launch System from continued to being funded https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System. The SLS is essentially a massively expensive, very large rocket that can only be used once. It has cost billions of dollars and will cost billions more, and it isn't going to be ready for a very long time, and may end up launching only 2 or 3 times. In contrast, SpaceX continues to work on the BFR (Big Falco Rocket https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BFR_(rocket), yes, "Falcon" can also stand for something else), is costing far less to develop than the SLS, will likely have a higher payload to low-earth orbit, and will be fully reusable. What this should be is a wake-up call to stop funding the SLS which is primarily massive pork for a small number of big defense and old space companies rather than a serious development of a useful launch system.

Re:The good news and the bad news

[JoshuaZ]

Rounding error compared to what? We don't lose anything by reducing CO2 use. And the amount of CO2 produced by launches is not small. For example, the Falcon 9 uses around 25,000 gallons of kerosene per a launch, which is about the same CO2 output as a moderate sized US town. However, the total produced CO2 if you count that made in making a rocket is typically an order of magnitude or more higher. Moreover, if your concern is about other pollutants, then the Falcon 9 and other rockets that SpaceX uses are also particularly clean for those also. One of the reasons that SpaceX avoided using solid rocket boosters is because they are terrible from a pollution perspective. Solid rocket motors often use aluminium perchlorate which is bad for the ozone layer since burning it releases chlorine (and has an impact similar to CFCs https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/04/090414-rockets-ozone.html), as well as all sorts of other nasties which are produced since they are also burning PBAN or some other rubber-like substance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polybutadiene_acrylonitrile. Yes, as a fraction of total pollution these are small, but we do better by reducing pollution from all sources in general, and every little bit helps.

Re:The good news and the bad news

[Solandri]

The good news is that it seemed like NASA would be one of the last groups to use reused rockets because of their deep-seated bureaucracy.

You do realize NASA used reusable rockets for manned spaceflight for 30 years? The Space Shuttle's main engines were reusable, as well as the solid rocket boosters (they would parachute down into the sea, where they were collected, disassembled, cleaned, repacked with fuel, and reassembled).

NASA's problem with reusable spacecraft has always been cost, not engineering. And since SpaceX tells them the cost in a fixed dollar amount with no extra work needed on NASA's part, there's no reason for them not to jump on this.

Why are you spreading misinformation?

[EnsilZah]

First you ask how much of it is replaced and then you immediately claim it's 'practically completely rebuilt'?

Here's a direct quote from the prelaunch press event:

Jessica Jensen: Sure thing. So, the biggest thing is insuring that all the hardware is qualified for multiple flights. And basically we do that with test units that are built to the same specification as the flight hardware, and make sure those can go through multiple life cycles. So for example, we will take one of our engines and fire it in Texas over and over and over again to simulate multiple flights. In between flights, the goal is to not swap out hardware. Basically, every piece of hardware has a service lifetime, based on that testing I just talked about, and if it's still within its service lifetime, we verify that all of the environments on the previous flight were good, then you can just continue to reuse it. We do, in between flights, do very thorough inspections, to make sure that something off-nominal didn't happen on the previous flight. So we go through, we look at critical areas, we inspect welds, but we do not, generally, replace engines. If we need to, we can do that, but in general, we do not do that. So, it's mostly just inspecting everything and making sure we're good to go. One of the other things we do, as you know, our stages go to Texas prior to each mission, where we do a stage firing. And after that we do a series of pressure tests and all kinds of avionics checkouts on the vehicle afterwards. We do that same set of tests now after each flight. And what that is, it gives us high confidence moving into the mission, like Kirk said, we're basically at an equivalent level of risk as we were on the first flight.