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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.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3F1d3QWsyk0
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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.
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NASA said reusable rockets would not work!
Bullshit. Being contrary just for the sake of it is pathetic. People are actually living in space, motherfucker... You want to go to mars and beyond? First you learn to live in space.
How about all the years of experience in launching from earth and docking in orbit?
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Replace the STS with the Saturn V and you shave off a third of the mass and $30-35B in launch and construction costs. Replace either with the Falcon Heavy and you probably shave off another $5B in construction costs. Replace everything with a BFS vehicle and you get a customizable medium-term laboratory with no more than 1% of ISS' total cost per mission. It's easy to dismiss what is essentially thirty-year old technology, but so far, whenever stuff became flight-ready, it had been already obsoleted. In this perspective, everything will seem expensive by the time it's operated.
Ezekiel 23:20
Well, we already had that before the ISS. Witness Mir and the Salyuts.
Ezekiel 23:20
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.
She shops at SpaceX for used space capsules. Ohhhhhhhhhhhh!o
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
The best way to get experience is to do the things you actually want to do. Practicing stuff you don't need makes little sense.
It's hard to say what a remade Saturn V would cost per flight. But the original Apollo program had an average cost of 1.5 billion $/Saturn V launch (in, IIRC, about 2010 dollars). Including test flights in the denominator and 'full'* dev cost.
* Government contracting accounting, so take with grain of salt. But don't assume it will be any better.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
So they launched hundreds of Lucas Film|Star Wars Mission Patches into space for what? To hand out to the visiting aliens?
Assuming certain economies of scale when building the ISS from three or four Saturn-V-launched components instead of thirty STS flights and five Proton flights, even at, say, $4B per S-V flight, just the launches of the components would have cost half as much than what they eventually did with the STS flights.
Ezekiel 23:20
If we zero the NASA budget I guarantee you 100% we stagnate into hopelessness.
Everything looks cheap next to the shuttle.
Proton is cheaper per pound to LEO unless you can get the new Saturn V to under 0.5 billion/launch.
Sure you save a bunch on docking adaptors, and save a bunch of EVA time hooking things up. But that isn't going to cut your weight enough.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
But that isn't going to cut your weight enough.
It doesn't? I would have assumed that larger modules are going to have measurably better surface/weight ratio (Skylab had 350 cubic meters of internal volume - about 38% of ISS's volume - at 18% of ISS' mass, i.e., about twice as much internal volume per mass). Not to mention the possibility of using large inflatable modules in the future.
Ezekiel 23:20
They had to take care of some outstanding bugs and feature requests for the death star attack run simulator our astronauts use for training.
.:Semper Absurda:.
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.
We're looking backwards at putting up the station. No fair assuming future technology...
You have to make a bunch of assumptions to get maximum Saturn V 'weight to LEO'. Why the maximum weight is an estimate today. It's more than Skylab's all up weight.
You'd be building the station out of repurposed 3rd stage tanks, specially prepared. The 'wet lab' version of skylab that never flew. Which brings up it's own issues. Sure you get a giant mostly empty tank on orbit, with a hardware package on the top. Then you have to vent the tanks, cut out hatch openings, put the contents that couldn't handle being immersed in fuel/LOX into it, plus you've still got an engine at one end. Would have been good experience to gain, it will come up again. Just bring up a sawzall, a blank powered nail gun and 10 rolls of top grade duct tape...
The mass is the point though, not the mass of the container, but the mass of everything else. Skylab was relatively empty. Think about all the trusswork etc on ISS that has no internal volume.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Has no more excuses for failing now.
Just write the check to SpaceX from now on.
Nobody's going to be able to sell non-reusable rockets, with SpaceX and Blue Origin competing. Unfortunately, ULA's current re-use strategy, so-called "SMART reuse" isn't going to be competitive and they are going to have to come up with another plan, but both ULA and Arianne understand that they can't compete without reuse
ULA's so-called "SMART reuse" is the wrong kind of efficient. It's actually more efficient in use of fuel and lifting power than SpaceX, but because they throw away the tanks and booster body, they are less efficient economically, and they lack the readiness aspect that has been a big seller for SpaceX of late - SpaceX has recovered boosters on hand and ready to go, and can mount a satellite launch quickly because of it. So far, this has been at least as important to customers as the total cost.
Bruce Perens.
It's worth it just to piss off the flat-earthers, the luddites, and the science-deniers. But we shouldn't be thinking of it just as a science mission. The eventual purpose is to get human colonies going off of earth permanently. Got to get the baby out of the cradle.
Bruce Perens.
And Spacelab ...
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Spacelab didn't dock with anything, nor was it ever docked with.
Ezekiel 23:20
And how did the scientists get into it?
And out again?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I was thinking more of using a more capable vehicle to launch the 1990s/early 2000s modules of the ISS (or rather their bigger versions built using contemporary technology), you don't necessarily *need* to look at future modules. Although even Skylab II was supposed to be better than either of ISS and Skylab when it comes to mass vs. utility. And of course the trusswork on the ISS is heavy. One reason why it's heavy is the ISS' shape and (linear) size. Using bigger modules would have largely eliminated that need.
Ezekiel 23:20
Get up off Momma's couch! There's a job waiting for you with these guys:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
BINGO! Absolutely correct!
It's worth it just to piss off the flat-earthers, the luddites, and the science-deniers. But we shouldn't be thinking of it just as a science mission. The eventual purpose is to get human colonies going off of earth permanently. Got to get the baby out of the cradle.
Not any more than going to the North Pole will let us colonize the North Pole. We could potentially manage to build a permanently manned outpost, rotating staff every 2-3 years. We simply don't have the technology to turn an environment like Mars into a self-sufficient colony nor do we have the technology to go interstellar. And it's far too simplistic to say we'll create that technology by going or that it's even a stepping stone. Like maybe we need a breakthrough in fusion power here on earth and sending a thousand chemical rockets to Mars changes nothing. Pushing this as a big stepping stone to the stars can go over the top and make people think you've seen too much sci-fi and is throwing billions after a nerd fantasy.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I didn't say anything about stars. That's not for this century. The solar system, though, isn't so science-fictional.
If electric power is what you want, we have the technology. It's just too dangerous to keep around on Earth.
I know a few people who have wintered at the South Pole. It's not a self-sufficient colony, but it doesn't need to be.
Bruce Perens.
...US military, which is engaged in conflicts all around the world that do not concern the US at all.
Ahhh, yet ye forgets all of those 'Industrial War Complex' corporations that need clients for their products, which keeps Americans employed. Right?
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.
Why wasn't this modded up?