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Elon Musk Shows Off Near-Complete Falcon Heavy Rocket (newatlas.com)
Eloking quotes a report from New Atlas: SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket has been a long time coming. The successor to its Falcon 9 and the vehicle hoped to carry humans to Mars, this booster will be one of the most powerful ever. And we've just gotten our best look at it yet, with CEO Elon Musk tweeting out photos of an almost complete Falcon 9 Heavy in the hangar ahead of a planned maiden launch next month. The Falcon Heavy is essentially three Falcon 9 first stages rolled into one, with a second stage sat atop the middle one. The nine engine cores in each first stage work together to provide thrust equal to eighteen 747 aircraft, making it the most powerful rocket currently in operation and the most powerful since the Saturn V rocket last lifted off in 1973. In a series of tweets, Musk revealed that when the Falcon Heavy does lift off for the first time, it will do so from the same pad used by the Saturn V rocket at NASA's Kennedy Space Center. Musk has said recently that the Falcon Heavy will carry his own cherry-red Tesla Roadster as its first payload, but as an earlier tweet professing his love for floors has shown, it's not always easy to tell how serious he is about such matters.
18 747s worth. That's equal to 3 atomic bombs, 27 football fields, and 10974 human hairs!
If you are a live now, have been born from 1960 onwards, you are privileged. As am I.
We've seen the computer revolution, Internet revolution, and now a space revolution.
Jobs will be diminished, Musk will be remembered.
Another consultant who stuck it out.
"We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx..."
Wonder how Elon plans to solve the water issue in Mars.. unless he plans to go and quickly come back.
As all private enterprises will, Musk will fail on his ambitious plans of conquering the space. The reason is that private companies will never be able to engage in projects of such magnitude, because they will be stopped sooner or later by their #profit fixation, by shareholders' limited views, and, simply, by basic greed. Large projects are the area of governments, of people enthusiast enough to work for free or sacrifice themselves for a higher purpose. Not for penny-counting companies. Those can only innovate in smaller scales, like patenting rounded corners to provide consumer nirvana and such.
https://i.imgur.com/A4YSU6R.png
I like the cut of his jib. Mars or bust, with style.
The only reason for having powerful rockets is to escape Earth's gravitational field. Once you are in the space, the thrust requirements are very low and having more power shouldn't matter much even when dealing with big distances. If you are working on something even remotely suitable to ever attempt to travel to Mars, you should better focus your efforts on other aspects like radiation, logistics, landing/re-launching, living there and, in general, getting the required huge funding (+ finding out ways to recover/justify it) and related issues (e.g., Kamikaze-like volunteers or a legislation allowing you to do such a thing with people). Nice rocket though. Is there any video about it? LOL.
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
mars orbit?, will it be like the car in heavy metal, will there be hot chicks on flying beasts and coked out aliens, will it play B,E,R until the universe gives up and surrenders? people with to much time and an obsession with cartoons want to know!
Love for floors or flowers?
Yep. Check it out! https://www.reddit.com/r/space...
Looks like it can take some serious payload... https://imgur.com/a/dtJIf
Going to Mars means taking lots of equipment with you. All that stuff doesn't magically appear in low Earth orbit.
A big rocket to launch stuff to LEO means that you can sling a larger amount of payload (+fuel + transfer vehicle) to Mars in one go. Otherwise you need more launches, and have to fiddle about with the costs of multiple Mars transfer vehicles and etc. It's cheaper to go bigger, basically.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
It's cheaper to go bigger
Yep. This is also true in warehouse stores, brothels, and firework stands.
Bigger = more bang for the buck.
Bear in mind that the bigger/more powerful, the more problematic it is likely to become. Blindly scaling up things is business talk, not physics/engineering one. In imaginary land, the problems remain constant, and the bigger is usually the better; in the real world, the problems increase exponentially and what works for 5 rarely works for 50. In any case and as said, this is a completely secondary concern at this point anyway. They shouldn't worry about how to send "lots of equipment", but about what that equipment is supposed to be and all the associated problems (exposure to radiation, long periods between resupplies, extremely problematic conditions, etc.).
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
Right about now is when you people claiming things about people being part of the "Cult of Elon" and bullshit about how it's all a scam. I just like that he's advancing technology to help humanity advance rather than simply exploit it.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Bigger also makes making launchers reusable much easier. Even with FH, the weight penalties for making the second falcon stage reusable were determined to be difficult to overcome.
Which is why Space-X has decided to develop and migrate all their launches from F9 to BFR much as they abandoned F1 once it had served it's purpose. BFR will be much larger than F9 but also 100% reusable.
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
If we look at the various different market sectors that Elon Musk has developed businesses for, then with the possible exception of Tesla, all of them, potentially even The Boring Company and Hyperlook [granted he isn't directly investing in this now] would seem to have the potential to be integrated at some future time.
For example, if mankind were to use "Boring Company" technology to cut an access tunnel up to a point near the 5,980-metre peak of the mountain, then use Hyperloop technology to provide a platform on which a rocket could be placed, put a stack of Solar City panels in the vicinity [to power the super-conducting magnets used by the maglev technology and perhaps also to synethsise the Methylox fuel, then essentially he has most of the components needed for a launch system that grabs another order of magnitude of cost savings/efficiency gains - because potentially the vehicle itself could do away with a potentially significant amount of fuel.
I took a quick look at the most recent launch, CRS-13, in which at 6km of altitude, the vehicle had achieved a speed of 938km/h, a little shy of MaxQ. I would have to concede that we are still a long way short, engineering-wise, of being able to achieve that even with a maglev track in an evacuated hyperloop tunnel. But Musk is all about continual, iterative improvement.
I would be the first to concede that all I've done here is borrow ideas postulated by science fiction writers for many years now: but if you go back to the 1950s and 1960s and look at the writing of Heinlein-era sci-fi writers, rockets that landed on their tails and took off again were a staple fare. It took real life 60-70 years to catch up, but SpaceX did it. With our rate of development increasing, what I outline here could be as little as 20-30 years away.
Which I guess leads to a question - which would be the most cost-effective solution: Falcon Heavy or a ballistic launcher? FH has massively lower development costs, but the operating expenses will be higher. A launcher will cost several metric f@ktons of money to develop, but, once done, should be significantly cheaper to operate.
br? Which would you go for?
More thrust (or prolonged thrust, which requires additional fuel / reaction mass to be sent up) gets you to Mars faster. Not a big deal for regularly scheduled supply flights, but very important for the ship carrying the actual meatbags.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Troll mod, really? I'm a big proponent of EVs, and actually a pretty big fan of Musk overall (get your ass to Mars!) but the low amount Musk is paying his assemblers literally ought to be illegal.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
More thrust (or prolonged thrust, which requires additional fuel / reaction mass to be sent up) gets you to Mars faster.
Although this is theoretically true, its practical applicability is almost none. Bear in mind that one of the most relevant aspects when traveling (fast) is overcoming opposing forces like friction (road or wind) or gravity. In outer space, you don't have anything of this and, consequently, going faster is rarely constrained by the power availability. On the other hand, having more power is directly related to more weight, what is directly related to more problems and higher difficulty to leave Earth, etc.
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
This is why the Falcon Heavy took time. Musk admitted that strapping three Falcons together was more difficult than first envisioned, and lots of parts had to be redesigned for higher strength and differing forces.
Nice :)
Oh, so they are doing it wrong? You should inform them, you'll save everyone years of frustration! Your mind is a gem, sharp and diamond-like.
That's what she said!
When will we build a better launch system than giant explosions? I want a nice giant railgun
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
Oh, so they are doing it wrong?
Not sure. Unlikely what seems usual among people with a video-, sci-fy-, let's-just-scale-it-up-based understanding, I do need to properly analyse a given situation in order to be completely sure about it being fine or not. As per my knowledge regarding how all this is going, I assume that most of their decisions are based on looking-cool concerns rather than on being actually useful. In fact, I don't even think that anything is really useful here as far as going to Mars is virtually impossible for many reasons. My whole point was that this specific issue of building a bigger rocket seemed particularly meaningless, mainly in the current stage.
you'll save everyone years of frustration!
I don't think that anyone with even a bit of physics/engineer knowledge really thinks that we will reach Mars within the next quite a few years. So, I seriously doubt that anyone at SpaceX would be really frustrated by not accomplishing what they should already know that is virtually impossible. There might be some quite naive and ignorant people who might still believe that such an event is likely to occur. I would be happy if my posts could help them to realise about their baseless expectations; dreaming is nice, but expecting what is impossible (+ likely to provoke unfair gains on others) sounds a bit worse.
Your mind is a gem, sharp and diamond-like.
Thanks. Note that I did get a degree in mechanical engineering, have a relevant physics/engineering expertise and consider myself a quite sensible and practical person. In any case, I think that most of sensible people with even a minor physics/engineering understanding should come to similar conclusions, at least after some analysis/research.
(I see that you tried sarcasm there, but you don't seem too good at that either. LOL)
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
It was both that and continual improvements to F9 making FH less necessary.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Yes, it's a fat tree implementation - 3 subclusters of 9 rockets. Scalable, commodity, etc.
The intro in not correct in calling the Falcon Heavy the rocket that will take humans to Mars. This is just a heavy payload version of Falcon which still uses the Merlin engine. The BFR (Big Fucking Rocket) will have 31 Raptor engines (more powerful) and a completely redesigned booster and second stage. It's the BFR that will go to Mars. https://www.nasaspaceflight.co...
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
NOBODY can compete with Saturn V.
Maybe someday someone will come up with a more efficient and proficient machine.
Making it all look like Kerbal Space Program?
This would be really funny. But it is also interesting if it is an Asparagus configuration, as it was planned earlier.
Once you are in the space, the thrust requirements are very low and having more power shouldn't matter much even when dealing with big distances.
True, unless you're sending up meatbags. At that point, extra thrust means a shorter flight. Right now, a trip to Mars and back on a free trajectory will take two years: six months one way, eighteen months the other way, you get to choose which way. With constant thrust, such as from an ion engine, the trip will take a lot less time.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Sputnik, and Yuri Gagarin as the first man in space are lost in my memory. The lunar landing, and my excitement at earlier Apollo launches, are still clear. I'd like to see us go back to the moon and gather inspiration that has been lost in the intervening time, and knowledge that could not have been gathered with the relatively crude instruments and extremely limited payload of the Saturn based lunar missions. The effective loss of our space program to the profoundly flawed Shuttle program cost us dreams, and cost us knowledge that only a more effective space program could provide.
Ebon Musk, when you finally pass away, I hope that your heirs can plant your remains on the moon, with your tombstone an air tank with tag scrolled with the poem "Requiem" as described by Robert A Heinlein in this story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... You've earned it.
The Musk fanboys are deluded.
Telsa will go bust late next year or in '19 unless Musk can convince more stupid people to pony up more money so he can flush down the Tesla toilet. Tesla and Musk fanboys have never read the financial statements or don't understand them.
Tesla is losing hundreds of millions a quarter making and selling cars. And if he can't make a profit now that he controls the market, he's gonna get crushed when the other automakers seriously get into the market.
Couple with his grandiose build out he's blowing hundreds of millions more every quarter. But Musk fans seem to think that he can tell his suppliers that he can't pay them but "look at the big factory! We're cool, right?"
Oh, and Tesla has many of it's components made overseas - all the electronics are made in Asia. So, this jazz of Tesla is 100% made in the USA is 100% horseshit.
But the Musk fanboys have been easily manipulated by Musk's publicists who created this cult of personality around him. And it has it's uses - it helped him sell those junk bonds to suckers.
And all the fanboys here don't understand that there are few private rocket companies in the World - Hello! Jeff Bezos anyone?
https://i.imgur.com/A4YSU6R.png
At that point, extra thrust means a shorter flight.
As explained to other poster, this is only theoretically true. Realistically speaking, more power isn't a relevant aspect when trying to go faster in space; other issues like braking, coming back and not colliding against anything else are way more worrisome. Reaching a quite high speed out there is quite easy, but doing it safely/reliably is a different story.
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
I know SpaceX is thinking things are good, but could anyone comment on what kind of leeway might be available with those connection points? From what I can see, there are only 4 per side booster, and they really don't look that big. Will that truly be enough? By what kind of margin? I'd almost expect the rocket to tear itself apart once those two boosters kick in.
Obviously, I'm nowhere near a rocket scientist...
He is the master of 'near-complete' and 'someday-functional'. Who gives a shit? I view his work as little more than well-funded neanderthal high school science fair projects. Why anyone thinks this douche is smart, let alone brilliant, is a mystery. Oh, wait, that's right: potential *profit*. Emperor Musk barely has underpants, let alone clothes, and he sure as shit isn't bursting at the seams with genius.
Look like the Tesla Roadster payload is almost ready for launch as well. Musk has said he is just hoping this thing gets high enough not to do pad damage when it explodes, but I'm hoping he is able to give his Roadster a Mars flyby.
I am not interested in articles about life extension advancements.
As the story goes, German-born rocket guru Werner Von Braun asked his ( mostly-german) rocket engineers whether the Saturn 5 was going to meet it's 99.999% reliability goal, and they said down the line "Nein! Nein! Nein! Nein! Nein!
Actually, it did really well, with 13 successful or at least survivable launches.
Now with Elon's 9 engines, again it's time to ask, and even more so, the likely answer is "Nein! Nein! Nein! Nein! Nein!
Don't forget the first lander to Venus! You've forgotten that one too! They sent Venera 3 to land on Venus, but it seems it failed on the landing. Turns out, it couldn't withstand half the G forces it was supposed to.
You know those darn commies; they can't Fake anything right!
Space is fake. Earth is flat. The eclipses prove it.
Solar Eclipse: https://vimeo.com/230976895
Light of the chromosphere can be observed on the back of the moon. Allais Effect
SCAM
Sorry, but in Space, navigation is all about gravity and dealing with it. Yes, you're weightless when not under thrust, but that doesn't meant hat gravity isn't having an effect. To reach Mars from Low Earth Orbit, you need about 4.3km/s of Delta-V. That is you need to be able to increase your speed by 4300m/s. That takes propellant and energy.
Right now, the standard Falcon 9 has just enough power to put a geostationary communications satellite into its transfer orbit. To go from LEO to Geostationary Transfer Orbit takes about 2.5km/s. In the case of Intelsat 35E, just getting the payload to a (super synchronous) GTO meant there wasn't enough propellant left to perform a landing, so the mission was flown expendable.
Anyhow the whole point here is that the FH lets you impart enough velocity into a larger payload that it will make it to Mars. In the case of the demo mission, it's only launching Elon's roadster, which is pretty lightweight, so there is plenty of margin left, but in the case of a larger payload, they'll need every bit of performance they can get.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
coming back and not colliding against anything else are way more worrisome
Actually the bigger worry would be *not* colliding with anything, and drifting off into deep space. At both ends of the trip, you want to collide with the atmosphere of your target so that you don't need to expend the propellant to brake yourself into orbit. In between? Well, to quote the Hitchiker's Guide. "Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space."
The probability of running into anything out there is somewhere between 0 and nil, it's far more likely you're going to suffer a failure of your equipment than run into something, especially once out of LEO.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
The point I was trying to make was that being fast in space is very easy and that it isn't a matter of lack of power availability. A different story is how you are planning to manage all the speed/acceleration aspects. If you want to reach certain speed inside the Earth atmosphere and let you go, even the slightest increase would be associated with a relevant energy consumption. On the other hand, if you want to do it in outer space, the story would be completely different. Your 4.3 km/s, similarly to pretty much any other thing, are meaningless out of context: very difficult against gravity + friction vs. extremely easily against nothing.
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
The probability of running into anything out there is somewhere between 0 and nil
You are right on that, but this wasn't my point. I was saying that reaching a very high speed in outer space is easy, but what really matters is properly controlling the ship. Breaking, turning or whatever other action which is extremely simple against opposing forces become very difficult when nothing stops you.
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
Logically, I meant "braking" rather than "breaking".
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
Rockets are metaphorical penises dude. That sounds like a hella gay childhood you had there... how is dancing at Chippendale's going?
Showing off his big rocket to everyone in public!? THE INDECENCY!
This is my sig, there are many like it but this one is mine
Even reusing all stages of the rocket won't make them cheap enough for mass adoption.
You say that, but have you done the maths on this? Musk has, there was a story earlier this year when Musk stated flying halfway round the world could be done for the same cost as a full-price economy ticket. Once he gets the reusability thing down, a large part of the cost will then be fuel, if the fuel can be made cheap enough, space travel can be made somewhat affordable. Maybe not an everyday thing for most people, but maybe something you could afford to do once a year.