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SpaceX Successfully Lands Two Falcon Heavy Boosters Simultaneously After Rocket Launch [Update] (spaceflightnow.com)
After nearly a decade of development, SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket has successfully launched from pad 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida today. After reaching orbit, the two side boosters simultaneously landed at Landing Zone One. We do not know the status of the central core of the rocket, which was destined to land on the "Of Course I Still Love You" drone ship roughly 8:19 minutes into the flight.
According to Space.com, the Falcon Heavy is the most powerful rocket to launch since NASA's Saturn V -- the iconic vessel that, with 7.5 million pounds of thrust, accomplished the definitive Apollo-era feat of putting astronauts on the moon. Elon Musk says that Falcon Heavy is "twice as powerful as any other booster operating today." As for the payload, it includes a Tesla Roadster electric car. "The Falcon Heavy will send the vehicle around the sun in an elliptical orbit that will extend farther than Mars' orbit," reports Space.com.
UPDATE: SpaceX has confirmed The Verge's reporting that the middle core of SpaceX's Heavy Rocket missed the drone ship where it was supposed to land. "The center core was only able to relight one of the three engines necessary to land, and so it hit the water at 300 miles per hour," reports The Verge. "Two engines on the drone ship were taken out when it crashed, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said in a press call after the rocket launch. It's a small hiccup in an otherwise successful first flight."
According to Space.com, the Falcon Heavy is the most powerful rocket to launch since NASA's Saturn V -- the iconic vessel that, with 7.5 million pounds of thrust, accomplished the definitive Apollo-era feat of putting astronauts on the moon. Elon Musk says that Falcon Heavy is "twice as powerful as any other booster operating today." As for the payload, it includes a Tesla Roadster electric car. "The Falcon Heavy will send the vehicle around the sun in an elliptical orbit that will extend farther than Mars' orbit," reports Space.com.
UPDATE: SpaceX has confirmed The Verge's reporting that the middle core of SpaceX's Heavy Rocket missed the drone ship where it was supposed to land. "The center core was only able to relight one of the three engines necessary to land, and so it hit the water at 300 miles per hour," reports The Verge. "Two engines on the drone ship were taken out when it crashed, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said in a press call after the rocket launch. It's a small hiccup in an otherwise successful first flight."
That I had to double-check that I was watching a live stream and not a CGI of what they expected to happen.
It's like they know what they are doing or something over there at Space-X.. Time to make some money!
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Quite amazing to watch the two boosters land simultaneously (at 37:58).
I guess Mr. Musk was sandbagging a bit when he said he would be happy if the pad wasn't destroyed.
Everyone at SpaceX must be very proud, and rightly so.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
As I write this, still no word as to whether or not the core stage landed on the drone ship successfully.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
many things are shitty nowadays - islamic fundamentalism, dying off of coral reefs, melting of permafrost, plastic pollution in the oceans, spreading of idiocracy.... one bright, very bright spot is Space X and a community of people (of which I am a member) that fervently follows the space programs, our steps into the new frontier.
I feel lucky that there are other people like me, and I can interact with them through the Internet (mostly on reddit).
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Undoubtedly the coolest technology test in history. Epic. Well done SpaceX! You've just inspired kids again like NASA did in the 60's.
What a shitty Slashdot summary for such an important event!
Don't bother reading that shitty article. Just go to SpaceX's website directly, where there is video footage. Or look at the SpaceX tweets.
Did the core of stage 1 land successfully?
Awe-inspiring to watch those 2 boosters land in a flawless ballet of dust and fire. This is one for the history books.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
I have to admit I was watching it live and it looked like everything went smoothly as can be. I'm guessing SpaceX probably simulated everything for the launch but as they say sometimes you have to try it out in real-life to see if it really works! I imagine the United Launch Alliance might be panicking now as SpaceX is well on their way of making "Heavy" launches significantly cheaper as former heavy launches were all done by them with a significantly more expensive rocket.
Sure, what they've done isn't exactly easy, but it's not as groundbreaking as you make it out to be. This is an incremental improvement on 1960s-era technologies. The hardest work underlying this technology was done before 1970. That earlier work was truly groundbreaking, and even more impressive because so much of it predated practical digital computing. They aren't 'stepping into a new frontier'. That was done decades ago by our grandparents, or even our great grandparents on some cases. The most innovative aspects of SpaceX are more when it comes to the economics and financing of space launches. The technological advances are actually quite minimal.
According to twitter posts, it seems that it did not. 2 out of 3 is not bad ;) Also, they had to have something not go perfect in order to learn from the test flight :)
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
Even if the center core turned out to not land correctly, this is still absolutely amazing. The simultaneous landing of both the side boosters was literally awe-inspiring. SpaceX had initially said they might stagger their landings by a little in case one went wrong, but it looks like they had the hubris to land them both literally at the same time. And lesson there is hubris is fucking awesome, and those obnoxious Greek gods can go suck it.
More seriously, this is going to have a massive impact on the heavy end of the launch market. Even without reuse, it looks like Falcon Heavy is going to be cheaper for almost all big payloads than any of the other heavy launchers, especially Ariane 5 and Delta Heavy. The only issue right now limiting its use are twofold: First, it has a relatively small fairing, so it is possible that some payloads will have volume issues- but that will be rare, and making a new fairing is something SpaceX may do if a customer is interested in it. Second, the Falcon Heavy is for pretty obvious reasons not man-rated. That may change in the future, and the current plan right now is to just man-rate the Falcon 9, but if the Falcon Heavy does get man-rated then there will be almost no market for anything else. If Grey Dragon or others can go on a Falcon Heavy it will be a very different situation. And of course, the Falcon Heavy doesn't have the same lift capability as the SLS, but the SLS still hasn't flown yet, and will cost literally a billion dollars or so a launch.
I wouldn't assume conspiracy. Elon is the sort who'd just let the feed roll. He's been quite open about how "space is hard" and honest and forthcoming when things go wrong. Whatever took out the video feed was accidental.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-B_tWbjFIGI&feature=youtu.be&t=2299
Why would it suspiciously be cut short? Elon Musk actively celebrates the learned experiences of failure when rockets blow up. He was even joking around yesterday that if the entire mission was a failure with the entire thing exploding (the entire heavy, not just the central booster), that it would still be an awesome experience.
The simultaneous landing of both the side boosters was literally awe-inspiring.
Oh man, you said it. I lost it somewhere between the lift-off and that awesome visual of both boosers landing simultaneously.
A tiny, little, shy but manly tear rolling down them old cheecks.
OK, maybe not that manly. I don't care.
Even without reuse, it looks like Falcon Heavy is going to be cheaper for almost all big payloads than any of the other heavy launchers, especially Ariane 5 and Delta Heavy.
I agree, but reusing the boosters would be more than just icing on the cake.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
It is hard to make a rocket nozzle that works well in the atmosphere and in space.
Yes! This is one of the reasons for staging. The first stage engines are optimized for atmospheric use and the upper stage for vacuum or near vacuum conditions. In the case of the Falcon Heavy, the first stage uses 27 Merlin 1D engines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merlin_(rocket_engine_family)#Merlin_1D, and the upper stage uses a single vacuum optimized Merlin 1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merlin_(rocket_engine_family)#Merlin_1D_Vacuum. This isn't the only reason for staging (all that extra mass from carrying extra storage tanks for empty fuel and oxygen is another big one) but it is a major one.
With that many engines to steer, I wonder if there is some way to use the extra degrees of freedom to shape the plume to get a bit more thrust?
I don't have a source for this off-hand, but given my understanding my guess is going to be no. Almost all the things that happen to alter the thrust profile occur in the engine itself or immediately outside the engine. Anything you would do that could have any chance at this would end up having to have multiple outer engines pointing somewhat inwards which would mean you'd have some thrust canceling out from the outer engines. Anything you could gain by somehow altering the profile of the inner engines wouldn't be remotely worth losing thrust that way. If more containment would give more thrust in some range, you'd just build your engine with a longer nozzle.
With that many engines to steer, I wonder if there is some way to use the extra degrees of freedom to shape the plume to get a bit more thrust?
I don't have a source for this off-hand, but given my understanding my guess is going to be no. Almost all the things that happen to alter the thrust profile occur in the engine itself or immediately outside the engine. Anything you would do that could have any chance at this would end up having to have multiple outer engines pointing somewhat inwards which would mean you'd have some thrust canceling out from the outer engines. Anything you could gain by somehow altering the profile of the inner engines wouldn't be remotely worth losing thrust that way. If more containment would give more thrust in some range, you'd just build your engine with a longer nozzle.
The way you adjust the plume is to have a higher expansion on the engines operating in vacuum. On the normal pressure engines, you expand the plume to atmosperic pressure, but on a vacuum engine, that's not a limit.
For an engine that operates in atmosphere, and then continues to operate in vacuum, you can somewhat compromise-- overexpand some, but not enough to lose performance at lift-off. That's what the original Atlas boosters did: all three engines fire on take-off, but the two outboard engines were dropped and the center engine continues to orbit. The center engine had a higher expansion, so it would perform better in vacuum, at the cost of some performance loss at take-off.
Alternately, you can have an extendable nozzle.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Here is a tweet with a view of monitors showing smoke clearing from the drone ship deck with no rocket aboard. It seems it missed the ship. Not too surprising as the centre core is a new machine that has never flown before. Also, the re-entry profile was likely one of the hottest ones they have tried.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
What a pleasure it was to see rockets land like God and Robert A. Heinlein intended!
Why is all the good stuff already modded 5, when I have mod points?
Yup. It takes a lot for me to cry, but watching that was, well, goddamit, one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen. This is the beginning of the Second Space Age. You've got to give Musk credit. He may seem like a money-burning madman, but maybe that's what it takes.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Hes in development mode... error reports are still turned on. :) It would have sucked if nothing went wrong... it leaves you wondering and waiting for that bug to show up.
[($)]
That's part of Musk and his team's brilliance. They understand that failure is as good a teacher, sometimes even a better teacher, than success. Those earlier rocket engineers blew up a lot of hardware in the quest for space. You cannot be afraid to take chances.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Yeah, I recall him saying that he'd consider the test flight a success if they just managed to get far enough away to avoid damaging the launch pad.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I noticed the words "Don't Panic" displayed in large, friendly letters on the Tesla's console.
Let me make sure I have a firm grip on my towel.
He may seem like a money-burning madman, but maybe that's what it takes.
I see little madness in burning money this way. What better can a man do with lots of money? Get a nice car, maybe two, get a beautiful villa... a yacht, a place to spend the winter... and then? Another villa? Two more, three more? After a certain point, magabucks are just a number on your bank account, and purely pointless.
What Elon is doing with his money is awe-inspiring, electrifying, actually transcendent. One of the best damn thing you can do with your life before kicking the bucket.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Very much so. I wish I could have been there, but just watching it on TV was awe inspiring. I'm now really curious what the battery/solar setup on the payload is. Obviously Musk does both, and with dragon has the space experience. I'm wondering if we're going to get video from Spaceman in his Tesla for just a little while, or if he's got it set up to broadcast for the next decade.
Knowing Musk, it's the latter.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Not at all - all the first-stage boosters use atmosphere-optimized engines that also work pretty well in space. But you'll notice that the single second-stage engine has a much larger bell, almost as large as those from the 9 first-stage engines combined - that's to optimize it for vacuum, which gives it a nice efficiency boost.
Basically, when designing the engine you have to pick the ambient pressure to optimize for - at that pressure it will burn as powerfully efficiently as possible, with effectiveness dropping as pressure changes in either direction - typically first stage engines are optimized for high power somewhere in the mid-to-high atmosphere, where they spend most of their time, while second stages are optimized for efficiency in full vacuum, since they don't need the raw power for liftoff, or to ever deal with an atmosphere.
I would assume there's also other optimizations that can be done to reduce efficiency falloff as pressure changes, but they almost certainly come at the expense of lower peak performance, so it's a balancing game.
As for trying to shape the first-stage plume by vectoring the engines - it might be possible, but is unlikely to show any gains. You need to keep two things in mind:
1: Any vectoring will, by necessity, be trading forward thrust for lateral vectoring effect
2: By the time the plume leaves the bell, it's basically stopped pushing the rocket forward - the rocket isn't actually propelled by the gasses shooting out the back - it's propelled by those by those rapidly-expanding gasses bouncing off the engine and bell as they expand. Once they leave the engine bell they no longer have any effect on the rocket at all (except possibly indirectly through fluid-dynamics effects on the surrounding atmosphere.
Combine the two, and you'd have to pull off some pretty impressive fluid-dynamic miracles to even manage to break even. And even assuming you somehow managed that, it would almost certainly become impossible as you exceeded the speed of sound (aka the speed at which atmospheric disruptions can propagate)
Here's a good photo of what's basically going on - the bell is designed to contain the engine exhaust until it falls to ambient pressure and stops expanding, at which point no more work can be extracted from it. Too big, and the atmospheric pressure pushes the plume away from the bell, and you lose thrust to turbulence losses and wasted mass worth of useless bell. Too small, and the gas is still expanding when it leaves the bell, and you're throwing away all the work that could have still been done. Obviously in a vacuum that gas is going to keep expanding essentially forever, but the more it expands, the less remaining work it can do, and the faster the size (and mass) of a containing bell will increase. So at some point the diminishing returns just aren't worth pursuing any further.
https://i.stack.imgur.com/cJ4e...
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Falcon Heavy has a much smaller payload capacity than Saturn V.
Good thing they can send 2 or 3 for less money.
As Airbus is learning quite painfully, larger payload isn't the ultimate metric.
The Saturn V was an amazing thing for its day. But needs and the optimal equipment changes. In the era of a few big missions, that Saturn V made sense. But now we are in the era of lots of small to medium sized missions, the Falcon Heavy makes more sense.
Reusable launch systems aren't new. Nothing about it is particularly remarkable.
Except the boosters that fly themselves back to the launch site and land on their tail. That, until Space X, was sci fi movie stuff.
After several years of our so-called "leaders" casting their eyes down, looking to the past, and pitting one against another in a zero-sum game, it is exhilarating to see what happened today.
America is greatest when we look for hard - some might say impossible - challenges and go for it.
And all this because of an immigrant.
Hey, Windows users, there is no such thing as "forward" slash, there is only slash and backslash.
You just gave me the idea for a new Crypto. Heres my whitepaper. MuskCoin can only be mined by launching a spaceship. One MuskCoin is 90 million dollars. I have already premined 0.5 MuskCoin as my fee for this Whitepaper
**Life is too short to be serious**
Nope. Watch the video again, they both seem to be focusing on one pad, as you say, but in the last few seconds the other pad comes into view on one of the feeds.
They're really close, but they are different.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Nope, you're right - I suspect somebody goofed on the feeds. The ground-cam clearly shows the near rocket landing on the bigger pad with the X inside a black circle, while the supposedly-different booster feeds show both landing on the same X-only pad (look at the buildings and roads in the last seconds to confirm it's actually the same pad)
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
In the press conference today he said he's hoping that the cameras on the drone ship turn out to be intact, he expects there to be some good explosion footage on them ;) I love how it always gets posted.
One interesting thing from the press conference: of all of the parts of the rocket, he's most pleased to get the titanium grid fins on the boosters back. The central core didn't have the new grid fins, but the boosters did - and they're very expensive, and currently a production bottleneck for them.
It's time for Operation Crazy Plan.
The plans Changed. Musk said on the media interview that they were NOT going to man rate FH because BFR will be ready much sooner than they thought and it will handle the moon. It sounds like end of 2019.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
It wasn't quite live. There is obviously a long enough delay inserted that they were able to shut down the feed before the world saw the main rocket crash. I wouldn't call that part catastrophic. I don't intend to rain on the parade, because all in all this is a brilliant achievement, but losing the main vehicle isn't the small blip that SpaceX said it was either. Two of the three engines failed. That's significant in and of itself. Losing the main vehicle because of that isn't a minor event. Still, it represents mission success, which is the main thing. And it's nice to see something outside of government with that kind of heavy lift ability.
FH is as safe as F9
How do you figure that? FH is basically three F9s strung together. Whatever the chance of a catastrophic failure is on a F9 launch, FH will be basically 3 times that.
There was supposed to be an Earth-shattering Kaboom!
And the more corporate egotists we have in space now, the better off we are. It means competition, new ideas and assumption of risk.
Your life must suck badly.
Lol, Musk just tweeted that the third burn was "successful", except that they missed mars and ended up with a giant elliptical orbit that goes way into the asteroid belt. Not quite to Ceres, but close.
Not sure I'd call that sort of burn successful, but if the goal was "get way far from earth uncontrollably", I guess that works.
Another poster noted that in a news conference Musk said that they only had 12 hrs of battery on board to transmit with. That seems a little odd to me, as Musk does high-tech battery and solar, and Dragon obviously does space solar. But if that is true, it's dead weight in a semi-perpetual orbit. Not sure how permanent it will be, as the orbit is not what they initially claimed it would be.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Yup, I noticed that too when watching it live (even when they were saying they're different). I then re-watched it this morning and I noticed that they fixed the video so the bottom panels show different feeds.
They also fixed the fairing separation - I didn't see it happen live, just heard the music and the cheers, but now you see it how it happened.
They've fixed the video, it was definitely the same feed when broadcast live.
This has been explained extensively. No usefull payload was placed on the rocket because being an experimental flight the engineers were expecting the rocket would not work (anything between blowing up on the launch pad to disintegrating in orbit).
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
Not sure I'd call that sort of burn successful, but if the goal was "get way far from earth uncontrollably", I guess that works.
I would imagine that the goal would be full burn for all of the fuel so they'd have an idea of what max performance would be.
6000 people at SpaceX plus tens of thousands of others in suppliers created an awesome piece of art as a stepping stone to getting humanity to Mars. It was hardly a narcissist piece: it was an homage to the hopes and dreams of all of us who enjoy science fiction and have dreamed of going to the stars ever since we were old enough to realize we could go there. Musk provided the framework and the impetus, but, I assure you, a whole lot of other people supported creating that visionary photograph of the astronaut driving to Mars.