Slashdot Mirror
SpaceX Launches NASA's Planet-Hunting Satellite, Successfully Lands Its Falcon 9 Rocket (theverge.com)
SpaceX launched NASA's TESS spacecraft Wednesday evening from Cape Canaveral, Florida, and successfully landed its Falcon 9 rocket on a drone ship following takeoff. This marks 24 successful landings for SpaceX now, notes The Verge. We will update this post once TESS is deployed into orbit. From the report: TESS is NASA's newest exoplanet hunter. The probe is tasked with staring at stars tens to hundreds of light-years from Earth, watching to see if they blink. When a planet passes in front of a distant star, it dims the star's light ever so slightly. TESS will measure these twinkles from a 13.7-day orbit that extends as far out as the distance of the Moon. The satellite won't get to its final orbit on this launch. Instead, the Falcon 9 will put TESS into a highly elliptical path around Earth first. From there, TESS will slowly adjust its orbit over the next couple of months by igniting its onboard engine multiple times. The spacecraft will even do a flyby of the Moon next month, getting a gravitational boost that will help get the vehicle to its final path around Earth. Overall, it will take about 60 days after launch for TESS to get to its intended orbit; science observations are scheduled to begin in June.
They aren't buying the results. They can't afford the price. They are simply outrunning ferocious attempts to put a leash on them and protect the pork their business model threatens.
I've been where you're at. At the engineering level, we always either railed about the excessive requirements or drank the koolaid just to have peace of mind. The higher ups always whined too, but at least they knew that the engineering "requirements" are simply the means to keep the engineers employed long term. I didn't truly understand that until I accidentally let myself get lassoed into a position that was involved in negotiations.
The management doesn't believe that there will be anything else if they get the job done. The sad truth is, they are probably right because congress didn't give approval out of an interest in space - it was given to feed money and jobs into their districts.
On the other hand, SpaceX is always ready to get a job done so that they can go on to the next job, and the next, and the next. The real fun is yet to come.
If it upsets you, take action and send them an application.
Also people do not realize this often, but right now SpaceX has done 8 flights this year. The total worldwide is 38 at this time in 2018. This is 20% of worldwide flights. Last year was also around 20% worldwide. They launched more often than Soyuz, and more often than Long March LVs in 2017 (both have multiple type of vehicles, config and profiles, while the Falcon is mostly a single design). Of their 18 launches last year, 5 were reused, so until they are all at block 5 we won't really know the impact of reusability. But man, they are getting contracts after contracts and can launch at a pretty fast pace. Any normal corp would sit on this cash cow, but they are still pushing for reuse, falcon heavy, BFR and not slowing down.
Even if on the fence about reuse, or outright think it is foolish for any reason or are vocal again Elon/SpaceX (and yes, some criticism are valid), if you remove those from the equation, they have a pretty nice launcher: fast deploy, can do a lot of mission, incredible primary mission success rate. Sure they did not invent anything new in rocket science, but they still got here quite fast.