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SpaceX Picks Rocket for First Relaunch
- greglindahl 10y agoThis Fortune post is a bad-blog-rewrite of a nearly-fact-free Mashable blog entry. Not a very good choice!
- geerlingguy 10y agoYeah, for some reason, I don't think Fortune would be the company to break news of this magnitude, especially in light of this [1]. [1] https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/752190828798353408 https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/75219082879835340...
- endgame 10y agoThat page falls over with a JS error. Try: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/752190828798353408 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/752190828798353408 > Misunderstanding of what "beta" means to Tesla for Autopilot: any system w less than 1B miles of real world driving
- sctb 10y agoIf someone can suggest a better article, we can update the submission.
- smcnally 10y agohttp://www.space.com/33444-spacex-reusable-rocket-first-reflight-this-fall.html http://www.space.com/33444-spacex-reusable-rocket-first-refl... http://mashable.com/2016/07/16/spacex-falcon-9-rocket-relaunch/#a87NWKOtWuqU http://mashable.com/2016/07/16/spacex-falcon-9-rocket-relaun...
- scarygliders 10y agoI imagine the refurbishment of a used Falcon 9 1st stage will involve a wee bit more than just a bit of spit and polish. It'll be examining the rocket engines for faults, replacement of degraded parts, examining the whole structure for defects, and replacement of any other parts if required - however, that will still be cheaper than completely building a 1st stage from scratch. Here's hoping the re-use will be a successful one!
- ceejayoz 10y agoInitially, I think you're right. Eventually, I think they're aiming for airliner-style reuse. Engineer any frequently-breaking parts to be better, then check every X flights once they've got the kinks worked out.
- walrus01 10y agoI am guessing it will be more like an engine rebuild on an engine for a 777 - tear down and xray of key parts. The turbopumps and compressors in a rocket engine are very sensitive, high precision parts.
- Neeek 10y agoIsn't that the kind of detailed tear down that forced the shuttle in to being more expensive than traditional systems?
- mikeash 10y agoIndeed. Hopefully SpaceX can do less, since their hardware is more robust. The Space Shuttle engines were driven at the edge of failure because they needed every last bit of performance. SpaceX's designs tend to go for robustness at the cost of efficiency, so they ought to need less work.
- walrus01 10y agoPossibly of interest, the giant engines used in the Delta IV Heavy have 80% less part count than an SSME, but they were never intended to be human-rated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RS-68 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RS-68 Not that it has brought launch costs down much, considering how the ULA loves their juicy government contracts for billion dollar NSA/NRO satellite launches. IIRC the Falcon 9 engine design is the opposite of an RS-68, which is the "one huge fucking engine" design philosophy, which is why a falcon9 has a cluster of many smaller engines and is tolerant of an individual engine failure during launch.
- gwern 10y agoI wonder who's going to sign up to put their cargo on the first refurb rocket? I suppose SpaceX will be offering steep discounts in order to prove the prototype.
- dredmorbius 10y agoFood and consumables for the ISS, or low-cost satellite launch are likely targets. A kilogram of water on Earth is worth a few pennies. In space, it's worth $5,000 - $10,000. The value-add difference is the launch cost. Take a bunch of cheap stuff you'd like to have (but don't need essentially, and can readily replace), and pack it on a refurbed booster. If successful, you've gained a few thousand dollars per kg mass. If failed, you're only out the source materials (and the booster, though since this is a test, it's the outcome that's most significant).
- usrusr 10y agoEven if the payload is cheap, the second stage and delivery vehicle (dragon) are not.
- sgc 10y agoBut that is irrelevant to the customer. They just care about their own replacement costs (including time).
- jakub_h 10y agoFor fuel delivery to LEO, the delivery vehicle could be quite cheap. Even the Dragon might be an overkill. Perhaps a simple tank with a simple RCS assembly would be enough.
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- generj 10y agoThey already have a buyer, though there is some dispute between SpaceX and them about the level of discount. I think 33% off was what SpaceX is offering, they want more on the range of 50% off. The truly hard part for SpaceX has been getting tthe insurance providers onbaord.
- martythemaniak 10y agoFriendly reminder, they are launching a Dragon on an ISS resupply mission tonight at 1245am EST. Secondary mission is trying to land the first stage on Landing Zone 1, like the first landing in December. You can watch it live on spacex.com or their YouTube or or ustream channel.
- Cogito 10y agoAnd lots of extra info and discussion at https://spacexstats.com/live https://spacexstats.com/live and the SpaceX subreddit https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/4t2umd/rspacex_spacex_crs9_official_launch_discussion/ https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/4t2umd/rspacex_spac...
- geerlingguy 10y agoDirect YouTube links: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCCyVCvN2bo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCCyVCvN2bo (Technical webcast; less talk) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThIdCuSsJh8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThIdCuSsJh8 (Hosted webcast; lots of explaining)
- ohitsdom 10y agoIt'd be HUGE if they can recover this rocket a second time. The data from a rocket that has flown twice would be priceless.
- wirt 10y agoThey nailed it!
- will_hughes 10y agoThe rocket that they just landed today was a new rocket, not a re-flown core.
- sp332 10y agoThe article says they have picked a rocket to re-fly (and re-recover) in September. This is not about the launch today.
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- stepanhruda 10y agoIt wasn't a reflown rocket.
- Spare_account 10y agoI think there is some confusion in this thread. The thread is about the plan to re-fly a recovered first-stage sometime in September of this year. The top comment is, however, about today's launch which was a new rocket as you have commented. Your comment was positioned as a reply to a different top-level comment which was on the thread's topic and it doesn't make sense in that context.
- exabrial 10y agoWhat blows my mind is it only takes one engine to land the thing out of like the 9(?) it has.
- greglindahl 10y agoOne engine is too powerful, actually. That's why they call the final burn a "suicide burn": the rocket can't throttle down far enough to hover, so you've got one chance.
- eddy_chan 10y agoForgive the laymans question but how much would it cost to ferry one extra rocket whose mission is to help it land by giving a larger margin of error when landing on the drone ship. I'm guessing carrying a few extra tonnes of deadweight engine for 99% of the mission is a big deal.
- greglindahl 10y agoThey've never really had problems with the suicide burn.
- seer 10y agoSince most of the weight of the rocket is fuel and payload, when landing it is very very light so even one Merlin engine, throttled to its minimum is way to much and the rocket has thrust to weight ratio bigger than one, so it cannot hover (the moment it slows down it starts going up again) thus the suicide burn - it has to cancel all of its velocities at the precise point of landing. But even if that was not the case and it could throttle down enough, suicide burn is the most efficient way of landing a rocket (the least amount of fuel required) as it has very small gravity losses - the faster you slow down, the less you have to fight against gravity, so they would use it in most cases. The amount of fuel left when going anywhere besides low earth orbit (or the international space station) is so big that they hardly have any to spare - the tyrany of the rocket equation and all that... You can test it all out yourself in Kerbal space program :-)
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- riyadparvez 10y agoJust landed safely.
- dummy_01 10y agoAre there pokemon in space?
- fixermark 10y agoDue to the COCOM limits on commercial GPS systems in smartphones, a phone's GPS should fail to work when it is higher than 16,000 ft [http://support.spectracom.com/articles/FAQ/Why-are-there-altitude-and-velocity-limits-for-GPS-equipment http://support.spectracom.com/articles/FAQ/Why-are-there-alt...]. Since Pokémon GO's client requires functional GPS and locks out when it cannot use one (to prevent cheating around turning off one's GPS when one is at a location of interest to pretend you haven't left it), it will fail to operate at ISS orbital altitude, even if it has reliable network link to the Pokémon GO servers. So the answer to your question is "Only if one of the crew packed a Game Boy and a copy of one of the previous games." ;)
- spike021 10y ago> So the answer to your question is "Only if one of the crew packed a Game Boy and a copy of one of the previous games." ;) That wouldn't be so terrible!
- grkvlt 10y agoActually it's 60k feet or 18km, which you can check, since phone GPS will still work on a commercial airliner during cruise.
- fixermark 10y ago100% correct; thank you for catching that. I held the fact in my mind's ear and it clearly got corrupted.
- bargl 10y agoOne thing a lot of people don't think about is that the price of the payload isn't going down yet. The satellites that launch to GEO tend to be 300-500 million dollars. I've heard figures all around there. There is a VERY low risk factor that companies which launch these will accept. These satellites drive business for companies for years their life cycle is 20 years or so. They are a massive investment, and any risk on getting the satellite to space is seen as something to avoid at all costs. Different rocket companies are considered to be the gold standard because they introduce VERY low risk to your payload. Even though these payloads are insured it's still not worth loosing one because you loose out on a ton of revenue. I'm speaking strictly of GEO satellites right now, but the whole economy around satellites will have to be rethought if we can cheaply get devices out there. I suspect that using "tried and true" hardware would become much less important and the cost of the massive satellites would go down because we can launch 5 a year every year instead of 1 or 2 a year. If one of them fails that's fine, we can replace it with something new and margins of safety that are applied in the industry can be reduced.
- jakub_h 10y agoExactly. There's a vicious cycle of expensive payloads driving costs of launches up (extra scrutiny, fewer launches, less experience, less cost-reducing hardware innovation - the RL-10 alone is sixty years old and quite expensive to build by hand from thousands of components, for example) in turn again driving costs of payloads up (you want the best bang for the buck if the price per kilogram is high, so you use overengineered spacecraft designs and materials). Fortunately, there seems to be no shortage of ways out of this - new large markets like massive LEO constellations and fuel depots for more capable exploration missions immediately come to one's mind.
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- ryanmarsh 10y agoHow do you xray something as big as a rocket for stress fractures?
- Kliment 10y agoEither you send xrays across the surface, using the curvature, or you place a detector on one side and an emitter on the other. Since you would know where you expect the stress to have the greatest effect, you test the worst spots first, rather than scanning the whole thing.