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Orbcomm OG2 Falcon 9 Satellite Launch

100 points by cryptoz 12y ago

coder23 12y ago
This is the fourth separate attempt at launching this mission. The first one was more than a month ago. Their biggest problem are helium leaks. Successful launch. We can expect better video footage of the first stage landing.
- skizm 12y ago
  So what happened on the first 3? Crashes?
  - coder23 12y ago
    Here is the video of the previous one. It landed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjZ33C9JZTM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjZ33C9JZTM Video was barely recognizable before repair.
    - apendleton 12y ago
      That was a different mission.
  - apendleton 12y ago
    No, aborted before launch.
    - skizm 12y ago
      That makes sense. I feel like a crash would have been bigger news. Lucky I caught the stream when it actually went up!
- jccooper 12y ago
  First was a first stage helium valve, second was weather, third was thrust vector control actuator.
cryptoz 12y ago
Wow I can't believe this finally launched. So far so good! And of course, the most exciting thing about this is the return attempt of the F9 first stage core. I don't think that'll be covered in the webcast but we'll certainly get video of it later. MECO successful. Edit: r/spacex has good updates regarding the landing attempt [T+27m]: Elon's jet and NASA plane circling a particular area... http://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/2aany2/rspacex_orbcomm_og2_official_launch_discussion/ http://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/2aany2/rspacex_orbco...
- vonklaus 12y ago
  I wonder if they have tracking planes or a spotter out on the water. After all this bad press and the violent ocean churn from the last attempt, it would be nice to get a money shot of the vehicle hovering over the water.
  - JshWright 12y ago
    You mean like this one (from the last launch)? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjZ33C9JZTM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjZ33C9JZTM
  - rst 12y ago
    It doesn't actually hover over the water. For that, the rocket's thrust would have to exactly balance the weight of the first stage, with the tanks nearly empty, and even a single Merlin engine can't actually throttle down that low. As long as the engine is firing, the rocket is accelerating up, so the actual landing maneuver is something they call a "hoverslam", which is designed to zero out vertical velocity close enough to the ground that after they cut off the engine, the legs can take up the difference. (Weight conditions at launch are obviously very different. In addition to the weight of the second stage and payload, there's also the weight of the first stage fuel -- and the fuel will be most of the weight of any rocket at launch.)
    - mrfusion 12y ago
      Hmm, but on the grasshopper videos it seems to be hovering in air and descending pretty agiley?
K-Wall 12y ago
I'll admit I do not regularly follow space launches but I am amazed at the various places that they have installed video feeds. Seeing the first stage drop off was incredible.
- mikeash 12y ago
  Cameras are fairly cheap these days, and a video feed would be extremely valuable to figure out what happened in the event that something goes wrong. Telemetry from sensors is also extremely useful, but sometimes you just want to see what happened with your eyes.
- Kiro 12y ago
  What's a first stage drop off?
  - mikeyouse 12y ago
    AKA stage separation. The first stage must provide a lot of thrust to get into lower gravity, so it's quite heavy with fuel and has 9 engines. After the fuel in that stage is expended, the rocket splits in two, dropping that first stage back to earth. The top half of the rocket contains additional fuel and whatever payload the rocket is delivering (including potentially an additional stage + engine) and is powered with a single engine. Here's an older video showing the separation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4lOJjKGoIY#t=193 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4lOJjKGoIY#t=193 (Goto: 3:15 if the link doesn't work) The first stage that drops off is the one that SpaceX is attempting to recapture. Historically, that stage just lands in the ocean and is either scuttled or must be extensively cleaned and retrofit in order to fly again. SpaceX figures if you leave a bit of extra fuel in the tanks, you can land it vertically at the same site it took off from, and save yourself the time and expense associated with cleaning and retrieving it. This would be very valuable since the rocket engines are typically the most expensive components of a launch, and the first stage has 9 such engines: http://i.imgur.com/QzrPePS.png http://i.imgur.com/QzrPePS.png
    - yock 12y ago
      It isn't higher gravity they're overcoming with the first stage, but rather the much higher atmospheric pressure near the surface. Gravity in orbit is almost identical to gravity at the surface.
sgrove 12y ago
"Speed 7.2km/s...and we have miko" - what's miko referring to in this case?
- cjbprime 12y ago
  Other commenter described it as MECO, googled that, found "Main Engine(s) Cut-Off".
- geoffeg 12y ago
  MECO. Main Engine Cut-Off.
- coder23 12y ago
  It's MECO. Main engine cut-off.
caval 12y ago
Watching the camera feed of the launch around the 5 minute mark all I could think was: if the rocket turned around now, it could probably land in New York in another 5 minutes
- jerf 12y ago
  On a ballistic trajectory, you can reach anywhere on Earth in 40 minutes or less. I've seen cute little diagrams of the relevant times before, but I wasn't able to quickly Google one up.
  - mikeash 12y ago
    Everyone who grew up during the Cold War knows this instinctively!
duncancarroll 12y ago
Orbcomm, you say? This is all I can think of: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a9/U.F.Off_-_The_Best_of_The_Orb_%28The_Orb_album_-_cover_art%29.jpg http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a9/U.F.Off_-_The_...
martythemaniak 12y ago
This launch seemed to use a much steeper trajectory. Typically they go downrange much faster than they gain altitude, but today they seemed to go up faster than they were going downrange. How does this affect the fuel efficiency of the launch? Is this a way to cut down the horizontal velocity so they first stage can return more easily?
- marvin 12y ago
  Maybe. This time, the satellite load was just 1.1 tonnes (vs. 6 tonnes capacity), so they probably had more room for maneuvering and hence decided to do stage separation closer to the launch site in order to aid with the recovery attempt. Or maybe it's standard procedure on lighter payloads; perhaps it reduces maximum dynamic pressure.
- Zuph 12y ago
  It's a product of a higher target altitude (650km for Orbcomm vs. 330km for an ISS resupply) and wanting to perform a single second-stage burn to achieve the target orbit.
mbell 12y ago
Launch webcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbHnSu-DLR4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbHnSu-DLR4
teh_klev 12y ago
Is this the re-usable launch vehicle, i.e. the one that re-enters the atmosphere and lands itself upright?
- cryptoz 12y ago
  Essentially yes. They won't be able to reuse this particular vehicle, but it will return and hover over the ocean for them to retrieve. They'll recover it and study the results to make the next one even better. Real reusability is probably at least a year away.
- yock 12y ago
  Yes, the first stage has landing legs. They're planning to deploy the landing legs over water and attempt to hover the booster just before it hits the surface.
- InclinedPlane 12y ago
  SpaceX only has one launcher at present, the difference between re-use and expendable use is a matter of how that hardware is used, not how it's built. Every Falcon 9 v1.1 launch to date has made use of the same, fundamentally reusable first stage core. To actually reuse the core requires bolting on some additional hardware (which has flown on 2 flights already) such as landing legs and then flying the stage back to land. In software terms this is like hiding new functionality behind a "feature flag" so that you can let the code bake in production for a while.
grey-area 12y ago
Looks like the landing was only partially successful - Rocket booster reentry, landing burn & leg deploy were good, but lost hull integrity right after splashdown (aka kaboom) https://twitter.com/elonmusk https://twitter.com/elonmusk
- infogulch 12y ago
  It's better to use a permanent link. In two weeks that link to his profile going to be useless. This applies to blog homepages as well. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/488718649515986944 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/488718649515986944
- arrrg 12y ago
  Well, if it disintegrated due to falling over in the waves and colliding with the water it isn’t necessarily unsuccessful, since it is not designed for landing on water (i.e. the rocket disintegrating after landing on water due to being in water is not a failure – what matters is whether, hypothetically, the rocket would have survived, had it landed on land). Edit: Seems like Musk is making that point himself: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/488719729599578112 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/488719729599578112
- trothamel 12y ago
  I think it's hard to say that, yet. The rocket isn't really made to survive tipping over onto its side in the water. If they "landed" properly (legs deployed, descending at a slow speed when they hit the water), I think one can make an argument for a fully successful landing. It really depends on how fast they hit the water.
  - grey-area 12y ago
    Sure, it depends, we'll have to wait and see what SpaceX decide to release about it. It'll be nice to see video if they have some.
alimoeeny 12y ago
In case you want to watch it on youtube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbHnSu-DLR4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbHnSu-DLR4
joewalnes 12y ago
Awesome! Are they going to repeat the launch for the west coast?
- Crito 12y ago
  Their launch manifest (http://www.spacex.com/missions http://www.spacex.com/missions) lists one more launch from Vandenberg in 2014, and a few more in 2015. Eventually, if everything goes according to their plans, they will be doing regular launches from the west coast. (Which site they use is determined by which sort of orbit they are shooting for. They will launch from Vandenberg whenever appropriate. Vandenberg is typically used for high-inclination/polar orbits, or the rare retrograde orbit)
pjkundert 12y ago
The second stage Falcon engine appears to have suffered some insulation degradation and loss. It develops just above the bell, on the right-hand side of the motor image in the video. After second stage shutdown, a vapor emission is visible just above the site of the degradation (at the very end of the video). Was this a normal venting, or a non-catastrophic failure of the second stage engine? Congratulations, SpaceX, on designing such a robust engine! Video of launch: http://new.livestream.com/spacex/events/2980259/videos/56576194 http://new.livestream.com/spacex/events/2980259/videos/56576...
- lutorm 12y ago
  I believe those are normal vents. If you look at previous videos like http://youtu.be/RtDbDMRG3q8 http://youtu.be/RtDbDMRG3q8, there's are whole frost "christmas trees" at several places around the base of the nozzle.
cstross 12y ago
Humph. I'm choosing to take this personally! (I was in Orlando at YAPC::NA in June, and drove up to the Cape twice in hope of seeing it launch. Scrubbed both times, and I got bitten to hell by mosquitos before I discovered DEET -- yes, I'm British, we don't have flybown tropical swamps.) Ah well, maybe next time I visit ... (Note that on the second visit they'd closed off the beach that enthusiasts usually used to watch launches from. Much muttering among the rocket fans present about SpaceX behaving very oddly -- this was the attempt when they also cancelled the webcast. I wonder what was going on?)
dm2 12y ago
I have nothing at stake in these launches but every one of them makes me nervous, I almost can't watch them. At any moment, boom. The launch video was beautiful though, the water vaporizing and forming a could around the rocket is awesome, the inside view of the engine was amazing. Can't wait to see the landing video! What about the location of the landings? Have they been on target?
- rrmm 12y ago
  They seem to be having consistent results (modulo the landings), so it's almost safe to take a successful launch for granted (at least for people like us who are just watching).

100 points by cryptoz 12y ago

This is the fourth separate attempt at launching this mission. The first one was more than a month ago. Their biggest problem are helium leaks. Successful launch. We can expect better video footage of the first stage landing.

skizm 12y ago
So what happened on the first 3? Crashes?
- coder23 12y ago
  Here is the video of the previous one. It landed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjZ33C9JZTM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjZ33C9JZTM Video was barely recognizable before repair.
  - apendleton 12y ago
    That was a different mission.
- apendleton 12y ago
  No, aborted before launch.
  - skizm 12y ago
    That makes sense. I feel like a crash would have been bigger news. Lucky I caught the stream when it actually went up!
jccooper 12y ago
First was a first stage helium valve, second was weather, third was thrust vector control actuator.

cryptoz 12y ago

Wow I can't believe this finally launched. So far so good! And of course, the most exciting thing about this is the return attempt of the F9 first stage core. I don't think that'll be covered in the webcast but we'll certainly get video of it later. MECO successful. Edit: r/spacex has good updates regarding the landing attempt [T+27m]: Elon's jet and NASA plane circling a particular area... http://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/2aany2/rspacex_orbcomm_og2_official_launch_discussion/ http://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/2aany2/rspacex_orbco...

vonklaus 12y ago
I wonder if they have tracking planes or a spotter out on the water. After all this bad press and the violent ocean churn from the last attempt, it would be nice to get a money shot of the vehicle hovering over the water.
- JshWright 12y ago
  You mean like this one (from the last launch)? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjZ33C9JZTM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjZ33C9JZTM
- rst 12y ago
  It doesn't actually hover over the water. For that, the rocket's thrust would have to exactly balance the weight of the first stage, with the tanks nearly empty, and even a single Merlin engine can't actually throttle down that low. As long as the engine is firing, the rocket is accelerating up, so the actual landing maneuver is something they call a "hoverslam", which is designed to zero out vertical velocity close enough to the ground that after they cut off the engine, the legs can take up the difference. (Weight conditions at launch are obviously very different. In addition to the weight of the second stage and payload, there's also the weight of the first stage fuel -- and the fuel will be most of the weight of any rocket at launch.)
  - mrfusion 12y ago
    Hmm, but on the grasshopper videos it seems to be hovering in air and descending pretty agiley?

K-Wall 12y ago

I'll admit I do not regularly follow space launches but I am amazed at the various places that they have installed video feeds. Seeing the first stage drop off was incredible.

mikeash 12y ago
Cameras are fairly cheap these days, and a video feed would be extremely valuable to figure out what happened in the event that something goes wrong. Telemetry from sensors is also extremely useful, but sometimes you just want to see what happened with your eyes.
Kiro 12y ago
What's a first stage drop off?
- mikeyouse 12y ago
  AKA stage separation. The first stage must provide a lot of thrust to get into lower gravity, so it's quite heavy with fuel and has 9 engines. After the fuel in that stage is expended, the rocket splits in two, dropping that first stage back to earth. The top half of the rocket contains additional fuel and whatever payload the rocket is delivering (including potentially an additional stage + engine) and is powered with a single engine. Here's an older video showing the separation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4lOJjKGoIY#t=193 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4lOJjKGoIY#t=193 (Goto: 3:15 if the link doesn't work) The first stage that drops off is the one that SpaceX is attempting to recapture. Historically, that stage just lands in the ocean and is either scuttled or must be extensively cleaned and retrofit in order to fly again. SpaceX figures if you leave a bit of extra fuel in the tanks, you can land it vertically at the same site it took off from, and save yourself the time and expense associated with cleaning and retrieving it. This would be very valuable since the rocket engines are typically the most expensive components of a launch, and the first stage has 9 such engines: http://i.imgur.com/QzrPePS.png http://i.imgur.com/QzrPePS.png
  - yock 12y ago
    It isn't higher gravity they're overcoming with the first stage, but rather the much higher atmospheric pressure near the surface. Gravity in orbit is almost identical to gravity at the surface.

sgrove 12y ago

"Speed 7.2km/s...and we have miko" - what's miko referring to in this case?

cjbprime 12y ago
Other commenter described it as MECO, googled that, found "Main Engine(s) Cut-Off".
geoffeg 12y ago
MECO. Main Engine Cut-Off.
coder23 12y ago
It's MECO. Main engine cut-off.

caval 12y ago

Watching the camera feed of the launch around the 5 minute mark all I could think was: if the rocket turned around now, it could probably land in New York in another 5 minutes

jerf 12y ago
On a ballistic trajectory, you can reach anywhere on Earth in 40 minutes or less. I've seen cute little diagrams of the relevant times before, but I wasn't able to quickly Google one up.
- mikeash 12y ago
  Everyone who grew up during the Cold War knows this instinctively!

duncancarroll 12y ago

Orbcomm, you say? This is all I can think of: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a9/U.F.Off_-_The_Best_of_The_Orb_%28The_Orb_album_-_cover_art%29.jpg http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a9/U.F.Off_-_The_...

martythemaniak 12y ago

This launch seemed to use a much steeper trajectory. Typically they go downrange much faster than they gain altitude, but today they seemed to go up faster than they were going downrange. How does this affect the fuel efficiency of the launch? Is this a way to cut down the horizontal velocity so they first stage can return more easily?

marvin 12y ago
Maybe. This time, the satellite load was just 1.1 tonnes (vs. 6 tonnes capacity), so they probably had more room for maneuvering and hence decided to do stage separation closer to the launch site in order to aid with the recovery attempt. Or maybe it's standard procedure on lighter payloads; perhaps it reduces maximum dynamic pressure.
Zuph 12y ago
It's a product of a higher target altitude (650km for Orbcomm vs. 330km for an ISS resupply) and wanting to perform a single second-stage burn to achieve the target orbit.

mbell 12y ago

Launch webcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbHnSu-DLR4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbHnSu-DLR4

teh_klev 12y ago

Is this the re-usable launch vehicle, i.e. the one that re-enters the atmosphere and lands itself upright?

cryptoz 12y ago
Essentially yes. They won't be able to reuse this particular vehicle, but it will return and hover over the ocean for them to retrieve. They'll recover it and study the results to make the next one even better. Real reusability is probably at least a year away.
yock 12y ago
Yes, the first stage has landing legs. They're planning to deploy the landing legs over water and attempt to hover the booster just before it hits the surface.
InclinedPlane 12y ago
SpaceX only has one launcher at present, the difference between re-use and expendable use is a matter of how that hardware is used, not how it's built. Every Falcon 9 v1.1 launch to date has made use of the same, fundamentally reusable first stage core. To actually reuse the core requires bolting on some additional hardware (which has flown on 2 flights already) such as landing legs and then flying the stage back to land. In software terms this is like hiding new functionality behind a "feature flag" so that you can let the code bake in production for a while.

grey-area 12y ago

Looks like the landing was only partially successful - Rocket booster reentry, landing burn & leg deploy were good, but lost hull integrity right after splashdown (aka kaboom) https://twitter.com/elonmusk https://twitter.com/elonmusk

infogulch 12y ago
It's better to use a permanent link. In two weeks that link to his profile going to be useless. This applies to blog homepages as well. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/488718649515986944 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/488718649515986944
arrrg 12y ago
Well, if it disintegrated due to falling over in the waves and colliding with the water it isn’t necessarily unsuccessful, since it is not designed for landing on water (i.e. the rocket disintegrating after landing on water due to being in water is not a failure – what matters is whether, hypothetically, the rocket would have survived, had it landed on land). Edit: Seems like Musk is making that point himself: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/488719729599578112 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/488719729599578112
trothamel 12y ago
I think it's hard to say that, yet. The rocket isn't really made to survive tipping over onto its side in the water. If they "landed" properly (legs deployed, descending at a slow speed when they hit the water), I think one can make an argument for a fully successful landing. It really depends on how fast they hit the water.
- grey-area 12y ago
  Sure, it depends, we'll have to wait and see what SpaceX decide to release about it. It'll be nice to see video if they have some.

alimoeeny 12y ago

In case you want to watch it on youtube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbHnSu-DLR4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbHnSu-DLR4

joewalnes 12y ago

Awesome! Are they going to repeat the launch for the west coast?

Crito 12y ago
Their launch manifest (http://www.spacex.com/missions http://www.spacex.com/missions) lists one more launch from Vandenberg in 2014, and a few more in 2015. Eventually, if everything goes according to their plans, they will be doing regular launches from the west coast. (Which site they use is determined by which sort of orbit they are shooting for. They will launch from Vandenberg whenever appropriate. Vandenberg is typically used for high-inclination/polar orbits, or the rare retrograde orbit)

pjkundert 12y ago

The second stage Falcon engine appears to have suffered some insulation degradation and loss. It develops just above the bell, on the right-hand side of the motor image in the video. After second stage shutdown, a vapor emission is visible just above the site of the degradation (at the very end of the video). Was this a normal venting, or a non-catastrophic failure of the second stage engine? Congratulations, SpaceX, on designing such a robust engine! Video of launch: http://new.livestream.com/spacex/events/2980259/videos/56576194 http://new.livestream.com/spacex/events/2980259/videos/56576...

lutorm 12y ago
I believe those are normal vents. If you look at previous videos like http://youtu.be/RtDbDMRG3q8 http://youtu.be/RtDbDMRG3q8, there's are whole frost "christmas trees" at several places around the base of the nozzle.

cstross 12y ago

Humph. I'm choosing to take this personally! (I was in Orlando at YAPC::NA in June, and drove up to the Cape twice in hope of seeing it launch. Scrubbed both times, and I got bitten to hell by mosquitos before I discovered DEET -- yes, I'm British, we don't have flybown tropical swamps.) Ah well, maybe next time I visit ... (Note that on the second visit they'd closed off the beach that enthusiasts usually used to watch launches from. Much muttering among the rocket fans present about SpaceX behaving very oddly -- this was the attempt when they also cancelled the webcast. I wonder what was going on?)

dm2 12y ago

I have nothing at stake in these launches but every one of them makes me nervous, I almost can't watch them. At any moment, boom. The launch video was beautiful though, the water vaporizing and forming a could around the rocket is awesome, the inside view of the engine was amazing. Can't wait to see the landing video! What about the location of the landings? Have they been on target?

rrmm 12y ago
They seem to be having consistent results (modulo the landings), so it's almost safe to take a successful launch for granted (at least for people like us who are just watching).