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SpaceX (because, godsdammit, they're amazing)


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#1 Destructor!!!

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Posted 18 January 2016 - 01:14 AM

Last month:
 

 
Today:
I posted in anticipation of today's (yesterday's) launch in the "Christmas Haul" thread. Check that link for details of today's flight. I wanted to stop hijacking the Christmas thread, so I made this one. So, today's launch...
 
In short:
 
- The payload was placed into a perfect orbit. Mission Success!
 
- The first stage landing...

 
Yeah... awesome explosion!
 
That's the third in a row on the drone ship - each caused by increasingly finicky technical hitches - a lack of hydraulic fluid, stiction in a valve, and, today, a collet failing to latch Landing Leg 3 into landing position, allowing the rocket to tip over.
 

 
The SpaceX fan community didn't take long to put together an uplifting video set to an awesome song:
 


#2 s8film40

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Posted 18 January 2016 - 07:27 AM

I watched the one last month from my house. It's hard to express how strange it was watching a rocket launch and then come back even from the distance I was at. I'm definitely going out to watch the next one!



#3 Destructor!!!

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Posted 18 January 2016 - 09:18 AM

S8film40, you have all of my envy. Just all of it.

It must have looked like this for you:


#4 s8film40

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Posted 18 January 2016 - 09:35 AM

S8film40, you have all of my envy. Just all of it.

It must have looked like this for you:

Not quite. I live in Central Florida, a little under an hour away. This is my typical view at home of launches from KSC:

oqSzxx2l.jpg

I was a little surprised at how visible the landing was for me. I often drive out to watch launches I kind of regret not going out to see this one. I miss the sonic booms from the shuttle, and these launch/landings have it all! A launch, sonic booms and a landing. I will definitely be trying to go out to see the next one!



#5 Destructor!!!

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Posted 24 January 2016 - 04:15 PM

That's an amazing photograph. You're very lucky, both to live near, and to appreciate the awesomeness of rocket launches.

Hopefully, if the building commercial interest in space gains the kind of momentum some say it can, more and more spaceports will be built all over the world.

 

A sci-fi future like The Expanse is looking less and less far-fetched these days (let's make the society more like Star Trek, though, k?)! What a time to be alive!?

What excites me about companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin and Bigelow Aerospace, Space-miners like Golden Spike, Planetary Resources, Moon Express, and Deep Space Industries, and even large chunks of NASA, is how much energy and potential there is in them - and how much vision!

 

Musk's SpaceX is doing all of this to colonise Mars. He says that with a straight face, and he means it. Landing and re-using rockets, building manned capsules, building bigger and bigger rockets, breaking boundaries in cost effectiveness in the industry... it's all building towards Mars.

Jeff Bezos is doing Blue Origin to (in competition with SpaceX) lower the cost of access to space so that ordinary people will get the opportunity to fly beyond Earth's grasp.

Robert Bigelow is prepping modular inflatable space stations that are larger, safer, and cheaper than the modules of the ISS, and he plans to make them available for rental... imagine...

Space Station for rent.
Approx habitable volume of semi-detached home.
350km average orbital altitude.
Very good views of Earth/Stars.
All mod cons.
Spaceflight to/from included.
$50mil/month ONO
Rentals@BigelowBalloons.net
NO TIME WASTERS!

 

The space miners are looking at mining asteroids and the Moon for resources in space - resources like ice (which can be made into fuel, air, potable water, etc...), metals and minerals (for building stuff with 3D printing tech), and precious elements like gold and rare-earth metals - allowing us to do more with smaller rockets by launching spacecraft up empty, and re-fueling in orbit - or even just constructing the spacecraft in space!

And then there's NASA. While one arm is tied up in the SLS, which may or may not come to full fruition, the other side of NASA is promoting the commercial spaceflight industry. They just issued their second round cargo contracts, signing up SpaceX, OrbitalATK, and Commercial Crew reject Sierra Nevada Corporation Space Systems. Each company will bring two versions of their space vehicle to bear on that contract.

OrbitalATK will offer their uprated Cygnus as well as some kind of re-entry capable Cygnus derivative.

SNC Space Systems will offer the Dream Chaser, a mini shuttle capable of unpowered landing on any runway in the world with a low re-entry g-force load - allowing sensitive equipment, experiments, or even injured crewmembers to potentially reach help fast.
SpaceX will field their proven Dragon cargo vessel, as well as their updated Dragon 2 - featuring retropropulsive landing capability for it to land anywhere on Earth with the precision of a helicopter.

NASA is also researching future concepts that may be key to that sci-fi future, like the "Spiderfab", or "Green Propellant" (a replacement fuel for toxic Hydrazine - widely used, including on Dragon 2).

 

Anyway, speaking of Dragon 2, since this is a SpaceX thread:

 

SpaceX released some new test footage of their Dragon 2 testing its hover capability:

 

 

And here's a pretty interesting video purely assembled from interviews, news coverage, and documentaries, spliced with SpaceX footage:



#6 Destructor!!!

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Posted 12 October 2016 - 08:19 PM

I should have updated this thread more over the last year... sorry about that!

So, that Jason-3 mission I was referring to in the first post succeeded in its primary mission of launching a NASA/NOAA satellite. It then nailed the landing, but failed the standing, unfortunately. A latch that was suposed to lock the extended leg in place froze solid due to its proximity to the chilled liquid oxygen tank and the prevailing foggy conditions continually depositing vapour on it.
Despite going to space and coming back through the atmosphere, it remained frozen upon landing.

The launch after that (SES-9) was launching a very heavy payload to a very high orbit, and came back too fast to survive landing.

However, the following mission, the CRS-8 cargo resupply to the ISS, on April 8th 2016, successfully landed on the Drone Ship!!!

This video is a wonderful short retrospective of their progress to that point, set to a song I really like:



CRS-8 was a spectacular success that was just phenomenal to watch live. This is the moment of landing, listen to the crowd go nuts. That's a 15-storey smokestack falling out of the sky and landing on a floating football pitch on tongues of fire! Here it is in 4k - such beautiful footage!

CRS-8's booster is the first in the queue for re-flight.
 
JCsat-14 was next, and was very like the SES-9 mission - flying a similar-mass payload to a similar orbit. The customer mission was accomplished flawlessly, and the booster was returned. It was actually a little physically harder on the booster than the SES-9 flight had been.
Nevertheless, it utterly nailed the landing, thanks to a new landing strategy that decelerated hard by using 3 engines instead of the usual 1.

Without even being cleaned, that booster has gone on to be fired for 8 full flight duration burns with simulated flight stresses (the orange cap on top is tethered to motors that can vary the stress on the top of the rocket, simulating the the varying weight of the top of the rocket throughout the dynamic acceleration profile of flight.). Once it completes its tenth full-duration test, they will retire it to a museum and consider the rest of the returned rocket fleet qualified for 10 re-uses.

 

Thaicom 8 came next. Another high+heavy mission. Another successful delivery of the payload to orbit. Another successful landing. Another stunning video!

 

ABS 2A and Eutelsat 117 West B a dual-payload mission makes for a real mouthful of a name. The primary mission was again flawless, but the landing suffered some difficulty. It seems a thrust imbalance in one of the engines threw off the delicate calculations required to "hoverslam" the rocket down onto the deck - the engines cannot safely throttle low enough to hover at a constant height, so the onboard computer calculates the optimum altitude at which to start the engine for landing, such that the rocket reaches 0 speed at 0 altitude over the deck. They call it the suicide burn, and in this case, the thrust imbalance caused the calculations to come up short, and the rocket stopped in mid-air above the droneship, began to ascend, and then ran out of fuel and plopped 40 metres down onto the deck. This is all that made it back to port.

 

The next mission was a corker! CRS-9, another ISS re-supply, delivered a Dragon carrying a new docking port to the ISS that will enable future SpaceX missions to deliver astronauts to the station on their Dragon version 2. This was the second-ever mission to land its first stage back on solid ground at Cape Canaveral. Here is the moment of landing from the webcast.

It was another night launch, but it yeilded some of the most spectacular footage, particularly when, after stage separation, the first stage performed a fast-flip manoeuvre, and fired its engines into the plume of the departing second stage - creating an auroral display of interacting plumes in the Florida sky. The clear skies also allowed a clear view of every one of the booster's burns. This mission provided the majority of content in this gorgeous video:

 

JCsat-16 was the next mission (and currently the most recent mission). As the name suggests, it was almost exactly the same mission as JCsat-14. During landings, the live video from the drone ship almost inevitably cuts out. The vibrations from the landing burn have proven too much for the cameras and transmitters aboard the ship, no matter what SpaceX does to attempt to toughen them up. Usually, if the landing is successful, the video restores momentarily. This time, the stream stayed off for an extended period of time. The hosts assumed the worst and started cautiously talking down the webcast audience's hype. Then this happened. XD

 

Nearly up to date now! Whew - what I intended to be a minor update is getting out of hand again.

 

On September 1st, a few days before the slated liftoff time, the Amos-6 mission rocket was sitting on the pad being fuelled-up for a wet-dress rehearsal of launch, up to and including a firing of the engines. 8 minutes before that firing, during final propellant loading on the upper stage, something caused a helium tank inside the second stage oxygen tank to burst. Then this happened. You probably all remember that video from the news. The investigation as to what caused the helium bottle to let go (and what the source of ignition for the fire was) is ongoing, but the rocket's design has been exhaustively investigated, and no plausible cause can be found there. There are plenty of theories out there, many of them pretty wild, but I will wait for the results of the investigation to express an opinion.

 

So. Now. The real reason I decided to update this.

 

I think I'll do this as a separate post...



#7 Destructor!!!

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Posted 12 October 2016 - 08:30 PM

SpaceX's Bold Push To Make Humanity A Multiplanetary Species...
At the International Astronautical Congress in Gudalajara, Mexico, on the 27th of September, SpaceX lead engineer and CEO Elon Musk laid out his company's plans to facilitate en masse the colonisation of Mars and the wider crewed exploration of our Solar System.
 
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The plan hinges on the gigantic Interplanetary Transportation System - a spaceflight architecture consisting of three basic designs:

  • A 70-metre tall booster rocket with 42 methane-powered Raptor engines pumping out 3.5 times the thrust of the Saturn V, and capable of lifting nearly 4x the payload to LEO.
  • A 49.5 metre long Space Ship. Basically a 100-person capacity spaceliner. The ship is capable of a 3-month transit time to Mars thanks to its 9 Raptors, and capable of landing 450 tonnes on the surface of Mars (after cargo transfer on orbit). To put that in perspective, the entire mass of the ISS is 420 tonnes - ITS could land the mass of the ISS on Mars, and still have room for a stack of 10 Tesla model S'.
  • A tanker based on the same design as the spaceship, used to refuel the ship for Mars TMI after the ascent to LEO. The Spacecraft will need 5 refueling flights of the tanker before it can depart for Mars.

SpaceX promo video depicting the ITS in action:

 
This plan is so audacious that it's hard to take in. It makes practically every Mars landing architecture ever imagined in science fiction pale in comparison. It's outrageous!
But it's real:
 
gd6mlp0gs4ox.png
 
They have built part of the spacecraft (a revolutionary 12m-diametre tank made of Carbon Fibre), and pressure tested it. They have also built and successfully test-fired a Raptor engine. (<-Warning: LOUD)
Their development schedule is aggressive, with test-launches of the complete stack aimed to put a prototype spaceship in orbit of Earth before 2020, an unmanned landing of the spaceship on Mars in 2022, and a human-crewed flight to depart in late 2024 for touchdown in early 2025. That's people on Mars in just over 8 years...
 
But that's just the beginning. With the ability to refuel itself from the available elements on Mars, combined with SpaceX's intention to mass-produce these ships in the hundreds, this allows human expeditions out into the wider solar system:
 
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The ITS Space Ship on a crewed mission to Jupiter.
 
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Crewmembers strewn about her feet, the ITS Space Ship stands on the surface of Europa, an ice-encrusted moon of Jupiter containing a liquid water ocean larger than all the oceans on Earth.
 
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An ITS sails above the rings of Saturn. Saturn would actually be a much more welcoming place than Jupiter. Jupiter has violent radiation belts that would injure the crew through almost any practical protection.
 
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An ITS Space Ship stands on the surface of Enceladus - a small moon of Saturn with similar properties to Europa. The geysers erupting into space in the background are real. The Cassini space probe has sampled the water and found indications of complex carbon chemistry in it that may be a lifesign. Not pictured is Saturn's most inviting moon, Titan. It has an atmosphere so thick and gravity so low that you could hold onto some cafeteria trays, flap your arms and fly!. Titan is attractive because the atmosphere is made of methane and the ground is made of water ice - which can be split to yield oxygen. Suck in some atmosphere and process some ground, and you have refuelled your rocket. What's more, the thick atmosphere allows you to slow down when you get there without really using much fuel, meaning you can burn most of it hard enough to get you there fast. With all these positive features (and I didn't even mention the occasional view of Saturn through the clouds!), I think Titan will have a real allure to it.
 
This is Elon Musk's full presentation on the ITS. Well worth watching:

 
If you ask me, this is how a Star Trek future begins.



#8 Daysleeper

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Posted 13 October 2016 - 12:19 AM

Elon Musk should rename his company into UESPA... ;-)




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