SpaceX launch webcast: Orbcomm-2 Mission [video]
spacex.com
spacex.com
I also want to commend them for a few minor things:
- a real-time stream from landing (as opposed to holding it and releasing footage few days later, as before)
- a real-time stream from satellite deployment, with a camera placed so that we could see everything (as opposed to the typical low-quality stream of the engine nozzle)
- a launch timeline visible on the stream
This mission looked an order of magnitude better than anything they did before. It's like, before they were just playing around, and now they're doing serious business. Keep it up, SpaceX!
But they really upped the PR game this time, that's for sure. I assume somebody must have had a look at the viewer count numbers from the last few and put 2 and 2 together on the opportunity they were missing out on. A nice job of it overall.
Presumably the sting of the term is now entirely gone. Nothing succeeds like success.
It's amazing to me how much power SpaceX has to both re-activate so (comparatively) soon after a failure and to delay the launch by a day solely for its own purposes (perhaps it's launch client gets a discount?).
Agreed, though. It was masterly done. Loved the timeline.
They want to reuse rockets similar to planes in the future. It's mind blowing and super exciting!
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Really such a groundbreaking thing like this should be glorified in the media and put on loop for a while. simply amazing.
And confuse people that happen to be tuning in at the wrong time? No thanks. This is a live stream not a news broadcast.
I was working on a signal distortion problem with a colleague when I heard the rumble of the launch. "Rocket just launched", I said. He was on Google chat with me and said, "It did?". He lives a few miles south of me and so he gets the sound waves a few seconds later ;).
A couple of minutes later I did a double-take. "THAT's a new sound!". I've heard rockets blow before, but I've never heard one come back to land.
Then I checked the internet to confirm what my ears had already told me.
Congrats to SpaceX and thank you for not landing it on my house!
But perhaps more importantly its the first "first" for SpaceX which has not been done by NASA or anyone else. Launch a payload in to orbit and recover the booster back to the launch site. The SRBs from the shuttle were essentially shell refurbs, SpaceShip 1 and Blue Origin sub-orbital hops. This was, in my estimation, the real deal. It has to be an amazing feeling being on the team that made this possible. Congratulations, that is one way to write yourself into the history books.
Edit: I was so excited I couldn't even multiply 9 by 5!
One of the huge differences (and there are many) is that Falcon 9 was doing 6,000 Km/hr (~4,000 mi/hr) when the first stage separated and turned around to come back.
The path was not straight up, but rather one to launch the second stage into orbital flight (which reached 26,000 Km/hr and 600 miles of altitude).
Then Falcon9's first stage FLEW a curved return path; fired three engines to slow down from holy-crap miles-per-hour, shut them down and then, at exactly the right moment in time, fired one engine to land.
The Bezos rocket went straight up to zero velocity and came straight back down.
It's like throwing a bottle straight up in the air compared to throwing one in a parabolic path to the top of the Empire State building and having that bottle then turn around, fly that same parabolic path to return and land at your feet.
Not sure why Bezos feels the need to try to imply his effort (which IS significant) is on the same league as SpaceX other than to potentially try to leverage the fabricated parity for publicity and external funding.
when SpaceX launched 1000m and landed? Just because it was higher? It seems like SpaceX has Bezos beat on both sides - they launched and landed a rocket before Bezos, and now theyve launched and landed a rocket higher than Bezos. So all Bezos did was launch his rocket higher than SpaceX's at the time. Is that right?
EDIT: One question for the rocket scientists here: exactly how reusable do they expect these returned first stage rockets to be? What is the process of certifying that a returned rocket is fit to fly, and what components are most likely to need repairing/replacing with each launch?
There's really not a lot of costs that can add up for reuse of these stages. It'll require a bit of cleaning up, a few new bits and pieces replaced and added, and a lot of inspection work. But most of the cost of the stage is in manufacturing the engines and tanks, so it should add up to enormous savings, even if it's relatively costly to reuse each stage compared to the theoretical limits.
Edit: the flip-side is that the reliability and robustness improvements from reusability may be as big a win as cost. Currently it costs tens of millions of dollars to launch a rocket to orbit, which means it's almost never done except as part of a paid launch. Moreover, despite the seemingly high number of launches very few of those launches represent expanding the test-envelope much, every single launch is typically straight down the middle of the performance envelope, to maximize the chance of success. That results in learning very little about these vehicles despite how much they've been flown. By introducing reuse and dropping the cost of flight it may become possible to do real test programs, which would make it possible to determine the flight envelope characteristics of vehicles and help lead to improving designs over time.
But if they can get it to point where it's a matter of gassing it up for the next flight, that's a huge savings. Fuel is a few hundred grand for a rocket that costs sixty million dollars. It's nothing, basically.
On the other hand, the solid boosters of the Space Shuttle were severely damaged by the impact and corrosion of the sea water, after "recovery" they were essentially a source of parts for new boosters.
Overall, I really hope they can improve re-usability above what the Space Shuttle achieved.
(Incidentally, SpaceX is known for keeping some aspect of their operations trade secret, rather than patenting. So, if they had some solvent that dissolved the gunk and simplified the cleanup process, or some such similar trick, it's likely that no one outside the company would know about it.)
I have no real idea how significant coking of the Merlin engine is, but the SSMEs were hardly "clean".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_embrittlement [2] http://www.tms.org/Superalloys/10.7449/1991/Superalloys_1991... [3] http://www.interspacenews.com/FeatureArticle/tabid/130/Defau... [4] http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/174534main_ssme.pdf
hah! Tears in my eyes here this is absolutely incredible to watch.
I stayed up for this, I hope I didn't wake up the neighbours and it will take days to wipe the grin of my face.
EDIT: To quote my friend's reaction,
"HAPPY FEET, WOMBO COMBO!
Let's Kerbal the shit out of Space."
edit: haha, nice downvote, whoever it was. :)
Government space missions are limited by taxpayer interest/funding, and the high cost of access to space has mostly limited commercial interest to things like communication and surveying satellites. I'm really looking forward to what new opportunities open up in both spaces when we can do so much more for the same cost.
Those missions are remarkable partly because they're amazing firsts, and partly because of what they've been able to accomplish with huge limitations and cost restrictions. They're amazing because of finesse, and if this whole reusability thing works out, you'll be able to brute force them instead. Visiting a comet is amazing. Making launches so cheap that it becomes practical to visit fifty comets would be astounding.
It's a bit like the invention of the steamship. It doesn't take you anywhere new. Sailing ships got the job done. But it transformed the world just the same.
"Congrats @SpaceX on landing Falcon's suborbital booster stage. Welcome to the club!"
EDIT:
Musk: "Congrats to Jeff Bezos and the BO team for achieving VTOL on their booster"
Musk: "It is, however, important to clear up the difference between "space" and "orbit", as described well by https://what-if.xkcd.com/58/"
http://money.cnn.com/2015/11/24/news/companies/elon-musk-jef...
EDIT2:
NASAWatch: "Gee Jeff @SpaceX just put a bunch of stuff into orbit - again. Something you have yet to figure out how to do."
https://twitter.com/NASAWatch/status/679126712295120896
I'm not sure if they're all joking around, or are there serious ego issues at play here.
Think we can get Gates or Buffet into it as well maybe?
That's not even fun banter. Just a squeaky voice trying to get a sucker punch in.
Not to remove any merit to Blue Origin's achievement, but it's nowhere near what SpaceX just pulled off.
EDIT: Here's a video that compares/contrasts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8c7RUjNFDo
- SpaceX rocket goes really fast horizontally; it has to flip around and boost back, and then correct from horizontal to vertical orientation.
- Falcon 9 is an actual space launch system; it has different (i.e. much stricter) engineering constraints than a suborbital rocket. In particular, this affects the engine design.
- Most importantly, the first stage of Falcon 9 does what's known as "suicide burn" - it waits until the last possible second to fire back the engine, so that it reaches exactly zero velocity relative to the ground as it touches down. It does so, because it can't hover - even the single one one of the nine Merlin engines, throttled down to minimum, still generates more thrust than the now almost empty booster weights. On the other hand, Blue Origin's rocket can slow down to a hover, and then take its time to stabilize and land.
Rockets that can reach orbit have very bad weight to payload ratios (Falcon 9 is ~2.5% takeoff weight to LEO) so there isn't much room for dead weight.
Who said that was the achievement? What is important about that achievement?
The important achievement is dramatically reducing the cost of sending things into space (such that they will stay there). SpaceX's rockets achieve this, Blue Origin's don't even attempt to be in that league. Using your Everest analogy, Blue Origin was the first to climb some lesser peak nobody cared that much about (still, nice job), then SpaceX climbed Everest, and Bezos said "welcome to the tall mountain club."
Anyone who understood what was being achieved. That doesn't mean that a single achieve or being first in itself is that meaningful, but it's still an achivement.
Just like anyone who understands mountaineering knows that climbing Everest isn't the greatest norvthe hardest achivement among tall mountains i.e. the eight-thousanders.
They're in the same club like a general aviation pilot landing his Piper Cub on a giant runway and a navy pilot landing his F-14 on a carrier are "in the same club". While it's technically true, pointing it out would be pretty tacky...
The achievements are comparable, despite the fact it makes SpaceX come second. Blue Origin was first with a VTOL rocket stage, as part of a space system.
Now, if you want to invent an extra category of 'first VTOL landing for a first stage booster for an orbital rocket system that uses boost-back to change trajectory mid-course' or similar, they SpaceX are first with that, and of course it's an awesome achievement.
That assertion is ridiculous. The rocket is optimized to do one thing, push it's payload into orbit, this is a very strict restriction, especially on a two stage rocket. On the other hand, the designer of a suborbital vehicle has ample design space to play.
It's like comparing your practice free throw, in your back yard, with a slam-dunk in the NBA.
Blue Origin was first, and Bezos can quite rightly welcome SpaceX to 'the club' as the second company to achieve this, without being accused of being classless, surely?
F9 will significantly reduce the cost of putting things in orbit.
NS will reduce the cost of space tourism (momentary views of earth), but would require new engines and a different design and landing style to put things into space, something like F9.
Hence implying they are the same is a bit tacky and inappropriate as it will mislead lots of people.
So from what I've read, the returns are immense; the amount of learning they can do from examining their own rocket is the real initial treasure. Their rocket design should advance considerably based on this trove, and I suppose the source of many papers, publications, and public-sourced patents. Reusable rockets seems not quite a glorious enough term? There's a massive dividend any time this actually works, and imagining the future of this tech is joyous.
We can guess how much this will bring down the cost. How much will it bring down the price? Say it's just following the supply/demand curve to get more customers. If landing was reliable and the rockets were durable, what would it really take to scale? If you actually got 10 of these going full-duty. How close can you back-to-back launches? The scale of that operation in terms of engineers to manage the workload... The return-on-automation (in other words, software) is immense the first few billion dollars you spend on it. That means they need to hire a fuck-ton of very good developers. Cool!
But what if it's more of a binary market and the only new customers are only at a much lower price point? In that case it's just serving the existing market at much higher margin. I believe this will make space more accessible -- cost savings ultimately flow through.
BTW, one of the advantages of pledging your patents for free use is you can really show off the right way to write a patent. The whole point is forcing disclosure in return for a benefit, so now make that disclosure top-notch. In theory, what if patent applications were examined by the top-of-the-field peers and only real advancements in the field which were fully and properly documented by the patent would be granted? I hope not all software patents are evil. The "provisional patent" is an interesting form of self-publication at least, but it does create a pesky 1-year ticking clock.
As a talent/recruiting event this is pretty much about as good as it gets.
Seriously, if a position interests you, apply. There have been plenty of ITAR exceptions.
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-real-reason-spacex-is-h...
They might end up offering lower cost launches, reducing the margin, but discounts on Nth-launches don't make sense.
Note: The never before been re-used part is probably the most important factor here. Once they have re-used rockets a few times they'll have a reliability factor for these situations.
... but if I understand correctly, one of the points of the reusable rocketry experiment is to be able to lower the price point to allow new customers who couldn't afford to launch at the previous per-pound cost. To give a terrible but not inaccurate analogy: Think similarly to how the Nintendo Wii found itself in entirely new markets of game players by droppping a $200 console onto the market alongside competition that was nearly double that price-point.
Does anyone know what specifically changed to allow a landing attempt on land as opposed to barge? Was it just that they gained enough confidence with the barges that they would at least be able to hit the target (and not crash into a building or something), or was some regulatory clearance received or something? Or something about this launch (ie lighter payload?) made a return to land feasible?
I suspect even as this becomes routine most landings will still be on the barge. Every ounce of fuel you use to reverse your direction is an ounce you could have put toward a larger payload.
I believe the main concern was not putting what amounts to an ICBM into Disneyworld. Hitting the barge (even though they hit a little hard each time) proved they could hit within a few feet of where they planned reliably.
It's nice to see a lot of the lessons from media training. :D
I used to sell test equipment and software to SpaceX's launch ops, avionics, and calibration crews, starting between launches 2 and 3. It was touch and go back in those days. These guys have worked their tails off for over a decade and deserve every bit of congratulations they receive.
Walking into the SpaceX facility in Hawthorne was always a humbling experience. Instant "I am the dumbest person in this room" syndrome.
Congrats guys!!
EDIT: and here's just the landing itself: http://www.gfycat.com/WeepyCelebratedAfricanaugurbuzzard.
Link : http://www.spacex.com/news/2015/12/21/background-tonights-la...
I went back and recorded the release speed (km/hr), altitude (km) for each drop:
25960 626
25954 627
25950 628
25944 630
25937 632
25935 632
A circular orbit at that height is about 29000 km around; 25 km/hour of difference between release 1 and 6 would give them a separation of 6 degrees longitude/day, or ~50 days until the faster satellites 'lap' the slowest one.
Not any sort of rocket scientist, but I gather the strategy with these kind of LEO satellites is to just throw a pile of them up there semi-randomly, and count on at least one being in the neighborhood when you want to talk to it.
edit: Last paragraph is wrong. See my comment two levels down for the answer.
I too am confused about the utility of launching 11 satellites into virtually the same orbit.
1) The companies pursuing this, SpaceX, Blue Orgin, etc., can't be the first to think of it. If the first stage accounts for 75% of the cost of a launch, as one article I read says, I'm sure many have considered, going back to the first launches decades ago, how to reuse it.
2) The technology to land rockets vertically has existed for a long time, going back to the lunar lander at least.
Additionally, Blue Origin and SpaceX have different goals from traditional aerospace firms that requires them to drive costs down below what a government would require. Blue Origin want to offer rides to space to tourists; for that, their costs need to be low enough for a person to buy a ticket. SpaceX wants to land their rockets on Mars, and then take off again. Being able to land the first stage of the Falcon 9 allows them to perfect the landing and reuse of rockets on Earth, before taking that knowledge to Mars.
Usually changes like this result from a technical or economic development.
And they have a drive, too. Mars is not a marketing story, Elon seems to really believe in doing it, and a lot of people at SpaceX buy into this vision.
Landing the Lunar Lander on the moon is completely different to landing a tall, thin high-centre of gravity rocket full of explosive fuel, using AI because there's no crew onboard.
Or did you mean something else?
I'm pretty sure the first vertical landing of a rocket was only achieved in the last few years.
This development trajectory leads to a capable launcher, but one that is wholly unsuited for reuse. Reusing the first stage is now extraordinarily difficult, extraordinarily costly, and has little advantage (since most of the cost is in the upper stage anyway). You see the effects of this design pattern in most expendable launchers. Both the Delta IV and Atlas V boosters use a single engine in the first stage, and both use an RL-10 LOX/LH2 engine for the 2nd stage, an extremely expensive engine on its own, let alone when it's integrated into a high-tech stage (such as Lockheed-Martin's legendary Centaur line). The Ariane 5 has gone through 5 different generations of upper stage advancements, and it too has only one engine on its first stage. India's GSLV uses a solid first stage with hypergolic boosters and second stage and a LOX/LH2 3rd stage.
Meanwhile, there hasn't been much pressure on rocket designers to be hard headedly pragmatic. Often times winning government contracts or even private investment meant convincing people of your beyond state-of-the-art designs that would leap frog the competition, rather than rely on common sense engineering and iterative advancements. That's how we got the Shuttle (which was supposed to be about 2 orders of magnitude cheaper to operate than it turned out to be), the X-33/VentureStar program, the NASP/X-30 program, Rotary Rocket, Pioneer Rocketplane, and all the other programs and startups that were cancelled when they ran out of money, ran into engineering problems, or both.
The sensible thing is to try reusing some of the rocket and make the most of that from a cost perspective. Something that saw a bit of attention with the old DC-X program over two decades ago. One problem with that program was that it envisioned a new launcher that was mostly an SSTO, and aimed at building up from small scale rather than building toward reuse from full orbital scale.
The genius of Musk and SpaceX has several facets:
1) Begin with expendable, but design with reuse in mind (high throttle ability in the first stage, most of the costs in the first stage), and work towards there iteratively. That way you get experience in a lot of the most important bits of the business: building orbital rockets, building rocket engines, building spacecraft, launching rockets. And you get cold, hard cash flowing into the company from launches. Cash that keeps the company in business, and finances further innovations.
2) Build reuse not as a different vehicle but as a "feature flag" on a common design. The difference between a reusable launcher and an expendable launcher for SpaceX is a mode selection, not an architectural difference. This means that you get operational testing of the vast majority of your flight hardware for your vehicle with every single expendable launch. This is a well-known risk mitigation strategy in software and other industries, and here it works marvelously. Prior to today's launch SpaceX had 14 previous launches of substantially the same hardware (counting only the v1.1 version).
3) Opportunistically use the first stage after stage sep. for experimenting with boost back and landing. From the very first v1.1 launch SpaceX has been aggressive at testing aspects of the landing and reuse flight mode, equipping stages with landing gear in many cases. This is a fantastic cost saving method as it takes what would be trash and transforms it into test vehicles being operated in typical flight profiles. This takes advantage of hundreds of millions of dollars of flight hardware to conduct an R&D test program on the cheap.
Combine all of that together and you end up with a way to get from A (expendable rockets) to B (reusable rockets) without having to take on a ton of risk, without having to spend insane amounts of money, without having to design and operationally prove a brand new reusable vehicle design, and to build a revenue earning and self-sustaining business before being able to finish reusable vehicle development. It took a significant amount of foresight and savvy to be able to see that route and to execute on it.
And yes, knowing what we know now it would have been easy to do this sort of stuff in the past, more so if we wanted to just throw money at it. But it wasn't obvious until being proven.
The fact that the Falcon 9 is deliberately designed for less efficiency with 9 engines on the first stage, but still ends up cheaper than the alternatives is even more impressive given that insight.
Interest question about safeing it once it is landed. You can't just dump excess liquid oxygen are you'll end up starting fires. Fortunately it isn't like the shuttle which had Hydrazine in the OMS tanks that had to be managed post landing.
I can't wait until they land one in the daylight, and on the west coast so I can watch in person.
It's quite interesting that their biggest competitor ULA is having to rely on tiny Blue Origin to develop a replacement for the Russian RD-180 that ULA uses on their big money maker Atlas V.
Looks pretty close.
First flight since the failure on June 28
Attempt to land 1st stage on land near the launch site
First flight of an upgraded rocket
Launch infographic https://i.imgur.com/D9BdO86.png by /u/zlsa on reddit.
/r/SpaceX Orbcomm OG2 Launch 2 Official Launch Discussion & Updates Thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/3xnoz5/rspacex_orbc...
What's interesting too is that the descent path of the rocket has an engine failure trajectory that will ensure the rocket will fall into the ocean if a failure occurs during the powered descent.
There's a reason the United States' launch facilities are primarily along the east coast of the country.
The first stage is pretty stable though. The engines are by far the heaviest part, and they're at the very bottom. The legs are also a fairly wide base.
EDIT: On rewatching the broadcast, "Procedure 11.100, section 3" is what they do (I have no idea what that is, but it's what the LD told the landing pad crew to "proceed with")
(Becomes clear 25~ seconds in)
http://www.spacex.com/news/2015/12/21/background-tonights-la...
Also, what happens to the mass-adapter (i.e. the balancing 12th non-satellite)?
(Also, is it fair to say that while this is an achievement, it is only more-so when they can reliably repeat it; I mean it's not exactly safe yet for people, who knows what a gust of wind could do?)
T-4 minutes and still zero actual mission audio...
I can't stop smiling!
I can't wait for this to fuck over Comcast and every other last-mile monopoly acting like jerks to their customers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRsufOoNOIQ
;).
However, having watched this just now, I could have really done without all the bro-nerd whooping and faux prime time personality-presentation. The latter's awkward and naff and just got in the way for me - the former was simply irritating in the extreme.
Maybe I'm getting old, but I'd rather have a bit of restraint and less of the infantile gesticulation and cursing in the background where this sort of thing's concerned.
grumble
Anyway, onwards and upwards (and back again), SpaceX!
I'm sure some people are less bothered by it than we are, though.
If I were to make a suggestion, it would be to house the loud employees in a large sound-proof booth, but I suspect that would only lead to yet more downvotes here...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZZv5Z2Iz_s
I'm serious!
Ultimately they're limited by available manpower and production capacity.
(And if you're interested, search YouTube for many, many attempts to simulate what SpaceX did in KSP, including barge landing attempts.)
Are there any replay videos?
More interesting stuff on the Falcon 9 rocket: http://www.spacex.com/falcon9
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Traffic_in_Arms_...
Unless you're German, than that statement is almost certainly false. And even Germany is changing.
Your statement most likely reveals more about your political leanings then the levels of nationalistic fervour in different countries.
But a good demonstration of the toxic virality of nationalism, I guess. It manages to wriggle itself into anything.
I have to admit though that once on holiday in Germany, while siting in the ruins of a castle overlooking the Rhine at night, myself and some Brit and American friends of mine burst into a rousing chorus of Deutschland Uber Alles, much to the dismay of our German friends. So perhaps I have an odd sense of humor in this respect. And no I'm not some kind of proto Nazi. I also once memorized the words to much of the State Anthem of the USSR, and knew how to use them, but alas it's since largely slipped my memory. Life's too short to spend it walking around with a stick up your arse about these things IMHO.
I can't seem to locate the exact time, but this is most likely the interview where Elon Musk mentioned it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIDoTKMqwT4
Edit: foreign national working at SpaceX. If there were not foreign national's involved in today's success, then feel free to ignore me.
It's a commercial. What are they selling?
Bear in mind the video was a live stream. Unless the 'USA' chant was pre-planned and orchestrated by the company, it's just part of the background noise of the employees celebrating.
So how high does the first stage fly?
Epic.
http://space.stackexchange.com/questions/7949/why-does-the-s...
So before we all thank Elon for taking our money, let's pat our selves on the back.
Really we should thank the amazing spacex engineers, who worked tirelessly. Not just Elon. Sure he worked hard too, but not much more than anyone else at spacex
I'm just tired of the Elon worship. Nobody acknowledges the amazing people who actually made this happen. As an engineer it pisses me off. Sorry if this is an unpopular opinion.
I would have hoped this thread would be a reprieve for you. I'm seeing tons of respect for SpaceX as a whole here. Ditto for the video, where they thank their partners at NASA, The FAA, etc. - and customer, Orbcomm - for making all this possible. I don't recall Elon being mentioned once in the video. Elon's mentioned a few times in thread for the purposes of citation about the plans of SpaceX, and some silly twitter drama - that's about it. No Elon worship I can spot.
> Sorry if this is an unpopular opinion.
I think pretty much everyone is on board with appreciating the hard work of everyone at SpaceX, NASA, The FAA, Orbcomm, and all the engineers and taxpayers who made it possible. Elon's one of those people though. This... jealousy of him? That's probably not the right phrasing. But if it's poorly received, I suspect it's because it comes across as appreciating the hard work of everyone but him. Or put differently: It's not appreciating the hard work of everyone.
IMO, the statement is not as absolute as it first seems. At one point, Rome held that title, about 100 years ago it was Britain, in another 100, it probably will be China.
You know he said recently that he was going to give less interviews. I'm sure he likes and uses his public persona to help his endeavors...but that's just being smart.
Steve Jobs did the same thing with Apple.
And as for thanking the American people. Hogwash. Did you personally make a choice in this matter? Sure you voted in the officials that did...that's where the money went...and they made the choice to spend it this way.
You know why? Because it's a smart move. A move towards a future where space travel can expand and grow because it will be more economical and feasible to accomplish.
So...yes, of course the engineers should be applauded! And THEY know this! And I'm positive they are celebrating this monumental event.
You should too! :)