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SpaceX Falcon 9 FT Launch of JCSAT-14 & First Stage Drone Ship Landing Attempt. May 6

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nekkid

nekkid

It doesn't matter who we are, what matters is our plan.
Nelo Ice said:
Lol yeah. Shit like that is like ok screw you Bezos. Speaking of which I think he's shut up since. Musk and SpaceX just continue to lay the smackdown on him and BO. And I didn't even know he tried to patent barge landings.

edit: With that said have no problem seeing BO have success but it's great seeing SpaceX just continue to make history.
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Oh absolutely, BO and Virgin are doing great stuff. It's just that SpaceX is at a whole different level. Bezos would do well to realise that and wind his neck in (which, as you say, he appears to have done).
 
Jezbollah

Jezbollah

Member
I just woke up and saw the results. ELATED.

A landing at night with the ballistic re-entry? How many boxes do these guys want to check off? Fucking WOW.

Memo to Elon: "We're going to need a bigger processing facility at CC"

krang said:
Oh absolutely, BO and Virgin are doing great stuff. It's just that SpaceX is at a whole different level. Bezos would do well to realise that and wind his neck in (which, as you say, he appears to have done).
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Yep. I think he's finally realized the difference between tourism and science...
 
P

Pristine_Condition

Member
Dan27 said:
Yep. I think he's finally realized the difference between tourism and science...
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I prefer to think Bezos' original comments were an errant but well-intentioned play to boost his own team's morale, rather than really take a shot at SpaceX. With a scoop of playful "billionaire vs. billionaire" banter on the side to make it interesting. But I hope probably some of his engineers took him aside and told him to cool his jets on that stuff, as that had to be kind of embarrassing for them.

Blue Origin is doing some great work. They just need to keep their heads down and keep working on doing what they are doing.
 
blu

blu

Wants the largest console games publisher to avoid Nintendo's platforms.
JoseJX said:
The only reason why I support mocking Bezos is that Blue Origin tried to patent landing rockets on a barge. Actively trying to hold back progress like that deserves mocking.
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They what? Oh, Bezos, you Bozo.
 
P

Pristine_Condition

Member
Nice photo as always from John Kraus at AmericaSpace:

DLjeVO4.jpg


EDIT for photo nerds: Settings: 257 seconds, f/16, and ISO 100
 
P

Par Score

Member
Awesome for SpaceX to nail this twice in a row, the real test now is whether they can get one of these landed stages to fly again, and just how much "refurbishment" it takes.

(The Merlin engines used on the first stage are probably the most robust, most ridiculously over-engineered, and most heavily tested rocket engines ever created, so I have full faith in them making this happen)
 
Jezbollah

Jezbollah

Member
I think this is my favorite landing of them all. It's like a magic trick - the F9 appearing on the ship after a ball of flame. Copperfield or Blane couldn't have done that :D
 
C

CyclopsRock

Member
Dan27 said:
I think this is my favorite landing of them all. It's like a magic trick - the F9 appearing on the ship after a ball of flame. Copperfield or Blane couldn't have done that :D
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I love how it just appears during the brief freeze in the deck cam. I can't wait for the distant shots
 
A

Averon

Member
What are SpaceX's competitors doing to combat SpaceX's re-usability? Are no other company even close to SpaceX in this area?
 
C

Crispy75

Member
and apart from that, nobody is doing anything. All large launch vehicles currently in development (Europe's Ariane 6, China's Long March 5, Japan's H3, India's GSLV-III and Russia's Angara) are 100% disposable with no plans for reusability. Every competitor's mid-term strategy is "pray that reusability isn't worth it".

Of course every space program worth its salt has reusability research and testing programmes. But nobody has put anything like as much weight behind an actual operational programme as SpaceX.

The Shuttle was such a crazy stupid expensive design that it put the willies up everyone's backs and set the cause of reusable rockets back by 30 years.
 
A

Averon

Member
Crispy75 said:
and apart from that, nobody is doing anything. All large launch vehicles currently in development (Europe's Ariane 6, China's Long March 5, Japan's H3, India's GSLV-III and Russia's Angara) are 100% disposable with no plans for reusability. Every competitor's mid-term strategy is "pray that reusability isn't worth it".

Of course every space program worth its salt has reusability research and testing programmes. But nobody has put anything like as much weight behind an actual operational programme as SpaceX.

The Shuttle was such a crazy stupid expensive design that it put the willies up everyone's backs and set the cause of reusable rockets back by 30 years.
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If re-usability is even half as good as SpaceX claims it will be, I don't see how these other companies and organizations can continue to ignore it. How can they compete with SpaceX when SpaceX can send your payload at only 70%-80% of the cost of their cheapest options? A 20%-30% launch cost reduction is significant.
 
P

Pristine_Condition

Member
krang said:
Well that's...one idea.
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LOL. Looks like a whole shitload of ideas to me.

...and not dissimilar to something like this:

k6TOTyT.jpg
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EDIT: I remember seeing that ULA plan from a year ago, and between then and now I somehow forgot the whole stage of the plan with the deployment of the Hypercone. I follow this stuff pretty carefully, and try to read up on this stuff as much as I can, and STILL couldn't remember all the stages of the proposed system. LOL
 
I

IntelliHeath

As in "Heathcliff"
HellBlazer said:
Thanks for making these threads, Cameron. I don't suppose there's a way to easily keep track of all space-related threads popping up on GAF, is there?

Anyway, I'm hoping they can stick the landing, even though it's unlikely. This whole re-landing the first stage business is even cooler in the context that each attempt is also a practice run for landing propulsively on Mars.
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Well. You could ask Cameron to make SpaceGAF threads so people could share articles and drop links there which could make it easier like some OTs.
 
C

CyclopsRock

Member
Reusability is only half the story of these things, really. The other half is that this sort of technology will be required to land a heavy payload on Mars (its very thin atmosphere makes parachutes very ineffective but its gravity is still high enough that you'll hit high speeds without them). They have a lot of things on Earth that they won't have on Mars - accurate GPS systems and the like - but the act of propulsively landing rockets is something that we're going to need to get good at if we want to put anything heavy on Mars, and SpaceX have a huge head start there.
 
C

CrunchyFrog

Member
ninge said:
ULA have a very advanced plan to combat SpaceX re usability:

recovery.jpg


I am not even kidding.... https://spaceflightnow.com/2015/04/13/ula-unveils-its-future-with-the-vulcan-rocket-family/
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SapceX's system is obviously way more robust. It's entirely autonomous and saves the entirety of the first stage, engine and fuselage. it remains the be seen, though, how "refurbishable" it is, whether the shock from landing can be fully tested, accounted for, and repaired, so the real test will be the relaunch in June.

Have they said whether there's a limit to the number of reuses for a first stage, practical or theoretical?
 
C

Crispy75

Member
Averon said:
If re-usability is even half as good as SpaceX claims it will be, I don't see how these other companies and organizations can continue to ignore it. How can they compete with SpaceX when SpaceX can send your payload at only 70%-80% of the cost of their cheapest options? A 20%-30% launch cost reduction is significant.
Click to expand...

There are two arguments (which you can give as much weight as you believe in them)

1. The savings are not there. You're paying people to recover, refurbish and recertify rockets instead of building them. The difference in cost is low. This is the lesson that the Shuttle taught us.

2. Reliability and service quality matter. ULA have a perfect launch record over 90 launches, and has long, deep experience in the business. Over the lifetime of a satellite, launch costs are not that great, so why not pay a bit extra for mission assurance?

Both arguments will dis/prove themselves over time. If the savings are real, and SpaceX demonstrates long-term reliability, then they deserve to utterly dominate the commercial market. Other launchers will be restricted to flying their own government's military/prestige payloads.

The Russians have the most to lose given their rather poor reliability of late and reliance on low costs.
CrunchyFrog said:
Have they said whether there's a limit to the number of reuses for a first stage, practical or theoretical?
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From the horse's mouth "At least 25, as many as 100" but really this is uncharted territory. With that many reuses, customers may well *prefer* to launch on a previously-flown stage due to its flawless flight history. We'd think it mad if everyone paid to fly on the maiden flight of a jet, for example.
 
C

Crispy75

Member
Chumpion said:
Europe should get its shit together and start pumping serious money into Skylon.
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Skylon's amazing and I'd love to see it fly, but it's got a difficult business case. It's a big upfront R&D cost before you start selling payload to orbit. SpaceX are makinga *profit* on their test programme. And there's no guarantee it'd be any cheaper than SpaceX's approach, once the infrastructure and processing costs are taken into account. And it doesn't scale very well - there can be no such thing as a Skylon Heavy.

Brilliant technology though.
 
P

Pristine_Condition

Member
Chumpion said:
Europe should get its shit together and start pumping serious money into Skylon.
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The engine concept is interesting, if they can get it to work. But even in the LEO missions Skylon is being designed to do, The current Falcon 9 kinda kills it in capability.

Now, if the concepts of next-gen, privately-owned LEO space stations and space hotels take off, and there becomes a real need for a spaceplane that can carry 30 people up at a time, like a plane, then they've got something.

krang said:
To be fair I thought that landing mechanism for Curiousity was fucking lunacy - so what do I know?
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The landing system for Curiosity was that complicated because it really needed to be. The Sky Crane method was actually deemed the "least crazy" method by NASA, and tested well, many times. http://www.space.com/16889-mars-rover-curiosity-sky-crane-landing.html And with the current state of technology at the time, it really was.

SpaceX's practical work in supersonic retropropulsion has really changed the game, but it's come at the cost of some failures which SpaceX was (and still is) willing and able to tolerate. NASA had a lot of guys working on that tech, but NASA was not in the position to experiment with a no-chutes landing on Mars on a big project like Curiosity.
 
C

CyclopsRock

Member
CrunchyFrog said:
SapceX's system is obviously way more robust. It's entirely autonomous and saves the entirety of the first stage, engine and fuselage. it remains the be seen, though, how "refurbishable" it is, whether the shock from landing can be fully tested, accounted for, and repaired, so the real test will be the relaunch in June.

Have they said whether there's a limit to the number of reuses for a first stage, practical or theoretical?
Click to expand...

Because the first stage never actually goes orbital (even in geostationary cases like this one), it doesn't suffer quite the same aerodynamic pressures that, say, the Space Shuttle re-entering the atmosphere did. As such, my understanding is that the "limit" is more about how many times you can fire the engines (which is many tens of times, I believe) but they do this as a test before flying, for example. So it's not exactly how many launches, but rather how many times it gets started, which isn't quite the same.

One cool idea I heard - and I don't know if this was "official" or mused by a staff member or just some random fuckhead on Reddit - was the idea that, once they get to a point where they're confident a rocket can fly again without too much maintenance, then they could actually refuel the rocket on the drone ship and fly it back to base, rather than tow it all the way back one at a time.
 
C

CyclopsRock

Member
Crispy75 said:
There are two arguments (which you can give as much weight as you believe in them)

1. The savings are not there. You're paying people to recover, refurbish and recertify rockets instead of building them. The difference in cost is low. This is the lesson that the Shuttle taught us.

2. Reliability and service quality matter. ULA have a perfect launch record over 90 launches, and has long, deep experience in the business. Over the lifetime of a satellite, launch costs are not that great, so why not pay a bit extra for mission assurance?

Both arguments will dis/prove themselves over time. If the savings are real, and SpaceX demonstrates long-term reliability, then they deserve to utterly dominate the commercial market. Other launchers will be restricted to flying their own government's military/prestige payloads.
.
Click to expand...

I think #1 is the stronger of the arguments. I'm not sure it's true - SpaceX don't have anything like the bloat that, say, ULA do, and their processes are all pretty new thanks to not living with the baggage of legacy hardware - but it definitely remains to be seen. For #2 though, that's true for the really heavy Geostationary ones that costs hundreds of millions to make. But there's a whole market out there for fairly cheap satellites that right now really struggle to ever get anywhere because the cost of entry is too high (things like research projects not backed by huge governmental organisations). If SpaceX are successful in lowering the cost of entry (literally), they may well end up discovering a whole new market rather than pinching the (relatively small) private market which exists now.
 
nekkid

nekkid

It doesn't matter who we are, what matters is our plan.
CyclopsRock said:
Because the first stage never actually goes orbital (even in geostationary cases like this one), it doesn't suffer quite the same aerodynamic pressures that, say, the Space Shuttle re-entering the atmosphere did. As such, my understanding is that the "limit" is more about how many times you can fire the engines (which is many tens of times, I believe) but they do this as a test before flying, for example. So it's not exactly how many launches, but rather how many times it gets started, which isn't quite the same.

One cool idea I heard - and I don't know if this was "official" or mused by a staff member or just some random fuckhead on Reddit - was the idea that, once they get to a point where they're confident a rocket can fly again without too much maintenance, then they could actually refuel the rocket on the drone ship and fly it back to base, rather than tow it all the way back one at a time.
Click to expand...

No, that's a genuine plan.
 
P

Pristine_Condition

Member
Crispy75 said:
Skylon's amazing and I'd love to see it fly, but it's got a difficult business case. It's a big upfront R&D cost before you start selling payload to orbit. SpaceX are makinga *profit* on their test programme. And there's no guarantee it'd be any cheaper than SpaceX's approach, once the infrastructure and processing costs are taken into account. And it doesn't scale very well - there can be no such thing as a Skylon Heavy.

Brilliant technology though.
Click to expand...

If you are only thinking about space, the SABRE engine project that makes Skylon go is probably a complete non-starter rather than your charitable wording of a "difficult business case." But there's also a substantial interest in that engine tech for hypersonic military aircraft. The US Airforce didn't do a feasibility review on it for nothing. So they've got that going for them. The proposed craft itself is not that crazy, if they've got the powerplant worked out.
 
C

Crispy75

Member
The engine, sure, but the airframe is a massive challenge for sustained hypersonic flight. Skylon gets up to speed in the atmosphere but rapidly leaves it behind. Staying there means you get really hot, really quickly.
 
blu

blu

Wants the largest console games publisher to avoid Nintendo's platforms.
Par Score said:
(The Merlin engines used on the first stage are probably the most robust, most ridiculously over-engineered, and most heavily tested rocket engines ever created, so I have full faith in them making this happen)
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That'd be the Russian RD-180.
 
S

strata8

Member
The pace at which SpaceX moves is nuts. It was less than 3 years ago that their first landing attempt ever smashed into the ocean. Now they're performing crazy 3-engine suicide burns and landing successfully on barges.
 
P

Pristine_Condition

Member
Crispy75 said:
The engine, sure, but the airframe is a massive challenge for sustained hypersonic flight. Skylon gets up to speed in the atmosphere but rapidly leaves it behind. Staying there means you get really hot, really quickly.
Click to expand...

Not that big a deal, according to the designers. It's ballistic coefficient is very low. Reentry temps are still the hottest the plane will ever get. The size of the plane is also a big advantage for both shedding heat in the Mach 5 air-breathing burn to orbital mode when it becomes a rocket and starts really moving, and in reentry. The designers say the craft will reenter at only 830 degrees Celsius, and its fiber-reinforced ceramic skin, which is an existing, technologically-mature material, is rated to sustain 1,127 degrees Celsius. It will also employ some active cooling.

The airframe challenges for potential hypersonic aircraft for the military that may use the SABRE engine tech will likely be far more challenging, and will really require exotic, whiz-bang new shit that will cost a shit-ton of money to develop. But if it's the US Airforce, that's par for the course.
 
C

Crispy75

Member
Pristine_Condition said:
The airframe challenges for potential hypersonic aircraft for the military that may use the SABRE engine tech will likely be far more challenging, and will really require exotic, whiz-bang new shit that will cost a shit-ton of money to develop.
Click to expand...

That's exactly what I was talking about :)
 
D

DEAD RABBIT

Member
CyclopsRock said:
Because the first stage never actually goes orbital (even in geostationary cases like this one), it doesn't suffer quite the same aerodynamic pressures that, say, the Space Shuttle re-entering the atmosphere did. As such, my understanding is that the "limit" is more about how many times you can fire the engines (which is many tens of times, I believe) but they do this as a test before flying, for example. So it's not exactly how many launches, but rather how many times it gets started, which isn't quite the same.

One cool idea I heard - and I don't know if this was "official" or mused by a staff member or just some random fuckhead on Reddit - was the idea that, once they get to a point where they're confident a rocket can fly again without too much maintenance, then they could actually refuel the rocket on the drone ship and fly it back to base, rather than tow it all the way back one at a time.
Click to expand...

Oh... that's neat. The reverse should also apply then. Launch to space, return to ship, refuel, return to base, install new cargo & refuel, return to ship, refuel, launch to space, etc.
 
E

Elfforkusu

Member
GTO launch first stage landing?

That's the last box checked. ULA and company better get with the program, space X is going to be able to cut prices like crazy in a few years.

Great news for manned space flight.
 
M

Marty Chinn

Member
Heh, my wife was a part of this launch and didn't realize it until this morning. She was in a room without any screens watching the launch and only monitors viewing data from the satellite attached to it. She's bummed that she missed watching it since they were having a launch party there too.
 
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