Falcon 9 Launch & Recovery Operations |
Falcon 9 Launch & Recovery Operations |
Jun 3 2008, 04:20 PM
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#1
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 1018 Joined: 29-November 05 From: Seattle, WA, USA Member No.: 590 |
SpaceX just sent a press release with an update on the Falcon 9. They successfully did a 5-engine test. They also mentioned the next Falcon 1 attempt will be late June "or July," presumably meaning "late June or early July," but you never know. :-)
Here's the full text. This isn't on their web page yet, the last I looked: McGregor TX – Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) conducted the first five-engine firing of its Falcon 9 medium to heavy lift rocket at its Texas Test Facility outside McGregor on Thursday, May 29. At full power the engines generated almost half a million pounds of force, and consumed 1,750 lbs of fuel and liquid oxygen per second. This five engine test again sets the record as the most powerful test yet on the towering 235-foot tall test stand. The test of the five Merlin 1C engines, arranged in a cross pattern like the Saturn V moon rocket, is the last step before firing the full complement of nine engines, scheduled for this summer. With all engines operating, the Falcon 9 generates over one million pounds of thrust in vacuum - four times the maximum thrust of a 747 aircraft. “This is the first time that we’ve added more than one engine at a time, and all phases of integration and testing went smoothly,” said Tom Mueller, Vice President of Propulsion for SpaceX. “As with previous tests, we saw no unexpected interactions between the engines, and are on schedule for adding four more engines.” The first Falcon 9 will arrive at the SpaceX launch site at Cape Canaveral by the end of 2008. The next flight of SpaceX’s smaller Falcon 1 rocket is scheduled for late June or July of 2008. |
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Sep 27 2009, 04:50 PM
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#2
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 1018 Joined: 29-November 05 From: Seattle, WA, USA Member No.: 590 |
I just noticed a Spaceflight Now article was posted a couple of days with some information I hadn't seen before, which they got from a phone interview with Elon Musk:
http://www.spaceflightnow.com/news/n0909/24falcon/ The dragon capsule for Flight #1 will end up in a circular orbit 155 miles up, but won't have engines to maneuver itself. Nevertheless, it'll carry a payload of some sort for an unidentified customer. SpaceX has actually requested a November 29 launch date, but Musk says that'll only happen if everything goes according to plan. He said that on the last two Falcon 1 flights everything actually DID go according to plan, but, of course, this is a brand new rocket. It agrees with UGordan that Flight #2 won't even try to get close to the ISS, and #3 will approach but not try to dock. It implies that #4 WILL try to dock, assuming the other flights went okay. (Apologies if there are any errors in the summary.) UGordan: I really appreciate your corrections, clarifications, and new information -- especially since you seem to have some kind of inside information. :-) Do you know why they're not trying harder to recover and reuse the rockets? They've made a big deal in their printed materials about how important that is. --Greg |
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Sep 27 2009, 05:16 PM
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#3
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 3652 Joined: 1-October 05 From: Croatia Member No.: 523 |
The dragon capsule for Flight #1 will end up in a circular orbit 155 miles up, but won't have engines to maneuver itself. Nevertheless, it'll carry a payload of some sort for an unidentified customer. No, the first Falcon 9 was supposed to carry a (tentatively government) payload and use the large 5m payload fairing, but the customer dropped out at one point so the plan until now was to fly a dummy payload (similar to F1 flight 4). Since Avanti, their 1st F9 customer, also dropped out recently and switched to Ariane 5 or Soyuz, the immediate need for demonstrating the 5m fairing went away. Along with the fact it's apparently a pacing item in development, they decided not to postpone the inaugural F9 flight any more than necessary to wait for the fairing and just fly a Dragon structural qualification unit instead. But there won't be any other payload onboard. It'll be just an instrumented shell. Maybe they'll throw in some bricks to simulate mass, but that's it... QUOTE UGordan: I really appreciate your corrections, clarifications, and new information -- especially since you seem to have some kind of inside information. :-) Do you know why they're not trying harder to recover and reuse the rockets? They've made a big deal in their printed materials about how important that is. No inside information here, I've just been closely following them. Regarding stage recovery the story goes something like this: back after flight 2 (or 3) they realized the first stage gets cooked on the way down so they need to improve its thermal protection system. Since flt3 was a failure that destroyed the 1st stage and they wanted to go ahead with flt4 ASAP (it went just 2 months after No.3), there was no time to fix the known TPS issue. Then came F1-05 and Razaksat and they decided they wouldn't try recovery on it yet - in fact they had to remove the recovery hardware to install a vibration dampener system for the satellite once the vibration problem was discovered. They said they'll make a bigger effort in recovering 1st stages with the Falcon 1e. As for Falcon 9, Elon did say they were going to try recovering the 1st stage on the first flight (not 2nd stage yet), but that was several months ago and I wouldn't be surprised if schedule pressure made them drop recovery again. He stressed this is something that's untrivial to pull off and it might take them several flights and years to work out - hence why their pricing assumes no stage recovery. -------------------- |
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Sep 27 2009, 05:44 PM
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#4
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 1018 Joined: 29-November 05 From: Seattle, WA, USA Member No.: 590 |
But there won't be any other payload onboard. It'll be just an instrumented shell. You know, on rereading the article, it's clear you're correct, but on a first read it definitely seemed as though they were talking about the contents of the Dragon capsule. The human ability to read what one expects to see -- regardless of the actual text -- is very strong . . . It's a shame that the stage recovery is so difficult. I'd guess the loss of the engines is the worst part, just in terms of expense. Do you actually think they'll ever be able to recover the second stage? I'd have thought it would burn up on reentry. Especially if even the first stage is "cooked." --Greg |
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Sep 27 2009, 06:00 PM
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#5
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 3652 Joined: 1-October 05 From: Croatia Member No.: 523 |
It's a shame that the stage recovery is so difficult. I'd guess the loss of the engines is the worst part, just in terms of expense. They're expensive, no doubt, but I believe the majority of the vehicle cost is concentrated not in the first stage, but in the upper stage where all the expensive avionics and air-startable/restartable engines are. QUOTE Do you actually think they'll ever be able to recover the second stage? Don't know; probably nobody knows that yet. They are planning on flying a heat shield on the stage similar to the Dragon one, but that and deorbit propellant comes directly from the vehicle's total payload capacity so it's a tradeoff between getting max payload and getting the stage back. Reentering a stage which has its center of gravity at the back (the engine section) is dynamically unstable so active control is needed etc. Keep in mind salt water exposure is one of the bigger problems in recovering stages - the thing is corrosive, it harms avionics and engines. -------------------- |
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