SpaceX returned its first 21 Dragon cargo missions to splashdowns in the Pacific Ocean southwest of Los Angeles. When an upgraded human-rated version of Dragon started flying in 2019, SpaceX moved splashdowns to the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico to be closer to the company's refurbishment and launch facilities at Cape Canaveral, Florida. The benefits of landing near Florida included a faster handover of astronauts and time-sensitive cargo back to NASA and shorter turnaround times between missions.

The old version of Dragon, known as Dragon 1, separated its trunk after the deorbit burn, allowing the trunk to fall into the Pacific. With the new version of Dragon, called Dragon 2, SpaceX changed the reentry profile to jettison the trunk before the deorbit burn. This meant that the trunk remained in orbit after each Dragon mission, while the capsule reentered the atmosphere on a guided trajectory. The trunk, which is made of composite materials and lacks a propulsion system, usually takes a few weeks or a few months to fall back into the atmosphere and doesn't have control of where or when it reenters. //

In May, a 90-pound chunk of a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft that departed the International Space Station fell on the property of a "glamping" resort in North Carolina. At the same time, a homeowner in a nearby town found a smaller piece of material that also appeared to be from the same Dragon mission.

These events followed the discovery in April of another nearly 90-pound piece of debris from a Dragon capsule on a farm in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan. SpaceX and NASA later determined the debris fell from orbit in February, and earlier this month, SpaceX employees came to the farm to retrieve the wreckage, according to CBC. //

This means SpaceX can no longer splash down off the coast of Florida because the trajectory would bring debris from the trunk down over populated areas in the United States or Mexico.

When recoveries shift to the West Coast, the Dragon capsule will fire its Draco thrusters to slow down, and then once on course for reentry, release the trunk to burn up in the atmosphere on a similar trajectory. Any debris from the trunk that doesn't burn up will impact the Pacific Ocean while the capsule deploys parachutes for a slow-speed splashdown. //

“One benefit of the move to the West Coast is much better weather," Walker said. "We have a number of sites in Florida, that we feel like we’re sometimes threading hurricanes a lot. When we look at the flight rules for wind, rain, wave height, all of the criteria that determine our flight rules for return, we actually saw that the West Coast sites that we’re looking at have much better weather, which allows us to have much better return availability.”

The Falcon 9 is grounded pending an investigation, possibly delaying upcoming crew flights. //

"Upper stage restart to raise perigee resulted in an engine RUD for reasons currently unknown," Musk wrote in an update two hours after the launch. RUD (rapid unscheduled disassembly) is a term of art in rocketry that usually signifies a catastrophic or explosive failure. //

Going into Thursday's mission, the current version of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket, known as the Falcon 9 Block 5, was indisputably the most reliable launch vehicle in history. Since debuting in May 2018, the Falcon 9 Block 5, which NASA has certified for astronaut flights, never had a mission failure in all of its 297 launches before the ill-fated Starlink 9-3 mission. //

The Falcon 9's only total in-flight launch failure occurred on its 19th flight on June 28, 2015, when the upper stage's liquid oxygen tank burst a couple of minutes after launch from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. The rocket disintegrated in the upper atmosphere, dooming a Dragon cargo capsule en route to the space station.

SpaceX resumed Falcon 9 launches six months later in December 2015. On that flight, SpaceX landed the Falcon 9's first stage booster back at Cape Canaveral for the first time, a historic achievement and a harbinger of the company's later success in reusing rockets. //

SpaceX's Falcon family of rockets, which counted 335 consecutive successful launches since the on-pad explosion in 2016, or 344 flights since an in-flight failure. Both numbers are all-time industry records.

A booster landing would be a calculated risk to SpaceX's launch tower infrastructure. //

In a short video released Thursday, possibly to celebrate the US Fourth of July holiday with the biggest rocket's red glare of them all, SpaceX provided new footage of the most recent test of its Starship launch vehicle.

This test, the fourth of the experimental rocket that NASA is counting on to land its astronauts on the Moon, and which one day may launch humans to Mars, took place on June 6. During the flight, the first stage of the rocket performed well during ascent and, after separating from the upper stage, made a controlled reentry into the Gulf of Mexico. The Starship upper stage appeared to make a nominal flight through space before making a controlled—if fiery—landing in the Indian Ocean.

The new video focuses mostly on the "Super Heavy" booster stage and its entry into the Gulf. There is new footage from a camera on top of the 71-meter-tall first stage as well as a nearby buoy at water level. The video from the buoy, in particular, shows the first stage making an upright landing into the ocean.

SpaceX teases an image of Starship's large launch tower in South Texas at the Starbase facility. Prominently featured are the two "chopsticks," large arms intended to catch the first stage booster as it slowly descends back toward its launch pad.

Then, in simulated footage, the video shows Starship's first stage descending back toward the launch tower with the title "Flight 5." And then it fades out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2BdNDTlWbo

Dtiffster Ars Praefectus
8y
3,075
Subscriptor

expand...As has been pointed out by others they have gotten cheaper on an absolute basis inflation adjusted as well. And there isn't much competition that is cheaper than them on an absolute basis, and all of it with only a fraction of their capacity. You got Electron at 200/300 kg for SSO/LEO for 8.5 mil, PSLV for 1.6/3.2 tonnes SSO/LEO for 18 mil, Vega C at 1.45 tonnes SSO for 37 (very subsidized) mil euro, and GSLV for 2.5/3/6 tonnes GTO/SSO/LEO for 47 mil. F9 does that with a droneship landing 5.4/12/18+ tonnes GTO/SSO/LEO for 69.5 mil. If all you need is exactly the performance of one of those rockets for one payload, then yes they are cheaper. And that is true for some payloads, but not for a substantial amount of the market. Otherwise those rockets would be out launching SpaceX right now, right? And rocket lab wouldn't be building neutron, right? Sounds like you are the one falling victim to hater math.

And you've got plenty of their commerical (i.e. non starlink) missions use a pretty substantial amount of F9 and FHs capabilities. They've launches F9 with expended boosters and FHs with expended center cores many times in the last few years. Most of the GTO birds are bigger than GSLV can handle, and F9 can handle most upper birth GTO sats to synchronous and the smaller lower birth GTO to supersynchronous that Ariane V used to handle for a fraction of what customers used to pay for the ride share without a hassle. Crew and Cargo dragon missions obviously need SpaceXs vehicles and use about 2/3 of the F9s capacity.

And although we haven't yet got substantially better rockets on the market yet, SpaceX has driven competitors to try. An Atlas V 551 used to cost 250+ mil, and DIVH over 600 mil. The top of the line Vulcan with 6 boosters which is roughly on par with DIVH is being sold for 200ish mil. There are a whole mess of at least partially reusable rockets that are only going to exist because of SpaceX. Fanboy math or not the market is working and it's thanks to SpaceX spurring innovation. Hate all you want, things are going swimmingly, and notice that it is not launch customers that are complaining about SpaceX.

Edit: forgot Alpha at 630/1030 kg SSO/LEO for 17.5 mil, which is again too small to eat many launches. //

expand...We've seen reporting recently that SpaceX appears to execute a Starlink launch for an internal cost of about $20M. That suggests they could offer ASDS launches profitably for $30M and RTLS launches for even less. If they were doing that, who the hell would invest in Stoke Space or Rocket Lab or any company not backed by Jeff Bezos? //

You'd think they had promised to make launch free at this point. They're 17% lower per-launch than they were just seven years ago and well below half of what the industry norm was prior to their entrance on the market.

The space agency did consider alternatives to splashing the station. //

NASA has awarded an $843 million contract to SpaceX to develop a "US Deorbit Vehicle." This spacecraft will dock to the International Space Station in 2029 and then ensure the large facility makes a controlled reentry through Earth's atmosphere before splashing into the ocean in 2030.. //

"This decision also supports NASA’s plans for future commercial destinations and allows for the continued use of space near Earth."

NASA has a couple of reasons for bringing the space station's life to a close in 2030. Foremost among these is that the station is aging. Parts of it are now a quarter of a century old. There are cracks on the Russian segment of the space station that are spreading. Although the station could likely be maintained beyond 2030, it would require increasing amounts of crew time to keep flying the station safely.

Additionally, NASA is seeking to foster a commercial economy in low-Earth orbit. To that end, it is working with several private companies to develop commercial space stations that would be able to house NASA astronauts, as well as those from other countries and private citizens, by or before 2030. By setting an end date for the station's lifetime and sticking with it, NASA can help those private companies raise money from investors. //

The station, the largest object humans have ever constructed in space, is too large to allow it to make an uncontrolled return to Earth. It has a mass of 450 metric tons and is about the size of an American football field. The threat to human life and property is too great. Hence the need for a deorbit vehicle. //

volcano.authors Smack-Fu Master, in training
6y
73

flerchin said:
The idea that SpaceX wouldn't even bid unless it was fixed price, and then came in well under the estimates for cost-plus is wild.

It's almost as though the cost-plus era has some political baggage that challengers like to point out.

RTWAP Smack-Fu Master, in training
1y
12

afidel said:
I assume SpaceX prefers the firm fixed price contract because it reduces the army of paper pushers needed and the amount of time that engineers and technicians need to waste documenting their work on the contract? I guess if you can actually execute correctly it's more profitable to just submit a bill and get paid than to do the old cost plus change order malarkey.

My speculation is that it enforces a certain discipline in the requirements. SpaceX isn't going to just happily go down every rabbit hole of dithering on requirements and possible changes because unless it's a costed and signed change order they'd be losing money on it. And anyone at NASA looking to change things knows it requires a highly visible contract change ($$$), not just a larger bill from the contractor. //

Tridus Ars Tribunus Militum
17y
2,189
Subscriptor

afidel said:
I assume SpaceX prefers the firm fixed price contract because it reduces the army of paper pushers needed and the amount of time ....

Yeah, exactly. They're not paying people handle the paperwork end of cost-plus.

Also if they think they can do it for significantly under that, the potential profit margin is higher since they'll get paid that no matter what it actually costs them to do it. It takes a high degree of confidence to want to go this way, but if any space company has the experience with this type of contract to make it work, it's SpaceX.

It REALLY showcases the differing mindset and abilities between them and a company that won't bid on fixed price contracts like Boeing, though.

"They're the largest satellite operator in the world." //

We discussed Starlink's rapid road to profitability—it took just five years from the first launch of operational satellites—and the future of the technology.

One of the keys to Starlink's success is its vertical integration as a core business at SpaceX, which operates the world's only reusable rocket, the Falcon 9. This has allowed the company not just to launch a constellation of 6,000 satellites—but to do so at relatively low cost.

"At one point, SpaceX had publicly said that it was $28 million," Henry said of the company's target for a Falcon 9 launch cost. "We believe today that they are below $20 million per launch and actually lower than that... I would put it in the mid teens for how much it costs them internally. And that's going down as they increase the reuse of the vehicle. Recently, they've launched their 20th, maybe 21st, use of a first-stage rocket. And as they can amortize the cost of the booster over a greater number of missions, that only helps them with their business case." //

SpaceX was founded as a launch company in 2002, first with the Falcon 1 and then the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets. But it is clear today that a significant portion of the company's revenue, if not a majority, comes from its Starlink satellite internet business. So is it still primarily a rocket company?

"I think today they're a satellite communications company," Henry said of SpaceX. "I think it's interesting that Stéphane Israël from Arianespace—in the early days, like 2015, 2016 when Starlink was just announced—would try to court customers and say, 'Do you want to fund your competitor?' And no one really took him seriously. Now people are taking him very seriously. [SpaceX is] the largest satellite operator in the world. They have literally more than doubled the number of consumer subscribers for satellite internet in the world.. This is a humongous, nearly unrivaled impact that they've had on the industry."

SpaceX demonstrated Thursday that its towering Super Heavy booster and Starship rocket might one day soon be recovered and reused in the manner Elon Musk has envisioned for the future of space exploration.

For the first time, both elements of the nearly 400-foot-tall (121-meter) rocket not only launched successfully from SpaceX's Starbase facility near Brownsville, Texas, but also came back to Earth for controlled splashdowns at sea. This demonstration is a forerunner to future Starship test flights that will bring the booster, and eventually the upper stage, back to land for reuse again and again.

The two-stage rocket took off from Starbase at 7:50 am CDT (12:50 UTC) and headed east over the Gulf of Mexico with more than 15 million pounds of thrust, roughly twice the power of NASA's Saturn V rocket from the Apollo lunar program of the 1960s and 1970s.

With the first three Starship launches, the FAA license required SpaceX conduct a mishap investigation with federal oversight if the rocket failed to reach its destination intact. The outcome of the last test flight—Starship's breakup over the Indian Ocean—triggered such an investigation by SpaceX. //

But this approach isn't congruent with SpaceX's roadmap for Starship development. SpaceX's iterative approach is rooted in test flights, where engineers learn what and what doesn't work, then try to quickly fix it and fly again. A crash, or two or three, is always possible, if not likely. The FAA is making an adjustment for this week's mission.

"As part of its request for license modification, SpaceX proposed three scenarios involving the Starship entry that would not require an investigation in the event of the loss of the vehicle," the FAA said in a statement.

Based on language in the code of federal regulations, the FAA has the option to approve these exceptions. The FAA accepted three possible outcomes for the upcoming Starship test flight that would not trigger what would likely be a months-long mishap investigation.

These exceptions include the failure of Starship's heat shield during reentry, if the ship's flap system is unable to provide sufficient control under high dynamic pressure, and the failure of the Raptor engine system during the landing burn. If one of these scenarios occurs, the FAA will not require a mishap investigation, provided there was no serious injury or fatality to anyone on the ground, no damage to unrelated property, and no debris outside designated hazard areas.

This change is quite significant for the FAA and SpaceX. It shows that federal regulators, suffering from staffing and funding shortages, are making moves to try and keep up with SpaceX's rapid, and often ever-changing, development of Starship.

"If a different anomaly occurs with the Starship vehicle, an investigation may be warranted, as well as if an anomaly occurs with the Super Heavy booster rocket," the FAA said. //

Bannerdog Ars Praetorian
8y
410
Only SpaceX can say, "not all of our rockets crash".
Hopefully someday, "none of our rockets crash*". //

taxythingy Ars Centurion
7y
397
Subscriptor

uhuznaa said:
Just using somewhat contaminated preburner exhaust for pressurization the oxygen tanks (hot oxygen with some steam and CO2 in it) would be much simpler and lighter though than having pure propellant go through heat exchangers first. Best part is no part and so on. It would be a quite typical approach for them.

At least all the valve and filter clogging in the last flight is hard to explain otherwise, where was all the ice coming from? Usually filters are just for protecting the engines (especially the pumps) from ingesting random debris ending up in the tanks but to have the filters of several engines clogged by ice there needs to be quite a lot of that. It's a mystery to me where all this ice came from. If you use clean oxygen for pressurization and purge the tanks with dry nitrogen before tanking there just should be no ice anywhere.

(They could tap hot methane off the nozzle cooling but there is no source for clean hot oxygen gas except using a dedicated heat exchanger just for that, and it seems the ice was in the oxygen tanks.)

The oxygen is super cooled to improve density and is getting close to the triple point (within 20K) at tank pressure, where solids can form. The general understanding is that solid O2 forms, probably at the liquid gas interface (boil off is cooling it further) and that then settles to the tank bottom as a slush. This is more likely to occur after the main burn when the tank is near empty.

On relight, that has to be filtered out, else it will either block the injectors or otherwise run rough.

The Shuttle had filters, but that was more for debris, if I remember correctly.

The main reason SpaceX chose a methane-fueled engine wasn't really about efficiency. Rather, it comes from a more practical consideration: methane is plentiful on Mars, which is the final destination of Starship. //

Like the BE-4, the Raptor uses a staged combustion scheme to achieve better fuel efficiency. However, the Raptor has a full-flow, twin-shaft configuration. This means the Raptor has double the number of pre-burners, each driving a single propellant pump. What SpaceX got out of this design is greater reliability and safety.

The downside is that the engine is also far more complicated to build. Thankfully, over the years, SpaceX has simplified and iterated on the engine with each hot-fire test. Today, the latest version of the Raptor (Raptor 3), isn't just cheaper than the first one, it also has nearly 50% the nominal thrust — increasing from 408,000 pound-force at sea level on the Raptor 1, to almost 593,000 pound-force on the Raptor 3. //

However, while the design of the BE-4 has remained largely unchanged since its conception point in 2011, the Raptor series has gotten to its third iteration. The Raptor 3 — the latest version — was a complete redesign of the engine to make it smaller, more streamlined, reliable, and most importantly, offering more thrust. The Raptor 3 can deliver up to 593,000 pound-force of thrust, making it by far the most powerful Methalox engine ever. With 33 Raptor cores powering the Super Heavy first stage of Starship, SpaceX's massive launch system can bring up to 330,000 pounds to orbit, dwarfing Vulcan's best by nearly five times. //

Efficiency is everything in rocketry, which is why specific impulse (Isp) is such a big deal in this field. Simply put, this number represents the amount of thrust an engine can generate when burning a certain amount of propellant over a set period — typically in seconds. The higher the Isp of a particular rocket engine, the more efficient it is since it can produce more thrust, while consuming less fuel.

According to measurements made by Everyday Astronaut, the Isp for the BE-4 sits at around 310 seconds, while the initial version of the Raptor goes up to 330 seconds. The 20-second difference may not sound like much for most of us, it's actually very important for a rocket engine.

Basically, when you attach the two engines to the same rocket, each carrying an equal amount of propellant, the Raptor will be able to burn for 20 extra seconds compared to the BE-4. //

There's also the matter of availability. SpaceX is churning out one Raptor engine core per day at their in-house manufacturing plant in McGregor, Texas. Meanwhile, the BE-4 has (infamously) encountered troubles during development and production, resulting in a four-year delay in the engine's launch. In fact, it was because of all the issues surrounding the BE-4 that ULA had to postpone the launch of their flagship Vulcan rocket several times. And since the Vulcan's maiden flight in January, it has been the only time the BE-4 has been used in a realistic launch mission so far.

As for the Raptor? It performed brilliantly in the last few tests of the Starship system.

Clearing blocked filters and clogged valves is the order of the day. //

SpaceX is targeting June 5 for the next flight of its massive Starship rocket, the company said Friday.

The highly anticipated test flight— the fourth in a program to bring Starship to operational readiness and make progress toward its eventual reuse—will seek to demonstrate the ability of the Super Heavy first stage to make a soft landing in the Gulf of Mexico and for the Starship upper stage to make a controlled reentry through Earth's atmosphere before it falls into the Indian Ocean. //

Glorified Desktop Support Ars Praetorian
5y
547.
jhodge said:

Valves are the devil's own devices, aren't they?

I'm very curious about the clogged filters

I'm going to guess air. Tanks aren't a vacuum when the LOX is pumped in (although they are perhaps flushed with an inert gas). Dry ice is warmer than LOX. There might be other avenues where air enters the system, and then you have dry ice slush that could clog filters.

NASA's senior leaders in human spaceflight gathered for a momentous meeting at the agency's headquarters in Washington, DC, almost exactly 10 years ago. //

Now, with the shuttle's retirement, these princely figures in the human spaceflight community were tasked with selecting a replacement vehicle to send astronauts to the orbiting laboratory.

Boeing was the easy favorite. The majority of engineers and other participants in the meeting argued that Boeing alone should win a contract worth billions of dollars to develop a crew capsule. Only toward the end did a few voices speak up in favor of a second contender, SpaceX. At the meeting's conclusion, NASA's chief of human spaceflight at the time, William Gerstenmaier, decided to hold off on making a final decision.

A few months later, NASA publicly announced its choice. Boeing would receive $4.2 billion to develop a "commercial crew" transportation system, and SpaceX would get $2.6 billion. It was not a total victory for Boeing, which had lobbied hard to win all of the funding. But the company still walked away with nearly two-thirds of the money and the widespread presumption that it would easily beat SpaceX to the space station.

The sense of triumph would prove to be fleeting. Boeing decisively lost the commercial crew space race, and it proved to be a very costly affair. //

So what happened? How did Boeing, the gold standard in human spaceflight for decades, fall so far behind on crew? This story, based largely on interviews with unnamed current and former employees of Boeing and contractors who worked on Starliner, attempts to provide some answers. //

The problem is that while a company might do something that unlocks a payment, the underlying work may not actually be complete. It's a bit like students copying homework assignments throughout the semester. They get good grades but haven't done all of the learning necessary to understand the material. This is only discovered during a final exam in class. Essentially, then, Boeing kept carrying technical debt forward so that additional work was lumped onto the final milestones.

Ultimately, the flight software team faced a reckoning during the initial test flight of Starliner in December 2019. //

The bottom line is that Boeing technically earned the flight software milestones in its commercial crew contract. But by not putting in the work for an end-to-end test of its software, the company failed its final exam. As a result, Boeing had to take the disastrously expensive step of flying a second uncrewed flight test, which it did in May 2022. //

All of Boeing's struggles with Starliner played out against a much larger backdrop of the company's misfortunes with its aviation business. Most notably, in October 2018 and March 2019, two crashes of the company's relatively new jet, the 737 MAX 8, killed 346 people. The jets were grounded for many months.

The institutional failures that led to these twin tragedies are well explained in a book by Peter Robison, Flying Blind. Robison covered Boeing as a reporter during its merger with McDonnell Douglas a quarter of a century ago and described how countless trends since then—stock buybacks, a focus on profits over research and development, importing leadership from McDonnell Douglas, moving away from engineers in key positions to MBAs, and much more led to Boeing's downfall.

It's estimated that, in addition to paying customers and the families of victims, the grounding of the 737 Max for nearly two years cost Boeing $20 billion since 2019. This critical loss of cash came just as Boeing's space division faced crunch time to complete work on Starliner.

There were so many other challenging issues, as well. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in the spring of 2020 occurred when Boeing was dealing with the fallout from all the software issues on Starliner's debut flight. Additionally, the pandemic accelerated the retirement of experienced engineers who had brought spaceflight experience from the shuttle program. Boeing's best people were focused on the aircraft crisis, and the experienced space hands were leaving.

So it was all a pretty titanic struggle. //

In hindsight, it seems obvious that the strain of operating in a fixed-price environment was the fundamental cause of many of Boeing's struggles with Starliner and similar government procurement programs—so much so that the company's Defense, Space, & Security division is unlikely to participate in fixed-price competitions any longer. In 2023, the company's chief executive said Boeing would "never do them again."

A Boeing spokesperson pushed back on the idea that the company would no longer compete for fixed-price contracts. However, the company believes such contracts must be used correctly, for mature products.

"Challenges arise when the fixed price acquisition approach is applied to serious technology development requirements, or when the requirements are not firmly and specifically defined resulting in trades that continue back and forth before a final design baseline is established," the spokesperson said. "A fixed price contract offers little flexibility for solving hard problems that are common in new product and capability development.". //

The surprise is not that Boeing lost to a more nimble competitor in the commercial space race. The surprise is that this lumbering company made it at all. For that, we should celebrate Starliner’s impending launch and the thousands of engineers and technicians who made it happen. ///

Except it still hasn't succeeded

A Rocket A Day Keeps the High Costs Away asks why it is, considering that the V2 cost about US$13,000 each (1945 dollars) and could be launched at rates approaching 100 a week, that today's launchers cost 1000 times as much. A market-oriented approach to overcome the current cost barrier to space development is suggested. //

September 27, 1993

There's a pretty general consensus that one of the greatest barriers to the exploration and development of space is the cost of launch to low earth orbit. The incessant and acrimonious arguments among partisans of the Shuttle, DC-*, NASP, TSTO, Big Dumb Boosters, bringing back the Saturn V, buying launches from the Russians and/or Chinese, or of developing exotic launch technologies (laser, electromagnetic, skyhook, etc.) conceal the common premise of all those who argue—that if we could launch payloads for a fraction of today's cost, perhaps at a tenth to a thousandth of today's rates of thousands of US$ per kilogram, then the frontier would open as the great railway to orbit supplanted the first generation wagon trains. The dispute is merely over which launch technology best achieves this goal.

Conventional wisdom as to why industry and government choose not to invest in this or that promising launch technology is that there aren't enough payloads to generate the volume to recoup the development cost and, in all likelihood, there never will be.

How much would it cost to find out if this is true? //

Consider the following mass-produced expendable rocket.

• Number manufactured: 6,240 //

These are actual figures for the first mass-produced rocket vehicle, the V-2 (A-4)—fifty years ago. //

... after the war U.S. intelligence expert T. P. Wright estimated that at full production, unconstrained by wartime shortages, the Mittelwerk plant could have produced 900 to 1000 V-2s per month.

One thousand rockets per month…fifty years ago. Think about that. ///

This is almost what SpaceX is doing with Falcon9, 30 years later...

SpaceX launches have become extremely routine. On Tuesday evening, SpaceX launched its 42nd rocket of the year, carrying yet another passel of Starlink satellites into orbit. Chances are, you didn't even notice.

All the same, the cumulative numbers are mind-boggling. SpaceX is now launching at a rate of one mission every 2.7 days this year. Consider that, from the mid-1980s through the 2010s, the record for the total number of launches worldwide in any given year was 129. This year alone, SpaceX is on pace for between 130 and 140 total launches.

But with Tuesday evening's mission, there was a singular number that stood out: 300. The Falcon family, which includes the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy boosters, recorded its 300th successful first-stage landing. //

Landing 300 rockets means SpaceX has preserved 2,700 Merlin rocket engines. //

Only a handful of rockets have ever launched more than 300 times, and they are all Russian. Several different Soyuz variants have launched over the years, with the Soyuz-U the all-time champion with 786 launches, followed by the Kosmos-3M booster with 445 launches and the Proton-K booster with 211 launches. //

Across all of its variants and dating back to its debut in 1966, the Soyuz rocket has launched more than 1,700 times. Nearly six decades on, it's still going, and the Soyuz will likely continue to fly a dozen missions or so per year for much of the rest of this decade, if not beyond. //

peterford Ars Praefectus
14y
3,643
Subscriptor++
"landing an orbital class rocket booster on boat is boring" is not something I thought I'd write.
I remember being super excited about the first! //

Lexomatic Ars Centurion
13y
241
Subscriptor++
Dje said:
Do we know what was the percentage of Falcon 9 launches dedicated exclusively to Starlink satellites?
During 2024 to date, 66% (27 of 40 production missions). The other 13 comprised four for NASA to the ISS (i.e., Commercial Cargo and Commercial Crew) and nine third-party (two USSF, one lunar lander, two rideshares with a total of 64 craft, and various commsats). The relative masses are 430 mt and >55 mt (the USSF masses are unknown).

Pretty much every day, SpaceX is either launching a rocket or rolling one out of the hangar to the launch pad. At this pace, SpaceX is redefining what is routine in the space industry, but the rapid-fire launch rate also means the company is continually breaking records, mostly its own.

Friday night's launch will break another one of those records. This first-stage booster, designated by the tail number B1062, has flown 19 times since its first flight in November 2020. The booster will now be the first in SpaceX's inventory to go for a 20th flight, breaking a tie with three other rockets as the company's fleet leader.

When SpaceX debuted the latest version of its Falcon 9 rocket, the Falcon 9 Block 5, officials said the reusable first stage could fly 10 times with minimal refurbishment and perhaps additional flights with a more extensive overhaul. Now, SpaceX is certifying Falcon 9 boosters for 40 flights.

This particular rocket has not undergone any extended maintenance or long-term grounding. It has flown an average of once every two months since debuting three-and-a-half years ago. So the 20-flight milestone SpaceX will achieve Friday night means this rocket has doubled its original design life and, at the same time, has reached the halfway point of its extended service life.

In its career, this booster has launched eight people and 530 spacecraft, mostly Starlinks. [260+ tons into orbit] //

Remarkably, this will be the sixth Falcon 9 launch in less than eight days, more flights than SpaceX's main US rival, United Launch Alliance, has launched in 17 months.

It will be the 38th Falcon 9 launch of the year and the 111th flight of a Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy rocket—the 114th launch by SpaceX overall—in the last 365 days. More than a third of SpaceX's Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy missions, a number that will stand at 332 after Friday night's flight, have launched in the past year.

SpaceX's third towering Starship rocket, standing some 397 feet (121 meters) tall and wider than the fuselage of a 747 jumbo jet, lifted off at 8:25 am CDT (13:25 UTC) Thursday from SpaceX's Starbase launch facility on the Texas Gulf Coast east of Brownsville. SpaceX delayed the liftoff time by nearly an hour and a half to wait for boats to clear out of restricted waters near the launch base. /)

Part rocket and part spacecraft, Starship is designed to launch up to 150 metric tons (330,000 pounds) of cargo into low-Earth orbit when SpaceX sets aside enough propellant to recover the booster and the ship. Flown in expendable mode, Starship could launch almost double that amount of payload mass to orbit, according to Musk. //

wagnerrp Ars Legatus Legionis
14y
24,910
Subscriptor
Hispalensis said:
Yes, I was thinking of a modified Starship with a detachable nose, so that you can use the two stage boost. I my mind today even with the partial success they have already validated something that looks awfully like an SLS, but in an order of magnitude faster development time.
SLS is a 1.5-stage rocket that carries Orion and ICPS to orbit (or nearly so). ICPS then has (nearly) its whole propellant capacity to get Orion to TLI. Starship is a 2-stage rocket, and by the time it makes orbit, it has already spent most of its propellant.

The first half of the rocket equation is specific impulse (exhaust velocity), which for which SLS wins. The second half of the rocket equation is mass ratio, and while SLS starts in orbit with a fresh second stage, Starship has already spent 6km/s getting there. Again, SLS wins. Starship couldn't even make it to TLI, possibly not even fully expended. But it's not supposed to. It's supposed to be an optionally 3-stage rocket, where Starship starts fresh and fully fueled in orbit after it has been refueled. It's a "distributed" third stage.

Apples to apples, one disposable SLS gets 80-100t to LEO, and one disposable Starship gets 250-300t to LEO. If you strapped a Dragon capsule on top, you would have 15t less that. Again apples to apples, one disposable SLS gets itself plus 25t of Orion to TLI (3km/s away), and five disposable Starships get itself plus 150t to the Lunar surface (6km/s away). If one were so inclined, they could develop a Lunar ascent stage to carry Orion and ESM all the way to Earth return, load it all up in a Starship, land it on the Moon, and still have over half the payload remaining for other hardware. //

wagnerrp Ars Legatus Legionis
14y
24,910
Subscriptor
Super3DPC said:
When payload bay doors moved to open, you can see a lot of outgassing of remaining air inside. Maybe this is why attitude control was lost and Starship can’t stop spinning. Maybe they just didn’t have enough control authority from their RCS to counter such massive amount of outgassing. There is more than 500 cubic meters of volume inside that payload bay.
Their only "RCS" is from venting ullage in the propellant tanks. It's not impossible that they starved the system, especially if they had to deal with a lot of unexpected thrust from the payload bay. RCS depletion would explain why they were unable to stabilize for the burn, or right themselves for re-entry. If pressure is sufficiently low, it may also be a structural concern, though it's doubtful they were in thick enough atmosphere to worry about buckling.

The third flight test aims to build on what we’ve learned from previous flights while attempting a number of ambitious objectives, including the successful ascent burn of both stages, opening and closing Starship’s payload door, a propellant transfer demonstration during the upper stage’s coast phase, the first ever re-light of a Raptor engine while in space, and a controlled reentry of Starship. It will also fly a new trajectory, with Starship targeted to splashdown in the Indian Ocean. This new flight path enables us to attempt new techniques like in-space engine burns while maximizing public safety.

Between Sunday night and Monday night, SpaceX teams in Texas, Florida, and California supervised three Falcon 9 rocket launches and completed a full dress rehearsal ahead of the next flight of the company's giant Starship launch vehicle.

This was a remarkable sequence of events, even for SpaceX, which has launched a mission at an average rate of once every three days since the start of the year. We've reported on this before, but it's worth reinforcing that no launch provider, commercial or government, has ever operated at this cadence.

SpaceX has previously had rockets on all four of its active launch pads. But what SpaceX accomplished over a 24-hour period was noteworthy. Engineers inside at least four control centers were actively overseeing spacecraft and rocket operations simultaneously. //

"Could you imagine if I had walked up to you five years ago and said our constraint to launch is launch pad availability?" said Matthew Dominick, the NASA commander of the Crew-8 mission. "You would have thought I was crazy, but we’re at a cool spot in spaceflight right now. We’ve got rockets competing for launch pads, so you’re not waiting on payloads. You’re not waiting on rockets. You’re waiting on launch pads now."

“Right now, we’re certified for five flights on Dragon, and we’re looking at extending that life out," said Steve Stich, NASA's commercial crew program manager. "I think the goal would be for SpaceX to say 15 flights of Dragon. We may not get there in every single system." //

This ship has spent 466 days in orbit, longer than any spacecraft designed to transport people to and from Earth. //

Space Shuttle Discovery launched more often, but time on station was much shorter. And those launches were vastly more expensive. Paying for a few extra Dragons is chump change compared to the billion dollars per Shuttle launch.

SpaceX has four human-rated Dragon spaceships, plus three Dragons designed for cargo missions. A fifth Crew Dragon is on track for completion later this year, and will probably make its first flight in early 2025, according to Stich. SpaceX officials have said this will be the final Crew Dragon spacecraft the company will build, and the fleet of five capsules will be enough to satisfy demand for Dragon missions until the next-generation Starship vehicle is ready to take over.

It will be at least several years, and possibly longer, until Starship is certified for human launches and landings. Until then, Dragons will continue launching on Falcon 9 rockets, even if some satellite missions shift to Starship.

SpaceX has flown some of its reusable Falcon 9 boosters as many as 19 times, nearly double the rocket's original life expectancy, and is looking at certifying Falcon 9s for as many as 40 launches and landings.

JohnDeL Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
8y
6,157
Subscriptor
The single bit requirement indicates that this was primarily an engineering mission and not a science one. The intent was to test out new technology and see how it might be improved for use on later science missions.

A great example of this is the Sojourner/Pathfinder mission. Sojourner's mission goals were to roll one meter and send back one image and last one sol on the surface. The nominal plan was for it to roll (IIRC) 10 meters, send back 100 images and APXS readings, and last 7 sols. What we got was 100 meters, more than a thousand readings and images, and a lifetime of 83 sols.

Thanks to Sojourner's work, we now have freakin' huge rovers on Mars that have lasted for a decade, rolled more than 30 km, and provided thousands of images and readings that have significantly improved our understanding of Mars.

We can expect the same sort of improvement from Odie's siblings when they finally make it to the Moon. Per aspera, ad astra!

Altemus said crises like this, and the loss of the range finders, happened over and over. "This mission kept throwing us alligators, and we would reduce these alligators to snapping turtles because they don't hurt as bad," he said.

If one assumes there is a 70 percent chance of recovering from any one of these crises but you have to address 11 different crises on the way to the Moon, the probability of mission success is less than 2 percent. //

In truth, NASA is thrilled with Intuitive Machines' performance. The aerospace industry at large understands what this company was up against and is celebrating its success. Most of the customers flying on Odysseus are getting the data they paid for.

The reality is that Intuitive Machines is a private company with about 250 people working on this lunar lander program. That's a small fraction of the resources that national space programs typically devote to these initiatives, and with all the data it has gathered, Intuitive Machines and its customers can be pretty confident that the company will stick the landing next time.

And there will be a next time, as the commercial lunar landers built by private companies in the United States cost about $100 million instead of the half-billion dollars the government would have spent on a specialized, one-time mission to the Moon.

Here's why I think this is a truly notable success. Consider the trials and turmoil that a similarly sized company called SpaceX went through 18 years ago as it worked toward the first launch of its first rocket, the Falcon 1. Rockets are hard, but so are spacecraft that must make a soft landing on the Moon. I would argue that a lunar lander like Odysseus is as complicated, if not more so, than a relatively simple booster like the Falcon 1. //

Unlike the initial Falcon 1, Odysseus flew all the way to the Moon on its very first time out and made a soft landing. It has been phoning home ever since, sending a rich stream of data. That's a pretty big win.