Kerbal Space Program is a computer game in which the player can build spacecraft, aircraft, and spaceplanes to their own design and use them on missions, both robotic and with crews, to explore the planetary system of the star Kerbol. The space program is conducted on behalf of the Kerbals, inhabitants of planet Kerbin, and the player manages the space program, advancing in technological capability, ambitiousness of missions, and size and skill of the kerbonaut corps. //

One thing which is certain is that after you've spent some time with Kerbal Space Program you will develop an intuition about orbital mechanics which few people, even authors of “hard” science fiction, have.

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).

There's just one catch... //

This would offer a competitive alternative to the Falcon 9—if it existed.

However, it does not. Back in 2020, Russian officials said Amur would debut in 2026. Recently, however, Borisov indicated that its debut would slip to 2028 or 2029. Anyone who follows the launch industry will well know what that means. Amur hardware does not exist, and all plans regarding its development are notional. It may well never exist.

Even assuming a debut by something like 2030, recall that it took SpaceX more than five years after the debut of the Falcon 9 to land a first stage rocket successfully. It took another five years for the company, which is known for moving fast, to begin reusing first stages frequently. Finally, it took 14 years for the first Falcon 9 rocket to be flown 20 times. So if Russia debuts the Amur vehicle in the next five years, we might, under the best of circumstances, expect Roscosmos to fly a stage 20 times by the mid-2040s. //

Shortly after the breakup of the Soviet Union, the Russian government approved the development of the Angara rocket in 1992. The first test flight did not happen until 2014, and as of earlier this month, it was still conducting test flights rather than carrying meaningful payloads into orbit.

So if it took Roscosmos three decades to design, build, and test the Angara rocket, which is fairly conventional, how long might it take to develop the more innovative Amur vehicle with a capacity for vertical landings and reuse? //

PatientZero Ars Centurion
7y
200
cervier said:

You mean the Soviet space program which benefited from talented people from OUTSIDE russia, like Ukraine?
Corrected, and you are very correct. Even Korolev (the only reason why the Soviet Union had a successful space program) was Ukrainian.

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.

Eric Berger

I've got a guilty secret that I can now share—I loved the Delta IV Heavy rocket.

No, I didn't love the price, which was preposterous, at times approaching $400 million. This precluded Delta from having any other customers than the US government. I didn't love the low flight rate, just 16 missions in 20 years. This prevented the rocket's operator, United Launch Alliance, from ever approaching anything remotely like efficient operations.

But there were two things I adored about the Delta IV Heavy rocket, which made its final launch on Tuesday. I loved watching it take flight. And I love that, warts and all, it demonstrated that private companies could develop a heavy lift rocket. The Delta booster, although the product of decades of traditional space development, offered a glimpse of the commercial launch future that we're living in today. //

The most metal of rockets
As in heavy metal rock concert, lots of pyrotechnics and sound!

Shlazzargh Ars Praetorian
8y
536
I think that the fact that you can point to a specific Falcon 9 rocket and say "This rocket has flown more times than all of the Delta IV Heavy's combined" says quite a bit about how our view on rockets and reusability have changed. The D4H is an amazing rocket that does the job well -- a now it is even easier to see what a shame it was to just throw all that work in the ocean after one time. //

Wickwick
To be a bit more fair, the Delta IV flew 45 (?) times. With side cores on the Heavy variant, that’s a total of 77 total cores. For the pre-SpaceX industry, that was a respectable number. //

melgross Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
21y
9,197
Subscriptor++
stdaro said:
the sad thing, to me, is the lack of vision from the venerable old space enterprises. They had the engineering skill and the resources to scale up space access like spaceX has, but were strip mined for profit by finance bros who just saw an opportunity to demand rent from the government for the accomplishments of their predecessors.

Had the D4H been developed and evolved over time, and especially if rocketdyne had made an attempt to scale up and reduce the cost of the rs-68, we could be seeing it competing with F9H and Atlas now, instead of being abandoned.

Boeing/ULA and rocketdyne had a 40 year head start on SpaceX, but somehow ended up with raptor being the better engine, and starship being the largest launcher to ever reach orbit.
It wasn’t that management stripped them. It was a different time, when NASA and other space agencies hated the very idea of independent companies competing with them. Even the Delta was really done in conjunction with the government. not until someone at NASA, a few years ago, I forget her name, convinced them to give a contract to SpaceX, did things change. //

normally butters Ars Praefectus
17y
4,935
Boeing designed the Decatur rocket factory to produce 50 Delta IV core stages per year. This was an audacious bet on the future of commercial launch demand. Soyuz/R-7 barely achieved those annual late rates at their Soviet-era peak. Now Delta IV is retired after fewer than 50 launches all-time, although over 50 cores were flown due to the triple-core Heavy configuration.

It would take another generation for Falcon 9 to meet and exceed the flight rates that Delta IV was envisioned to support. But when that finally happened in 2022, SpaceX did it with just 4 new F9 boosters. It's the much smaller upper stage that occupies most of the stage manufacturing floor space in Hawthorne.

Ultimately, I think Boeing was looking at the same market potential we see today: LEO comsats from the likes of Orbcomm, Globalstar, and Teledesic. But the business model for those companies collapsed across the board due to high costs and the dot-com bust. They needed launch costs lower than anybody could provide at the time, even ILS Proton, and frankly they probably had cost issues with the production of their satellites as well.

The tandem duo of F9 and Starlink cracked the chicken-and-egg problem, by using vertical integration to bootstrap the new market segment rather than anticipating others putting the remaining pieces in place. //

normally butters Ars Praefectus

I think it's important to understand that RS-68 was a prime example of the kind of vision you're describing. That's what happens when the venerable old space enterprises enthusiastically take on the challenge of developing a less expensive rocket engine. RS-68 was their vision of a highly-simplified replacement for the RS-25, sacrificing performance in pursuit of lower cost. The J-2X engine developed for the Ares rockets was over 70% heavier than than Apollo-era J-2 in pursuit of simpler manufacturing.

There was once a proposal for an RS-68R evolution with a regeneratively-cooled nozzle instead of ablative cooling. But regen isn't something that's easily bolted on to an existing engine, it would have been a dramatic redesign, and the redesign process would have been very expensive. It's difficult to pay Aerojet-Rocketdyne to make their engines cheaper without the amortized cost of the redesign exceeding the unit cost reduction. That's what happened with NASA's decision to fund RS-25E development. The amortized development costs actually made each engine more expensive than the older version.

Also note that when Delta IV was being conceived by McDonnell Douglas in the 1990s, post-Soviet Russia was offering phenomenal world-beating kerolox booster engines for extremely attractive prices, and that's what designs like Delta IV would be up against. Boeing was more interested in their stake in the commercial Sea Launch venture, based on the Russian/Ukrainian Zenit rocket, than their Air Force bid. It seemed foolish to invest in kerolox engine development when it would require billions of dollars and well over a decade to match what they could buy off the shelf for the aerospace equivalent of "dirt cheap."

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."

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.

So Shaw took the precautions available to him.

"When we got on orbit, I went down to the hatch on the side of the orbiter, and I padlocked the hatch control so that you could not open the hatch," Shaw said. "I mean, on the orbiter on orbit you can go down there and you just flip this little thing and you crank that handle once, the hatch opens and all the air goes out and everybody goes out with it, just like that. And I thought to myself, 'Jeez, I don’t know this guy very well. He might flip out or something.' So I padlocked the hatch shut right after we got on orbit, and I didn’t take the padlock off until we were in de-orbit prep." //

After the Space Shuttle Challenger accident in 1986, the focus of the Shuttle program shifted somewhat, and NASA started flying fewer payload specialists. Those who flew came to be considered more a part of the crew and were met with less suspicion. According to some Space Shuttle astronauts, the lock was used less and less often. The final payload specialist to fly on the Shuttle was Ilan Ramon, the first Israeli astronaut. He died, of course, in the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003, when the vehicle broke up in the atmosphere during its return to Earth.

Although much of the concern for Shuttle commanders had come from flying non-professional astronauts, there was another incident later in the program with an all-professional crew that revived interest in the padlock program. It occurred during a 1999 flight. Because I have not been able to confirm the details with multiple sources, I won't name the astronaut or the mission. But essentially, a multiple-time flier had a bad reaction to some medicine he took after the launch. This seriously affected his mental state, and the astronaut had to be physically restrained from taking drastic action, including opening the hatch. //

This all may seem like a bit of historical trivia, but the issue lives on today. The Space Shuttle has been retired for 13 years, but the padlock remains in the fabric of US spaceflight with Crew Dragon. A commander's lock is an option for NASA's crews flying to the International Space Station on Crew Dragon, as well as private missions. //

That such incidents don't happen more often in commercial aviation may give us some comfort, but in reality, there have been many attempts by passengers to open an emergency exit door in flight. (Fortunately, it's almost impossible at cruising altitudes). And given that it has happened with two people out of the approximately 650 who have gone to space, it suggests the odds are non-negligible.

Nield concluded his note to me with a request. "Let me know," he said, "if you have any thoughts on how to mitigate the risks."

I wish I did. //

jeremyp66 Ars Scholae Palatinae 7y 811

YetAnotherBoris said:
The solution is obvious in this age of AI: automate all hatches, and put a computer exclusively in charge of activating them. The computer will be in turn controlled by a totally stable and reliable AI, with which the crew can communicate via voice interface.

Bonus points if it's called HAL...

The Hatch AI Lock

Sometimes, success has unforeseen consequences. The United States Space Force and Air Force (and NASA) have, in essence, decided they will simply procure space launch as a service from SpaceX. This isn’t an actual decision but is nevertheless true enough, as it has become the default situation. Cost and availability — the comparative ease of getting a launch slot — have resulted in tremendous business success for SpaceX.

An unforeseen consequence of this success is that the Space Force, the Air Force, and NASA have deprioritized rocket research and development efforts that would foster continued independent space access. Some programmatic officers would suggest there is no need for the government to continue to pursue rocket science. SpaceX is doing the required R&D, so why spend money on anything other than what’s needed for deep space? ///

Where is the basic research that NASA (or anyone on earth) was doing to make it possible for boosters to land and be reused? SpaceX are the only ones in the history of space to dare think of the concept, much less try to develop it...

Government R&D?

There were 96 flights of SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets, plus the first two test flights of the enormous new Starship rocket. In 2024, SpaceX said it aims for more than 140 launches of the Falcon rocket family. There may be up to 10 Starship test flights this year, according to the NASA official who manages the agency's contract with SpaceX to develop Starship into a human-rated Moon lander.

The Falcon 9 rocket that launched NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken on SpaceX's first crew mission in 2020 launched and landed for the 19th and final time just before Christmas, then tipped over on its recovery ship during the trip back to Cape Canaveral, Florida.

This particular booster, known by the tail number B1058, was special among SpaceX's fleet of reusable rockets. It was the fleet leader, having tallied 19 missions over the course of more than three-and-a-half years. More importantly, it was the rocket that thundered into space on May 30, 2020, on a flight that made history on several counts.

It was the first time a commercial rocket and spacecraft launched people into orbit, and ended a nine-year gap in America's ability to send astronauts into orbit from US soil, following the retirement of the space shuttle. This mission, known as Demo-2 and launched by SpaceX under contract with NASA, ended US reliance on Russian rockets to send crews to the International Space Station. //

Hurley told Ars he would like to see the booster's remains displayed in a museum alongside the Crew Dragon spacecraft (named Endeavour) he and Behnken flew in 2020. "In a perfect world, I’d love to see Endeavour and at least now part of that booster in the Smithsonian or in a museum somewhere," he said. //

Early on December 25, the booster tipped over on the drone ship due to high winds and waves, SpaceX said. This rocket, which was built nearly five years ago, didn't have SpaceX's newest design of landing legs, which can self-level to prevent toppling at sea. //

A day later, the drone ship sailed into Port Canaveral, just south of SpaceX's launch pads, with the rocket's wreckage on the deck. The upper two-thirds of the booster, comprising its liquid oxygen tank, was missing, presumably left to sink to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. The remaining parts of the rocket were badly mangled, with bent landing legs and buckled engine nozzles.

Depending on how you count them, this booster launched nearly 870 satellites, mostly Starlinks, plus Hurley and Behnken on the Crew Dragon Demo-2 mission. It lofted more than 260 metric tons of payload into orbit. Its 19 flights match the number of missions SpaceX's chief US competitor, United Launch Alliance, has launched since May 30, 2020. //

"We are planning to salvage the engines and do life-leader inspections on the remaining hardware," he wrote on X. "There is still quite a bit of value in this booster. We will not let it go to waste."

1966: Atlas-Agena & Titan-Gemini ~ 1h 40m apart (4x)

This was the shortest time between orbital launches at Cape Canaveral since 1966. //

It seems like SpaceX did everything this year but launch 100 times.

On Thursday night, the launch company sent two more rockets into orbit from Florida. One was a Falcon Heavy, the world's most powerful rocket in commercial service, carrying the US military's X-37B spaceplane from a launch pad at NASA's Kennedy Space Center at 8:07 pm EST (01:07 UTC). Less than three hours later, at 11:01 pm EST (04:01 UTC), SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9 launcher took off a few miles to the south with a payload of 23 Starlink Internet satellites.

The Falcon Heavy's two side boosters and the Falcon 9's first stage landed back on Earth for reuse. //

These were SpaceX's final launches of 2023. SpaceX ends the year with 98 flights, including 91 Falcon 9s, five Falcon Heavy rockets, and two test launches of the giant new Super Heavy-Starship rocket. These flights were spread across four launch pads in Florida, California, and Texas. //

It's important to step back and put these numbers in context. No other family of orbit-class rockets has ever flown more than 63 times in a year. SpaceX's Falcon rockets have now exceeded this number by roughly 50 percent. SpaceX's competitors in the United States, such as United Launch Alliance and Rocket Lab, managed far fewer flights in 2023. ULA had three missions, and Rocket Lab launched its small Electron booster 10 times.

Nearly two-thirds of SpaceX's missions this year were dedicated to delivering satellites to orbit for SpaceX's Starlink broadband network, a constellation that now numbers more than 5,000 spacecraft. //

As if these statistics weren't enough, SpaceX closed out the year by, yes, setting yet another record. The back to back launches Thursday night took off 2 hours and 54 minutes apart, the shortest turnaround between two SpaceX flights in the company's history. It also set a modern era record at Cape Canaveral, Florida, with the shortest span between two orbital-class launches there since 1966. The Florida spaceport was the departure point for 72 orbital-class rockets in 2023, also an unprecedented level of launch activity there.

SpaceX looks poised to set more records next year. In 2024, SpaceX aims for an average of a dozen launches per month, for a total of 144 rocket flights. The company will get out of the starting blocks early in the new year, with two Falcon 9 launches slated for January 2 and 3.

whatthehand • 1 day ago • Edited 1 day ago

Seriously. It seems like contemporary space (more specifically spacex) fans talk about reusing rockets as if this is like reusing towels or something.

For the reasons you mention and more, reuse has got very limited use at best. And until we see a series of audited financials that dig deep down into specific areas of their business, we can't even confirm the supposedly game-changing economics of it all. Spacelaunch is about as niche of a task as there could be. It's not analogous to reusing towels or toothbrushes or cars or even airplanes. ...
...
From the layperson all the way to NASA, which itself so clearly seemed to doubt their choice even within their own initial selection statement for HLS. Even u/MrPennywhistle in his ever optimistic and infectious enthusiasm helped inadvertently spread a really bizarre belief that has since taken on a new life in popular space discourse: mainly, the strange understanding that there's somehow more to be learned by rapidly, carelessly, prematurely and DELIBERATELY destroying hugely expensive and underdeveloped test-articles. I think it was following AMOS-6 and what he meant to communicate was that having a failure prior to your main mission is a saving grace to be taken advantage of: that there's much to be learned when things go kaboom by accident. Instead it's become a thing where people literally cheer their lungs out when they see a fractional prototype of a giant and expensive craft (that Artemis is desperately banking on) fail catastrophically and tear itself into a million pieces right before their eyes because "tHeReS sO mUcH DaTa! ... //

LukeNukeEm243 • [10 hr. ago][1] • Edited 10 hr. ago
The hit to payload because of reuse isn't much of an issue because you can design the rocket to be as big as you need in order to get the payload into its desired orbit. Sure, it results in a larger, more complex rocket for the same mass of payload, however you won't have to throw the entire thing away after one mission, which will result in lower costs.

SpaceX has hit their aspirational goal of 10 reuses per booster with Falcon 9 and they are continuing beyond it. Their most used boosters have been used 17 or 18 times. They have reused 39 boosters to date, for a total combined 251 landings. Right now they have a successful landing streak of more than 116 since 2021.

This year they have launched only 4 new boosters, the other 81 launches used previously-flown boosters. Similar story for last year when they only launched 4 new boosters, while launching 56 times with reused boosters. For comparison, ULA has so far launched only 3 times this year, and 8 times last year.

SpaceX is operating on an entirely different level than the rest of the launch providers. [They are launching more mass per quarter than the rest of the world combined][2]. Is it a coincidence that they just so happen to be the only launch provider doing reuse at the moment?

As for destructive testing, it is their preferred method because it allows for changes to be made more easily and they can find unknown flaws quicker. They could spend years developing and reviewing the design of Starship so that it would likely work perfectly on the 1st time like SLS. Or they could test the design they have, see what goes wrong with it, and then make improvements to the problem areas for next time. Also these prototypes are way cheaper than an operational rocket like SLS which costs like $2.1 billion alone to launch. I mean, SpaceX is only going to get about $3 billion total from NASA for the first lunar lander and its development. That money is spread out across all the various development milestones. The fixed-price contract incentivizes SpaceX to work efficiently with both their time and money.

And the reason the SpaceX employees and fans cheer during test launches is because the prototypes are: 1- very cool to see (it's like Kerbal Space Program in real life) and 2- they show visible signs of progress. IFT1 tested the launch infrastructure, the quick disconnects were successful and the rocket made it past the tower, SuperHeavy had never flown before that. IFT2 demonstrated even more progress with the deluge system protecting the pad, all engines running nominally through to the hotstage separation, and Starship almost making it to its intended trajectory.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/SmarterEveryDay/comments/189vh8h/comment/kbzgf6h/

[2] https://twitter.com/BryceSpaceTech/status/1720153323393663411

Amazon announced Friday that it has purchased three Falcon 9 rocket launches from SpaceX beginning in mid-2025 to help deploy the retail giant's network of Kuiper Internet satellites. //

Last year, Amazon bought up most of the Western world's excess launch capacity from everyone but SpaceX, securing 68 rocket flights from United Launch Alliance, Arianespace, and Blue Origin to deploy thousands of satellites for the Kuiper broadband network. Amazon previously contracted with ULA for nine Atlas V launches to support the initial series of Kuiper launches, the first of which lifted off in October with Amazon's first two Kuiper prototype satellites. More Atlas Vs will start launching operational Kuiper satellites next year. //

Amazon is helping to fund a big expansion in ULA's footprint at its Florida launch base, an effort that will double the ULA's launch capacity. The investment to fund the growth in ULA's capability to support Kuiper launches totals about $2 billion, with around $500 million going toward upgrades at Cape Canaveral.

Those upgrades include the outfitting of a second vertical hangar and a second mobile launch platform for Vulcan rockets, alongside the integration facility and launch table already built to support the first few Vulcan missions. Having dual lanes for launch processing in Florida will allow ULA to fly as many as 25 Vulcan rockets per year, the company says.

ULA and its subcontractors are also expanding factory space at locations around the country to produce more Vulcan engines, solid rocket boosters, and payload fairings for the Kuiper missions.

Amazon and ULA officials hope these investments will spare the Vulcan rocket from the growing pains experienced by other launch vehicles as they enter service. For example, it took 31 months for the Atlas V rocket to reach its fifth flight in the early 2000s. A decade ago, SpaceX's Falcon 9 made its fifth flight 33 months after its inaugural launch.

That won't do if Amazon is going to deploy more than 1,600 Kuiper satellites by mid-2026.

During Artemis I, NASA’s new mega Moon rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS), roared into the night sky and sent the Orion spacecraft on a 1.4-million-mile journey beyond the Moon and back. //

The spacecraft reached a maximum distance from Earth when it was 268,563 miles away from our home planet. Orion surpassed the record for distance traveled by a spacecraft designed to carry humans, previously set during Apollo 13.

A close up view of the Orion in space. The orange spacesuit on Commander Moonikin Campos can be seen through one of the crew module's windows. The American flag on the body of the crew module and red NASA lettering can also be seen.

A camera mounted on one of Orion’s solar array wings captured a close up image of the crew module.

Starship Flight Test 2
November 18, 2023, at 7:02 a.m. — SpaceX's Starship launches on its second fully-integrated flight test from the orbital launch pad at Starbase in Texas. The rocket successfully reached stage separation under the power of 33 Raptor engines on the Super Heavy booster, with the new hot-staging separation method a success! Starship made it to space and was later terminated, while the Super Heavy booster experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly shortly after stage separation.