SpaceX And/Or Rocketry In General

SpaceFlight Now has a Falcon nine for sometime this month from Vandenberg, Iridium satellites. These will be polar orientation @ LEO. Here's hoping! :-)

Cheers, Mike.

An Iridium twitter has Dec 16 for the Falcon 9 @ Vandenberg.

So I guess in the end was the enthalpy component of the Gibbs here ie. the energy to drive the reaction is the pressure differential either side of the COPV shell initially at least with constant volume. The solid oxygen caused the shell rupture .... just goes to show that Gibbs certainly applies in low temperature/entropy scenarios. Actually Einstein ranked Gibbs second to Lorentz when he was asked in later life who were the smartest physicists during his career.

FWIW : It seems that SpaceX's launch customers have been privy to the full data/analysis on the COPV issue. This involvement was from the get-go of the investigation. I think such transparency is both quite brave and clever business. You don't see that sort of approach very often. To my knowledge there have been no withdrawals from the manifest. If that is true then I think simple honesty has been a major reason in maintaining customer confidence. Such I think contributes to the 'market disruptor' legend that is building around Elon and his enterprises. In a traditional commercial sense he is behaving rather anti-intuitively and many can't cope with that.

{ An important advantage he has is not having a gaggle of public/random investors to satisfy with SpaceX. So I don't feel so bad now about not having access to shareholdings. If it works better this way then more power to him. }

Cheers, Mike

Ah, these Iridium satellites are made of LEGO :

Cheers, Mike.

While SpaceFlight Now still shows a Falcon 9 Vandenburg launch of Iridium satellites on December 16, 2016, other sources I trust say the soonest possible has been pushed out into January 2017.

From SpaceX itself this comment "We are finalizing the investigation into our September 1 anomaly and are working to complete the final steps necessary to safely and reliably return to flight, now in early January with the launch of Iridium-1. This allows for additional time to close-out vehicle preparations and complete extended testing to help ensure the highest possible level of mission assurance prior to launch."