I do believe that Elon's tweet specifically asserted it was ready to be _fired_ again. Headline writers in more than one place transmuted that to being ready to _fly_ again, which is quite a different thing.
While the Shuttle was nominally a 100-flight bird, more than one important part was rated for considerably less. SSMEs (Space Shuttle Main Engines) in particular I think were only expected to be good for about ten cycles. (after I wrote that, I looked around, and found an assertion that they tried for 55, and in real life actually ran one 15 times)
I hope someone asks Elon (who might answer--his staff are far too well-trained to spill the beans) how many cycles he thinks the current engines are good for. (with more looking around, I found a claim of 40).
Unless they are hopelessly gold-plated, I believe the correct answer to be a very great deal less than 100. That is one of several reasons I think his assertion that re-use leads right on to factor of a hundred launch cost reduction is poppycock if one prices the refurbishment effort anywhere near the truth. But, suppose it is just a factor of two. That would still be quite splendid. SpaceX is already giving the rest of the industry serious heartburn with a price structure that, so far as I know, does not count on re-use. And even a gloomy Gus such as I might grant some upside to, say, a factor of five, which would be splentastic.
Ah yes, the most failures of equipment happen within the first X of use. Those are the manufacturing defects. The other end of life events are related to erosion/corrosion/metal fatigue/etc events.
As to engine failure, catastrophic failure, is catastrophic. A several pound fuel turbine pump blade separating from a shaft and leaving its housing at high mach isn't likely to be stopped easily. To carry enough shielding to do so and the rocket wouldn't have enough thrust to get off the ground. Also there is the issue of the almost instantaneous loss of thrust and the load factors that puts on the rest of the rocket structure. A normal engine failure/abort (controlled shutdown) will allow a second or two of throttle down, loading the rocket structure slowly. A catastrophic one likely bends some support member leading to another catastrophic event.
I think this is why a solid rocket escape system is the first choice. Have a computer monitor flight. It likely can sense an impending failure before the big kaboom and get the crew capsule out of the blast radius.
Thanks, even for the portions of the flight I'd seen before, that version uses camera angles new to me in many cases. A couple of the landing viewpoints in particular were vivid.
Be sure to bump the resolution up from default. Maybe not all the way to 4K, but most of the footage is good at well above the default.
Thanks for posting. I can never get enough of the launch/return sequence or the exuberance of these young engineers. I had not seen this closeup footage of the engines during landing phase in other videos.
I like that footage alot. That Falcon landing is ( as such things can be compared across historical times ) on a definite par with that prior Eagle landing.
If you look quite closely at the last two seconds before engine shut off on landing it has that ( now inverse ) exponential thrust character that liftoff has. Indeed running the clip backwards you could see that better. Of course it is not truly time symmetric because of how fuel status changes, as rockets typically don't suck the gases back in and recreate separated fuel flows ! My point being this 'hover slam' manoeuvre is a sort of reverse take off in the kinematics at least. :-)
There is only a brief shot of Elon which I reckon is deliberate. I'd guess and say the reason why he's keeping that Falcon in memoriam is as much for his own team as the rest of us. He has always spoken of collecting great people together to do great things so that short clip was a celebration of his SpaceX team. After all they have come back from zero to hero in pretty short time. Elon is a very clever guy and I feel is smart enough to realise that he needs a very clever team. Mind you I have never met the guy but he seems about as ego-less as one can be, in comparison to others of similiar intellectual calibre.
Quote:
I think this is why a solid rocket escape system is the first choice. Have a computer monitor flight. It likely can sense an impending failure before the big kaboom and get the crew capsule out of the blast radius.
Interesting point - about the computer control I mean. Much the same question was asked in the 60's with Gemini etc. I think it was Wally Schirra who held off from punching out on the pad when one of the Gemini's didn't light up at zero count. He felt no upward motion and deduced that re-settle & topple was unlikely. With the equipment of the day ( quite crappy crash couches for a bumpy land return ) that was the right call for safety. But times change ....
Wally Schirra was an outstanding pilot ( Navy aviator originally ) who ultimately retired because he lost faith in NASA with the White/Chaffee/Grissom deaths. While another excuse was made at the time, he later made comments indicating that it didn't seem that the pilots were seeing eye to eye with flight managers.
Cheers, Mike.
I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...
... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal
Very recently the current west coast drone ship (aka ASDS) built over the hull of Marmac 303 has been getting a refreshed deck paint job, which among other things reveals that it has inherited the Just Read the Instructions name.
Here is a link to an image apparently taken today while the painting was partially complete:
The west coast drone ship, a propelling tug, and one or more other support vessels are reported in motion having left the port of Los Angeles and heading toward the expected F9 landing site for this mission.
People reading various marine forecasts are suggesting swells at landing time in very roughly the ten foot range, which apparently is not unusually bad at all for the area--so for this concept to work much the scheme needs to work at that condition.
I've not spotted a teaser for video of the Jason 3 launch yet, but Wired asserts that NASA Livestream will carry it starting almost an hour before launch.
Multiple sources give the scheduled launch time as 10:42:18 a.m. PST, January 17, 2016, which would be 18:42 UTC. Sadly I'll be otherwise engaged.
In case of delay, there is an alternate time for the next day eleven minutes earlier. Current weather forecasts actually make that look rather worse, so let us hope for a Sunday launch and recovery.
I do believe that Elon's
)
I do believe that Elon's tweet specifically asserted it was ready to be _fired_ again. Headline writers in more than one place transmuted that to being ready to _fly_ again, which is quite a different thing.
While the Shuttle was nominally a 100-flight bird, more than one important part was rated for considerably less. SSMEs (Space Shuttle Main Engines) in particular I think were only expected to be good for about ten cycles. (after I wrote that, I looked around, and found an assertion that they tried for 55, and in real life actually ran one 15 times)
I hope someone asks Elon (who might answer--his staff are far too well-trained to spill the beans) how many cycles he thinks the current engines are good for. (with more looking around, I found a claim of 40).
Unless they are hopelessly gold-plated, I believe the correct answer to be a very great deal less than 100. That is one of several reasons I think his assertion that re-use leads right on to factor of a hundred launch cost reduction is poppycock if one prices the refurbishment effort anywhere near the truth. But, suppose it is just a factor of two. That would still be quite splendid. SpaceX is already giving the rest of the industry serious heartburn with a price structure that, so far as I know, does not count on re-use. And even a gloomy Gus such as I might grant some upside to, say, a factor of five, which would be splentastic.
Ah yes, the most failures of
)
Ah yes, the most failures of equipment happen within the first X of use. Those are the manufacturing defects. The other end of life events are related to erosion/corrosion/metal fatigue/etc events.
As to engine failure, catastrophic failure, is catastrophic. A several pound fuel turbine pump blade separating from a shaft and leaving its housing at high mach isn't likely to be stopped easily. To carry enough shielding to do so and the rocket wouldn't have enough thrust to get off the ground. Also there is the issue of the almost instantaneous loss of thrust and the load factors that puts on the rest of the rocket structure. A normal engine failure/abort (controlled shutdown) will allow a second or two of throttle down, loading the rocket structure slowly. A catastrophic one likely bends some support member leading to another catastrophic event.
I think this is why a solid rocket escape system is the first choice. Have a computer monitor flight. It likely can sense an impending failure before the big kaboom and get the crew capsule out of the blast radius.
There's just been a
)
There's just been a successful full duration static fire for the Jason-3 payload launch @ Vandenberg.
@ Gary : I was thinking of the aerospike ( where did that go ? ), but as you say that still needs a turbine.
Cheers, Mike.
I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...
... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal
Some new footage "The Falcon
)
Some new footage "The Falcon has landed" | Recap of Falcon 9 launch and landing
RE: Some new
)
Thanks, even for the portions of the flight I'd seen before, that version uses camera angles new to me in many cases. A couple of the landing viewpoints in particular were vivid.
Be sure to bump the resolution up from default. Maybe not all the way to 4K, but most of the footage is good at well above the default.
RE: Some new
)
Thanks for posting. I can never get enough of the launch/return sequence or the exuberance of these young engineers. I had not seen this closeup footage of the engines during landing phase in other videos.
I like that footage alot.
)
I like that footage alot. That Falcon landing is ( as such things can be compared across historical times ) on a definite par with that prior Eagle landing.
If you look quite closely at the last two seconds before engine shut off on landing it has that ( now inverse ) exponential thrust character that liftoff has. Indeed running the clip backwards you could see that better. Of course it is not truly time symmetric because of how fuel status changes, as rockets typically don't suck the gases back in and recreate separated fuel flows ! My point being this 'hover slam' manoeuvre is a sort of reverse take off in the kinematics at least. :-)
There is only a brief shot of Elon which I reckon is deliberate. I'd guess and say the reason why he's keeping that Falcon in memoriam is as much for his own team as the rest of us. He has always spoken of collecting great people together to do great things so that short clip was a celebration of his SpaceX team. After all they have come back from zero to hero in pretty short time. Elon is a very clever guy and I feel is smart enough to realise that he needs a very clever team. Mind you I have never met the guy but he seems about as ego-less as one can be, in comparison to others of similiar intellectual calibre.
Interesting point - about the computer control I mean. Much the same question was asked in the 60's with Gemini etc. I think it was Wally Schirra who held off from punching out on the pad when one of the Gemini's didn't light up at zero count. He felt no upward motion and deduced that re-settle & topple was unlikely. With the equipment of the day ( quite crappy crash couches for a bumpy land return ) that was the right call for safety. But times change ....
Wally Schirra was an outstanding pilot ( Navy aviator originally ) who ultimately retired because he lost faith in NASA with the White/Chaffee/Grissom deaths. While another excuse was made at the time, he later made comments indicating that it didn't seem that the pilots were seeing eye to eye with flight managers.
Cheers, Mike.
I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...
... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal
Very recently the current
)
Very recently the current west coast drone ship (aka ASDS) built over the hull of Marmac 303 has been getting a refreshed deck paint job, which among other things reveals that it has inherited the Just Read the Instructions name.
Here is a link to an image apparently taken today while the painting was partially complete:
JRTI mark II
The west coast drone ship, a
)
The west coast drone ship, a propelling tug, and one or more other support vessels are reported in motion having left the port of Los Angeles and heading toward the expected F9 landing site for this mission.
People reading various marine forecasts are suggesting swells at landing time in very roughly the ten foot range, which apparently is not unusually bad at all for the area--so for this concept to work much the scheme needs to work at that condition.
I've not spotted a teaser for
)
I've not spotted a teaser for video of the Jason 3 launch yet, but Wired asserts that NASA Livestream will carry it starting almost an hour before launch.
Multiple sources give the scheduled launch time as 10:42:18 a.m. PST, January 17, 2016, which would be 18:42 UTC. Sadly I'll be otherwise engaged.
In case of delay, there is an alternate time for the next day eleven minutes earlier. Current weather forecasts actually make that look rather worse, so let us hope for a Sunday launch and recovery.