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Re: SpaceX

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I like how the astronauts take a Tesla to the launch pad. :) Hope Dragon aces its in-flight abort test.
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Re: SpaceX

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SpaceX's launch abort test came off flawlessly. Next up comes Demo 2, which will fly two astronauts to ISS for a two-week stay and return. Assuming that goes well, it's operational.

Now there's a bit of politicking over whether SpaceX or Boeing will be first. Boeing's Demo 1 mission failed to rendezvous with ISS, so it hinges on whether NASA will require a do-over, or call that flight "close enough." (It wasn't a critical failure, and the anomaly could've been easily remedied if crew had been aboard.) Boeing and NASA have a longstanding sweetheart relationship, so don't be too surprised if a Starliner takes passengers to ISS before a Crew Dragon does, even though (IMO) that honor properly belongs to SpaceX.
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Re: SpaceX

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Re: SpaceX

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Wow that little shit really took off.
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Re: SpaceX

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Daehawk wrote:Wow that little shit really took off.
According to the press conference after today's test, this was only around 3 gs, while Dragon can go up to 6ish. There's significantly more shit in reserve.

Another neat tidbit that came out is that the time from an anomaly being detected and Dragon getting the hell out of Dodge is about 700 ms. And that Dragon is designed to survive a theoretical Falcon fireball even if it doesn't get away in time to avoid the fireball.
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Re: SpaceX

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Zaxxon wrote: Sun Jan 19, 2020 5:33 pm
Daehawk wrote:Wow that little shit really took off.
According to the press conference after today's test, this was only around 3 gs, while Dragon can go up to 6ish. There's significantly more shit in reserve.

Another neat tidbit that came out is that the time from an anomaly being detected and Dragon getting the hell out of Dodge is about 700 ms. And that Dragon is designed to survive a theoretical Falcon fireball even if it doesn't get away in time to avoid the fireball.
Speaking of fireballs, it's funny that that gif ends before the RUD of the Falcon 9 booster caused by the departure of the aerodynamic capsule.

Edit: A lot of the news coverage I've seen made it seem that SpaceX commanded the destruction of the booster. That was just a side-effect of the fact that the capsule left and that the booster lost attitude control when the capsule commanded it to shut down its engines.

Scott Manley's video has a good image of the capsule leaving, then the booster exploding, with another part (maybe the second stage) flying off to the right.

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Re: SpaceX

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I've seen some imagery where it looks to me like the rocket turned orthogonal to direction of travel. I dont know if that was a guidance failure or not. It probably stressed a seal or full on split it and all that fuel ignited. Still it was a very good test by SpaceX. This is a big step forward for a human-rated launch to orbit/ISS capability. Pretty awesome.
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Re: SpaceX

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malchior wrote: Mon Jan 20, 2020 3:24 pm I've seen some imagery where it looks to me like the rocket turned orthogonal to direction of travel. I dont know if that was a guidance failure or not. It probably stressed a seal or full on split it and all that fuel ignited. Still it was a very good test by SpaceX. This is a big step forward for a human-rated launch to orbit/ISS capability. Pretty awesome.
SpaceX actually wanted it to go boom-boom so as to burn up the remaining fuel rather than having it end up in the ocean.

Agreed, this test seems to have gone flawlessly based on SpaceX and NASA comments afterward. The Dragon did land a few seconds earlier than anticipated, so I'm not sure whether that's an issue or not. I guess we'll know more in a month or so.

In other SpaceX news, they static-fired the Falcon 9 for the next Starlink mission, which is this week (!). No rest for the weary this year, it seems.
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Re: SpaceX

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malchior wrote: Mon Jan 20, 2020 3:24 pm I've seen some imagery where it looks to me like the rocket turned orthogonal to direction of travel. I dont know if that was a guidance failure or not. It probably stressed a seal or full on split it and all that fuel ignited. Still it was a very good test by SpaceX. This is a big step forward for a human-rated launch to orbit/ISS capability. Pretty awesome.
From the press conferences, the capsule chose when to release from the booster and when it released, the booster lost it's guidance. It did eventually turn against it's flight direction and was ripped apart (well, the second stage actually appears to have made it to the ocean surface where it blew up).
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Re: SpaceX

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In recent years I've been hearing about either Space X or NASA putting astronauts into orbit around the moon in 2021 or 2022. Is that still in the plans?
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Re: SpaceX

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Also, apparently the Dragon trunk did well, too. To my knowledge, they have not planned to re-use the trunk, although perhaps they will given this...


Apollo wrote: Mon Jan 20, 2020 3:33 pm In recent years I've been hearing about either Space X or NASA putting astronauts into orbit around the moon in 2021 or 2022. Is that still in the plans?
SpaceX is targeting 2023. NASA 2024
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Re: SpaceX

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Hrdina wrote: Mon Jan 20, 2020 12:42 am

Scott Manley's video has a good image of the capsule leaving, then the booster exploding, with another part (maybe the second stage) flying off to the right.
I expected to see more Kerbals in that video.
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Re: SpaceX

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Zaxxon wrote: Mon Jan 20, 2020 3:35 pm SpaceX is targeting 2023. NASA 2024
SpaceX has a fairly good chance of reaching that date if they can achieve orbit with Starship next year, as planned. NASA will not hit their goal without a major budget increase that's unlikely to come through.
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Re: SpaceX

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Kraken wrote: Mon Jan 20, 2020 5:07 pm
Zaxxon wrote: Mon Jan 20, 2020 3:35 pm SpaceX is targeting 2023. NASA 2024
SpaceX has a fairly good chance of reaching that date if they can achieve orbit with Starship next year, as planned. NASA will not hit their goal without a major budget increase that's unlikely to come through.
Concur. It's also going to be interesting to see how Starlink progresses. At the rate they're launching, the beta product really could be available for much of North America by late summer.
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Re: SpaceX

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Musk doesn't think small.
In one of Thursday's tweets, for example, Musk wrote that the eventual goal is to launch each Starship vehicle three times per day on average. Each Starship will be able to carry about 100 tons of payload to orbit, so, at that flight rate, every vehicle would loft about 100,000 tons annually, he explained.

And there won't be just one Starship — far from it, if everything goes according to Musk's plan.

"Building 100 Starships/year gets to 1000 in 10 years or 100 megatons/year or maybe around 100k people per Earth-Mars orbital sync," Musk wrote in another Thursday tweet.

"Orbital sync" refers to an alignment of the two planets that's favorable for interplanetary travel, which comes along just once every 26 months. So, Musk envisions huge fleets of Starships departing during these windows.

"Loading the Mars fleet into Earth orbit, then 1000 ships depart over ~30 days every 26 months. Battlestar Galactica …" he wrote in another tweet. (And Musk wants each Starship to keep flying for a while. In yet another tweet, he said SpaceX is aiming for an operational life of 20 to 30 years for each vehicle.)
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Re: SpaceX

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I mean, a Mars colony ain't gonna launch itself. The numbers sound ludicrous, and the timeline probably is, but a launch here and there will never get us a functioning colony.
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Re: SpaceX

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Re: SpaceX

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It's official: SpaceX will perform the first commercial crewed flight.
NASA has unambiguously confirmed that SpaceX – with its Crew Dragon spacecraft – will soon become the first private company in history to launch astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS), both an unexpected twist from the usually tight-lipped space agency and a major upset for Boeing.
Without diving into the politics of it, it's a big deal because Boeing has long enjoyed a privileged place in the military-industrial-congressional complex. There's more about that at the link if you're interested.
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Re: SpaceX

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Nice to see them finally confirming what's been clear as day to those paying attention for awhile now. The last Starliner test was a disaster on multiple levels.
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Re: SpaceX

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I read elsewhere today that the launch date was "set" for May 7, but there's a little wiggle room for that. Hopefully they won't move it forward too much, as my satellite is supposed to be on the schedule for late April. :D

There will be a lot of pressure on SpaceX to perform, but then again they've done succeeded at all the tests that Boeing is allegedly being paid more than SpaceX for doing so thoroughly...
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Re: SpaceX

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Hrdina wrote: Mon Feb 17, 2020 1:44 am I read elsewhere today that the launch date was "set" for May 7, but there's a little wiggle room for that. Hopefully they won't move it forward too much, as my satellite is supposed to be on the schedule for late April. :D
Good luck! Something tells me May 7 is the optimistic date. I'm internally calibrating expectations for late May/early June.
There will be a lot of pressure on SpaceX to perform, but then again they've done succeeded at all the tests that Boeing is allegedly being paid more than SpaceX for doing so thoroughly...
Agreed. Though I clearly jinxed them with my commentary yesterday, as the stage 1 landing for this AM's Starlink launch missed the boat by a few feet. Bummer. 50th successful landing will have to wait a couple of weeks.
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Re: SpaceX

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Zaxxon wrote: Mon Feb 17, 2020 11:26 am
Hrdina wrote: Mon Feb 17, 2020 1:44 am I read elsewhere today that the launch date was "set" for May 7, but there's a little wiggle room for that. Hopefully they won't move it forward too much, as my satellite is supposed to be on the schedule for late April. :D
Good luck! Something tells me May 7 is the optimistic date. I'm internally calibrating expectations for late May/early June.
Someone at SpaceX (possibly Musk) said that the Demo-2 flight can be made ready in short order -- all the hardware is on site and ready to fly -- but they have an enormous amount of safety paperwork to process in concert with NASA. It's an important review process to ensure that everybody's confidence in every system is at 100%, not just government red tape. But bureaucracy is what's driving the date.
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Re: SpaceX

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Re: SpaceX

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#itshappening

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Re: SpaceX

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SN4 made it past the cryo test without going boom.

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Re: SpaceX

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Interesting history of the Falcon 9, SpaceX's secret sauce. Worth the read if you're a rocket geek, and if you aren't, we have other threads for your kind.
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Re: SpaceX

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Kraken wrote: Wed Jun 03, 2020 10:46 pm Interesting history of the Falcon 9, SpaceX's secret sauce. Worth the read if you're a rocket geek, and if you aren't, we have other threads for your kind.
Cool stuff! Thanks for sharing! I am even more amazed at SpaceX's "can do" attitude and the fact that they learn so much and so fast from their failures, are able to make many improvements to their rockets, and keep it all configuration controlled so as to have reproducible results.
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Re: SpaceX

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Yeah, their speed of getting shit done is pretty incredible. This is why I'm not as dismissive of the Mars plans as many are. It's not that I see a clear path for them to be launching anything toward Mars in the next several years--it's more that I remember the initial grasshopper tests of F9 around 7 years ago. From there to here is a huuuugggeee leap that almost no one actually thought would happen.

Where will they be in 4, 6, or 8 years? I'm not going to say they can't do anything at this stage.
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Re: SpaceX

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I would love to see them build a space dock which would serve as a jumping point for manned missions throughout the solar system.
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Re: SpaceX

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Zaxxon wrote: Thu Jun 04, 2020 11:34 am Yeah, their speed of getting shit done is pretty incredible.
Yep, amazing what you can do with steady funding, no big brother looking over your shoulder, no red tape and an accepting attitude toward failure.
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Re: SpaceX

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Lassr wrote: Fri Jun 05, 2020 2:32 pm
Zaxxon wrote: Thu Jun 04, 2020 11:34 am Yeah, their speed of getting shit done is pretty incredible.
Yep, amazing what you can do with steady funding, no big brother looking over your shoulder, no red tape and an accepting attitude toward failure.
To be fair, I wouldn't sell my institution or NASA as a whole short - we (collectively) have done some amazing things with respect to instrument, spacecraft, and rover missions; things that do not lend themselves to mass production or reproducibility.
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Re: SpaceX

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Floating spaceports for intercity travel. Of course.
Musk didn’t share much more about the plans, but did say in response to another tweet that claimed this amounted to “Referb[ushing] oil platforms with a hyperloop to transport from land” was “pretty much” part of the plan, so that could be involved in shuttling passengers back and forth to and from their departure and destination spaceports.
Of course.
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Re: SpaceX

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They included this idea in their earth-to-earth demo CGI awhile back. This is the first I've seen of it actually moving to the physical plane, though.
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Re: SpaceX

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engadget
Part of the SpaceX mission has been to create reusable rockets that make spaceflight cheaper, and it has become routine to see the company’s booster rockets return safely to Earth. With today’s launch SpaceX set a new milestone by catching both halves of the nosecone fairing, according to a tweet from CEO Elon Musk.

He’s previously said the parts are worth about $6 million, and while the company has reused some after they landed in the sea or a ship caught one half, it’s potentially cheaper to get them back undamaged if both fall into a net.
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Re: SpaceX

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They also set a record with this launch as far as launch vehicle reuse turnaround. I think it was 51 days (this one previously launched the astronauts at the end of May), beating the shuttle's pre-Challenger turnaround record.
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Re: SpaceX

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TechCrunch
SpaceX has been developing Starship, its next-generation spacecraft, at its site in Boca Chica, Texas. The company has built a number of different Starship prototypes to date, include one prior version called the Starhopper that was essentially just the bottom portion of the rocket. Today, the company flew its first full-scale prototype (minus the domed cap that will appear on the final version, and without the control fins that will appear lower down on its sides), achieving an initial flight of around 150 m (just under 500 feet).
...
SN5 is now the first of these larger test vehicles to actually take off and fly. This prototype underwent a successful static test fire earlier this week, paving the way for this short flight test today. It’s equipped with just one Raptor engine, whereas the final Starship will have six Raptors on board for much greater thrust. It managed to fly and land upright, which means that by all external indications everything went to plan.
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Re: SpaceX

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Cool. I read elsewhere that they'll attempt a 20 km "hop" before the end of the year, then switch focus to the Super Heavy, which is Starship's first stage, basically. Even allowing for setbacks, reaching orbit next year is doable.
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Re: SpaceX

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SpaceX: You will believe that a grain silo can fly.
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Re: SpaceX

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A grain silo? They actually get me real internet in my rural Michigan area and I will believe pigs fly!



(Side note, I think pigs on exercise wheels are what power my present internet.)
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Re: SpaceX

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