Oh Hell Yeah – Falcon 9 Makes it To Orbit
June 4th, 2010
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From NASA’s confused, convoluted and underfunded Constellation program to the de-funding of it in favor of a non-existant plan, there has been little good news from the American space program. There is one exception, however. SpaceX has been making great progress in the design and testing of the Falcon 1 and 9 rockets. The Falcon 9 is especially exciting. It’s the first space launch vehicle to be developed 100% privately, the first completely new liquid-fueled rocket in decades and the first American rocket capable of completing a mission with an engine failure since the last Saturn-IB lifted off in 1975.
The Falcon-9 is designed to be human rated and is complete with the Dragon capsule, designed to carry cargo and eventually humans to Low Earth Orbit. The rocket also can be configured as the Falcon-9 Heavy, which consists of three core boosters and is capable of lifting 28 metric tons to LEO, putting it ahead of the mighty Russian Proton rocket, the current most popular heavy lift ELV, and exceeding the capacity of all current ELV’s with the exception of the ultra-heavy configuration of the Atlas-V.
SpaceX also hopes to make the Falcon-9 considerably cheaper than other rockets. The vehicle is intended to be partially reusable, with stages being retrieved after parachuting back to earth. If the design meets projections, it may set a new standard for the economics of heavy lift vehicles and possibly help reestablish the United States as a major player in the commercial satellite launch business.
Today the first Falcon-9 lifted off and sent its payload, a test version of the Dragon capsule into low earth orbit!
First time trials of rockets are certainly not assured successes and SpaceX has spent some time testing the design on static test stands and dry runs for launch. This flight is the culmination of years of development and an enormous step in making the Falcon-9 a cargo and human-carrying rocket we can rely on.
This entry was posted on Friday, June 4th, 2010 at 10:47 pm and is filed under Announcements, Good Science, Space, media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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June 5th, 2010 at 12:44 am
Watched the feed live, and I haven’t been this excited by a launch since the Apollo days. Bravo, SpaceX
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June 5th, 2010 at 1:42 am
YEEEEAAAAAHHH!!!!
Next big step- a private space station.
As Heinlein once said, “If you can get your ship into orbit, you’re halfway to anywhere.”
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June 5th, 2010 at 2:52 am
Sorry if I’m missing something, but why is this so exciting for everyone? The article says there are already bigger powerful rockets to lift more. Why is this special? Just because it has been made without the government? I guess that is cool, but to get so excited about it when its like the ones there already are seems silly so I’m confused why everyone thinks its a big deal.
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June 5th, 2010 at 6:54 am
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISuLhcn-73g
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June 5th, 2010 at 7:25 am
Why would CNN plat such a commercial? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FvA6BbMeb0
The Anti-Christ is among us and all you do is sit there scoffing at everything thrown at you.
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June 5th, 2010 at 7:30 am
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhiAl0Ff2xE
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June 5th, 2010 at 7:56 am
It’s a bit like getting one’s first car.
Sure, objectively, it’s an old, beat up POS. But it’s YOUR old, beat up POS. And that means you can go places on your own, without needing a ride from Mom.
Scale this up. It’s a beginning- it’s a step into a full time presence in space. Because the current Nasa program just ain’t cutting it.
Again, it’s a start! Yay!
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June 5th, 2010 at 9:30 am
This is a great acomplishment – I would point out that the claim of 100% private development does ring a bit hollow. Space X has recevied NASA COTS funding and a number of subsidies (like acess to the Cape for launches) which helped them succeed. In my opinion the secret to thier sucess was two fold – significant private funding and a keep it simple approach. The “big guys” and NASA make the hardware too complex and try to pay politics my spreading the work all around the country (like having mission control in Houstion). Private funding means they did not have to play politics and could keep the system simple.
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June 5th, 2010 at 10:07 am
Nel said:
This is HUGE for a number of reasons. For one thing, it’s the new first spacecraft intended to carry humans in a long long time. The last one in the US was the Space Shuttle. The Falcon/Dragon combination may be ready for carrying astronauts in a year or so, and that’s HUGE because it will mean we have an answer to the loss of the Shuttle.
This rocket is revolutionary for a number of reasons. It’s intended to be mostly reusable. It’s the first liquid-fueled first stage of this size to be recoverable and reusable with very minimal refurbishment. That’s an enormous technical challenge, especially for the engines. The Merlin engines are a technical marvel.
The big thing is cost. The projected cost of the Falcon 9 brings the cost per kilogram to LEO down to about $3000. That’s a HUGE reduction over most systems.
If you want to consider what SpaceX has done for cost reduction, look at the Falcon-1, which is not being offered for commercial launch service. The Falcon-1e can lift about a metric ton into low earth orbit. That’s a fairly small payload, but lets say you need to get a small to medum satellite into a specific low earth orbit with a dedicated rocket to launch it (as opposed to hitching a ride as a secondary payload). The Falcon-1 is by far the lowest cost way of doing it.
The projected cost of the Falcon-1 was 6.7 million dollars per launch. The current cost of the rocket is 8.9 million for the Falcon-1 and 10.5 for the Falcon-1e (less with a multi-launch contract). SpaceX hopes to get that down to 7 million and 8.5 million respectively in the next few years, once they have begun launching the rocket on a regular basis. But even if they don’t, the cost of 8.9-10.5 million is still very low.
You can walk up to SpaceX today and pay them 8.9 million dollars and get a rocket launch to send a payload into orbit. Before the Falcon-1, the cheapest rocket for sending small payloads into orbit was Orbital Sciences Pegasus.
Pegasus has a lower capacity than the Falcon-1 and costs a minimum of $30 million per launch.
So right there, they’ve cut the cost of a small dedicated orbital rocket by 2/3. That is HUGE. If they can do this for medium-heavy launch vehicles, it will be enormous!
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June 5th, 2010 at 11:11 am
I’m not sure the numbers alone quite express how huge this is. Right now one of the major reasons nobody has even looked seriously into industrial uses of microgravity or uses for travel (space-planes) is the cost of getting into low earth orbit. There are satellites which use the access to huge regions in line-of-sight, but I am talking about construction, freight, moon-mining (for minerals which cannot form with the Earth’s large oxygen-content), etc. Right now, I think it’s still much too expensive for large-scale industrial or commercial use, but a two-thirds reduction in cost is definitely a step towards a fundamental change in industry.
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June 5th, 2010 at 1:09 pm
People in general tend to underestimate the impact of minor, boring improvements. In the real world you almost never see huge leaps. You see scores of these minor, evolutionary improvements that rapidly compound into a major improvement.
You also see “phase transitions” when a technology becomes cheap, small, productive or safe enough for some particular purpose and matures into mass-adoption. You can’t make a helicopter unless you can build a combustion turbine(or reciprocating engine for that matter) with enough power density to lift itself and the helicopter body off the ground. You don’t get the mass adoption of computers until you have integrated circuits with enough performance and low enough cost for enthusiastic amateurs to start playing around with them and making software.
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June 5th, 2010 at 4:12 pm
When the second stage was firing, there was a period of time when the stage began to spin on its access. It was not expected, but the rotation was not severe enough to cause the mission to fail. (Right now they’re looking into why it rotated like that toward the end of the firing)
Apparently the rotation produced a spiral exhaust trail, similar to the failed Russian missile over Norway, although not nearly as dramatic or severe. However, a large number of people in Australia saw it. As the rocket stage crossed over the Australian coast into orbit, it caught the light of dawn and was reported as a “UFO”
I know a few Australians visit this site from time to time. Anyone happen to see it?
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June 5th, 2010 at 5:13 pm
Speaking of Australian regulars here, Craig Schumacher who signs himself ‘Finrod’ was involved in a very serious auto accident, that also took the life of his mother and aunt. Craig spent nine days in intensive care in a coma.
The details here: http://www.canberratimes.com.au/news/local/news/general/canberra-woman-dies-after-funeral/1839002.aspx
Finrod and I kept up a regular private correspondence, and tag-teamed more that a few idiots here and elsewhere on the net. I wish him a swift recovery.
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June 5th, 2010 at 6:19 pm
DV82XL said:
What? Really? Oh hell! Any idea how he is doing? I’m glad he survived, but that obviously of enormous concern.
Have you communicated with him at all? Do you have any idea whether he’s suffered any kind of cognitive or neuro-psychiatric injuries from this? I really hope not. Physical injuries are terrible, but when something takes away from the mind, that can be infinately worse.
Of course, losing close family members is also a terrible thing that brings its own pain.
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June 5th, 2010 at 11:13 pm
I haven’t been in touch with him yet, apparently according common adequatenesses, he spent nine days in a coma, but has emerged. This happened far from his home, and I guess it will be awhile before he can go back.
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June 6th, 2010 at 12:18 am
DV82XL said:
Oh, hell. Hey, if you talk to him, wish him well for me, eh?
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June 6th, 2010 at 1:36 am
DV82XL said:
Okay, well I sent an email to one of the administrators for his pro-nuclear energy advocacy group. I am eager to hear back.
I don not want to do anything against his wishes, like if he wants to be private about this issue, then I would not want to make a big deal of it online. However, if it would be helpful I’d be more than happy to start some kind of collection to aid in his recovery. I’m aware that Australia has a comprehensive medical care system, but those kind of programs do not mean that someone does not still end up with a lot of issues due to out-of-pocket expenses, lost wages, incidental expenses, items not covered etc.
I’ll help any way I can, but I’m not going to make a big post and start collecting funds if that’s not what he’d want.
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June 6th, 2010 at 1:51 am
I’ve been rereading Heinlein lately, and he posited nuclear powered ships which boiled water via direct heating (to use the steam as reaction mass for rockets). Any thoughts on how technically feasible this would be, given the current state of the art (primarily mass/power ratios), and the cost effects on spacelift?
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June 6th, 2010 at 2:32 am
Go to the Atomic Rockets website (http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3ay.html#libertyship)
There’s lots of good info about a few other engine types.
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June 6th, 2010 at 11:17 am
There have been a number of nuclear rocket concepts proposed and which have good scientific theory behind them. These range from nuclear explosives, set off in sequence behind the rocket to ion engines powered by a nuclear electric-generating reactor and everything in between.
If you want to consider nuclear rockets which are the most technically mature and realistic to see in our lifetimes and which are the closest to becoming a reality, there are two which stand out:
Project Prometheus: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Prometheus
Basically it’s a deep space probe that is powered with ion engines – nothing new about that, it’s been done many times before, except this would be huge and have huge ion engines and an on board nuclear reactor to power them.
NERVA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NERVA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NASA-NERVA-diagram.jpg
This design is similar to what you mention, except it uses hydrogen as the reactionary mass. It could theoretically use any gas or possibly liquid, but hydrogen is lightweight and cheap. It’s a high temperature reactor that is just an open-cycle heater for the hydrogen. The fission reaction makes generates extreme heat and hydrogen is pumped through and comes out the nozzle at very high temperature.
It’s not as powerful as some of the more exotic design concepts, but it was developed to a remarkable extent before the program was canceled in 1972.
A large series of tests of rocket engines of this type were conducted at the Nevada Test Site in the 1960’s and early 1970’s. Fully operational nuclear thermal rocket engines were successfully bench tested at full power. One of them even operated for over two hours.
The KIWI engine was intended to be a ground prototype to the NERVA engine. It was basically the same as the NERVA but scaled down and not designed to be flown, but just to prove the concept. It was highly successful in testing. They even blew up a full scale engine while it was operating at full power. This was not an accident – it was intentionally destroyed to test what the worst case effects would be of a catastrophic failure.
So we were really just about there when the project was shut down. We had them running at full power in tests and were not far from being ready to fly one.
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June 6th, 2010 at 5:48 pm
Nibiru is coming!
http://www.sunshinecoastdaily.com.au/story/2010/06/06/alien-ufo-tourists-invade-air-space-strange-sight/
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June 7th, 2010 at 12:23 am
I am always anxious to see the “Ford Motor Co.” of space travel, a company that can enter a stagnant field and turn it into a burgeoning industry complete with competition and fast-paced innovation. Will it be Space X?
I don’t expect to be taking vacations to the moon in my lifetime, but I would like to witness some of the fruits of space entrepreneurship before I die.
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June 7th, 2010 at 12:32 am
Shafe said:
I would be very very very very happy to take a vacation to LEO. Actually, the one thing I have always thought of as my kind of ultimate fantasy is to experience weightlessness, and for a sustained period of time, not like 30 seconds in the vomit comet (although that would be truly awesome in and of itself)
What I’d really want is to be weightless in some kind of environment that is large enough to float around and stuff in. Something like a space station or even the Spacehab unit on the shuttle.
Of course going to the moon would be amazing, but if I could experience a day or so in an orbiting pressurized chamber I would consider it to be my number one life affirming experience.
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June 7th, 2010 at 7:59 am
DV82XL,
I’m very sorry to hear about Finrod. I sure hope that he has a full recovery.
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June 8th, 2010 at 12:35 am
I spoke with Finrod (Craig) last night. I found out the hospital he was at by e-mailing his uncle and I called them and asked if I could speak to him. I was very happy to find he was able to take phone calls. He seemed glad to hear from someone, but then again, maybe he was being polite – it’s just that I know those places are pretty boring and isolated.
The good news is he was totally coherent and seemed to be in descent spirits – I mean given the circumstances and all. Certainly not an easy or happy time, but he seemed to be looking forward to getting out, which is good. I know people in those circumstances can find the whole thing both overwhelming and depressing – experiencing a loss, painful injuries and lengthy recovery all at once.
It sounded from what he said that he is expected to make a relatively full recovery, but he was injured quite badly. He told me the coma he was in for nine days was not as a result of injury – it was drug-induced. That’s how severe the injuries were.
He will likely be in in-patient care for some time, probably weeks. He may have his laptop and be able to communicate sooner than that though. He doesn’t seem to know for sure if he can get it set up there.
Another small piece of good news: apparently he does not have any financial problems stemming from this. I realize Australia has a single-payer based health-care program, but just the same, these kind of things generally cause all kinds of expenses that are not covered or misc complications (lost wages, taking care of commitments, logistical issues etc). Hence, I had offered to start a collection to help out. He seems to think this won’t be necessary. He has the support of friends and family members who can help out financially if necessary.
Oh, and also, he’s getting all the CT-scans and xrays his doctors recommend with no concern for the radiation exposure, of course.
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June 8th, 2010 at 2:30 am
I think Boeing’s shuttle derived booster concept would be a simpler and safer vehicle than the Falcon 9 and especially the Falcon 9 heavy. The Falcon 9 as uses a petroleum fuel in both the first and second stages: that’s great for BP oil but not for the environment.
The Boeing concept uses a single stage core vehicle capable of launching a stretched Orion-like capsule into orbit (20 tons), twice as much as the two stage Falcon 9. The Falcon 9 heavy, potentially capable of launching more than 30 tons would require three core boosters plus an upper stage.
And strap on a couple of 5-segment SRB’s and an upper stage and the Boeing core vehicle suddenly becomes a heavy lift vehicle capable of placing more than 100 tonnes into orbit.
Boeing’s new hlv concept could be the DC-3 of rocket boosters:
http://newpapyrusmagazine.blogspot.com/2010/05/boeings-new-hlv-concept-could-be-dc-3.html
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June 8th, 2010 at 2:50 am
Marcel F. Williams said:
RP-1 (rocket grade kerosene) has been standard since the earliest days of the space program. The first stage of the Saturn-V runs on it. The Soyuz runs on it. The Atlas, the Saturn-1B, the Titan-I and many others.
It has numerous advangages over H2. it has a few disadvantages, such as lower lsp and greater weight per joule, but it has some big advantages. It has much greater energy density, meaning smaller tanks and stages. It does not require insulation or special handling. It does not need to be specially stored on the ground. It is generally non-explosive in liquid form, it does not boil off.
It’s pretty clear that Space-X chose RP-1 for a lot of good reasons. They want their stages to be recoverable and if they used H2, they’d likely need to build the sages much larger and out of very thin gauge material that would not make it back. It would also complicate the engine design to make it a fully cryo system.
Not that hydrogen doesn’t work well as a fuel for some applications. The Delta uses hydrogen and oxygen and it’s unbeatable for high energy upper stages like the Centaur.
It’s really not great for BP. Even if rocket launches were to increase ten fold, the market for RP-1 is a tiny tiny drop in the ocean of petroleum consumption. It’s tiny even compared to comparably small niches like avgas or lighter fluid.
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June 8th, 2010 at 2:59 am
Marcel F. Williams said:
Great.
In the meantime: Scoreboard.
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June 8th, 2010 at 7:00 am
I’m re-posting this over from the Energy from Thorium forum:
I’d like to invite our pro-nuke heavy hitters onto Quora.com.
Quora is a question and answer site similar to Yahoo Answers but with a social media/social networking twist. At the moment it is an invite only service. It is scaling upwards fast and the people with money to fund projects i.e. Venture Capital are watching it closely or are involved themselves.
The community of Quora is open to sensible responses. My recent response about the safety of nuclear power has already been voted to the top ranks: Example Is Nuclear Power Safe? http://www.quora.com/Is-nuclear-power-safe.
I have been very involved in social media lately and have seen that for the younger generation a place like Quora is perfect to reach out to undecided minds and cut through all the BS surrounding nuclear power and thorium. This is our chance to make sure we get in on the ground floor and outreach to a large community.
Quora requires that you use your real identity, so you will be accountable for what you are saying. To join, some may have to shod their favorite internet handles in place of their names and actual backgrounds – I’m looking at you DV28XL
,
BTW, I do not represent Quora in any means, I just got hooked on it last night and saw instant responses and feedback to my answers regarding Nuclear Power.
DrBuzz0, DV28XL, Marcel, Shafe, ChemGeek, An Actual Scientist and other handles that I recognize who are willing to define this new wild internet west send me an email address which I can use to invite you onto Quora.
-Scott Carleton
http://www.leftbraintorightbrain.com
carleton.scott@gmail.com
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June 8th, 2010 at 9:14 am
ScotterC said:
The Energy from Thorium forum suffers from selection bias, and I’m afraid this will too. Kirk is a very good politician, don’t get me wrong; he knows his constituency (nuclear engineers) and he speaks their language and gives them what they want, which is nuts and bolts. The topic of the site is the relative merits of different applications of the technology, and since the people who are inclined to read the site are the ones who are inclined to use the forum, his constituency spends its time talking amongst themselves about their favorite reactor designs, which reduces their availability for outreach, and the end result is that there isn’t much outreach on that forum.
Bad ideas that make sense beat good ideas that are outside people’s experience any day of the week. If being right would win debates, we would have won 30 years ago, and the same thing is going on here. It may well be a good idea (and I think it is) to get engineers involved in outreach, but if they want to use the tools you give them to talk to each other about their favorite reactor design instead of to undecided people about why it would be a good idea to have a market for any of them, they will come to the incorrect conclusion because (a) they can and (b) they want to.
If you want to draw people into a dedicated outreach forum, an approach that might select the right people is to find a few people who are (a) good at outreach and (b) inclined to do it, and create a forum at a central location. It will go unused for a while, and don’t promote it through the usual channels (pro-nuclear groups, forums, blogs, lists, and so forth). Then create a Google Toolbar button that sends the current page URL to your server (with a PHP script that generates an RSS feed out of the items as the target), and promote that heavily to pro-nuclear people as a way to “report” discussions of nuclear technology-related issues to people who have time to get involved in them. Clicking it would report the current page to your core group of people (via the RSS feed, which they would have subscribed to), who would use the comment page, forum software, or other system used on the reported site, to get involved in the discussion, and agree to link to your forum in their website field or forum signature as the case may be. Interested neutral people will go there, and, outnumbering the small group of dedicated outreach people, they will drive the conversation. As it gets more popular, more pro-nuclear people will be drawn to it – but only people who are interested in outreach, since they already have a general discussion forum at EfT.
ScotterC said:
The Charge of the Polite Brigade was repelled on the internet a while ago. Nobody has to go to any website, and the moment you start trying to set a tone, people start leaving for other places that will let them say what they want and be who they want. That’s why Wikipedia is kicking Knol around the block – the internet’s sociodynamics simply do not let you decide what your users are going to do. You say you aren’t involved in this, and if you aren’t – unless you can come up with a good reason why this is different from past attempts to turn the internet into a processed medium – I wouldn’t get started. Accountable, sensible, intellectual people may well go there, but even convincing all of them won’t change much. We need to go out and talk to people, not build fences around ourselves.
ScotterC said:
I’d Love This Product Even If I Weren’t a Stealth Marketer. In other words, it sure sounds like you’re involved. If you are, say so. There’s no shame in suggesting to someone that your site solves a problem they have. If you aren’t, don’t use the investor pitch on a customer; it weirds people out.
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June 8th, 2010 at 9:56 am
Stewart Peterson said:
There is certainly a selection bias within our various communities. I have seen what you describe at EfT forum and since I am not as interested in the reactor technologies as I am with the political implications of why we don’t have a majority of clean nuclear power I rarely post there. I respect the engineers however and believe that Kirk has set up a strong knowledge database that will prove useful for the future of LFTR and all MSRs
Thank you for the recommendation. It does sound interesting but I personally do not have enough time and would prefer to use someone elses medium that is already in place.
I don’t have any involvement with Quora. Feel free to disbelieve me but it really doesn’t matter. Apart from my day job I have a strong interest in Venture Capital, Information Technology and Social networking. My blog describes as such. I am extremely open about who I am on the web and probably only suffer from the fact that I don’t have enough content on the web as of yet to support my professed identity.
Due to my interest in VC, IT and Social networking I came across Quora through Twitter, Tech Crunch and other startup news mediums. I had a friend in Silicon Valley send me an invite. It lay dormant for about a month. Then I would receive emails that people were following me on said quora so I started to investigate last night.
The only field I can claim any expertise in at the moment would be nuclear power and the energy related fields so I, of course, checked out what questions had been raised about nuclear power. I immediately discovered that someone had asked ‘Is Nuclear Power Safe’ and I was not satisfied with the answers present. I posted a short succinct answer:
“Nuclear power is extremely safe. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics it’s actually safer then the real estate industry.
Here’s the deal with waste. First off, it isn’t waste. 96% of the energy is still left in Spent Nuclear Fuel to be used at a future time. Here’s the other key: Nuclear Power Plants are the only power plants that sequester ALL of their waste and contain it in large steel casks. Contrast this with a coal or natural gas plant which dumps its waste into the atmosphere during the course of normal operations.”
Within an hour my answer was voted to the top. I have never seen such quick feedback on the internet for such a controversial subject. As I explored more I realized that this would be a great place to have the bloggers, commenters, and pro-nuke addicts I had been following for years expound on what they know so well and get good feedback from. I feel that since the site is an invite-only medium that it keeps out a lot of the less web in-tune riff raff. This may not last for long, but I feel that it is important to have our community represented.
I feel especially that someone such as Drbuzz0 should be on the site because he researches his posts so well and typically has short, succinct answers to a variety of bad science that I feel needs to be spread to a larger medium. Over the past few months I have digged a variety of his posts to little avail. Quora may prove a better repository for his insights.
Stewart, since you are already open to your identity on the web, why not try it before you knock it? DV82XL has already joined up. And hopefully once Finrod has recovered I would like him to join as well because I would certainly like to have his input.
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June 9th, 2010 at 12:06 pm
Also, Stewart. Why would I not admit to being part of a group that runs an invite only system? It doesn’t make sense.
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