Rocketry General Thread

Postponed until 14.30 UTC tomorrow. Aborted at t-13 seconds due to potential issue with thrust vectoring of the 2nd stage.

Thanks for the update guys. I overslept today and totally forgot about it until now.

Edit: didn’t forget today! Total mission success of Dragon deployment and a RTLS landing through the clouds

Yep. All went perfectly.

On the hosted webcast they reused the same script from yesterday verbatim. Was kinda odd.

This still looks amazing.

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It looks like cgi and I love it. We’re in the future and I’m so happy to be a part of it.

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From Elon’s instagram

https://www.instagram.com/p/BQtNTk4Brqp/

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Going through the clouds really drives in the scale. That’s a huge vehicle. :open_mouth:

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Even my mom was impressed by the video. :grin:

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It just shows how hard it is to represent scale in a video game when we find it so hard to do with unfamiliar objects in real life.

When SpaceX landed their first Falcon 9 I spent some time trying to work out the scale in a way my brain could conceptualise. I worked out that the first stage was about the height of a 14 story building that we have in the centre of my city. It towers high over the buildings around it. I stood and looked at it and imagined a booster that big dropping out of the sky and landing there. It was incredibly difficult to visualise even though I’ve seen video of it happening in real life.

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Little gathering in the UK tomorrow regarding future of spaceflight from the UK.

I’ve asked if there will be video:

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Looks like Blue Origin just released a CGI of New Glenn, their planned orbital launch vehicle. It looks to be in the same range as SpaceX’s FH with an estimated payload between 35mt to 60 mt probably depending on where the landing is.

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The unbuilt saturn series is the most ridiculous shit I’ve seen.

S-1 (Saturn 1 booster) + Titan Second Stage + Centaur

Uhhh so there’s totally a launch tomorrow morning(tonight) from SpaceX. Looks to be 1:34 AM EST, so that’s 10:34 PST tonight on the 13th for the west coasters here or approx 12 hours from this post. That’s a nice surprise. It was originally to be on the 12th but it got delayed for reasons I’m not sure where made public and I have no idea why. It’s just a standard GTO launch except there will not be a landing attempt to everyone’s disappointment.

The stream can be found on spacex’s youtube page.

Too much weight in the payload to attempt a landing?

Yes, but again to my knowledge I haven’t read anything about it other than a landing will not be attempted. They’ve launched and landed 5200 kg birds before but this one is only 5500 kg…it’s not that much heavier and I haven’t done the math for how much extra fuel it would cost but apparently enough to not allow landing.

I read that it was sending the satellite to a particularly high orbit and that’s why they needed the extra fuel.

It’s just another commsat to GTO(Geostationary transfer orbit). This is the standard orbit most commercial birds go to and have launched/landed a few to that insertion. It appears the difference between 5300 kg and 5500 kg is the cutoff for being able to land. It has to exist somewhere I suppose.

It really does feel a little frustrating though, for something that sounds so trivial.

As an aside, one of the reasons Arianespace say reusing engines wouldn’t be cost-effective (barring something like three times the number of annual launches) is that they send many satellites to GTO.

I don’t see why GTO is necessarily a barrier. Falcon 9 has seen hotter reentries on GTO launches but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible as the numbers aren’t in on what it costs to refurb a landed GTO F9. It’s not cost effective for Arianne 5, absolutely. It wasn’t designed for it and because it was built around doubling up and sending 2 sats (~11 tons) up at once rather than re-usability. I forget what they called their fly back the engines with wings idea but they put in the time to come up with that for arianne 6 so they are clearly thinking about it. ULA and Ariannespace will become blockbuster to netflix if they don’t start playing catch up and fast. Blue Origin still has a long way to go, but at least they are committed to the idea and are farther along than ULA or Ariannespace with landing an orbital booster as far as their tech goes.

Just a comment on this

they could effectively double their amount of launches by launching sats 1 at a time rather than 2, and using extra capability on a similarly designed rocket around reusability. Falcon 9 takes huge hits to its actual payload to land the boosters. It can actually put about 20tons into LEO, very similar to Arianne V capabilities, but chooses to pay the extra fuel towards landing rather than more payload.

As I said though, the numbers for the economics aren’t in, but SpaceX is due to launch their first refurbed booster at the end of this month so they are about to be coming in soon, and it’s two largest competitors don’t even have a prototype for reflying a rocket. It’s a pretty huge disparity. It took 6 years of launches to shape F9 into the rocket it is today…not even counting the 3 years of development from 2008 until it’s first launch and that was considered fast. If we consider that SpaceX could regularly refly rockets beginning next year, even for a fast and mobile company it wouldn’t be until 2028(!) until a competitor would be flying and landing using the same time scale. BO has a headstart obviously, but ULA and ArianneSpace do not.

As easy as they make it look, let’s not forget that landing a rocket is definitely not trivial :wink:

edit: fact checks if you believe wikipedia. I’d argue that this is kinda moot because they didn’t get nasa funding until the end of 2008 to actually start building it. They were so focused on launching falcon 1 to find income that I find it hard to believe they were developing a larger rocket at the same time.

Development of the medium-lift launcher began in 2005, and it first flew in June 2010

Add 3 years to that time line…2031…