I meant as a pure accomplishment ignoring any of the political factors. Yes the Apollo architecture was defended and lost, but it doesn’t downplay the achievement of landing on the moon and come back.
The landing as big as that accomplishment because its the beginning of the next Era where we can go places without costing 5% of the gdp. It’s affordable for more than just the wealthiest government on the planet.
A just small but juicy tidbit of news…the falcon heavy core has just been spotted on the test stand in texas. That sucker has never been closer to being launched and finally might happen this year. I believe they are waiting for slc-40 to come back online so that they have a 2 pad redundancy in the off chance of an anomaly in the test launch.
I’ve read that they have to finish some work on the 39A pad before they can launch heavy’s there.
That work will shut the pad down ~60 days for other launches.
So they have to wait for LC-40 before they start that work OR they can’t launch anything towards the east for 60 days.
They’ve been waiting for the repairs on lc-40 to finish.
Hey everyone I dropped the ball on the announcement but I come with reparations!
Quite impressive imagery. Especially the telescopic ones.
Getting pretty crowded at that flight proven booster hangar, I bet.
@elonmusk: Close-up of rocket stage separation, fast flip, boostback burn in a ring of fire and then… https://t.co/RM8kDgazVX
Spacegasm
Dear lord that is impressive. Most impressive.
What amazes me most about the whole thing is that the rocket returns flying backwards through the atmosphere. They did some clever things to make sure that the dynamic pressure of reentry doesn’t damage the rocket’s business end.
I tried to locate the numbers on dynamic pressure for the reentry process, but failed. I wanted to compare them to the numbers for Chuck Yeager’s record-breaking Mach 1 flight in the Bell X-1 rocket plane. However, while searching for those numbers, I tripped over this; a recording of a Falcon 9 first stage reentry in infrared. Note that the video does not follow the stage all the way to the ground. It’s to show the way the stage heats during reentry. Be patient. Like all NASA videos, there’s no pounding music or anything else to keep your attention while they show the footage.
I wrote a simulation about a year ago and yesterday was the first day they showed F9 S1 reentry data which was really useful for me to see how wrong I was. Although, I never tried to boostback but only tried to recreate the ballastic reentry on a drone ship landing. It still has it’s issues as the flight is about 2 minutes later than it should but I can run the sim and find dynamic pressure along a ballastic trajectory with a similar degree of error…it’s just a bit difficult to orient, burn, and land in the right place for me to do alone for a RTLS trajectory.
Crosschecking my data I had max speed of about 2300 m/s before the reentry burn(but keep in mind, ballastic trajectory with a drone ship landing-no boostback burn at all to kill velocity) and the reentry burn reducing it’s velocity to about 1200m/s which is 200m/s slower than the RTLS core when it starts it’s reentry burn.
I found the image from my pdf that I was taking these numbers from. Time starts at 0 with MECO. The weird stuff at the end is due to the fact that my stage was holding an angle of attack and instanteously changed its AoA to 0 to begin it’s landing burn which if I remember right isn’t simulated because that’s not really what I was after.
A graph of it’s trajectory
It looks like the forums are nuking my x axis but if you view the images on imgur they look fine.
What’s really neat about supersonic retropropulsion(That really cool shot of the reentry burn) is that the exhaust actually creates a shockbarrier wider than the rocket itself, artificially increasing it’s cross-section and the amount of drag it experiences helping to slow down the rocket even further. Every bit of fuel not spent slowing the rocket down helps putting a payload up there. It’s really cool stuff.
I never thought about adding dynamic pressure to the sim so I’ll work on that and try to get back to you with numbers, but they will definitely not be 100% accurate. I was only looking at maximum heating as a function of v^3 to try to find a flight regime that lowered heat without expending more fuel.
Definitely dropped the ball on that one thanks Martin!
The next launch is a launch to the space station and will be a RtLS so that’s fun and then the next one after that will be another reused falcon 9! So that’s super exciting that they are launching another so soon.
It is in very stark contrast that most of the population of India is dirt poor, but they appear to be pushing ahead with their space program.
India sets June 5 as the day it will joint the heavy-lift rocket club - theregister.co.uk
GSLV Mk III to test itself on a 3,136kg sat, plans for 8,000kg payloads real soon now
Spotted: Bizarre SpaceX rocket-snatching machine that looks like it belongs on Robot Wars - theregister.co.uk
Old news. Just search for Spacex roomba.
I wonder if they’ll use it for the next barge landing.
Now that is something I’d like to see! That thing is huge and must be incredibly heavy.
Speaking of SpX
There’s a launch tomorrow at 5:55 EST from Canaveral to resupply the ISS so that’s fun to watch. Those are light enough payloads that I believe it will be a RTLS though I have not confirmed.
Also there’s a really interesting conspiracy theory floating around that the NROL payload that spacex launched at the beginning of May will be imaging the berthing for :reasons:
More info here
Lego NASA Saturn V - Hands On Build & Review - Scott Manley builds
Adam Savage Builds the LEGO NASA Apollo Saturn V!
‘Monster’ rocket ‘selfie’ delights India
Its the picts from takeoff. So here.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-40197268