LIVE: SpaceX Falcon 9 v1.1 - CRS-3 Dragon - ATTEMPT 2 UPDATES

[Chris Bergin]

Robert asking about the quads and upcoming burn. Was an isolation valve, which wasn't responding. Back up worked fine. Everything looking good for all four thrusters. On track to make the burn.

[Ben the Space Brit]

As far as Elon is aware, vehicle is 'go' for the first orbital burn.

[MP99]

Falcon 9 stage 2 will be deorbited SW of Australia shortly; first time the second stage has been deorbited on an F9 flight

I wonder whether this is being driven more by orbital debris considerations, wanting to practice relights on the second stage (building up experience for GTO missions), or if they're trying to use it to start gathering data for F9R upper stage reuse, or something else entirely.

If the burn is to depletion it gives a data point on what total vehicle performance really is.

No surprise, but Antares nails it.

0.15% prop residuals at lox depletion, if I picked up correctly. [Edit: pretty much in line with expectations.]

Cheers, Martin

[Prober]

Elon says they still can do 10 launches this year.

[AJA]

Elon states that improved thrusters on the core nulled roll and he's happy with that. He also said that they've proved that the legs don't impact the ascent performance.

I also heard more N2 margin. (Propellant pressurisation.. but I thought that was He? RCS gas itself?)

EDIT: Yup, RCS prop.

[sdsds]

Don't yet know enough to say if there's any commonality between this valve issue and the one that occurred previously.

[dcporter]

Elon says production constraint was a single item – "injection casting"? – and they think they've licked it at this point, "unlocking" production.

EDIT: "Injector castings", possibly Merlin pintle injectors (thanks AJA).

[Chris Bergin]

Everyone's asking Elon questions!

[Ben the Space Brit]

Is that Bill Nye reporting for CBS?

[Chris Bergin]

A decent chance of bring back a stage this year (to land I assume).

[sdsds]

Alan: dark plume.
Hans: don't know root cause at this time.
Elon: we sprayed water around the pad, "We splashed dirty water on ourselves. A little embarrassing but no harm done."

[Chris Bergin]

Sooty launch was dirty water which "we splashed on ourself"

[Ben the Space Brit]

Elon: Ultimate goal is for Falcon-9 to require only refuelling in between flights.

Hoping to refly a recovered booster next year.

[AJA]

Supposed to be getting telemetry in a couple of minutes from airborne assets (on the first stage), so Musk says they should keep the presser going for sometime.

[Ben the Space Brit]

Gerst: ORB-CRS-2 remains on stand-by until Dragon berths.

[Prober]

Orbital May6th still on until dragon is @ISS
Orbital then moved to June.

[dcporter]

McGregor F9R is dev-1 – New Mexico will get a different vehicle, dev-2.

[Mongo62]

Two F9R vehicles, Dev-1 and Dev-2 -- one will be at McGregor, one in NM.

[sdsds]

Joseph Abbott, Waco Tribune Herald (!)

Elon: Orbcomm launch is expected in the next 4 to 6 weeks. We want to review carefully the data from this launch. Regarding F9R we're going to keep doing tests out near Waco with F9R. So what we have at Waco is dev1. Re: dev2, one will be at Waco and one at Spaceport America.

(He clearly seemed to say there would be two vehicles, not moving the vehicle currently at Texas.)

[Lurker Steve]

2. They can still burn to depletion, while putting it in the predefined zone in the Pacific.

By definition, burning to depletion and putting the second stage into a predefined "landing zone" in the Pacific are mutually exclusive, due to uncertainty in propellant consumption.

It's kind of like saying " drive your car until it runs out of gas" and also "park the car carefully in the garage".

lol.. but the garage is a VAST swathe of the Pacific.

Except for when it is actually the Indian Ocean...