Quote from: Jim on 02/04/2018 02:58 pmQuote from: Robotbeat on 02/04/2018 02:51 pmSimply stretching the upper stage of FH would basically null out any performance difference. And adding a kick stage on top of *that* would allow FH to launch Europa Clipper direct to Jupiter like SLS.There is no kick stage for Europa Clipper on FH. "Kick" stages are solid motors which have high thrust. Solid motors and Falcon are none starters.What does this mean? SpaceX doesn't like solids, but I think they're open to use solid kick stages from someone else, didn't they submit a bid for Solar Probe Plus using 3rd party solid kick stage?
Quote from: Robotbeat on 02/04/2018 02:51 pmSimply stretching the upper stage of FH would basically null out any performance difference. And adding a kick stage on top of *that* would allow FH to launch Europa Clipper direct to Jupiter like SLS.There is no kick stage for Europa Clipper on FH. "Kick" stages are solid motors which have high thrust. Solid motors and Falcon are none starters.
Simply stretching the upper stage of FH would basically null out any performance difference. And adding a kick stage on top of *that* would allow FH to launch Europa Clipper direct to Jupiter like SLS.
"Lithobraking"We need to add that new term to the NSF online space terminology dictionary. Where is that thing these days anyhow?
Does a static fire subject the vehicle to more stress while it is at full thrust and being held down than if it were allowed to launch?
Musk: if we wanted to, we could add t[w]o more side boosters, make it Falcon Super Heavy.
QuoteMusk: if we wanted to, we could add t[w]o more side boosters, make it Falcon Super Heavy.https://twitter.com/jeff_foust/status/960629934388588544I assume someone's already computed the lift capacity of this in the depths of the thread, can anyone point to it?
Quote from: speedevil on 02/05/2018 09:07 pmQuoteMusk: if we wanted to, we could add t[w]o more side boosters, make it Falcon Super Heavy.https://twitter.com/jeff_foust/status/960629934388588544I assume someone's already computed the lift capacity of this in the depths of the thread, can anyone point to it?I BOTE about 76 tonnes to LEO, 25 tonnes to TLI. Not a Super improvement. Raptor upper stage would be a lot easier and more effective.
If they could make a dual payload adaptor, FHs payload drastically increases when the center stage is expended, to like 20 tonnes to GTO. Falcon Heavy is also is capable of direct geo insertion. So with center core expended you could probably do Ariane 5 sized dual payloads direct to GEO. Charge $140 million per flight and you're cheaper than an A5 and probably make a cool $100 million in profit per flight!
Thinking about it, there could be a major market for Falcon heavy, and it would be this: If they could make a dual payload adaptor, FHs payload drastically increases when the center stage is expended, to like 20 tonnes to GTO. Falcon Heavy is also is capable of direct geo insertion. So with center core expended you could probably do Ariane 5 sized dual payloads direct to GEO. Charge $140 million per flight and you're cheaper than an A5 and probably make a cool $100 million in profit per flight!
Hi Everyone! So yeah really excited about today incredibly proud of the SpaceX team, they've done an incredible job of creating the most advanced rocket in the world and biggest rocket in the world.I'm still trying to absorb everything that happened because it seems surreal to me.I had this image of just a giant explosion on the pad with you know a wheel bouncing down the road and like the Tesla logo landing somewhere with a thud. But fortunately that's not what happened, the mission seems tho have gone really as well as one could have hoped with the exception of the center core.I was at the two side boosters, if you guys are here you sold them land that was epic, I think that's probably the most exciting thing I've ever seen literally ever. The center core obviously didn't land on the droneship, we're looking at the issue but we think it diddn't have enough TEA/TEB to relight all three engines. The center one lit I believe, the outer two did not and that was not enough to slow the stage down. Apparently it hit the water at 300 miles an hour and took out two of the engines on the droneship. So if we got the footage like that sounds like some pretty fun footage, so if if the cameras didn't get blown up as well then we'll put that out for the blooper reel.We weren't gonna reuse that Center core anyway or the two side boosters, we'll figure out some place to put them but as they're not block five or version five, we weren't planning on reusing any of the cores. The upper stage seems to have worked perfectly so far, the two burns were executed correctly, and now we'll see if the upper stage avionics survive quite an arduous trip through the Van Allen belts.Normally the stage will pass quickly through the Van Allen belts but here it's essentially dwelling there for several hours, and then it's going to do a restart, deplete is propellant and go to trans-mars injection.The propellant levels all look good after the second burn of the upper stage we were only 0.3 Sigma away from predictions, so it has plenty of propellant to complete the trans-mars injection, assuming that the fuel doesn't freeze or the oxygen doesn't boil off and the electronics don't get fried.We'll find out in a few hours if that that burn is successful.I went out to the landing zone and took a look at the side boosters, they look in really good condition so they're they're both refliable, although as I said they're combination of version 3 and version 4 so we're only gonna be reflying version 5 at this point. That launches shortly and that that'll be our mainstay, we will stick to version 5 for the falcon architecture we don't expect to have any version 6.David Kerley form ABC News Elon spectacular what did you learn, what did Falcon Heavy teach you?I guess it taught me that crazy things can come true, because I didn't really think this would work, and when I see the rocket liftoff, I see like a thousand things that might not work and it's amazing when they they do. Seeing the two boosters land synchronized, really just like the simulation, it makes you think that it could be quite a scalable approach you know, with those just coming in, landing, taking off, landing, doing many flights per day.It gives me a lot of faith for our next architecture the interplanetary spaceship. We have different names for it but BFR is code name. It gives me confidence that BFR is really quite workable.I was actually looking at the side boosters - I'm like 'they're pretty big you know 16 stories tall, 60 foot leg span but we really need to be way bigger than that so I think it's given me a lot of confidence that we can make the BFR design work. I think we can really do this a lot.You know and keep advancing the technology to achieve full and rapid reusability which will have a profound effect on the future.One of the interesting things about Falcon Heavy versus Falcon 9 is that Falcon heavy has the same level of expendability as Falcon nine, sixty million dollars falcon 9, Heavies 90, even though it's got three times as much capability, because in both cases the only thing that's expended is the upper stage.We're going to start recovering the fairings, we're gonna recover boosters and so the cost difference between a Falcon Heavy and a Falcon 9 is minor.Marcia Done, Associated Press What was going through your mind and how how amazed for you to see your Roadster up there with Starman, just cruising along with the blue planet and how long will we be getting live views do you think from the car? Well I think it looks so ridiculous and impossible, you can tell it's real because it looks so fake.Honestly we'd have way better CGI if it was fake.You know the colors all look like kind of weird in space as there's no atmospheric occlusion, it's like everything was too crisp.We didn't really test any of those materials for you know - space hardness or whatever, so it just has the same seats that anormal car has - it's a strictly a normal car in space - I kind of like the absurdity of that.If you look closely on the dashboard there's a tiny roadster with a tiny spaceman, because hot wheels made a Hot Wheels roadster and a friend a friend of mine suggested "hey why not put that Hot Wheels roadster with a tiny spaceman on the you know the car - like that'd be cool surprise"Silly fun things are important. Normally for a new rocket they've launched things like a block of concrete or something like that, I mean that's so boring and I think the imagery of it is something that's gonna get people excited around the world.It's still tripping me out, you know tripping balls here. Brendan Burn (?)Congratulations Elon on great launch today where do you see the Falcon Heavy fitting into this launch industry, is this something that is going to be for more national security or do you see this for interplanetary missions, what's the future of Falcon Heavy?Falcon Heavy opens up a new class of payload. It can launch more than twice as much payload as any other rocket in the world, so it's kind of up to customers what they might want to launch. It can launch things direct to Pluto and beyond with no need for a gravity assist or anything. Launch giant satellites, it can do anything you want. You could send people back to the moon with a bunch of Falcon Heavy and an orbital refilling. Two or three falcon heavies would equal the payload of a Saturn Five.But I wouldn't recommend doing that because I think that BFR architecture is the way to go, but I think it's gonna open up a sense of possibility, I think it's going to encourage other companies and countries to say 'hey if SpaceX which is a commercial company can do this with internal funds then then they could do it too. So I think it's an encourage other countries and companies to raise their sights and say 'hey, we can do bigger and better', which is great. We want a new space race. Races are exciting!Darryl Mail (?) FoxCan you talk us through your thought process as you were watching the launch, you said you were incredibly concerned about it and you just wanted it to clear the pad?I think this is true of anyone who's involved closely in the design of something, you know all the ways it can fail and and there's a mental checklist scrolling through your mind of all the things that can break.I mean. there's thousands of things that can go wrong and everything has to go right.Once the rocket lifts off there's nothing, there's no opportunity to do a recall or upload a software fix or anything like that, it has to be a hundred percent - at least for the ascent phase. I've seen rockets blow up so many different ways, so you know it's a big relief when it it actually works.I bet whoever launched something like a 747 or or dc-3 or something like that, I bet the chief engineer was like 'I can't believe that things like flying'. Irene Klotz from Aviation Week Congratulations. Can you talk to us a little bit about what needs to happen to certify Falcon Heavy for national security missions. Gow far along you are in the process and how many flights you might need to do and also if you're able to say anything about how much SpaceX's investment was to get to the rocket to this point thanks. It depends on which national security mission that we need to get. How many flights depends on which mission but we have a number of commercial customers for Falcon Heavy and so I it's not gonna be in any way an impediment to acceptance of national security missions. We'll be doing several heavy missions flights per year so, say there's a big national security satellite that's due for launch in three or four years and we're probably have like a dozen or more launches done by then.I don't think launch number will be an inhibitor for national security stuff. And yeah so I think we've got the STP mission that's coming up which is another test mission that will go on falcon heavy block 5 and then we'll be launching block 5 single stick in a couple months so I think it's hopefully smooth sailing for qualification for national security missions.Falcon heavy costsOur investment to date probably a lot more than I'd like to admit. We tried to cancel the Falcon Heavy program three times at SpaceX because it's like 'man this is way harder than we thought'. The initial idea was just I thought you know you stick on two first stages of side boosters how hard can it be? It's like way hard.We have to redesign the center core completely. We redesigned the grid fins, because well it's a long story but you've got a nose cone on the end of at the end of the booster instead of a cylinder, you lose control authority because if you if you've got a cylinder you can kind of bounce the air off of the rocket and you get like a 30% more increased control authority than if you've got a cylindrical section instead of a Ogive section at the end of the booster so we have to redesign the grid fins. Redesigning the control system. Vastly redesigned the thrust structure at the base to take way more load - that center boosters got to deal with over a million pounds of load coming in combined from the site boosters so it ends up being heavier so that the center core basically complete redesign, and even the side boosters has a pretty large number of parts that change. Then the launch site itself needs to change a lot.I'm guessing our total investment is over half a billion. Probably more.I'd like to take some questions from the phone I think the first one up is Dan Fergana from BuzzFeed newsCould you talk a little bit about the decision to have the two side boosters come down at the same time is that just the way it falls out from the physics or was that a actual decision you made?We did offset them slightly but really they they pretty much just come down that way. We want them to offset slightly just so that the radars didn't interfere and we actually wanted no communication between the two stages, they're both going to a point in absolute space and we're just worried that the radar reflection of one would be seen by the radar receiver the other. But no, that's just kind of how it happened. It's actually meant to happen just like that. Keith cowling at NASA watch first of all congratulations you've launched a rather unconventional payload into space, one that's generated a lot of buzz and there's a lot of people some of them citizen scientists some of them they're just newbies when it comes to tracking things and states are going to try and track the the Tesla and understand what's happening to it - you know like that movie dude where's my car - Other than the live web cam today what does SpaceX going to do to interact with this community of Tesla trackers once the car leaves orbit? Do you have a plan are you just gonna kind of wait and see what bubbles up in the internet and react to it? We don't have a plan. No plan, the battery's gonna last about 12 hours from launch roughly and after that it's just gonna be out there in deep space for maybe millions and millions of years who knows. Maybe discovered by future alien race thinking what the heck what what were these guys doing did they worship this car? Why do they have a little car in the car? That'll really confuse the. I'm not sure what's gonna happen but I think you know it's kind of a fun thing and sure hope that next burn works by the way. We'll know in a few hours.Chris Davenport from the Washington Post so now that you're focusing more on the BFR, I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the timeline. I know you said it's coming along faster, and then what that means for your plans for Mars and the moon Well I don't want to get too off-topic but you know I think we might, if we get lucky, be able to do short hop flights with the spaceship part of BFR maybe next year. Bill Harwood from CBS Two really quick ones you mentioned the the drone ship a couple of thrusters got hit, did the thing land on the ship or near?Take the information that I have with a grain of salt, it may be incorrect. The information I received was that we hit the water at about 300 miles an hour and about a hundred metres away from the ship. Which was enough to take out two thrusters and shower the deck with shrapnel. You mentioned the burn coming up can you give us any sense of how long a burn are we talking about and when you hope to have some confirmation and be able to tell us that it did or didn't work I don't have the number off hand, I was just looking at the profound residual Sigma which is like the key number. It's it's a decent decently long burn. Maybe a minute or so and yeah that'll be in few hours hopefully. I actually don't have the latest information because I've just been out at the landing zone and haven't been back to launch control since going to the landing zones. I don't have the latest information on the status of the upper stage.Tom Costello for NBC News Congratulations again! I want to follow up on Chris's question because Chris asked you what's your timeline potentially to go to the Moon or Mars and you said, did you say as soon as next year, can you quantify that but then I tie my real question I'm just doing Chris's work. By hopper tests I mean kind-of-like the grasshopper program for falcon 9, where we just had the rocket take take off and land in Texas at our Texas test site so we'd either do that at our South Texas launch site, near Brownsville or or do ship-to-ship. We're not sure yet whether ship-to-ship or Brownsville, but most likely it's gonna happen in our Brownsville location because got a lot of land with nobody around and so if it blows up, it's cool.By hopper test I mean it'll go up several miles then come down. The ship is capable of single stage to orbit if you fully load the tanks. So we'll do flights of increasing complexity. We really want to test the heatshield material so, like you know fly out turn around accelerate back real hard and come in hot to test the heat shield, because we want to have a highly reusable heat shield that's capable of absorbing heat from interplanetary entry velocities. So it's really tricky.The potential to go to the moon or mars what's your timeline, any idea? So a lot of uncertainties on this program but it is going to be our focus, now that we're almost done with with Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy, we're gonna level off at block 5 or version 5, so there won't be anymore major versions of Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy. Dragon is also going to level off at dragon version 2. There might be point releases like 5.1 or Dragon 2.1 or something like that but most of our engineering resources will be dedicated to BFR and and so I think that that will make things go quite quickly.The ship part is by far the hardest because that's going to come in from super-orbital velocities. Mars transfer velocities these are way harder than coming in from low-earth orbit. There's some of the heating things that scale to the eighth power. I diddn't think there's anything that scales to eight power but turns out on reentry certain elements of reentry heating scale to the 8th so just testing that ship out is the real tricky part.The booster I think we understand reasonable boosters. Reusable spaceships that can land propulsively that's that's harder, so we're starting with the hard part first.I think it's conceivable that we do our first full-up orbital test flight in 3-4 years including the booster. inaudible question on moon/mars We'd go to low earth orbit first but it would be capable of going to the moon very shortly thereafter it's designed to do that.Martin Avenue reddit's r/space I'd like to congratulate it you as well as so many people have done just now. I'd like to know about Starman spacesuit is it a production model, is it instrumented and/or pressurized and what's holding his what's holding him up?Well there's a mannequin inside, so it's just basically stuffed, but yeah that is the actual production design so the real one looks like just like that that in fact that's one of the qualification articles so that's that's real that's the real deal yeah.I figure if you're gonna go on a dangerous trip you want to look good. It took us three years to design, it was real hard, it's easier making spacesuit that looks good or doesn't work or that works but doesn't look good it's really difficult to make a space suit that looks good and works. You have to make it a multi-part process and it was surprisingly difficult.I take motion from Business Insider um thank you so much for doing this by the way and I want to go back to VFR for a second since you were talking about that, and also Starman which is such an inspirational thing that's happening. Have you thought given any thought to what you might do with BFR in that way what is the what is the payload and any thoughts of that? No, no ideas, sugestions are welcome!I mean it's a beast so you know the BFR 9 meter diameter or 30 feet roughly. You can put a lot in 30 feet, hundred twenty meters long. Although you know I bet it doesn't look that big after a while. timber notes from ports Hi Elon thanks again for doing this. Two questions for you one just about faring recovery, just curious how the SpaceX is coming with that, and Jeff Bezos just responded to your tweet congratulating you on your launch today. You just mentioned a minute ago that we need a new space race I'm just curious if you see yourself in a race with blue origin. What's the first part of the the question again? Checking in on fairing recovery.Fairing recoveryI'm pretty sure we'll have fairing recovery in the next six months.It turns out that you pop the parachute on the fairing and you've got this giant awkward thing that tends to interfere with the air flow on the on the parachute and and mess it up.Gets all twisty and and was low priority too. We have fairing version two which is the really important one that we want to recover, so even if we recovered fairing version one, we wouldn't be re-flying it in the future. Fairing two and recovery that's very important, and my guess is - next six months we figure out recovery.We've got a special boat to catch the fairing, like a catcher's mitt. It's like a giant catchers mitt in boat form. It's gonna run around and catch the fairing.Kinda fun.I think you might be able to do the same thing with dragon so if NASA wants us to, we could try to catch dragon.Made for the fairing, but it would work for dragon too. James Dean from Florida today Speaking of those dragons could you give us a status on Commercial Crew and and you know when we might realistically see that astronaut just get into low-earth orbit much less the Moon or Mars We're making great progress on crew dragon or dragon version 2 - mission assurance is always number one priority but then the the priority used to be falcon 9 block five and then a month ago I said absolute priority is crew Dragon. We're pretty much done with falcon 9 block five, almost done with Falcon Heavy, a few tweaks that could occur with falcon heavy block five but they're minor. And so it's all hands on deck for crew dragon and we're aspiring to send crew to orbit at the end of this year. I think the hardware will be ready.Chris Gephardt How quickly can the pad be reconfigured between heavy and Falcon 9 since you need that pad for both?It's no problem, it can go back and forth this is its designed that way. And for the block five version of the Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy are the does the Falcon having need a dedicated core built for it?It does. Tthe center core needs to be dedicated, the center core is a special build, the side boosters we can reuse existing Falcon 9s but we need to just replace the interstage with a with a nose cone and and use the upgraded titanium grid-fins, which are sweet.Those worked out real well I'm really happy about those in fact I'm glad we got the side boosters back because they had the titanium grid-fins, and the center core diddn't. So if I have to pick, I would have picked the side boosters. I just picked the center core to explode. That would be like the least bad. The grid-fins are super expensive and and awesome but their production rate is slow. We want them back. The most important thing to recover where those gridfins. Is there anything inside the spacesuit testing like its ability to function> Nope, I know it definitely works so you can just like jump in a vacuum chamber with it and be fine.
Quote from: Jim on 02/04/2018 02:58 pmQuote from: Robotbeat on 02/04/2018 02:51 pmSimply stretching the upper stage of FH would basically null out any performance difference. And adding a kick stage on top of *that* would allow FH to launch Europa Clipper direct to Jupiter like SLS.There is no kick stage for Europa Clipper on FH. "Kick" stages are solid motors which have high thrust. Solid motors and Falcon are none starters.There is no stretching of the upperstage. there is no more F9 development.Europa Clipper on FH would use gravity assists.Why are we even discussing this? Europa Clipper is mandated by law to fly on SLS. End of story.
Quote from: Robotbeat on 02/04/2018 02:51 pmSimply stretching the upper stage of FH would basically null out any performance difference. And adding a kick stage on top of *that* would allow FH to launch Europa Clipper direct to Jupiter like SLS.There is no kick stage for Europa Clipper on FH. "Kick" stages are solid motors which have high thrust. Solid motors and Falcon are none starters.There is no stretching of the upperstage. there is no more F9 development.Europa Clipper on FH would use gravity assists.
Based on the final orbit, this launch could have lifted roughly 7500 kg to GTO-1800 with 3-core recovery and a large center core boost-back. Block 5 improvements will allow it to do that with 3-core RTLS, or more payload, IMO.
...I noted that the view of Starman in the Tesla car reminded me of the early 1960's animated cartoons of " The Jetsons" ! ...
