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SpaceX Launches Reused Falcon 9


Waspie_Dwarf

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A few minutes ago a Falcon 9 launched from pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center. The first stage seems to have performed perfectly. This marks a major milestone for SpaceX as the first stage had already flown, back in April 2016. This is the first time that such an orbital class launch vehicle has been re0flown. The rocket successfully landed on the SpaceX recovery vehicle, "Of Course I Still Love You.".

Let's see if they can land this baby a second time.

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Successful landing!!!

That booster has now flown, landed, re-flown and landed again. We may have just finally entered the era of reusable space launch vehicles. Congratulations SpaceX,this could be a real game changer.

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The SES-10 communications satellite has been delivered into it's transfer orbit. A highly successful flight.

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This is the beginning of a new era in space flight IMHO.  Really something to see and launched right on time as well.  

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Really cool!!! 

I wonder if anyone has talked about roughly how much money was saved? Obviously the goal here but I seem to have missed any discussion of that.

Also how many times does Spacex plan to be able to re-launch the vehicle?

 

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9 minutes ago, lost_shaman said:

Really cool!!! 

I wonder if anyone has talked about roughly how much money was saved? Obviously the goal here but I seem to have missed any discussion of that.

Also how many times does Spacex plan to be able to re-launch the vehicle?

 

It's not as straight forward as you think but this article does a through job of discussing the pluses and negatives but the short and long of it is roughly 30% and fifteen times or maybe dozens of times.   http://spacenews.com/spacexs-reusable-falcon-9-what-are-the-real-cost-savings-for-customers/

Edited by Merc14
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Thanks Merc14. 

Seems like a long road, but Spacex is doing it. I'm not going to bet against them at this point.

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11 hours ago, Waspie_Dwarf said:

A few minutes ago a Falcon 9 launched from pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center. The first stage seems to have performed perfectly. This marks a major milestone for SpaceX as the first stage had already flown, back in April 2016. This is the first time that such an orbital class launch vehicle has been re0flown. The rocket successfully landed on the SpaceX recovery vehicle, "Of Course I Still Love You.".

Let's see if they can land this baby a second time.

Did using the refurbished boosters from the Space Shuttle not count as the first time an orbital class vehicle has been re-flown? The boosters were essentially the first stage of the shuttle. And of course, the shuttles were themselves reused. That said, I am not in any way diminishing Space-X's achievement.

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58 minutes ago, Derek Willis said:

Did using the refurbished boosters from the Space Shuttle not count as the first time an orbital class vehicle has been re-flown? The boosters were essentially the first stage of the shuttle. And of course, the shuttles were themselves reused. That said, I am not in any way diminishing Space-X's achievement.

It's a little difficult to compare. The shuttle  SRB's were recovered but you can't really consider them a vehice. They also needed to be stripped back to their component parts and totally refurbished before the next flight. SpaceX has the goal of relying a Falcon 9 1st stage within 24 hours of landing. 

The shuttle orbiter was, of course, reusable but it too took many months to refurbish between flights. It never achieved the turn around times it was planned for and was more expensive than a conventional launch vehicle. Also, all the time they were throwing away the largest component, the external tank, it is difficult to argue that NASA were fully recovering an orbital class vehicle.

Of course the Falcon 9 is also not fully reusable as the second stage is not recoverable. Initially SpaceX planned to develop a reusable 2nd stage but abandoned the idea. I assume that this was because it would not have been economically viable.

SpaceX also recovered the payload fairing on this mission. They cost around  $2 million ago, so this could be yet more cost savings.

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2 hours ago, Waspie_Dwarf said:

It's a little difficult to compare. The shuttle  SRB's were recovered but you can't really consider them a vehice. They also needed to be stripped back to their component parts and totally refurbished before the next flight. SpaceX has the goal of relying a Falcon 9 1st stage within 24 hours of landing. 

The shuttle orbiter was, of course, reusable but it too took many months to refurbish between flights. It never achieved the turn around times it was planned for and was more expensive than a conventional launch vehicle. Also, all the time they were throwing away the largest component, the external tank, it is difficult to argue that NASA were fully recovering an orbital class vehicle.

Of course the Falcon 9 is also not fully reusable as the second stage is not recoverable. Initially SpaceX planned to develop a reusable 2nd stage but abandoned the idea. I assume that this was because it would not have been economically viable.

SpaceX also recovered the payload fairing on this mission. They cost around  $2 million ago, so this could be yet more cost savings.

Like I say, I am not in any way diminishing Space-X's achievements - what they have done over the last ten years or so has been amazing, and this has changed the whole nature of building and launching orbital rockets. No longer can the cartel of aerospace suppliers operate on a cost-plus basis. Competition is now in the market, and that will drive costs down. Mr Musk is obviously a very shrewd operator. I can remember him being criticized by the "establishment" of the space industry for appearing to go back-over in designing expendable rockets. But all along he had this spectacular plan!

I have a book called Missiles and Rockets written in 1975 by Kenneth Gatland. In it he describes NASA's claims of how the shuttle will cost $10 million per flight (about $200 million in today's money) and have a turnaround time (refurbishment of boosters and orbiter) of two weeks. We know these early claims by NASA were grossly optimistic, with the times actually involved being as you described above. Twenty four hours to re-fly a Falcon 9 first stage sounds incredible, but we are forty years on since the design of the shuttle. If anyone can do it, Space-X will!

I would imagine the plan to reuse the second stage was uneconomical because it would need a heat shield to survive re-entry from orbit. The nose fairing is of course jettisoned long before orbital velocity is reached. But again, in future Space-X may well demonstrate entirely reusable "conventional" rockets are viable. 

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Got to give credit to the whole SpaceX team, they are really talented and innotive group of people

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14 minutes ago, Derek Willis said:

Like I say, I am not in any way diminishing Space-X's achievements - what they have done over the last ten years or so has been amazing, and this has changed the whole nature of building and launching orbital rockets. No longer can the cartel of aerospace suppliers operate on a cost-plus basis. Competition is now in the market, and that will drive costs down. Mr Musk is obviously a very shrewd operator. I can remember him being criticized by the "establishment" of the space industry for appearing to go back-over in designing expendable rockets. But all along he had this spectacular plan!

I have a book called Missiles and Rockets written in 1975 by Kenneth Gatland. In it he describes NASA's claims of how the shuttle will cost $10 million per flight (about $200 million in today's money) and have a turnaround time (refurbishment of boosters and orbiter) of two weeks. We know these early claims by NASA were grossly optimistic, with the times actually involved being as you described above. Twenty four hours to re-fly a Falcon 9 first stage sounds incredible, but we are forty years on since the design of the shuttle. If anyone can do it, Space-X will!

I would imagine the plan to reuse the second stage was uneconomical because it would need a heat shield to survive re-entry from orbit. The nose fairing is of course jettisoned long before orbital velocity is reached. But again, in future Space-X may well demonstrate entirely reusable "conventional" rockets are viable. 

There are differences though in that the shuttle went into orbit for days at a time lifting massive loads and then returned, sometimes with cargo on board, to land on a runway.. I looked up why they took so long to turn around and was surprisd to read they changed all teh engines out!  I never knew that and wonder why give the durability of the RS-25 engines and their reliability..  

Question: Scott from Melbourne
Why does it take so long to get shuttles ready for a launch?

Answer:  It takes a long time, Scott, because of all the things we're doing to try and make sure that the shuttle is ready to go support the next flight. Although there are a lot of redundant systems on the orbiter, we really don't like to get on orbit and then have to take advantage of that redundancy. So we try to make sure that the orbiter is the best it can be. So all the systems - the SSMEs (Space Shuttle Main Engines) are changed out, the orbiter mechanisms for up in the payload bay, the ET doors, all the ECS Systems (Environmental Control Systems) that provide cooling and air for the astronauts and crew, all the data processing systems... they're all thoroughly checked out before flight. One of the things that also is a real time-consuming thing for shuttle processing is a need to change payloads. Because the orbiter is so flexible, and we can fly multiple types of payloads. One mission you may be flying a deployable payload and in the next mission it's possible that you're flying a payload that you're bringing back. So you need to reconfigure the payload bay. So really the flexibility of the system unfortunately adds to the time of getting it turned around.

from - https://www.nasa.gov/missions/highlights/webcasts/shuttle/sts113/processing-qa.html

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Hi Merc - That's a major point on the use of back-up systems.  Do you know how many SpaceX has?  I hope they don't anticipate a periodic failure rate necessitating the use of a redundant system.

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2 hours ago, Merc14 said:

There are differences though in that the shuttle went into orbit for days at a time lifting massive loads and then returned, sometimes with cargo on board, to land on a runway.. I looked up why they took so long to turn around and was surprisd to read they changed all teh engines out!  I never knew that and wonder why give the durability of the RS-25 engines and their reliability..  

Question: Scott from Melbourne
Why does it take so long to get shuttles ready for a launch?

Answer:  It takes a long time, Scott, because of all the things we're doing to try and make sure that the shuttle is ready to go support the next flight. Although there are a lot of redundant systems on the orbiter, we really don't like to get on orbit and then have to take advantage of that redundancy. So we try to make sure that the orbiter is the best it can be. So all the systems - the SSMEs (Space Shuttle Main Engines) are changed out, the orbiter mechanisms for up in the payload bay, the ET doors, all the ECS Systems (Environmental Control Systems) that provide cooling and air for the astronauts and crew, all the data processing systems... they're all thoroughly checked out before flight. One of the things that also is a real time-consuming thing for shuttle processing is a need to change payloads. Because the orbiter is so flexible, and we can fly multiple types of payloads. One mission you may be flying a deployable payload and in the next mission it's possible that you're flying a payload that you're bringing back. So you need to reconfigure the payload bay. So really the flexibility of the system unfortunately adds to the time of getting it turned around.

from - https://www.nasa.gov/missions/highlights/webcasts/shuttle/sts113/processing-qa.html

According to my 1978 edition of Rocket Propulsion Elements by George Sutton (the later editions are still the standard university text) Rocketdyne expected no more than 10% of RS-25 components would need to be changed after each flight during the early stages of the program, and this would reduce to less than 5%. The plan was that for the first dozen or so flights the engines would be removed, but after experience was gained the component replacements would be done with the engines in situ. However, an article in the August 1988 edition of the Spaceflight magazine describes how during the early flights some 60% of components needed replacing. Essentially - and especially after the Challenger accident - the policy became one of removing the engines after each flight. Over the years the component replacement percentage was brought down. In all, 46 RS-25 engines were used during the shuttle program. During the concept phase, there was the belief that the engines would eventually be almost as servicable as airline jet engines. Of course, during the concept stage it was believed there would be twenty-five flights per year and a fleet of at least ten shuttles.

The shuttle, in my opinion, comes in for unfair criticism. It is true the program was expensive and lives were lost. But the program was bold and audacious, and so was never going to be easy. The propulsion components from the shuttle are being used in the Space Launch System, which could be around for fifty years, and which will open up a whole new era of space exploration.

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2 hours ago, paperdyer said:

Hi Merc - That's a major point on the use of back-up systems.  Do you know how many SpaceX has?  I hope they don't anticipate a periodic failure rate necessitating the use of a redundant system.

I don't know.  It is a privately held company so everything is not out in the open as it is with NASA.  It will be interesting to see how the customers react to rockets going up for the third or fourth time, I am guessing they will ask for discounts to offset the risk at least until it is a proven system and they have already had their share of problems for sure.

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