SpaceX News

Point out news stories, on the net or in mainstream media, related to polywell fusion.

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KitemanSA
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Re: SpaceX News

Post by KitemanSA »

ladajo wrote:And another boring launch...

<yawn>
Sorry dude but that much power is NOT boring.

ladajo
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Re: SpaceX News

Post by ladajo »

Yes, however the measure to which it has been harnessed makes it "boring".
That said, fair point, it is amazing to watch and consider what it took to get here. And, then consider what is next.

I would also hope that you know me well enough by now to understand the humor I intend by <yawn>...
The development of atomic power, though it could confer unimaginable blessings on mankind, is something that is dreaded by the owners of coal mines and oil wells. (Hazlitt)
What I want to do is to look up C. . . . I call him the Forgotten Man. (Sumner)

Tom Ligon
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Re: SpaceX News

Post by Tom Ligon »

More notable, the judges who have been bored with so many recent launches just slept in.

This is victory. Space travel is becoming routine.

williatw
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Re: SpaceX News

Post by williatw »

SpaceX to build BFR factory in Southern California


Image
Artist’s concept of SpaceX’s planned spaceship on the moon. Credit: SpaceX


SpaceX plans to build its massive BFR rocket boosters and spaceships inside a cavernous new factory at the Port of Los Angeles, officials announced this week.


SpaceX plans to build its massive BFR rocket boosters and spaceships inside a cavernous new factory at the Port of Los Angeles, officials announced this week.
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti confirmed Monday during a State of the City address that SpaceX will produce its Big Falcon Rocket at a site at the Port of Los Angeles.

“This vehicle holds the promise of taking humanity deeper into the cosmos than ever before,” Garcetti added on Twitter.

SpaceX and port officials have discussed the aerospace company’s use of a 19-acre waterfront parcel at the harbor since 2015, and the parties wrapped up lease negotiations last month. The Los Angeles Board of Harbor Commissioners on Thursday approved the agreement with SpaceX.

SpaceX’s huge new rocket will tower nearly 350 feet (106 meters) tall and span 30 feet (9 meters) in diameter, according to information presented by company founder Elon Musk last year.

The reusable vehicle will come in two pieces.

A booster stage, powered by 31 methane-fueled Raptor engines will produce nearly 12 million pounds of thrust and be capable of returning to Earth for propulsive vertical landings like SpaceX’s existing Falcon rockets. An upper stage that doubles as an interplanetary transporter will carry people, supplies, satellites, and huge propellant tanks that can be refilled in space.

Bruce McHugh, SpaceX’s director of construction and real estate, told the Board of Harbor Commissioners on Thursday that the 19-acre site at Berth 240 “is the perfect spot to build our big rocket.”

SpaceX examined potential factory locations in Southern California, Florida, Louisiana and Texas before settling on the Port of Los Angeles location, according to Michael DiBernardo, the port’s deputy executive director of marketing and customer relations.

Image
Artist’s illustration of the BFR in flight.

McHugh said SpaceX needed a location with access to the water because the BFR is too big to transport on trucks, as the company currently moves its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy boosters. A barge will pick up the BFR booster and upper stage, also known as the Big Falcon Spaceship, and transport them to their test sites and launch pad.

The huge vehicle’s design is still in the early stages, and SpaceX revamped the design of its mega-launcher over 2016 and 2017, ending up with a smaller rocket than Musk originally envisioned. But the BFR — in its current iteration — dwarfs all rockets currently flying in dimension and capability, and would measure roughly the same size as NASA’s Saturn 5 moon rocket, while producing nearly twice as much thrust at liftoff as the Apollo-era launcher developed in the 1960s.

“We don’t know exactly what we’re building, but we know it’s big, and we know it can’t be trucked,” McHugh said Thursday. “So that’s why this spot has enough land, it’s near the water, and we know that we could produce our product there.”

SpaceX already leases land at the Port of Los Angeles as a base for the company’s recovery fleet, which deploys into the Pacific Ocean to pick up Dragon capsules returning from the International Space Station and retrieve rocket boosters and payload fairings from Falcon 9s launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base northwest of Los Angeles.

SpaceX’s headquarters and current manufacturing site is in Hawthorne, California, around 15 miles (24 kilometers) north of the port.

McHugh said SpaceX intends to build an 80,000-square-foot (7,400-square-meter), 80-foot-tall (24-meter) fabrication hangar at the Berth 240 location within about a year.

“When we add onto it, it’ll wind up being a total of a 200,000-square-foot (18,600-square-meter) building, assuming everything works out for us,” McHugh said. “We are building a ship that’s never been built before. We are doing research and technology that’s never been done.

“We’re also doing this in a parallel path. We are working on the means and methods of how we’re going build this product. So far, it’s going to be a composite-type rocket.”

McHugh said approximately 20 engineers and 20 production technicians are currently working on the BFR project. By the time the BFR is ready for full production, in roughly three-to-five years, McHugh estimated around 700 people will be working at the new factory.

“Elon wants it way faster, but I think it’s three-to-five years,” McHugh said.

Known for setting optimistic schedules, Musk set an “aspirational” goal last year to have the BFR ready for a robotic mission to Mars by 2022, and a human voyage by 2024. Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s president and chief operating officer, said last month the BFR could be ready for test flights into Earth orbit in 2020.

McHugh said the rockets built at the Port of Los Angeles will be shipped through the Panama Canal to Cape Canaveral for launch preparations.

SpaceX officials have said in recent months that early atmospheric tests of the spaceship part of the BFR could begin next year, likely at the company’s launch base in South Texas, which is still under construction.

Image
A manufacturing tool for the BFR’s interplanetary spaceship


“The ship part is, by far, the hardest because that’s going to come in from super-orbital velocities, like interplanetary Mars transfer velocities, moon transfer velocities,” Musk said last month. “These are way harder than coming from Earth orbit.”

The spaceship’s high-speed returns will stress the craft’s heat shield and structure beyond the temperatures and pressures experienced by a capsule re-entering the atmosphere from Earth orbit, or by a descending rocket stage.

“Testing that ship out is the real tricky part,” Musk said Feb. 6. “The booster, I think — I don’t want to get too complacent — but I think we understand reusable boosters. Reusable spaceships that can land propulsively, that’s harder. We’re starting with the hard part first.”

The spaceship design Musk revealed in September had a cluster of six Raptor engines — he later said the ship could have seven engines — and methane and liquid oxygen tanks containing almost a quarter-million pounds (1,100 metric tons) of cryogenic propellants for deep space burns and landing maneuvers. The spacecraft would stretch 157 feet (48 meters) long and have an internal pressurized volume exceeding that of an Airbus A380 jumbo jet, enough room for 40 passenger cabins.

Musk revealed a tool that will be used to build the BFR’s interplanetary spaceship in an Instagram post April 8.
SpaceX will pay the Port of Los Angeles $1.38 million per year under its lease agreement for the Berth 240 location.


https://spaceflightnow.com/2018/04/21/s ... alifornia/

alexjrgreen
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Re: SpaceX News

Post by alexjrgreen »

Ars artis est celare artem.

paperburn1
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Re: SpaceX News

Post by paperburn1 »

Get ready to yawn again
SpaceX confirmed the target launch date in a tweet Monday, and the launch window Thursday opens at 4:12 p.m. EDT (2012 GMT) and extends until 6:22 p.m. EDT (2222 GMT).
“Block 5 basically summarizes all that we learned on reusability,” said Hans Koenigsmann, SpaceX’s vice president of build and flight reliability, in a briefing with reporters last month. “Whenever we recover a booster and then it goes through refurbishment, we find things that are giving us … lessons for the next block. In this case, we tried to summarize all of these lessons learned into a booster that then is able to fly, and be recovered and fly again multiple times without a lot of refurbishment.
Also not very news worthy, another dragon reentry just fine with no problems 3 days ago...Yawn. 8)
I am not a nuclear physicist, but play one on the internet.

williatw
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Re: SpaceX News

Post by williatw »

Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design*
39. (alternate formulation) The three keys to keeping a new human space program affordable and on schedule:
1) No new launch vehicles.
2) No new launch vehicles.
3) Whatever you do, don't develop any new launch vehicles.

1. Engineering is done with numbers. Analysis without numbers is only an opinion.

2. To design a spacecraft right takes an infinite amount of effort. This is why it's a good idea to design them to operate when some things are wrong .

3. Design is an iterative process. The necessary number of iterations is one more than the number you have currently done. This is true at any point in time.

4. Your best design efforts will inevitably wind up being useless in the final design. Learn to live with the disappointment.

5. (Miller's Law) Three points determine a curve.

6. (Mar's Law) Everything is linear if plotted log-log with a fat magic marker.

7. At the start of any design effort, the person who most wants to be team leader is least likely to be capable of it.

8. In nature, the optimum is almost always in the middle somewhere. Distrust assertions that the optimum is at an extreme point.

9. Not having all the information you need is never a satisfactory excuse for not starting the analysis.

10. When in doubt, estimate. In an emergency, guess. But be sure to go back and clean up the mess when the real numbers come along.

11. Sometimes, the fastest way to get to the end is to throw everything out and start over.

12. There is never a single right solution. There are always multiple wrong ones, though.

13. Design is based on requirements. There's no justification for designing something one bit "better" than the requirements dictate.

14. (Edison's Law) "Better" is the enemy of "good".

15. (Shea's Law) The ability to improve a design occurs primarily at the interfaces. This is also the prime location for screwing it up.

16. The previous people who did a similar analysis did not have a direct pipeline to the wisdom of the ages. There is therefore no reason to believe their analysis over yours. There is especially no reason to present their analysis as yours.

17. The fact that an analysis appears in print has no relationship to the likelihood of its being correct.

18. Past experience is excellent for providing a reality check. Too much reality can doom an otherwise worthwhile design, though.

19. The odds are greatly against you being immensely smarter than everyone else in the field. If your analysis says your terminal velocity is twice the speed of light, you may have invented warp drive, but the chances are a lot better that you've screwed up.

20. A bad design with a good presentation is doomed eventually. A good design with a bad presentation is doomed immediately.

21. (Larrabee's Law) Half of everything you hear in a classroom is crap. Education is figuring out which half is which.

22. When in doubt, document. (Documentation requirements will reach a maximum shortly after the termination of a program.)

23. The schedule you develop will seem like a complete work of fiction up until the time your customer fires you for not meeting it.

24. It's called a "Work Breakdown Structure" because the Work remaining will grow until you have a Breakdown, unless you enforce some Structure on it.

25. (Bowden's Law) Following a testing failure, it's always possible to refine the analysis to show that you really had negative margins all along.

26. (Montemerlo's Law) Don't do nuthin' dumb.

27. (Varsi's Law) Schedules only move in one direction.

28. (Ranger's Law) There ain't no such thing as a free launch.

29. (von Tiesenhausen's Law of Program Management) To get an accurate estimate of final program requirements, multiply the initial time estimates by pi, and slide the decimal point on the cost estimates one place to the right.

30. (von Tiesenhausen's Law of Engineering Design) If you want to have a maximum effect on the design of a new engineering system, learn to draw. Engineers always wind up designing the vehicle to look like the initial artist's concept.

31. (Mo's Law of Evolutionary Development) You can't get to the moon by climbing successively taller trees.

32. (Atkin's Law of Demonstrations) When the hardware is working perfectly, the really important visitors don't show up.

33. (Patton's Law of Program Planning) A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan next week.

34. (Roosevelt's Law of Task Planning) Do what you can, where you are, with what you have.

35. (de Saint-Exupery's Law of Design) A designer knows that he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

36. Any run-of-the-mill engineer can design something which is elegant. A good engineer designs systems to be efficient. A great engineer designs them to be effective.

37. (Henshaw's Law) One key to success in a mission is establishing clear lines of blame.

38. Capabilities drive requirements, regardless of what the systems engineering textbooks say.

39. Any exploration program which "just happens" to include a new launch vehicle is, de facto, a launch vehicle program.

39. (alternate formulation) The three keys to keeping a new human space program affordable and on schedule:
1) No new launch vehicles.
2) No new launch vehicles.
3) Whatever you do, don't develop any new launch vehicles.

40. (McBryan's Law) You can't make it better until you make it work.

41. There's never enough time to do it right, but somehow, there's always enough time to do it over.

42. Space is a completely unforgiving environment. If you screw up the engineering, somebody dies (and there's no partial credit because most of the analysis was right...)






https://spacecraft.ssl.umd.edu/akins_laws.html

krenshala
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Re: SpaceX News

Post by krenshala »

Looks like todays launch was aborted at T-58 seconds, and is rescheduled for tomorrow (11 May). Not sure on the time, however.

Skipjack
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Re: SpaceX News

Post by Skipjack »

krenshala wrote:Looks like todays launch was aborted at T-58 seconds, and is rescheduled for tomorrow (11 May). Not sure on the time, however.
From what I have read it is 16:14 eastern.

Maui
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Re: SpaceX News

Post by Maui »

Per: https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/c ... k_v_first/
SpaceX on track to double their 2017 launch rate. Source

Arguably version 6 of Falcon 9. There will be minor changes here and there but no major block changes going forward. Source 1 | Source 2

Falcon 9 Block V will be the mainstay of SpaceX's business and is expected to fly 300 or more times total. Source

Block V designed to fly 10 or more times with no refurbishment at all between flights. Scheduled maintenance after the 10th flight. Source

SpaceX intends to demonstrate flying the same booster twice within 24 hours as soon as next year. Recover booster -> retract legs -> go to hangar -> attach second stage -> attach payload -> go to pad -> fuel -> launch. Source

Hardest part of making Block V was human-rating it. Literally thousands of requirements to do so. Met or exceeded all requirements. Designed to be the most reliable rocket ever built. Source 1 | Source 2 | Source 3

Block V Merlin engines see an 8% thrust increase over Block IV. Thrust is now 190,000 lbf. SpaceX believes there is still more room to improve the Merlin engines - perhaps up to 10% more thrust and an improvement in ISP. Source 1 | Source 2

Block V has a lot of new added thermal protection. Black interstage, raceways, and landing legs don't need paint. Thermal protection composed of a material that is hydrophobic and therefore doesn't attract water. Source

Octaweb for Block V is much stronger. Better thermal protection on the inside. Each engine contained within a bay which should allow for an engine to have a "bad day" and not affect the other 8 engines. Thermal protection on the inside is to protect against an engine fire. Source 1 | Source 2 | Source 3

Landing legs are much easier to stow. Internal latch mechanism can be closed and opened with ease. New landing gear can be retracted via an actuator. Old landing gear took hours to retract. Source 1 | Source 2

Titanium grid fins are now standard on Block V and will be used going forward. Can withstand temperatures of 2000 degrees F. Source

There is active cooling on the titanium heat-shields at the base of the Block V. Source

Confidence in fairing recovery in future flights. Source

SpaceX will be gathering data about the re-entry experience of the second stage. They will try to transmit data to the Iridium constellation during re-entry. Source

SpaceX will be adding heat shields to the second stage until they can recover it. Question is payload penalty. Elon is confident that full reusability of the second stage is achievable. Source 1 | Source 2

Falcon 9 cost breakdown is roughly 60% booster, 20% second stage, 10% fairing, 10% for launch. Propellant is only $300,000 to $400,000. Source

Re-use of the entire vehicle could bring down launch cost by an order of magnitude. Source

Ironically B1046, this first Block V, needs to be taken apart after its first launch to confirm that Block V doesn't need to be taken apart after a launch. Won't fly again for a couple of months. Source

3rd and 4th flights of a given Block V booster should occur in late 2018. By late 2019 they should have cores reaching their 10th flight. Source

Elon is stressed about the first Block V launch. Getting a rocket that can re-fly 100 times is "crazy hard". Source

Boca Chica, Texas launch site will be dedicated to BFR launches. Source

SpaceX's inventory of Block V boosters expected to eventually reach 30 to 50 boosters, depending on the demand for brand new cores. Source

SpaceX has acted as a "forcing function" to drive down launch costs - China looking at reusable rockets. Source

Block IV flights probably could have been pushed to a 10 day increment but with Block V coming it was unnecessary. Source

Gigantic amount of research and testing went into creating the new COPVs for Block V. Most advanced pressure vessel ever developed by humanity. Source

Falcon 9 pricing is now $50 million for a flight-proven booster. $60 million for a brand new booster. Source 1 | Source 2

Elon loves NASA. Source
I found the plan for 30-50 boosters extremely surprising if they are really going to be able to re-fly in 24 hours without refurb and with BFR in the wings. Wouldn't this completely undercut BFR?

krenshala
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Re: SpaceX News

Post by krenshala »

Depends on the payload. If its big enough then F9/FH won't cut it (though possibly only if they aren't willing to 'throw it away').

TDPerk
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Re: SpaceX News

Post by TDPerk »

Maui wrote:Wouldn't this completely undercut BFR?
Because BFR will be less expensive to launch than the F9, the F9 cannot undercut the BFR. It won't matter how cheap the F9 is to refurb or fast to recycle for launch--it's costs are still higher.
molon labe
montani semper liberi
para fides paternae patria

Maui
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Re: SpaceX News

Post by Maui »

Per above info, they are aiming for F9 2nd stage reusability. If they can achieve that, not sure how BFR could possibly be cheaper to launch.

TDPerk
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Re: SpaceX News

Post by TDPerk »

Maui wrote:Per above info, they are aiming for F9 2nd stage reusability. If they can achieve that, not sure how BFR could possibly be cheaper to launch.
Less ground crew and far less expensive fuel. Also, 100 minimum launches before refitting means the not10x R&D cost is spread over far more flights.

Fuel cost is only a little higher for far more capacity.
Ground crew cost is far lower.
R&D $$$ to be amortized per flight is far lower.

Total cost to fly is lower.
molon labe
montani semper liberi
para fides paternae patria

Aero
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Re: SpaceX News

Post by Aero »

And time required to recover and re-launch is much lower. It will take a great deal of time to recover and return the second stage of the F-9 to the launch site.
Aero

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