Space News thread

[Neo]

It's a huge investment to factor in multiple malfunctions along the way. Kudos

[Takeovers]

Kudos

Really! Only few years ago most professionals thought this will never work and Elon Musk is crazy to even try. Today they conced it will work, but add that it will not be economical. They are wrong again.

It's a huge investment to factor in multiple malfunctions along the way.

Actually not that bad. Those launches are commercial. The stage has already made money for SpaceX before it tries to land. If they would not try to land it, it would just crash into the ocean like all the rockets before it. It is mostly the operational cost of the barge, not that much compared to the value of the stage, when recovered. The first two crashes damaged the barge and it needed repairs. This time they have reenforced the barge and protected expensive equipment with blast shields. Also the explosion was a lot less violent, probably little damage beyond a new paint job for the circles and the X in the center.

[Neo]

Ah yes I see, once the payload has been launched its actually a bonus if they recover the rocket which would otherwise be destroyed. Cheers

[OhOh]

The stage has already made money for SpaceX before it tries to land.

Ah yes I see, once the payload has been launched its actually a bonus if they recover the rocket which would otherwise be destroyed. Cheers

What is the % payload reducation due to designing, building and operating this "reusable" rocket and building the launch/recovery shipping fleet?

[Takeovers]

What is the % payload reducation due to designing, building and operating this "reusable" rocket and building the launch/recovery shipping fleet?

Not everything is known, especially building and operating cost for the barges.

Customers presently pay ~63 million $ for the launch. Reasonable estimate is 40 million for the launch vehicle, 23 million for launch operations and net profit. They need a lot of net profit to keep their research and investments up. Of 40 million for the vehicle ~ 70%, 28 million $ would be the first stage. Estimates on how much maintenance or refurbishment costs, vary wildly. Especially their competition says it is not economical. The IMO most reasonable estimate based on what Elon Musk has said about lifetime of the engines would be no more than 3 million $ for maintenance and no less than 10-20 flights, after maybe some weak spots have been identified and improved. That would drop cost of the first stage from 28 million $ to less than 8 million $, 20 million savings per launch.

Payload penalty due to reuse is ~30% for RTLS, 15% for barge landing. The latest upgrade of the Falcon 9 has increased the payload capacity by 30% without increasing cost much, just a minor increase in pad handling. So now they will be able to recover at least by barge landing all of their present launch contracts and still increase the maximum payload size possible.

The latest statement by Elon Musk was they expect 70% successful landings this year, 90% next year and then slowly getting near 100%.

But this launch vehicle he calls evolutionary progress. For the next generation on the drawing board he predicts revolutionary progress up to 99% cost reduction, depending on flight rate with full reuse of first and second stage.

He has just won a development contract from the Air Force for an advanced upper stage which would be required for second stage reuse. The Air Force pays only part of the development, SpaceX needs to put their own money in the development. This is a very interesting thing. I will try to write a separate post on it.

[Takeovers]

The Air Force is awarding development contracts to aerospace companies.

Air Force Awards Two Rocket Propulsion System Prototype OTAs

This in itself would not be very interesting news without knowing the background. I will try to give some.

The Atlas V launch vehicle of ULA is presently the workhorse for Air Force and NASA launches. Expensive but reliable. There is one problem with it though. Its big first stage engines are russian RD-180. It's a very advanced engine and US aerospace companies are not able to provide an engine with similar performance as this 30 year old russian design. But the Air Force and Congress don't want to be reliant on russian technology for their military needs any more after present political developments.

So Congress in its Federal budget awarded a several hundred million $ amount to the Air Force to build a US made replacement for the RD-180 and fly Atlas V with that new engine.
But rocket science does not work that way. I actually watched the Congress hearing live, where representatives of ULA and the Air Force told Congress even a direct replacement will require major redesign of Atlas V and they don't want to do that. ULA has already started to develop a new launch vehicle, the Vulcan. They are going to buy a new methane engine from a new supplier, Blue Origin of Amazon owner Jeff Bezos. They are not interested in a RD-180 replacement engine. ULA competitor SpaceX confirmed that such an engine would be of very limited use in that same hearing.
Of course Congress did not listen to that testimony and awarded money for RD-180 replacement anyway.
The Air Force then did not follow the intent of this law, probably even violating the letter of the law in awarding development contracts to several companies to develop advanced systems instead.
In short, the Air Force defied Congress, refusing to finance something, no one wants and spending that money on things that will actually help US aerospace industry to become more competetive.

[Takeovers]

A few pictures of the landing barge. Pictures from Karen D. LaFon via Facebook

Space X Of Course I Still Love You - Album on Imgur

One of four thrusters that keep the barge stationary while waiting for a stage to land. Barge and stage don't communicate. The stage comes down on a predetermined location and just expects the barge to be there. That needs station keeping of below 1m error for the barge and the stage to target with the same precision. The stage does have a landing radar that gives the vertical distance to aim for.






The X in the center of the barg, the original SpaceX X design. With a person in the center for size.


A water cannon that keeps the landing surface wet while the stage descends and the blast wall that protects equipment behind it in case of RUD. Also some tripods to support the stage once people have boarded and safe the stage for transport.

[kingwilly]

Pics gone

[Takeovers]

Pics gone

Mine of the barge?

Loaded into the TeakDoor gallery and changed links. Must be visible now.

[kingwilly]

Karen D LaFon's post 832

[Takeovers]

What's left from the stage after Kaboom. I doubt these engines will fly again.

[OhOh]

Customers presently pay ~63 million $ for the launch.

What weight of payload is that for and to what height. How do the costs compare with the EU/Russian non re-usable launch. Without that in the equation one cannot judge whether there is any likelihood of present and future return on any investment.

[Takeovers]

Customers presently pay ~63 million $ for the launch.

What weight of payload is that for and to what height. How do the costs compare with the EU/Russian non re-usable launch. Without that in the equation one cannot judge whether there is any likelihood of present and future return on any investment.

They are already the cheapest launch provider without reuse. The Russians offer their Proton rocket, a very capable system. But the system has a quite high failure rate. They have just slashed the price for launches by a lot. They can do that because the Ruble has tanked and domestic pay is low but even after cutting prices they are still more expensive than Falcon. India and China also offer cheap launches, but for smaller payloads and are still not competetive in price with SpaceX. Ariane of Europe is very reliable but much more expensive.

With the latest improvements to their rocket SpaceX can now launch quite heavy com sats. Their next flight is going to be a 5,3t satellite to GTO by SES. And they will land that on a barge or at least try. Or more than 13t to LEO, reusable. They are getting better at it and will succeed soon. That means they could launch sats with more than 6t to GTO, which hurts Arianespace a lot. Up to now Arianespace felt safe that SpaceX cannot compete for the heaviest satellites, but now they can.

Plus the Falcon Heavy is coming that will be the most capable launcher that presently exists. Only Saturn V and the russian Energiya were more capable but their cost was so high that the US and Russia stopped building them. The NASA SLS will also be more capable but their cost is STELLAR, absurd. NASA is presently planning one launch every two years, because they cannot afford more.

[Neo]

How Astronomers Will Solve the 'Alien Megastructure' Mystery

By Maddie Stone on 21 Jan 2016 at 8:30PM

KIC 8462852 has quickly become one of the biggest astronomical mysteries of the decade. It’ll be months before we have any firm answers on this fitfully flickering star, but astronomers intend to get to the bottom of it. How?

“If we could catch it in the act of dimming again, that would really help,” Penn State’s Jason Wright told Gizmodo.
Wright’s the astronomer who made KIC 8462852 famous last fall, when he nonchalantly suggested that the star might be occluded by an alien megastructure. He, along with several other astronomers I spoke with this week, agrees that the way we’re going to figure this weird star out is to watch it doing something weird.

KIC 8462852, also known as “Tabby’s Star,” was first spotted in the Kepler Space Telescope’s dataset last September. Despite being an ordinary, main sequence F-type star—slightly hotter and larger than our sun—it caught astronomers’ attention. Over four years of observational data, the star’s light output intermittently tanked, something that isn’t consistent with any astronomical phenomenon we’re aware of. Explanations for the star’s unruly behaviour ranged from a swarm of comets to gravity darkening to alien megastructures. You can imagine which of those possibilities sparked a global hysteria.

But KIC 8462852 wasn’t done surprising us. The mystery deepened last week when Louisiana State University’s Bradley Schaefer decided to look at KIC 8462852 in old photographic plates of the sky. When he did, he saw something astonishing: over the past century, the star’s total light output has dropped by about 19 per cent. This star isn’t just sputtering—it’s fading out entirely.

“Observationally, there is zero precedent for any main sequence star to vary in brightness like this,” Schaefer told
Gizmodo. “Seeing this star fade by 20 per cent over a century is more than just startling.”


Dips in KIC 846285’s brightness over Kepler’s 1500 day observational period. The bottom two panels are blown-up versions of the top one centred around day 800 and 1500. Via Boyajian et al. 2015

“We were baffled when it was just the Kepler data, and if it were just this we’d be baffled,” Wright said. “The comet hypothesis was great because it could explain almost anything, but it doesn’t really work for the new data.”
What we do know, according to Wright, is that whatever’s occluding the star isn’t emitting strongly in the infrared spectrum, meaning it isn’t very warm. That means we’re talking about something in a distant orbit, which doesn’t improve our odds of getting a good look at it.


KIC 8462852 is fading over time. Blue diamonds represent measurements taken between 1890 and 1989, while solid and dashed lines are fitted trends. Via Schaefer 2016.

But there is one way astronomers can learn what’s causing the star to sputter—and that’s to catch KIC 8462852 doing it again.

When Kepler watched KIC 8462852 flicker several years back, it was only collecting white light—aggregating information across the visible spectrum. All we can do with this data is pinpoint dimming events. But if it happened again, astronomers would be prepared to make precise measurements in a broader range of wavelengths. As KIC 8462852's starlight passes through whatever material is occluding it, certain colours will be absorbed more than others. This gives us a spectral fingerprint, which can be used to work out what type of material we’re looking at.

“From the spectrum, we might see absorption lines from any gas associated with the ‘occulter,’” Shaefer said. “We might see a reddening that would point to the occulter being mainly dust, or we might see a colour neutral dip that would point to a solid body. This would greatly narrow down models.”

For the next few months, astronomers are sitting tight. KIC 8462852 is behind the Sun and only visible during daylight hours, making it impossible to observe from the ground. According to Tabetha Boyajian, the Yale astronomer who discovered the star, a few satellites are monitoring it, but the temporal coverage isn’t great. “Mainly, we are now using this time to prepare for what to do when the star becomes visible again in a few months,” she said.

This includes discussing different scenarios, and figuring out what data will be needed to confirm or refute each of them. “When the dipping begins again, we will be prepared to hit it with everything we have,” she said.

Wright added that although two independent surveys haven’t turned up any evidence of extraterrestrial technology, UC Berkeley’s SETI program is now working with the billionaire-backed alien hunting initiative Breakthrough Listen, and plans to conduct a very sensitive broadband sweep of the star’s neighbourhood in the next few months. The prospect that we’re looking at a bona fide Dyson sphere is as unlikely as ever, but....well, it hasn’t been ruled out.

“The ET hypothesis has very little predicative power,” Wright said, noting that you can invoke it to explain just about anything—the so-called “aliens in the gaps” fallacy.

Nevertheless, you can bet astronomers won’t rest until they’re sure one way or the other.

Top image via Harun Mehmedinovic/Gavin Heffernan/project SKYGLOW

[Takeovers]

The SpaceX Dragonfly program.

SpaceX is building one of the two future crew vehicles that will send astronauts to the ISS next year, if everything goes right. Initially the SpaceX Dragon will probably touch down in water, like Apollo did and like the present cargo Dragon does. But SpaceX is planning to switch to land landing Dragon. Land landing will make it much easier to get it flight ready for another flight. However before NASA agrees to land landing SpaceX needs to prove they can do it safely. That's what the Dragonfly program is for. Test and demonstrate flying Dragon with its onboard engines. The test article in this video is the same, that did the pad abort test last year at Cape Canaveral. After landing in the Atlantic it was refurbished and will now do a number of tests.



Initial tests have Dragon suspended in the air from a crane. That gives security for the test article in case of problems. This test fire done in November 2015 was perfect though. Other tests will include dropping Dragon with a helicopter, then deploying parachutes and finally on descent use the engines for a soft landing. Other tests will do purely engine landing after helicopter drop. Also Dragon launching itself from the ground then soft landing.

This ability is important for another goal of SpaceX. They want to send their own Mars missions and Dragon will be the lander. Maybe as soon as 2018, if all goes well.

[OhOh]

^ & ^^^ Thanks for all the information. Looks as if the company has a plan and is achieving it.

[Takeovers]

^ & ^^^ Thanks for all the information. Looks as if the company has a plan and is achieving it.

Yes, and their goal is humans to Mars. On an unprecedented scale. Their plan sounds totally absurd though. Mars is too expensive for NASA, Congress won't give them the huge budget they would need. So Elon Musk wants to do it himself. But as he does not have that scale of money he declared he will make spaceflight at least two orders of magnitude or 100 times cheaper to make his goal possible. His long term goal is to send 100 people to Mars in one flight, with a total cost for the 100 passengers less than what NASA is presently paying Russia to send 1 Astronaut to the ISS.

No doubt Elon Musk has to be batshit crazy to attempt something like this. But he is well on the way to achieving it.

[Takeovers]

For comparison the two other companies who have plans for orbital vehicles.

The CST-100 spaceliner by Boeing. They have chosen a different approach to land landing. They come down with parachutes and use airbags to cushion the landing. Since this is a much more conventional methods they already have permission to use the method with astronauts on board.



The third contestant was the Dream Chaser spaceplane by Sierra Nevada corp. They have lost the competition for crew transport but recently won a contract for cargo transport with that vehicle. Many love it because it is a SpaceShuttle like winged vehicle. I don't fancy the concept but admire the dedication of the couple who own Sierra Nevada because it is their dream and they put as much of their own money into it as they can. BTW the couple are immigrants from the Middle East and started as young engineers at Sierra Nevada before they became the owners. Dream Chaser can land on large airport runways.

[Takeovers]

Also for comparison here the pad abort test of Dragon. The same engines you see hovering it under the crane here in full power action. Those engines are designed to pull Dragon with crew away from an exploding rocket. Both on the pad and in flight. The Dragon in this video is the same one as used for the tests.

[Latindancer]

A Hubble pic.

Is this some kind of photographic anomaly, or what ???

[harrybarracuda]

Time lapse?

[Takeovers]

Time lapse?

More likely a brain lapse of the person posting it - on pinterest I mean, not Latindancer who posted it here. It is on pinterest and that seems regarded not trustworthy. Nice photo though. It's M17 - Messier catalog 17. Also called NGC 6618 - New Galactic Catalog 6618.

[OhOh]

Is this some kind of photographic anomaly, or what ???

Superman wont like his home town being displayed on this forum.

[Takeovers]

How Astronomers Will Solve the 'Alien Megastructure' Mystery

Very interesting post. A phenomenon that gets astronomers excited. No aliens needed for the being excited. Let's wait and see what new data will show.

[OhOh]

This is presumably a competitor?

"Aerospace company Blue Origin announced that it has successfully landed a booster that was previously launched and landed, marking a first in the pursuit of reusable space technology.A predominantly limiting factor in space travel is that many major components of liftoff must be discarded once the rocket has escaped the Earth’s atmosphere. If humanity intends to travel between planets, reusable rocket boosters are a must.
Blue Origin has recently announced some major strides. Owned by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, the company has had its share of setbacks, but on Friday, engineers successfully landed a rocket that previously took off and landed in November."