SpaceX Tuesday...
Discussion
Flooble said:
p1stonhead said:
Yeah I cant wait to see them try. Landing 3 would be another level.
Is that why they have more than one barge? Formation flying!While they could bring one through the Panama Canal to help out, this obviously takes time.
Eric Mc said:
I was a child of the Apollo era and the current developments, both in manned and unmanned spaceflight, are to me, renewing my interest in spaceflight.
In the 60s there were no fewer than seven different manned spacecraft developed and flown ( Vostok, Voskhod, Soyuz, Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and the LM ) then came a long gap to the Shuttle in 1981.Apart from the Chinese knock-off copy of a Soyuz ( Shenzou ) there has been no new manned orbital spacecraft developed in the last 35 years and now there are three coming at the same time ( Dragon, Orion, and the CST-100 ) - and we may even see a manned Dreamchaser eventually too
Beati Dogu said:
Flooble said:
p1stonhead said:
Yeah I cant wait to see them try. Landing 3 would be another level.
Is that why they have more than one barge? Formation flying!While they could bring one through the Panama Canal to help out, this obviously takes time.
MartG said:
In the 60s there were no fewer than seven different manned spacecraft developed and flown ( Vostok, Voskhod, Soyuz, Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and the LM ) then came a long gap to the Shuttle in 1981.
Apart from the Chinese knock-off copy of a Soyuz ( Shenzou ) there has been no new manned orbital spacecraft developed in the last 35 years and now there are three coming at the same time ( Dragon, Orion, and the CST-100 ) - and we may even see a manned Dreamchaser eventually too
Do CST-100 and Orion really count, given that they are traditional Powerpoint-heavy Engineering-lite funds transfer programmes? The last timescale I saw projected something ridiculous like 2022 or later for both of them to make their first human-carrying flights - and you can guarantee there will be some unexpected delays en-route. By the time they fly I rather suspect the Dragon will not only be in routine use but will have been through a couple of development iterations.Apart from the Chinese knock-off copy of a Soyuz ( Shenzou ) there has been no new manned orbital spacecraft developed in the last 35 years and now there are three coming at the same time ( Dragon, Orion, and the CST-100 ) - and we may even see a manned Dreamchaser eventually too
I don't see the corralation between free falling boosters and those under control and steering command heading together for a touchdown a few hundered meters apart. There are videos available showing the shockwaves from supersonic launches, my interest is how these shock waves, from twinned recovering boosters, will interact with the boosters control systems, structure and trajectories.
By the time the boosters are a kilometer or so above their landing pads they'll be subsonic. They will be returning from altitude on a convergent path but I don't think they'll be close enough whilst still travelling supersonic for proximity of shock waves to be an issue. Indeed, what would the bump of a shockwave do to the returning booster anyway?
As it is, aircraft can go supersonic flying in close formation without control problems so I don't think that is an issue at all.
As it is, aircraft can go supersonic flying in close formation without control problems so I don't think that is an issue at all.
Eric Mc said:
The distance they diverge and converge during fly back is determined by
a) the trajectories they fly back
b) the position of the two landing sites
Ah, that was the thing, I was thinking of separation spatially not temporally. Since they are landing on a barge anyway you can have landing sites a hundred miles apart so no worries about interference.a) the trajectories they fly back
b) the position of the two landing sites
Unless I've missed something?
Flooble said:
Eric Mc said:
The distance they diverge and converge during fly back is determined by
a) the trajectories they fly back
b) the position of the two landing sites
Ah, that was the thing, I was thinking of separation spatially not temporally. Since they are landing on a barge anyway you can have landing sites a hundred miles apart so no worries about interference.a) the trajectories they fly back
b) the position of the two landing sites
Unless I've missed something?
Edited by MartG on Sunday 24th April 23:35
The rocket that landed the other day is now at the Kennedy Space Centre for engine testing. It seems they'll do this at pad 39A, formerly the launch site of the Space Shuttle and Apollo programs. SpaceX have a 20 year exclusive lease on this from NASA and will use it in the near future for Falcon 9 NASA resupply missions and Falcon Heavy launches. They can test the returned rocket there and it won't interfere with their busy schedule at Cape Canaveral's Launch Complex 40.
The next Falcon 9 launch from LC-40 is shaping up to be on the 3rd May. The rocket itself is currently in Texas and will be test fired at SpaceX's facility there towards the end of this week. The payload is a Japanese communications satellite. They'll attempt another barge landing for this mission too.
The next Falcon 9 launch from LC-40 is shaping up to be on the 3rd May. The rocket itself is currently in Texas and will be test fired at SpaceX's facility there towards the end of this week. The payload is a Japanese communications satellite. They'll attempt another barge landing for this mission too.
What happened to the booster which landed in Florida a few months back? I know its going to be put outside the SpaceX factory as a 'trophy' but did they ever say whether or not it would have been viable to use again? I cant imagine they didnt test it to find out even if they were not planning to use it?
Eric Mc said:
I think that would only stagger the landing times by a few seconds - although that would be enough to keep their landings apart time wise.
While I can imagine common sense says you try to separate the return flights and landings as much as technically possible for all the many "just in case" scenarios I have a feeling Mr Musk would love to see a coordinated landing, the spectacle would be fantastic :-)Also I suspect SpaceX will have taken note of the radius of debris from the Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly landings to know how close the pads could be... it would be ironic to spot the landing of the first booster only for the second to fall over and send a single chunk of debris through the engine of the first!
Given the complexity of the task if they do land 3 for 3 on an early heavy launch the team behind it should all buy lottery tickets because it will be pretty remarkable IMO.
p1stonhead said:
What happened to the booster which landed in Florida a few months back? I know its going to be put outside the SpaceX factory as a 'trophy' but did they ever say whether or not it would have been viable to use again? I cant imagine they didnt test it to find out even if they were not planning to use it?
Stolen from wikipaedia, but I think it's accurate.On 31 December, SpaceX announced that no damage had been found on the stage and that it was ready to perform a static fire again. SpaceX had initially moved the booster to their hangar at LC 39A, but they moved the stage to LC 40—the pad from which it was launched—on 12 January. On 15 January 2016, SpaceX conducted the static fire test on the recovered booster, obtaining good overall results except for one of the outer engines experiencing thrust fluctuations. Elon Musk reported that this may have been due to debris ingestion.
In February 2016, SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell indicated that some unspecified modifications to the stage design would occur as a result of the booster's post-flight evaluation and static fire.
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