Anti-clickbait : when the article is better than the headline suggests.
Along the way, Musk’s competitors in the aerospace business have snickered behind his back about the oft-delayed rocket, ridiculing his ability to meet schedules. They’ve also suggested that trying to fly a booster with 27 engines will meet the same fate as the Soviet N-1 rocket. Four times, from 1969 to 1972, the Russians attempted to launch their titanic “Moon rocket,” and it failed spectacularly each time. Its 30 engines were just too many to fire, throttle, and steer at the same time.
Which is to miss that the Soviets were making progress with each failure. It wasn't a fundamentally flawed design, it was just that failure was necessary for its eventual success. It would have been like cancelling the attempts to land the first stage of the Falcon 9 after the first few failures : short sighted.
But there is one thing the critics can’t take from Musk now. His rocket shatters an increasingly stale paradigm that has limited the ambitions of the US launch industry from the beginning. Traditionally, NASA or the military has given industry a design for a rocket and provided funds to develop, test, and then fly the booster. Musk has upended that model.
One thing Musk nailed in 2011, however, was pricing. He noted (correctly) that the cost of launches had risen steadily during the first decade of the 2000s after Lockheed Martin and Boeing had combined their rocket business into a new company, United Launch Alliance. The inflation-adjusted cost of a Falcon 9 from 2011 to now is $55 million, which is only slightly less than the actual $62 million price tag on a modern Falcon 9 rocket (which has more than twice the performance of the version 1.0 booster). And the Falcon Heavy price is now $90 million, less than the quoted price in 2011.
At first blush, the Falcon Heavy’s maiden launch carries a whimsical payload—Musk’s own midnight cherry red Tesla Roadster. But far more significant is where that Roadster will go. No company has ever launched a private payload beyond geostationary orbit before. Yet Musk intends to launch the Tesla into an elliptical orbit around the Sun, a Hohmann Transfer Orbit, that will bring the vehicle near Mars. This orbit is critical to understanding how Musk plans to sell the rocket and what its flight, after all these years of waiting, means for the aerospace industry.
“I think Musk is sending a relatively big and heavy thing to deep space not only because he loves the car and Mars, but because he wants to demonstrate that capability to NASA and other space agencies with their eyes on the Solar System,” Autry said.
At present, the NASA model for exploring the outer Solar System generally involves missions that cost billions of dollars and are large, complex, and infrequent, said Casey Dreier, director of space policy for The Planetary Society. A single mission, he said, may be the only chance in a scientist's professional lifetime to gather data. One way to improve this involves flying more lower-cost spacecraft on less-expensive rockets.
“Having a rocket like the Heavy, which could significantly reduce travel time to ocean worlds, could help increase the turnaround time to just a few years, creating a relatively rapid feed-forward cycle to build upon discoveries and technology that would allow NASA to truly plumb the depths of some of these destinations using a fleet of smaller missions,” Dreier said.
Currently, Space X has yet to deliver on its promise of vast launch cost reductions. But if we do get to the era of "cheap" launches, I wonder how much (if any) cost can be further saved from the cost of the payloads themselves. If the launch cost becomes so low that paying for another one becomes not unthinkable, would it make sense to reduce redundancy, testing, etc. and just build two spacecraft ?
For the last 18 months, Musk has talked openly about the rocket that will come after the heavy, the “Big Falcon Fucking Rocket,” or BFR. Most recently, in September, he said the rocket would have the capacity to lift 150 tons to low-Earth orbit in a fully reusable mode.
Whatever happens, it seems as though the Falcon Heavy may have a limited lifespan. It could help NASA pare down costs on science missions to the outer Solar System, but we have yet to see the space agency embrace the rocket. So ultimately, the powerful booster could be symbolic more than anything else, pushing the commercial frontier of spaceflight beyond low-Earth orbit and into deep space. In this sense, it marks the beginning of a new era.
But the ultimate goal of Space X is space exploration and colonisation. The real question is whether they can do this in a profitable (and therefore successful) way.
http://yur.is/2E7za5c
"Yet Musk intends to launch the Tesla into an elliptical orbit around the Sun, a Hohmann Transfer Orbit, that will bring the vehicle near Mars."
ReplyDeleteo_O
As soon as you can reduce the cost of a vessel by the launch cost it makes sense to build 2 for redundancy instead of putting all the redundancy into one.
ReplyDeletePart of the problem with this model is that it doesn't reflect how these missions are specced out and paid for currently, but that could probably change pretty quickly.
Ralph H. Yes, SpaceX intends to launch the payload on "an elliptical orbit around the Sun, a Hohmann Transfer Orbit, that will bring the vehicle near Mars."
ReplyDeleteThis is not the same as sending the vehicle to Mars. This is an orbit that never intersects Mars. The payload has no means to make the powered maneuvers required to alter its trijectory, to slow down, in other words, which it would need to do to get into Mars orbit -- so this is no threat in terms of violating planetary protection protocols. The payload simply could never arrive at Mars and could never impact on Mars.
William Black i know, it only 'touches' mars orbit around the sun and then you do need very much deltaV to stay at that orbit.
ReplyDeleteRhys Taylor You are completely spot on in regards to the Soviet N-1. The reasons for each launch failure were not so simple as the number of engines -- the argument is specious (and the Boeing/Lockheed Martin/ULA trolls who raise it (mostly) know this).
ReplyDeleteThe argument assumes a static one-for-one comparison between the late 1960's/early 1970's Soviet era technology, manufacturing techniques, and control systems, with the means and methods of modern day SpaceX -- this is obviously absurd.
The causes of each N-1 failure are complex, but fall into known categories/events. For example:
1. The Soviet N-1 program was under extreme time and budgetary pressure. They had no funds, no facilities, and no time to do exhaustive integrated systems testing. So every launch was an experiment with systems never before tested together required to work together perfectly the very first time. This led to errors.
For example the engine-control computer -- which operated the first stage engines -- was terribly buggy and the cause (learned long after the fact) of several launch failures. The computer system itself was not sufficiently insulated against the intense vibration environment in which it was expected to operate and its programming was flawed.
2. Due to time constraints (and the fact each stage with its complex plumbing and turbo-pumps needed to be assembled at the factory -- then completely disassembled and shipped by rail and finally truck to the launch site, where it was then reassembled) there was insufficient quality control.
During reassembly debris, and in one case a carelessly dropped bolt, were left inside the propellant lines. This destroyed one of the rockets on launch when a turbo-pump ingested a bolt at supersonic velocities and it promptly exploded, causing the rocket to detonate immediately on launch destroying the pad and nearby support facilities.
So, you know, Don't Believe Everything You Read.
Boeing/Lockheed Martin/ULA are multi-billion dollar businesses who have enjoyed a competition-free strangle-hold on the spaceflight rocket launch arena going back to its very beginning -- and, after decades they now find themselves in a fight for their very lives against a very smart competitor.
William Black Exactly. The comparison to the N1 inevitably has a certain surface-level plausibility, but it's not really fair. That said, the one important point the article doesn't make is that tomorrow's launch does have a much higher probability of simply exploding than any recent Space X rocket : if it gets off the ground, that will be a great success. But I don't think anyone is really expecting this to go the route of the N1 : a couple of mishaps and we'll see a successful Falcon Heavy being launched.
ReplyDeleteThough I would like to see Space X sticking to a coherent strategy rather than changing it every five minutes.