[HN Gopher] SpaceX caps 2022 with record-setting 61st Falcon 9 l...
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SpaceX caps 2022 with record-setting 61st Falcon 9 launch
Author : signa11
Score : 141 points
Date : 2022-12-30 12:54 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cbsnews.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cbsnews.com)
| dwaltrip wrote:
| Every so often, I check the bar chart on the "Timeline of
| spaceflight" Wikipedia page:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_spaceflight#Orbita...
|
| Space activity is really picking up. There were 177 successful
| orbital launches this year, and 135 last year. The best year
| after that was 1967 with 120 launches... We are in interesting
| times!
| SEJeff wrote:
| You reminded me of:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_you_live_in_interesting_ti...
|
| This is a golden age of (new)spaceflight and I'm thrilled to be
| living it.
| prox wrote:
| Are there any true competitors for SpaceX? I don't mean the
| consortium but more similar operating conpanies?
| thinkcontext wrote:
| Odd that the other comments don't even mention ULA and
| Arianespace. SpaceX definitely dominates the competitive
| market but there is some more nuance than that.
|
| In head to head competition ULA won a larger share of NSSL
| launches than SpaceX. Obviously a lot of people think this
| will result in taxpayers overspending and was not a really
| fair competition.
|
| ULA and Arianespace have had more success against SpaceX for
| GEO than LEO missions, though I believe that has lessened
| over time. GEO is more competitive because SpaceX uses RP1
| for its upper stage which is not as efficient as the others
| that use hydrogen.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| IIRC ULA's accuracy is also a bit better, so for an
| expensive payload going high up it can be worth it to spend
| a bit more if it means your $1b payload is gonna last a few
| more years before running out of fuel. There's also the
| whole vertical vs horizontal integration thing
| mlindner wrote:
| That's somewhat incorrect, and accuracy of the sort
| you're talking about only really matters for vehicles
| without any on-board propulsion, which is a rare thing on
| military satellites. The accuracy certainly doesn't save
| you "years" of propulsion.
| nordsieck wrote:
| > Obviously a lot of people think this will result in
| taxpayers overspending and was not a really fair
| competition.
|
| Part of this is due to SpaceX bidding Starship for NSSL
| phase 1 (development) and getting rejected by the Airforce,
| while ULA, Blue Origin, and Orbital ATK (now Northrup
| Grumman) got development money for their respective
| rockets. This meant that SpaceX had to amortize the cost to
| develop vertical integration, a larger fairing, etc. over
| their NSSL phase 2 (operational) bid.
|
| > ULA and Arianespace have had more success against SpaceX
| for GEO than LEO missions, though I believe that has
| lessened over time. GEO is more competitive because SpaceX
| uses RP1 for its upper stage which is not as efficient as
| the others that use hydrogen.
|
| From what I understand, this is mostly ArianeGroup. ULA
| does some high energy missions, but they're mostly for
| NASA/DoD. I'm sure they're hoping to improve their
| commercial competitiveness with Vulcan, though.
| metadat wrote:
| Jeff Bezos' _Blue Origin_ is a competitor in theory but in
| reality as far as I know they have not won a single contract
| from SpaceX. Not sure if they 're even in the ring.
| geocrasher wrote:
| How can the be in the ring if they can't even make it to
| orbit.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin is a competitor in theory
|
| Not really, even in theory. It's only even remote current
| participation in the orbital market is the very overdue
| BE-4 engines it is developing for ULA (which I assume is
| "the consortium" that the upthread poster excluded in
| asking about competition.) Currently, its a suborbital
| launch company with aspirations of sometime becoming
| something more.
| nordsieck wrote:
| > ULA (which I assume is "the consortium" that the
| upthread poster excluded in asking about competition.
|
| Could also be referring to "the National Team".
| kwooding wrote:
| RocketLab (https://www.rocketlabusa.com/) services a slightly
| different segment (i.e. not as heavy) but does take things
| regularly to space (and in the case of Capstone, to the
| moon!)
| thinkcontext wrote:
| RocketLab has not had much success in raising its launch
| rate. Meanwhile SpaceX undercut them on $/kg with their
| rideshare program which likely robbed them of a large
| number of potential customers, so RLs segment was not as
| separate as they would have liked. Indeed in their short
| history SXs rideshares have launched considerably more
| payloads and more weight than RL in their whole history.
| There are of course some payload's that want to go to a
| specific orbit not served by SXs rideshare.
| apawloski wrote:
| For launching payloads into LEO? Yes, see Rocket Lab. Small
| sat operators are using both.
| nordsieck wrote:
| > Are there any true competitors for SpaceX?
|
| RocketLab (Neutron), Relativity (Terran R), and Blue Origin
| (New Glenn) are all trying. But none of them are there yet.
|
| Out of the bunch, RocketLab has the most operational
| experience. They're also the only company (of the above
| three) that isn't currently aiming for 2nd stage reuse.
|
| It'll be interesting to see how things shake out.
| mlindner wrote:
| For people reading, just for clarification, but all three
| of these rockets have shown no hardware publicly of any of
| the vehicles besides some engine testing. They're all years
| away from launching, let alone reaching any kind of scale.
| geocrasher wrote:
| And to think that just a few years ago reusing a rocket even
| _once_ was an incredible feat!
| reddog wrote:
| Except that the space shuttle solid rocket boosters were
| recovered and reused.
|
| From Wikipediea: "Out of 270 SRBs launched over the Shuttle
| program, all but four were recovered - those from STS-4 (due to
| a parachute malfunction) and STS-51-L (destroyed by range
| safety during the Challenger disaster).[6] Over 5,000 parts
| were refurbished for reuse after each flight. The final set of
| SRBs that launched STS-135 included parts that had flown on 59
| previous missions, including STS-1.[7] Recovery also allowed
| post-flight examination of the boosters,[8] identification of
| anomalies, and incremental design improvements"
|
| Also the rockets on the shuttle itself were landed and reused.
| mlindner wrote:
| They weren't fully re-used as each shuttle booster ejected
| the engine nozzle right before impact with the water.
| Additionally, they had to be disassembled before re-filling
| with fuel. It was re-manufacturing versus re-use.
| ktpecot wrote:
| Calling the shuttle reusable is such a massive stretch. It's
| like the shuttle of Theseus they basically had to rebuild it
| every time and it cost something like 1.5 billion dollars.
| Basically could've built a brand new rocket every time.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Recovery of the first stage of SpaceX rockets is not even
| close to being the same thing as reuse of the shuttle.
| Surviving re-entry is a completely different set of specs
| than floating through atmosphere at a much much slower rate
| of descent.
| ktpecot wrote:
| I mean from a technological point of view sure, but that
| just shows how bad the design was(compared to what we
| know now). The falcon program shows that it's obviously
| way more economical to just ditch the 2nd stage and reuse
| the booster. F9 launches cost sub 20 million and a
| shuttle launch costs on the order of a billion. Squabble
| over whatever details you want about performance or who
| had to do what R&D but F9 is clearly in a different
| league.
| dylan604 wrote:
| > Squabble over whatever details you want about
| performance or who had to do what R&D but F9 is clearly
| in a different league.
|
| Falcon 9 First launch attempt 2007 [0]
|
| Shuttle First launch 1981 [1]
|
| I wonder if there's an advantage to having 26 years of
| watching someone else before designing yours? You also
| act like the rockets from the shuttle were not reused.
| They always (except for 2 instances) came back with the
| shuttle. The SRBs were also recovered, so it's not like
| these were wasted.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_first-
| stage_b...
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle
| ktpecot wrote:
| I'm not disputing SpaceX had the advantage of learning
| from peoples mistakes. And I'm not arguing that they
| didn't physically get the engines and boosters back I'm
| just saying that calling the space shuttle and F9 both
| reusable may be semantically true but is really not
| giving an accurate representation.
| dylan604 wrote:
| SpaceX is also contributing to the increasing amounts of
| space junk. How long is the second stage just floating
| around after delivering payloads? Once the shuttle
| delivered payloads, it just left nothing but space.
| ktpecot wrote:
| Lol are you just making stuff up now? The second stage re
| enters the atmosphere and burns up.
| dylan604 wrote:
| No, it was a legit question. It depends on the payload
| though right? For StarLink deployments at LEO, I'm sure
| it re-enters soon-ish. But what about for higher altitude
| launches of other types of satellites? How long does the
| second stage float around?
| mlindner wrote:
| If you have questions I'd suggest asking them as a
| question. Your post read as a statement of fact with a
| rhetorical question attached.
| dylan604 wrote:
| "How long is the second stage just floating around after
| delivering payloads?"
|
| How much more of a interrogative statement does it need
| to be made to be considered asking a non-rhetorical
| question?
| mlindner wrote:
| A brief look would have you find that for most (but not
| all) launches the second stage de-orbits after one or two
| orbits and isn't even left in orbit for a day. (For some
| launches it's impossible to de-orbit the stage and no
| matter which provider you launch with will leave a second
| stage as junk in orbit.)
|
| Also, this isn't just SpaceX, every launching
| country/company leaves second stages in orbit, some,
| unlike SpaceX, don't even try to dispose of their second
| stages and leave all second stages in orbit.
|
| I'd recommend reading up more on the topic as I think you
| read something at some point and think that SpaceX is an
| especially bad actor in the space when in fact they are
| one of the most responsible actors, if not _the_ most
| responsible actor, in the space launch sector at the
| moment.
| dylan604 wrote:
| SpaceX is launching stuff at an incredible rate. That's
| the great thing, but it also means that as they continue
| to launch, the amount of 2nd stages left behind will only
| increase.
|
| I didn't read anything one time in weird corner of the
| internet like seem to want to insinuate. There are plenty
| of sites where you can see the items being tracked. There
| is a large number of second stages in orbit that are not
| coming back any time soon. It might have been some
| coincidental bit of luck that on one particular perusal
| of one of these sites I just happened to click on 2 such
| items. Again, as they continue to increase the rate of
| launches, this will become an issue. And obviously, I
| don't believe SpaceX is the only such party doing this.
| That's just an unintelligent comment to have made.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Almost Immediately after the payload is deployed, the
| second stage does a deorbit burn. So maybe an hour? Each
| Shuttle launch ended with ditching the enormous external
| tank into like the Indian Ocean, far more dry mass in the
| atmosphere/ocean than a Falcon 9 upper stage. (Also, the
| ET was about $100-150 million apiece.)
| dylan604 wrote:
| I was not aware of the second stage doing a de-orbit
| burn. TIL
| [deleted]
| mlindner wrote:
| They also lugged a large amount of extra dry mass into
| space because of the mass of the orbiter. The part that
| was least important to re-use and most expensive to re-
| use is the part that was re-used the most.
| dylan604 wrote:
| maybe, but it was the coolest part to re-use. whatever
| inefficiencies the shuttle had that people squabble over,
| it was a very inspiring program. not sure how much
| inspiration to a small kid a SpaceX launch is, but i know
| exactly how much the shuttle was.
| drusepth wrote:
| >not sure how much inspiration to a small kid a SpaceX
| launch is, but i know exactly how much the shuttle was.
|
| From what I've seen, it sounds like many kids these days
| feel the same way about SpaceX launches now as you did
| about the shuttle (incredibly inspiring). I hope that's
| reassuring.
| dylan604 wrote:
| it is. i know that i flew my shuttle around my room much
| more than my apollo rockets. my fighter jets had a hard
| time keeping up with the shuttle in my room too. i once
| saw footage of the "chase" planes as the shuttle screamed
| past them on approach. just so much more "cool" to the
| shuttle than a capsule.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| This video showing kids' reaction to the Falcon Heavy
| inaugural launch is pretty fun. The dual-landing is
| absolutely insane. Straight up science fiction.
| https://youtu.be/A0FZIwabctw
| SilverBirch wrote:
| Daddy, when I grow up, I want to grab massive government
| subsidies and attack trans-people, just like Elon...
| mannerheim wrote:
| What do kids have to do with anything? The goal is to get
| to space affordably and reliably; the shuttle failed on
| both fronts SpaceX is succeeding at.
| dylan604 wrote:
| >What do kids have to do with anything?
|
| What do kids ever have to do with anything? They are the
| next generation that may or may not want to be involved
| in whatever they might be getting inspired by.
|
| >The goal is to get to space affordably and reliably; the
| shuttle failed on both fronts SpaceX is succeeding at.
|
| Shuttle had ~135 missions (number from memory) with 1
| failure at launch. The second failure was at re-entry, so
| assumption is that the mission deployed whatever was
| being deployed (if that was part of the mission). How
| many missions has SpaceX lost payloads on? >1? If we do
| percentages, sure, but to say that 1 failure at launch is
| unreliable is just farcical.
| ktpecot wrote:
| Are you actually trying to say the mission when Columbia
| came apart on re entry and killed 7 people was
| successful? And you're gonna say the challenger mission
| failure that killed people is the same as SpaceX losing a
| satellite and a dragon cargo capsule.
|
| That's one of the worst takes I've ever heard
| mannerheim wrote:
| The space shuttle killed 14 people because it was a
| poorly-built, designed-by-committee piece of garbage.
| mlindner wrote:
| Rockets landing vertically is the most sci-fi thing ever
| and has been a staple of science fiction since the early
| 20th century. I think that's plenty more cool than
| landing it horizontally.
|
| Anyway, coolness factor doesn't really matter for space.
| Economical things also tend to end up looking cool over
| time anyway simply because streamlined designs which are
| efficient tend to also look cool..
| fpoling wrote:
| The first stage of SpaceX is the most expensive part with
| nine engines. The second stage is just single engine.
| Plus SpaceX reuse fairings and the Dragon is also
| reusable. So re-usable parts are like 95% and expendable
| parts are vastly cheaper than Shuttle refurbishing.
| ploxiln wrote:
| I didn't know the SRB components were also re-used!
|
| It's a useful clarification that the Space Shuttle program
| had a large amount of reuse in the design ... but it still
| cost over a billion dollars for each reuse, many multiples of
| e.g. fully expended soyuz. So until SpaceX proved that reuse
| could be done well, and economically, it wasn't obvious. Now
| it's super obvious and practically all space programs are
| frantically trying to catch up.
|
| (The SS could carry fairly large ISS module payloads into
| orbit, while cheaper rockets/spacecraft couldn't ... but
| couldn't get to high orbits or beyond ... details details.)
| fpoling wrote:
| There are estimates that the production cost of Soyuz is
| less than 20 millions USD,
| https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/48592/what-is-
| the-...
|
| It is not clear if SpaceX is there per flight. They still
| need to spent several weeks on refurbishing of the landed
| booster.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Several weeks on-site vs years in a factory on the other
| side of the country. It's a clear win. Marginal per
| launch cost is on the order of $15 million, including the
| price of a new upper stage. More full cost including GSE
| and amortization on the booster and fairing more like $25
| million.
| Faark wrote:
| We should keep in mind that Soyuz is the name of both a
| manned space capsule (like dragon / cst100), but also a
| rocket family (like falcon).
|
| You link seems to be specifically about Soyuz MS, a
| capsule. No idea how much SpaceX spends on refurbishing
| dragon.
| justapassenger wrote:
| No outsider knows if Falcon reuse is economical. SpaceX
| keeps on raising money (they have a lot of going on, so
| that's not surprising) and without insight into financials
| we don't known if their launches are subsidized by VC
| money.
| allenrb wrote:
| Mostly the heavy steel booster cases were reused, iirc. I
| don't believe the reuse process was ever cost-effective. As
| for the Shuttles themselves, so much inspection and refurb
| was required that it made reuse look unattractive.
|
| SpaceX is getting the entire first stage back in mostly
| flight-worthy condition. Nobody outside the company truly
| knows how much work is done between flights but it appears to
| be vastly less than Shuttle.
| bumby wrote:
| > _mostly flight-worthy condition._
|
| Can you expand on this? I've looked for information on how
| much rework they require but have never come up with a good
| explanation. I'm curious because spaceflight requirements
| are typically very stringent and refurbishing back to those
| requirements isn't a trivial task. A _lot_ of the cost for
| Shuttle was refurbishing to meet the quality requirements.
| 93po wrote:
| I could be wrong but I believe they use brand new first
| stages for any manned mission because the stakes are
| higher. And they allow customers to elect for a brand new
| first stage at added cost. So the standards for
| refurbishment may be not quite as strict for regular
| payload/resupply missions because worst case scenario
| you're blowing up tens of millions of dollars of
| equipment/supplies instead of 3 human beings.
| Faark wrote:
| I remember this as well, generally for nasa launches,
| initially. But certainly isn't the case anymore for
| commercial crew.
|
| B1061 launched both Crew-1 & Crew-2, B1067 both Crew-3 &
| Crew-4 (with a commercial launch in-between). Crew-5 was
| new and Crew-6 seems to be planned as well.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_first-
| stage_b...
| [deleted]
| bumby wrote:
| This makes sense and falls inline with how NASA has
| always ratcheted up requirements as the risk increases.
| The highest risk level is human-rated flight, but they
| also gauge things like payload cost and "one-of-a-kind"
| nature of payloads.
| 93po wrote:
| I think someone more familiar with this than me could look
| at the cost of a Falcon 9 launch with a re-used first stage
| and compare it to a non-re-used first stage launch cost and
| make some assumptions/ballpark guess about how much work
| goes into refurb.
| Maraguy wrote:
| We're fast approaching the golden age of rockets.
| imglorp wrote:
| Now we need the corrupt, entrenched, fossilized, competition
| to catch up. It's clearly not a tech problem but a business
| one.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Before I learned about SpaceX, I thought it was literally
| impossible to reuse rockets because they burned up in the
| atmosphere or something. After all, not a single space agency
| in the world was doing it. Surely the smart engineers working
| in those places had good reasons.
|
| Watching SpaceX land rocket boosters on target again and again
| is kind of magical, like something out of Kerbal Space Program.
| I wonder how long it's gonna take to get a fully reusable
| rocket. They're working on the Starship and it's supposed to be
| fully reusable.
| aisengard wrote:
| The only thing that burned up in the atmosphere for the Space
| Shuttle program was the fuel tank. All the other components,
| including the booster rockets, were recovered and refurbished
| for reuse.
|
| The innovation here isn't about reusability at all, it's
| about the economics of reuse. Maybe landing a rocket back on
| the pad rather than recovering them from the ocean makes it
| cheaper to reuse, has there been a study around that?
| mlindner wrote:
| Note that for the Space Shuttle, the external tank was
| large proportion of the fuel-carrying capacity of the
| vehicle, i.e. "most of the rocket". And for the solid
| rocket boosters they were not fully recovered as they
| ejected the rocket engine bell just before impact with the
| water which sank to the bottom of the ocean on each launch.
|
| Additionally, solid rocket boosters are some of the hardest
| things to re-use as the process of re-filling them is more
| like re-manufacturing them than actual true re-use. The
| sections (they had 4 sections) need to disassembled and
| refilled with the epoxy that is the solid rocket fuel. They
| were additionally made of steel rather than aluminum so
| were not substantially valuable components to recover
| versus the high end aluminum alloys in the external tanks.
| ericd wrote:
| Yeah, SpaceX's reuse is much, much simpler than the shuttle
| booster refurbishment. At the extreme, Starship is intended
| to have no refurbishment between flights - refuel and fly
| again, so that the cost of each flight will be mostly the
| fuel cost, on the order of single digit millions. Falcon 9
| I believe is trickier since its kerosene fuel generates a
| lot of soot compared to the methane engines of Starship,
| and can be fouled. If you've ever used a camp stove with
| kerosene vs methane, one leaves your stove covered in black
| soot.
| bumby wrote:
| > _Starship is intended to have no refurbishment between
| flights - refuel and fly again_
|
| Surely this entails a host of quality checks between
| flights? What is that cost estimate at?
| ericd wrote:
| This is based on pretty old info, which probably comes
| from an offhand statement by Musk, so big grain of salt,
| but I think they're hoping to get it to be on par with a
| jetliner, which if I understand correctly is just a
| maintenance schedule based on # of flight hours. Not sure
| if that's going to be feasible given the difference in
| the violence of the flight profile.
| bumby wrote:
| That would be interesting to hear how they come up with
| those maintenance schedules. Even with the uptick in
| flights, it doesn't seem like they'd have the dearth of
| reliability data to make that determination with
| reasonable accuracy. But maybe they have a lot of
| internal reliability data we're not privy to.
| Faark wrote:
| The reliability data will be collected by inspections.
| Also from memory, their fleet leaders tended to do
| Starlink launches. Loosing one of those might suck, but
| can still be sold as due to pushing boundaries and
| something that wont happen to customers. They need backup
| launch equipment, ofc.
| bumby wrote:
| The gold standard for reliability studies involves
| collecting in situ failures though. You can infer a lot
| from inspections on non-failed components, but it's not
| as useful as having actual failure data. When I'm
| referencing their in-house data, I'm referring to
| failures (whether in situ or as a bench experiment)
| tuatoru wrote:
| Just FYI, "dearth" means scarcity. Perhaps you meant
| wealth.
| bumby wrote:
| Thank you.
| SEJeff wrote:
| Landing the rocket back on the pad requires significantly
| more fuel for most missions. The reason most Falcon 9s do
| landing at sea instead of RTLS is due to this. They have to
| boost up and out over the ocean to the correct insertion
| coordinates, and then they run out of fuel (for the
| mission). When they run out of mission fuel, they just use
| gravity and fall straight downwards to land on a drone
| ship.
|
| In short, performing RTLS requires additional fuel. This is
| fuel that can no longer be used to boost the payload into
| the correct orbital insertion. So all RTLS missions tend to
| be lower performance missions that don't need the full
| power of the Falcon 9 / Heavy since they have fuel to spare
| for RTLS.
| nordsieck wrote:
| > The innovation here isn't about reusability at all, it's
| about the economics of reuse.
|
| It's about both.
|
| SpaceX showed that the 1st stage of a rocket can be
| reliably reused in production. Which is really important
| from an architecture perspective because 2/3 stage rockets
| are just more efficient than 1/1.5 stage rockets (mostly
| due to the propellant mass fraction term of the rocket
| equation).
|
| To give some examples, the payload mass fraction of some
| reusable rockets is:
|
| * Shuttle(partial reuse): 1%
|
| * Falcon 9(partial reuse): 4%
|
| * Starship(full reuse, in development): 2%
| gitfan86 wrote:
| Right, for the Space Shuttle the shortest interval on a
| back-to-back mission was 63 days.
| SEJeff wrote:
| And I _believe_ that the Falcon 9 with the fastest
| turnaround was B1062 with 21 days between flights. The
| previous record (also from a Falcon 9) was two separate
| boosters who launched and relaunched 27 days apart.
| raverbashing wrote:
| To be fair to the older models, I think the main issue is:
| only "recently" (let's say, some 30yrs ago), we have had
| computers and sensors fast enough to manage an automated
| reentry of rocket stages (and ship drones as well)
|
| And SpaceX had to iterate a lot to get this working as well
|
| It is rocket science
| dotnet00 wrote:
| The older model also didn't incentivize the things needed
| to support a reusable rocketry program. Companies were
| encouraged to have bloat and making satellites was still
| extremely expensive so there wasn't anywhere near enough
| demand to justify producing and reusing a handful of
| boosters.
|
| Ariane space was still arguing that reuse wasn't viable for
| them due to their low flight rate only until a handful of
| years ago. As far as I'm aware, ULA's CEO still insists
| that anything more than their proposed engine segment reuse
| is going to require too high of a flight rate to pay for
| itself (IIRC he said they'd need 10 flights per booster).
|
| This is also part of why SpaceX's model works. Even when
| disposable F9 is much cheaper than previous rockets in its
| class.
| bumby wrote:
| > _The older model also didn 't incentivize the things
| needed to support a reusable rocketry program._
|
| I assume you mean the cost-plus contracting model? Or is
| there a different incentive mechanism you're referring
| to?
| dotnet00 wrote:
| Cost-plus is part of it, but also just the launch vehicle
| acquisition process in general.
|
| Early on, SpaceX's biggest hurdle was getting payload
| contracts. IIRC they had to sue the government several
| times to overturn bad acquisition policies. Government
| acquisition processes weren't suited to supporting small
| new entrances into the launch market and there was
| somewhat of a belief that you weren't a credible launch
| provider unless you were as large as Boeing or Lockmart.
|
| In comparison nowadays it's relatively normal for lower
| cost programs or ones which can accept some loss to try
| flying on less proven rockets. New bold approaches to
| designing, building and flying rockets aren't immediately
| dismissed as just young naive engineers who haven't had
| the reality of spaceflight beat into them.
| bumby wrote:
| What was determined to be bad acquisition policy?
|
| My understanding is that early contracts were awarded to
| ULA because SpaceX wasn't certified for military
| payloads. That, combined with your statement, implies the
| certification process levies bad requirements. Do we know
| what these bad requirements were?
| dotnet00 wrote:
| As Musk had pointed out at the time, the requirements
| were essentially just large amounts of paperwork (since
| if NASA considers F9 reliable enough for cargo and even
| crew, it's kind of ridiculous to suggest it can't handle
| a GPS satellite), such that it was unreasonable for USAF
| to buy multiple years worth of launches without
| competitive bidding despite obviously having another
| option almost through certification. At the time they had
| made that award, SpaceX was already mostly through the
| certification paperwork with zero changes needed to the
| rocket.
|
| Besides that, although not a lawsuit, Lori Garver's book
| "Escaping Gravity" goes into a lot of depth regarding the
| behind the scenes political struggle regarding commercial
| cargo and commercial crew and how Congress and some parts
| of NASA leaned on the idea that they couldn't tolerate
| any failure as a means of trying to disqualify anyone but
| ULA,Boeing etc from those programs.
|
| I was wrong about them having to sue "several times"
| though.
| bumby wrote:
| A small nit: the DoD and NASA are two different customers
| who don't have to align on their risk thresholds. Just
| because NASA is okay with a particular risk, doesn't mean
| that the DoD should be. What I've seen happen in some
| cases is one side essentially says "That may be okay for
| them, but we don't trust their level of oversight and
| want it done our way." I would push back a bit on the
| "mostly certified" as being sufficient; you're either
| certified or you're not.
|
| I've seen the paperwork argument cut both ways. It can
| definitely create a bureaucratic mess. On the other hand,
| one of the things NASA tries to drive is "risk informed
| decision making". Part of this process involves writing
| waivers when a requirement can't/won't be met to document
| what the new risk is (and they have to document that they
| find that risk acceptable). A lot of times, this process
| was dismissed at "just large amounts of paperwork" but in
| dismissing it, they made it very hard for decision makers
| to fully understand what the residual risk was. It was
| interesting to me that paperwork was used as an excuse to
| not commit to the process, but when it was streamlined,
| it still wasn't used. To me, that feels more like
| avoiding accountability than avoiding needless paperwork.
| This misunderstanding of risk is at the heart of most of
| NASA's spaceflight mishaps.
|
| I wasn't aware of Garver's book, but thanks for bringing
| it up. Sounds like a good read.
| justapassenger wrote:
| You need economy of scale for reuse to makes sense. Space
| launch market still isn't that big, and even for spacex half
| of their launches are from their internal project, starlink.
| Jury is still out if this is actually economical, as we don't
| have insights into their financials and they keep on raising
| money (so we don't know if some portion of that goes towards
| flacon subsidies).
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| There is no doubt that a reusable rocket will be more
| economical. You need cheap rockets first to get economies
| of scale. It's gonna be big in the future.
| waltbosz wrote:
| I was at an outdoor party on the same night that a Starlink
| satellite deploy mission occurred over my area.
|
| I was able to see, with my naked eye, as the rocket fired off
| some sort of burn.
|
| It looked like an airplane with headlights pointing backwards.
|
| It wasn't until the next day that I confirmed what I had seen
| when I read about it on my local Reddit sub.
|
| It was really cool to have actually seen a the-future-is-now
| event like that.
| adolph wrote:
| I had a similar experience a month or two ago at dusk. There
| was a broad line of twinkles moving across the sky. It took me
| a few moments to realize it wasn't a meteor breaking up but a
| new set of Starlinks doing their orbits together before moving
| into separate tracks.
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| Space seems to be mostly about satellites, not about "real"
| space. The Moon, Mars, yes they represent interesting multi-
| billion dollar contract opportunities paid by a few big
| governments; but I don't see any other market opportunity besides
| that.
| MentallyRetired wrote:
| Central Floridian here. Considering blocking notifications from
| my "space launch alert" app. Feels like every day between spacex
| and the other companies. It's amazing.
| waltbosz wrote:
| What's the use case for the app? Is it to remind the user to go
| outside and look up to see something interesting? Or does it
| serve as a warning system so that one is not spooked by
| mysterious loud noises?
| perihelions wrote:
| Wikipedia has some very clean summaries of the statistics:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_and_Falcon_He...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_first-stage_b...
| Veedrac wrote:
| My own spreadsheet, with mass to orbit (linear and log), mass
| per flight, booster flights, and reflight time. Best viewed
| landscape.
|
| https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vQ4zCmVceLNd...
|
| 60% growth year on year still going strong.
|
| Raw sheet, if someone wants to clone:
| https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/11wy9u3hKQjgdmC1N3Clg...
| thinkcontext wrote:
| According to that list 2023 should be even more amazing. They
| have ~50 commercial or gov customer flights scheduled vs the
| ~30 they did this year.
|
| I wonder how much they can increase the flight rate, if they
| can't they'll face the dilemma of not having enough capacity to
| also launch the same or more Starlinks.
|
| What are the odds Starship begins launching Starlinks next
| year? If it doesn't they may want to open another pad, there's
| one available in Kourou.
| mlindner wrote:
| Hi, I help maintain the wiki page (different username than
| this one), and one thing to think about with regards to the
| "planned" number is that there's substantial numbers of
| satellites that are completely unknown until just before
| launch, either because they're a commercial customer who
| doesn't want to reveal business plans or whether it's a
| government customer wanting to launch a spy satellite with
| short notice given to possible other countries.
|
| This is especially notable with SpaceX's own launches as
| SpaceX apparently shoves them into gaps in their schedule
| whenever there isn't a customer payload to launch. So
| suddenly long stretches of no launches can become suddenly
| filled with a bunch of Starlink launches.
|
| Alternatively, many satellites are delayed (or canceled),
| often for multiple years, because of construction issues,
| regulatory issues, or funding issues (or sometimes
| bankruptcy). If you go back in Wikipedia history and compare
| what the list of launches for 2022 was at the end of 2021
| versus what actually launched, there are substantial
| differences. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=
| List_of_Falcon_9_... (There were 38 non-Starlink launches
| planned for 2022 at the beginning of 2022, and only 27
| launched.)
|
| Those tables with the "planned" column explicitly only
| includes launches for which there is some kind of source
| stating that they'll be launching on Falcon 9.
| thinkcontext wrote:
| Thanks that's very useful perspective. And thanks for the
| work keeping the wiki page up to date!
| dotnet00 wrote:
| I think an orbital launch attempt for Starship is pretty
| likely in 2023. They seemed to have planned to try deploying
| Starlink with it from the start but have changed those plans
| and seemingly don't plan to do so for the next 2-3 Starship
| prototypes (they sealed off the "PEZ" style dispensers).
|
| Personally I don't think they'll be able to get more than 3-4
| launches of it in, in part due to regulatory considerations.
| In which case maybe we'll see 1 or 2 Starlink launches on
| Starship depending on how well the first flight goes.
| Faark wrote:
| Idk man, I totally expected them to launch in 2022. They
| don't seem to have much confidence, or they would have done
| so. Especially since the "regulatory considerations" you
| mentioned include limits per year. Their production seems
| good enough that just disposing of them by test flight
| would be a win. So why no launch attempt, yet? Is risk not
| acceptable anymore since Artemis? Yeah, no bets from me for
| now, but will be interesting to see what happens.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| My personal opinion is that somewhere along the line this
| year they had to sharply recalibrate their risk
| tolerance. I think they might have expected to be able to
| more easily extend their launch approval out of Starbase
| as needed (ie "regulatory considerations"). Alternatively
| maybe they're expecting a much sharper drop in investor
| capital in the next year or two.
|
| As such they may have had to change their success
| criteria for the first launch such that while previously
| they would've considered simply not damaging launch
| infrastructure to be a success, now they might need to at
| least be able to make orbit.
|
| An alternative explanation is simply that most of their
| work this year has been on "stage zero" - the launch
| infrastructure. It isn't as open to the sort of rapid
| iteration seen with the vehicles themselves but it needs
| to be sorted out so they can start building the various
| additional pads they want in Florida. So perhaps that's
| what's preventing them from launching for now.
| thinkcontext wrote:
| Speaking of stage zero, I have difficulty wrapping my
| head around how they will test landing. The risk of
| damaging it seems like it would be quite high the first
| 20 times or so they try. Interrupting launches to repair
| damage seems like too large of a penalty.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| Their plan appeared to be to test the flight profile at
| sea. So they would specify some precise GPS coordinates
| to perform a soft touchdown at off the coast of Hawaii
| and once they're confident with that they can test on the
| real thing.
|
| Additionally, part of the reason for building so many
| pads up front (IIRC they have two in various stages of
| construction at Cape Canaveral) is probably so that one
| failure doesn't stop everything.
|
| Besides that, the booster flies a trajectory such that
| it'll just crash into the water nearby if it isn't able
| to initiate its catch burn. On top of that, unlike F9,
| the Superheavy booster is meant to be able to hover
| meaning it has a few seconds to make any corrections that
| may be necessary. Catching the ships themselves will
| certainly be much trickier, although at least they have
| the somewhat uncanny looking velocity when skydiving at
| low altitudes.
| thinkcontext wrote:
| This seems generally right for a positive scenario.
|
| One thing which they will need to complete before launching
| Starlinks V2 from Starship is launch a few from Falcon 9.
| They'll need some prototypes in orbit before they go into
| the kind of mass production they would want for Starship.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| Wasn't this last batch of Starlinks the first V2 launch?
| geocrasher wrote:
| This is a fantastic resource, thanks for posting it. Using it,
| I realized that in 2022, SpaceX had no landing failures. Their
| rockets nailed every landing they attempted, which is even more
| impressive when you realize they flew twice as many missions as
| in 2021.
| [deleted]
| ngoilapites wrote:
| [flagged]
| Centigonal wrote:
| Elon is self-aggrandizing, pompous, and indifferent toward the
| well-being of his employees - but does that mean that it's a
| bad thing when his company sends rockets into space? Thousands
| of people who aren't Elon contributed their effort and talent
| to this feat - Does Elon's behavior around twitter negate their
| contributions?
| dwaltrip wrote:
| Don't feed the off-topic flamewar, downvote and carry-on ;)
| ngoilapites wrote:
| [flagged]
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| At a minimum, it's a personal attack, which is against
| the site rules. It's also off-topic, in a way that's
| likely to hijack the thread.
|
| But, yes, the negative emotional charge in that short a
| post is getting pretty close to flamewar.
| ngoilapites wrote:
| OK I see your points, still, a personal opinion (he
| disgusted me) is not an attack. The real world is not off
| topic. And using violent words like "hijack" to describe
| an online conversation seems to me inadequate.
| [deleted]
| ngoilapites wrote:
| In my opinion yes. It is not only twitter, too many aspects
| of his ventures are negative for human development standards.
| mrshadowgoose wrote:
| Maybe not for you. However, other people do not see the world
| in black and white, and can get over their hatred for a single
| person, and appreciate the technical accomplishments of
| thousands of others.
| ngoilapites wrote:
| Being done with someone after too many shitshows implies no
| black or white worldviews.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Being done with someone after too many shitshows implies
| no black or white worldviews_
|
| "Being done" with anything, with no chance for
| reevaluation, redemption or shading, is _by definition_
| black-and-white. That's fine. Maintaining full color or
| even grayscale is hard work, and if we're honest, we all
| simplify with stereotypes when topics don't merit full
| attention.
|
| But we shouldn't do so blindly. And if we're going to act
| on such a simplified worldview, _e.g._ by expressing a view
| on it, we should be able to take time and attention to look
| at the facts more stoically.
| chasd00 wrote:
| I would love to read a minute by minute breakdown of what happens
| the 48hrs before a launch and 48 hrs after a launch. Like to the
| level of detail of the order of attaching straps to lift the
| booster off a drone ship and the individual commands to bring the
| flight computers online.
|
| edit: actually, i'm goign to ask that everyday astronaut guy to
| figure that out :)
| martyvis wrote:
| The Nasa Space Flight live streams go into a lot of nerdy
| detail on selected missions and tests. They seem to refer to
| spreadsheets that they have built up based on timing vents and
| lots of telescopic viewing.
| lbayes wrote:
| The linked domain (cbsnews.com) behaved reasonably at first, and
| then suddenly redirected to a wall of clickbait ads and broke
| back button navigation.
| 93po wrote:
| I'd recommend ublock origin, or double checking you don't have
| a malicious addon installed/malware.
| JumpinJack_Cash wrote:
| If you read this comment could you please reply commenting if you
| see yourself as a smart guy with A-type personality who is
| generally in a good mood?
|
| I have this theory that rockets are like the NFL for such people.
| Together with fighter jets , bombs , tanks and missiles.
| Something done for pleasure and not for ROI.
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