SES-9 - Falcon 9 v1.1 Upgraded - Canaveral SLC-40 - 04.03.2016 23:35 UTC

[Salo]

http://spacenews.com/spacex-aims-to-debut-new-version-of-falcon-9-this-summer/

SpaceX Aims To Debut New Version of Falcon 9 This Summer
by Peter B. de Selding — March 20, 2015
 
SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said the new-version Falcon 9 will not force the company to begin a lengthy new process of certifying the vehicle with NASA and the U.S. Defense Department to carry those agencies' high-value payloads. Credit: SpaceX
 
WASHINGTON – SpaceX plans to inaugurate its new, more-powerful Falcon 9 rocket this summer, using the same Merlin 1D engine with a modified fuel mix and other changes to extend the company's planned reuse of the first stage to cover all SpaceX launches, SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said.
In March 16 and 17 appearances at the Satellite 2015 conference here, Shotwell said the new-version Falcon 9, which has yet to be named, will be about 30 percent more powerful than the rocket's current version.
Hawthorne, California-based SpaceX's plans to reuse its Falcon 9 rocket's first stage have been carried out so far by attempted landings in the ocean and on an unmanned ocean barge following launches into low Earth orbit.
The Falcon 9 v1.1 rocket needs more power to perform the same maneuver after a launch carrying a telecommunications satellite to geostationary orbit 36,000 kilometers over the equator, thus the need for the upgraded engine.
Shotwell said the company stopped full qualification of the Merlin 1D engine's capabilities to keep the first Falcon 9 v1.1 flights on schedule. But the qualification work has continued.
"We've gone back and gotten that performance on the engine to place it on the vehicle," Shotwell said. "So we've got a higher-thrust engine. We've finished development on that and are going into qual [qualification testing]. What we're also doing is modifying the structure a little bit."
As it adopts the new-version Falcon 9 and prepares for the inaugural flight — still scheduled for late this year — of its Falcon Heavy rocket, SpaceX wants to limit its production line to two versions of the rocket's core.
"Falcon Heavy is two different cores — the inner core and the two side sticks," Shotwell said. "The new Falcon 9 will basically be a Falcon Heavy side booster. So we're building [only two different] cores to make sure we don't have a bunch of configurations around the factory so we can streamline operations and hit a launch cadence of one or two a month from every launch site we have."
The upgraded Falcon 9, Shotwell said, will make its inaugural flight this summer. Customer SES of Luxembourg has said it is willing to be the first customer for the launch of a 5,300-kilogram telecommunications satellite to geostationary orbit.
...

[Salo]

http://spacenews.com/spacex-early-adopter-ses-ready-to-reuse-falcon-9-%C2%AD-for-the-right-price/

SpaceX Early-adopter SES Ready To Reuse Falcon 9 ­— For the Right Price
by Peter B. de Selding — June 18, 2015

"That's Not Cool" "We asked Elon [Musk, SpaceX's founder]: You almost landed on the platform. It landed, a leg broke, the rocket fell over and went into the sea and they couldn't recover it," SES Chief Technical Officer Martin Halliwell said. "So we said to him: Why don't you put a net around the platform? You know what his answer was? 'That's not cool.'"
 
PARIS — Satellite fleet operator SES on June 17 said it wants to reuse the first stage of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that will launch the SES-9 satellite by September for a future, discounted SpaceX launch, and is awaiting the response of SpaceX.
In a presentation to investors in London, SES Chief Technical Officer Martin Halliwell said he remains convinced that Hawthorne, California-based SpaceX is on the verge of proving its reusability thesis, which is that recovering, refurbishing and reusing a Falcon 9 first stage will dramatically reduce launch costs.
 
Image from an SES-9 fact sheet

Luxembourg-based SES, with Halliwell leading the charge, has been a major supporter of SpaceX and was the first established commercial fleet operator to use the vehicle for a mission to geostationary transfer orbit. The SES-8 satellite was successfully launched in December 2013.
SES has seven satellites under construction, five of which are contracted for SpaceX launches, starting with SES-9. SES said it has been given a guarantee by SpaceX that the launch will occur no later than September.
SES has agreed to allow SES-9 to be the first launch using an upgraded Falcon 9 main-stage Merlin 1D engine, whose performance is being increased to allow SpaceX to attempt first-stage recovery even on launches to geostationary transfer orbit, the destination of most telecommunications satellites.
Just as it secured an attractive SpaceX price for the SES-8 by being one of the first established customers, SES now wants a cut-rate price on a Falcon 9 with a previously used first stage.
 
Martin Haliwell. Credit: SES

"Our launch vehicle for SES-9 will be a recoverable vehicle," Halliwell said. "We believe they will be able to recover it on this mission. We actually asked them: If we do recover it, can we use it again and get a good price discount? We're still in discussions."
Unlike previous presentations in which he mainly lamented the state of the launch-vehicle industry, Halliwell's June 17 comments were laced with optimism that Europe's next-generation Ariane 6 would be just as economical as today's Falcon 9, and that Russia's Angara rocket, to replace today's Proton, also shows promise.
 
"So we said to him: Why don't you put a net around the platform? You know what his answer was? 'That's not cool.'"
 
Halliwell said SES is such a strong believer in rocket reusability's cost-reduction promise that the company suggested to SpaceX a way to improve the likelihood of recovering a Falcon 9 first stage.
"We asked Elon [Musk, SpaceX's founder]: You almost landed on the platform. It landed, a leg broke, the rocket fell over and went into the sea and they couldn't recover it," Halliwell said. "So we said to him: Why don't you put a net around the platform? You know what his answer was? 'That's not cool.'
"It's a true story: 'That's not cool.' Hey, you can't win them all."
Rockets don't follow Moore's Law, but satellites do and Halliwell had promised SES investors that the company would bring down the cost of a given 36-megahertz transponder, or its equivalent, by 20 percent between 2009 and 2018.
With the last three satellite orders ­— for SES-14, SES-15 and SES-16, all carrying high-throughput spot-beam capacity in addition to wide beams — the company has secured a 12-percent reduction per transponder.
SES-14 is being built by Airbus Defence and Space of Europe. SES-15 is under construction by Boeing Space and Intelligence Systems of El Segundo, California, and SES-16, also known as LuxGovSat, is from Orbital ATK of Dulles, Virginia.
Halliwell said the price reductions came despite the fact that three different vendors are building three satellites. "We've got to squeeze," Halliwell said. "The vendors understand this. They know we'll be coming back for more."
SES-14 and SES-15 are all-electric satellites, meaning their launch weight, for the same payload, is 40-50 percent less than it would have been using conventional chemical propellant. That alone reduces launch cost and, in the case of the Boeing-built SES-15, allowed SES to book a launch aboard Europe's Ariane 5 rocket as a co-passenger.
Measuring the cost advantages of high-throughput satellites remains a subject of debate in the satellite industry even as many operators move to add HTS capacity on their future spacecraft.
Christophe De Hauwer, SES's chief development officer-designate, told the investor conference that SES computes HTS's potential using megahertz, not megabits, as the measure.
Four megahertz of HTS capacity, De Hauwer said, has about the same revenue-generating capability as 1 megahertz of traditional wide-beam capacity for data applications.
Using the example of SES-12, under construction by Airbus Defence and Space, De Hauwer said its 14 gigahertz of HTS capacity, divided by four, is equivalent to 3.5 gigahertz of conventional-satellite bandwidth. That is equal to 97 36-megahertz transponders.
One transponder for data applications is presumed to generate $1 million per year in revenue.

[vlad7308]

Сало, спасибо, очень интересно!

[Salo]

Не ранее 1 ноября. Первый пуск F9 v1.2 и одновременно первый пуск F9 после аварии.

[Salo]

http://spacenews.com/spacex-to-debut-upgraded-falcon-9-on-return-to-flight-mission/

SpaceX To Debut Upgraded Falcon 9 on Return to Flight Mission
by Jeff Foust — August 31, 2015

A SpaceX Falcon 9 v1.1 rocket launches from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The Falcon 9 return-to-flight mission will be the first of an upgraded version with increased performance. Credit: SpaceX  
 
PASADENA, Calif. — The return to flight of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket, still a "couple of months" away, will also be the first launch of an upgraded version of the vehicle with increased performance, the company's president said Aug. 31.
Speaking at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics' Space 2015 conference here, Gwynne Shotwell said the company was working through a series of intensive reviews of the Falcon 9 after its June failure while preparing the latest upgrade to the vehicle to increase its performance.
"Our next flight will be both the return to flight and the first flight of the upgraded vehicle," she said. "So whenever people ask me what keeps me up at night, it's getting ready for that flight."
SpaceX had been working for some time on a upgrade to the current Falcon 9 v1.1, sometimes called v1.2, that features engines with increased thrust, providing an increase in performance of about 30 percent. That first launch of the upgraded Falcon 9 was scheduled for September before the June 28 launch failure.
Shotwell said after her panel session that there is a payload assigned to that return-to-flight mission, but could not name it without the permission of the customer. Prior to the launch failure, SES was scheduled to launch its SES-9 satellite on the first upgraded Falcon launch.
SpaceX blamed the June launch failure on a broken strut holding down a helium bottle in a propellant tank in the rocket's upper stage. Helium leaking from the bottle then caused the tank to overpressurize and burst. Shotwell said SpaceX still believes that is the root cause of the failure.
Shotwell added that while this problem is relatively straightforward to correct, SpaceX is also examining the vehicle for other potential issues. "What we wanted to do was to take advantage of the lessons that we learned from that particular failure and make sure we're not seeing something like that anywhere throughout the vehicle," she said. That includes a series of top-down reviews, and having the work done by every company engineer checked by another engineer.
That additional investigation has delayed the vehicle's next launch. While SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk said in July the vehicle could return to flight in September, Shotwell suggested it may be November before that launch takes place. "It's taking more time than we originally envisioned to get back to flight," she acknowledged. "We're a couple of months away from the next flight."
Shotwell remained optimistic about not just returning the Falcon 9 to flight this year, but also successfully landing the vehicle's first stage, either on an oceangoing platform or a pad on land, as part of SpaceX's efforts to develop a reusable version of the vehicle. The company has attempted landings of the first stage on its "autonomous spaceport drone ship" after launches in January and April, but neither was successful.
"I want to see a Falcon 9 first stage land on a drone ship or land on my landing site this year," she said. "I want to stick a landing this year."

[Salo]

http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2015/09/full-thrust-falcon-9-stage-testing-mcgregor/

[Apollo13]

Уже 2 половина ноября.

With the RTF manifest still evolving, preliminary planning dates are now showing the SES-9 mission to launch in the second half of November, with the 20th cited as the latest date (L2).

[anik]

Peter B. de Selding ‏@pbdes
SES: No earlier than Nov 17 for SpaceX Falcon 9 v1 upgrade flight of SES-9. 15-second ignition of denser-fueled 1st stage this week. #WSBW

[Александр Ч.]

Интересная картинка от Питера:

[Salo]

Видео:

Upgraded Falcon 9 First-Stage Static Fire | 9/21/15
SpaceX

This week we static fired the upgraded Falcon 9's first stage for a planned 15 second test. This was the first test of the upgraded first stage with densified propellant, and we've now static fired both stages of the upgraded Falcon 9.
 
 This was also the first time we utilized our new Falcon Booster Test Stand at our facilities in McGregor, TX.

[Salo]

Elon: We hope to launch again in 6 to 8 weeks (Nov 5-19)

[Salo]

Пуск намечен на конец декабря и состоится после пуска с одиннадцатью Orbcomm G2 :
http://spacenews.com/spacex-changes-its-falcon-9-return-to-flight-plans/

[che wi]

http://www.ses.com/21353546

[Salo]

Пуск ожидается 27 декабря.
http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2015/10/spacex-fire-full-thrust-falcon-9-first-stage/

[Salo]

Возможен перенос на январь 2016.

[Pirat5]

Salo пишет:
Возможен перенос на январь 2016.

Deflang пишет:
Ну.. Как обычно, Спейсх в своём духе)

Ну это уже предполагалось с начала ноября.
December 27 2015 - SES-9 - Falcon 9 v1.2 - Canaveral SLC-40 
NET January 3 2016 - Dragon SpX-8 (CRS8 ), BEAM - Falcon 9 v1.2 - Canaveral SLC-40
Одно дело развести 2 пуска по космодромам (Jason-3), и другое дело - на одном космодроме с разницей неделя! - 2 пуска, через Новый год, и учитывая приоритет CRS над остальными пусками.

[Salo]

https://twitter.com/pbdes/status/666978122940706816

Peter B. de Selding ‏@pbdes  
SES: We still assume late-Dec Falcon 9 v1.2/Upgrade launch of SES-9 sat. (will be 2d flight of upgraded Falcon, after mid-Dec Orbcomm LEO).

5:55 - 18 нояб. 2015 г.

[Salo]

Пуск ушёл на январь 2016.

[Salo]

Peter B. de Selding ‏@pbdes   3 часа назад  
SES: We now expect our SES-9 (5,300kg-important-for-2016-rev-forecast) satellite to launch on SpaceX Full-Thrust Falcon 9 in mid-January.

[Salo]

James Dean ‏@flatoday_jdean 15 часов назад
SES reports its SES-9 communications satellite has arrived at Cape Canaveral for mid-January launch to GEO on upgraded SpaceX Falcon 9.