Iridium Next Flight 1 (x10) - Falcon 9-030 - Vandenberg SLC-4E - 14.01.2017 17:54 UTC

[Salo]

http://www.spacex.com/news/2016/09/01/anomaly-updates

Below are updates regarding the anomaly that occurred in preparation for the AMOS-6 mission:
December 7, 10:30am EDT
We are finalizing the investigation into our September 1 anomaly and are working to complete the final steps necessary to safely and reliably return to flight, now in early January with the launch of Iridium-1. This allows for additional time to close-out vehicle preparations and complete extended testing to help ensure the highest possible level of mission assurance prior to launch.

[Salo]

Chris B - NSF ‏@NASASpaceflight 2 ч2 часа назад
Chris B - NSF Ретвитнул(а) Matt Desch
There's a NET January 7 placeholder....again pending FAA, processing flow, good static fire and LRR.
Chris B - NSF добавил(а),

 
 Matt Desch @IridiumBoss
Iridium's @Falcon9_rocket in processing at @VandenbergAFB, getting ready for our launch in early Jan. Progress! #Thistimeitsforreal!

[Salo]

10 ч10 часов назад
Christian Daniels ‏@CJDaniels77
@IridiumBoss Have you gotten a date yet when the static fire test will occur?


Matt Desch – ‏@IridiumBoss
@CJDaniels77 Yes, but given approval process and RTF focus, leaving it to SpaceX and VAFB to announce when they are ready. Progressing well though!
5:40 - 21 дек. 2016 г.

[Salo]

Matt Desch ‏@IridiumBoss  
Our first 10 #IridiumNEXT satellites are all fueled now, tucked in and dreaming of flying in space. Very. Soon. Happy Holidays!
   
7:29 - 25 дек. 2016 г.

[Salo]

Iridium Corporate ‏@IridiumComm  1 ч.1 час назад
Satellites have been fueled, pressurized & dispenser tiers are being stacked as we move closer to first launch #IridiumNEXT #NEXTevolution
 

[Зловредный]

Мда. Так что, SpaceX разобрались с причиной взрыва и уверены, что такого больше не случится?

[Salo]

Iridium NEXT: Changing the Paradigm In Space Communications

[Pirat5]

Зловредный пишет:
Так что, SpaceX разобрались с причиной взрыва и уверены, что такого больше не случится?

Похоже, что окончательно ещё не разобрались. Однако сменили тактику: теперь они боятся взрыва, но не верят, что он произойдёт.  И каждая новая попытка (с января) будет добавлять Маску уверенности.

Проглядываются 2 варианта: до первого пуска RTF Маск будет молчать, как рыба об лёд, а потом скажет: «ага! Я был уверен!». 2й вариант: за сутки (двое) до старта он скажет: «мы всё проверили, просмотрели всю телеметрию, но уверенности в успехе нет. Совсем нет. Но мы всё проверили. Так что не рассчитывайте, если чо...». Вопрос как он уговорит комиссию...

[Salo]

http://spaceflightnow.com/2016/12/30/iridium-satellites-closed-up-for-launch-on-falcon-9-rocket/

Iridium satellites closed up for launch on Falcon 9 rocket             
 December 30, 2016 Stephen Clark
 
The first 10 Iridium Next satellites were encapsulated inside the payload fairing of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket earlier this week. Credit: Iridium

The first 10 satellites for Iridium's next-generation mobile voice and data relay network have been fueled, joined with their deployment module and encapsulated inside the clamshell-like nose cone of a SpaceX Falcon 9 booster for launch as soon as next week from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.
SpaceX and Iridium have not announced a target launch date, but engineers are aiming to have the mission ready for liftoff by Jan. 7. That schedule is still very preliminary.
An official target launch date is pending the Federal Aviation Administration's approval of the SpaceX-led investigation into the explosion of a Falcon 9 rocket on a launch pad at Cape Canaveral on Sept. 1, which destroyed the Israeli-owned Amos 6 communications satellite awaiting liftoff a few days later.
SpaceX missions have been grounded since the explosion. The California-based launch company, founded and headed by Elon Musk, hoped to resume launch services by the end of 2016, but the investigation, launch preparations, and the FAA's review of the Sept. 1 mishap pushed the Falcon 9's return-to-flight into January.
The launch of Iridium's first 10 next-generation communications satellites, the first part of an eventual network of 81 spacecraft, was next in line on SpaceX's manifest at the time of the Sept. 1 explosion.
Meanwhile, construction crews at Kennedy Space Center's launch pad 39A in Florida are finishing up modifications to the former space shuttle launch complex to support Falcon 9 flights as soon as late next month.
The launch facility used by SpaceX's previous missions from Cape Canaveral, Complex 40, suffered major damage after the Sept. 1 rocket explosion, the first such on-the-ground mishap at the Florida spaceport since the early years of the Space Age.
All of SpaceX's near-term launches from Florida will take off from pad 39A.
But the launch for Iridium from California's Central Coast is first in line as final preparations are nearing completion inside SpaceX's hangar at Space Launch Complex 4-East, a hillside facility overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

Спойлер

Within the last week, technicians from satellite-builders Thales Alenia Space and Orbital ATK have filled all 10 "Iridium Next" satellites with hydrazine fuel used to maneuver the spacecraft once in orbit.
The satellites are mounted on a deployment module developed by SpaceX specifically for the Iridium missions to be flown on Falcon 9 rockets. SpaceX is under contract to launch at least 70 Iridium Next satellites through early 2018, primarily in batches of 10 at a time.
Launch arrangements for the remaining Iridium Next satellites, which are built as spares, have not been announced.
The mounting system is made up of two tiers, each holding five satellites. Ground crews inside the SpaceX payload processing facility at Vandenberg have stacked the two tiers and encapsulated the satellites inside the Falcon 9's payload fairing, which is emblazoned with the Iridium logo.
After the Falcon 9 rocket completes its pre-flight "static fire" test on the launch pad — the same test that resulted in the explosion in Florida on Sept. 1 — the 10 Iridium Next satellites will be mated with the booster for liftoff.
 
The two tiers of the SpaceX-built deployment system for the 10 Iridium Next satellites are stacked atop each other in this image. Credit: Iridium
 
Once the Falcon 9's second stage reaches a polar orbit around 388 miles (625 kilometers) above Earth, the 10 signals relay stations will separate from the deployment module to begin three months of tests to check the health and function of spacecraft systems, ground and inter-satellite communications links, and tack-on instruments to track global air and maritime traffic.
The satellites will maneuver into the operational Iridium constellation at an altitude of 485 miles (780 kilometers), replacing the company's 66 existing satellites one-by-one.
One of the Iridium Next launches in the fourth quarter of 2017 will only carry five Iridium Next satellites. The rest of the Falcon 9's lift capacity will be taken up by two U.S.-German gravity research spacecraft, a follow up to the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, or GRACE, satellites launched in 2002.
The GRACE-Follow-On mission was supposed to launch on a Russian-Ukrainian Dnepr rocket, but that program's future is in doubt in the wake of Russia's annexation of Crimea and military activity in eastern Ukraine. Russian officials have said they plan to discontinue Dnepr launches.
Managers from the German Research Center for Geosciences in Potsdam, or GFZ, switched the GRACE-FO mission to a Falcon 9 rocket launch. The German research center is partnering with NASA on the mission.
The Iridium Next launch in early January will mark the third Falcon 9 mission from the West Coast complex, and the 29th Falcon 9 launch overall since SpaceX's workhorse booster debuted in June 2010. One of the Falcon 9 flights is counted as a failure, not including the vehicle lost on the launch pad Sept. 1.
SpaceX founder and chief executive Elon Musk told CNBC last month that investigators believe they have narrowed the likely cause of the Sept. 1 mishap to a problem during filling of the rocket's second stage with super-cold liquid oxygen.
The explosion occurred about eight minutes before the Falcon 9's engines were to ignite during a hold-down test.
The oxygen likely froze solid and caused a high-pressure helium tank to burst, blowing the upper stage apart almost instantly, and leading the rest of the rocket to collapse in a fireball. The helium is used to pressurize the second stage's propellant tanks for flight.
Musk said engineers believe they can fix the problem with a change in fueling procedures, avoiding major hardware changes that would have kept SpaceX missions grounded longer.
 
A view of the Falcon 9 rocket's first stage at Vandenberg undergoing preparations for next month's launch for Iridium. Credit: Iridium/SpaceX

The upcoming launch is a big step for Iridium, which is spending $3 billion on the new satellite program. Iridium's current satellite network is aging — the old spacecraft launched between 1997 and 2002 — and needs an upgrade.
"There were many challenges on the program, from orbit determination knowledge design, to encryption design, to integration and verification test planning, to planning for on orbit acceptance activities, but the team made it all come together and the satellites are ready for deployment to enhance the future of mobile satellite communications — I could not be more proud," said Joel Rademacher, director of systems engineering for the Iridium Next program.
With a full load of propellant, each satellite weighs nearly 1,900 pounds (860 kilograms), and when combined with the specially-designed multi-spacecraft mounting dispenser, the Iridium Next package will be weigh in at more than 20,000 pounds, the heaviest payload launched by SpaceX to date.
SpaceX intends to recover the Falcon 9's first stage booster on a barge positioned south of Vandenberg in the Pacific Ocean, a continuation of the company's efforts to master vertical rocket landings and reusability.

[свернуть]

[Salo]

Jeff Foust ‏@jeff_foust  11 ч.11 часов назад  
Jeff Foust Ретвитнул(а) Iridium Corporate
Getting close to launch, it would seem...
Jeff Foust добавил(а),

 
   
   
 Iridium Corporate  @IridiumComm  
 Milestone Alert: The first ten #IridiumNEXT satellites are stacked and encapsulated in the Falcon 9 fairing. #NEXTevolution @SpaceX

[vogel]

SpaceX ‏@SpaceX  2h2 hours ago

Targeting return to flight from Vandenberg with the @IridiumComm NEXT launch on January 8. Update: https://t.co/15yMaiobpX

[Salo]

https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2017/01/spacex-return-rtf-falcon-9-iridium-spacecraft/

[Salo]

http://spaceflightnow.com/2017/01/02/spacex-failure-probe-complete-flights-resume-sunday-from-california/

SpaceX failure probe complete; flights to resume Sunday from California
 January 2, 2017 William Harwood  
STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS & USED WITH PERMISSION
 
File photo. Credit: NASA

After an exhaustive investigation, SpaceX engineers have identified the most likely cause of the spectacular explosion of a Falcon 9 rocket during a pre-launch test Sept. 1 that destroyed the booster and its $195 million satellite payload, the company announced Monday.
SpaceX engineers believe the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station mishap was triggered by the failure of a high-pressure helium tank, one of three used to pressurize the second stage liquid oxygen tank.
Putting corrective actions in place, the company said Monday it plans to resume flights with a launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base northwest of Los Angeles on Jan. 8 to boost 10 Iridium NEXT satellite telephone relay stations into orbit.
It is not yet known when SpaceX plans to resume flights from Cape Canaveral. Launch complex 40 at the Florida Air Force station was heavily damaged in the Sept. 1 mishap, and the company plans to use a repurposed space shuttle launch pad at the nearby Kennedy Space Center for its next Falcon 9 flight from Florida.
Sources indicate the first flight from Kennedy will be another commercial mission. The next SpaceX flight to deliver cargo to the International Space Station, the company's 10th under contract to NASA, is expected to take place some time after the commercial mission.
SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket uses super-cooled, or "densified," liquid oxygen and RP-1 kerosene fuel to provide additional performance during ascent. To achieve and maintain the desired low temperatures, propellant loading begins just 35 minutes before launch.
To push propellants to the rocket's engines, the Falcon 9 uses highly pressurized helium stored in aluminum bottles, wrapped in a tough, insulating carbon composite material. The bottles, known as composite overwrap pressure vessels, or COPVs, are mounted inside the propellant tanks, submerged in frigid liquid oxygen and chilled kerosene.

Спойлер

On Sept. 1, about five minutes before a planned test firing of the Falcon's nine Merlin 1D first stage engines — a routine pre-launch test for SpaceX — the second stage suddenly exploded in a spectacular conflagration that was caught on video and widely seen around the world.
The rocket and it's $195 million payload, a commercial communications satellite, were destroyed, causing heavy damage to launch complex 40 at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. Just 93 milliseconds elapsed from the first signs of trouble to the explosion.
"Investigators scoured more than 3,000 channels of video and telemetry data covering a very brief timeline of events," SpaceX said in a statement posted to its website. "Because the failure occurred on the ground, investigators were also able to review umbilical data, ground-based video, and physical debris.
"To validate investigation analysis and findings, SpaceX conducted a wide range of tests at its facilities in Hawthorne, California and McGregor, Texas."
SpaceX is generally tight-lipped when it comes to technical details, and the statement posted Monday provided only a general overview of the team's findings. It said accident investigators "concluded that one of the three composite overwrapped pressure vessels (COPVs) inside the second stage liquid oxygen (LOX) tank failed."
"Specifically, the investigation team concluded the failure was likely due to the accumulation of oxygen between the COPV liner and overwrap in a void or a buckle in the liner," the company said.
Investigators believe those extremely low temperatures may have caused some of that trapped oxygen to solidify. In any case, when the tank was pressurized, trapped oxygen pushing against the carbon overwrap fibers likely generated friction "leading to ignition and the subsequent failure of the COPV."
Liquid oxygen has a temperature of around minus 298 degrees Fahrenheit, but SpaceX chills the propellant to around minus 340 degrees for use aboard the Falcon 9. The RP-1 kerosene fuel, which normally is stored at a room temperature 70 degrees, also is chilled. The lower temperatures increase the propellants' density.
A rocket engine's thrust is directly proportional to the rate propellants are consumed and expelled. By "densifying" the Falcon 9 propellants, more fuel can be stored and pumped through the engines, increasing performance.
While earlier rockets, including the Titan 2 booster used to launch NASA's Gemini spacecraft in the 1960s, used propellant cooling to increase density, and thus engine performance, the upgraded Falcon 9 is believed to be the first utilizing super-cooled cryogenic oxygen.
SpaceX founder Elon Musk said in 2015, when propellant cooling was first implemented in the Falcon 9, that "we're sub-cooling the propellant, particularly the liquid oxygen, close to its freezing point, which increases the density quite significantly."
Failure investigators "identified several credible causes for the COPV failure, all of which involve accumulation of super chilled LOX or SOX (solidified oxygen) in buckles under the overwrap," the company said in its statement.
"The corrective actions address all credible causes and focus on changes which avoid the conditions that led to these credible causes. In the short term, this entails changing the COPV configuration to allow warmer temperature helium to be loaded, as well as returning helium loading operations to a prior flight proven configuration based on operations used in over 700 successful COPV loads."
The company did not provide any details about those earlier helium loading procedures but said it plans to redesign the helium bottles in the long term "to prevent buckles altogether, which will allow for faster loading operations."
The Sept. 1 failure was the second involving the Falcon 9's second-stage helium pressurization system.
During a June 2015 launch to deliver supplies to the space station, a strut holding a second-stage helium tank in place inside the liquid oxygen tank failed, allowing the helium bottle to shoot up and crash into the top of the oxygen tank, triggering a catastrophic rupture.
It was SpaceX's first outright Falcon 9 failure in 19 launchings dating back to the rocket's maiden flight in June 2010. After taking steps to ensure all internal struts met design specifications, SpaceX launched nine successful missions in a row before the Sept. 1 launch pad disaster, all of them using densified propellants.

[свернуть]

[Зловредный]

"In the short term, this entails changing the COPV configuration to allow warmer temperature helium to be loaded, as well as returning helium loading operations to a prior flight proven configuration based on operations used in over 700 successful COPV loads. In the long term, SpaceX will implement design changes to the COPVs to prevent buckles altogether, which will allow for faster loading operations."

Я правильно понимаю, что это означает? В том неудачном случае с AMOS-6 они экспериментировали с процедурой заправки гелием?

[Apollo13]

Зловредный пишет:

"In the short term, this entails changing the COPV configuration to allow warmer temperature helium to be loaded, as well as returning helium loading operations to a prior flight proven configuration based on operations used in over 700 successful COPV loads. In the long term, SpaceX will implement design changes to the COPVs to prevent buckles altogether, which will allow for faster loading operations."

Я правильно понимаю, что это означает? В том неудачном случае с AMOS-6 они экспериментировали с процедурой заправки гелием?

Новая процедура заправки впервые была использована во время предстартового прожига JCSat-16. Amos-6 был уже второй раз.

[Зловредный]

Ага. Это называется "доигрались". Спасибо

[Pirat5]

Jan 08 2017

Iridium NEXT Flight 1 (1-10) 10:28/18:28 (PST/GMT)

=21:28 MSK

https://twitter.com/IridiumBoss/status/815947379883044864
Matt Desch‏@IridiumBoss
Our date is now public. Next Sunday morning, Jan 8 at 10:28:07 pst. Iridium NEXT launch #1 flies!

[Salo]

James Dean ‏@flatoday_jdean  20 мин.20 минут назад  
SpaceX mishap report still "under review" by FAA, which has not yet issued a launch license for Iridium return-to-flight mission.

[ZOOR]

С этими короткими твитами хоть кто бы строчку по-русски писал
Я правильно понимаю, что FAA еще не дала разрешения на пуски после аварии?

[vogel]

ZOOR пишет:
С этими короткими твитами хоть кто бы строчку по-русски писал
Я правильно понимаю, что FAA еще не дала разрешения на пуски после аварии?

Да, пишут, что отчёт по аварии ещё рассматривается, и FAA зелёного света пока не давали.