SpaceX Falcon 9

[tnt22]

B1042.1

Bob Richards‏ @Bob_Richards 23 ч. назад

Slower vehicles please keep to the left....

[tnt22]

SpaceX | McGregor, TX

SpaceX

Дата загрузки: 7 нояб. 2017 г.

The SpaceX engine testing facility in McGregor, TX

(3:02)

[LRV_75]

Молодцы!

[tnt22]

B1042.1 ...

SpaceX - Load - Transport - Test 11-07-2017

USLaunchReport

Опубликовано: 9 нояб. 2017 г.

(32:10)

[V.B.]

[Apollo13]

http://spacenews.com/spacex-aims-to-follow-a-banner-year-with-an-even-faster-2018-launch-cadence/

SpaceX aims to follow a banner year with an even faster 2018 launch cadence

by Caleb Henry — November 21, 2017


SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell at SpaceX's mission control center. Credit: SpaceX

SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell — a finalist for SpaceNews'Corporate Executive of the Year award — previews 2018 in an exclusive interview .

Updated at 5:14 p.m. Eastern with correct target launch date for BFR. 
WASHINGTON — SpaceX, now on track to more than double its personal best for launches conducted in a single year, wants to further accelerate its launch pace in 2018 by perhaps 10 or more missions.
"We will increase our cadence next year about 50 percent," Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX president and COO, told SpaceNews in an interview last week. "We'll fly more next year than this year, knock on wood, and I think we will probably level out at about that rate, 30 to 40 per year."
With 16 launches completed and three to four remaining by year's end, SpaceX is tracking to perform around 20 launches this year. Remaining 2016 missions include the mystery Zuma payload, NASA's Commercial Resupply Services-13 mission, a launch of 10 Iridium Next satellites, and potentially Falcon Heavy's long-awaited debut.
Shotwell said the demand coming from the satellite telecommunications market for missions to geostationary transfer orbit (GTO) will weigh heavily on SpaceX's ultimate launch rate next year.
"It really depends on the telecom market for what the rate is going to be," she said. "We have seen a dip in GTO missions. I don't know whether that is a temporary dip or more permanent."
Commercial satellite operator purchases of large, geostationary satellites were low the past two years, and even lower this year. To date, just eight have been ordered in 2017, well below the 20 to 25 the industry previously considered norm
SpaceX conducts its 16th launch of 2017, delivering Koreasat-5A to orbit Oct. 30. Its planned 17th launch of the year, a classified payload dubbed Zuma, has been delayed past Thanksgiving by a fairing issue. (SpaceX)
al. Some operators are buying smaller non-geosynchronous satellites instead of traditional geostationary spacecraft.
Shotwell said those launch projections don't include SpaceX's own satellites, which a company executive told Congress Oct. 25 would begin launching "within the next few months." She said SpaceX has estimates for how many missions will be required to launch its own constellation of 4,425 satellites, but declined to give further details.
 
Block 5 and Falcon Heavy
SpaceX is working on the final design spin of the Falcon 9 rocket, the "Block 5," featuring upgrades largely driven by requests from NASA for commercial crew missions and the U.S. military for national security missions awarded under its Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle, or EELV, program. The Block 5 iteration has four goals, Shotwell said — meeting civil and defense requirements, increasing lift capability, simplifying manufacturability, and rapid reusability.
"We should ship the first Block 5 this year," she said. "We are going to spend some time in Texas testing it, [then] it should fly in late Q1."
Block 5 engines will reach 190,000 pound-force (lbf) of thrust at sea level, up from the current Merlin 1D's 176,000 lbf at sea level. A Block 5 engine that experienced a test mishap Nov. 4 didn't explode, she said, but did result in a fire. She said SpaceX is still working on the investigation.
Shotwell said the Block 5 Falcon 9 should be able to refly "10 or more times" with limited refurbishment. The Falcon Heavy will also use Block 5 cores, she said, with the exception of the first mission.
Shotwell said SpaceX is in the process of gaining Air Force certification for the Block 5 and for the Falcon Heavy. That process requires three flights before carrying an EELV payload, which SpaceX will do, though Shotwell added that the company will be able to compete for EELV missions with Falcon Heavy before completing those required flights. She declined to confirm the Falcon Heavy's inaugural launch date, saying only that SpaceX is aiming for December, though it could slip to January.
 
Bracing for BFR
SpaceX plans to supersede the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy with the Big Falcon Rocket, or BFR, which is slated to debut in 2022. What SpaceX won't do is shove customers that are comfortable with the existing Falcon family onto BFR, Shotwell said.

An illustration of a SpaceX "BFR" spaceship at a notional future lunar base. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk emphasized the versatility of the updated BFR system in a Sept. 29 speech. Credit: SpaceX
"We are going to fly Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy as long as our customers want us to be flying those. We will be flying BFR at the same time and we anticipate that given both stages are reusable, that the value proposition for BFR  — even though it's a bigger vehicle —  will be better for our customers. We do believe they will want to come over to BFR, but we will be flying Falcon 9s and Falcon Heavies until our customers are comfortable moving over," she said.
BFR is being designed for crewed and uncrewed missions, with satellite launches contributing to revenue for SpaceX's interplanetary aspirations. The reusable rocket features a new methane-oxygen engine called Raptor, and will use 31 such engines on its first stage, up from the Falcon 9's nine Merlin engines and the Falcon Heavy's 27 Merlin engines.  
Shotwell estimated that around 50 percent of the work on BFR is focused on the Raptor engines. "We are making great progress with those," she said.
SpaceX has hinted at the possibility of Raptor engines debuting on the Falcon 9, but Shotwell said that is now less likely as the company freezes the Falcon 9 design.
Shotwell said SpaceX plans to attempt second stage recoveries from the existing Falcon family is less to reuse them, and more to learn about reusability in preparation for the BFR's second stage, the Big Falcon Spaceship, or BFS. That second stage, featuring six Raptor engines, will be designed for reusability from the beginning, she said.

[Apollo13]

Первый Блок 5 планируется отправить в Макгрегор в этом году.

[tnt22]

Chris B - NSF‏ @NASASpaceflight 33 мин. назад

SLC-40's comeback closing in. At least one visual sighting of the new TEL being rolled out and erected at the pad (likely for fit checks). Big test will be the Static Fire for CRS-13 next week. TEL certainly appears to be on track to support!

[Apollo13]

https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/62aqi7/rspacex_ses10_official_launch_discussion_updates/dfl9xge/?context=3

I've been waiting so long for this! I interned at LC-39A while the refurb was going on and boy did B1021 give us trouble! I'm so happy to finally see my baby fly!
Edit: since people are asking for more info, I'll give a couple fun problems we ran into.

[/li]
• Trying to upgrade parts from block 2 to block 3, failing to install them three times, then giving up and trying (and succeeding with) a method from block 1
• Trying to remove parts that weren't originally intended to be removable
• Discovering parts on the booster that theoretically didn't exist before it launched
  

This part was (is?) made of a stock material on assembly rather than fabricated, but wasn't officially given a part number until after the launch of CRS-8. It must have been created during B1021's original assembly and installed, but with no way to officially record its installation since a part number didn't exist. Fast forward to refurb and it calls for the removal of a part that was never officially installed, so I had to dig up some other paperwork detailing what occurred.

В ходе подготовки к повторному пуску в ступени обнаружили лишние детали

[Димитър]

http://spacenews.com/spacex-aims-to-follow-a-banner-year-with-an-even-faster-2018-launch-cadence/

Я правильно понял, что Блок 5 - окончательный вариант Фалкона и больше его менять не будут? 
А метан и спасение второй ступени будет уже на BFR / BFS? 

[triage]

-

[vlad7308]

Димитър пишет:
Я правильно понял, что Блок 5 - окончательный вариант Фалкона и больше его менять не будут?

примерно так

[tnt22]

512Tech‏ @512tech 22 ч. назад

Elon Musk said he wanted to build a spaceport in Texas. So far, the only liftoffs fr om the planned beach site are being achieved by seagulls and pelicans.

http://www.512tech.com/technology/progress-slow-spacex-planned-south-texas-spaceport/1R1yN1aM7FsO2XGBr4uOJI/#_=_

Jay Janner / AMERICAN-STATESMAN/Austin American-Statesman
Antennae at the SpaceX South Texas Ground Tracking Station in Boca Chica on Wednesday November 8, 2017.

SPACEX

Progress slow at SpaceX's planned South Texas spaceport

Posted November 21st, 2017

Bob Sechler

BOCA CHICA -- More than three years ago, SpaceX founder Elon Musk gathered with state leaders at this remote South Texas beach to trumpet it as the future location of the world's first commercial spaceport.

But so far, the only liftoffs fr om the shifting dunes are being achieved by seagulls and pelicans.

SpaceX — the Hawthorne, Calif., company started by the Musk with the aim of reducing the cost of space travel and one day facilitating the colonization of Mars — still counts the Boca Chica site in its plans. The company installed two large tracking antennas at the location this year, perhaps the most tangible indication yet of its intended purpose as a launch point for commercial satellites and, eventually, exploration of the solar system.

But progress on the Boca Chica facility — in which Musk vowed SpaceX would invest $100 million and initially predicted could be sending up rockets by late 2016 — has been slower than either SpaceX or state officials envisioned when it was announced in 2014.

Спойлер

The state has pledged a total of $15.3 million in incentives to the project, although SpaceX has returned a small portion of the state money it has received so far because it hasn't met early job-creation goals.

The slower rate of progress is partly the result of difficulties building on the beach after bedrock turned out to be deeper than expected and the water table turned out to be higher than expected. That prompted SpaceX to bring in hundreds of thousands of cubic yards of new soil to stabilize the site to support future structures. Other slowdowns have been caused by the company's focus on more pressing issues after one of its rockets exploded in 2015 shortly after liftoff from a leased launch pad at Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and another exploded on the pad in 2016, temporarily grounding some of SpaceX's commercial operations both times.

Most recently, SpaceX has said the first blast-off from Boca Chica could take place by the end of 2018. Spokesman James Gleeson reiterated that goal in a recent interview — although he added a caveat.

"SpaceX has continued to make progress on building the first-ever commercial spaceport in South Texas while also overcoming a number of challenges in the last few years," Gleeson said. "We continue to target late 2018 but we're reviewing our progress in South Texas and SpaceX will turn the launch complex online as soon as it's ready."

Boca Chica is in Cameron County, about 20 miles east of Brownsville at the southernmost tip of Texas, wh ere Texas Highway 4 dead-ends into the Gulf of Mexico. A small housing development, called Boca Chica Village, is nearby.

According to state documents obtained by the American-Statesman through an open-records request, the deadline for the Boca Chica spaceport to become operational or potentially lose more of the state incentive money pledged to it is less than a year away — on Sept. 30, 2018. The agreement also requires that 120 people be employed by the facility by the end of this year, 180 by the end of 2018 and 300 by the end of 2024.

Only a handful of people were working at the location during a recent visit by the American-Statesman, however, and there was little to distinguish it amid the windswept landscape as the future site of a cutting-edge launching point for space exploration.

Aside from the two tracking antennas brought in this year — which aren't yet operational — the most notable structure was a large platform of compacted soil, set off by fencing and a "SpaceX Launch Site" sign. Across the highway, the metal framework of what appeared to be a storage building was being erected around some heavy equipment.

'Par for the course'

The spaceport has been viewed by state and local Cameron County leaders as the linchpin to establishing South Texas as a hub for an emerging private U.S. space industry in an era of NASA budget cuts, and former Gov. Rick Perry was on hand for the ground-breaking ceremony in September 2014. At the time, the Brownsville Economic Development Corp. estimated SpaceX would create 500 jobs over 10 years with an annual payroll of more than $51 million.

Musk — a billionaire serial entrepreneur who also started electric-car maker Tesla and is known for bold statements and futuristic pronouncements — said during the groundbreaking that rockets launched from Boca Chica would carry commercial satellites at first but eventually could be critical to establishing a human presence on Mars. SpaceX's formal name is Space Exploration Technologies Corp.

"It could very well be that the first person that departs for another planet will depart from this location," Musk said at the time.

The rate of progress at Boca Chica since then isn't necessarily a surprise to some SpaceX observers, however, because both the company and Musk have reputations in the aerospace industry for issuing ambitious timetables that often are revised.

"Being behind schedule is kind of par for the course for SpaceX," said Bill Ostrove, primary space analyst for Forecast International. "They lay out very aggressive plans in terms of time schedules that are very rarely if ever met. There's kind of an expectation that anytime SpaceX gives you a date, you always have to assume that there is going to be a few years of delay."

Still, Musk does have a track record of eventually accomplishing many of the goals he sets — such as when SpaceX made history this year by relaunching into orbit and then successfully landing a booster rocket that it had flown before. The feat marked a milestone because the company views reusable rockets as the key to lowering the cost of space flight.

"I wouldn't doubt (Musk) in the end," Ostrove said, although he said he hadn't heard anything specifically about SpaceX's latest Boca Chica plans.

Texas beat out Florida, Georgia and Puerto Rico to win the future spaceport. The state pledged $2.3 million from the jobs-focused Texas Enterprise Fund and $13 million from another state incentive fund called the Spaceport Trust Fund, in addition to millions more in various tax incentives committed by local governments nearby the proposed launch site. SpaceX received its first payment from the state's spaceport fund — routed through the Cameron County Spaceport Development Corp. — this year, totaling $2.6 million and intended to help pay for infrastructure, such as the tracking antennas.


Jay Janner / AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
A worker frames a building at SpaceX in Boca Chica on Wednesday November 8, 2017.

To date, SpaceX has paid back about $81,000 of the $400,000 in incentives money it initially received from the Texas Enterprise Fund because it didn't meet hiring goals for either 2015 or 2016. Under the incentives agreement with the state, the company was supposed to have created 60 full-time jobs related to the site by the end of last year, but it had created only 10, according to documents obtained by the American-Statesman.

Support for the project continues to be solid among state leaders and local Cameron County officials, however.

"The governor's office remains confident Brownsville will be home to the launch of a new SpaceX venture," said Ciara Matthews, a spokeswoman for Gov. Greg Abbott. "SpaceX has continually maintained a partnership of transparency with the state of Texas, and the governor's office continues to work with the company to ensure a successful project and full compliance with their (Texas Enterprise Fund) agreement."

Cameron County Judge Eddie Treviño, Jr. said he doesn't consider the spaceport behind schedule because his understanding of SpaceX's plans since he took office in November last year has been that the first launch wouldn't take place until late 2018.

But Treviño also said he wasn't aware that SpaceX had fallen short of its hiring targets, noting that Cameron County isn't charged with monitoring job creation at the site since the company's job-related incentives come from the state. Cameron County has granted a $1.8 million, 10-year property-tax abatement to SpaceX, he said.

"Obviously, (the hiring shortfall) is a slowdown and a little bit of a delay, but I haven't heard anything (else) that would indicate the project is in a slowdown or is a project that is not going to come to fruition," Treviño said. "We are being told (by SpaceX) that the plan and the project is still moving forward."

He said he's confident "we are going to see launches taking place from Cameron County" eventually.

"It's really exciting," Treviño said. "Obviously, we would love to see more tangible examples of the progress, but I'm sure we will."

According to SpaceX, he and others won't have to wait much longer for an increase in activity at the future spaceport. The recently installed antennas at Boca Chica are expected to be operational next year — although they'll initially track flights blasting off from elsewh ere — and the company also indicated development of the overall launch complex should pick up.

"Even as our teams worked to modernize and repair our launch complexes in Florida so that we could reliably return to flight for our customers, SpaceX invested $14 million into the South Texas project," said Gleeson, the company's spokesman.

"Now, with our launch construction projects in Florida wrapping up by early 2018, SpaceX will be able to turn more attention to our work in South Texas," he said.

[свернуть]

[V.B.]

Я думаю, Боку Чику они будут делать сразу под BFR. Поэтому и притормозили пока работы.

[tnt22]

Chris B - NSF‏ @NASASpaceflight 2 ч. назад

Still working on the new TEL at SLC-40 today. Back to vertical. Needs to be lowered to horizontal, rolled back and then the Falcon 9 booster is mated in the HIF. Rollout. Power On. Prop Load. Ignition. Still NET Monday for the Static Fire test for CRS-13. NSF Member photo.

[tnt22]

http://spacenews.com/new-and-improved-florida-pad-ready-to-resume-falcon-9-launches/

New and improved Florida pad ready to resume Falcon 9 launches
by Jeff Foust — December 8, 2017


SpaceX's Space Launch Complex 40 prior to the September 2016 pad explosion. SpaceX has rebuilt SLC-40 with improvements that will support higher launch rates. Credit: SpaceX

WASHINGTON — More than a year after suffering significant damage in a Falcon 9 explosion, a Florida launch pad is ready to return to service, incorporating improvements that will allow a higher flight rate.

The first launch fr om Space Launch Complex (SLC) 40 at Cape Canaveral, Florida, since a September 2016 pad explosion is scheduled for Dec. 12, when a SpaceX Falcon 9 launches a Dragon cargo spacecraft to the International Space Station. The rocket's first stage performed a successful static fire test there Dec. 6, the first major activity at the pad since the accident.

Спойлер

SpaceX spent about $50 million rebuilding the launch pad after the accident, in the process incorporating improvements to the pad based on lessons learned fr om launches there and at two other launch pads in Florida in California that will support "many years" of Falcon 9 launches, a company official said.

"We really looked at this as an opportunity to not only rebuild the pad, but to make it better," said John Muratore, director of SLC-40 at SpaceX, in a call with reporters Dec. 8.

That work, he said, included taking steps to make hardware on the pad more robust and thus less likely to suffer damage during a launch. Much of the support equipment that was above ground and exposed to launches has been moved below ground, protected by concrete and steel and thus less likely to be damaged in a launch or even in the event of an explosion.

"That's critical to our rapid flight strategy," he said. "If you don't take damage on the pad then you can fly more often." It should be possible, he said, to turn the pad around between launches in a week or less.

Among the changes to the pad is a "really augmented" water system to protect the pad from damage to the launch, and improvements to the flame trench to lim it erosion of the concrete there. Those particular changes, he said, can allow for much longer static-fire tests there, which would enable the company to do things like testing a previously-flown first stage after replacing one of its engines.

Muratore said another change at SLC-40 was making the pad interfaces common with those at neighboring Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center, as well as SLC-4E at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. "That is a really a big advantage for us since we can move people around as we hit normal surges of lots of activity, or gaps in activity," he said.

SLC-40 was built in the 1960s for launches of the Titan 3 and 4 rockets, then transferred to SpaceX, which started launching Falcon 9 rockets from the pad in 2010. As the rocket's flight rate increased, there was little opportunity to do upgrades to the pad prior to the accident last year.

"We sort of put the equipment wherever we could fit it on the pad," Muratore said. "The idea of digging up all the concrete and all the steel, that was something we couldn't do and continue to the make the manifest. In this tragedy, we had an opportunity to rebuild."

Rebuilding SLC-40 took longer than originally anticipated. SpaceX executives, including Chief Executive Elon Musk and President Gwynne Shotwell, previously said they expected SLC-40 to be ready to resume launches in the spring or summer of 2017.

Muratore said work didn't start until February because the pad was on "lockdown" after the September accident until late November or early December 2016, after which some environmental remediation work was required before the company could start rebuilding.

"In any large construction project like this, whether you're doing an upgrade to your house or building a launch pad, it's really hard to predict from the start what's going to happen," he said. One issue he said SpaceX encountered was that the 50-year-old documentation from the pad's original construction didn't reflect wh ere plumbing and wiring was actually located.

"It's sort of a combination of things we discovered along the way that slowed us down, combined with, as we got into it, opportunities to really improve the pad," he said.

SpaceX could take its time to rebuild SLC-40 because LC-39A, which started hosting Falcon 9 launches in February, could take over the workload of Florida launches. That allowed the company to incorporate all the changes it wanted. "We could have gotten the pad back in operation sooner," Muratore said, "but we wouldn't have had the pad we wanted to keep for the next 10 to 20 years."

With SLC-40 in service, the company will have flexibility to schedule launches both there and at LC-39A. Some missions, such as Falcon Heavy launches and those of the Dragon v2 spacecraft, will only take place at 39A. SLC-40 will only host "single-stick" Falcon 9 missions, with no plans to add support for the Falcon Heavy.

"[Pad] 40 will be set to just run single-stick missions as fast as we can," he said.

[свернуть]

[Apollo13]

http://elib.dlr.de/114960/1/IAC17-D2.4.4.pdf

https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/7hx6bh/german_aerospace_center_study_systematic/

Systematic Assessment of Reusable First-Stage Return Options
Martin Sippel, Sven Stappert, Leonid Bussler, Etienne Dumont
Martin.Sippel@dlr.de Tel. +49-421-244201145
Space Launcher Systems Analysis (SART), DLR, Bremen, Germany

[Apollo13]

Судя по всему ступень 1026 (JCSat-16) в августе 2017 окончательно утилизировали.

https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/6rbmkh/rspacex_discusses_august_2017_35/dlsa0kc/

Talked to a guy from ULA today who works at the cape said he drove by last night at 2am and saw the SpaceX guys "tearing apart" a rocket. He didn't say if it was a new or reused stage but thought it was out of the norm being as late as it was.

[drzerg]

https://imgur.com/gallery/MQcEE

маск принимает команды от рептилойдов с марса!

[V.B.]

И как ловить обтекатель этими штуками? Натянут между ними сетку?