SpaceX Falcon 9

[NK]

Apollo13 пишет:
Если все будет хорошо этим летом во время миссии Jason-3 будет предпринята попытка посадки на землю.

пусть земля ему будет пухом приобретает другой  смысл

[Дмитрий В.]

Петр Зайцев пишет:

Дмитрий В. пишет:

О различии в размерах ББ и ЦБ ФХ известно уже около года. Если оптимизировать проектные параметры, то есть тенденция к увеличению массы ПГ при увеличении РЗТ в ББ относительно ЦБ. Поэтому ББ имеют емкость объем баков процентов на 15 больше, чем в ЦБ.

Но поскольку это различие проявляется лишь в длине, то никаких проблем с оснасткой не возникает.

Непонятно как эти модули связаны наверху. Там ведь если есть какие-нибудь пояса прочности, то они теперь не совпадают по высоте.

Не понял сути вопроса? Там нет никаких проблем с силовыми связями:

http://www.spacex.com/falcon-heavy
И все усиления остаются на своих местах.

[Grus]

Дмитрий В. пишет: И все усиления остаются на своих местах.

По нижнему пояску между буквами E и X видно, что усиление на разной высоте, то есть нижний бак, разумеется, разный. Попасть верхним поясом - некоторая трудность.

Согласен, слишком часто рабочие сложности выдаются за препятствие. Привычная демагогия.

[Sam Grey]

Петр Зайцев пишет:
Непонятно как эти модули связаны наверху. Там ведь если есть какие-нибудь пояса прочности, то они теперь не совпадают по высоте.

Спейсы вывесили (и зачем-то потом быстро убрали) фотографию аэродиманической (?) модели FH. Это к вопросу о поясах прочности и их связки.

[Grus]

Sam Grey пишет: Спейсы вывесили (и зачем-то потом быстро убрали) фотографию аэродиманической (?) модели FH. Это к вопросу о поясах прочности и их связки.

Этот макет сильно отличается от рисунка сайта. Скоро увидим.

[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 fr om 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.
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.
The current Falcon 9 v1.1 is in the middle of a U.S. government certification process that began about a year ago and is expected to be finished by midyear. Once that is completed, further rocket enhancements will be treated as modifications not requiring the same detailed review by the government agencies.
"There will be iterations that go on from there, but they will be certified as changes. It won't be certified as an entirely new rocket," Shotwell said.
"Nearly half of the activity for certification is certifying SpaceX as a company — our manufacturing processes, our quality control, our launch sites and our launch processes," she said. "In fact this has taken a majority of the time, to understand how we do business. That doesn't change with the rocket, and in fact that doesn't change when we go from a Falcon 9 single stick to a Falcon Heavy.
"So certification, while it might be an iterative process, becomes quicker and quicker to certify vehicle changes."
SpaceX postponed the scheduled March 21 launch of a telecommunications satellite for Turkmenistan because of an unspecified suspected anomaly in the helium pressurization tanks that are on both the first and second stage. The discovery was made not on the vehicle itself but on tanks being reviewed in the production facility.
"We were doing some component stress testing over the weekend and got a little uncomfortable with the helium pressure bottles," Shotwell said. "It passed inspection, but we're going to go and do some work on the bottles and delay the flight. I don't have a time frame right now, and we have back-to-back missions ... that we want to fly before the 17th of April."
One industry official said the Turkmenistan launch would be pushed to late April, allowing SpaceX to launch a Dragon cargo vehicle to the International Space Station for NASA before April 17.
Shotwell also addressed range-safety issues in returning a Falcon 9 stage to a launch site and how the company maintains a corporate culture of risk mitigation even after 16 largely successful missions. Most of the company's workforce of more than 4,000 employees was not there to witness the early Falcon 1 failures.

 On safety issues relating to the return of a Falcon 9 first stage:
"It's more a range safety activity. We basically have to get clearance from the range. I think the Eastern Range is going to let us, but they'd like to see us land on the drone ship first. But they have their finger on the button.
"If you think about the decision-making before you blow up a launch vehicle for safety reasons, on ascent it's a harder decision. You've got a payload onboard. Someone's bird is not getting to orbit if you press the Command Destruct button.
"If you hit Destruct an incoming stage, it's an experiment at this point anyhow, it doesn't have a ton of fuel on it, it's probably going to hit a barge. You can imagine if a rocket with a bunch of fuel hit a building, there would be a huge explosion. You can be a little twitchier with your finger on the button for incoming."

On restarting development of the Falcon 1 rocket given the increasing demand for small-satellite launch options:
"There's no question that the market is larger for a vehicle that size. But we can accommodate secondaries on Falcon 9."

On maintaining a risk-averse corporate culture when most employees have never lived through a launch failure:
"The vast majority of our employees were not around during the hard times through 2008. We do talk about the three Falcon 1 failures pretty regularly. We show video of the failures within the company. It is really important to know how hard this is, so you do anything you can to make sure the next flight is going to go off successfully."

On U.S. Air Force certification of the Falcon 9 v1.1:
"We've definitely turned a corner. We've been working really well with them since we hit certification hard, which really started last March or April. So we've only been at it a year.
"Generals [Ellen] Pawlikowski and [Samuel A.] Greaves [the former and current chiefs of the U.S. Space and Missile Systems Center at the Air Force Space Command's Los Angeles Air Force Base] have really pushed their teams hard to try to make them aware of how alternate ways of doing business are OK.
"Just because we do things differently doesn't mean we don't do them well — especially given the success we've had to date. So the Air Force has been working really hard. It's going really well and I anticipate being certified very shortly."

On the pad abort test of the upgraded Dragon capsule, being redesigned to carry astronauts starting in 2017:
"I was going to do it after the [Turkmenistan] and NASA missions. Given the recent delays, I'm not quite sure. I think it'll be ready to go in just a couple of weeks. So it's going to be a mater of what, wh ere and when. All three are going from [launch pad] SLC 40."

On the Falcon Heavy rocket's inaugural flight:
"Later this year. The pad will be ready for it by September or October of this year. We'll get it launched as quickly as we can. We don't really have customer launches until mid-2016, so we're still working off margin, which is nice."

On expanding its  production facilities:
"We keep extending the facility in the Hawthorne area, in Los Angeles County. I feel like I sign a lease every month or six weeks for a new facility. We should be able to produce 40 cores a year in that factory."

[Salo]

Salo пишет:
http://imgur.com/Otj4QCN,QMXhN9I
SpaceX Design and Operations overview of fairing recovery plan

[Lanista]

Десантника с джетпаком не хватает =)

[Salo]

Instead, he emphasized SpaceX's growing launch capacity, particularly for launches to geostationary orbit. Currently SpaceX uses only Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral for GEO missions, a pad also used for ISS cargo and other missions.
Matsumori said that renovations to Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center, previously used for shuttle launches, will be done by late summer. That pad will host launches of future ISS crew missions as well as the larger Falcon Heavy launch vehicle. SpaceX is also developing its own launch site near Brownsville, Texas, primarily for GEO missions, which Matsumori said should be ready by late 2016.
Those additional sites, the company argues, will allow it to avoid schedule bottlenecks in the future. "We have found that crowded launch sites are a single point of failure of any launch organization," Shotwell said, saying the sites will allow the company to do as many as 36 GEO launches per year by 2016.

 - See more at: http://spacenews.com/spacexs-competitors-emphasize-schedule-reliability/#sthash.3qgJz8D9.dpuf

[Salo]

[Salo]

http://www.parabolicarc.com/2015/03/23/spacex-busy-list-rest-2015/

SpaceX's Busy To-Do List for Rest of 2015             
Posted by Doug Messier
on March 23, 2015, at 5:33 am

SpaceX vehicle integration building at Pad 39A. (Credit: NASA)
 
By Douglas Messier
 Managing Editor
SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell was making the rounds last week in Washington, D.C., speaking before the Satellite 2015 conference and a House Armed Services subcommittee meeting. Much of the focus was on the latter, where Shotwell engaged in a she said-he said battle over launch costs with United Launch Alliance CEO Tory Bruno.
More interesting were the updates Shotwell provided on SpaceX's plans for 2015 and beyond. What emerged is just how crowded the company's agenda is for the rest of the year. The table below provides a summary.

 

Record Number of Launches


Falcon 9 launch (Credit: SpaceX)
 
SpaceX is aiming for 13 orbital launches this year, including the introduction of a more powerful Falcon 9 and the debut of the 28-engine Falcon Heavy launcher. The company is also aiming to complete on-pad and in-flight abort tests for its crewed Dragon spacecraft.
Thirteen orbital flights would more than double the six launches the company achieved in 2014. Through March, SpaceX has notched three successful Falcon 9 launches.
Whether they get to 13 launches remains uncertain. The schedule has already suffered a hiccup, with a month-long delay in the launch of the TurkmenAlem52E/MonacoSat 1 satellite from March 21 to April 24. The problem? Helium. It's the same issue SpaceX had last year that contributed to a reduction in the number of planned flights from 10 or 11 to six. The company had brought helium tank production in house, and things didn't  go exactly according to plan.
Shotwell said that to enable the increased launch rate, SpaceX has increased production of Merlin 1-D engines. The company plans to produce 180 engines this year, 240 in 2016 and 400 the following year, she said.
SpaceX will introduce an upgraded version of the Falcon 9 this summer with the launch of a satellite for SES. The upgraded booster will be about 30 percent more powerful than the current version. The extra performance will allow SpaceX to launch communications satellites to geosynchronous orbit while at the same time landing the first stage for refurbishment and reuse.

Falcon 9 Recovery
 

Credit: SpaceX
 
SpaceX came tantalizingly close to landing a Falcon 9 first stage on a floating barge the first time out in January. It's highly likely the company will succeed in an attempt later this year. Shotwell said the company will attempt landings on the next two Dragon commercial resupply missions, which are scheduled for April and June.
Once a first stage is recovered intact, SpaceX plans to ship it to a test facility located at Spaceport America in southern New Mexico. Engineers will then put the stage through test flights to determine the limits of the hardware.
SpaceX will eventually recycle first stages for orbital launches. Future plans also include landing Falcon 9 first stages at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and Vandenberg Air Force Base instead of on an off-shore barge.  It's not clear how soon the company will be able to attempt these milestones.

Falcon 9 Certification

Shotwell said last week that she expects certification of the Falcon 9 v1.1 booster in the first half of the year. The U.S. Air Force, which oversees the certification process, has set the same deadline. Shotwell said the Air Force certification process is going well. NASA is running its own parallel process.
Certification is required for SpaceX to launch NASA's Jason 3 ocean altimeter satellite later this year. The launch is now scheduled for July 22.
Shotwell said she does not expect the upgrade t0 the booster planned for this summer to involve a lengthy new certification process.

Long Range Programs
 
 

Elon Musk (center) and Texas Gov. Rick Perry break ground on a new launch complex. (Credit: Texas Governor's Office)
 
Shotwell also gave updates on several long-term SpaceX ventures.
The company is building a private launch complex in Texas. Shotwell said once that facility is up and running, SpaceX will have the capability of launching 36 Falcon rockets annually.
The company's ambitious effort to provide broadband Internet to the planet via more than 4,000 small satellites is still in the exploratory phase. Shotwell said there were few additional details to provide at present.
A recent $1 billion investment in SpaceX by Google and Fidelity Investments was not for the satellite Internet venture but for general business purposes, Shotwell said.
Despite the recent boon in the small satellite market, SpaceX has no plans to re-introduce the Falcon 1e launch vehicle that it abandoned several years ago. Shotwell said the Falcon 9 could launch small satellites as secondary payloads.
Work is continuing on SpaceX's Mars transporter, which will use Raptor engines fueled by liquid oxygen and methane. Shotwell believes there is a commercial market for a Mars vehicle.
"There are a surprising number of people who want to leave Earth," she said.

[Salo]

http://spacenews.com/report-highlights-misunderstandings-between-spacex-air-force-on-certification/

Report Highlights Misunderstandings Between SpaceX, Air Force on Certification
by Mike Gruss — March 31, 2015

"There is a large gap between the perceptions of the partners," the report about the Falcon 9 (above) certification process, released March 27, said. "There is also a lack of common understanding of some basic objectives and definitions embodied" in the Air Force-SpaceX agreement on the certification requirements, the report said. Credit: SpaceX  
 
WASHINGTON — By the first week of January, when U.S. Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James called SpaceX founder Elon Musk, the relationship between their two camps was already knotted and tense.
The Air Force and SpaceX were still tangled in a lawsuit over the service's sole-source contract to the company's archrival, United Launch Alliance, for a large batch of rockets. Meanwhile, the Air Force still had yet to certify SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket to carry national security satellites despite pledging to do so by the end of 2014.
 
U.S. Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James. Credit: U.S. Air Force/Jeff Fisher

Now, James had bad news. She told Musk that it would take another six months to certify the Falcon 9, effectively taking SpaceX out of the running for a U.S. National Reconnaissance Office launch contract worth more than $100 million.
SpaceX executives — and even some Air Force officials — were surprised. "The company thought (they) were there," one industry official said.
A report released March 27 details why certification has taken so long and how the process strained the relationship between the Air Force and the upstart rocket company.
In short: SpaceX believed its track record dating back to 2013 should have given the Air Force confidence in its rocket and was slow to embrace the service's need for large volumes of data, the report said. The Air Force, meanwhile, viewed the certification process as a kind of design review and pushed SpaceX to make dozens of changes to its Falcon 9 rocket, processes and organizational structure.
The review panel was headed by retired Gen. Larry Welch, a former Air Force chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Ellen Pawlikowski, the service's top uniformed officer for acquisition, and SpaceX President and Chief Operating Officer Gwynne Shotwell.
"There is a large gap between the perceptions of the partners," the report said. "There is also a lack of common understanding of some basic objectives and definitions embodied" in the Air Force-SpaceX agreement on the certification requirements, the report said.
Air Force and SpaceX officials have declined to release even a redacted version of the June 2013 Cooperative Research and Development Agreement.
Air Force officials have said that as part of the agreement, staff at the service's Space and Missile Systems Center (SMC), which buys military space systems, would review data from three Falcon 9 launches and study the vehicle's flight history, design, reliability, process maturity, safety systems, manufacturing and operations, systems engineering, risk management, and launch facilities. Hawthorne, California-based SpaceX successfully launched those missions in late 2013 and early 2014.
But the precise meaning of certification was poorly understood, the report said.
"It needs to be clear that the Certifying Official is not certifying readiness to launch," the report read. "Instead, the certification should be a declaration of confidence in the New Entrant's ability to satisfactorily meet all the requirements to successfully deliver to orbit on schedule with the defined level of risk."
The report also details a level of misunderstanding, if not mistrust, between the two sides.
SpaceX was slow to understand the Air Force's certification data requirements and often felt the service was being prescriptive, the report said.
"The SpaceX view is that the Air Force should have confidence in SpaceX capabilities based on its track record of performance," the report said.
 
SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell testifying before the U.S. House Armed Services Committee. Credit: House Armed Services Committee video capture

SpaceX's perception that it was being over scrutinized was evident during a March 17 hearing of the House Armed Services Committee."It bears noting that the New Entrant Certification requirements that SpaceX must live up to vastly exceed the requirements that the Atlas 5 and Delta 4 launch vehicles had to meet in 1998, prior to their ability to compete for" military launch contracts, Shotwell said in written testimony. The Atlas 5 and Delta 4 are the two main rockets operated by ULA.
The Air Force, the report said, was slow to embrace SpaceX's innovations. The service also sought to dictate "conditions to SpaceX in detail without a productive structure or process to resolve issues as they occur," the report said.
Ultimately, SpaceX had little recourse but to begin giving the Air Force what it wanted, the report said. "This can be the worst of all worlds, pressing the Falcon 9 commercially oriented approach into a comfortable government mold that eliminates or significantly reduces the expected benefits to the government of the commercial approach," the report said.
Approximately 400 certification items were still outstanding when work on the report concluded. The report suggested that some of these issues could wait until after the Falcon 9 is certified, which would require a departure from Air Force practices.
"It is neither possible nor should it be necessary to close all the issues by the certification date as currently required by language in the agreement," the report said.
Among the major remaining certification issues identified in the report: SpaceX integrates satellites to its rockets horizontally, but the Air Force prefers vertical integration; GPS-based launch vehicle tracking; information assurance; and secure flight termination.
James said in a March 23 press release that the two parties are focusing on second-stage-engine and fairing qualification and contamination control. "I look forward to continuing to work with SpaceX on this final portion of our certification effort," James said in a prepared statement.
Despite the misunderstandings, certification appears to be on track, sources say, and SpaceX has seemingly offered an olive branch to the Air Force. During the hearing, Shotwell said SpaceX and service were working "shoulder to shoulder" on certification.
A second report on how the Air Force can improve its certification process is expected later this year, said Capt. Chris Hoyler, an Air Force spokesman. ULA is expected to be part of those conversations as it will need to certify the new vehicle the company says it is developing to replace the Atlas 5 and Delta 4.

[Salo]

[Андрей Иванов]

Компания SpaceX еще раз попробует поймать первую ступень ракеты-носителя.
http://tass.ru/kosmos/1883922

[triage]

да, клоуны для этой статьи нужны (про этих журналистов)

 http://tass.ru/kosmos/1883922
По замыслам конструкторов, благодаря включению тормозных двигателей, она должна плавно опускаться на парашюте, находясь в вертикальном положении и раскрыв посадочные опоры. Специальная программа позволяет рассчитать, куда будет падать ступень, и вовремя направить туда специальную морскую платформу размером с футбольное поле. 

[FarEcho]

pnetmon пишет:
да, клоуны для этой статьи нужны (про этих журналистов)

http://tass.ru/kosmos/1883922
По замыслам конструкторов, благодаря включению тормозных двигателей, она должна плавно опускаться на парашюте, находясь в вертикальном положении и раскрыв посадочные опоры. Специальная программа позволяет рассчитать, куда будет падать ступень, и вовремя направить туда специальную морскую платформу размером с футбольное поле.

Ух ты!!! Я аж кофе подавился.   
Нет, случайно такое не сморозишь - специалисты напряженно и вдумчиво работали над фрамулировками. 

[Атяпа]

Не ступень на баржу, а баржу подгоняют под ступень?!

[triage]

главное на парашюте

кажется есть немного правды  - заблаговременно выводят баржу в точку полученную при расчетах полета ступени... и баржу чуть гоняют под ступень и компенсируют воздействие воды-течений.... 

у них читается - что баржа прям с большущей скоростью перемещается в точку прибарживания ступени

[Salo]

[Salo]

https://www.flickr.com/photos/spacexphotos/16892430560/