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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Developing rockets is difficult – even when those rockets use existing rocket boosters. Such is the case for SpaceX and the development of the Falcon Heavy. Once operational, Falcon Heavy will be the most powerful rocket in the world. While the path to its inaugural mission has been challenging, Elon Musk is urging caution surrounding expectations of the rocket's first flight, which is expected later this year from LC-39A at the Kennedy Space Center, Florida.
The long wait is nearly over as SpaceX readies for the final series of upgrades/modifications to LC-39A at the Kennedy Space Center for the upcoming debut of the company's heralded Falcon Heavy rocket.
Designed as a souped up version of the Falcon 9 – which has enjoyed a great deal of fame and attention this year with the first (and now second) reflights of previously-flown core stages as well as lofting the first reused Dragon capsule on the CRS-11 resupply mission to the ISS – Falcon Heavy's initial design seemed simple.
But as Elon Musk stated at the keynote to the ISSR&D (International Space Station Research and Development) conference on Wednesday, "it ended up being way harder to do Falcon Heavy than we thought.
"At first it sounds really easy to just stick two first stages on as strap-on side boosters. But then everything changes."
Mr. Musk admitted, "We were pretty naive about that."
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(Score: 2) by Absolutely.Geek on Tuesday July 25 2017, @06:08AM (2 children)
Yes and no; while I agree that if everything works they may lose a F9H next time. They will learn a great deal success or failure; the data feed from this first flight will tell them a great deal about how the forces are being applied to various parts of the vehicle.
Especially this first flight I'm sure they wont be "flying blind" it will be instrumented up to the eyeballs.
Don't trust the police or the government - Shihad: My mind's sedate.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday July 25 2017, @06:17AM
Not only that, but not blowing up does validate millions of lines of code and most major mechanical systems.
If it fireworks the second time, you can compare the code paths that weren't taken and find that 16-bit integer cast that should have been a 64-bit, a lot faster.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by c0lo on Tuesday July 25 2017, @08:01AM
Like... you unmount a probe from some strut (showing "within limits") and suddenly the resonance frequency modifies enough that the stress amplitude slowly grows out of bounds after 2 minutes into the next flight.
(grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford