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SpaceX Attempts Historic West Coast Landing Tonight -- Successful! [Updated]

posted by chromas on Sunday October 07 2018, @08:23PM   
from the Look!-Up-in-the-sky! dept.

martyb writes:

[Update: launch occurred on time, first stage separation and landing were successful, satellite release into orbit successful. And it IS rocket science that they made look easy. --martyb]

Spacex Will Attempt to Make a Historic West Coast Landing Sunday Night:

This will be SpaceX's 17th launch attempt this year.

[...] On Sunday night, SpaceX is scheduled to launch a Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, which is a couple of hours north of Los Angeles. While the company has landed several first stage boosters on a drone ship offshore from California, until now it has not attempted to land at a site along the coast. But now it has completed the "Landing Zone 4" facility and received the necessary federal approvals for rockets to make a vertical landing there.

[...] This will be SpaceX's 17^th launch attempt this year, bringing the company close to tying its record-setting pace of 18 launches last year. With as many as half a dozen launch attempts left this year, SpaceX should easily surpass its 2017 total, barring a major accident.

This Block 5 first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket has previously flown once before, launching 10 Iridium NEXT satellites into a polar orbit 625km above the Earth. It returned to a drone ship off the West Coast after that flight. The payload launching Sunday night, the SAOCOM 1A satellite for Argentina's Space Agency, weighs less than a lot of the Falcon 9 payloads launched into a Sun synchronous orbit several hundred kilometers above the Earth. Therefore, the first stage will have ample fuel to return to the new coastal landing site.

SpaceX is also likely to try and retrieve one-half of the Falcon 9 rocket's payload fairing. It has come close to catching these before with its large, catcher's-mitt shaped net attached to a boat, but it has yet to succeed.

SpaceFlightNow reports:

Launch time: Approx. 0221 GMT on 8th (10:22 p.m. EDT; 7:22 p.m. PDT on 7th)
Launch site: SLC-4E, Vandenberg Air Force Base, California
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will launch the SAOCOM 1A for CONAE, Argentina's space agency. SAOCOM 1A is the first of two SAOCOM 1-series Earth observation satellites designed to provide radar imagery to help emergency responders and monitor the environment, including the collection of soil moisture measurements.

Launch will be live streamed on YouTube starting approximately 15 minutes before launch. Backup launch time is on Thursday.

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Original Submission

• company put to the test (Score: 4, Interesting) by takyon on Sunday October 07 2018, @09:28PM

  by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Sunday October 07 2018, @09:28PM (#745639) Journal

  It looks like SpaceX will fall short of its goal of 30 launches for 2018, hitting maybe 24 launches. Compare to 18 launches in 2017. The market for Falcon 9 or greater capabilities is leveling off (don't expect many Falcon Heavy launches at all). SpaceX will have to attract smallsat customers if it wants to boost its launch rate. It can probably do so; a November 19 ridesharing mission [wikipedia.org] will carry "more than" 70 small satellites, which works out to less than $1 million per satellite (could be more or less depending on the size).

  SpaceX could even become its own largest "customer" by launching satellites for Starlink [reddit.com].

  It's good that SpaceX has gotten approval for rocket landings in California, because now is the time for the company to get serious about reusability. All Block 4 launches are complete. Block 5 is supposed to be the last major iteration of the Falcon 9 design, and the easiest to refurbish. With the improvement in thrust over Block 4, they may be able to land all Block 5 first stage boosters. If BFR is delayed, Block 5 will remain the company's workhorse for years to come.

  BFR is interesting for many reasons, but one big one is that it could potentially be cheaper to launch than Falcon 9 with the capability to lift more than Falcon Heavy. The rear cargo pods and increase in payload fairing volume could allow it to carry a lot of smallsats. Rockets dedicated to single tiny payloads (at a higher $/kg) may not be as attractive as some people believe:

  Later this year, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will launch its biggest batch of satellites yet [theverge.com]

  *SPOILER* (click to show) *SPOILER* (click to hide)

  Later this year, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will launch more than 70 satellites into orbit — the largest batch of satellites sent into space at one time from one of the company’s vehicles or of any other US rocket company. Dubbed the SSO-A mission, the flight is scheduled to take off from Vandenberg Air Force in California in late 2018, though an exact date has yet to be determined.

  The epic satellite rideshare was coordinated and brokered by Spaceflight Industries — a company dedicated to finding launch “real estate” for small satellites that need to get into space. Spaceflight has become a go-to resource for many small satellite manufacturers, as they have limited options for getting their hardware into orbit. Huge rockets like the Falcon 9 or Atlas V are typically far too big and expensive to send a handful of tiny satellites into space. For the last decade, these companies have only really had just two options: launch their satellites as cargo to the International Space Station, where they are later deployed, or hitch a ride on the flight of a larger satellite.

  Spaceflight will work with manufacturers to find extra room on rockets that are already scheduled to launch bigger payloads into orbit. The company will then figure out a way to help integrate those small satellites into the mission, so that multiple payloads can go up at once. So far, Spaceflight has found rides for more than 140 different satellites on multiple launch vehicles. The company even helped to book room for 20 satellites on one of the most massive rocket rideshare yet, when an Indian PSLV (Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle) rocket launched 104 satellites into orbit in February 2017 [theverge.com].

  Rocket Report: Firefly resurrected, World View accident, Bezos to talk space [arstechnica.com]

  *SPOILER* (click to show) *SPOILER* (click to hide)

  New report quantifies surge in small rockets. In an updated report [usu.edu] on the state of the small-satellite launch industry, Carlos Niederstrasser quantifies the increase in potential small launch vehicle contenders, defined as rockets capable of carrying up to 1,000kg to low-Earth orbit. The growth has been remarkable. "The total number of efforts we are tracking... has increased from a mere 31 in 2015 to over 101 in 2018," he writes.

  Boom times ... "It is clear that the market will not be able to support most of this [sic] new entrants, but it is equally clear that both the founders and the capital markets think that there will be room for multiple players," the report states. There is so much activity that grappling with all of it is almost impossible. But certainly this newsletter will try.

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  [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]

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