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SpaceX completed the last big test of its crew capsule before launching astronauts in the next few months, mimicking an emergency escape shortly after liftoff Sunday.
No one was aboard for the wild ride in the skies above Cape Canaveral, just two mannequins.
A Falcon 9 rocket blasted off as normal, but just over a minute into its capsule catapulted off the top 12 miles (20 kilometers) above the Atlantic. Powerful thrusters on the capsule propelled it up and out of harm's way, as the rocket engines deliberately shut down and the booster tumbled out of control and exploded in a giant fireball.
The capsule reached an altitude of about 27 miles (44 kilometers) before parachuting into the ocean just offshore to bring the nine-minute test flight to a close and pave the way for two NASA astronauts to climb aboard next time.
Everything appeared to go well despite the choppy seas and overcast skies. Within minutes, a recovery ship was alongside the capsule and preparing to pull it from the water.
"I'm super fired up," Elon Musk, the company's founder and chief executive, said at a news conference. "It's just going to be wonderful to get astronauts back into orbit from American soil after almost a decade of not being able to do so. That's just super exciting."
NASA astronauts have not launched from the U.S. since 2011 when the space shuttle program ended.
[...] Last month, meanwhile, Boeing's Starliner crew capsule ended up in the wrong orbit on its first test flight and had to skip the space station. The previous month, only two of the Starliner's three parachutes deployed during a launch abort test.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Monday January 20 2020, @09:47PM (2 children)
I don't think you'll find that Musk is a hero to extinction rebellion types.
To actually answer the question, LOX / RP-1 is hell for the environment, and if you compared a rocket to flying in a plane, the rocket would absolutely crush the plane on carbon emissions. Several kT of carbon per launch.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 21 2020, @12:26PM (1 child)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9 [wikipedia.org]
RP-1 is just C12H26 (more refined kerosene) so you get a reaction with xO2 +C12H26 -> 12 CO2 + 13 H2O... 170kL of kerosene is 0.8*170 = 136 tonnes.
So, as you can now see, we don't even need to do any calculation as we a launch of Falcon definitely produces less than "several kT of carbon" as it doesn't even have that much loaded... actually, the water to carbon dioxide ration means that 2/3 of the fuel weight is converted to carbon emissions. So ballparking we are talking maybe 250-300 tonnes of CO2??
liquid oxygen + kerosene. The only "hell" is that it's very rich mixture of fuel so your combustion is actually not that good. But otherwise, it's very light footprint for the environment even compared to most efficient planes or cars. The main reason is rocket launches are so sparse that their emissions are negligible.
Naturally, planes are much more efficient and less polluting per kg transported. But it's like comparing a car to a plane here.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Tuesday January 21 2020, @02:33PM
Alright, fine, I'll admit it, I used the entire fuel mass as an analog for the carbon emissions because I was lazy.