SpaceX Completes First Fully Expendable Falcon Heavy Mission
SpaceX Completes First Fully Expendable Falcon Heavy Mission:
The triple-core rocket blasted off on Sunday evening to deliver three satellites to a high Earth orbit.
SpaceX's giant Falcon Heavy rocket successfully delivered three satellites to high Earth orbit on April 30. The launch marked the first time that none of the rocket's boosters were recovered.
Wild SpaceX Video Shows Hottest Reentry Yet of Reusable Rocket Fairing
Wild SpaceX Video Shows Hottest Reentry Yet of Reusable Rocket Fairing:
The dramatic footage shows a Falcon Heavy fairing blazing through the atmosphere at speeds reaching Mach 15.
The most recent flight of SpaceX's Falcon Heavy was historic in that it was the rocket's first fully expendable mission, and it was also the first Falcon Heavy mission to include previously flown fairings. As new footage attests, the fiery return of these fairings was a sight to behold.
After several delays, the Falcon Heavy blasted off from Launch Complex 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Sunday, April 30 at 8:26 p.m. ET. The triple-core rocket successfully deployed its primary payload, the broadband ViaSat-3 Americas satellite, and two smaller satellites to geosynchronous Earth orbit (GEO).
Key to SpaceX's ongoing success is its devotion to reusability—it's a lot cheaper to recover your engines and reuse them than to produce new ones for every launch. For this mission, however, none of the rocket's three booster stages could be recovered, as they expelled all their fuel in the effort to get the payloads to GEO. That said, SpaceX did make the attempt to recover the rocket's fairings, so in that sense it wasn't a fully expendable mission.
[...] Newly released SpaceX video of the ViaSat-3 mission shows stage separation, second stage engine startup, and the jettisoning of the fairings, which split apart as two halves and fell back to Earth.
A second video provides a POV perspective of one fairing's free fall through the atmosphere. In a tweet, SpaceX said fairing reentry for this mission "was the hottest and fastest we've ever attempted." Reaching 15 times the speed of sound, the reentering fairing produced a "large trail of plasma in its wake," the company wrote.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by ElizabethGreene on Thursday May 04 2023, @01:22PM
Watching that fairing video, and I'm not usually this person, I have to wonder if you could survive surfing a ballistic re-entry down on a supersonic fairing in an EV suit.
I don't know the physics well enough to know if you'd get liquified, cooked, or decapitated or something, but it sure is pretty.
(Score: 3, Touché) by squeedles on Thursday May 04 2023, @02:30PM
... when *not* landing a rocket is now notable.
(Score: 0, Interesting) by DannyB on Thursday May 04 2023, @02:44PM (6 children)
I would dare say that a fully expendable SpaceX launch is probably cheaper than any of SpaceX's competitors prices by quite a bit.
Just a bit over a year ago SpaceX raises prices for rocket launches [cnbc.com] citing inflation.
Vulcan Centaur launch price [wikipedia.org] is between $100-$200 million. (From ULA [wikipedia.org].)
Compare with Falcon Heavy [wikipedia.org] launch capacity.
Vulcan Centaur mass to LEO: 27,200 kg (60,000 lb), which is 30 tons.
Falcon Heavy mass to LEO: 63.8 tons (141,000 lb).
So we end up with price and capacity for fully expendable configurations at:
SpaceX Falcon Heavy: $97 million for 63.8 tons to LEO.
Vulcan Centaur: $100-$200 million for 30 tons to LEO.
If I am missing something, please correct.
Other factors that may influence soylentels choice of launch provider for their own space launch projects would be:
One problem SpaceX seems to face is that the US government seems very resistant to Starship development, maybe because that one car company which the government shall not ever mention the name of, does not allow unions.
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by DadaDoofy on Thursday May 04 2023, @04:05PM (3 children)
"With SpaceX you are trusting your payload to a company controlled by a man that acts like a child subject to extreme knee-jerk decision making to "get back at" woke companies. Examples: bringing Twitter down in flames simply because he got triggered because Twitter, after bending over backwards to avoid it, Twitter finally enforced its own clearly written policies against Trump, which caused Elon to become very triggered. The latest: Elon says he will give NPR's tweeter handle to another company allowing impersonation. Yeah, that is going to go over well."
Who's triggered? LOL
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DannyB on Thursday May 04 2023, @06:09PM (1 child)
Triggered? I described something that should be considered a business risk. It was big news when Elon who runs a multi billion dollar space company was smoking a blunt.
Then later . . .
Elon then embarked on a series of childish and knee jerk reactions leading to what I believe may be the demise of Twitter.
* Trump got kicked off Twitter after breaking the rules many times, even with Twitter giving him a wide berth
* Elon being offended about this
* Suggesting he could buy Twitter, etc.
* Elon buying Twitter. Then making many bad decisions.
Examples of Elon's bad decisions at Twitter:
* Elon didn't seem to understand basic human behavior. If you start selling "verified" identities for $8, anybody here on SN could have predicted something like the Eli Lilly impersonation which followed, and an announcement by "Eli Lilly" that they would give away insulin for free.
* Elon drove out or got rid of many employees who had been at Twitter for a long time. I am not an insider and don't know the details. But I suspect that before Elon bought Twitter, it was a working company that had been in business a long time. It had carefully developed policies and procedures.
* Without elaborating more, Elon acted like a bull in a china shop. The person at twitter responsible for several government compliance issues (sorry forgot precise details) resigned -- and I can see why, as Twitter was already out of compliance with a consent decree and things were only getting worse.
Triggered?
This is just news. Facts. Something that you probably do not like. And something that people doing business with Elon should consider.
For someone who is a genius in some areas, he certainly has gigantic deficits in other areas, especially regarding interacting with other humans.
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 4, Funny) by DadaDoofy on Thursday May 04 2023, @08:08PM
Yes. Thanks for making how much so abundantly clear.
(Score: 1, Troll) by DannyB on Thursday May 04 2023, @06:14PM
Oh, I should have mentioned NPR's twitter account. And what led up to that.
Giving out verified accounts was recent news, and not well received by those who "received" these self serving gifts from Twitter.
Elon labeled NPR a "state sponsored" organization. This label is usually reserved for Russian, Chinese and other obvious propaganda organizations.
Under pressure, Elon changed the label to "state supported" or something like that. While technically true, it isn't really truthful.
This is because Elon was triggered.
NPR decided to drop Twitter complete. I'm sure this enraged Elon. How dare they!
It seems to me that Elon is the one triggered. NPR is just making a wise business decision to distance themselves from this train wreck.
If NPR is impersonated by some other organization because Elon actually does gift the NPR account to another, I'm sure this will result in big fireworks.
Similarly, if NPR's account is deactivated in violation of Twitter's TOS, then NPR might sue. NPR only has to log in every 30 days to keep their account "active". There is no TOS requirement that they ever tweet again. Ever.
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Friday May 05 2023, @09:19AM
Thanks for the post. Interesting that SpaceX is better than factor 2 cheaper.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday May 05 2023, @01:37PM
Or because SLS's days are numbered, but the more they resist, the bigger the number of days and more funding.
(Score: 2) by agr on Friday May 05 2023, @10:14AM
Given that the Falcon Heavy mission launched three satellites to GEO, the only way to match that with Vulcan Centaur would require three launches. You can’t split three payloads into two missions. Note that while none of the three FH boosters were recovered, two had flown before, so SpaceX reusability still gave them an advantage.