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posted by martyb on Tuesday February 06 2018, @09:10PM   Printer-friendly
from the it-IS-rocket-science dept.

Update: Launch seems to have been successful. The two side boosters landed nearly simultaneously. Footage from the drone ship was cut off. The car made it into space; but the third stage will need to coast through the Van Allen radiation belts for around six hours before it makes the final burn for trans-Mars injection.

Update 2: The middle booster of SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket failed to land on its drone ship
Falcon Heavy Post-Launch Media Briefing - Megathread

SpaceX's newest rocket, the Falcon Heavy, is set to be launched at around 1:30 PM EST (6:30 PM UTC) today. The launch window extends to 4:00 PM EST (9:00 PM UTC).

SpaceX will attempt to recover all three boosters during the launch. The two previously-flown side boosters will attempt to land nearly simultaneously at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station's Landing Zones 1 and 2. The center core will attempt to land on a drone barge hundreds of miles off the coast of Florida.

The dummy payload for the Falcon Heavy is Elon Musk's personal 2008 Tesla Roadster. It is carrying a mannequin wearing SpaceX's space suit flight suit that will be used when the company begins to send astronauts to the International Space Station. The car will be launched into a heliocentric orbit that will bring it close to Mars (and back near Earth) periodically, and is equipped with three cameras. Its stereo system will be playing David Bowie's Space Oddity.

If the launch is successful, the Falcon Heavy could be flown within the next 3 to 6 months for a customer such as the U.S. Air Force, Arabsat, Inmarsat, or ViaSat.

Falcon Heavy will be capable of launching 63,800 kg to low-Earth orbit (LEO), 26,700 kg to geosynchronous transfer orbit (GTO), 16,800 kg to Mars, or 3,500 kg to Pluto (New Horizons was 478 kg). It will supplant the Delta IV Heavy, which is capable of launching 28,790 kg to LEO or 14,220 kg to GTO. Space Launch System Block 1 will be capable of launching 70,000 kg to LEO (Block 1B: 105,000 kg to LEO, Block 2: 130,000 kg to LEO).

Musk has suggested that an additional two side boosters could be added to Falcon Heavy (perpendicularly?) to make a "Falcon Super Heavy" with even more thrust. This may not happen if SpaceX decides to focus on the BFR instead, which as planned would be able to launch 150,000 kg to LEO while being fully reusable and potentially cheaper than the Falcon 9 (or capable of launching 250,000 kg to LEO in expendable mode).

The webcast can be seen here or directly on YouTube.


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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by c0lo on Tuesday February 06 2018, @11:09PM (3 children)

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday February 06 2018, @11:09PM (#634161) Journal

    A geosynchronous space station would be interesting.

    Oh, yeah, for some values of "interesting".
    One of these values being the following interesting trivia "Did you know the geosync orbit is 35,786 km altitude, in the outer part of the Van Allen Radiation Belt? That's where the high energy (0.1-10MeV) electrons [wikipedia.org] are playing".

    A Bremsstrahlung [wikipedia.org] in the X-Ray spectrum for cascading collisions (most probable) or gamma radiation if the electron is stopped in a single collision.

    --
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
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  • (Score: 2) by deimtee on Wednesday February 07 2018, @09:03AM (1 child)

    by deimtee (3272) on Wednesday February 07 2018, @09:03AM (#634339) Journal

    The van allen belt ions are only a problem because the ones that miss you get to go round again. There isn't actually that much in them, and there are serious proposals to actually drain them if we get heavily into space industry.

    --
    If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
    • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 07 2018, @09:19PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 07 2018, @09:19PM (#634573)

      I've wondered whether the belts contribute energy to the earth's magnetic field, if so then draining them could be long term catastrophic.

  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday February 07 2018, @01:00PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday February 07 2018, @01:00PM (#634386)

    I agree the environment isn't as nice as LEO, but bug, feature, whats the difference. I was kinda into the idea of "We're gonna have to make heavily shielded interplanetary shuttles sooner or later, so may as well start by experimenting with them in comfortable close-to-earth geosync orbit"

    In science fiction they usually handle it by everyone goes into a multi layer vault of lead sheet and the main water tank when there's a bad solar flare. Day to day exposure, ... low level chemo drugs in the food?