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.
(Score: 4, Informative) by takyon on Wednesday February 07 2018, @01:46AM (4 children)
In the press conference, Musk said it was more important to recover the side boosters because of the expensive titanium grid fins they had. He said that if he had the choose one to be destroyed, it would be the center core. Even though the center core of Falcon Heavy has to be custom built for Falcon Heavy (a normal Falcon 9 booster is not strong enough for the job).
I believe the current $62 million and $90 million prices for Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy assume expendability. Customers could get a 10-30% discount on those prices when reusability is attempted.
Of course, this is just a test. Previously, he had said that just having the rocket explode after 20 seconds (far enough to not damage the launch pad) would be a victory. Instead, they nailed the simultaneous booster landing and scored a PR coup with "Starman" instead of the temporary excitement of a huge fireball. And now the rocket is testing direct-to-GEO capability and soon we should have an Earth-Mars cycler (the first one ever?).
BFR shouldn't have the same issues. It's just two stages, the booster and the spaceship. The booster will have the oomph to land on the ground consistently, or over the water if used near major cities for city-to-city transport. The problem that killed the Falcon Heavy center core this time was that it ran out of fuel [twitter.com]. BFR booster will have a massive amount of fuel.
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(Score: 2) by choose another one on Wednesday February 07 2018, @10:52AM (3 children)
Well, not quite. Problem was only one engine ignited out of three required, so probably not fuel but igniter (the TEA-TEB - hypergolic chemical igniter). I think fuel tank is same for all engines but ingiter supply and tankage may be separate for each engine (?) and hence it was possible for two engines to run out of igniter, or maybe there was only enough igniter to light one, or some other failure.
If there is separate igniter supply and that was the problem, then there were six other engines that could have been used instead but probably zero time in which to use them - this is the inherent risk with hover-slam, if the burn doesn't happen exactly as planned you are toast, no second chances.
Worth remembering also that the center core is the one that is _not_ a standard F9 core - I believe it is heavily modified for strength and it will be heavier too therefore. I'm sure they'll figure out what happened.
The real WTF, for me, was the "successful" final burn, which has apparently put the payload into an orbit way beyond what was planned and possibly out to Ceres. Not sure what happened there - failure to shut-off, or they just burned until fuel ran out (planned?!), or got the calculations wrong, or what. Seems a little reckless if they planned to just burn all the fuel and see where it ends up.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday February 07 2018, @06:00PM (2 children)
I haven't read anything about this yet, but if it is true I'll dump it into the next Falcon Heavy story going live in 1 hour, 54 minutes.
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(Score: 2) by choose another one on Wednesday February 07 2018, @07:46PM (1 child)
Confirmed by Musk himself here: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/961083704230674438 [twitter.com] if you want a reference, also now plenty of stuff on various news sites, I still haven't seen any explanation of _why_ it overshot though.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday February 07 2018, @08:02PM
It is done, new story is live.
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=18/02/07/1324216 [soylentnews.org]
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