Nice seeing you at the launch, Pork Rind. If we could convince others to come, we could make this a regular Dopefest…
Launch was beautiful. Weather was perfect aside from some low-laying fog. Didn’t affect our view a whole lot. I wish I had a better lens but I still got a decent shot of it just after takeoff, as well as a bunch during stage separation (you can see the ignited second stage as well as the first stage maneuvering for the boostback burn).
The new titanium grid fins apparently worked very well, and will work “indefinitely” according to Musk. Titanium has a much higher melting point than aluminum so conditions that would burn through Al could be very comfortable for Ti.
I suspect this is not so much a cost thing as it is a turnaround thing. Treating the grid fins as a consumable item probably wouldn’t affect the bottom line much, but it’s just one more thing to remove and replace. I suspect they have quite a few things along these lines for the upcoming Block 5 upgrades–that is, items which are not really a problem or even a great cost, but which nevertheless prevent a fast turnaround. New landing legs are a known one but there are probably a bunch of smaller things as well.
Yes! Great to finally meet a Doper in real life! My plan to beat the traffic by heading toward the base entrance and cutting over was foiled by the fact that they kept Ocean Ave closed for quite a while after launch.
As Dr. Strangelove noted, the weather was great other than some fog that obscured the first couple of seconds of visibility. And in 10x binoculars, the stage separation and maneuvers were easily visible. The downside of the whole day is that they never activated the launch operations frequency so I got none of the radio chatter and status updates that I heard back in January. In the spirit of going with what works, it might be time to ditch the radios and buy bigger binoculars. Maybe.
Thanks! It’s a Tamron 18-270 zoom on a Nikon D5100, so 400 mm equivalent I think. We were around 4 miles away at launch (hopefully this link will work), so the first shot is about from there, while the second shot is just after stage separation, which I think is about 70 miles out on this mission.
I continue to be amazed that it can get to that distance in about 2.5 minutes, starting from a dead stop…
Interesting fact: the last CRS flight took off, staged, flew back and landed (well north of 200 mile round trip) in less time than it would have been required to drive the road between 39A and LZ1 at 70MPH.
Nice one. And it manages all that carrying 100 tons of second stage.
The only aspect to all this that’s a bit of a downer is that it shows off how far behind everyone else is. ULA, Arianespace, the Russians, etc… no one is close. I recall a comment at work that reminds me of the current situation: you know we’ve screwed up when the stuff on our roadmap is worse than what the competition is shipping. It sure seems like the Ariane 6 is DoA when it comes to commercial launches. The Russians are having serious reliability problems, and I don’t see how ULA can get their costs under control. Blue Origin is doing interesting stuff, but they’re secretive and slow so I can only get so excited.
Well, at least SpaceX isn’t sitting on their laurels. Let’s hope the Heavy flies this year!
A little less interesting than usual due to the lack of a landing. This is a 6000 kg geostationary bird, which is past the limit of what SpaceX can launch in reusable mode. So no legs, no grid fins, and definitely no barge (or land) landing. To those of us watching all the recent launches, the rocket looks rather naked. I wonder if they’ll at least attempt a controlled reentry instead of just letting it burn up, though I doubt it since the customer probably wants every last drop of propellant put into the transfer orbit.
In other news, the first (partially) reused Dragon capsule splashed down today. They replaced a few things (like the heat shield) that are potentially affected by salt water, but the bulk of it has flown before.
Still left on their plate, reusability-wise:
Payload fairings. They’re still working on soft-landing these via guided parachutes, but it’s still in the early stages.
Second stage. SpaceX gave up on second stage reuse pretty early on, realizing that they couldn’t make it cost effective with the current architecture. However, Musk has said they may make a “Hail Mary” effort at some point. They do have some super-light payloads on their manifest that may make it possible. Probably still not cost effective, but it may serve as a useful experiment for their future (ITS) second-stage reusability efforts.
Thanks to those posting to this thread. It works as a heads-up to those wandering aimlessly, until something cool bumps the head.
From this site, where you can watch the launch, live:
Out of an abundance of caution, SpaceX will be spending the 4th of July doing a full review of the rocket and launch pad systems. The next launch opportunity for Intelsat 35e from Launch Complex 39A (LC-39A) at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida is now no earlier than Wednesday, July 5 or Thursday, July 6. Additional updates will be posted to this page as they become available.
Nice one. They really used every drop of propellant on that one. According to Musk: min apogee requirement was 28,000 km, Falcon 9 achieved 43,000 km
Note that this puts the apogee above geostationary height–which is actually a good thing, since (for reasons that you’ll discover if you play Kerbal Space Program), raising your perigee (i.e., the lowest point in the orbit) becomes cheaper when the apogee (highest point) is higher. In short, it means the satellite needs to spend less onboard propellant getting to its target orbit, which means a longer lifetime (since that propellant would otherwise be used for ongoing stationkeeping purposes).
I wonder if SpaceX will get some kind of financial bonus because of this. I vaguely recall this kind of performance bonus happening in other cases, though I don’t recall the details.
Musk is doing another talk about SpaceX’s Mars plans at the International Astronautical Congress in Australia in ~3 hours. Probably worth checking out; the previous one was pretty great, aside from the weirdos asking bizarre questions at the end. Live stream here.
