SpaceX Successful Static Fire

ron_ivi writes "SpaceX's website is announced that they had a " great static fire today" where their Falcon rocket successfully had 3 seconds of thrust. Nice pictures and video of the test; and if analysis shows all was well, they'll be launching Thursday."

WOHO!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

In 50 years I will be traveling into space because of them!!!

Awesome

[Eightyford]

I think this is great. I love Scaled Composite's X-prize winner, but this company is actually shooting for orbit! If you don't already know; it is a hell of a lot harder to reach orbital speeds as it is to only reach the outer limits of the atmosphere and descend.

Re:Sad

[Quantum Fizz]

Why is it sad? I mean, is there any reason a priori to expect a guy that excelled in programming FPS games to do better than another guy that set up an online banking/payment system?

I mean, it's a whole different ballpark, aerospace. Whereas Carmack can change a few lines of code and recompile while at ID, it takes only a few minutes and is basically free. At Armidillo, if he tests his rocket and it doesn't perform right, then he has to rebuild the thing, it can take months and cost hundreds of thousands. Why would you expect him to be necessrily better at aerospace? Because he knows how to optimize 3D rotation matrices to make a 3D first-person game?

Re:Sad

[Goonie]

Third, Carmack is rally, trooly, rooly building his rocket himself in his backyard, just like Commander Keen. It's more a hobby (albeit a very expensive one) than a business.

Nice, but we did that in the 1950s.

[Animats]

Very nice. Reasonable design. And roughly comparable to the Atlas ICBM booster [astronautix.com] of half a century ago.

The proposed bigger model, the Falcon 9-S5, is comparable to the modern Atlas V [astronautix.com]. 6 launches to date, 100% success rate. About 2x the price the new guys claim, but then, the Atlas is a proven product.

But the commercial launch market has collapsed. Iridium is done, and nobody wants to launch that many sats again. The geosync comsat market is saturated; everybody is going fibre optic. There's just not that much going up.

One thing I wonder

[Anonymous Coward]

SpaceX's info page states triple redundant systems as a reason for increased reliability.

One problem - pretty much every other rocket out there has dual or triple redundant avionics too.

Also, SpaceX doesn't state whether they do things Boeing style (External interfaces and functionality of the flight avionics boxes are specified, and then each of the three units comes from a different manufacturing and design team, resulting in them not only having different software but different hardware), or Ariane style? For a description of what happens when you do triple redundancy Ariane style, see http://www.rvs.uni-bielefeld.de/publications/Repor ts/ariane.html [uni-bielefeld.de] . For those who don't want to read the link, here's the simple summary. The rocket had triple redundant flight systems. Shortly after launch, the primary system failed due to a software bug. Backups immediately failed too due to the exact same software bug. The rocket's range safety failsafes went off. Rocket go boom!

John and Elon are doing two **different** things

[everphilski]

Elon is copying technology that already exists and making a fairly conventional rocket - single engine pintle motors. He's also funding a full-scale production facility.

John is not. He is funding it by selling off his collection of cars. His development team is a group of friends. His idea is a little different - a VTVL with a hovering tail setdown, not a splashdown. He's working on four throttled throatless engines on his stage - a radically different beast. Control law between multiple engines is a pain. Quite frankly it hasn't been done yet - Apollo used 1 single gimbleable engine, and even that was in reduced gravity! Much easier since your closing velocities will be slower. Etc.

Long story short, Elon is repeating history but trying to cut costs and make it manageable. John is trying to do things a new way.

Re:Official: rocket scientists have no common sens

[Anonymous Coward]

Anybody else think that all that hot fire of death was a little close to the fuel tankers and trees?

Anybody else think that the average geek, wanna be rocket scientist, is full of crap?

Points to ponder:
+ This island is tiny. Even a geek like yourself could throw a ball from one side of the island to the other.
+ You actually want your propellant tanks, particularly the LOX tank, close to the launch vehicle, as handling propellant is troublesome, particularly on a hot, humid, tropical island.

Many in the space buisness are thrilled to death to see fresh blood willing to be creative and cost effective in an era where the big two launch providers hose you around for a quarter billion for a heavy lift ride to orbit. If these SpaceX guys succeed, then you can just about do double the number of science missions for the same money, as the launch costs shrink tremendously.

GO SPACEX!

Re:John and Elon are doing two **different** thing

[Rei]

He's made both normal and throatless engines, and has gotten no decent ISP with either. The reason he's working more with throatless engines now is because he kept damaging his engines before ;) I swear, the armadillo aerospace blog is one disaster after another, half of which would have been resolved simply by reading history and the other half of which would have been resolved by doing the math first.

John is not "innovating". He's repeating the mistakes of the past. Remember his doomed experiments with thrust vectoring? How long did it take for him to give up what has been shown time and time again to not work well in rockets? How long did he stick with peroxide?