Space X revolutionizes space travel; successfully lands first stage at sea!

[jimmy olsen]

Click to watch video of the launch
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-spacex-return-to-flight-20151221-story.html

SpaceX launches rocket and makes historic landing in Florida

Elon Musk's SpaceX not only blasted 11 satellites to orbit on Monday, but also brought its towering first-stage booster back down, with a historic landing at a pad at Cape Canaveral, Fla.

It was the company's first launch since its rocket carrying cargo to the International Space Station exploded on June 28.

SpaceX employees at the company's Hawthorne headquarters cheered and gave high-fives after the rocket's first stage turned around and landed on a concrete pad 10 minutes after liftoff.

The much anticipated launch of 11 small satellites for OrbComm, a New Jersey company, had been repeatedly delayed as SpaceX employees worked through glitches with the upgraded rocket.

On Thursday, with the rocket vertical on the Florida launch pad, Musk tweeted that the liquid-oxygen fuel was "presenting some challenges."

When everything then looked like a go Sunday, Musk tweeted that he had decided to wait one day when the conditions for landing the rocket looked 10% better.

Musk has already tried twice to land the Falcon 9 on an unmanned ocean barge the size of a football field. The rocket successfully turned around, slowed from hypersonic speeds and hit its target on the barge. It then crashed.

Landing the rocket Monday was a giant step toward making spacecraft reusable – a longtime quest of Musk and aerospace engineers.

Their goal is to recycle the first stage, including its expensive engines, so it can be used repeatedly, lowering the cost of space travel.

SpaceX says landing the rocket is a secondary priority at the Monday launch. Its main goal is to blast OrbComm's satellites to orbit and show the world that it has recovered from the June 28 disaster, which cost NASA and taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars.

Just two minutes after launch that day, the Falcon 9 disintegrated, destroying food and other supplies greatly needed on board the space station.

Musk said a company-led investigation had pointed to the failure of a 2-foot strut holding one of many helium bottles on the rocket's second stage.

He isn't the only billionaire trying to build reusable rockets. Last month, Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos revealed that his space company, Blue Origin, had successfully landed a test rocket at its launch site in West Texas, which it planned to use again.

"Full reuse is a game changer," Bezos said then, "and we can't wait to fuel up and fly again."

But SpaceX's Falcon 9 is a much different rocket from the one flown by Blue Origin.

SpaceX launches satellites into orbit and flies cargo to the space station. Blue Origin, on the other hand, has built a much smaller ship designed to fly passengers to sub-orbital space for a few minutes.

[Ed Anger]

Elon Musk is a fag.

[mongers]

Well it was kind of cool; to the stars. 

[MadImmortalMan]

Tonitrus' money at work. 

[Eddie Teach]

Elon Musk is a fag.

Probably. He reminds me of Seth MacFarlane. I don't think that has anything to do with the story though.

[Zanza]

Good development. I hope they can repeat that reliably. Private space transportation is very promising. Let's hope it literally takes off.

[jimmy olsen]

They have repeated their accomplishment on a barge at sea!


http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-11/elon-musk-s-drone-ship-landing-is-moon-walk-for-new-space-age

Elon Musk's Drone Ship Landing Is Moon Walk for New Space Age

by Dana Hull  &  Julie Johnsson 

April 11, 2016 — 6:01 PM JST

It was a scene straight from a science fiction movie. A white, pencil-shaped rocket angling down through a hazy-blue sky, then gracefully touching down, amid billowing smoke. All on an automated drone-ship in choppy Atlantic seas. In that moment, Elon Musk reached a new milestone in his bid to dominate commercial space and, one day, send humans to Mars.

What a week for Musk. Days after the triumphant unveiling of Tesla's latest electric car, SpaceX won over the Internet as countless thousands tuned in to watch the Falcon 9 rocket launch and, roughly eight minutes later, its spectacular first-ever landing at sea. At the company's mission control center in Hawthorne, California, a throng of employees exploded in cheers. President Barack Obama and Apollo astronaut Buzz Aldrin, who walked on the Moon nearly half-a-century ago, were among the first to send shout-outs from around the world.

With his characteristic bravado, Musk soon chimed in: "Tickets to orbital hotels, the moon and Mars will be a lot less than people think," he wrote on Twitter.

If that sounds over the top, few could deny the symbolic importance of the moment that heralded a new era of affordable, reusable rockets even as it brought back the enthusiasm and drama of the Moon shots and early space shuttle days from a generation ago.

Brash Upstart

"This is the dramatic visual of the new space age," said Marco Caceres, senior analyst at consultant Teal Group in Fairfax, Virginia. "NASA has been trying to recreate the excitement of the Apollo era. Elon Musk just did it."

Long considered a brash upstart nipping at the heels of staid aerospace giants, Space Exploration Technologies Corp. is coming of age 14 years after it was founded by Musk with the lofty-- and many have said unrealistic-- goal of revolutionizing spacecraft and colonizing Mars. Trips to the Red Planet aside, SpaceX is now within striking distance of becoming dominant in the payload business. It's planning to fly 18 missions this year, triple the number in 2015.

That's a highly ambitious goal in an industry known for delays and mishaps. And Friday's launch-- a supply run to the International Space Station -- was only the third so far this year. Yet if SpaceX hits its target, it will fling more rockets into space than any of its competitors from the U.S., France, Russia and China and achieve a launch cadence not seen since the end of the Cold War.

Drone Landing

The rocket booster that landed on the drone ship Friday will be brought to port and tested on land; if everything checks out, it could fly again as early as June. By the second half of this year, Musk expects SpaceX to launch--and recover--rockets every two to three weeks.

"We'll be successful, ironically, when it becomes boring," said Musk at a news conference with NASA Friday. "When it's like, 'Oh yeah, another landing, OK, no news there."'

That will be a bad day for competitors like Europe's Arianespace, which flies the Ariane 5, and United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of Boeing Co. and Lockheed Martin Corp. They are scrambling to match SpaceX's lower costs and fast-paced Silicon Valley vibe. Reusable rockets, once scoffed at by the established players as a pipe-dream, are now on the top of everyone's agenda.

Launch Costs

The cost of a Falcon 9 launch is $61.2 million, according to the company's website. Established launch companies won't be able to match SpaceX's launch costs for years. The price tag for launching a ULA Atlas V rocket, which is not reusable, was $184 million two years ago. ULA has succeeded in getting that price down so far by a third, but it won't fall below $100 million until 2019 at the earliest.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which ended its 30-year space shuttle program in 2011, now partners with private industry to fly both cargo and crew. SpaceX's Dragon capsule, loaded with 7,000 pounds of cargo, supplies and an inflatable extension module, reached the space station orbiting over Algeria on Sunday morning, New York time. Dragon is scheduled to return to Earth and splashdown in the Pacific Ocean May 11.

Government agencies like NASA are just one of three markets for launch providers like SpaceX. Satellite companies depend on rockets to get their communications equipment into orbit. And the $70 billion national defense market, which includes highly sensitive missions for the military, is another. SpaceX has bid on a contract to launch GPS satellites for the U.S. Air Force.

Tight Loop

SpaceX also has an advantage by playing outside the old aerospace procurement system which relies on multiple contractors and subcontractors. Legacy aerospace companies have long supply chains with embedded testing, documentation and procurement procedures that inflate costs. SpaceX builds not only the Falcon 9 rocket but the rocket's Merlin engines in-house. The tight loop between design, manufacturing, and prototype testing is a Silicon Valley approach, said consulting firm Alix Partners in a recent report.

"The fact that SpaceX makes its engines itself is a really big deal," said David Wireman, an aerospace analyst with Alix Partners. "The engines are a big chunk of the cost of any rocket. SpaceX has broken the supply chain."

At industry conferences largely populated by middle-aged men in gray suits, you can spot the SpaceX employees, in part, by the logos on their jackets and by their youthful look. SpaceX has roughly 5,000 employees; their average engineer is 32.

SES of Luxembourg first flew with SpaceX in 2013 and has contracted for another four launches through 2017. Like other satellite customers, SES was drawn to SpaceX's vision, lower cost and fast-paced culture.

"The fundamental difference that SpaceX has is that they are on a mission, and the mission is to go to Mars," said Martin Halliwell, SES's chief technical officer, in an interview. "That is absolutely unique within the industry. It's a true passion felt by Elon and every single person in the company."

[jimmy olsen]

Video of the famous occassion.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=lSx4DGBstYA

[grumbler]

Video of the famous occassion.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=lSx4DGBstYA

[Siege]

Awesomeness.
One step closer to the singularity.

[mongers]

[Seigy/]

Guys, they're just running the film backwards. 

[Seigy/]

[jimmy olsen]

Interview with Musk following the landing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNygOavo2mY&nohtml5=False

[jimmy olsen]

So awesome!

http://www.theverge.com/2016/4/29/11526886/spacex-red-dragon-spacecraft-mars-propulsive-landing

How SpaceX's Red Dragon could change the way we land on Mars

The pros and cons of propulsive landing

    By Loren Grush on April 29, 2016 11:03 am @lorengrush

Share on Facebook (874) Tweet Share (11) Pin (3)

SpaceX's bold plan to put a Dragon spacecraft on Mars in 2018 will rely on a type of landing technique known as propulsive landing — a way of using rocket engines to go down instead of up. As the Dragon descends toward the Martian surface, eight SuperDraco engines embedded in the spacecraft's hull will fire, slowing down the vehicle's descent and allowing it to land gently on the ground.

It's akin to how SpaceX lands the first stages of its Falcon 9 rockets on Earth, and it could be a revolutionary way of landing on Mars. Right now, getting cargo to the Red Planet is an extremely complicated process. The Martian atmosphere is one-hundredth the density of Earth's, providing less cushion to slow down incoming vehicles. In the past, getting hardware to Mars has required complex engineering, using a combination of heat shields, retrorockets, parachutes, and more. Propulsive landings could streamline that process, allowing SpaceX to put large amounts of mass on Mars safely in a less complicated way.
Added Weight

The technique stands in stark contrast to how NASA's Curiosity rover got to Mars in 2012. Its descent to the surface was called the "seven minutes of terror" because a lot of crazy engineering feats had to go right in order for the entire landing to work. The rover entered Mars' atmosphere inside a capsule with a special heat shield attached. Eventually, a parachute deployed to slow the capsule down, and the rover was ejected at a certain altitude. Retrorockets then fired to control the rover's descent and the vehicle was finally lowered down to safety using a "sky crane." All of that was needed to land a rover that weighed just under 2,000 pounds.

The reason the landing became so complex is because NASA's Mars missions are driven by cost and a need to minimize mass, said Bobby Braun, an associate professor of space technology at the Georgia Institute of Technology, who has worked on six NASA landers. NASA tries to save money on its Mars missions by launching them on cheaper, smaller rockets, such as the United Launch Alliance's Atlas V, and the heavier the landing system, the less room there is for scientific instruments. "What that means is you minimize the systems that land the payload," Braun said. Parachutes have been an attractive landing option for NASA, because they're a low-weight method of slowing down vehicles from space. But Curiosity was too heavy to be slowed down by parachutes alone. So NASA came up with a complex system that was light enough to launch from Earth, but robust enough to slow down Curiosity's Martian descent.

Landing a vehicle propulsively requires a lot more extra weight than previous landing methods, because extra propellant is needed to fuel the engines during descent. But weight won't be as much of an issue for SpaceX, once its Falcon Heavy becomes operational. The Falcon Heavy is a much bigger version of the company's Falcon 9 rocket, which SpaceX says will be able to send more than 29,000 pounds of payload to Mars. The Mars Science Laboratory, which brought Curiosity to Mars, weighed 8,463 pounds, according to NASA. "When [the Falcon Heavy] does fly, we'll be able to throw a lot more mass to Mars than our current launch vehicles can," said Braun. "Because we can throw a lot more mass, we don't have to be so mass efficient crazy."

And with SpaceX lowering the cost of making and launching rockets, sending heavier masses to Mars won't necessarily be as expensive as it used to be. SpaceX claims the cost of the Falcon Heavy will start at $90 million. The low-end price of launching an Atlas V is $164 million, according to ULA.
Getting to the ground

The Red Dragon's landing will be way less complex than Curiosity's. Once it enters the Martian atmosphere, it will mostly just need to fire its engines on the way down to the ground. "It's one phase of flight, one technology," said Braun. "It's much less complex, and it should be over time much more reliable than the way we do landings now." Braun also said that the system can be scaled up easily, eventually landing up to 20 metric tons on Mars. "Most people think we're going to need close to 40 to 80 metric tons of payload when we send humans to Mars," said Braun. "Sending that down in 20 metric-ton chunks is a pretty easy way to go."

A crucial part of the Red Dragon missions will be figuring out the right place to land. Using rocket engines to lower a spacecraft down to Mars will likely kick up a bunch of rocks and dust on the surface, which could damage the spacecraft. When Curiosity landed, the retrorockets used to help lower the rover kicked up some debris, damaging one of the vehicle's sensors. "The problem with landing jets is you kick up a lot of stuff," said John Rummel, NASA's former planetary protection officer. SpaceX will need to find a site that poses less risk of damaging the vehicle.

The company will also have to pick a spot that complies with international planetary protection laws. According to the United Nations' Outer Space Treaty, which was ratified in 1967, organizations sending spacecraft to other worlds must avoid contaminating the area. But vehicles that go to Mars often carry thousands of Earth microbes over with them, despite scientists' best sterilization efforts. SpaceX will need to try to pick a place where those microbes will wreak the least havoc on Mars. "It's a pretty cold, dry place, but there are some places on Mars that are warmer and wetter than others," said Rummel. "SpaceX would be well served to not land in one of the places that are potential 'special regions.'" These include the regions on Mars that are thought to have running water.

But it's possible the SpaceX's Red Dragon could pose less of a contamination risk than previous spacecraft, according to Rummel. During its trip to Mars, the Curiosity rover was encapsulated by a heat shield, so it was never exposed directly to solar UV radiation en route, Rummel said. If the Red Dragon isn't encapsulated in anything on the ride to Mars, its exterior will be exposed to the sun's UV rays all the way to the planet, which could help destroy lingering Earth microbes. "The nature of that particular vehicle makes it somewhat easier to keep clean and launch in a way that would actually provide you with some additional cleaning on the way to Mars."

SpaceX still has a lot of work to do before it can prove the potential benefits and downsides of its Red Dragon landing approach. The Falcon Heavy still isn't ready, and the company has never landed the Dragon spacecraft using the SuperDraco engines. SpaceX has a complicated road ahead, but if the company pulls it off, the Red Dragon missions could make landing on Mars a lot more simple.

http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/04/spacex-has-already-demonstrated-its-key-mars-landing-tech-with-the-falcon-9/

Can SpaceX really land on Mars? Absolutely, says an engineer who would know
Company has quietly tested Mars landing techniques with its first stage returns.

by Eric Berger - Apr 29, 2016 10:59pm JST

In September, 2014, a Falcon 9 rocket blasted off from Florida carrying a Dragon spacecraft bound for the International Space Station. The capsule carried some notable cargo, including the first 3D printer to be tested in space as well as 20 mousetronauts to study muscle loss. Yet the most far-reaching part of that mission came after the Falcon 9 deployed its upper stage and began falling back to Earth.

As it descended into the upper levels of Earth's atmosphere, the rocket's engines fired for its "reentry burn." A few minutes later, the first stage splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean, completing one of the last flights before SpaceX began trying to land its rocket on an autonomous drone ship. But even as SpaceX was testing technology needed for terrestrial landings of its reusable Falcon 9 rocket, it was also taking some of its first steps toward landing on Mars.

Why landing a flying, fire-breathing Red Dragon on Mars is huge

Putting such a large spacecraft on Mars is unprecedented for a nation or company.

That's because during that launch—and about 10 others since late 2013—SpaceX has quietly been conducting the first flight tests of a technology known as supersonic retro-propulsion—in Mars-like conditions. It did so by firing the Falcon 9's engines at an altitude of 70km down through 40km, which just happens to be where the Earth's thin upper atmosphere can act as a stand-in for the tenuous Martian atmosphere. Therefore, as the Falcon thundered toward Earth through the atmosphere at supersonic speeds and its engines fired in the opposite direction, the company might as well have been trying to land on Mars.

These test flights were classic SpaceX—flying a primary mission, such as delivering cargo to the International Space Station, but also piggybacking other technology demonstration missions on top of it. The company has also found ways to build Earth-based systems that will also translate to Mars. The Dragon 2 spacecraft, built to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station, has eight SuperDraco thrusters to power its launch abort system if the capsule must quickly separate from its rocket during an emergency. But SpaceX also plans to use the same thrusters for supersonic retro-propulsion in the Martian atmosphere.

Before these recent tests, however, engineers weren't sure whether this kind of advanced propulsion would work. NASA and US universities had tested supersonic retro-propulsion in computational fluid dynamics simulations and small-scale air-in-air wind tunnel tests, but not live flights. Understandably, a lot of engineers were concerned about the stability of a vehicle during the turbulent period when its rocket engine fired directly into an atmosphere it was rushing into at supersonic speeds.

SpaceX began testing supersonic retro-propulsion as far back as September 2013, when the company first flew its upgraded Falcon 9 rocket, v1.1, which had about 60 percent more thrust than the original. But even as this vehicle made its maiden flight—a test flight really—SpaceX started collecting data on a controlled descent in the Martian-relevant conditions of the upper atmosphere. A year later, amid growing interest from NASA, a space agency WB-57 airplane and a Navy NP-3D Orion aircraft trailed the Falcon as it reentered the atmosphere to capture images and thermal data.

Among those eagerly watching the flight tests was Bobby Braun, an aerospace engineer at Georgia Institute of Technology, who has led a joint research effort with SpaceX and NASA to study supersonic retro-propulsion. "I have access to all of that data, and I'll tell you that it's worked like a charm every time," he told Ars. "The stability was manageable, and while there are still some issues, there are no showstoppers."

Propulsive landing is key to eventual human missions to the red planet for one simple reason—it scales. In 2015 Braun, Hoppy Price and a couple other engineers wrote a paper for the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics describing how supersonic retro-propulsion could be used to land up to 28 tons of useful cargo on the surface of Mars. The spacecraft and rockets would be different, but the basic landing technology is the same. "This is scalable all the way up to human Mars exploration," Braun said. "What SpaceX is doing right now is quite similar to how we might land humans on Mars."

Successfully landing Dragon on Mars would be unprecedented. It likely would enter the Martian atmosphere weighing about eight tons, and it would burn two of those tons as propellant to get down to the surface. Compare that to the largest object humans have ever landed on Mars, the Curiosity rover. It started off at 3.6 tons before entering the atmosphere, and through its sky crane and other steps, it shed weight down to 900kg by the time it reached the surface.

Braun is almost uniquely positioned to say whether SpaceX might succeed. In 2010 he was named NASA's chief technologist and formulated the Space Technology program to help NASA devise advanced technologies like entry, descent, and landing that would enable human missions to Mars. Since leaving NASA he has worked with both the space agency and SpaceX on propulsive descent technologies. And he's bullish on SpaceX's chances. "This is no stunt," he said. "It's something they've been working on for a while. Don't get me wrong, it is certainly a risky proposition. But you've got to give them credit. They've been testing a lot of these Mars landing technologies already here on Earth. That certainly improves their chances of success."

Just three months after that September 2014 test flight with government planes collecting data, NASA had seen enough, too. It signed a Space Act Agreement with SpaceX, saying it would provide assistance with deep-space navigation and communications if the company would share its flight data. If NASA were to try to conduct that kind of test on its own, the cost would probably exceed $2.5 billion or $3 billion, Braun said. "It's a great deal for NASA, in my opinion, and it's a great deal for SpaceX."