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Commercialization

SpaceX Pulls Off Weekend Double Header

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
June 26, 2017
Filed under

After nine launches in 2017, it’s tough to be an honest critic of SpaceX, Ars Technica
“SpaceX garners a lot of acclaim for its achievements, and it has legions of admirers within the aerospace community and the public at large. But it also has critics, primarily competitors who look at SpaceX and see a company that gets a lot of hype but doesn’t always deliver. What is perhaps most striking about this weekend’s back-to-back launches is that the company’s successes drove a stake into some of the most credible criticisms that have been levied against SpaceX in recent years.”

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

50 responses to “SpaceX Pulls Off Weekend Double Header”

  1. Jeff2Space says:
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    Watched both of the launches and landings live. Congrats to SpaceX. Here’s hoping that the 2nd burn of the 2nd stage goes well, along with deployment of the satellites.

  2. Mac Johnson says:
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    Hold your horses. All 10 satellites have yet to separate in their correct orbits.

  3. Dante80 says:
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    Congratulations to SpaceX, Iridium, the Western range and everyone involved for the successful conclusion of another launch campaign.

    Right now there are two ships at sea, one on the Atlantic and one on the Pacific, each carrying a used rocket stage back to land. One of said stages finished its second launch campaign.

    I quite like this timeline.

  4. ed2291 says:
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    I believe the launch and recovery of the second flight proven first stage plus over ten recoveries of the first stage means we are going to the next step and legacy systems used up until now are obsolete. Launching two from both coasts in a little over 48 hours plus plans of reusing other parts of the Falcon 9 bode well for the future. It would be great if NASA left launch systems to Space X and focused on exploration and satellites, but I know politics is probably too involved. Well done Space X! Looking at everything they have done, I believe this is a great step forward.

  5. ed2291 says:
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    It would be nice if they could launch the flight proven rocket again from pad 40 so it would be the first stage 1 launched 3 times and from all three of Space X’s launching pads. Just happily dreaming now.

    • Bob Mahoney says:
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      And I am waxing nostalgic for what might have been. 500,000 more pounds of thrust and approrpriate other upgrades and the Falcon 9 might have replaced the shuttle SRBs. Then the rest of the stack might also have eventually evolved as well to further efficiencies and (now I’m dreaming) genuine commercial opportunities.

      Sigh.

      Well done, SpaceX. It is a delight to see your continuing success.

      • dbooker says:
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        Would an F9 really need 500K lbs more thrust? Are you just comparing the thrust of the SRBs to the thrust of the F9? What about the the difference in weight between the 2? According to Wikipedia shuttle SRBs weighed 1,300,000 lb while producing 2,800,000 lbf thrust. The Falcon 9 weighs 954,800 lb and produces 1,710,000 lbf thrust. SRB thrust to weight is 2.15. F9 thrust to weight is 1.79. But the SRBs burn out in 127 seconds whereas the F9 provides thrust for 150 seconds. 23 more seconds of thrust is significant. It would be interesting to compare F9 thrust over time as can be found in Wikipedia here https://en.wikipedia.org/wi….

        • Bob Mahoney says:
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          Good points and yes, I just compared the gross thrusts. My brain wasn’t working completely today. Thanks for the further insight.

  6. MarcNBarrett says:
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    Watched the first launch on YouTube live, didn’t catch the second one because I didn’t know about it and didn’t expect it. WHAT ROCKET COMPANY LAUNCHES TWO ROCKETS IN ONE WEEKEND??? And sticks BOTH landings on a barge! SpaceX is unreal.

    • fcrary says:
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      It’s not a company, but the Soviet Union did launch Vostok 3 and 4 a day apart in August, 1962. And from the same launch complex. Which reminds me. When SpaceX launches a Falcon Heavy, where will the stages land? They can’t exactly share a barge or pad.

      • Brian Thorn says:
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        Outboard boosters will return to LZ-1, which is being expanded with more landing pads. Core will land on the barge.

        • fcrary says:
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          That has some real, visual potential. How close are the two pads in LZ-1 and how much time will there be between the two landing? I’m thinking of a final decent video with both in the image, landing a few to ten seconds apart.

          • Terry Stetler says:
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            About 10 o’clock (northwest) of the existing pad, and about 1 pad diameter distant.

          • fcrary says:
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            Thanks. I hope either SpaceX or NASA has a good photographer on the job for this. I’m trying to frame it in my head, and to get the ocean and coast where I’d like them, you’d want to take the video from west or west-northwest of LZ-1. That’s deep into restricted territory, so the imagery I’m thinking of couldn’t be taken by an ordinary tourist or spectator.

          • Terry Stetler says:
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            About this far. Image from the LZ-1 EIS

            https://uploads.disquscdn.c

      • JohnJay says:
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        For FH, the two outside boosters will return to LZ1 (they are already paving a second pad). The central core, because it goes much farther downrange, will land on the barge.

      • ed2291 says:
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        I believe two will land separately on land and the third will land on land or a barge depending on the trajectory. There are facilities to have all three land on land near the launching point.

      • Winner says:
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        Two pads for the sides and one barge for the core.

    • Bob Mahoney says:
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      Did not the successful Agena & Gemini launches take place on the same day? Back when humans were learning how to fly rockets in the first place…

  7. Neal Aldin says:
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    More than anything else, I think Space X displays the right attitude. After today’s drone ship landing there was a discussion about the rugged abuse the landing legs take. Space X reported they were working on a redesign that would improve their reliability and reduce the turnaround maintenance requirements. Imagine if NASA had made similar decisions on Shuttle, rather than just trashing it since they’d grown tired of it. Now NASA has no capability. Space X improves theirs.

    • tutiger87 says:
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      Hell, just imagine if we’d have done liquid flyback booster…smh

    • Vladislaw says:
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      Congress appropriates funding and that drives what NASA does. NASA does not get to dictate to congress what it is going to do.

      The space shuttle was a pork wagon and operated for 30 years EXACTLY how congress funded it to operate.

      • George Purcell says:
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        Yes. And once you understand this you also understand that an SLS that never flies but delivers the same payload, if you will, is fulfilling the old mission of STS.

    • Jeff2Space says:
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      The shuttle was hideously expensive and Congress wasn’t very trilled about spending a lot more development money on it. If you take the cost of the entire shuttle program (including development) and divide by the total number of flights you get about $1.5 billion.

      SpaceX has a list price of $62 million for a Falcon 9 flight. So while Falcon 9 doesn’t do nearly what the shuttle could, it does only cost about 4% of a shuttle flight.

  8. Giuseppe says:
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    It will be soon embarrassing to launch a rocket and not recover it. I wonder if engineers designing new rockets (like Ariane 6 or Vulcan) are feeling outdated.

    • Brian Thorn says:
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      Vulcan and Ariane 6 both have concepts for recovering the engines for re-use, but that would be an upgrade after the baseline vehicle is in service. In Vulcan’s case, it looks like Vulcan-Centaur will be first (to get rid of RD-180), then Vulcan-ACES (to allow retiring the costly Delta IV), and then the engine recovery system will be added. Adeline (engine recovery) will follow several years after Ariane 6 enters service.

      • Giuseppe says:
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        IMHO, in a few years, hopefully we will have Spacex, Blue Origin and DARPA (XS-1) sending first stages up and recovering them intact. It will be hard to justify at that point starting development for an partial-recovery system. What I think is that there will be some psycological bias toward viewing reusability as a standard requirement when starting a new rocket development.

      • Jeff2Space says:
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        Without significant money for development those concepts will never materialize. We’ll see just how serious Vulcan and Ariane 6 are about reuse only after they’re fully developed and flying.

  9. Michael Spencer says:
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    Handwriting? Meet wall.

  10. Michael Spencer says:
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    The only thing between SpaceX and launch monopoly?

    Capacity. And even that will fall, as those crazy kids learn how to turn those boosters around more quickly, and as another pad comes on line (alas, not in Florida; thanks, Governor!)

    Over and over I have been stunned as our new capabilities come on line -“our new capabilities” in the sense of mankind’s leaps. Neal Armstrong has nothing on what we have been doing right here on Terra.

    Some changes have been incremental, at least at first, as in the case of the mobile phone, which morphed into something much greater than a phone. Or, witness the scarcely believable power we have given ourselves with ‘social media.’ And then there’s the power of personal computers.

    I’ve written that it’s a “good time to be alive” countless times here on Keith’s website. And it is true. I am sitting on the recently-restored boardwalk on Long Island as I write this, looking out at the calm Atlantic Ocean with my feet up on the railing. I am managing three current projects back in Naples as I type this and bask in the warm sun.

    What is that if not a new page in our collective history?

    And now comes SpaceX, making the long-held dream of space travel and actual “thing”. What is there in human history that can compare to the changes being wrought? Clipper ships? Locomotives? GPS satellites? Maybe.

    But none of those will allow a person to stand in space, viewing the Earth as a while. As our tiny island in a huge ocean. We are now enabled in powerful ways. I hope we use this ability wisely.

    • Bob Mahoney says:
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      I once had the opportunity during a radio interview about his history of the Transcontinetal Railroad (https://www.amazon.com/Noth… to call in & ask Stephen Ambrose what he considered the most significant technological advance in history.

      While he wisely wouldn’t commit to any given one, he admitted that he had come to appreciate that one of the most significant was the telegraph because suddenly the world had access to instant communication whereas just prior it took as much time as it took to travel to get news to people in other locations. Consider, results of elections didn’t reach the other coast until weeks or even months later.

      Just as all philosophy since Plato are footnotes to what he already had said, so most of the electromagnetically-carried communications revolutions following Morse et al are just footnotes to that first sending of current-carried messages down a wire. I would say that only the marriage of instant comm to the digital computer begins to approach a similar leap.

      To my mind, all these recent space ops advances, as impressive as they are, remain footnotes to the V-2, etc. Charles Sheffield in his book The Web Between the Worlds had the ‘genius’ behind the plot live by the credo that “Rockets are wrong.” You can glean from the title what the book is about… Until a space elevator (or some similar monstrous advance) becomes a reality, I think we’re still improving the V-2 because we’re battling the rocket equation every time.

      I deeply share your sentiment about using the tech wisely. Science & tech are amoral and offer no inherent guidance; it can bring vast good as well as vast evil. Let us hope & pray that we do not, to quote the knight in Indiana Jones/Last Crusade, choose poorly.

      FWIW.

      • Michael Spencer says:
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        Pointing to Morse makes a lot of sense. What we do with our shoes is essentially the same.

        Perhaps the big invention is immediacy?

  11. mfwright says:
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    Will it be soon where problem is not struggling to put things into orbit but problem will be managing things in orbit? i.e. so much stuff in orbit, operational and junk, which will render LEO as useless because anything in that region will collide with debris? I wonder if the “ATC” activities by the Space Command will be delegated to another agency specifically to deal with managing orbital spacecraft like FAA does with airplanes? Or this agency then be privatized (Planetary Ventures?).

    • fcrary says:
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      The FAA model doesn’t quite work. Space debris is a global issue, and one country can’t regulate it on their own. That’s true, to some extent, for civil aviation, but not in the same way. A carrier flying from London to New York has to worry about US and UK air regulations, but they really don’t need to think about what the rules in India are. The rules are similar by international convention and for convenience, but not because of physical laws. For space debris, it’s a matter of everything everyone does affecting everyone else.

      That said, I don’t see this as an unsolvable problem. There are effective ways to minimize producing debris, de-orbiting spacecraft at the end of their lifetime (and not trying to overdo it and keep operating until the thing dies and can’t be de-orbited), etc. Those practices are fairly common today. But with the advent of both low-cost access to space and large numbers of small satellites, we’ll probably have to go further. Perhaps something like international treaties with some real teeth and draconian liability clauses.

  12. billinpasadena says:
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    Elon,

    Fantastic, but give the team a rest! I can’t imagine how they keep up this pace.

    • ed2291 says:
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      I believe there were two different launch teams, one on each coast. Space X certainly has depth. And the Falcon Heavy may well launch later this year!

    • spacechampion says:
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      Last I heard they have 6400 employees. A deep bench to call upon.

  13. John Carlton Mankins says:
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    https://uploads.disquscdn.c… Colleagues…

    My daughter took the attached photo out the passenger side window of our car, on the way home from a movie in San Luis Obispo — first Falcon 9 launch we’ve seen with our own eyes! (It was hard to keep my eyes on the road; so cool…)

  14. George Purcell says:
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    At what point in time does SpaceX become the, well, experts compared to the old guard?

    • fcrary says:
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      When did the geophysicists who believed in plate tectonics become the accepted experts in their field? It wasn’t until the older scientists who considered the idea nonsense retired or, eventually, died.

      • imhoFRED says:
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        So then … how long till Big Aerospace “dies” and stop making expendables? Delta IV is on life support. Delta 2 is no longer in production.

        I think that many business practices other than reusability are the underpinning of SpaceX’s success and that these are under appreciated.

        Designing for economic efficiency, instead of maximum performance is one of these. I believe that Boeing or LM could build a reusable rocket … I don’t believe that those companies could produce an economically optimized rocket design

  15. Mark Thompson says:
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    Could NASA hire Spacex to apply re-usability technology to SLS stage one. Fins seem easy to add. And space shuttle engines should be reusable, no?

    • Jeff2Space says:
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      Falcon 9’s first stage was designed from the start to incorporate reuse. SLS quite simply is not.

      • fcrary says:
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        Yea… I don’t know very much about the SLS first stage, but that would be a huge change. The RS-25 can, obviously, be reused (although turn-around maintenance isn’t what you’d call easy.) But recovery requires a restart in flight. I don’t think the RS-25 can do that. Mechanically, you’d be putting stress on the structure in ways the designers never considered. And, in terms of the trajectory, the staging probably doesn’t happen at the right time and place for recovery.

        Those are all issues that are basically built in from the start of a launch vehicle’s design. They can be changed, but it would almost be like starting over from scratch. I really don’t like the idea of taking SLS all the way back to the drawing board. I’ll just keep waiting for the Falcon Heavy and a high-energy upper stage for it.

        • Michael Spencer says:
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          The high-emery upper stage? Exactly spoken like a planetary scientist!

          Perhaps we will see a Neptune or Uranus orbiter while i’m still around.

        • Daniel Woodard says:
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          Unfortunately the core stage is not a booster, and being a “high energy” LH2 stage it is carried almost to orbital velocity, making return extremely difficult due to downrange distance and velocity at staging.

  16. Dewey Vanderhoff says:
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    Recovering and reusing boosters aside, keep in mind that SpaceX can build a brand new Falcon 9 every 3-4 weeks and launch it with a book price of about $ 62 million as an ELV throwaway. They still beat all the other launchers, private or quasi-govermental from any nation, in their weight class, on price alone. Even the Chinese Long March. The SpaceX business model is viable without reusability. It becomes stellar with it .
    All we can hope for now is that Falcon Heavy delivers as promised.