Redefining What Going Into Space Means
SpaceX Falcon Launch Vehicle Unveiled in Washington D.C., earlier post (2003)
“Among the speakers at the rocket’s unveiling were Elon Musk, President and CEO of SpaceX and Patti Grace Smith, Associate Administrator for Commercial Space Transportation, FAA. Musk and Smith were introduced by Keith Cowing, editor of NASAWatch.com”
Keith’s note: For those of you who may think that today’s Falcon Heavy Launch of sports car with a spacesuited mannequin is a little unusual: this is not the first time Elon Musk has used a PR stunt to make a point – and push the envelope. In 2003 Frank Sietzen (SpaceX’s first DC employee – and my late co-author whose ashes are flying on SpaceX later this year) and I came up with an idea for Elon: Bring his Falcon 1 rocket to Washington, DC. and park it in front of the Air and Space Museum. So he did. Who does something like that? Elon Musk does. So does Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, Peter Beck …
I still think it’s a wasted opportunity to let someone shove a scientifically useful payload aboard. Nothing too complex, just whatever they can rig together and ship to the assembly site.
If this flight fails, it will be sacrificing a second hand car. If it succeeds, the PR will be huge. You would rather risk someone’s real, hard, science work? For SpaceX, this would also require a fair bit of effort and additional distracting resources to deploy whatever experiment(s) you might want to see them place on board, still with a high chance of failure. The joke semi-dummy payload is really a better idea…
It takes years to design, build, test, and qualify something like this to launch (i.e. an actual satellite). This is doubly true since it’s going to be going into solar orbit (Hohmann transfer orbit between earth orbit and Mars orbit). You need a decent directional antenna just to communicate. This means you also need to be able to point the satellite accurately. You’re talking hundreds of millions of dollars here to insure that it actually works and can point a high gain antenna at earth. “Nothing to complex” is an “old and busted” Tesla Roadster..
The fact is that SpaceX has said this first test flight is risky and has about a 50/50 chance of success. That’s why this flight needed a mass simulator. Just because Elon Musk chose to launch his “old and busted” Roadster as a mass simulator doesn’t mean it’s safe to launch a “real” payload. Who’s going to risk their expensive payload on a 50/50 shot at getting into space?
Who would put an expensive payload on it? That’s not what I was talking about. Hell, you could just shove a pile of cubesats into it for the same effect if a single payload’s not possible.
You’re not understanding my point. There is no such thing as an inexpensive satellite in a solar orbit that goes all the way out to the distance of Mars that can actually communicate with earth. You need attitude control and a directional antenna and a transmitter with a decent amount of power. That means it’s going to be a multi million dollar satellite, no way around that.
So called smallsats in earth orbit aren’t a problem because they’re only a few hundred miles away, so you don’t need to have a directional antenna on them. Most of them don’t even have an active attitude control system, instead relying on passive stabilization (earth’s magnetic field is available to help with that).
Actually, it’s not nearly that bad. While “multi-million” is probably correct, deep space CubeSats can realistically be done for under five million. Existing CubeSats have active attitude control, and some have propulsion sufficient to desaturate the reaction wheels (magnetic torque rods don’t work without a planet’s magnetic field…) JPL has a deep space transponder designed for CubeSats, and there a number of CubeSat-sized, high-gain antennas awaiting flight opportunities. As a matter of fact, a number of planetary CubeSats are already being built for launch as secondary payloads on the SLS EM-1 flight.
Actually, that’s not correct, especially for CubeSats. Given the current backlog, some of those teams might be quite willing to take a 50% chance of a launch failure. I’m not sure about JPL and the INSPIRE team, but they’ve been waiting to launch for a long time and are likely to become pointless if they don’t get a ride in the next few months. That CubeSat is primarily to get into solar orbit and demonstrate the ability of CubeSats to operate in deep space. But a pair of JPL CubeSats, MarCO, are launching with the InSight Mars mission in May. When they get to Mars in November, they will have demonstrated everything INSPIRE was supposed to do. That makes a 50% chance of a launch failure seem attractive, compared to becoming obsolete before every being launched.
Interesting. It’s unfortunate then that INSPIRE didn’t hitch a ride on this Falcon Heavy test flight. Makes me wonder if the failure was on the SpaceX side (never offering the opportunity to interested parties) or if the failure was somewhere else. I’d like to see our intrepid space reporters dig into this one to find out the answers.
Even the most basic instrument that can be rigged together and strapped on top with a remote chance of actually working would cost millions of dollars. Nobody’s going to risk that capital on a 50/50 launch in place of a mass simulator.
They may have been afraid of bad press. CNN had a good story on the possible consequences of a launch failure (which, fortunately, didn’t happen.) One of their points was that SpaceX’s competition like to talk about reliability, and a high profile failure, even if it’s a test flight, would be used against the company.
Remember the Falcon 9 launch of CRS-1. Orbcomm was flying a test/demonstration spacecraft as a secondary payload (a pathfinder for their constellation) and it ended up in a lower than planned orbit. One of the engines shut down and the primary customer (NASA) comes first. Orbcomm knew that, understood the risk ahead of time, and didn’t complain. But it’s still cited as a partial failure of the Falcon 9 and used as evidence of the vehicle’s unreliability. After that bad experience, I wouldn’t be surprised if SpaceX didn’t want to put anything which anyone could call valuable on the first Falcon Heavy launch.
Of late I’ve been reading in the early history of manned (and womaned!) aviation. Back in the first decade or two of powered flight there were a great many activities by fliers that were PR stunts, pure and simple.
Even after WW 1 showed the military value of aviation, many fliers made strenuous — and life-endangering and often life-ending — efforts to “raise awareness” of flight among the general public for the purpose of making aviation commercial.
What’s surprising to me is that we’re not seeing more publicity stunts along with rocket launches by entrepreneurs.
Interesting of bringing a rocket to the museum in 2003 to show a real piece of hardware to illustrate this is a real program (was that Falcon 1 a flight qualified vehicle?). But wait, that Skylab in DC is a flight qualified hardware (though after these years much of the plastics have decayed).
Regarding the car in FH, maybe it is a waste but it brings attention to the space program which gets very little coverage in mainstream media. Reminds me of Dennis Tito’s flight to ISS in 2001 which many said was a waste of resources but also brought attention to ISS which many general public didn’t know existed at the time.
I found a Youtube video of the video stream I watched live from the Falcon 1 4th flight in 2008–the one that worked–and watched it while waiting for the FH launch. Amazing how far SpaceX has come in a decade.
Amazing how much grayer my hair has become in a decade, too:-)