Biologist, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA Space Biologist and Payload integrator, Editor of NASAWatch.com and Astrobiology.com, Lapsed climber, Explorer, Synaesthete, Former Challenger Center board member 🖖🏻

39 replies on “Meanwhile, Back At NASA and FAA”

  1. No coverage on NASA TV either.
    Leroy Chiao noticed on CNN how this launch had captured the attention of the younger attention; yet you wouldn’t know it from NASA’s lack of interest.

    1. Yeah just checked and was stunned NASA did not have a media crew there for the event nor anything on the launch.

      1. Maybe if NASA pretends real hard it never happened FH will just go away and not threaten the future of the SLS/Orion 🙂

      2. Oddly, at Space.com (if you’ll forgive me for mentioning another space site, Keith), there was a link that seemingly appeared to be tied to NASA television, and broadcasted the launch: (https://www.space.com/17933…
        However, the differences were that:
        (a) this was a link that went only into a space.com page,
        (b) the video itself was via you-tube, not NASA, and
        (c) despite those two words “nasa” and “television” in that link, that’s likely just a coincidence, because the NASA TV website itself deliberately went out of its way to announce that it would NOT be broadcasting the launch!

    3. Moderately unfair- NASA Issued ~700 car passes, put up first aid tents, and helped corral something like 10k visitors at the cape. I suspect PAO is being careful because the senate requires SLS and NASA doesn’t want to publicly advocate against $3.5B a year that helps maintain the 10 healthy centers.

      1. Switching a 24/7 feed from a repeat broadcast to a live event accessible from fixed pad cams is hardly advocating against another program. Having said that however, I don’t doubt for a moment your position that D.C. politics played a role in the decision.

      2. Considering Falcon Heavy reportedly cost about $500 million to develop, yea, I’m sure the SLS supporters in Congress currently have their fingers in their ears and their eyes closed tight and are screaming “La, la, la, I can’t hear you!”.

  2. If NASA acts this way towards the FH launch I wonder what they will do if Elon Musk follows through and sends a couple of tourists around the Moon? Also ignore it?

    2. I’m waiting for BFS to perform a reusable SSTO test flight so NASA management can ignore that. Remember how NASA management blamed everyone but themselves for the failure of X-33? And later they ignored all new reusable technologies in favor of “shuttle derived” expendables (Ares I, Ares V, and SLS). The wasted opportunity cost is mind boggling.

      2. Yes, and let’s not forget how they rejected liquid fuel flyback boosters for the Space Shuttle as “impractical” and held on to the SRBs that killed the crew in the Challenger accident.

        1. The trade that was made was SRBs were cheaper to develop but had high operating costs. LFBBs would most definitely have been more expensive to develop but also had a higher chance of reducing operating costs in the long run. The disposable ET was a similar trade.

          SpaceX has always made low cost the highest priority. That’s why Elon Musk founded it in the first place. No one was doing anything significant to reduce launch costs.

  4. Maybe some of NASA’s budget needs to be diverted to rebuild their PAO. They always seem to be several steps behind.

    1. Their PAO is hamstrung by NASA management who is beholden to Congress and their support for SLS/Orion as an aerospace jobs program.

    2. Maybe some of NASA’s budget needs to be diverted to rebuild their PAO.

      You might have that backwards. The PAO budget should be diverted to other, more practical efforts, and PAO shut down.

      The public relations aspects of NASA are usually better handled by individual programs, and volunteer-enthusiasts could fill in for the rest. PAO’s budget would pay for a lot of NASA merch to give out to enthusiasts.

    1. Senator Nelson congratulated SpaceX

      Haven’t seen his full speech on the floor, but from the material I’ve seen published, he didn’t mention SpaceX by name once. Only in a tweet.

      1. Finally saw the full speech:

        “Mr President, just a few minutes ago, the largest rocket since the moon program, the Saturn V, launched from the Kennedy Space Centre. People from across the world saw it on TV as well as over the internet. Thousand of people lined the beaches at the Kennedy Space Centre.

        Perhaps even more impressively, as this rocket with three Falcon 9s strapped together, 27 engines, taking a payload for it’s first test flight. It was so successful that the two side Falcon 9s with the centre core of the Falcon 9 that the two side Falcon 9s we watched in amazement as they returned to Earth a hundred yards apart on two landing zones at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.

        At liftoff, the Falcon Heavy generates five million pounds of thrust, it’s twice as powerful that we have as any other rocket currently flying, and especially with the ability to land and reuse the boosters it promises to be a very affordable way to get to space.

        The test launch of the Falcon Heavy is a spectacular demonstration of the comeback of Florida’s Space Coast and of the US commercial launch sector which is succeeding in a big way. Last year we tried we tied the all-time record for the number of US commercial launches. That’s good news for the civil space program, it’s good news for national security, it’s good news for employment in the US, and it’s great news for jobs and the economy.

        Mr President, I yield.”

        Weird reluctance to mention SpaceX or Elon Musk directly.

        [Plus it’s a horrible rambling speech, for something so short, speaking from prepared notes. Term limits anyone?]

        https://www.youtube.com/wat…

        1. Maybe he hopes that by not mentioning SpaceX folks will assume NASA had something to do with it… He also left out that this is the first private payload sent into a Solar Orbit and will be the first private payload to reach the Asteroid Belt. Free Enterprise has just broken free of Earth Orbit.

          Of course both of those are scary options for the NASA “monopoly”.

        2. There is a lot of people on the right that are against Musk because of the 7500 dollar electric car subsidy, those same people were all for the 67000 dollar subsidy President Bush game the hummer. They also do not like the solar city of Musks there are always hit pieces on right wing rags about Musk and his subsidies. Also this picture didn’t help https://uploads.disquscdn.c…

  6. An interesting comparison would be the first launch of a Delta IV Heavy. How did NASA cover or publicise that launch?

    1. New Delta IV Rocket Launches Successfully in Flight Debut

      “”Exploration does have a number of components, including human, robotic and cargo components,” said Karen Poniatowski, NASA’s deputy associate administrator for launch services in the Space Operations office at the agency’s Washington, D.C. headquarters. “So expendable launch vehicles will clearly play roles.”

      ——

      “We look at them comparatively to determine what capabilities are being afforded the nation so we understand what we might need,” Poniatowski told SPACE.com. “And it’s not just Atlas or Delta, there are many emerging launch companies to consider so it isn’t one size fits all.””

      https://www.space.com/597-d…

      1. Thanks for checking. I guess that means a similar level of coverage for the Falcon Heavy launch would be statements and/or interviews, but not live coverage.

  7. This was obviously an incredible achievement, but I am curious about the two anomalies and what caused them.
    The first, the failure of two of three engines to ignite on the core stages landing is likely a simple error – software – but I can’t imagine how they did not catch it in the first place. This was the major change they made to land a center stage from a Falcon Heavy
    The second, the overshoot of the payload due to the second stage firing too long also seems easily correctable but isn’t the science of orbital mechanics advanced enough so this shouldn’t have occurred?

    1. I’m not sure about the engine (non)restarts. But it looks like the initial orbital determination was off. They are now talking about 0.98 x 1.67 AU. That’s only about a tenth of an AU past Mars. That’s not a bad delivery error for a first launch. It also now has a COSPAR ID number, 2018-017A, which has to be a first for a car.

      Someone really ought to run the trajectory through a good numerical integrator. It would be interesting to see a prediction of what’s going to happen to it.

      1. Someone really ought to run the trajectory through a good numerical integrator. It would be interesting to see a prediction of what’s going to happen to it.

        Supposedly a reasonable (~2m km) flyby of Mars in 2020, but not much of interest other than that.

        The issue people are having is that’s it’s such a light, oddly shaped object, it’ll be subject to all the modelling annoyances (light pressure, subtle gravitational perturbations, etc) that make long term modelling useless. Particularly since it’s outward trajectory isn’t known to a high level of accuracy. (No new radio tracking available, obviously. And no visual tracking time would be assigned on serious, grown-up instruments.)

        1. Well, I’ve seen the sort of trajectory calculations done for Cassini, which was definitely oddly shaped and probably had a higher cross-section to mass ratio than a car. That was actually quite good.

          But I wasn’t thinking of the sort of trajectory integrations a spacecraft’s navigation team would use. More like what a scientist studying orbits or (for example) a family of asteroids. The math is the same, but the former is about high precision. The later is about making many, many runs, with initial conditions which span all the uncertainties, and getting a statistical prediction. In this case, something like “there is a X% chance that the Tesla will pass within Y km of Mars within the next Z thousand years.”

  8. Two things:

    1. SpaceX is, in some sense at least, just a renter, right? Yes, there are leasehold improvements, but still just leasing the site? While SX has been very clear about ‘standing on shoulders’ – as they should be – FH isn’t a JV in any sense, is it?

    2. SLS and FH are both marvelous machines but with very different capabilities, and that as things stand now, the cost differential is about the only thing that starts to equate the two, and that even in that case multiple FH launches would be required, as would the development of several key technologies, not the least of which would be on-orbit transfer of cryogenic fuels.

    The “specialness” of FH derives, not so much from the technology, but from the fact that is was developed entirely with private money, that it approaches historic lifting abilities, and that the cost is stunningly low.

    And indeed as Eric Berger points out, F9 has been subject to a continual process that has increased mass ability dramatically to the point that it starts to compete with FH. This fact, and the usefulness of FH in proving certain engine configurations of BFR and the ability of SX in-house to trust design software, made this test flight worthwhile to SX (it also adds weight to the SX decision to power BFR with a single (massive) tube rather than ganged boosters)

    And the above shouldn’t be seen as a missive from Debbie Downer. Nor does it take away from just how cool it was to see two boosters land simultaneously! As the landed I thought to myself “Isn’t this the way it’s supposed to work?”

    It’s just some thinking about how the Big Picture might fit together.

    1. We are on the SLS Block I .. it is only a 70 ton launcher. It beats the SpaceX Falcon heavy in three areas.

      #1 – It has a a wider fairing
      #2 – It has a high energy 2nd stage utilzing the centaur
      #3 – it costs 10 to 15 times more than a falcon heavy.

        1. 16 or four launches… Boeing has only won an award for two cores at a cost of 2.4 billion. So until actual funding gets passed only two.

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