Elon Musk is scheduled to present his plan on getting humans to Mars and beyond at 2:30 Eastern (12:30 Mountain). The Youtube link below should carry it live, or be available afterwards.
SpaceX has also released a “teaser” video showing the system in action:
The booster is 12 meters in diameter, the spacecraft is 17 meters in diameter and the complete stack is 122 meters tall. This is bigger than the Saturn V. Liftoff thrust is 28,730,000 pounds.
The animation is pretty spiffy, but I can’t help but think that the mission depicted is… ummm… a little simplified.
Not a whole lot of data is presented in the article, but they do say that important areas of the launch site – the LOX farm, the fuel farm, the Falcon Support building – were largely unaffected by the catastrophe.
Purest speculation: a helium tank popping would of course be terribly bad, but it would not seem to cause a big sudden fireball. But a high pressure tank cutting loose, even when filled with an inert gas like helium, could easily trash tanks and lines containing LOX and kerosene, mixing the two. Again, though, simply breachignt he fuel and oxidizer in this case wouldn;t *necessarily* lead to combustion.
Some extreme handwaving, though… they were apparently using supercooled LOX. By using liquid oxygen at a temperature well below what they’d need to to keep it liquid, the exterior of the tank could in principle get cold enough to chill liquid oxygen out of the *air.* So, *maybe,* the tank would have liquid oxygen condensation on the outside, where it might mix with carbon fiber components, or cork insulation or some other carbon or hydrocarbon structure. The *possibility*exists that the oxygen could seep into those components. And anyone who has ever soaked a charcoal briquet in LOX and then shocked it (by, say, hitting it with a hammer, dropping it from a great height or popping a high pressure tank of helium next to it) knows that such a mixture of carbon and LOX is quite unstable and will detonate.
There was a time when American auto manufacturers had important aerospace divisions. Chrysler, for example, was responsible for rockets such as the Redstone, Jupiter and the Saturn I and Ib first stage.
In late 1956, Lovell Lawrence Jr, an assistant chief engineer at the missiles division of Chrysler, publicized a concept for a nuclear-powered “flying saucer.” It seems to have been *partially* a reasonably rational concept for a long duration spacecraft for missions to Mars. It would spin like a frisbee to generate artificial gravity, though the relatively small radius would be likely to produce some harsh Coriolis effects. The saucer would be about 50 feet in diameter and only 6 feet thick.
Where the design goes a bit off the rails is that the performance expected of the craft was insanely impressive. It was a single-stage-to-solar-orbit craft, capable of taking off horizontally from a runway using nuclear-powered jet engines (note: “jet” in this case might mean “rocket.”) The craft would be capable of going from the Earth to Mars in 9 to 12 weeks.
Being that close to an atomic reactor (with a light enough shield to allow the thing to take off) would be a death sentence long before the craft would get to Mars.
After years of trying to research this concept, all I’ve managed to scrape up are three things from Ye Olde internet: two newspaper articles and one cover story from a UFO “fanzine.” I have tried over some years to obtain a copy of the “Saucer News” from August-September 1957 from sites like ebay, but without success. It seems like an original printing, or at least a decent scan, would provide a reasonably good version of the Chrysler saucer art. Anybody has more on this, I’m interested.
The engineering of this attempt was clearly better than Evel Kneivels shot 40 years ago… but the *psychology* of it doesn’t seem to be there. I was just a youngun when Evel made his attempt, but I remember it being Big News, while this one was nearly stealthy by comparison. And the choice of putting the viewing area where the spectators would be looking STRAIGHT AT THE SUN? Lame. There also doesn’t seem to have been an accurate countdown… a lot of the videos make it look like the people were a little surprised at just when the thing launched.
High speed footage of the foam plug inserted into the throat of the SLS solid rocket motor tested hereabouts a few months back. The purpose was to keep unwanted stuff – dirt, water, birds, hippies, etc. – out of the motor prior to ignition, and then to get the frak out of the way once the motor is up and running.
Jeff Bezos of Blue Origin has described a new rocket his company is working on , the “New Glenn.” It’s kinda big:
The “New Glenn” will be 27 feet in diameter (close to the Shuttle External Tank, it seems), 270 feet tall in a two-stage configuration and 313 feet tall in a three stage configuration. The first stage is recoverable, landing vertically under rocket power. It will have seven BE-4 engines burning natural gas and oxygen, producing 3.85 million pounds of thrust. The second stage uses a single BE-4 engine with an increased expansion ratio. The third stage uses a LOX/LH2 BE-3 engine.
The article says that Bezos has claimed that the rocket will fly “within the decade.” If that means by the end of 2019, that’s pretty ambitious.
This blog has been blathering forth for more than 8 years now, so at some point I probably posted some version of this video of a Saturn V shake test carried out by shoving and pulling on the CSM section. Don’t care. It’s cool even if it’s a repeat.
Imagine NASA doing this in a couple years with the SLS. Yeah, no.
Produced by Bell Aerospace around 1960 as a promotional item was this “ticket” for a flight from New York City to Melbourne, Australia. The aircraft shown was a two-stage hypersonic passenger transport; the first stage was essentially a supersonic transport equipped with turboramjet engines; it carried on its back a rocket powered passenger spaceplane. At the time it was pushed by the likes of Walter Dornberger, who had previously publicized a two-stage all-rocket powered hypersonic transport. There was some link between this design and the Dyna Soar program, but it is unclear just how involved the engineering was on the HST. Artwork was produced and a good display model, but it’s hard to tell if it went any further than that.
I have uploaded high-rez scans (600 dpi) to the 2016-09 APR Extras folder on Dropbox. This is accessible to all APR Patreon patrons at the $4 level and above.
Well, this ain’t good. During propellant loading operations, an explosion occurred at the Falcon 9 launch pad, destroying the rocket and the Amos 6 communications satellite.
Details are fuzzy, but some reports suggest that it was the hydrazine propellant for the *satellite* that was the cause of the explosion rather than the Falcon 9 itself.
So far, very little to go on. All the videos I’ve seen start well after the explosion; not too many people were filming the rocket at the time, as nothing was scheduled to happen right about then. I’m sure more will come out later. The engineer in me say “probably just one of them things, sometimes mistakes are made or mechanisms fail,” but the more paranoid part of me wonders about:
It was an Israeli satellite. There are people who don’t like the Israelis.
SpaceX’s recent successes have irritated some big-money competitors, who have had to crank out new designs of their own in order to compete. They won’t be saddened to see SpaceX take a hit.
So, which would be worse? Bog-standard engineering/operations failure… or sabotage?
UPDATE: Video of the explosion itself:
Time between visible explosion and audible is about 12 seconds, so the camera is probably about 2.5 miles away.
Here are some craptacular screenshots from the above video:
Note that the explosion seems to originate from just below the payload fairing…
The explosion starts up top, and you can see it march down through the booster, bursting the tanks.
A few seconds in, you can see the payload fairing drop. By this point the booster itself is long gone; it seem like the fairing was actually being supported by the tower. Note that the top of the tower is now bent over.
Since the explosion originated below the payload shroud, my guess is that the *payload* didn’t initially explode. Looks like either the upper stage or the feed lines leading into the payload. In either event, it’s damned odd to have an explosion at the point in the process. A static discharge event? A hydrazine leak onto something catalytic?
