I missed this one earlier in the day… a SpaceX Falcon 9 launch vehicle put a “Dragon” capsule test article into orbit. It made two orbits at 182 miles altitude, staying up for three hours twenty minutes, and ended the mission witha successful re-entry and splashdown on target off the California coast.
While Dragon cannot go to the moon (it’s not designed to make hyperbolic entries… it’d likely burn up), it can in principle go to the Space Station. Once proven out, perhaps NASA will pay American entepreneurs, rather than Russian government interests, to send Americans to the ISS. Or, better, to a *real* space station. Perhaps a station built from numerous Bigelow station modules.
Watch the videos. Note the rather impressive combustion of what looks like a stream of kerosene a few seconds after ignition. First, the webcast:
[youtube Q-ci9xIgNZM]
NASA’s High Def coverage:
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11 Responses to “SpaceX Dragon: SUCCESS!!”
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>While Dragon cannot go to the moon
>(it’s not designed to make hyperbolic entries…)
odd, Musk tell at NASA TV that heatshield is build for Hyperbolic entries
one of reporter in Muks interview aks him about :
Captiol Hill is try to cut support for commercial space flight
even canceled COTS/CRS to minimized Spending
lets hope that is only lout thinking of stupid politicians…
Of the Dragon heatshield, Musk says (with some hyperbole here) “It’s actually the most powerful stuff known to man. Dragon is capable of re-entering from a lunar velocity, or even a Mars velocity with the heat shield that it has.”
Source, this article:
http://spaceflightnow.com/falcon9/002/100716firststage/
I thought the most powerful stuff known to man was antimatter, but what do I know. 😉
In reporting the launch on the evening news, Brian Reynolds led off the story saying, “NASA launched . . .”. I guess it will be a while before the national networks realize that anything that has to do with space does not necessarily spring from the brow of NASA.
Congratulations to Space-X for a job well done.
The first stage was carrying recovery parachutes; does anyone know if the recovery system worked this time?
BTW, splashdown was within 800 meters of the aim point.
SpaceX is starting to look like one really competent aerospace organization, with the two successful Falcon 9 development flights in a row and Dragon doing so well on its first test flight.
One interesting thing about Dragon is that although it has three recovery parachutes, it can make a survivable landing with just one deployed; IIRC, Apollo needed two to properly deploy to do a survivable landing.
Today’s landing had a impact velocity of 18 mph according to SpaceX.
NASA TV is running yesterday’s press conference with Mush on repeat and he talked at length about recovering the first stage. It turns out they didn’t – but they were pretty sure they wouldn’t anyway.
He talked a good deal about how difficult it is to make a recoverable liquid fueled first stage – calling the “holy grail” of of spaceflight.
They’ve got better data from this flight than they did the last thanks to a new black box (which I couldn’t tell if they recovered) and they think it’ll be 2-3 years before they are really ready to recover and refurbish a first stage.
He also admitted at that point that they’d need a customer willing to pay to take that risk too!
Apparently the flare of combustion is due to a failure of the quick-release on the RP-1 hose, but I heard that the Delta IV Heavy had worse on its early flights.
They did have an engine shut down during boost, but of the 18 engines it had, only 16 are required to achieve orbit. So they still had another engine to spare.
And they failed to retrieve stage one.
So if these were the worse things that happened, the launch was a fantastic success.
They also successfully shut down and restarted the second stage, which was one of the test times.
The payload was kind of DoD. Five cube sats. Two from National Reconnaissance Office , two from Las Alamos, one from the US Army.
Has SpaceX released video from the recovery vessels of the splashdown? If so I haven’t seen them. Also, I’ve seen still from a video shot from a camera inside the Dragon capsule looking out the window, but I’ve not see any video from that either. I’d be interested in seeing video from both those vantage points if it is available.
FYI, more SpaceX flight video here:
https://send.spacex.com/bds/Login.do?id=A043517252&p1=naj20dpsbfegcidgdlgffcj20
Falcon 9 has nine engines in the first stage, not 18.
Video from inside the capsule was embargoed due to the presense of a wheel of cheese that was to be delivered to “Ye National Cheese Emporium”. Mr. Henry Wensleydale, proprietor, was not available for comment.
The cheese was bolted to the deckplates is circular drum bearing a picture of a cow and labeled with the warning “Top Secret!”.
There’s photos of the cheese here:
http://www.spaceflightnow.com/falcon9/002/cheese/
In case anyone doesn’t recognize it, that’s the cow from the movie “Top Secret” by the guys that made “Airplane!”